The Killing Jar

by Jennifer Bosworth

  “But you can’t tell the truth,” I argued. “You’ll have to lie on national television.”

  “It’s not like I’ll be under oath.” She sighed. “Besides, I’ve been lying to you and Erin your whole lives. What does it matter if I lie to the rest of the world?”

  I gritted my teeth until I felt they might shatter. “You can’t do this to me,” I said, tears of anger and frustration beginning to leak from the corners of my eyes. I wiped at them furiously, and then gave up and let them flow. I shouldn’t hide what my mom was doing to me. She ought to know she was destroying what little hope for happiness I had left.

  Mom moved to leave. “I really do think this is the best thing for us.” She didn’t meet my eyes when she said it. “Welcome home, Kenna.” She closed the door behind her.

  I sat there for a long moment, tensed and trembling with fury, a sob perched in my throat like a cough. Mom was the one who’d abandoned me at Eclipse, who had introduced me to their way of life, and now she was willing to move the whole family to a different city just to keep me away?

  Why? Who were the Kalyptra that my mom feared me becoming like them?

  I needed to understand.

  I opened my laptop and closed the window to Blake’s blog, and then opened a new Google browser and searched: Eclipse moth, mythology.

  I didn’t come up with much, but there was a Wikipedia page that talked about Calyptra moths, a genus of vampire moths that fed on blood and tears. The Eclipse moth was mentioned briefly. The page said the Eclipse moth, if there were any evidence of its existence, would be included in the same family as Calyptra. The Eclipse moth was featured in certain Central and South American and Native American myths and legends, and was sometimes worshipped as a goddess. Brujas in Mexico referred to her only as La Madre.

  The Mother.

  The only other source of information I found was an online compendium of mythical beasts and monsters. The entry for the Eclipse moth said it lurked deep in forests, and supposedly grew to enormous size, drank human blood, and was said to bestow a “wondrous gift” upon those who worshipped it, the ability to “consume the breath of life and see beyond the veil that separates the physical world from the spiritual.” It also mentioned that the Eclipse moth was elusive, but that it couldn’t resist a combination of blood and fire.

  I shuddered.

  There was an illustration beside the paragraph with information about the Eclipse moth, depicting a moth the size of a small house hovering over a naked woman bound to a wooden stake. Her wrists were slit, streaming blood, and the moth’s tongue extended toward one wound. A circle of worshippers knelt around the feeding moth, bowing in supplication.

  I slammed my laptop shut, but the image stayed behind my eyes like a camera flash. The moth in the illustration was much larger than the one I had hallucinated in the forest, but still … a moth that grew to enormous size. Could it really be a coincidence? Maybe I’d read about the Eclipse moth at some point, and my mind had hallucinated it when I’d overdosed on midnight glory anima.

  I shook my head and forced a laugh. It was silly to take anything seriously that I read on a website that looked like it had been designed by a Swedish death metal band.

  I tried to wipe the memory of that illustration from my mind, but the image lingered like a song that you can’t get out of your head. I needed to replace it with something else, a song I wanted to hear.

  I needed to see the Kalyptra before my mom stole me away to the other side of the country, and I didn’t have a lot of time left.

  I crept to my bedroom door and opened it a crack to peer down the hall toward my mom’s bedroom. There was no light shining from beneath her door. She must have gone to sleep.

  I slipped into the hall, walked softly to Erin’s room, and knocked so lightly I barely made a sound. Erin and I had never knocked on each other’s doors before, but things had changed. I didn’t feel comfortable walking into her room unannounced anymore, and I had a feeling she wouldn’t be cool with that, either.

  The light in Erin’s room was off, but I heard her bed creak and a moment later she opened the door a few inches. She saw it was me and hesitated to open it farther. She simply stared at me, eyes large and expectant, and more than a tad wary.

  I sighed, feeling heavy and out of place. Yes, things had definitely changed.

  “I need a favor,” I said, and was relieved when she opened her door wider to allow me inside.

