I looked at the demon, who stood beside me, shining and broken.
“Come with me.”
Chapter Twenty-Five
I CHASED AFTER The Nightcatcher, and the demon followed. I slung the bow and quiver of arrows across my back as we ran across the highway into the woods. The distant city threw its light across the trees. The shadows of skyscrapers tattooed my arms.
The trees opened up like a mouth. Come here. Let me eat you. They were monster-headed, their foliage like claws.
The puddles underneath us were full of stars and the stars were riddled with holes.
The city light reflected like glitter in the demon’s cheeks and her skin shone night silk. She touched my hand and squeezed. I squeezed back.
The bowstring dug into my aching cuts.
“Why did she take Phaedra?” I asked. “Why would anyone?”
“Maybe she wanted to be taken.”
The demon clung fast to me. I’d become used to her smell, its cool crispness, almost blankness, like the smell of ice. I thought I could even become used to the spiders that sat engorged on her fingernails, or the larvae that occasionally dripped down my shirt.
“She’s not here anymore,” the demon said. ”Let’s go home. I’ll make you warm.”
And I might have turned back, except I smelled The Nightcatcher’s molting fur hanging off the tree branches. She’d run through here and left her scent behind. If we didn’t walk fast enough, it would contaminate our blood.
“She’s not here,” the demon said.
I wanted to believe the demon, I really did. I wanted to think that the shape at the end of the path was only a scarecrow swaying in the breeze, and that the way the moon shone down, only gave an illusion of that sleek textured fur. I wanted to believe that the thing didn’t move when I took a step and tilted its head to regard me.
It skittered away into the trees.
Nightcatcher, was it you who tried to destroy my mother? Was it you who called to her that night I found her being devoured alive?
The trees rustled.
The demon crouched and scratched at the dirt. Her living hair caught my throat and black widows scurried across my fingers. I unslung the bow from my back.
I’d used this bow before. It fit the shape of my hands, as if worn down through the years. Saint Peter had kept it safe for me, until the time I asked for it back. There was a memory buried within me, a distant, darkened memory of a ship rocking underneath me and a great creature rising out of great waters.
I knew how to notch the arrow and aim.
I knew I needed to breathe to slow the world down, or I’d miss my shot.
Inhale. Exhale.
The trees rustled behind the demon. I turned, and there she was.
Learn to breathe. Heh heh heh heh. Slow it down. Slower. Learn to breathe, even though the air is turning to poison and your lungs are filling with smoke.
The Nightcatcher had poisoned my entire life, but it could end here. I could reverse this. My mother and I might be schizophrenic, but if The Nightcatcher was real, I could go home tonight with her head in my travel bag and tell my mother there was nothing left to fear. There'd never be another night where The Nightcatcher crept into our home and forced her to swallow bleach.
I aimed the bow at her. I pulled the drawstring back and dropped my shoulders.
“Don’t,” the demon said.
I breathed in.
“Don’t.”
I breathed out.
Her head emerged from the trees. She reached down, not with two hands but eight. Her eyes were baby blue.
I shot her and she tumbled into the dirt.
I stood still for a moment, panting. I thought she must’ve feigned injury, waiting for me to come close. But then I saw the arrow, embedded into her skin, and her blackened blood splashed against the leaves.
As I walked toward The Nightcatcher, she twitched and genuflected. I pulled the drawstring back, ready for the killing blow.
But when she lifted her head up, I saw it wasn't The Nightcatcher at all.
It was the baby-faced spider, her mouth opening and closing as she gasped for air, blowing black bubbles from her ruined lungs. It was the same little Arachne that Momma once took me down into the woods to watch die.
I lowered the bow and I slumped into the grass. My hands couldn’t clench the bow anymore, and it fell from my fingers.
The spider child gurgled.
“I told you,” the demon said.
I tore at the grass and when I looked down, my hands were full of blue flowers.
Baby Arachne reached for me. The fine hairs of her limb brushed against the back of my hand. As gently as I could, I took that limb in my hand and kissed its furry tip.
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
Baby Arachne sighed and, just as it happened years ago, she slipped away.
I turned to the demon.
"You've got a little something," the demon said, and touched her lips.
I rubbed my mouth with the back of my hands and it was black.
***
That night, the demon and I dug a grave for baby Arachne with our bare hands. Dirt pushed its way through my split knuckles, but I didn’t dare stop digging. Maybe The Witch was dead, and Saint Peter had fallen asleep on the side of the road with a concussion, but I didn’t dare. I kept swallowing, but I couldn’t swallow the grit in my teeth and on my tongue.
Let my blood mix into the dirt, let the baby Arachne’s black ichor stain every bed sheet I ever climb onto. I pulled the arrow out of her side, and it came out with a sick little puckered noise.
It was I who pushed the dirt over her head. It was I who covered her mound with flowers.
I bit down on my bleeding knuckles. I pushed my head into the soft mound. The demon held me.
Chapter Twenty-Five
WHILE THE DEMON AND I were in the woods, Saint Peter managed to flag down a car and get her and Genie to a hospital. The van was totaled and towed to a scrap yard.
