The Killing Jar

by Jennifer Bosworth

  I basked in Rebekah’s company when she was with us, but I didn’t mind that she abstained from nights in the dreaming tent. Her presence might have altered the bacchanalian group dynamic, made it more formal. Everyone would be on their best behavior.

  Sometimes after our jam sessions there was dancing, or late-night feasts of fresh breads and cheeses and fruit and honey. Some nights Sunday, the artist, painted temporary tattoos on our arms and shoulders and backs. She preferred to paint on me because I was a blank canvas, not a single tat to my name. She offered to give me permanent ink, and I almost said yes, but then I thought of what Blake would say. Blake loved art, but was not a fan of tattoos. Erin, too, had strong opinions against them. Still, I told her I would think about it.

  There were nights when the Kalyptra began to partner off into couples, and I would slip away and return to my room, blushing furiously and missing Blake, wishing I could walk over to his house like I used to and knock on his window, lure him out for a walk in the woods. I replayed the memory of our kiss over and over like a favorite song, the kind that never gets old.

  In her sewing studio one day, I asked Illia the question that had been nagging at me. “Why aren’t there any kids at Eclipse? I mean, you guys have plenty of sex. Do you make your own condoms here or something?”

  Illia, threading a needle, jerked and accidentally poked herself, drawing a bright bead of blood. She sucked at it and cocked her head to study me, seeming bewildered by my question.

  “We can’t have children,” she said. “Not with each other, anyway.”

  “Why not?”

  She hesitated, and I wondered if this was a subject she and the others had been instructed not to get into with me. There seemed to be a lot of those subjects, deemed off limits by Rebekah. No matter how many times I questioned the Kalyptra about the origin of our power, I never got a straight answer.

  “Kalyptra can only have children with normal people because our power is passed down to the child. Our power is what makes us Kalyptra. None of us is willing to give that up, even for a child.” She lowered her eyes, as though she didn’t want to witness my reaction. “Except for your mother. Her power passed to you.”

  My mouth dropped open, and for several seconds my mind went completely blank as I absorbed what she was telling me.

  “My mom lost the ability to cull because of me?” I said after a moment of silence.

  Illia raised her eyes tentatively and nodded. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have been the one to tell you.”

  “No,” I said, my voice cold and my shoulders trembling with quiet rage. “My mom should have been the one. She should have been the one to do a lot of things.”

  MIDNIGHT GLORY

  There was a game the Kalyptra liked to play. A game they’d invented that was similar to Truth or Dare.

  The game was called Dominus, and it worked like this: we rolled a set of homemade dice to decide who was the Dominus. The Dominus was basically the master of the game, and got to decide the punishment for those who chickened out of their dares. He or she also got to wear a crown and a velvet cloak that Illia had made, and had to sit with a chicken in his lap.

  The first time I played, Yuri challenged me to stand on my head for an entire minute. I could barely do a cartwheel, but I had no choice but to try. I made it about three seconds before toppling over onto a pile of pillows to the triumphant laughter of the others.

  “Punish her!” the Kalyptra crowed in unison. “Punish her! Punish her!”

  Diego, that night’s Dominus, held his chicken up for silence, and spoke to me in a grave tone, although I saw a smile twitching at the corner of his mouth. “Kenna, you failed to complete your challenge, and must therefore be punished.” Diego whispered something to Stig, who looked appalled.

  “Oh, she won’t like that,” Stig said, stroking his pointy beard. “Choose something else.”

  “She’s not supposed to like it,” Diego reminded Stig. “That’s the whole point.”

  “What?” I said, getting nervous. I thought they’d go easy on me since it was my first time playing the game.

  “You’ll see,” Diego said, and to Stig, “Go on.” Diego jerked his head toward the door to the yurt, signaling for Stig to go and retrieve something. Stig was gone for less than a minute before he returned with a wriggling, muddy earthworm dangling from his fingers.

  “No,” I said, appalled. “I am not eating a worm.”

  “You don’t have to eat it,” Diego said, and couldn’t suppress his grin any longer. “You have to cull it.”

