The Killing Jar

by Jennifer Bosworth

  He carried me all the way to Eclipse House. I hid my face against his chest, eyes shut tight, afraid to open them. Afraid the monstrous moth would change its mind and return for me. For my blood.

  AWAKE

  The next morning I woke before dawn, but not in my bed. I sat up, blinking in the hazy, predawn light, the previous night’s events shuffling into place in my brain.

  The dreaming tent.

  The midnight glory anima.

  The dead.

  The blood.

  The moth.

  I remembered everything. I wished I didn’t.

  I was in Rebekah’s room, in her bed. Cyrus had carried me, fading in and out of consciousness, all the way back to Eclipse House and up three flights of stairs to Rebekah’s room, where she had opened up her cupboard and brought out one of her culling jars for me. I didn’t see the shape of this jar, didn’t know what kind of anima was inside. Instead of letting me cull the anima herself, she culled it and channeled it into me, the way I had done for my family. Like she wanted to take care of me. And she had.

  The ache in my head had vanished instantly, and I felt the flesh of my forehead knit itself whole—such a strange sensation, like closing a zipper on your own skin. And then my bad trip had turned into a euphoric, waking dream, my blissed-out body seeming to float several inches above the floor as color and light and soft sensation embraced me. I drifted on a warm river and eventually ended up in a sleep filled with safe, impregnable dreams.

  I swung my legs over the side of the bed. Cyrus was crashed out on floor pillows, shirtless, one arm flung over his face. He snored faintly, which I found endearing. I resisted the urge to kneel down beside him and touch the bare skin of his back to experience the smoothness of it again. The warmth that radiated from him. As he’d carried me from the forest, I had kept my face nestled against his chest, breathing in his scent, warming my shivering body against his.

  Seeing him so soundly asleep, I felt a surge of affection for this hippie cowboy. He had tried to protect me from myself last night, and I’d ignored him. But still he’d come after me. If he hadn’t, I might still be alone and lost in the forest, afraid to move for fear of calling the attention of that thing. That moth with its curious, probing tongue.

  But that monstrosity hadn’t been real, had it? Certainly the hallucinations of Jason and Thomas Dunn, and of my family and the blood raining down on me weren’t real. The moths in Jason’s killing jar weren’t real. So why should the mega-moth, that impossibly huge creature, be real?

  Rebekah stood on her balcony, looking out at the green mountains and the silver sky, speckled with a few tenacious stars. She turned her head when I stepped outside. The morning air was dewy, and clung to my skin like wet silk.

  I came up beside Rebekah and leaned against the railing. For a moment neither of us said anything. I wanted to thank her for healing me and bringing me fully out of my bad trip, for taking care of me like I was her responsibility, her own child. But I was embarrassed to bring it up, embarrassed that I couldn’t handle the midnight glory anima. I didn’t want to be a burden to Rebekah.

  Rebekah saved me the trouble of figuring out what to say by speaking first. “Cyrus tells me you saw the Mother last night,” she said.

  I blinked at her, thinking I must have heard her wrong. “No, I didn’t see my mom,” I told her. A hallucination of her, yes, but not my actual mom.

  Rebekah shook her head. “Not your mother. The Mother. The Mother of the Kalyptra.” She smiled. “In a vision, of course.”

  I shook my head at her, utterly confused. “Who is the Mother?” I would have thought she considered herself the mother of the Kalyptra.

  “Our goddess,” Rebekah said. “She is our maker. The Eclipse moth, the Kalyptra anima.”

  I noticed that Rebekah’s pupils were slightly enlarged, and wondered if she was on anima. She sounded dreamy and slightly disconnected. But it was early in the morning, so maybe she was just groggy.

  “I saw a moth,” I said hesitantly, not sure whether I wanted to admit what I had decided could not be possible. “It—she tasted my blood.” I touched my forehead, where the laceration had been. “But she didn’t like it.”

  “That’s because you’re Kalyptra. The Mother doesn’t drink the blood of her children.”

