by A. L. Tyler
It wasn’t until much later that Gina joined him, sitting on the bed with Ember’s head in her lap, slowly stroking her hair as she slept.
“Well?” She asked, eyeing the door warily as Ethel walked in.
Theo was holding his head in his hands; the service he offered was reserved for his most difficult patients, and he had done it many times over the years, but it never failed to make him tired in a way that no amount of sleep would ever cure. It burdened the soul to know some of the things he knew.
“Did you chloroform your daughter?”
Gina cringed. “I can’t think. I can’t think when she’s around, and when she looks at me—“
“That’s called guilt. You did terrible things to this girl, Gina.”
Gina scoffed. “I didn’t ask you to—“
“You didn’t ask me to do anything.” Theo snapped. “You were going to let it go…No. No, you had already let it go. You treated her like she was worthless. You couldn’t even do her the justice of giving her up for adoption. You just ostracized her, and then you fed her to the Knox family.”
They had taken all of the lights out of the room, but there was enough light streaming through the window to illuminate Gina’s pale face as her hard eyes softened, and her hand stopped to rest on Ember’s brow.
“I love my daughter, Theo,” She took a deep breath, shaking her head. “I had one job to do. Just one. I promised to give her a life, and keep her safe. And I couldn’t do it. She came back, and I need your help. I need to train her—“
“No.” Theo said flatly. “You don’t deserve her. She doesn’t deserve the life you want to give her. I took my family away from all of this to keep them safe from the Acton Knoxes of the world. She can come with me.”
Gina looked down at her lap, breathing, and trying to steady herself. She didn’t remember it that way; in the moment, it had all made sense. Since figuring out what was happening, she had spent days trying to convince herself that neither of them had said or done the things that she remembered. “I saw Amy a few years back. She stopped and stayed for a few days, passing through on her way to Russia.”
“How many years?”
“Four. Maybe five.”
“It’s been six since I’ve seen her.” Theo said plainly, cracking his knuckles as he looked to the window. “You know why? She died in Russia. Some man whose name I don’t even remember, who I had never seen before in my life and who I have never seen again since, showed up in my office to tell me my little sister had been ripped to pieces. And he was sorry. That’s what happens to angels, Gina. They die for the cause.”
Without looking at him, Gina carefully wiped her cheeks on the back of her hand and slid out from under Ember’s head, resting her carefully back on the mattress before walking from the room. Theo glared as Ethel walked in, her arms crossed, nodding slightly to herself.
“That make you feel better about it?” She asked, crossing her legs and sitting on the floor. “It’s not her fault.”
“It’s not?” Theo said in mock disbelief. “This girl is a renegade, Ethel. I think you know what she did to her. Her life isn’t about duty. She felt that rejection very keenly.”
Ethel only shrugged. “I made her send her away. She wanted to keep her, but I know better than most that renegades make piss poor soldiers. As you said, her life isn’t about duty, and Gina doesn’t understand that.”
In disbelief, Theo shook his head. “You do fine—“
“We create our own chaos.” Ethel said calmly. “That’s what she means when she says she can’t think. This island only has room for one of us, and it’s me. If I have to suffer so that she can have a normal life, I’m going to do it.” She leaned forward, holding his gaze. “Gina won’t tell you to do it, but I will. I want you to take it all away from her. Erase it all, and give her an excuse to never come back here, and she can go and became a psychiatrist in Arizona. One with an unlisted number, who’s impossible to find when someone needs her.”
Theo didn’t even crack a smile. “You want me to rob her of who she is. You want me to take away all of her memories of what Gina did, and make you out to be a model family?”
Ethel snorted, smiling and shaking her head. “You just don’t get it, do you? Theo, Gina didn’t do those things. I’m saying it isn’t her fault, because whatever Ember remembers isn’t what really happened.”
