Thirteen Mercies, Three Kills

by Liv Olteano

  “How does it feel?” she whispered very close to my ear.

  I shivered. “If it involves you, anything feels exotic and thrilling, I think.”

  She kissed the side of my throat, wrapping her arms around me. “Do you feel like trying on a whole suit? Don’t feel pressured to. I’m simply offering you the option, if you’re curious about it.”

  I opened my eyes slowly and stared ahead. “Would you like to see me in a whole suit?”

  “Would you like to see me in a dress?” she answered me, chuckling faintly.

  “Only if you felt like wearing it. I’d like to see you in anything. And out of it too,” I added in a barely audible whisper.

  She hummed. “Great answer. Can I take it off of you? I’d like to,” she whispered breathily.

  “Please do. Though I’m sure you’ve seen women taking their clothes off countless times.”

  “I did. But now I have a fascination with you. With your person. With the scent of your skin. With the taste of your mouth. With the warmth of your inner thighs,” she whispered, running her fingertips up and down my torso.

  “Thank you,” I replied awkwardly.

  I couldn’t think right when she was this close to me, touching me, caressing me.

  “Do you only like women?” she asked softly when we were lying back down on the bed. “Or are men attractive to you as well?”

  I bit my lower lip. “I’ve found some men attractive and some women very beautiful. I haven’t liked anyone as I like you,” I confessed. “But I’m sure that sounds ridiculous.”

  She kissed my forehead. “It does not, Mer. It sounds adorable and so very sweet. Thank you.”

  “Do you like both?” I asked, looking into her eyes.

  She lifted a shoulder. “I’ve been around for so very long. I go through phases. Sometimes I like only women for a very long time, then at times I like both for a while, then I might go back to women or like men better for some time. It’s a rather fluid thing.”

  “Does—does it still feel good? After doing it for, I’m sure, so, so many times, with so many different people?”

  “Do you like sweets?”

  I nodded.

  “Have you eaten a lot since you were a kid?”

  I grinned. “As many as I could.”

  “Do you like them any less, as a whole?”

  “No, but—”

  “I know it’s not the same. But it’s not so entirely different either. We like what we like, and when we get it, we enjoy having it. It doesn’t matter how many times, before or after, we will have the same thing, or a similar one.”

  “I’m sorry if I ask stupid questions,” I muttered, mortified I might have made a fool of myself.

  “Not at all,” she said, running her hand through my hair. “Ask me anything you’d like. I love answering your questions.”

  I doubted it, but I didn’t say so. She must have been asked the same silly things by countless other clueless young men and women throughout time. We just held each other in silence. We stayed like that for a while. There were so many things I wanted to ask still, but somehow I felt this wasn’t the time for them. I simply wanted to enjoy this moment, the togetherness of it, so sweet and tender.

  When I felt sleep coming over me, I made to get up.

  “Leaving me already?” she asked, holding on.

  I chuckled. “I should go sleep in my room, or else Nana might have an apoplectic fit tomorrow morning.”

  Nikola frowned. “I suppose she’ll try to skin me alive if she finds out I’ve corrupted you so.”

  I fluttered my eyelashes. “Technically I’m the one who corrupted you, am I not? I did come here asking you to make love to me. Which you haven’t done.”

  “There is that. I still think she’ll try to skin me alive, though.”

  “She’s just protective of me. I don’t think it’s something personal.”

  Nikola smiled. “My sweet Mer, I’m protective of you too. I appreciate her care. I always will.”

  “Then it’s settled. I’m going back to my room to sleep. We’re going to need all the rest we can get for tomorrow.”

  She frowned. “Are you worried?”

  I nodded. “I so hate social functions, you have no idea.”

  She chuckled. “I meant the Verner plot, but all right. Never fear, I’ll be there to save you from any awkward social moments.”

  I looked at her dubiously. “Promise?”

  She nodded. “Promise.”

  “Oh, and Nikola? May I borrow a pair of black pants and your knee-high boots for the ball?”

  “Sure, if that’s what you want.”

  I grinned. “It is. Thank you.”