  “But it wasn’t real,” I said, sounding a little desperate, wanting Rebekah to agree with me. “It couldn’t have been real.”

  “When the veil comes down, you see what others can’t,” Rebekah said, which didn’t really answer my question. “Did you know a group of moths is called an eclipse?” she asked, and I was somewhat relieved that she diverted the conversation away from the reality or unreality of what I’d seen.

  I shook my head at Rebekah’s question. “Why are they called that?”

  “Because moths are obscure. Their coloring helps them blend with their surroundings so they can hide in plain sight, like the silent sun when the moon masks it in an eclipse. The sun is still there, only you can’t see it. Moths are expert at disappearing, just like us. We disappeared right in the middle of the world, yet people rarely happen upon us here, and when they do they don’t know who or what we are. To them, we’re merely people. They have no idea they’ve just encountered superior beings.”

  The disdainful tone she used when talking about regular people put my back up, but I tried to brush it off. She probably didn’t mean to sound as condescending as she did.

  “Do you know why I built this place, Kenna? Why I gathered this family and introduced them to a new way of living?”

  I said nothing, only looked at her expectantly and shook my head.

  “When I was a little girl, I had a large family,” she said. “Three brothers and four sisters, one of whom was my twin, Anya. She was your mother’s namesake.”

  Her stiff tone told me she considered naming my mother after her twin a mistake.

  “Anya and I were the eldest of our siblings,” she went on. “Our mother and father were quite wealthy, so they could afford to give us the kind of lives most people only dream of. We lived in San Francisco and attended school there, but we spent our summers at our mother and father’s country home, where we passed every day playing together from sunup to sundown, swimming in the river, riding horses, gardening, caring for animals, reading fairy tales beneath shade trees, taking music lessons. During those summers, it was as though we existed in a place without time, another world separate from the one that waited for us in the fall. Our own daydream realm where we would be young forever. Young and happy and free.”

  She paused, her mouth quivering at the corners.

  “When I was seventeen, my youngest sister, Gillian, came down with influenza. We did all we could for her. My mother and Anya and I nursed her night and day, and my parents called in the best doctors, but it made no difference. Gillian died, and soon after, my mother came down with the fever. And then my father fell ill. One by one, my brothers and sisters sickened and their fevers drowned them in sweat, and they coughed until their throats tore. They writhed and twisted in their sheets, fraught with delirium, as I tried to hold them down and pour medicine into their throats, which they only coughed up, along with blood. I was there with each of them when they died, because by the end I was the only one still well enough to care for them. I took care of them. But it made no difference.”

  I swallowed hard, thinking of Erin, of the helpless dread I felt every time she caught a cold. “Anya got sick, too?” I asked, although I wasn’t really asking. I already knew. If Anya were alive, wouldn’t she be here now?

  Rebekah nodded, and the tears in her eyes slid free and trailed down the sides of her nose. She wiped at them absently. “I haven’t talked about Anya in a long time, but I think about her every day. I write down every memory I have of her to preserve her. She was brilliant, my sister. Brilliant and fascinated with learning and kind to everyone. If there were any fairness in this world, she would have lived, not me. She was by far the better of
the two of us.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, my own voice thick with emotion. Rebekah’s twin sounded so much like Erin. And the way she felt about her twin was the same way I felt about mine. That she was the better of the two of us. That she deserved life, not me.

  I wondered why Rebekah had never mentioned a desire to meet Erin.

  “I lost my entire family in the space of a month,” Rebekah continued. “For a long time after, I wished the influenza had taken me, as well. But when I married and became pregnant with your mother, all of that changed. The marriage didn’t last, but I had my Anya. I had a reason to live again.” She wiped at one eye with her long, elegant fingers, naked of their silver rings. “I created Eclipse for her, and I gathered a family for her, so she could have the kind of childhood I remembered. The kind I lost. A beautiful dream that would never end.”

  Rebekah’s mouth closed and she turned back toward the mountains just as a sliver of sun appeared, spreading honeyed light across the farm.

