The Killing Jar

by Jennifer Bosworth

  There were a few grumbles, but the crowd dispersed, heading back to the gardens and fields, most of them craning their necks to peer at my mom and me over their shoulders.

  Stig ushered us toward the house. “Rebekah’s inside. I’m sure she’ll be happy to see you.”

  Mom snorted derisively. “No need to lie to me, Stig. I’m a big girl now. I can handle my mother.”

  Judging from the slight tremor in Mom’s voice, I wasn’t so sure she believed what she said.

  REBEKAH

  Stig led us through corridors that twisted and turned and split. The immense building could have been designed by a rabbit; it seemed more warren than house. The walls, floor, and ceiling were exposed wood, oily and aged. Ethereal paintings of moths with black circles on white wings crowded the walls in the hallways. The same species of moth that was inked on my mom’s back.

  “What kind of moth is that?” I asked.

  Hearing my question, Stig glanced over his shoulder and gave my mom a look that I didn’t know how to interpret as anything other than a warning.

  “It’s … an Eclipse moth,” my mom said, and then quickly added, “But it isn’t real. That is, it doesn’t exist. It’s like a fairy tale creature.”

  “Then what’s with the obsession?”

  Mom shrugged. “Eclipse moths are the Kalyptra’s totem. Sort of a mascot or a family crest.”

  I guessed there was more to this story, but Mom didn’t seem keen on talking about it in front of Stig, so I let it drop.

  We turned a corner and Stig nearly collided with a girl heading fast in the opposite direction.

  “Pardon me—” she started to say, and then she saw my mom and froze with her mouth open. She had skin the color of brown sugar, and long, silky black hair woven into an intricate braid that hung to her elbows. Her fierce eyes were small and dark, like black pearls.

  “It’s you,” the woman said, breathless and flustered, blinking rapidly. “I thought … I mean … you’re not supposed to be here.”

  “I know.” Mom lowered her eyes, as though in shame. “Joanna, this is my daughter, Kenna.”

  Joanna’s eyes cut to me and widened. For a long moment, all she did was stare at me. “She has gray hair,” she said finally.

  “It’s not her natural color,” Mom said, a sardonic crackle to her tone. She’d been coolly furious when she saw what I’d done to my blond hair.

  “Why would anyone dye their hair gray?” Joanna asked in clear abhorrence.

  Mom shrugged, as if to say, Teenagers. Who knows why they do anything?

  Joanna continued to study me, and her brow furrowed. “What’s wrong with her?” she asked, but the apprehension in her voice told me she was not referring to my hair.

  I shuddered and clutched myself. The respite I’d enjoyed was over, and my fever chills and aching body were ramping up again. I realized my teeth were chattering. My lungs felt hardened and shrunken, and my insides felt like they were caving in, like my rib cage would buckle and my organs and bones would fold into themselves like a collapsing universe. At the same time, parts of me seemed to be unraveling, trying to reach out for whatever—whoever—was near me, hair-thin veins trying to connect to something vital, something that could end my suffering. It hadn’t been this bad after Jason Dunn. If it had, I didn’t think I would have survived.

  “Catharsis?” Joanna guessed before Mom could answer.

  “I’m taking her to Rebekah,” my mom said in confirmation. “She needs help, and I can’t give it to her.” Again, Mom lowered her eyes. “Not the way I am now.”

  Joanna’s black pearl eyes darted to Stig, and then back to my mom. She seemed to be trying to decide something.

  “You should leave,” she blurted with sudden, forceful hostility. “Rebekah doesn’t care about you or your mongrel daughter. Just get in your car and go.”

  My mom looked like she’d been slapped. Even Stig appeared surprised by the vehemence in Joanna’s dismissal.

  “Joanna,” he said, shocked. “It’s not your place to speak for Rebekah.”

  My mom shook her head. “I don’t expect anyone to welcome me with open arms, least of all my mother.” She fixed her eyes on Joanna, and something unspoken passed between them. “I thought you might be different, Joanna. I guess that was too much to hope for.”

