The Killing Jar

by Jennifer Bosworth

  I chewed my lip, feeling anxiety wriggle beneath that layer of calm. “How long do I need to stay here?”

  “As long as it takes.”

  “Can anyone come visit me?” I asked, thinking of Blake and Erin. I’d never spent more than a few days away from home, and I wasn’t used to being separated from my twin. And Blake … we were so new, the romantic side of our relationship only a day old. What would happen to us if I didn’t see him for a week? A month? What if I wasn’t the same person after all this? What if he wasn’t either?

  “I’m afraid not,” Rebekah said. “We’re not accustomed to visitors here, and it wouldn’t be safe for you to be around normal people until you’ve … well, gotten used to your new circumstances.”

  “Not safe for them, you mean.”

  She smiled and stood, looking down at me. “We’ll keep you so busy while you’re here, you won’t have time to miss anyone. Besides, you and I have a lifetime of catching up to do.”

  I nodded, thinking how much warmer Rebekah’s demeanor was than my own mom’s. She didn’t feel like a grandmother. She felt like the mother I should have had. The woman who should have raised me. But then I felt guilty for thinking such a thing, like I was betraying my real mom. But hadn’t she betrayed me by raising me to be normal? By keeping me separated from the people who could have taught me how to be what I was without hurting anyone else?

  “It’s late,” Rebekah said. “I’ll leave you to sleep. You have a big day tomorrow.”

  “What will I be doing?”

  She cupped my chin in her soft hand and tilted my face so I was looking directly into her eyes. They were the same color as mine, pale green. In the dim room, her pupils were large, crowding out the color of her irises.

  “Tomorrow, you start over,” she said.

  Her skin against mine felt warm and charged. A wave of contentment swept through me, unwinding my muscles until I felt limp as a rag doll.

  Then she released my chin and bent to blow out the lamp.

  She slipped out the door, leaving me to the cool darkness with a sense of peace that felt wholly unfamiliar, but like something that should have been familiar. Like something I’d been missing for as long as I could remember.

  As I drifted off, I heard strains of music coming from somewhere outside the house, melodic guitars and hypnotic drums that settled me into a trance-like state, and I thought about how far I felt from the horrors I’d experienced less than a day ago. Now they felt like someone else’s nightmare.

  CYRUS

  When I woke in the early morning, there was still music playing, only now it was right outside my door. Someone picking softly at the strings of a guitar. With a jolt of alarm, I realized my own guitar was still in the back of Blake’s 4Runner, and since visitors were not allowed at Eclipse, I would not have access to it until I went home again, whenever that would be. For me, that was like being separated from a limb or a vital organ or my twin or my asthma inhaler or—

  Oh no.

  My inhaler. Another thing I’d left behind. Another thing I needed to survive.

  Anxiety pinched my airways, and I immediately began to wheeze. The tranquility I’d enjoyed during my conversation with Rebekah the night before was gone. All the old anxieties and fears and guilt had returned, and along with them came the knowledge that I had been forsaken by my own mother. She had dropped me off in this strange place and left me without so much as a goodbye. Without my inhaler. Without my guitar. Without my twin and without my boy.

  Now it was just me and a colony of complete strangers.

  Worst of all, the empty feeling that had plagued me yesterday was back, coupled with a straining sense of hunger like a wolf on a leash fighting to break free. It wasn’t as bad as it had been yesterday. The physical symptoms—the aching, fever-chilled, shuddering madness—were still held at bay, but I had a feeling this respite wouldn’t last. Whatever it was Rebekah had fed me from that jar—anima, she called it—I needed more.

  Still wheezing, I climbed out from under the quilt, shivering at the chilly bite in the air. Someone had left a pile of folded clean clothes on the short dresser next to the bed, but I didn’t bother with them, choosing to remain in the ash-gray T-shirt and dark gray jeans I’d been wearing since I arrived. There were flecks of dried blood on my shoulders from all that had soaked into my hair two nights before. I needed to wash my hair and brush my teeth. But did they even have toothpaste and running water at Eclipse? I scanned the room and saw no outlets. Clearly electricity was not a priority for the Kalyptra.