  “Do you hate her?” I asked, fearing the answer, because I didn’t want to believe it was possible to hate your own child. I didn’t want to believe it was possible for my mom to hate me, even though I’d taken something intrinsic from her. Because of me, she was no longer Kalyptra. How could she not hate me for that?

  Rebekah stared straight at the sun as it rose, her gaze unwavering, not even squinting against the brilliance. It was like she’d trained herself to look directly into the searing light.

  “I used to believe love was not a choice. That a sister must love her sister. A child must love her parents. A mother must love her children. But now I know that you always have a choice, in everything you do and everyone you love and everyone you hurt. And so I no longer consider your mother my child. That is my choice.”

  My heart lurched like I’d been punched in the chest. “Then you must not consider me your granddaughter.”

  She shook her head and turned to me, her skin and hair the color of champagne in the new light of day.

  “You’re Kalyptra. That makes you family.”

  Then I understood why she had never asked about Erin, never mentioned a desire to meet my twin.

  Erin wasn’t Kalyptra. She didn’t have our power. She meant nothing to Rebekah. Nothing at all.

  During my time at Eclipse, I had formed a bond with Rebekah that obscured what I felt for my real mom. Even before Jason, she had kept me at a distance, and now I thought I knew why. Because I had taken her power and made her ordinary. But the idea that Rebekah cared nothing at all for my twin chipped away at my fledgling love for my grandmother, weakening it at its foundation.

  “Do you miss them?” Rebekah asked.

  She didn’t have to say their names. I tapped my fingers on the balcony railing, creating a nervous rhythm. I didn’t know how to answer her question. At first, being away from Erin and Blake felt like being separated from two of my limbs. But the longer I was at Eclipse, the less I thought about my mom or Erin or Blake. I was so busy immersing myself in the world of being Kalyptra, in music and anima and unconditional acceptance, that I hadn’t had time to miss them.

  “It’s complicated,” I answered finally, and quickly changed the subject. Rebekah’s story had brought up something, yet again, that I still didn’t understand.

  “Rebekah, where did we come from?” I asked. “I assume no one else in your family was Kalyptra, or they would have been able to heal themselves, or be healed by you. Did you not know you were Kalyptra back then?”

  I thought of her use of the word influenza instead of simply calling it the flu. I tried to remember the last time there’d been an outbreak of the flu that killed entire families of people. I was pretty sure that hadn’t happened in a really long time. Rebekah looked no older than forty, and a youthful forty at that. My first night at Eclipse, she had said anima was the ultimate panacea, a vitamin that could cure any disease, heal any wound, as well as expand our consciousness, tearing down the veil between the mundane world and the ethereal. It made sense that anima extended life, but for how long? Were we to become immortal? Would any of us ever die?

  On and on. Every time I learned something new about the Kalyptra, it opened the door to a hundred more questions.

  Rebekah shook her head. “I wasn’t always Kalyptra. None of us were. We chose what we are, and became Kalyptra, all of us, including your mother. And then she chose to cast off her gift.” She smiled fondly at me, but something dark glittered in her eyes as she said, “You are the only one of us who was born Kalyptra, who never had a choice.”

  She started to turn away, and I grabbed her sleeve. “Why are we like this? Why can we do what we can do? What does any of it mean? Please, Rebekah, I want to understand. I want to know everything.”

  She raised an eyebrow at me. “You want to know things that only a true Kalyptra can know.”

  “You said I was Kalyptra. That I was family.”

  “Do you want to go home?” she asked.

  The question jarred me. “Y-yes. No. I mean, I do, but I want to be here, too. I want to be in both places.”

  She shook her head slowly, disappointed and clearly hurt. “Until you choose us, you aren’t one of us. I can’t tell you what you want to know, and I can’t let you live in our world.”

  I sucked in a breath as though I’d been hit in the stomach. “Rebekah…” I said, not wanting to believe she’d meant what she had just said.

  I can’t let you live in our world.

  Rebekah turned her back on me and went inside, signaling that our conversation was finished. If there was one thing I had learned about my grandmother, it was that once she decided something was over, there was no changing her mind.