  Joanna’s jaw clenched and her hands fisted at her sides, but what I saw in her eyes when she looked at my mom wasn’t anger or loathing. There was affection in them, deep and unmistakable. And she seemed to be pleading … pleading with her eyes for my mom to take me and leave.

  But I couldn’t be sure, and a moment later she turned on her heel and hurried away.

  My mom stared after Joanna with tears brimming in her eyes. I’d seen my mom sad. She was almost always sad. But I’d never seen her heartbroken, and that was how she struck me now.

  I turned to my mom. “How do you know her? Or him for that matter?” I nodded at Stig. “How long has it been since you left Eclipse?”

  “A long time,” she answered vaguely.

  “But you must have been back to visit?” Neither Joanna nor Stig looked older than twenty-five.

  Stig and my mom shared another of those secretive glances. “No,” she said. “Never.”

  I wanted to know more about this time discrepancy, but I had my own issues with time right now—mainly that I was running out of it. That reaching, unraveling feeling was getting stronger, and it seemed to be stretching toward my mom.

  I wiped sweat from my brow with the back of a trembling hand, teeth still chattering as violently as if I’d just climbed out of a frozen river in January. “Fine. Whatever we’re doing here, let’s get back to it. I don’t know how much longer I can hold on.”

  “Of course,” my mom said, snapping back to reality and squaring her shoulders, as though she were about to go into battle.

  Stig led us to a steep staircase and we began to climb. When we reached the third floor, we came to a closed wooden door, a pattern of branches and moons and fluttering moths carved on the surface.

  Stig knocked softly. “Rebekah?”

  “Come in.” The response was immediate, as though she’d been waiting patiently for our arrival.

  Stig pushed the door open, revealing cozy quarters that seemed to be part bedroom, part study, with a vaulted ceiling and exposed beams hung with colorful tapestries and lanterns. The walls were jammed with framed art, antique stringed instruments, and bookshelves. Fur rugs were scattered across the floor, the biggest lying in front of a fireplace with a stone hearth, surrounded by large, fluffy sitting pillows. Two large skylights let in shafts of lemony morning sun.

  The first person my eyes locked on to when I entered was Cyrus, standing in front of a rustic birch wood desk, talking to the woman sitting behind it.

  When I saw her, everyone else in the room faded.

  I had to blink when she turned her face toward me, like I’d looked directly at the sun. Her smooth skin was the color of dark honey, and a cape of caramel-blond hair cascaded past her waist to the tops of her thighs. Her arms were slender, waifish, and multitudes of silver rings circled her fingers. Her face was almost too beautiful to make sense. Wide-set, pale eyes. Shell-pink lips. An aristocratic nose and chin, and high, round, peachy cheekbones.

  She was nothing you’d think of when you think of a grandmother, but I knew on sight that this woman was mine.

  She rose and glided toward me, smiling, but didn’t spare so much as a glance for my mom. Her bare feet whispered across the wood floor and the gauzy fabric of her long, lavender dress fluttered around her ankles.

  “You must be my granddaughter,” she said. “I’m so glad to finally meet you.”

  I wanted to tell her to stay back, not to touch me. Even though my mom said I couldn’t hurt these people, the Kalyptra, I didn’t want to take any chances. But Rebekah smiled at me so gently, and there was a welcoming glow to her, like she’d been waiting for me all these years; like maybe, just by l
ooking at me, having never met me, she loved me. This air of acceptance overwhelmed me and I couldn’t speak.

  She cupped my cheeks in hands as soft as baby skin. “I’m Rebekah,” she said.

  Then my ears filled with a shuddering roar, and my skin pulsed, one pounding heartbeat reverberating through me, before I felt myself unravel, strands of me reaching for her, for my mom, for anyone at all. Reaching to pierce their skin and drink the life inside them.

  With an animal cry, I tore away from Rebekah, from all of them, and backed against the wall. “I can’t…” I said, breathing fast, though no oxygen seemed to reach my lungs. “I can’t hold on any longer.”

  I looked down at my body and saw slivers of white filament extend from me, threads of pale light waving and twisting, seeking purchase.