  “Oh. That’s all?” I held out my hand for the worm. “Not a problem. I thought you said this was going to be a punishment.”

  Although I’d stuck to plant anima since I had arrived at Eclipse, I didn’t see much harm in culling the anima of a worm. As Stig laid the squirming invertebrate in my open palm, I found I was actually looking forward to taking from a slightly more potent source of anima than plant.

  But I should have known better. The worm, after all, was supposed to be my punishment.

  The instant the earthworm’s anima hit my brain, my thoughts became sluggish and senseless. I tried to speak, but when I heard the garbled nonsense coming out of my mouth I didn’t even have the capacity to be horrified. Then things got worse. I flopped onto the floor and began to writhe and squirm, desperate for soil and moisture. I didn’t want to do it, but the impulse was undeniable. Instinct took over.

  I was vaguely aware of laughter from the Kalyptra. Distantly, as though I were underground, I heard Cyrus telling the others, “It’s not funny.”

  The game continued around me, and by my next turn the worm anima had worn off enough so that I could yell at Diego.

  I punched him on the arm, riling his chicken, which flapped its wings and tried to escape. “You’re a mean Dominus.”

  “Careful,” Diego said, a wicked grin on his face. “It’s your turn again.”

  I remembered what Rebekah and Cyrus had told me about the anima of certain creatures being tainted by their vessel. Now I understood what they meant, and I filed earthworm anima away in my head as off the menu, along with moth and human. I made a mental note to ask Cyrus if there were any other types of anima I should avoid, but I got caught up in the game again and forgot all about it until three nights later, when things went very wrong.

  * * *

  We were in a post-jam afterglow in the dreaming tent, lounging and chatting and eating strawberries and goat cheese on rye bread, when Rory burst in, holding a ceramic bowl of filled with black-petaled flowers.

  “Look what I found!” she called out, holding the bowl above her head and shaking her hips like a belly dancer in her harem pants and a cropped shirt that showed her flat, firm stomach. The bells tied to the ends of her dreadlocks jangled. “I went hiking in the woods today and discovered a patch of these beauties.”

  “Oh my.” Hitomi rubbed her hands together, her tone awed. “My favorite.”

  “What are they?” I asked, peering into the bowl. I’d never seen flowers with black petals, not real ones anyway. With their trumpet-shaped petal arrangement, these looked almost identical to the moonflowers that grew on the side of Eclipse House, except for the color.

  “Midnight glory,” Hitomi said. “Sister to the morning glory, but quite rare. Its anima is uncommonly potent for a flower. Shamans and diviners chew the seeds to give themselves prophetic dreams. For us, the effect of its anima is like a lucid dream. You close your eyes and whatever you imagine becomes real.”

  Hitomi placed her hand over the bowl. A thread of vena extended from the tip of her finger and connected to the rim of an ink-black petal. A subtle glow filled her eyes as she drank the flower’s anima, and then her pupils expanded, dark and bottomless. The flower shriveled and crumbled to powdery dust.

  Rory offered the bowl to me.

  “Kenna, I don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” Cyrus said, shaking his head at me.

  I hesitated, my hand halfway t
o the bowl. “Why not?”

  “Oh, Cyrus, don’t scare her,” Illia said, and then to me, “It’s something every Kalyptra should try at least once.”

  Hitomi smiled at me, eyes hazy and distant, as though she were looking at me, but not seeing me anymore. Or seeing some other fascinating version of me. Then her eyes drifted closed and she sighed and melted onto a pile of pillows in a state of obvious ecstasy.

  Diego moved to my side and draped an arm around my shoulder. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. The anima of these flowers can have an…” He looked at the ceiling, searching for the word. “An unpredictable effect.”

  “Like moth anima?” I asked.

  The Kalyptra all looked at one another in alarm.

  “No,” Cyrus said. “Not like moth. It’s just … kinda bizarre.”

  “Ah, she can handle it,” Yuri called out. “Do it, Kenna. It’ll expand your consciousness and take you to places you’ve never been before and whatnot.”

  “Leave her alone,” Cyrus growled at Yuri.

