"Why were they scared of shadows?" Rosie cut in.
"Because they didn't know that the monsters were merely shadows, schatzi. They thought they were real, live monsters that would hurt them if they got too close. Anyhow, one day their grandmother came into the cave. She grabbed John and Mary by the hands and led them to the monsters, then explained how the monsters were only shadows, like the ones on the walls in here," Oma March said, pointing to the far wall where the branches of a nearby crape myrtle cast fingery shadows on the paint.
"Then," she continued, "their grandmother took them outside into the bright, bright sunlight. It hurt 39and burned their eyes because it was the first time they'd ever seen the sun after living in the dark for so long. In fact, it hurt so badly that John thought he must be dreaming. He decided that the sun and the shadows were only a dream and that the cave and the monsters must be real. So John ran back inside the cave, sure that the grandmother was just playing tricks. But Mary stayed outside, and even though it hurt, she waited until her eyes got used to the bright sunshine.
"So, schatzi, who made the wiser choice? John, who refused to believe in the sunshine because it was strange and new, or Mary, who let her eyes get used to the light?"
Of course, I didn't realize that Oma March was talking to us about Plato at the time, but it forever changed the way I saw the sunshine. I look down at the shadow I'm casting across the rows of carrots that Rosie and I planted together a few weeks ago. Even in shadow, you can see the raised scars on my arms. My scars are my sunlight: I know the truth about the Fenris, while so much of the world still lives in the cave, in total, blissful ignorance.
God, sometimes I envy them, the freedom to go on with life without knowing about the monsters lurking in their midst. But I can't be John. How could I possibly try to pretend the sunlight doesn't exist, now that it's taken so much of me?
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And I'm not stupid--I realize what I'm giving up. At first it was just a drive to kill all the wolves in Ellison. When that was done, Rosie and I started camping in nearby towns, taking the occasional night trip to Atlanta to fight them there. The farther we traveled, the more successful we were--until they returned to Ellison. I inhale, letting the cool morning air swirl through my lungs, then return to the cottage.
I pause as the screen door slams shut behind me. Something is different. I furrow my eyebrows and scan the room, my senses on high alert. There--the door to Oma March's bedroom is cracked.
I step forward, muscles tensed and ready for whatever lurks on the other side. I grab a kitchen knife from the block and slink across the room, eyes locked on Oma March's door. I reach it and listen for a moment, waiting for the sound of haggard breathing to reach my ears or a corpselike stench to reach my nose, to let me know about the wolf on the other side.
But there's nothing. No scent, no sound, nothing to do but open the door and prepare to fight.
I ready myself. Count to three. And fling the door open.
Rosie screams as I charge forward, stopping me in my tracks. "God, Scarlett, you scared the hell out of me."
I sigh, heart still pounding, and lower the kitchen knife.
"Screwtape chased a mouse toy in here," she explains, annoyed. Her bare feet are brushing the exact spot where it happened. "I didn't mean to scare you."
I shake my head; my hair clings to the sweat on my forehead.
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"You don't need to explain. This is your house too--you can go where you want," I reply. I smile as best I can. "Except my room, of course."
"Why, you'll stab me with a kitchen knife if I do?" she jokes as I set the knife down onto Oma March's bedside table.
"Maybe," I answer.
Rosie laughs, but it's cloaked in melancholy. It's hard to really laugh in here; the room is like a tomb, thick with dust and trinkets and still, heavy air. All the shades are drawn, the bed is made, clothes folded in the drawers. We don't come in here. At least, not often. Rosie clutches a silver picture frame. She looks up at me from Oma March's squashy mattress like a doe uncertain if she should flee.
I lower myself to the bed and lean over her shoulder to see what picture she's looking at--it's an old black-and-white shot of our mother and grandmother, taken just weeks before our mother literally ran off to join the circus. Who'd have thought that a country girl from Georgia could become a star trapeze girl? The photo is like looking into a mirror--Rosie and I look uncannily like our mother. Dark hair, grass-colored irises, sharply tapered eyebrows, and bodies straight like boards.