She gave Theo a hard stare before continuing. “Ember came back on a clear spring morning. She dropped her bag in the water and Gina had to help her fish it out; it just about destroyed all of the books she brought, but she didn’t care because she was so happy to be back. The weight from the damn books is the reason she dropped it in to begin with. They came home, and we all cooked dinner together. Ember sat in the living room and taught Thalia how to braid her hair some fancy way, and then she taught Gina how to braid Thalia’s hair, and then she got really quiet. She asked why we sent her away, and Gina told her. She told her about the demons, and the life we lead, and the danger. She told Ember she wanted her to leave again, to stay safe, and Ember got very upset about it, and then Thalia got upset about it. Gina, being Gina, got weak and told them that they could talk about it when summer was done. We tucked the girls into their beds upstairs, but they stayed up talking anyways. Life went on, and it was almost like she never left.”
Ethel paused, shaking her head and furrowing her brow.
“What?” Theo asked; he was still frowning, but his expression had become distant. He had seen the cracks and odd seams in her mind, but had assumed it was because of her dealings with the demons.
“It was a few weeks later.” Ethel looked back at him. “It was the middle of the night, and we found her screaming on the doorstep. I don’t know why she went outside, or what happened out there, but that was the beginning of the end. That’s when things stopped matching up, and that’s close to the time we learned about Joseph. I don’t know how long he had been here. He might have been here all along. Gina figured it out, and she claims she caught him, and burned him, but Theo…” She shook her head. “I looked in the fire. There weren’t any bones. We fought, and that’s when I went for you—you have similar abilities. I thought you might be able to catch him, because maybe you’ll cancel each other out. Zinnia Knox told me that Acton burned him when Gina left, and made a gift of the bones to Isaac, but Jesus, I still haven’t seen the bones. He’s probably still here, screwing with all of us.”
“A meddler could do it.” Theo nodded, leaning forward. He crossed his arms, looking out the window as he thought. “You’re saying he erased her memory, and gave her this illusion to further his goal of luring her away. Ethel, is all of that true? Gina welcomed her back?”
Ethel’s expression turned sarcastic as she smiled. “Maybe it is. Or, maybe I’m just saying it to win your cooperation. Does it matter, if none of us will ever know the truth?”
Theo stared at her for a moment, but Ethel only continued to smile serenely. He threw his hands in the air and stood up, starting to pace. “Of course it matters! It matters a great deal.”
“It doesn’t.” Ethel spat back at him, leaning back against the wall. “Because the other day, I found myself standing in front of the house, and I had no clue what I was doing out there. And that’s the truth. It’s never happened before.”
“You’re senile.”
“Hunters don’t go senile, Theodore,” she said, without the slightest bit of humor. “He’s used his tricks on Gina more than a handful of times, and even if she doesn’t want to kill Zinnia’s little boy, I would have no qualms about it if I could catch the bastard.” She pointed to Ember’s sleeping form on the bed. “He’s using her to cut his teeth on puppeting renegades, and if he manages it, we’re up shit’s creek. I’m the only one who still immune here, and that means he’s one kill away from running the show if he ever gets the edge on me.”
Theo frowned as he turned back to Ember; most of the community looked upon renegades as unmanageable flukes, but Ethel w
as right—hunters that had the quirk of retaining human emotions had a few advantages. Their chaos made them harder targets for demons, but it would be just like Acton Knox to step up his game. While most hunters were bound by animal instinct to hunt and kill demons, renegades were more human in their emotions; more often than not, it got them killed. Most hunters looked upon them as a runt of the litter, and considered it kinder to let them die young than to weaken the community with their presence. If one wanted to study them, a young and inexperienced renegade would be the place to start. Ember hadn’t awakened to her calling yet, so it made sense that Acton would want her for practice.
“I’m not asking you to do anything extreme, Theo.” Ethel stood to face him. “I’m just asking you to erase the summer. Give her something better, or boring, or…anything, really, that isn’t what she went through. We’ll send her back to school, and she’ll go on to live a decent life.”
“You can’t.”
They both looked over. Gina had returned to the room. Her face was still paler than the moon, and she used one hand on the doorframe to steady herself, but her resolve had returned.
