by Kali Wallace
I picked up the skateboard and walked over to her.
“Is anybody else here?” I asked.
“No. Nobody. Danny called me. He told me you were looking for me.”
“And you’re still here alone?”
“It’s just me, I promise,” Violet said. “Lyle and Edward are in Cheyenne. They found Brian.”
“I know. I saw the news.”
“Edward went to the hospital. He said Brian is dying. There’s nothing the doctors can do.” I couldn’t tell if she was upset or relieved. “The nightmare didn’t do that.”
“No. That was me.”
We stood there in uncomfortable silence, Violet in the shade, me in the sun.
She inhaled carefully. “What you did to Brian . . . can you do that to anybody?”
“Oh.” I almost wanted to laugh. “I get it. That’s why you’re here alone.”
It didn’t matter if I had a plan or not, because Violet had one of her own.
When I was in tenth grade this kid named Anthony Chung brought a gun to school. It wasn’t the gun that shocked everybody; he wasn’t the first and he wouldn’t be the last. What surprised everybody, what they couldn’t get their heads around, was that it was Anthony Chung who did it. Anthony Chung, cross-country star, Science Olympiad team captain, honors student, no older siblings in gangs, no delinquent friends. He was well liked. He wasn’t a bully and nobody bullied him. Everybody kept asking, “Where did a good kid like that even get a gun?” It didn’t belong to his parents. Mom and Dad had asked me and Melanie one day after school, “You wouldn’t know where to find a gun, would you?” We promised we didn’t. I was thinking about all the friends I knew whose parents kept guns in their bedside drawers, in their coat closets, under their beds, and wondering why everybody was more worried about where Anthony had gotten the gun rather than why he had it in the first place.
I looked up and down the street. Nobody was watching. Bees hummed lazily around a bed of white and yellow daisies beneath the front window. The sun was hot on my head and shoulders.
“Where would a good kid like you even get a gun?” I murmured.
“What?”
A fat bumblebee settled on a blossom. Violet’s green eyes were so wary, so scared.
“Why don’t you ask what you really want to ask?” I said.
“What are you?”
“No. Not that.”
Violet hesitated, then said, “Let’s go inside.”
THIRTY-THREE
VIOLET LED ME through the living room and into the kitchen. The house was neat but dusty. The only books on the shelves were Bibles and Christian self-help books, and the only decorations were inspirational posters of sunrises and footprints in wet sand, with phrases like TRUST IN FAITH and NEVER GIVE UP printed in a bold font. There were small angels embroidered onto the pillows on the sofa. Looked like they had put some effort into their cover story of being a church group, if only in their interior design choices. It didn’t look like a place Mr. Willow’s family or anybody else had ever lived.
There were no photographs.
Violet gestured for me to take a seat at the table.
“I saw you once,” I said. I didn’t continue until she sat across from me. “In this video a friend of mine got from her church. An exorcism video. That was you, wasn’t it?”
“That was never supposed to get out.” Violet’s voice was calm, but her eyes tightened with an old pain. “I thought they were trying to help. They were trying to help.”
“Why? Why would they think you needed an exorcist?”
“It’s not important.”
“It’s important to me,” I said. “Tell me or I’m leaving.”
Violet’s lips twisted, not quite a smile. She didn’t call my bluff. “I killed my brother.”
“No, you didn’t.” I was certain of it, but she shook her head.
“I did. I did. You don’t understand.”
“So tell me.”
“His name was Teddy. He was two years older than me, and he was everything to our family. He was so good and so bright. We all loved him. He was our light. But he was sick.” Violet’s broken smile drained away. “There was something wrong with his heart. He collapsed one day playing with his friends. The doctors did all kinds of tests. They said he could still live a long, happy life if he was careful. And Teddy, he had always loved riding his bike and player soccer, but he was so good about it. He just laughed and said he would have to find another hobby, like making pottery.”
She stopped to draw in a few rough breaths. I waited.
“After my parents brought him home from the hospital, I came home from school and Teddy was watching TV. He was supposed to be resting. And . . . you know when you’re out in the sun and a cloud comes in, but you didn’t see it coming, you didn’t know the weather was changing, all you know is the light is gone and the colors are gone and you’re cold when you should be warm?” Violet spoke rapidly, her breath catching between words. “I started crying. I was having a fit. I was out of control. I was always bad, I always had tantrums when I didn’t get my way, and my parents tried to make me stop, but I didn’t care. I was screaming so much it hurt them. My mother was bleeding from her ears and Teddy was covering his head with his pillow and I was doing that to them, but I didn’t care. I didn’t stop. It took both of my parents to carry me up to my room and . . .”
“What?”
Violet looked down, scraped her fingertips over the table. “When they went back downstairs, Teddy was dead. His heart just stopped. He was supposed to be okay. The doctors said he would be okay, but he died. My parents—they said it wasn’t my fault, they didn’t understand, but they took me to their priest. Father Matt and . . . you saw the video. You know what happened.”
The priest had died too. I asked, “Your parents aren’t like you?”