"I like that picture. It's like a before shot," I say aloud. "Before they started fighting and Mom started, um... dating." That's putting it kindly. It's never been a secret that Rosie and I likely have two different fathers. In fact, we suspect we may have another sibling somewhere, but since Mom
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hasn't been here in more than two years, it's hard to know for certain. She came back after we were attacked but couldn't handle it--couldn't handle Oma March's death, could barely look at my scars... It was easier for her to skip out of town for a week, a month, a season, now years. Easier to leave her daughters to carry the weight of death alone.
Rosie exhales, a discouraged sigh. She sets the picture in her lap and looks around the rest of the room. "How long till we have to start selling off this room?"
I sigh. "Not for a while. There's still plenty of Mom's things in the attic to get rid of."
Rosie and I have sold everything from antique clocks to vegetables from the garden to make extra cash; she tried working at a coffee shop once, but it's impossible to have a job and hunt. We had college funds, but our mother drained those on liquor and drugs just after Oma March died. We've hardly touched this room, though I know that there will come a day when we'll have to decide to keep Oma's things or hunt Fenris. And of course, we have to hunt; it's our responsibility, now that we're out of the cave.
That doesn't make seeing our dead grandmother's things disappear hurt me any less. What if I lose my memory, like Pa Reynolds has? Will there be anything left of Oma March to remind me she existed at all? Anything left to remind me why I've dedicated my very being to the hunt?
"I guess it doesn't matter. I hardly remember some of this stuff anyway. It's like I know it's important, though," she says.
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"It is important." I lean into her a little. "It's important because you can't remember."
Rosie shrugs. She stretches her toes to the floor and flips up the corner of the woven blue and white rug. I look away. The rug is the only thing in the room that Oma March didn't put here. We had to buy it to cover the rust-brown stain that no amount of bleach or hot water would remove. I don't like to look at it, but Rosie brushes the rug away every time we're in this room, as if seeing the mark where blood puddled--some mine, some the Fenris's, some Oma March's--will make her remember the attack better. It's all a haze, from what she's told me. She remembers the Fenris, him charging us, and his teeth.
I remember more. I don't need to see the stain to remember the sound the Fenris's teeth made when they popped through the skin on Oma March's stomach. Or the way it felt to see out of my right eye for the last time, the image of a claw careening toward my face, the exploding sensation. The strong vengeance and turmoil that rushed through my body, the desire to be the last thing the monster ever saw. The blur of red blood and crimson rage that changed me forever. I wait until I hear the soft swish of the rug hitting the floor to turn my head back to my sister. Everything about this room aches somehow, as though it's one of my scars being reopened whenever the doorknob is turned.
"Sorry," she whispers. She rises from the bed and sets the picture frame back on the nightstand, in the exact spot where it came from. I rise and smooth the quilt where we
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wrinkled it, then follow her to the door. She shuts it quietly, as if there's someone on the other side whom she doesn't wish to disturb.
"Why don't you go into town to rent the movie for tonight? And we need more
gauze," I add, swinging open the refrigerator door. Rosie nods and grabs a canister off the countertop, rooting through a few layers of cookies to find a plastic bag filled with twenty-dollar bills. She removes two and reburies the bag.
"And take your knives." Rosie looks at me skeptically but straps the belt that holds her hunting knives around her waist. I'm overprotective, I know. But then, I know that the Fenris are everywhere.
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CHAPTER FOUR
Rosie
My mother is the only one in our family who ever learned how to drive, and for all her faults, I have to admit I sort of admire her for it. Oma March insisted that cars were a waste of money, and once she was gone, Scarlett adopted the sentiment, so I'm used to a lot of walking. Downtown Ellison is only a half hour or so by car, but it's a good two hours by foot and bus. I trudge down our gravel road, two canvas shopping bags in hand--I learned the hard way that plastic store bags can break during a long trek.