  Whoever was outside my door playing the guitar must have heard the floorboards creak under my feet, because the music stopped and there was a tentative tap on the wood.

  “Kenna? Are you awake?”

  It was a man’s voice with a slight Johnny Cash twang.

  I pressed my ear to the crack between the door and the jamb. “Who’s there?” I asked.

  “Cyrus. We didn’t officially meet yet.”

  Cyrus. The guy from the gate. The guy who made the back of my neck go hot when he looked at me.

  “Just a sec,” I said, my voice thin and hoarse from my narrowed airways. There was a pitcher of water and a bowl on a little table by the window. I hurriedly rinsed out my mouth, and then noticed a rustic-looking toothbrush and a jar of what looked like jelly. I opened the jar, sniffed it. It smelled like mint, so I dabbed my finger into it and tasted it, decided it was some kind of DIY toothpaste, and quickly brushed with it, hoping I hadn’t guessed wrong, that I hadn’t just washed my mouth out with lotion or shampoo.

  There was no mirror in the room, so I ran my hands over my hair and clothes to try to make myself at least semipresentable, and called it good enough.

  When I opened the door, I found Cyrus leaning against the wall, cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife. His guitar was propped against the wall next to him. He looked, if possible, even more beautiful than he had when I’d seen him the previous day, his shaggy mane all dark chocolate coils like he was Jim Morrison’s hair twin, his eyes a stunning shade of jewel blue against his graham-cracker tanned skin. He must have been too busy to remember the top few buttons on his shirt, because it was open to the defined squares of his pectoral muscles. Looking at him made it even harder to breathe.

  “Mornin’,” he said, closing his knife and pocketing it in jeans that looked to have been worn as soft as an old T-shirt. He smiled a charming half smile and gave a little bow, one hand placed on his stomach, the other behind his back. “I’m Cyrus.”

  “I know,” I said, wary. “Where’s Rebekah?” I couldn’t bring myself to call her Grandmother or Grandma or Nana or any of the things you were supposed to call a grandma. She looked too young for those labels. But remembering how much younger my mom had looked after I did whatever I did to bring her back from death, I couldn’t believe Rebekah was actually the age she appeared to be, which probably meant that none of the other Kalyptra were, either.

  “Asleep,” Cyrus told me. “She had a long night and needed to get some rest. She asked me to keep an eye on you today, show you around and introduce you to some of the folks since you’ll be staying here a while.”

  He must have seen my face change at the reminder of my sojourn sans expiration date, because he added quickly, “We’re good people. Everyone’s real excited to meet Rebekah’s long lost kin.”

  “One of them,” I corrected. “I have a twin sister.”

  At the thought of Erin, my breathing constricted again. I tried to take a deep breath to calm myself, but the air seemed to hit a wall inside my throat.

  Cyrus’s dark eyebrows scrunched together in concern. “Are you all right? You look like you might pass out or something. Rebekah won’t be too happy if you keel over on my watch.”

  I shook my head, determined to relax and control my breathing. It’s all in your head, I told myself, because that’s what every asthma doctor who’d ever examined me claimed, despite evidence to the contrary. But it was true that the
only triggers to my asthma seemed to be anxiety and panic, and I hadn’t actually showed any symptoms until after Jason Dunn’s death.

  I took a breath through my nose and let it out slowly. My lungs eased a little, but only a little.

  “I’m fine,” I told Cyrus, and then chewed the inside of my cheek in hesitation. “But I was wondering … I think I would be more fine if—”

  “I know what you’re going to ask,” he said, interrupting.

  “You do?”

  “Of course. We’ve all experienced what you’re going through on one level or another.” He winked at me and crooked his arm, gesturing for me to follow him.

  I did.