  Just as I was about the leave the room, she pulled me back by the hand and kissed the breath right out of me for I don’t know how long. Until my knees got weak and wobbly and I couldn’t quite remember my name anymore.

  “Oh sweet ink and needles,” I muttered, leaning my forehead against her chin.

  “Mmm,” she mumbled. “I’m making an official complaint about this leaving my bed business. I want you here with me. All the time,” she said.

  “A life spent in your bed doesn’t sound so bad,” I muttered and stepped out of the room. “Why didn’t you, though? Make love to me?”

  She caressed my cheek. “You feel you’re in danger. It means your adrenaline levels are running high. Might make you choose things you wouldn’t go for otherwise. I don’t want us making love to be something you would regret or rush into. You’re young and innocent to the ways of the world compared to me. I won’t under any circumstances take advantage of your innocence or your feelings.”

  “Not even if I want you to?”

  She chuckled. “Especially then. We’ll have time for lovemaking, Mer. All the time in the world. Besides, intimacy doesn’t necessarily mean sex. I believe we were intimate tonight. Don’t you?”

  “I do,” I admitted.

  Then I left. I wore a huge grin all the way to my room, and quite possibly also after I finally fell asleep in my bed with Nikola’s scent clinging to my skin and my nightgown.

  Chapter 18

  WAKING UP on what could be your last day alive was odd. I opened my eyes wide and stared at the ceiling. Darkwillow throbbed with stray souls. They seemed to have come to greet me—or send me off. Their whispering filled the corners of the room better than the flicker of candlelight. I turned in bed and looked out the window. The sky was very dark, blacker than usual. The room glowed with extra light, our “morning ritual” to trick some part of our bodies into thinking it actually was morning. In my heart it was night. In my mind, night. In my soul, thick black night. The hair rolls dug mercilessly into my head.

  I exhaled slowly and decided today would be a good day. I’d make the most of it. I’d have the tastiest coffee, smile the brightest, allow everything to amaze me—and all of that. Most importantly I wanted to see my mother’s portrait before the ball. I wasn’t technically allowed to go back yet, but I’d find a way in.

  The floor of my room was now covered in a thick blanket of pink smoke. It writhed, caressed the walls and the legs of my bed. The conviction I’d meet Death today gave me peace. In what way I’d meet it, though, I couldn’t tell. Would I manage to extract Verner’s soul? Or would I be the one accompanying Death on today’s journey? The ghosts in the corners of the room whispered louder, an air of urgency pressing against my skin.

  Nana came in and helped me prepare for breakfast. We found Nikola downstairs already, sipping her coffee. When I walked in, she looked up into my eyes and gave me the greatest smile I’d ever seen. It took my breath away, simple as that. I smiled back, dazed. This woman made my heart thump and my body thrum with new energy. She was my morning, my new beginning, the flicker of light in a world of darkness. It was instantly clear to me in a way only a last day would help crystallize. I had the best coffee I’d ever had and ate the best breakfast of my life. Candlelight looked brighter, sweeter. The wood in Darkw
illow’s floors smelled wonderful and each glass of water was heavenly. I imagined how forests would have smelled and river water would have tasted, though I hadn’t lived back when those things were free for anyone to see and get lost in. I’d seen pictures, read books. In our New World, everything grew on a platform or was filtered and processed ad infinitum before we came in contact with it. But today everything was wonderful and the sky wasn’t dark, at least not in my thoughts.

  After breakfast we retired to the drawing room. Nikola played for us, a beautiful mix of melodies that broke and mended my heart. Nana kept looking out the window, worrying her hands.

  I leaned in. “Worried about Jean?” I whispered.

  She frowned. “About us all.”

  “But also about Jean,” I added, smiling.

  Nana blushed. “Miss, this is not the time to—”

  “You’ll tell me about it after tonight’s resounding success?”

  She sighed. “How you can think of these things when all our lives are at stake….”

  “This is the perfect time to consider these things. What if we all die today? Won’t you have things you wish you’d said? If you won’t think about it now, when will you? There might not be another day to consider it all.”

