“Why didn’t you stop?” She was crying now, and I was bewildered.
“You said you’d rather die than go back to being sick.”
“I—I didn’t know how it would be! I didn’t know you’d do that.” She pointed an accusing finger, not at me, but at the corpse of the deer. “You were hurting it. It was horrible, Kenna. Is that what you did while you were at Eclipse? Killed animals? Sucked the life out of them like you did to Jason Dunn?”
I inhaled a sharp breath and shook my head rapidly. “No. No, of course not.”
“I don’t believe you.”
Voices from the woods. My mom calling our names. She must have heard Erin shout.
Erin pushed me again, lighter this time, not to hurt me or knock me down. It was like she was lashing out, only in defeat.
“I can’t let you do that to me again,” she told me. “I was wrong. I want to live, but … not like this. Not like you.”
My sister whirled around and ran from me.
“Erin, wait!” I charged after her.
Through the trees, I saw two figures with flashlights. Erin threw herself into my mom’s waiting arms and started sobbing. Blake headed straight for me.
“What happened?” he asked. “Why is she crying?”
I opened my mouth to explain about the deer, and then closed it again and shook my head. The emptiness in me was all-consuming. I needed to take anima, and I knew I couldn’t do it with Blake watching, not after Erin’s reaction.
Her words cut me, as sharp as any knife.
I want to live, but not like this. Not like you.
“We’ll talk later,” I said to Blake, my voice coming out flat and deflated. “There’s something I have to do.”
* * *
I walked to the river, culling plants along the way, but for some reason their anima didn’t satisfy me the way the anima at Eclipse had. Maybe that was because I had so recently culled a much more potent source of anima, and now everything in comparison seemed inadequate. What I wanted was another stag, to be filled with anima that made me feel mighty, formidable. To taste that experience again, if only temporarily.
But Erin was right. What I had done to that deer was horrifying. Necessary, but still it must have come as a shock to her to witness it firsthand. I must have seemed like a monster, every bit as repellent as the moth creature I’d imagined in the forest.
Would she ever see me the way she used to? Would my own twin turn away from me now that she knew what I was?
She had brought up Jason Dunn when she railed at me. So she had figured it out … She knew I had killed him.
I sank down by the bank of the river and bent to look at myself in the water. The moon was behind me, and the water reflected its light like a mirror. The smell of pine and the mossy scent of river water perfumed the air. I thought of the day I’d found Clint Eastwood’s kittens, their bodies limp and their fur matted with mud. And Clint Eastwood’s body, mutilated. Her head missing entirely. To this day, Erin still didn’t know what Jason had been, but now she knew what I was, and she hated it.
A cloud moved over the moon, turning the river dark. A drop of cold water landed on the side of my nose, and more peppered my cheeks and forehead. Seconds later, a deluge began.
I stood and ran back toward my house. I’d just entered the barren perimeter of trees when a flashlight beam stopped me in my tracks.
“Kenna, is that you?” It was Blake.
I stopped running. He didn’t have an umbrella or a raincoat, and his hair was plastered to his head, his T-shirt drenched and sticking to his skin.
Blake lowered the flashlight so it wasn’t shining in my eyes. “I know you wanted to be alone, but I got worried when it started to rain.”
“It’s okay,” I said, hugging myself to keep warm. “I’m finished out here.”
“You’re shivering. Come on, let’s get inside.”
I didn’t move. “How’s Erin?”
He hesitated. “She’s freaked out, but your mom is handling her. She’s just happy whatever you did worked.”
I clenched my fists, my palms slick with rain. It worked, but if Erin wouldn’t allow me to heal her again then ultimately it wouldn’t matter. Unless I forced anima on her. I could do that, sneak into her room while she was sleeping and dose her with a little anima every day. Maybe that would be enough to keep her healthy. Maybe I didn’t need to cull such potent anima to sustain her.
I didn’t know. All I knew was that Erin was disgusted with me, and it made me feel disgusted with myself, too.