“I’m adopted. They didn’t know anything about my birth mother. They were so afraid of me. Of what I could do. They didn’t know what else to think.”
“But they were wrong. You weren’t possessed.”
“They believed in possession. That was something they could understand. People can only see the world as they know it. It wasn’t their fault.”
“You’re a banshee, right?”
She flinched as though the word itself could hurt her. “I’m not anything anymore.”
“I thought banshees wailed because somebody was dying, not the other way around. You weren’t—”
“But I was! Don’t you understand?” The look Violet gave me was bleak. “Teddy should have lived. He was going to live, but I killed him. He could have had his whole life, but now he never will, because of me. Father Matt was only trying to help me and now he can’t help anybody else. I did that.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said again, but still she didn’t hear me.
“They knew what they had to do.” She said it so earnestly, with so much guilt, I wondered who she was trying to convince.
“How did you meet Mr. Willow?” I asked.
“After Father Matt died, they heard about a man who helped kids who were troubled. Spiritually troubled.”
“How old were you?”
“Eleven,” she said.
“You’ve been with Mr. Willow since you were eleven?” I couldn’t keep the shock from my voice. “Your parents sent an eleven-year-old girl to a stranger?”
“I still talk to my parents sometimes. They know I’m okay.” Violet sat forward and spread her hands on the table. “Edward’s the one who helped me understand what I was doing.”
“But you weren’t doing anything. You were only trying to warn them.”
Violet didn’t seem to hear me. “Magic is unnatural. We’re unnatural. It’s wrong to be like this. We kill people. Don’t you understand? There are people everywhere in danger. They don’t know we exist. They don’t know what we can do. How can you bear it?”
I thought about the little girl in the baseball cap crying as Brian led her into the darkne
ss. About Jake checking through the front window for unnamed dangers on the street and the fact that in spite of their dietary requirements he and his brother had only ever killed one person between them. About all the empty shells of people in the house in Nebraska. About Rain’s children, protecting themselves from their grandfather, a man who didn’t need magic to be a monster.
“How can you bear it?” I retorted. “Did you know all along he was kidnapping and killing people?”
“He’s not—”
“Are they all like me? People who are just looking for a place to stay? For some help? That’s why you pay Danny to trick them?”
“You don’t understand. It’s not like—”
“Do you even care if they’ve ever hurt anybody? Do you care if they have families? Do you ask them if they want to go home? Do you even give them a chance to live their lives and never hurt anybody?”
“We’re not like—”
“Yes, you are,” I said, my voice rising. I caught myself, took a breath to keep from shouting. “I know everything Brian did. What all of you did. Don’t lie to me about it.”
Violet pressed her lips together. She still wasn’t looking at me.
“What I don’t know is how many ended up like that girl at the house. Like Esme.”
“Edward says it only happens like that when they . . .”
“What?”
“When they’re not accepting,” Violet said quietly. “When they fight it.”
She knotted her hands together on the table. Her face was pale, her shoulders slumped.
“You really believe that?” I asked.
Violet didn’t answer.
“Did Esme want it?”
She said, very softly, “No.”
“She came to you for help,” I guessed, “and you did that to her.”
Violet was quiet for a long moment. “Esme and Lyle never hurt anybody.”
“Never? You want to see my scars?”
“Before,” Violet said. “When they came to us. They were being hunted, and they were just trying to get back to their family. Esme is the bravest girl I’ve ever met. She only wanted . . .” There were tears in Violet’s eyes, a rough catch in her voice. “Before I met her, I didn’t even know that people like . . . like that, I didn’t know we could have families. I didn’t know there were people who protected each other. Edward always said, he said they were all outcasts, because nobody wanted them. But Esme told me he was wrong.”
“So what you’re saying,” I said, my voice shaking with anger, “is that you were totally okay helping Mr. Willow murder people until you realized somebody might actually miss them.”
She wiped a tear from her eye. “She was going to show me. She was going to take me home to their family.”
I sat back in the chair. I could still feel a twinge in my side where Lyle’s gashes had healed. I was tired of talking around the point. I didn’t want to feel sorry for her, for the scared little girl she had been, the one who had only ever wanted a family that wouldn’t send her away for being different in a way they refused to understand.
“I have one more question,” I said.
Violet nodded.
“Why is he doing this? Why did Mr. Willow wake up one day and decide to start hunting down monsters?” She opened her mouth, but I went on, “And don’t tell me it’s because we’re irredeemably evil. I haven’t even met very many monsters yet and I already know that’s bullshit. You know it’s bullshit. Did he used to be one too?”
“No!” Violet looked shocked. “He does it to protect people. He knows—he’s known since he was a child what damage monsters can do, and the humans who let them live. Monsters destroyed his family. And it used to be that he had to kill them, when his father was in charge, but now he wants to help them.” To her credit, Violet lowered her gaze and amended, “Or he used to. He’s lost his way. I’ve tried to talk to him, to make him understand that what he did to Esme was wrong, but he won’t listen.”
