Blood Ties

by Gina Whitney

  “I’m good,” I said quickly, so he’d hurry and get into the car.

  I could see some of the shape-shifters still hadn’t retracted their fangs, and I wondered if they were for us. The chanting had stopped, but some in the crowd still heckled. “Good riddance!” shouted an anonymous voice while someone else spit on our tracks. But no matter how much they assailed, the shape-shifters never advanced. They just wanted us gone.

  Shaking, Aunt Evelyn turned the ignition and put her hands on the steering wheel, but quickly removed them. She rubbed her fingertips against her palms. The sparkly yet gritty traces of killer-defensive magic were still on her hands. Disturbed, she reached into the backseat for her purse and searched through it.

  From James’s car I could see her muddling about. I was sure the shape-shifters saw her as well, and were wondering what the heck she was doing. What I didn’t know was that Aunt Evelyn was thinking her magic didn’t do much good, seeing that Hari was gone. And she just wanted the useless conjury off her hands.

  Aunt Evelyn squirted a glop of Purell onto her grainy palms and furiously rubbed them together. The magic was thick and did not come off easily. She reached for one of the countless fast-food napkins she had stashed in the glove compartment. As she did this, she noticed one of Hari’s hairs lying across the center console.

  “He was shedding… That little puppy,” she said with bittersweet remembrance in her voice. She drew a deep breath through her nose as she thought of the beautiful boy they had lost. A visceral cry strived to explode out of her body. But she stifled it, thinking about the loss Addison had just endured as well.

  Aunt Evelyn looked at her. She had settled down quite a bit. In fact she was acting very strange. Instead of lamenting Adrian’s death, she sat in the passenger seat just staring out the window. A faraway look shared space on her face with a scant smile.

  “It’s kind of strange, huh? That this van arrived this morning with four people, and now we’re leaving with only two,” Addison remarked. Her words were somber, and in no way matched her slightly up tone.

  “Yes, very strange,” Aunt Evelyn responded, realizing that Addison had disconnected from reality.

  Meanwhile, I was fighting to keep my emotions from shutting down. In a psychosomatic response, my body was numbing, so much that I felt like I was floating over my seat.

  “Why is Aunt Evelyn just sitting there? We gotta get out of here,” I said to James. He was quiet. He was so overcome with sorrow, he couldn’t even grieve; he was well past that point. It was like he had pulled the pin on a grenade of misery, but would not—could not—let it go. We were just waiting for the inevitable explosion.

  Not only James, but Aunt Evelyn, Addison, and Julie were all now in the throes of hell. Like bicycle spokes all this staggering pain branched out from me. I’d had one job: to take Catherine down. And I had failed. Miserably so. Hell, I’d all but gift wrapped and handed the knife over to her.

  Aunt Evelyn finally cranked up her minivan and pressed hard on the gas. The van lurched forward and immediately accelerated toward the exit. James took up the rear. Our vehicles sped to the open gate, which was now unmanned. One of the protégés had killed the young guard effortlessly. Aunt Evelyn and James swerved to avoid running over his partially eaten body in the middle of the road. The only untouched part of his carcass was his heavily pomaded hair, which was still very much in place. No doubt the gate that had welcomed all would now become a heavily armed portal to a hermetically sealed compound.

  I held on tight as the car fishtailed out of the reservation, leaving tire tracks in its wake. Trees whizzed by in a collage of green and brown blurs as James raced down the narrow backwoods road. It was so quiet, except for the calling songs of crickets and the popping of rocks and gravel hitting the wheel wells. The steadily rising temperature inside the car, generated by James’s despair, was no match for the air conditioner. He had to keep wiping steam off the windshield so he could see. Not wanting to sound like a nag, I refrained from telling him simply to put the windows down.

  The road and trees quickly receded to a single point behind us. The swirling smoke of the extinguished bonfire was eerie against the pinkish-gray sky. Despite James’s previous instructions, I looked back. No one was chasing us. For a moment I allowed myself to believe everything was okay. I twisted back around and relaxed my shoulders. I eased up and slid comfortably down into the seat.