  She fidgeted in her seat. “Mighty encouraging, Miss. You make the whole thing sound like a suicide.”

  I shrugged. “If we fail, which might very well happen….”

  She shook her head. “You won’t fail. You didn’t fail in that alley when the two harvesters attacked us. You didn’t fail the ones you helped pass without pain. You won’t fail now. I believe in you.”

  Touching as that was, it didn’t make me believe in my chances any more. What everyone seemed to refuse to understand was I truly did not cause any of that by will. I never had. I just noticed these things happened once and gave them a chance to happen again. Thirteen mercies and one kill, while happening around me, were not truthfully mine. I didn’t press the matter, though. This was our last hope, or their last hope. All I had to do was immerse myself in the situation and see what happened.

  Nikola opened her eyes and got up from the piano bench. Her eyes were breathtaking, more so than usual. Or I simply allowed them to affect me more. She smiled, a soft tilt of her lips.

  “Anything on your minds, ladies? You’re whispering a lot.”

  I frowned. “I’m not sure if I should be amused or insulted.”

  “I’m leaning toward the second option,” Nana said, giving her a death glare.

  “Now, now. I didn’t mean to upset you.”

  Hmm. “I know how you could make it up to me.”

  She regarded me hotly for one endless moment, then seemed to rein herself in. “I walked right into that one, didn’t I? All right, do tell.”

  “I want to see my mother before the ball.”

  They both looked oddly at me for a few seconds.

  I sighed. “Her portrait in our parlor, I mean.”

  Nikola’s eyebrows lifted. “Oh. Well, we can go there on our way to—”

  I shot up to my feet. Nana didn’t see it and Nikola had her back turned, but I saw it perfectly. Her ghost came at us slowly, floating from the door of the drawing room toward the middle of the room, and us. I gripped my dress with each of my fists and willed my body to relax. She’d saved me from poison last night. She was still, in some way, my mother. A part of her, at least. Her hair looked wet, like blood dripping down her shoulders, trickling down her back and chest. Her beautiful eyes looked crazed, and her lips…. I shivered and stepped back despite my best intentions to stand still. Her lips were swollen and smeared with blood; the crude stitches keeping them shut bit into her flesh. She reached forward, aiming at me. I flinched.

  Nikola stepped closer slowly. “Mer, just breathe. She’s part of your mother. She won’t hurt you. I’m sure she won’t.”

  “How can you be so sure?” I whimpered.

  Nikola’s proximity helped calm me down a little, but not entirely.

  “She saved your life. Didn’t you, Angela?” she said in a level voice.

  Mother’s ghost froze in place. A thick layer of pink smoke cascaded into the room. Thick arms of smoke crawled up my skirt and wrapped around me. A few of them, however, touched her ghostly form. A look of relief passed over her face and she closed her eyes as the pink smoky arms embraced her. I frowned and stepped closer. The smoke had never paid ghosts any attention before. It seemed to know her, to recognize her, even in this terrifying form. I couldn’t help but feel there was something obvious here I wasn’t seeing. Something important.

  Nikola didn’t seem surprised or shocked by my mother’s ghost. Not even her appearance. Something about that bothered me. Something I couldn’t put my finger on. I glanced up into my mother’s eyes and shivered. They seemed bloodshot, tired, but underneath the layers of that, it was her. Her beautiful face, even if now it looked smeared with dried blood. She seemed pale and skinny, as she was when she died. The grimace of pain still contorted her beautiful features. It was that near-death version of her that troubled me the most. I wished she’d look as she had before the withering, when she was healthy, vibrant, and luminous. Standing right in front of me was the image of her death—the image I was desperately trying to escape.

  I gulped and went closer and closer in small steady steps. When there was just a little space between us, one tear escaped her left eye and tumbled down her gaunt, ghostly face.

  “Remarkable,” Nikola muttered. “Ghostly apparitions rarely exhibit human emotions.”

  “She’s not a ghost,” I said in a tiny voice. “She’s… somehow alive. But she’s not whole.”