“So you want to stop him. Fine. Why don’t you do it yourself? You don’t need my help.”
Violet shook her head. “No. No. I could never do that to him.”
“Why not?”
“I can’t,” Violet said, miserable. “I can’t. He’s done too much for me. It’s because of him I’m not a monster anymore. I can’t.”
Too grateful to act herself, or too brainwashed, but I didn’t think it really mattered. She was disillusioned now, but there was still a frightened eleven-year-old girl inside Violet, abandoned by her parents and taken in by a man who promised to make her better. There was no way to reason with that scared little girl.
“Get Lyle to do it,” I said. “It’s his sister who got messed up.”
“He thinks we might be able to help her,” Violet said. “Edward told him it might be possible. That there might be a way to ask for a . . . favor.”
“Is there?”
“I don’t know. We don’t know.”
“So that’s where I come in,” I said.
“It’s different for you,” Violet said. “You’re not like us. It wasn’t an accident that you came to us. Don’t you see? You’re a gift. You’re exactly what we need.”
It was the worst thing she could have said. It was precisely what I expected. Violet and I weren’t that different from each other. We both divided the world into killers and everybody else, and she knew which side of that line I was on.
“Katie—whoever you are—”
“You don’t need to know my name.”
“You can help us.”
“Say what you want.”
“You know what I mean.”
“I want you to say it to my face.”
Violet couldn’t meet my eyes. “He’ll come here if I ask. You don’t have to—it can be like Brian. Whatever you did to him. That’s enough.”
“So you can sit by his hospital bed and hold his hand and tell him how sorry you are?”
“No! I don’t—”
“What do I get out of this?”
“What?”
“You want to hire a contract killer, you have to offer something in return. I don’t work for free.”
Violet’s mouth dropped open. “You want money?”
“No,” I said. “That’s not what I want.”
“But what—” She stopped.
“I want you to take me where you take the rest of them,” I said.
In Brian Kerr’s memories I heard the clang of metal on metal and a low, low laugh rolling along a throat of stone. She waited at the end of a dark tunnel. The shiver of fear might have been my own, or it might have been an echo of his. He had never gone all the way to the end. He was human. He never had to. His job was to take the others and wait for them to emerge changed, or broken, or not at all.
Violet was shaking her head. “You don’t know what she’ll do.”
She was right. I had no idea what would happen. But I had to find out. Wherever I went next, whatever I chose to do with the rest of my afterlife, I couldn’t begin without knowing. I had to see for myself.
“Take me to her and I’ll do what you want.”
Violet didn’t try to talk me out of it. She said, “You’ll have to ride in the trunk.”
THIRTY-FOUR
VIOLET WASN’T JOKING. She made me ride in the trunk.
“I can’t let you see how to get there,” she said. “Nobody can know where it is.”
So into the trunk I went. It smelled of rubber and oil, and the gritty carpet was sticky in places, like a bottle of soda had exploded and nobody had bothered to clean it up. I hoped it was soda. I lay on my back, backpack and skateboard jammed in beside me, and for once in my life I was grateful to be barely five foot three. The space was airless and hot.
I rolled with each turn and tried not to think about the squashing-each-other game my sisters and I had played when we were younger. Still played, sometimes, because we were just that mature, when all three of us were stuck in the backseat, and whoever wa
s in the middle smashed the others against the doors every time the car turned.
I closed my eyes and stopped breathing until the rumble of the car chased away the memory of Sunny’s delighted laughter and Meadow’s annoyed grumbling. It was getting harder to make myself stop thinking of them.
I couldn’t guess how far we were going or what direction we were traveling, but I did notice when the speed dropped and the asphalt gave way to washboard dirt. About ten minutes on the dirt road and I learned something new about my existence among the living dead: I could still get carsick.
When we finally stopped, the trunk popped open and Violet said, “They’re not here yet. It’ll be a while. You might as well get out.”
She had called Lyle and Mr. Willow before we left the house. She hadn’t sounded very convincing when she told them she had found me in Boulder and it would be best to “get it over with” before I escaped again, but it had worked. They were on their way from Wyoming.
I climbed out of the trunk and took a few gulping breaths. We were parked on a dirt road so narrow it barely deserved the name, a rutted and rocky lane that disappeared into the woods in both directions. Narrow pines and white-barked aspens gathered close on both sides, branches reaching overhead, and steep hills rose above the forest.
“Where are we?” I asked.
“Nobody knows this place,” Violet said, which wasn’t any kind of answer.
The forest smelled clean and rich: warm sun on pine trees, fresh dry air, a faint hint of vanilla. Green grass and white flowers grew from the blanket of fallen needles beneath the trees. Overhead a white contrail tracked across the cloudless sky. The afternoon was beautiful and green and calm. I listened but heard only the gentle trickle of a stream nearby. No cars, no voices.
No birds.
No insects.
No squirrels chattering and chasing on tree trunks.
We were alone.
It should have been peaceful, but the silence was too complete. Violet looked nauseated and pale. There was more in those woods than I could see.