The demon and I headed back alone. I didn’t know how many miles we were from home, or if there was even a home left at all. I couldn’t trust myself anymore. Once I had a brain, not riddled in holes, a body, not on the verge of falling apart, a time, where I could crawl into my bed and not have to wonder if I’d wake up in the middle of an underground ocean.
The demon tripped and fell into the gravel on the side of the highway. She struggled to get up, and then fell again. The locusts in her hair cried for me. Her hair looked like road kill in the night. I carried her on my back until I collapsed. Then she carried me.
Nobody pulled over to ask if we needed help.
We arrived at the house just before dawn. I threw the bow and arrows onto the floor of our bedroom. Pluto jumped onto the bed, mewling. The dogs gathered at our feet. Despite how exhausted we were, we couldn’t sleep for hours. We stayed up and washed our faces in the kitchen sink. We brushed the dirt and grass out of each other’s hair. The dogs licked our wounded legs, but we were too tired to push them away. We collapsed into bed and stared at the ceiling, shivering, drowning, twitching.
I don’t know when I fell asleep, but in my dreams, The Nightcatcher chased me through the woods. She shot fish hooks attached to wires out of her hands. The hooks tore into my back. As I ran, the wires snarled in the trees, snaring me, entrapping me, tighter and tighter the more I ran. The hooks broke the bones in my back. I crawled across the ground, into a grotto.
A doe lay on the ground, heaving in labor. I cut her open and the pink, foam-mouthed fawn tumbled dead into the grass. I crawled into the doe’s uterus and closed the skin around me to hide.
The Nightcatcher tied the doe with wires and suspended her from the trees. She kissed the doe’s cold, clover-stained mouth and I felt the kiss on my mouth. The Nightcatcher left. I rocked inside the doe, upside down, cradled in her warmth. I rocked in and out of the dream.
The artist cut the doe down. I crashed to the ground. He pried her open and found
me inside.
“Where have you been?” I asked, and spit my broken teeth into his face.
He spit them back.
I awoke to Saint Peter standing by the window. She’d become so thin, her skin like a shredded canvas. She leaned her head against the window and sighed heavily, like her ribcage shrunk too small for her to breathe properly.
I sat up and pulled the blankets around me. The demon slept beside me, Pluto in her arms.
“Are you okay?” I whispered. “They didn’t keep you at the hospital?”
The moonlight was like splinters in her eyes.
“I’ve missed you so much,” she said.
“I’ve been here the entire time.”
Her brown roots were growing in and her blue hair faded nearly to white. Her sweater hung off her shoulders in threads, her skirt torn with holes.
“You don’t understand,” Saint Peter said.
But I did understand. Her clothes were falling apart and I was making her fall apart. I stopped eating, and she displayed the evidence on her body, a mirror of my mistakes. Once she carried her stigmata as crosses, but she replaced them with snake bites and burn marks. For me.
“You’re going to destroy yourself,” I said.
“Do you know what they call people like me?” she asked.
She crawled across the bed and pressed her face against my knee.
“Ecstatics,” she said when I couldn’t respond, didn’t know how to respond, “because nothing feels better than hurting for the one you adore.”
“I don’t deserve this from you,” I said.
“Stigmata comes from the Greek word stigma. It means brand. Like you would brand a slave.”
She breathed against my leg.
“I don’t own you,” I said.
“We used to touch like this,” she whispered. “We used to sleep in a bed covered in yellow flowers.”
“Please,” I said. “I can’t watch you do this to yourself.”
She lifted up her head, her hair like a dirty crown. Once she walked on water and preached on top of a mountain in all languages of the earth. Now she was with me, in the depths of a dark city, in a dirty punk house, stepping over needles and waking up hung-over every morning. Hey, let me total your van and slap your skin with poison fangs. Hey, we’re out of coffee, why don’t you let me drink your blood.
Maybe if the stories were true, her other god didn’t treat her any better – after all, he left her to die as a martyr, crucified upside down.
She reached for my face and I grabbed her hand to stop her. Red marks spread on the inside of her arm where the bowstring had slapped against mine.
“I’m not good at taking care of myself,” I said. “I’m going to kill you if you stay.”
“You have before,” she said.
“Please”
“I didn’t mind.”
Saint Peter gripped the inside of my thigh. She lifted up my dress. The demon and Pluto continued sleeping.
“I can’t,” I said in a frantic whisper.
It was as if speaking any louder would shatter all three of us.
“You’re different this time.”
God, look what I’d done to her - thinned her down, burned her, branded her, scarred her, scratched her, punctured her. And I’d been too wrapped up in my own problems to notice. Here, let me leave you to die while I lose my goddamn mind. Off to the hospital for a little vacation - all the while she’s puncturing herself with my damage. What do you want me to say? Hey baby, get a little closer, there’s still a little cocaine left on that stomach wound?
“You used to hold me as I slept,” Saint Peter said, “You kissed me here. And here. We ate mushrooms in the great forest. We travelled to places I can’t even dream about anymore.”
“And how did that work for us? If any of this is true, and I’m not just losing my goddamn mind, why are we here and not there? I can’t imagine getting any lower than this. We screwed up somewhere.”