Blake tried to take my arm to pull me in the direction of the house, but I yanked away. I could feel the anima flowing inside him like a self-contained river. And I wanted it. I wanted him.
I didn’t know what I was doing. One second I was pulling away from him. The next I had knocked the flashlight from his hand. It fell to the ground, pointing away from us. Then I grabbed the back of his neck and pulled his mouth to mine. For a moment he was too stunned to react, but when he did there was none of the politeness that had been present in our first kiss. This one was all fervor and need. Rain poured down our faces, caught in our lashes, and wet our lips. I relished the feel of Blake’s mouth moving on mine, and the sense of anima flowing just on the other side of his skin.
His lips tracked down over my rain-drenched chin to my neck. He kissed my collarbone. My fingers disappeared in his hair. I drew him down onto the soggy ground on top of me. The forest floor was soft with the ash of crumbled trees, silty like the dust from a moth’s wing. And there were moth wings beneath us. Hundreds, thousands of them. They blanketed the ground like fall leaves.
Blake hesitated, refusing to put his full weight on top of me. He looked bewildered, eyes wild, breathing as hard as if he’d just finished a marathon.
I yanked him down again, needing to feel his anima.
“We can’t, um, you know,” he said, knuckling his forehead in a way that made him seem too young, too innocent to be doing this.
“We won’t. I just want to be close to you,” I said. “As close as I can be.”
He bowed over me and grazed my lips softly with his, holding back. But I needed more urgency. I needed more need.
I rolled him over and straddled him so I could be in control, and found myself pinning him with his elbows over his head as I crushed my mouth down on his. I moved my hands to his chest, planted my palms there.
A memory flashed into my mind. Images. Fragmented perceptions. Jason Dunn’s empty eyes. My hand grabbing his arm. A vein of energy reaching out from the center of my palm to connect me to him, so I could drink his life. His light.
I sat up, rain pouring down my back, blinking at my hands still flat on Blake’s chest. The dropped flashlight pointed into my eyes, seeming accusatory. A tickling sensation had started in the center of my palms, hair-thin strands of my vena uncoiling like tenuous bridges.
I shot to my feet and Blake sat up, dazed, chest heaving. “What’s wrong? Did I do something?”
I backed away from him, holding up my hands as if to ward him off like a wolf I’d happened upon in the woods.
“Stay away from me, Blake,” I told him. “You’re my best friend, and I love you, but stay the hell away from me.”
SPLINTERS AND STAINS
When the doorbell rang the next morning, I knew before answering that it would be Blake. The rash of texts I’d received from him since I’d left him last night foretold his visit.
He lifted the black guitar case he carried by his side. “I thought you might want this back now that you’re home.”
“Oh, right. Thanks.” I hadn’t even thought about the guitar since I got home. My mind was still struggling to wake up from the dream that was Eclipse. I felt like I’d been ripped from the deepest sleep.
The rain had ceased sometime during the night, and morning dawned bright as sunflowers, although no amount of sunlight could turn the land around my house into anything other than a circle of depressing gray. How could gray h
ave ever been my color? It was a miserable color. But, then, I’d been a miserable person. That had changed at Eclipse, and now I felt the pull of that place like a tide drawing me back. I missed my other bed, missed my room with its potbellied stove and my mom’s antique guitar, even though I had to keep it hidden beneath my bed, where it still lay. I missed the Kalyptra, and the air that seemed to carry every scent and sound farther than the air in the rest of the world. If someone were baking bread inside Eclipse House, I could smell it from the field. If someone sang in the orchard, I could name every note. Even the sky there seemed different—deeper and bluer and more dramatic, regardless of whether my view of it was enhanced by anima.
“Want some coffee?” I asked Blake, raising my mug. I’d always drunk it black, the sharpness of its taste almost like a daily punishment for my past mistakes, but now I was used to Hitomi’s tea blends, and in comparison the coffee tasted too bitter. Or maybe it was just me who was bitter. I’d done time in paradise and come home to a dead forest, a dying sister, and a mom who felt like someone I’d never met.