  James was absorbed in getting me home safely, all the while trying and failing to block Adrian out of his mind. I figured I had to do something for him. After all it was my fault he was in that state in the first place. I pondered my tremendously limited options as I looked at the back of Aunt Evelyn’s minivan. James was tailgating, and I had to close my eyes to shut out the blinding glare of the red rear lights.

  After turning over solutions to my quandary, the most obvious were the only ones available: get the knife, and kill Catherine. Duh.

  But she sure as hell wasn’t just going to hand it over. She was stronger now, and we had lost some of our team. The only thing that was certain was that between Catherine and me, one of us would be dead at end of this. Which one? Well, she had the upper hand now.

  Fucking A! I wished there was a way to fast-forward past all of this shit.

  James and I did not find it necessary to talk during the long ride home. Stone-faced, he kept his eyes on the road. The only time his expression changed was when we crossed over from the blackness of the woods to the bright lights of Massapequa. And that was only to squint at the fluorescent glow.

  I looked out the splotchy window, dirtied by splatted bugs and my greasy face. In it I caught my reflection superimposed against the backdrop of shopping centers, grocery stores, and gas stations streaking by. I touched my cheek, hardly recognizing myself. I looked so sad…old…put-upon.

  Oh, God. What’s happening to me?

  Before I had time to mull that over, we arrived at Aunt Evelyn’s house. Over the course of my life, this home had taken on many personifications. It had been an abode that evoked wonderment and joy while I was growing up. It was a place of solace after discovering my magical path. Then it became a house of horrors when I’d witnessed my first ritualized killing. Tonight it took on what would be its last incarnation: the seat of wretchedness. This house was now a sarcophagus that would contain all of our pain and dread. Not even James’s love could prevent that.

  He parked next to Aunt Evelyn. His body was rigid, and he kept his hands on the steering wheel for a while as if he were contemplating an escape plan for him and me. I watched his eyes moving about the way they did when he was having an internal dialogue. I knew it was the end of his conversation when he let go of the wheel and smirked a little. He must have determined there was no place for us to run to. He coaxed himself out of the car, and I watched that terribly sad man cross over to my side. He looked like he like he had been hit by a truck and was wracked with pain, but holding it in. I knew it was not a physical pain he suppressed, but a heartfelt one.

  Aunt Evelyn and Addison took their time getting out of their minivan too. Aunt Evelyn was obviously distraught. However, Addison had an odd, calmly indifferent attitude. We all avoided eye contact, ashamed of destroying the trust of Chief Weylen and our inability to stop Catherine. We walked to the house with the speed of turtles and snails.

  I watched the others as they plodded along. Tonight they had been thrown too much to deal with at one time and had reached their limits. It frightened me some to see how they, my protectors, had been humbled. I was realizing they were not gods or perfect beings. They were just plain witches coping the best way they could.

  Once inside, I couldn’t help but notice how hollowsounding the house was. Somehow it had become empty and devoid of life. The house, so desperate for any sign of liveliness, started sucking up all of what we had remaining. We went into a freefall of depression.

  Aunt Evelyn meant to drop her keys in the bowl on the desk. She missed it all together. The keys fell
to the floor with a loud, jingling clank. In the emptiness of the foyer, it sounded like cymbals crashing in my ears. Aunt Evelyn didn’t give a care about the keys, and left them right where they landed.

  “Well, I guess that’s that,” she said. She shrugged her shoulders and raised her open palms like she wanted to say more, but did not have any words to give us. She simply walked away. The rest of them followed suit. They were islands breaking off and floating away from each other. They separated into different parts of the house to escape the extra burden of absorbing one another’s pain; they had too much of their own to deal with.

  James squeezed my hand and went up to my room. I noticed that Addison did not go to her room upstairs, but down to the basement.

  I was left alone in the foyer. Though I hadn’t a clue what to do for the others, I thought I was handling myself just fine. Then my face flushed and my stomach tightened. My eyes darted about, making sure the foyer wasn’t closing in on me. My throat was parched, and I had to take large, dry gulps. I felt like I was being buried in the sand, confined and suffocated. A brick of incapacitating gloom had been thrown at me, and I had to dodge it. I needed an immediate distraction.