  She turned on her bedside lamp and crossed her arms over her chest. “What is it?” she asked.

  I bit my lip and released it. “I have to go back.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “To Eclipse?”

  I nodded. “Tonight. Just for a day.”

  “Why?” she asked, her tone defiant, but I could tell by the resigned look in her eyes that she already knew the answer.

  “Mom told me about this whole moving thing. I need to say goodbye to the Kalyptra. I don’t know how long it will be before I see them again.”

  “Then let me come with you,” Erin said, dropping her arms to her sides. “I want to see where Mom came from. And … I want to meet our grandmother.”

  But she doesn’t want to meet you, I almost said before biting back the words in time.

  “No,” I said firmly, and felt a pang of regret for my tone when Erin wilted. “I’m sorry,” I told her more gently. “This is something I have to do alone.”

  “Then why are you telling me?” she asked.

  I took a breath and let it out, bracing myself for another bout of resistance from my twin. “I need you to convince Mom not to come after me.”

  Erin shook her head. “What makes you think she’ll listen to me? It’s not like I can play the dying-wish card anymore.”

  I winced at the same moment she did, both of us remembering that Erin was, indeed, still dying. Or she would be without me to keep her alive.

  “I’ll find a way,” Erin said quietly, lowering her eyes to the floor as if in defeat. “How do you plan to get there?”

  I cleared my throat. “Well, that’s the other thing…”

  BEST NIGHT EVER

  My mom owned two cars, one a used Prius—which was what she drove most often—and the other a beat-up Jeep Grand Cherokee that was older than I was. Mom barely drove the Jeep unless she had deliveries or was catering an event. I figured she wouldn’t be doing any of that over the next few days, so she wouldn’t mind if I borrowed it. At least that’s what I decided to tell myself, since my mom was pretty much guaranteed to lose it when she found out I’d gone back to Eclipse.

  Once I was on the road through the Cross Pine Mountains with Rushing behind me, I began to breathe easier, but I couldn’t relax. I kept my eyes trained on the road, searching for the turnoff onto the rutted, overgrown path to Eclipse. It was hard to see in the daylight, which meant it would be ten times harder in the dark. I almost missed the road and had to slam on the brakes and reverse on the highway. Good thing it was after midnight and there were no other cars in sight.

  The journey was even bumpier than I remembered it being, and the Jeep’s check-engine light came on after I’d driven about five miles into the wilderness, and shortly after that it began to make a rattling sound. I began to think this had been a bad idea, or that I should have at least waited until first light.

  I managed to reach the fence without the Jeep breaking down, but I was dismayed to find that the gate Blake had rammed open to come and retrieve me had been mended and was once again locked.

  I parked and got out of the Jeep, leaving the headlights on and the engine running while I studied the gate with my hands on my hips. I could abandon the Jeep and hoof it the rest of the way to Eclipse, or I could blast through it the way Blake had done. Or I could give up and go home.

  I sighed, my shoulders sagging. I didn’t like any of my options.

  “I knew you couldn’t stay away.”

  The voice came from the darkness, and I almost screamed before I recognized the famili
ar Johnny Cash twang.

  Cyrus stepped into the headlight beams, fingers hooked in his belt loops and a restrained half smile on his face. He sauntered to the gate. My heart, which had leaped into my throat when he’d spoken, now plummeted into my giddy stomach. I barely felt my feet as they moved me toward him. We stopped with the fence between us and put our hands on the top rail, our fingers almost touching. I sensed the anima singing through him, and I wanted to lay my palms over his knuckles and drink in that awareness of his vitality, that uncanny connectivity I felt with all of the Kalyptra, but most especially with Cyrus.

  “It’s so good to see you,” I said.

  “It’s better to see you.”

  Heat traveled up my neck and my skin prickled with excitement. “What are you doing here?” I asked, and he shrugged, his smile broadening.

  “Waiting for you.”

  “Liar,” I said.

  He put his right hand over his heart. “Truth.”

  “You’ve been out here since I left?”