  “I can make up my own mind,” I told Cyrus. I wasn’t sure if I found his protectiveness irritating or endearing.

  “Do what you like,” Rory said. “I’m partaking.” She fished a flower out of the bowl, and a moment later her pupils had expanded to the size of pennies. One by one, the others, including Cyrus, culled midnight glory until their eyes were as black as its petals and they were in another realm of rapturous consciousness, while I was on the outside, alone and separate.

  I looked down at the flowers with no small amount of trepidation. From what Hitomi described, midnight glory could provide a kind of hallucinatory experience for normal people, not just Kalyptra, which made it a drug, something akin to mushrooms or mescaline or ayahuasca. I’d never done a real drug, not even marijuana, but I supposed when it came down to it anima was a drug. It was a mind-altering substance that I couldn’t get enough of. I needed it every day to sustain me. Did the fact that I craved it constantly make me an addict, or was anima more like food and oxygen and water, things my body couldn’t thrive without? Was a person an addict for breathing or wanting lunch or getting thirsty?

  I took a determined breath and let it out, peer pressuring myself. Everyone else did it, so I might as well, too. I reached for a flower. But I released my control too soon and whip-thin tongues of energy unwound from four of my fingertips and attached to several of the flowers, instead of just one.

  Their anima hit me like a slow-motion wave, rolling through my body until it crashed into my brain. I closed my eyes and sank backward on the sofa. When I opened them and stared up at the roof of the dreaming tent, which was hung with a patchwork canopy of drapes and tapestries, the colors seemed to melt toward me like dripping paint. They pulsed and kaleidoscoped and pinwheeled and seeped. Color swallowed me and spit me out. Swallowed me and spit me out. Then sucked me down into an oozing vortex, where I spun inside a wormhole, traveling deeper and deeper.

  It was dizzying and surreal, definitely one of the best anima trips I’d been on.

  But then everything changed.

  “Kenna. Look at me. Look at what you’ve done.”

  The guttural, rasping voice sent a surge of chills across my skin.

  I sat up and found Jason Dunn standing in front of me, Jason Dunn as I had last seen him. He resembled a human in shape alone. He had arm and legs, a head and a torso. But that was where the similarities ended. His skin was wizened like that of a rotting pumpkin, his eyes black pits sucked deep in his face. His mouth puckered against toothless gums, and his fingernails were long, brittle, and yellowed, grasping a mason jar filled to capacity with what appeared to be dead moths.

  Jason’s caved-in mouth moved and the voice it produced made me want to clap my hands over my ears.

  “Look what you did to me, Kenna.”

  My heartbeat slowed, but I could hear it in my ears, a sporadic, thunderous ka-thunk! Ka-thunk! I closed my eyes tight and told myself that when I opened them again Jason would be gone. This was only a hallucination. Nothing more. I was tripping out on the midnight glory anima. None of this was real.

  But when I willed my eyes to open again, Thomas Dunn stood next to his son, wearing the same mummified features. The shriveled skin. Sockets and mouth like sinkholes in his face.

  “Look what you did to my boy,” Thomas Dunn said, staring at me with those black pits that should have been eyes. “You were supposed to pay. Your family lives and my boy is dead.”

  I clawed at my mouth and my eyes bulged so hard it felt like my retinas might detach. I searched around wildly for help, thinking Cyrus would know what to do. Cyrus would fix this. But Cyrus and the rest of the Kalyptra were gone. In their place were my mom and Erin, but they were as dead as Jason and Thomas Dunn. As dead as they had been in the basement, slashed and bloodied, Erin’s face a swelling mass of black bruises.

  “No, no, no.” I cowered against the wall of the yurt. “No, I saved you. I brought you back. I brought you back!”

  “For now,” Erin said, her mouth pulled down at the corners in a hideous grimace, as though she’d had a severe stroke that paralyzed her face. “But nothing lasts forever. Not death and not life.”

  The colors dripping from the ceiling bled to red, and began to rain down on my family until they were painted from head to toe, cocooned in blood. Jason and Thomas Dunn were washed red, as well. And then the blood found me. It drizzled down on me, hot and slick. I huddled with my knees against my chest, trying to hide from the crimson deluge.