  “Addison,” I yelled. I started down the basement stairs slowly, because I didn’t want to catch her in a private moment.

  “Come on in,” she said, sounding almost normal. In no way had I expected that, and I knew I had to watch her closely. After all who knew what reaction would come out of her next? But my main concern was that gloom brick that was still hurtling toward me. I had to get out of the way. I hurried down the remainder of those basement stairs, trying my best not to trip. The basement was still in disarray from Hurricane James. Piles of debris from his rampage littered the floor. I used my foot to push some rubbish to the side, and made my way over to Addison.

  “I’m just going to pack up some of Adrian’s stuff,” she said. She was so nonchalant, like she was talking about getting him ready for summer camp. “I have to get it out of sight so James won’t see it. Wouldn’t want him to be more upset than he already is.”

  The thing was that Addison wasn’t moving. She was just standing there kind of smiling.

  “No, we wouldn’t,” I said.

  Addison looked at me, and her eyes perked up as if she had just remembered to do something. “Oh, please…help, won’t you?”

  One of the last things in the world I wanted to do was touch Adrian’s shit. I wanted to be as far away as possible from anything even remotely related to him. But what could I say? No? No to a woman whose baby brother had died because of me? I couldn’t think of a humane way to refuse her request, especially since she was so vulnerable and trying to carry on, albeit in a strange way.

  “Sure, no problem,” I said.

  Apparently that was what it took for Addison to move. She drifted over to a paint-chipped, wooden, sliding closet. It was hard to shift, and she had to continually yank at the bulky door until it flung open. The interior of the closet was larger and deeper than the exterior gave away. Addison walked into the mouth of darkness, and disappeared into the black abyss. I could hear her foraging. Then a light came on.

  “Don’t just stand there. Grab some boxes. There’s plenty in here,” she chimed.

  I entered the closet, which was filled with discarded Christmas ornaments, old books, tools still in their plastic sheaths, and a bonanza of brown boxes that were squashed and torn. That didn’t seem to matter to Addison. She passed them off to me in assembly line fashion, and I tossed them to the middle of the basement.

  Some landed on Adrian’s bed. Each time a one hit that velveteen cover and brushed loudly over the top, I cringed.

  Addison airily headed over to his suitcase next. She started taking out items of clothing and folding them neatly. “You can pick up his things from the floor,” she said.

  Awesome! I had the dubious honor of picking up Adrian’s dirty drawers. I flinched with each pair of silk boxers I touched. All of them reeked of sleaze and left a slimy film on my hands. My teeth clenched so hard, I swore they started to crack.

  “You okay over there?” Addison said, not even looking my way.

  “Sure. Cool as ever.” I wanted to say to hell with it, but I knew I wasn’t there for myself. I was helping Addison.

  She took some of Adrian’s possessions off a low-hanging shelf he’d installed as a shrine to his narcissism. She wistfully reflected on each piece, sighing lightly with fond memories. She skimmed through a large stack of self-adoring photos Adrian had taken of himself. In some he was onstage in front of packs of swooning girls. Other photos featured his topless torso, taken with his cell phone in random bathroom mirrors. But a somewhat sweet photograph was tucked inside that ode to self-love. It featured a candid shot of the three siblings, smiling and happy together on some ordinary day. It surprised me that Adrian could be that sentimental.

  Addison let go a barely audible chuckle and went back to a box she had already halfway packed. I thought she was adding more to it. However, she pulled out a gray polo coated with Adrian’s scent. She put it to her face, nuzzling and sniffing it. Then she turned to me, her face now a bit sad and definitely accusatory.

  “I know he hurt you, and I’m…” Her next word came out with difficulty. “Sorry for that. But he wasn’t all bad. He was my brother.”

  I could see it coming. Wait for it. Wait for it.

  “His only real crime was loving you,” Addison finished.

  Boom.