  “Off and on. Mostly on.” He lowered his eyes. “The mood at Eclipse has been unusually somber. Everyone’s been sulking since you went away, including Rebekah.”

  “Really?” I raised my eyebrows. I couldn’t imagine Rebekah sulking.

  “Really,” he said, and lifted his gaze to mine. “But I had a feeling you couldn’t stay away for long.” He reached inside his shirt, pulled the key on its leather thong over his head, and handed it to me.

  “Welcome back, Kenna. Welcome home.”

  * * *

  I would have filed the night I played in front of the Folk Yeah! Fest crowd and kissed Blake for the first time in the “best night ever” category, were it not for the part where I came home to find my family massacred in an insane act of revenge. But even if the double homicide hadn’t happened, I didn’t think that night could compete with the night I returned to Eclipse.

  The Kalyptra—all of them night owls like me—were still awake when Cyrus and I returned. They greeted me with hugs and exclamations of delight, and even a few tears. Although Rebekah didn’t literally jump for joy like some of the others, I could tell she was pleased to have me back.

  “I knew you couldn’t stay away long,” she said, echoing Cyrus’s words, a satisfied smile on her lips as she wrapped me in her slender arms.

  “It seems like I was gone for a month,” I told her, closing my eyes and basking in her affection like I’d just stepped into the sunlight after being trapped in a dank cellar for days. But a sinking despair marred my happiness, the knowledge that tomorrow I was supposed to start packing up everything I owned so Mom could put me a safe distance from the Kalyptra.

  Rebekah seemed to sense my darkening mood. She held me back and searched my face. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What’s happened, sweet girl?”

  I swallowed emotion thick as tar and said, “We’re moving away. Like, as far as my mom can take us. She wants us to start over somewhere else. She didn’t say it, but I think she just wants to get me away from Eclipse.”

  “No,” Rebekah said simply, as though it were up to her.

  “It’s not like I want to go. Besides, I graduate in a year. Then I’ll be an adult, and I can go wherever I want.”

  Rebekah shook her head and said again, “No. Anya is not taking you away from me. I won’t allow it.”

  “She’s my mom. There’s not really anything you can do to stop her.”

  Rebekah smiled, and a wicked glint entered her eye. “I’ll think of something. In the meantime, we’ll make the most of every moment.”

  While Stig and Rory stoked the bonfire, Rebekah disappeared into Eclipse House and returned with a culling jar again wrapped in a scarf, so I couldn’t see the shape of the container. But I asked no questions, simply culled when it was my turn and felt myself turn to fire and light and joy and life. I was electricity and sunrise, the stars and the moon tearing across the sky. A supernova exploding in beautiful chaos that was somehow harmonious.

  And yet I was still me, only I was me to the power of greatness and glory. All that had happened in the last twenty-four hours—hurting Blake, being rejected by my twin, finding out that her condition was my doing, receiving the news that my family was moving—vaporized like so much water exposed to a blast of nuclear energy. The sad, hopeless, pathetic parts of me disappeared, and the good parts were amplified to magnificence.

  When the music began, it hit me like a sonic boom and swelled through the night in liquid jewel waves of gold and silver, sapphire and emerald, amethyst and ruby and pearl, melting together to turn the heavens to a great, undulating opal.

  Sunday brought me my guitar, and I joined their circle and played so hard my fingers should have bled. The Kalyptra danced around us in a whirling, revolving ring. There was a manic quality to this anima high, a need to move, to create, to touch and feel and exist and be the center of everything. It made me feel like anything was possible. I could run a thousand miles. Swim an ocean. Live forever.

  It was a familiar feeling, but at the moment I couldn’t recall why I knew it. So I didn’t try.

  Instead, I played and I sang with the Kalyptra. I joined my voice to theirs for the first time and I was harmonious with them. This was what I’d been missing at home, where the anima didn’t satisfy and the hunger inside me for something more never abated. Maybe it wasn’t the anima that was different at home, it was everything else.

  But now I was at Eclipse, with my people, where I belonged.