  “Nothing lasts forever,” Jason mimicked in his rasping raven’s voice. “Not death and not life.”

  Jason opened the lid of his mason jar, and the dead moths inside began to jitter and twitch, returning to life. With sudden velocity, they burst from the jar and flocked toward my face like off-kilter bullets, the combined murmur of the wings a roar in my ears.

  I screamed, a sound that tore my throat, made it raw.

  With the moths converging all around me, I bolted from the dreaming tent that had turned into a nightmare haven. I didn’t know where I was going because I couldn’t see where I was going. The moths surrounded me like a dark, trembling cloud, their wings shuddering and obscuring my vision. I ran and ran and I didn’t know I had entered the forest until branches raked my skin and snagged my hair. I pushed through them, arms out in front of me, eyes blind with the palpitation of dusty wings.

  I ran and didn’t stop until I smacked headlong into a low tree branch that knocked me flat on my back.

  Pain exploded in my head, turning my vision white, and then gray, and then black, and then starry.

  Dazed, I stared up at the sky through a mesh of leaves and branches, and saw that the stars had all turned crimson and the sky, too, was shifting to the color of blood. My body clenched in expectant horror, waiting for the sky to turn to blood as the roof of the yurt had and fall on me. Then I felt warm wetness seeping over my cheeks, and I realized the blood was coming from my head, not from the sky. I touched the place on my brow where I’d hit it on the branch. An ache radiated down through my nose and cheekbones, and I felt a swelling lump and a deep, open laceration. I wiped the blood from my eyes and realized, suddenly, that the thrumming of the swarming moths’ wings was gone.

  And a far worse sound had replaced it.

  Now there was only one set of wings beating the air, distant, but moving closer and closer. A sound that was at once as soft as a whisper and as loud as an approaching helicopter. My eyes, filling with blood again, searched the sky and found its source.

  A single moth, its wingspan as wide as my outstretched arms, descended through the sky, wings bone white with bloated black moons floating in their centers.

  I tried to scream. To move. To do anything.

  My body was frozen.

  It’s not real, I told myself. It’s not real. It’s not real!

  But I felt the wind of its wings on my face, made out specks of dust shimmering in the air around those m
assive wings.

  Then its tongue—its proboscis—unfurled, a glowing white whip as thick as my pinky finger, a swollen, tangible twin of the strands of energy that uncoiled from me when I took anima.

  It wasn’t real.

  It was not real.

  It was so close now I could reach out and touch it. If I had not been paralyzed with fear, I would have batted at it with my arms. Pummeled it. Clawed at its furry thorax. Instead, I lay prone and immobile, waiting for the moth to do what it would to me.

  It touched down on my chest, heavy as a soaking wet pillow, its eyes black and empty as a crow’s. Its wing beats slowed and its long lash of a tongue probed at the gash in my forehead, pressing into it like a man-eating vine, slipping beneath the skin. Then, without warning, as though it had tasted something it didn’t like, the behemoth of a moth withdrew its tongue and beat its wings like a bellows.

  It lifted into the sky and vanished into the treetops.

  “Kenna!” I recognized Cyrus’s voice, calling from somewhere nearby. Then he was at my side, falling to his knees. His hands checked my head wound, fingers gentle, but I shuddered at the memory of the moth’s tongue worming through the seeping laceration.

  “I’m so sorry,” Cyrus said, removing his shirt and pressing it to my bleeding forehead. “I never should have let you try that anima.”

  “I should have listened to you,” I said, my voice weak, barely audible. I wondered vaguely how bad the injury on my head was, how much blood I had lost.

  “Did you see it?” I asked.

  Cyrus shook his head. “What?

  “The moth. It was just here.”

  Cyrus’s brow furrowed, and he raised his eyes to search the sky. “No,” he said. “I didn’t see anything.”

  “It was as big as me, Cyrus. It … it was real.”

  Even in the dark, I could see the concerned expression on his face. He said nothing, only gathered me in his arms and lifted me like I weighed no more than a sack of fall leaves.