  I couldn’t get how she could even allude to Adrian’s nonexistent goodness. And if her definition of love was rape, well damn love. I wanted to scream at Addison, tell her what a fucking prick he really was. He was nothing more than a betrayer. Not only did he betray the witches, but he betrayed those who tried to help us. Many people died because of him.

  But I didn’t feel like getting into it with her, and kept my mouth shut. I just kept shoving Adrian’s shit into boxes, and snatched the packing tape. The sticky sound as I snappily unrolled it agitated Addison even further.

  “I’m sorry I was not sensitive to your plight,” she said. I could tell she wasn’t sincere. Hell, she was actually mocking me.

  I looked at her sideways as I tried to rip the packing tape with my hands. She handed me a pair of scissors with the blades pointed in my direction. I tried to take them, but she didn’t let them go. We both held the scissors, engaging in a tug-of-war for a few seconds. Addison released the scissors while cocking her eyebrow a fraction.

  “Thanks,” I said, peeping at her too.

  “No problem. Anything to help you.” Addison strode to the other side of the room, to Adrian’s CD player. She put on a recording of one of his songs. Surely an attempt to make me feel guilty.

  The music started, and I must admit if things had been different, I would have fallen under the trance of the surreal, haunting melody. The orchestration consisted of a hypnotizing twelve-tone atonality that had the ability to bewitch most people. Adrian’s angelic voice came in so innocently. I squirmed, becoming more uncomfortable with each note and chord. I tried to put a force field around me to prevent Adrian’s voice from entering. It didn’t work, and I was violated a second time.

  “He was so great,” Addison said as her smile grew inordinately wide. She was trying to stop the pain from coming, but she gasped as the grief clutched and stilled her. She looked at me with a maddening mix of resentment, compassion, and sadness.

  “You know, Adrian and I only volunteered for this because of James. We didn’t want him to go it alone. We went against our family for you, and we lost everything. Do you think it was worth it?”

  Her sorrow visibly emanated out of her in whorling, yellow tendrils that reached around the room, trying to latch onto me. One found its target. It was sharp, and my flesh burned at its very touch. I could see more tendrils coming at me. I was not about to stick around and get poked and burned by a multitude of etheric octopus arms. Without even giving Addison a goodbye, I got the fuck out of the
re.

  The tendril arms followed me up the basement steps. As soon as I entered the hall, I slammed the door behind me. I could see a faint yellow glow peeking from under the door and then receding back down to Addison.

  Relieved that I’d dodged that psychic onslaught, I went straight to the kitchen to get some comfort from Aunt Evelyn. However, that voice inside me advised against it. Of course I did not listen, and went in anyway. It didn’t take long for me to figure out that something was up with Aunt Evelyn too.

  She didn’t even notice I was there. She was intently going through cabinets, searching for something. Not finding it, she slammed the doors, each slam louder than the one preceding it. She stepped back and saw what she wanted not in the cabinet, but on top of it. She got on chair, but it was too short; her arms could not reach. As she got off the chair, the thong of her flip-flop slipped from between her toes, causing her almost to fall off the chair. And that pissed her off. She threw her hands up, and with a magical swoosh flung a hodgepodge of cereal boxes off the top of the fridge. Then Aunt Evelyn swiped again, this time over the kitchen table. A plate Adrian had eaten off of slung against a wall, along with a cup Hari had drank out of. All the cabinets opened, and pieces of ceramic tableware flew about the kitchen. Aunt Evelyn stood amid the jagged pieces. She was spent. She put her face in her hands and broke down in tears.

  I quietly removed myself and went up upstairs, quite horrified by the way everyone around me was falling apart. At the same time, however, something wonderful was happening to me. I was growing physically stronger due to the infusion of blood from the young woman I’d cannibalized. With each step my spine straightened, making me walk taller and more square-shouldered. I felt like I could run a marathon and climb Mount Everest all in one day. I was a dichotomy. Emotionally I was hobbled by grief and guilt. But my body was enjoying the power and prowess gained from that shape-shifter’s blood.