  The smoke writhed and seemed to murmur something, wrapping around and around me and my mother. My fears slowly dissolved. The pain of looking at the image of her dead dissipated.

  Nikola cleared her throat. “What makes you say she’s not whole?”

  “I can feel it,” I whispered.

  I could see it too. I’d stepped out of my body somehow, saw the room and everyone in it from a spiritual plane rather than through my human eyes. Nikola’s soul looked like an explosion of light, tiny tendrils of her bright-white soul licking at everything and everyone around her. She was blinding, almost impossible to look at. My mother’s ghost shone dimly, a multicolored river of faded light. Most pronounced was a shade of pink… a lighter shade of pink that oddly matched the smoke in the room. My own soul, a strange blend of colors, bright light spots and pink tendrils, seemed to almost keep the rest of her soul together. But my shade of pink matched the smoke and my mother’s soul too. We were parts of a whole, my mother, me, and the smoke. We were one.

  The other ghosts in the room circled us. Their eyes were wide and they reached out, trying to touch the writhing tendrils of pink smoke or the two of us. Mother seemed to want to say something, her eyes brimming with unspoken words. Where her ghost’s lips were sewn shut, in the spiritual plane, a band of gray wrapped around her like a binding of some sort. She couldn’t communicate what she desired. She was prohibited from it by something—by someone. The pink tendrils of smoke kept trying to get a grip on the binding, but it seemed to repel them.

  I tumbled back into my body and my knees gave out. Nikola rushed to my side and caught me. She carried and sat me on the sofa.

  “Mer? Are you all right?”

  I swallowed hard a few times. My throat felt raspy. “I’m fine. Nana, help me up.”

  Nana looked lost for a moment, just standing there, close to where my mother still hovered. Could she sense her, perhaps? She seemed disoriented, somewhat scared even. But she shook her head and came to my side, helped me to a sitting position.

  “There, Miss. Better?”

  I nodded and linked my hands together in my lap. I looked back up at my mother, her haunted eyes fixed on mine.

  “Mo…. Mother….”

  Her whole body shivered and she floated closer, followed by the tendrils of smoke wrapped around her.

&nbs
p; “You can’t talk to me,” I said in my most level voice.

  Her head flinched in a nod, and she tried to pull open the stitches on her lips. I shivered and shook my head.

  “Please don’t… strain yourself. Just nod or shake your head. You can do that?”

  She nodded.

  “Is it about tonight?” Nana asked.

  Mother nodded, her gaze fixed on mine.

  “About the smoke?” I asked.

  She nodded again, lifting her arms up on either side of her body. The smoke wrapped around her, snakes of smoky pink. They seemed excited, familiar—hers.

  I sucked in a lungful of air. “It belongs to you.”

  She nodded. The smoke crawled over my face and caressed my cheek. My eyes stung, even if the pain was diminished by the smoke. Tears streamed down my face. Their burn felt right, cleansing.

  “It’s a part of you, isn’t it? You’ve been here with me, comforting me.”

  Another tear slipped down her cheek. Oh sweet ink and needles. She’d been with me all along.

  “Does it listen to you and you alone?”

  She shook her head. I frowned as she pointed at me with one arm. That couldn’t be right; it didn’t listen to me. I couldn’t will it to do things. I’d tried, back in my parlor with Herveux’s guards. It wouldn’t budge.

  I shook my head too. “It doesn’t listen to me either.”

  She gestured between the two of us, back and forth, back and forth.

  “It listens to us?” I muttered incredulously. “To me and you?”

  She nodded. So when it wasn’t listening to me, it listened to her? Or it listened to us, perhaps when we both wanted the same thing.

  I inhaled deeply and looked her straight in the eye. “Will you help me extract Verner’s soul tonight?”

  She nodded, her whole body shaking. Her image flickered in and out of sight. Manifesting was an effort she didn’t seem able to make constantly. Her body became more and more transparent, but before it would vanish, she kept pointing at Nikola. What about her, though? Before I could ask, my mother’s image flickered out of view like a candle.