Ethel’s frustration was beginning to show. “Gina—“
“No,” she said. “I mean, because there’s another reason.”
Just within earshot and just out of site, Thalia had crept away from the soup in the kitchen several minutes earlier. No one had told her what was happening to Ember, or what Theo proposed to do to make her better; she only hoped that he could do it. Sitting on a step, she clutched a washcloth in her hands, twisting it tightly and wrapping it over her knuckles again and again.
“A reason?”
Ethel sounded upset; it wasn’t often that she stepped up to take any kind of lead, but when she did, she was usually right. The results weren’t often good, though. Thalia gulped; she had been afraid for too long, and her whole body shook when she didn’t have something to steady her.
Gina’s next words put a knife through her heart. “I think she might be pregnant.”
Thalia felt a strangled sound escape her throat as she tried to remember to breathe. She was sure they had heard her, but no one came.
“Is that even possible?” Theo was asking.
Ethel remained determined. “It doesn’t matter. Give her a memory of a rape, and we’ll get rid of it.”
“Ethel!” Theo sounded disgusted. “I am not going to—“
But sitting on her step, her throat gone dry and her vision going funny, Thalia didn’t hear the rest. Her world had narrowed to a buzzing noise, and a memory of a wish she had made as a little girl.
Ember had never been well-behaved, and she was wild, but she had been her sister. Even from afar, they had been sisters; Thalia had always thought that one day, they would be adults together. They would fight the monsters together, and have their children together—two little girls—and they would raise them together, just as Gina and Ethel had raised them.
Well, just as they had raised Thalia, anyways.
She ran from the house and outside, into the woods. Determined to find them, she ran into the dangerous place, where the monsters lived.
It was a childish thing to think, she realized, because now her sister was pregnant by the monster. Thalia was seventeen that year, and finally an adult. Ember had something growing inside of her that was part of him, and it wasn’t a child that she could ever look at without knowing it.
She felt the tears running down her cheeks; they were the last tears that she would ever cry. They were for the sister she had lost, because Ember wasn’t having a baby.
She was having an abortion or an abomination, and it made Thalia sick to her stomach.
Chapter 27
In The Garden, the days had continued to come and go as they usually did. It was slow, and growing colder. The vast majority of the summer tourists were gone, and aside from stopovers from fishers, the starving times were coming.
Zinny sighed as she watched Acton, huddled and disinterested at the bar, reading one of the books he had read at least a hundred times before. He had let Ember walk out of the bar. They had all known that something was wrong the moment that Isaac shot up from the table, dumping Kaylee from his lap.
Let it go. That’s all Acton had said. He had known what Thalia’s presence signified, even though the rest of them didn’t; Gina was back, and she intended to take back what Acton had on loan. He had sent Ember back to them without allowing anyone a goodbye.
Zinny had watched him from the corner of her eye for days, with doubt clouding her mind as she carefully re-examined every memory. His interest in Ember was something that she had always hoped that he was capable of, but had never really anticipated. The way he skulked around the house after their private outings told her that it had taken him by surprise as well; Acton didn’t hide his prizes. He showed them off so that everyone would know what he had and envy him for it.
But with Ember, he kept his mouth shut. He didn’t know what he had; he knew that he liked it, but he wasn’t sure if an affair with a hunter made him stronger or weaker in the eyes of his subjects. The fact that he had lured Gina’s daughter into an affair would make him a legend.
The fact that it had actually happened the other way around…well, that was something that no one could ever know. When Gina’s messenger had shown up to collect the wayward daughter, he had no choice but to let her go. After all, he had taken everything he could from her by that point. Keeping her around would have been an admission that it wasn’t about Gina anymore.
Unless, of course, Zinny was wrong, which she had to admit was possible. Maybe it had always been about Gina.