  * * *

  Cyrus led me across the sweeping belt of field that surrounded Eclipse House, where wildflowers speckled the long grasses with tiny starbursts of color: patches of vermillion, tangerine, lavender, and lemon. We passed the old A-frame barn and a grove of trees where a colorful webbing of hammocks connected the trunks, a brightly painted wooden wagon that would have looked at home in a Romani caravan, and a yurt, the panels cinched up to reveal an interior filled with lounging sofas, floor pillows, and a number of acoustic guitars propped on stands. Any other day I would’ve made a beeline for those instruments. The way some people were with babies or puppies—needing to hold them, paw at them, fawn over them—I was with guitars.

  Today, a more pressing need had replaced my usual compulsion, but even my craving for anima couldn’t entirely overshadow the bohemian idyll of Eclipse.

  “You know, I thought Eclipse was like some backwoods cult compound,” I said to Cyrus. “But it’s more like…” I trailed off, partly because I was out of breath, and partly because the word in my head seemed, for some reason, dangerous.

  Paradise, I thought. It’s like paradise.

  “You sure wind easily,” Cyrus commented when I didn’t finish, taking note of the whistling rattle in my throat. My airways had begun to feel like they were wrapped tight with rubber bands.

  “I have asthma,” I said.

  “Asthma…” he repeated, as though I’d spoken a word in another language.

  “You’ve never heard of asthma?”

  “It sounds familiar.”

  “It’s a medical condition. Tens of millions of people around the world have it.”

  He shrugged, unconcerned in a way that irritated me. “Not here they don’t.”

  “Good for you guys.” I sighed and decided to admit the truth, both to myself and to him. “The thing is, I forgot my inhaler—my asthma medication—and I’m going to need it soon or I could be in trouble. Maybe someone could take me home, just to grab some of my things?”

  He smiled, but shook his head. “I don’t know what an inhaler is, but I’m pretty sure we can do better than that.”

  He waited for me to start walking again, which I did after a petulant pause.

  “Tell me about yourself,” Cyrus said, making me feel like we were on a blind date. Not that I’d ever been on a blind date. For some reason the thought of Cyrus and me on a date, even though we weren’t, made flames bloom inside my cheeks. I had to turn my face away so he wouldn’t notice and ask why I’d gone from pale to pink.

  “Not really in a chatty mood,” I said.

  “It’ll help get your mind off the catharsis symptoms,” he urged. “What do you like to do? Do you have a job or go to school or something? Do you have a boyfriend? Who are you?”

  Who was I? That was not a question I could answer truthfully. I was the girl who murdered a kid at the ripe old age of ten. I was the girl who almost did the same thing to her twin sister after bringing her back from the dead. I was the girl who was so out of control and dangerous her mom dumped her at a hippie commune and left without a goodbye.

  “I’m a music snob,” I told him instead.

  “Oh yeah?” He raised a dark stripe of eyebrow at me, seeming intrigued. “What else?”

  “I’m a songwriter and I play the guitar. It’s probably the only thing I’m actually good at. This fall I start senior year, but I hate school, and I don’t want to go to college. I want to be a musician. And I’m not sure about the boyfriend part. I might have one. We haven’t really figured that out yet.”

  I wasn’t sure why I decided to tell him any of these things. Once I started, the information poured out. Even though he was a stranger, I felt oddly comfortable around Cyrus. Maybe it was the southern accent, slight though it was. Southern accents just made the people who had them seem like they could be trusted.

  And there was something about Cyrus’s face, too. The more I looked at it, the more I saw. He wasn’t quite as perfect as he’d seemed on first sight. His nose and chin were both slightly crooked, as though they’d been broken at some point. But the asymmetry only added interest and dimension to a face that would have been blandly flawless without it. My mom had claimed that true beauty was in the imperfections, but I’d always wondered if she only told us this because Erin and I were so very imperfect.

  “Your turn,” I said. “Who are you? What do you do? Do you have a girlfriend?”

  “Sure,” he said, grinning his crooked grin. “Lots of them.”

  Cyrus halted at a wooden fence, an enclosure several acres wide and long, containing a flock of sheep and a herd of goats, and a dozen horses. He leaned his elbows on the fence and pointed.

  “See that little one there?” he said, pointing to a shaggy, half-sized goat with brown and white fur. “He’s our resident troublemaker. He keeps finding a way to jump the fence, then he gets into the gardens and eats as much as he can before we catch him.”