The hills and farmland surrounding our cottage are the very definition of "rolling." Everything rolls endlessly--the trees into forests, hills into the horizon, clouds into mountains. Nothing really seems to end here, like we're situated on the roundest part of the earth. Whenever they show clips
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on the news of cities or deserts or steep-pitched mountains, it almost feels as if those places couldn't possibly exist--nothing can truly be that jagged, or that flat, or that sharp. The scattered few times I've been to Atlanta were even stranger, as though I were walking inside a storybook that couldn't possibly be real.
I find a rock and tap it with my foot as I walk. Halfway to the bus station. Scarlett would rather walk than ride the bus on the rare occasions she goes into Ellison; she says when she sits with people for that long, they begin to feel comfortable staring at her. Once, someone slipped her a card for a plastic surgery consultation. People don't understand that Scarlett is who she is because of the scars, because of the bites and wounds and pain.
When we were little, Scarlett and I were utterly convinced that we'd originally been one person in our mother's belly. We believed that somehow, half of us wanted to be born and half wanted to stay. So our heart had to be broken in two so that Scarlett could be born first, and then I finally braved the outside world a few years later. It made sense, in our little pigtailed heads--it explained why, when we ran through grass or danced or spun in circles long enough, we would lose track of who was who and it started to feel as if there were some organic, elegant link between us, our single heart holding the same tempo and pumping the same blood. That was before the attack, though. Now our hearts link only when we're hunting, when Scarlett looks at me with a sort of beautiful excitement that's more powerful than her scars and then tears
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after a Fenris as though her life depends on its death. I follow, always, because it's the only time when our hearts beat in perfect harmony, the only time when I'm certain, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we are one person broken in two.
I finally reach the bus stop and check my watch--I'm right on time, if the buses are running exact today. I sit down in a patch of soft clover and hunt for a shamrock with four leaves while I wait, using one of my knives to pick through the leaves. I wonder what Silas is doing, in that big empty house. I could go visit him... but the bus rolls up, a fog of dust and exhaust, dashing the prospect away. The driver gives me a curious look as she opens the door. I can tell she always wonders where I come from, but she never asks. Right after the attack people were concerned, but Mom and Pa Reynolds were enough to quell their worries. I imagine people just think one of them is still watching out for us. If they think of us at all.
I take a seat toward the back, one of only a few riders. It takes fifteen minutes for the long grasses to give way to freshly plowed fields, then scattered neighborhoods, and finally to downtown Ellison. The bus comes to a hard stop, the air brake shouting out, and the driver opens the door and slumps back in her seat. The knitting lady hobbles off, followed by a couple mountain-man-type passengers, and finally I step out onto the warm street.
The town's not bustling, by any means, but a few families push strollers, and groups of middle-aged women window-shop along the sidewalk. Ellison is the sort of place that
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people move to when they want a slice of Americana, though the entire place turns rather shady after the sun sets: BBQ restaurants become bars; coffeehouses transform into dance clubs; and, of course, the monsters come out after dark.
I stop in the grocery store first and grab eggs, milk, and ramen noodles, then pick up a bar of Baker's chocolate and some flour to make cookies for our movie night tonight. The video store is next, and then the drugstore. I want to rent My Best Friend's Wedding, but I don't want to be that cruel to Scarlett. At least she'll like the fight scenes in The Princess Bride.
The Ellison drugstore used to be a little family-owned thing, but a few years ago CVS slapped a giant red logo on the ancient wood and it went from basic drugstore to something closer to a mini-mart, complete with automatic doors and little customer-care cards. I hit the first-aid aisle and then head straight for the checkout counter. It's amazing, really, that the clerk hasn't called the police about me. Who else buys eleven packages of gauze every two weeks? There are a few essentials if you're going to be a hunter: peroxide, makeshift sutures, and lots of gauze. Fenris know to aim for the spots that bleed the most, so something to clot the blood is crucial. I fumble in my pocket for the two wadded-up twenty-dollar bills.