As she pretended to scrub at a section of the bar, she stole quick glances at her son, wondering why he had let her go. Ember Gillespie was the best thing to happen to the Knox family since Zinny had decided to found it. She appreciated good food, thanked the person who did her laundry, gave Asher attention, Isaac gifts, and Acton almost everything else. She wasn’t a loud whore like Kaylee, a brat like Rachelle, selfish like Delia, or stupid, like most of the girls that Asher tried to sneak into the house.
She was a perfect daughter.
Zinny pursed her lips as Acton flicked another page. He was either very bored or very bothered, and Zinny hoped it was the latter. If he wanted Ember back, then she was coming back.
Zinny would find a way to barter the trade if she had to.
When the bar door creaked open, and a small figure crept inside, Zinny almost didn’t see her. But as she walked forward, taking slow, deliberate steps, the bloody footprints were hard to ignore.
Without her shoes, Thalia had apparently been walking through the forest, and taking no regard for the sharp rocks and thorny patches. She had lacerations and rips in her pants clear up to her knees. The few demons who had showed up early that day were staring at her, and all conversation had died.
“’Lia!” Zinny gasped, grabbing for a clean towel. “Honey, what happened?!”
Acton turned around to see what was going on just as Thalia stopped in front of him. Her face was still bruised, and she had tired circles under both eyes. When she lifted her fist and slammed it into Acton’s face, he tensed his skin instinctively. Everyone heard the bones in Thalia’s hand crack as they snapped into pieces from the force of the impact. Acton didn’t move; he didn’t even flinch.
Zinny lifted a hand to her mouth. “Oh, my—“
Kaylee tried to stifle a giggle; several gasps went around the room.
Slowly lowering her hand back to her side as her eyes and her face turned red, Thalia opened her lips to speak, but she couldn’t seem to unclench her jaw.
“She’s pregnant,” she hissed.
Caught off guard, Acton glanced from Thalia to Zinny, who was still too shocked for words. Somewhere, Asher laughed. When Acton looked back to Thalia, he saw that she was crying…except that the tears never touched her cheeks.
They were evaporating before they even left her eyes. As a halo of heat sheen starte
d to rise off of her body, Zinny jumped the bar, ripping her dress in the process, but she didn’t care.
“Everyone out!” She screamed. No one dared disobey her, scattering like cockroaches under a light as she grabbed Thalia by the arm and started fighting her to pull her out of the bar and onto the street.
It wasn’t even a full second after they had passed the door that flames erupted from Thalia’s arm, and the girl screamed. She wasn’t in pain. She was screaming in rage. As she slapped at Zinny’s face and hands and body, the flames were spreading, and it wasn’t a normal fire. Zinny cried out as she felt the heat seeping under her demon’s skin and sending jolts and daggers up her arm and into her chest.
The girl would go down—Zinny knew she would, because everyone succumbed—but there was just too much fire. If she let her go, she would burn down the entire island, but the fire was so hot that she could see her fingers melting—literally melting—as she wrestled Thalia to the ground.
A hand came flying at her face, and she screamed in pain as her left eye went dark and the smell of burning hair and flesh filled her nostrils. She twisted away, and saw Acton on the other side of the flames.
“Go!” She screamed.
But Acton’s eyes were as cool and resolute as ever. He reached out and grabbed Thalia’s loose arm, and they both flinched as his skin made a loud sizzle and pop on contact. Together, they held her down until she stopped fighting and went silent.
The first time was always the hardest and the most exhausting. With her one good eye, Zinny looked down at the girl and shook her head; she had been a kind girl. She had gentle, wide, wonderful eyes; they were the color of robins’ eggs, and wanted to see the best in people.
Thalia would never look at her with those eyes again. When she woke, she was going to be as cold and determined as Gina.
Having cooled her arms in the ocean, and Thalia’s unconscious body as well, Zinny returned to the bar and wrapped her mangled arm in a silk scarf that had once belonged to one of Dani’s girls. Acton had persuaded Kaylee to bring it for Ember, but she wasn’t fond of fine things. She liked pretty things, and practical things, but not ones that were expensive. She was afraid of breaking things.