  I watched the goat race through an obstacle course of his young friends, knocking one of them over, and bounding over the top of another like it was a hurdle.

  “What’s his name?” I asked, smiling and chuckling a raspy laugh.

  Cyrus snorted in derision, and then realized I was serious. “Oh, we don’t name the animals.”

  “Why not?” I asked, and then decided it was a stupid question. This was a farm, and these animals were livestock, not pets. Did people eat goat? I was pretty sure they did, and the idea of anyone slaughtering this little goat was unthinkable to me.

  “I’m going to call him Bully,” I said decisively. “Bully the Kid. Baby goats are called kids, right?”

  Cyrus frowned at me, ignoring my question. “That’s not a good idea.”

  “Too late. It’s already done.” I called to the goat, “I hereby dub you Bully the Kid!” Maybe Bully’s name would stick and the Kalyptra would start to think of him as a pet instead of just an animal. You couldn’t eat a pet.

  I watched Bully race across the enclosure and then spring into the air for the sheer joy of it, releasing a bleat of triumph when he hit the ground. I’d never envied a goat before, but at that moment I really, really wanted to be Bully, to feel what he was feeling. Even a few seconds of simple happiness would suffice.

  I was comfortable existing in a mild state of malaise, and I’d always accepted that was who I was. My melancholia was like the vines that wrapped some decrepit structures, holding them up, fortifying them. Besides, I figured, not everyone had to be happy-go-lucky. The world needed miserable artists, too.

  But after what I had seen in the basement—my family slaughtered, their blood, their death—I wasn’t sure I wanted the darkness anymore. I wanted to tear off the vines that used to keep me from falling apart. To find some other way to exist, even if it meant becoming a whole new person.

  Tomorrow you start over, Rebekah had said to me last night, like I didn’t have a choice. Like that was just how it had to be, and I was both surprised and relieved to realize I was okay with that. I didn’t want to be me anymore. I hadn’t for a long time, but now that I was at Eclipse, separate from everything that made me me—my mom, my twin, my guitar, even Blake—I wondered if I could cast off the person I used to be and truly start fresh, like Rebekah said. The people here didn’t know anything about me. I could be someone else to them.
Someone better than who I’d been for the last seven years. For the last seventeen, for that matter.

  I knelt and held out my hand to Bully the Kid, trying to get him to come to me. He started toward me.

  “Best not touch him just yet,” Cyrus warned. “You’re still a bit raw. Wouldn’t want you to cull him now that you’ve named him.”

  I withdrew my hand quickly, and Bully gave me an offended look and a frustrated bray, which sounded almost identical to a baby crying, before darting off to play with his friends again.

  I straightened and turned to Cyrus, my lungs tighter than ever as anxiety swelled in me. “Is it always going to be this way?” I asked, terrified of the answer.

  Cyrus turned his back on the animals and leaned his elbows on the fence, his posture relaxed and casual. All he needed was a wheat straw sticking out of his mouth.

  “Nah,” he said, seemingly unaware of my angst. “You learn to control it. The catharsis only comes after you cull too much anima.”

  “Cull?” The word sounded so much like kill, I wondered if I’d misheard him.

  “Right. Culling is what we call it when we harvest anima from another living thing. Catharsis is what happens if you escalate the amount of anima you cull too quickly, and your body can’t handle it. But we’ll get you sorted in time, don’t worry.”

  “But how?” I asked. “How do I control the need?” The need for more, always more.

  As though sensing my agitation, Bully raced toward me, braying a sound like insane laughter. This time I couldn’t manage a smile, and he stopped at the fence, gazed at me with his black eyes, and then turned and raced away again.

  I sighed.

  Cyrus tilted his head to consider me, eyes squinted against the sun. “How much do you know about what you are?”

  “Umm, let’s see … pretty much nothing.”

  “So you’re a clean slate, huh?”

  I laughed humorlessly. “Yep. Squeaky clean. That’s me.” My laughter died, and I turned to him. “Tell me everything.”