  With my back against the wall, I slid to the floor, arms wrapped tight around me as though I could hold myself together. But my body was rebelling, and no matter how hard I willed the veins of light to withdraw back into me, they refused.

  Instead, they grew, reaching for my mom.

  I shut my eyes tight and covered my head with my hands, unable, unwilling to watch what was about to happen. “Get away from me! All of you!” I shouted at them, and I hoped they listened, even though, knowing what I’d done to the land around my home, I didn’t know if it would do them any good.

  But I didn’t hear any of their footsteps retreating from me. There was only Rebekah’s voice, calm and assured and in control.

  “Cyrus, fetch one of the jars. Quickly, please.”

  My entire body quaking, I dared to peek up at them and saw Cyrus throw open a cabinet on the far side of the room, removing a ceramic container. He handed it carefully to Rebekah, and she moved closer to me until I saw it was some kind of jar in the shape of an animal’s head. A sheep’s head, I realized when she was only a few feet away.

  She continued to ease closer to me with the jar held out in front of her.

  “Please,” I begged, my words vibrating through my trembling throat, strands of me reaching to engulf her. “Get away.”

  She kept moving closer, her eyes never leaving mine. Then she knelt and set the jar in front of me.

  I stared at the jar, and the sheep’s head with its blank eyes stared back.

  “Open it,” Rebekah commanded, her voice filled with so much authority that I had no choice but to do what she said.

  I opened the top of the lamb’s head. Again, I felt that sense of unraveling, like a ball of yarn dropped down a staircase with someone still holding the string at one end. The pale veins extruded from me, stretching and surrounding the opening at the top of the jar as a fine, white cloud of light drifted from inside. The veins hoarded the light and wrapped around it, and as the white cloud diminished, the emptiness inside me was filled. My lungs eased and my bones ceased aching; the fiery itching on my skin stopped, and the shuddering sound in my ears quieted to blessed silence.

  When the cloud was gone, the pale veins withdrew into me and I slumped against the wall and fell instantly, blissfully, asleep.

  THIS SIDE OF THE RIVER

  I dreamed of Blake.

  I stood on one side of a river, its rippling waters tinseled with moonlight, and he was on the other. My bank was lush with blossoming trees and a carpet of white flowers bathed in milky moonlight. But Blake’s side was dark, as though the forest behind him had recently burned, and the light did not reach it. He tried to tell me something, but the crashing roar of water drowned his voice. Then the river began to rise, pushing us farther and farther from each other until he was only a sliver in the distance, and I had forgotten his name.

  I woke in an unfamiliar bed, and the dream lingered for a moment like a bad aftertaste before dissolving into the basement of my subconscious.

  Though it was dark in the room and my eyes had not yet adjusted, I didn’t need them to tell me I was not alone. I tensed, sitting up quickly, willing my groggy head to clear, and then realized that I wasn’t groggy at all. My head was clear. My body felt normal. Better than normal, in fact. I felt freaking amazing, both physically and mentally. The pain and sickness that had racked me were gone. I didn’t think I’d ever known such a sense of perfect, untroubled serenity. It was like every worry and fear and the mound of guilt I’d harbored had been locked away in a safe room inside my head, still there, but unable to touch me for the time being.

  I recalled what had happened before I’d plunged into sleep. Meeting Rebekah. Losing control and coming undone. The sheep’s head jar, and the white cloud of light that had been trapped inside it. The pale, glowing veins that had emerged from me and siphoned it into my body. What had that light been? Whatever it was, I could feel it inside me still, a crystal glaze over every thought and feeling. A soothing balm that filled up the emptiness and drove away my pain.

  I was healed. The gnawing, aching, unbearable hunger that had been a constant torment since I’d woken in the basement was gone.

  But where was I now, and who was in the room with me?

  “Mom?” I tried. “Are you there?”

  “She’s gone,” said the person in the room, who I still could not see.