  Feeling hollowed out and emotionally drained, I followed her inside, where Cyrus was now sitting up, rubbing his eyes like a drowsy toddler who’d just awakened from a too-short nap. But when he saw me his eyes cleared and he stood up, a hank of dark curls tumbling over his brow.

  “Are you okay?” he asked, searching my face.

  I touched my brow where I’d split my scalp open before realizing he wasn’t referring to the wound. I felt another undeniable rush of warmth for him, but Rebekah’s icy response froze my blood.

  “She’s fine,” Rebekah answered for me. “In fact, I think she’s ready to go home.”

  LAST DAY

  Bully ran at me full tilt when I called to him from the fence, and then bounced and bleated when I offered him the parting gift of an entire bunch of carrots.

  “I’m going to miss you, kid,” I said as he munched distractedly on his treat. I tousled the wild tuft of hair between his ears, trying not to cry and not really succeeding.

  It had been twenty-four hours since Rebekah had decided to send me home, and I was still in shock. Every time I broke the news to another Kalyptra that I was leaving, I had to white-knuckle my emotions to keep from bursting into tears. The next morning, Cyrus would drive me home.

  I should have been elated at the prospect of being reunited with Erin and with Blake and my mom and my guitar, but mostly I just felt anxious. I wasn’t the same person I’d been when my mom had dropped me off at Eclipse. I didn’t know if I would fit into my old space in my old world anymore.

  “I don’t understand why you have to leave all of a sudden,” Cyrus said, leaning against the fence beside me, arms folded tight across his chest. He’d been nearly as upset as I was when Rebekah told me I had to leave. We’d spent a lot of time together, and I’d grown attached to him, to his easy smile and his country-boy charm. I woke up every day looking forward to seeing him, to taking anima with him and feeling the connection between us grow, like we were sharing the same dream, the kind from which you never want to wake up. But I hadn’t realized the feeling was mutual.

  Cyrus went so far as to question Rebekah’s decision that morning after the midnight glory disaster, earning a sharp rebuke before my grandmother sent us away.

  “I must have done something to make her mad,” I said.<
br />
  “What were you talking about before she said it was time for you to go home?”

  “A lot of things. She told me about her twin, and why she founded Eclipse. And I asked her some questions she didn’t want to answer because … I guess because I’m not really one of you.”

  He nodded, eyes veiled, and I could see that a part of him agreed with Rebekah. Whatever secrets the Kalyptra had, they didn’t trust me with them yet, and maybe they never would.

  I gave Bully one last scratch behind the ears as he finished his carrots. He bolted back to the herd, feet barely touching the ground.

  “I’m going to miss him.” I wiped at a tear leaking from the corner of my eye. “I’m going to miss everything about Eclipse. Except maybe the midnight glory.”

  I thought Cyrus would laugh, but he turned to me, his face serious. “I’m going to miss you, Kenna.” He raked a hand through his tangled curls and looked at the toes of his boots. “More than I know how to say. Eclipse is better with you as a part of it. As a part of us,” he added softly.

  For a moment the air between us was charged, almost crackling with electricity. I felt myself pulled toward him, a kind of horizontal vertigo.

  “Kenna!” Cyrus and I both jumped at the sound of my name, and turned to see Sunday jogging toward us through the field, afro bouncing and bracelets jangling. She had legs like an Olympic runner and her dark skin practically glowed under the bright sunlight. She wore one of Illia’s creations, a short yellow sundress with tiny, crystal buttons. She grabbed me by the wrist and tugged me away from Cyrus, toward Eclipse House.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, scrambling to keep up with her. I glanced over my shoulder at Cyrus and saw him standing next to the fence, arms hanging heavy at his sides and an abandoned-puppy-dog look on his face.

  “I have to draw you before you leave,” Sunday said. “Your face begs to be immortalized.”

  “It does?”

  “Oh yes. Those eyes of yours. The cheekbones. Exquisite, just like Rebekah’s.”