  We joined hands, and sang as we danced, switching partners, weaving through arches of arms, swaying among trailing fingers.

  A hand found mine and squeezed. I felt something pressed into it and looked up to see it was Joanna who had taken my hand. She released it quickly and spun away, but I found myself clutching a piece of folded paper. I slid it into my pocket without reading it.

  I will not let Joanna ruin my perfect night, I thought. My best night ever.

  And almost the instant I thought this, a strangled bleat of terror cut through the night.

  The music and dancing stopped, and we turned toward the source of the hideous sound. It had come from the field, halfway between the animal enclosure and the bonfire. Several pairs of eyes glowed in the darkness a hundred yards away.

  The keening went on and on, and then I was running. Running toward those glowing eyes and that terrible cry of pain. I remembered what Cyrus had told me my first day at Eclipse, about how Bully was such a troublemaker, how he kept finding ways to escape and pillage the gardens at night. And how it wasn’t safe to wander away from Eclipse alone because there were predators in the woods. Wolves and coyotes and mountain lions and bears.

  The glowing eyes scattered when I was within twenty feet of them. I could see their shape by that point, a pack of doglike animals, too small to be wolves. Coyotes, then. They had to be. But even if they’d been wolves, I would have charged into the middle of them because I had a terrible feeling I knew who had made that animal squall of pain.

  And I was right.

  I fell to my knees beside the small, twisted body of the animal the coyotes had attacked. I let out a moan.

  It was Bully. It was my wild, troublemaking little goat.

  The leather collar around his neck had done a little to protect him from the coyotes’ teeth, but they had ripped him open in a dozen other places and he was bleeding out, his blood black in the night. His dark eyes wobbled, searching my face as though begging me to help him.

  And I could, I realized. I could save him just like I had saved Erin. All I needed was the anima of some other creature. Another goat. A horse or a sheep. Something potent that I could channel into him.

  “Hold on, little guy,” I said, taking a moment to stroke the uninjured place between his eyes to comfort him. I wished there were more anima inside me now. If there were, I could simply infuse him, but the emotional shock of what had happened seemed to have sprung a leak in me, and the last of the anima that had filled me for the previou
s hour came rushing out like air from a punctured tire.

  Resolved, I stood, ready to cull one of the other animals to save my pet. It wasn’t fair to the animal whose life I would take, but I had to do something. I couldn’t let Bully die.

  Then I saw Rebekah and the rest of the Kalyptra coming toward me through the field, carrying lanterns, their expressions somber, as though they were part of a funeral march. Rebekah held a jar in the shape of a goat’s head in both hands in front of her, and when I saw it, relief swept through me.

  I wouldn’t have to cull one of the other animals to save Bully. Rebekah would use one of her culling jars to save him. She would take care of him as she’d taken care of me after my bad trip in the forest.

  Her eyes—all of the Kalyptra’s eyes—were ink black as they formed a ring around Bully’s mangled body. Rebekah, at their center, knelt in the place where I’d knelt a moment before.

  She opened the lid of the jar and began to chant in a low voice, in a language I didn’t understand, but which I thought might be Latin.

  I was confused. The cloud of light that normally accompanied the opening of a culling jar didn’t emerge, and neither did Rebekah’s vena. Instead, Rebekah dipped her finger into Bully’s blood and spread it around the rim of the jar, still chanting the same phrase over and over again, her eyes black as obsidian. And then I did see the light, the anima, only it wasn’t coming from the jar.

  It came from Bully, oozing from his mouth and nostrils, from his bloodied wounds like smoke from the windows of a burning building. Only this cloud moved with purpose. It snaked and funneled through the air, straight into Rebekah’s jar.

  Before I registered what was truly happening, it was too late. Bully’s life slipped from his body into the jar, and Rebekah closed the lid.

  For a long moment, I was too stunned to react. I simply watched as the ring around Rebekah disbanded and the Kalyptra headed back to the house. Finally, I regained enough presence of mind to do something.