But there was still Blake. Even though I knew he’d be better off without me in his life, I wanted him in my life. Like twins, we’d balanced each other out, finished each other. He was my light and I was his darkness. But in the end, maybe that just created more gray.
“No, thanks,” he said to my offer of coffee. He set the guitar case down on the porch. “Can we talk?” he asked, squinting in the sunlight. He’d forgotten his sunglasses, and I could see his eyes were bleary, red lidded. He looked like he hadn’t slept. I hadn’t either. Too many thoughts twisting and tangling inside my brain like fast-growing vines.
We sat on the porch, keeping several inches between us. So much for not reverting back to old patterns.
“I’m sorry about last night,” I said. “I didn’t know what I was doing.”
He entwined his fingers, keeping his eyes on his knees. “No, I’m glad you stopped us. I mean, it’s not like I don’t want to … you know. But we didn’t have protection, and it was muddy and raining and—” He shook his head. “It just wasn’t how I imagined it should be with us. Not that I thought there’d be silk sheets and chocolate strawberries or anything, but … well, you know.”
Blotches of red appeared on his neck and he cleared his throat and adjusted his collar like it was too tight.
I stared at him, uncomprehending, until it hit me: he thought I was talking about sex. He had no idea that, when we were kissing, I had been a hair away from taking his anima. And if I’d started to do that, I had no idea if I could have stopped. Then I would have added one more dead person to the list of people I’d culled, only this time it would have been someone I loved.
“Blake,” I said, my stomach filling with acid. “I have to tell you something.”
* * *
I started with the truth: I killed a boy named Jason Dunn.
I ended with another truth: I almost killed Blake.
In between, I did my best to leave out no details. Rebekah would be furious if she found out what I’d told him, but I felt like I owed him an explanation. Besides, if there was one person in the world I trusted completely it was Blake, and it was time he understood who I really was. Then he could decide for himself whether he wanted someone like me in his life.
“So that’s it,” I said after talking for over an hour with few interruptions from Blake. My coffee was cold now, and more bitter than ever. I finished it anyway and cringed, setting the mug aside. “I’ve never told anyone else.”
He looked at me, and the expression on his face made me want to sink into the ground. In his eyes, I saw what I always feared I would see if someone knew the truth: revulsion. It was fleeting, but I saw it in the downward turn of his mouth and the pinch of his eyes. Then Blake covered his face with his hands, dragging them down over his cheeks.
“You were just a kid,” he said. “You didn’t know what you were doing.”
“I did know,” I insisted. “He was bad. He made my sister suffer, so I decided to make him pay for it. It was murder, Blake, and it was intentional. I might as well have put Jason in a killing jar of my own. I am a killing jar, Blake. A living, breathing killing jar, and I almost put you inside, too.”
Blake stared out at the crumbling, gray woods.
“You want to go back to Eclipse,” he said, speaking my thoughts for me in a voice that sounded weary and defeated.
“I don’t know what I want.” After all those truths, I was starting with the lies again. I knew exactly what I wanted.
Blake stood and turned to me. His expression morphed from betrayal to heartbreak to loss, finally arriving at anger.
“You may not know what you want, but I do,” he said. “I want you here with me. When you decide that’s where you belong, I’ll be waiting.”
He shoved his hands in his pockets and walked away, his shoulders hunched and his head bowed slightly. It was the posture of someone trying to protect himself, and that’s why I didn’t run after him or call him back. I’d hurt him too much already. I didn’t want to hurt him anymore.
I didn’t want to hurt anyone.
I picked up my guitar case and went back inside the house with the intention of holing up in my room and practicing some of the Kalyptra songs I’d learned. I didn’t want to forget them. It occurred to me that I hadn’t written any new music since I’d gone to Eclipse, and that I didn’t actually feel any need to. I only wanted their music now. My own was too dark, too mournful. I wanted the brightness and vivacity of Kalyptra rhythms, the bone-rattling throb of Kalyptra drum beats.
But my mom waited for me in the foyer. Her eyelids were red, so I guessed she’d been crying.