  I heard a scraping sound, and then an orange flame burst to life, illuminating Rebekah’s stunning face in a warm glow. She lit an oil lamp on the bedside table, and the room filled with amber light. I took in my new surroundings. I was in a bedroom that was small but cozy. The bed was built into the wall, and the walls, floor, and ceiling were made up of planks of wood, like the inside of a cabin. There was a large cast-iron stove that looked like a potbellied steampunk robot next to the bed, and a colorful woven rug on the floor. The walls were bare, as though this room had never been occupied, or as if the former occupant had moved out and taken all of her things.

  My eyes returned to Rebekah’s. “What do you mean, she’s gone?” I asked.

  Rebekah sat in a chair across from me, but she leaned forward to take my hands in hers. Her proximity alarmed me until I remembered that whatever affliction I’d been suffering from for the last few hours was cured.

  My grandmother—who looked to be no older than forty, although that couldn’t be her true age since my own mom was near forty herself—tilted her head, brow furrowing in sympathy. “She went home. You’re to stay here with us for the time being.”

  “She left me here?” How could she abandon me with a bunch of strangers, even if one of them was my grandmother? I was aware of a distant sense of distress, but it lay beneath the tranquil glaze that covered my emotions like a cool, silk sheet.

  “For now,” Rebekah said, reaching out and smoothing back my hair. She lifted a lock of it, and I saw that my hair was no longer the ash gray I had colored it, but a smooth, butterscotch blond.

  I picked up a lock of my hair and studied it. “How did this happen?”

  “Anima,” my grandmother said simply, as though I should understand. But she saw my confused expression and smiled. “It has restored your body to its natural state. Well, not natural. I suppose ultimate is a more appropriate word. Your mother really never told you anything, did she?”

  I started to shake my head, and then stopped and lowered my gaze to the patchwork quilt covering my legs. “She tried once,” I said, remembering when I was ten years old, and my mom had found me in the yard, sobbing so hard I could barely breathe. She had taken me in her arms and comforted me until I’d calmed enough to tell her what was wrong. Erin was sick again and even though she was allergic, I had gone out to Mom’s garden to pick flowers to make a bouquet for her. I thought I could tie it with a ribbon to hang upside down outside her window. Then the flowers would dry and she would be able to look at them every day until she got better. But when I’d reached to pick some of the wild lavender that grew around our house, white threads had wormed from my fingertips and reached for the plant. I’d been so scared I’d fallen over backward and screamed. When I’d looked at my hand again the threads were gone.

  “What were they?” I had a
sked my mom, starting to cry again. “What’s wrong with me? Am I going to get sick like Erin?” The thought would almost have been a comfort. I’d always felt guilty for being the healthy one.

  I remembered my mom had covered her mouth with her hand, her eyes wide and frightened. I didn’t understand until what happened with Jason Dunn that she was frightened of me.

  I lifted my gaze to Rebekah’s. “A long time ago, she told me I was different from other people, that I had a dangerous gift and I could never use it. She said I—” I stopped, hesitating. Though I had obsessed about what my mom had told me all those years ago, I had never, ever spoken the words out loud, and I was afraid to, as if hearing myself say them would be a turning point from which I could never go back. But then I thought about what I had done to the land around my house and how everything living had died, and I decided I’d already reached the point of no return.

  “She said there were people in this world who could consume a living thing’s energy, and that I was one of them,” I said. “But that it was dangerous to do that because I might hurt someone, and if I did I might not be able to control my urges after that. She said if I ever felt the urge I should come and tell her right away.” I stopped there, not wanting to explain to the grandmother I’d just met how I had killed my ten-year-old neighbor, drunk his energy like it was a delicious milkshake.

  Rebekah’s eyes darkened. “Anima,” she said. “That’s what we call living energy. In Latin the word means many things. Life or spirit or sometimes soul. It is all of those things and none of them. But your mom was right about one thing: taking anima can be dangerous and addictive, but only if you’ve never been taught control, and in that way your mother failed you inexcusably.”

  I winced, feeling instinctively protective of my mom, but at the same time a part of me wanted to side with Rebekah. In regard to my “dangerous gift,” the only guidance my mom had given me was Don’t use it.

  Rebekah smiled gently at me, as though reading every thought that wound through my head. “Don’t worry, Kenna. While you’re here, we’re going to teach you what it means to be Kalyptra.”