Though maybe next time, instead of being humans, we’d be reincarnated as two fighting beetles, or vermin cupped inside a heroin addict’s hoodie.
“You need to leave me,” I said.
“Don’t say that.”
“Look at you,” I said. “No, don’t even. Look at me, and see what you're doing to yourself.”
“It’s because of her,” Saint Peter said. “That’s why it’s different this time.”
Silence.
“Yes,” I said.
“You don’t even see me, because of her.”
“I see you.”
“It’s too late. We used to be best friends. More than that.”
“You need to leave,” I said again.
“I need to keep you safe,” she said.
“By letting me destroy you?”
“I died for you. I’ve protected your woods for years.”
“You said it yourself, you can’t protect me any longer.”
“I won’t leave you.”
I grabbed her arms and wrenched them from my dress. I forced her to look at them. Her thin, poison filled, scarred arms.
The demon still didn’t wake.
“Please,” I said.
“I can’t.”
In the dark, she was not only sick but sick forever, her tears preserved in the cold light. Her skin cracked wherever I touched her. Her blood was the color of dust in her veins.
“Do you think I’m your goddess? I’m begging you to leave. I’m begging. Look at me.”
The demon shifted and stirred in her sleep, but she still didn’t wake.
“The Nightcatcher only wants me,” I said.
“I only want you,” she said.
I bit down on my tongue and blood spilled from her mouth.
“Oh Jesus fuck. Please. Don’t do this to yourself.”
Her fraying skirt touched my lips. I wrapped my hands around her small, cold thighs as she pressed further into me.
I whispered into her ear.
“I won’t do this to you.”
She gripped my dress tight enough to break her fingers. She wasn’t even looking at me as she tried to kiss me, breathing hard, her knees pushing in between my legs.
I grabbed her face.
“Look at me. Come back to me.”
For a flickering moment, she looked at me. She loosened her grip on my dress.
“Things are different,” I whispered. “I’m going to kill The Nightcatcher.”
We probably could’ve stayed on that bed for the rest of the night with our hips and legs locked together. But, after a few minutes, Saint Peter’s limbs lost all their energy. She relinquished her grip on me and slumped backwards on the bed.
The moonlight gnawed at her protruding spine.
“Okay,” she said.
I called a taxi while she covered her face in the sheets. I grabbed her bag and began to pack her things. Without speaking, she rose and helped me. Her clothes were strewn throughout the house, along with everything else, her candles, little ritual books, and psilocybin mushrooms in a bag underneath her bed.
We must’ve stayed in that house longer than I realized.
I tried to give the hunter’s bow to her, but she shook her head and wouldn’t take it.
When we were finished packing, I gave her what little money I had left. We stood by the window, both of us unable to speak.
Already the wounds on her arms were fading. The snake venom in her arms lost its bright coloring. The scars of bite marks, once ferocious and red, were now pale pink. When she noticed them disappearing, she pressed her hand over her mouth and her body shook with silent sobbing.
Outside the taxi honked.
With tears running down her lips, Saint Peter kissed the sleeping demon and the sleeping cat. She picked up her bag and turned toward the door to leave, but I caught her by the hips. I drew her into me. I kissed her on the mouth, kissed her hard until her lips parted. My tongue touched her bloodied teeth. I gripped her bony shoulder blades and held her tight.
/>
I whispered to her.
“I promise I will find you again. After all this is over. I will find you, and I will let you rest.”
I gave her my last cigarette and lit it for her. She inhaled like she couldn’t remember how. I followed her to the front door. I stood on the porch, in the cold, as she ran toward the waiting taxi. She loaded her bag into the trunk, her knees barely able to support her. She slipped on the gravel in her platform boots and grabbed the open door to keep from falling. She hiked her torn skirt to climb into the back seat. Before she closed the door, spots of blood welled up on her forehead.
Her own crown of thorns.
Chapter Twenty-Six
THE WITCH CAME BACK from the hospital in a wheelchair. Her kneecaps were crushed and her eyes crossed. There were bandages around her throat and bandages up to her elbows. Her exposed skin was bruised like an explosion, fire dark and orange.
“Are you okay?” I said, the stupidest thing I could say.
The dogs ran out the door and surrounded her, whining, licking. I wheeled her into the house and they followed, tails tucked, heads down.
“I have bones that will never heal again,” she said, “but that’s not important. You need to dye your hair. Now.”
Fatigue kept me from asking why.
“With what?”
“There’s dye and bleach underneath the sink. In the bathroom.”
I went into the bathroom, found the dye and the bleach. I bleached my hair, washed it out. I sat in the bathtub and massaged the dye in the hair. Washed it out.
I emerged from the bathroom, a redhead.
The police knocked on the door. They were looking for two ragged girls who broke into a house on the west side and stole dresses and jewelry, one blonde-haired and one black-haired. Skinny girls who hadn’t eaten in days, ruffians with drugs in their blood. Seen coming into this house.
“We’ll let you know if we see anyone like that,” I said.
I tugged on my freshly colored hair. I hugged myself in my too-thick sweater, hoping it would hide my thinness.
The police left.
“They’ll be back with a search warrant,” Genie said, “If you have drugs, take them or hide them.”
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