“We need a family meeting,” she said, her voice just raspy enough to confirm that, yes, she had definitely been crying.
I sighed, my body sagging. I felt so tired I could barely stay upright. I needed to take anima soon. At Eclipse, I was constantly sampling anima. I rarely went more than a few hours without it.
“Can it wait?” I asked.
She shook her head. She looked even more tired than I felt. “Now would be better. There are things we need to … resolve.”
Resigned, I set my guitar down in the foyer, and followed her to the dining room, where Erin was already seated at the table.
I sat across from my sister, who kept her eyes trained on the surface of the table, as though it were the most interesting thing she’d ever seen. I tried to get her to look at me, but she only drew more tightly into herself like a potato bug. Her rejection did more than sting: it crushed. It flattened me like roadkill.
And it pissed me off.
I had saved her. I’d healed her broken, useless, prison of a body, and this was how she treated me?
I folded my arms over my chest, clenching my fists and glaring at her so she would feel my anger, even if she didn’t see it in my eyes.
“So.” Mom cleared her throat, glancing between the two of us. “Our family has been through hell. I think we can all agree on that. But I have a feeling the worst is behind us now, don’t you, girls?”
Erin ignored her. I raised an eyebrow and waited for her to get this over with.
“As we move forward, we need to establish some guidelines,” she went on.
Mom launched into what was clearly a prepared speech. I tried to listen, but at some point I became fixated on her hands. I couldn’t stop looking at them. They were identical to Rebekah’s, the fingers long and slender. How could my mom have betrayed Rebekah the way she did? How could she abandon a mother who loved her so much that she built a new world for her? Rebekah had given her a freaking utopia, and she had shunned it. What was wrong with this woman?
“Kenna, are you listening?” Mom said.
I raised my eyes. “Yep. Keep Erin healthy, but don’t cull animals, only plants. Keep what I am a secret. Never do what I do in public. I got it.”
“Do I even get a say in this?” Erin asked, finally looking up. Her chin thrust
out defiantly. She looked beautiful and strong, and I hardly recognized her.
Mom’s brow furrowed in confusion. “Erin … you understand that we don’t really have a choice in all this. If you want to stay healthy, you have to let Kenna help you.”
“Then maybe I don’t want to stay healthy. Maybe I wasn’t meant to be healthy.”
“Honey,” Mom said, trying to maintain a reasonable tone, though I could tell she was panicking inside. “You don’t mean that.”
“I don’t? Tell me, why is it so important for Kenna to save me now? How long has she been able to do this … this thing she does? Her whole life? And only now you want her to start playing witch doctor to me?”
I raised my eyebrows at Erin. I had never heard her speak to our mom with such venom in her tone.
“She makes a good point,” I said. “I’ve been wondering the same thing myself.”
Mom looked helplessly from me to Erin, and then lowered her eyes. “I—I told you in the car, Kenna, I made a mistake, and I realize that now. I should have taken you to Eclipse a long time ago, but I was afraid.”
“Afraid of what?” Erin and I asked in unison.
Mom shook her head, her hair hanging around her face. I saw a tear drop from her eye and land on the table. “That you would turn out like me. That you would be too weak to control your gift.”
Cold fingers of dread traced my spine. “What did you do, Mom?”
She didn’t answer, only shook her head, more tears dripping onto the table. I should have felt pity for her, but instead disgust writhed through me like a serpent.
I stood abruptly, my chair shrieking across the hardwood. “You don’t even want me here. The only reason you sent Blake to pick me up was because Erin needed me. Otherwise you would have left me at Eclipse forever.”
My mom looked at me like I’d slapped her, raising her head and blinking in stunned surprise. “That’s not true. I—I only wanted to give you time. You know why I couldn’t stay there with you, why it was dangerous for me to bring you home.”
“I also know how easy it is for you to turn your back on family. You did it to your own mother. You were the only real family she had, and you just abandoned her. The same way you abandoned me.”
The Killing Jar Page 18