A rash of bubbly laughter distracts me halfway to the register; a group of girls about my age are clustered in the makeup section. They cast wayward glances at the cashier as they sample pink and purple bottles of nail polish, giggling
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to one another and holding their hands up to the light. I recognize one of them: Sarah Worrell. We were friends in middle school the year before I dropped out, just a few years after the attack. I couldn't bear leaving Scarlett home alone, training to fight wolves, so I just didn't go back after the summer was over. I told a few friends I was being homeschooled, dodged bullets when concerned parents and the county checked up on us, and tried to keep in touch with everyone, but it's amazing how quickly friends become strangers when you take textbooks and school socials out of the conversation.
I linger near the scented soaps longer than necessary, listening in on their discussion.
"This one won't match the beads on the dress, though," a girl with perfectly highlighted chestnut hair says brightly.
"They don't have to match. Try this one--it's called Second Honeymoon. Oh, or maybe Hawaiian Orchid!" Sarah offers, adjusting her glasses. I carefully watch the highlighted girl for a moment, trying to imagine what the dress looks like and where she might be wearing it. Not prom--it's not the right season, is it? I imagine all four of them in floor-length Hawaiian Orchid-colored gowns in a ballroom straight out of a Cinderella story. Is nail polish what I'd be talking about, if things had gone differently?
Sarah makes eye contact with me as she reaches for Second Honeymoon--I see flickers of recognition on her face. Maybe I should say something. Ask how she's doing, if she remembers me, what event they're picking out nail polish for. I smile at her a little, waiting to see if she'll break the ice
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and wave or something. But no--instead she just gives me a polite smile back, like she probably would anyone, and returns to her friends' discussion. I try to busy myself with a shelf of soaps but listen in closely; their voices carry, even at a whisper.
"I think she used to go to school with us," the blonde to Sarah's left says quietly. The others respond in hushed voices, before the blonde continues. "I don't remember. I wish I had hair like that, though. Do you think she uses that volumizing shampoo?"
"I know, right? Though her clothes could use some help--who wears pink like that? Oh yeah, her sister was that girl that got all torn up!" Sarah mutters, answering someone else's whispered interjection.
The
torn-up girl and her sister. I know I should feel bad for Scarlett--she's been relegated to the worse title--but a wave of self-pity hits me anyhow. I turn and block out their conversation. Why should I care what they think? They're concerned with parties and clothes and a variety of vain, stupid things. I run my hand over the columns of soap before tossing a coral-colored bar that reeks of flowers into my basket, where it clatters against the bottles of peroxide and boxes of gauze. Heavy perfume appeals to the Fenris. It draws them to you, makes them hungry. Second Honeymoon nail polish wouldn't make a difference to a Fenris, a Scarlett-like voice in my head reminds me. It's a waste of effort.
I grab a few more bars of the flowery soap when a clear woodsy scent sweeps over me, overpowering the soaps. I
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know this scent, though it's not the sort that would rein in a Fenris. I hold my breath, afraid to be the first one to speak.
"Those girls have nothing on the March sisters," Silas says, leaning in so close that I can feel his breath on my shoulder. A strange shiny feeling ripples through me and I wheel toward him, accidentally ramming my shopping basket into Silas's side. A few Ace bandages topple to the floor and the girls look up from their polish dilemma to snicker at me. Nice one, Rosie. I can feel the blush starting as I duck to grab the bandages, and when my hand brushes against Silas's legs, the heat spreads down my neck. Calm down. It's just Silas. I rise and force a smile that I hope doesn't look as goofy as I suspect.
He smiles back, bright-eyed, and reaches forward to take the basket from my hand. "Weekly supplies?"
"We might get a month out of it," I answer. I meander toward the register and he follows, basket in hand. I breathe slowly, willing my heartbeat to return to something of a normal rhythm as the cashier swipes each package of gauze over the bar-code reader.
Sisters Red Page 4
