The Killing Jar

by Jennifer Bosworth

  Rebekah blinked in surprise, as though this should have been obvious from the start. “Because you’re my granddaughter, and you belong here with me. I love you, Kenna. I loved you the moment I laid eyes on you and saw my face in yours, and I knew I had to do whatever it took to keep you at Eclipse with your true family. I’m sure I’ll love your sister, too, once she’s one of us.”

  “No! Rebekah, no, I changed my mind!” I clawed at the wall of the pit, sending explosions of pain through my wrist and up my arm and not caring one bit.

  “But I haven’t,” Rebekah said. “You were right. She’s my family, my blood, and she deserves a chance at what you have. It’s only fair.”

  “She won’t want it!” I realized as I said it that it was true. I’d deceived myself into thinking Erin would want to be Kalyptra, that she needed to be Kalyptra, but she would never choose this life. She had always been the better person. The better twin.

  “It may take time, but she’ll learn to accept our way of life, just as you did.” Rebekah smiled down at me, radiant and queenly. “I brought a few things to help you prepare for the ceremony.”

  She set her candle on the ground and lowered a basket tied to a rope over the edge of the pit. When it reached the bottom, she let the rope fall.

  “I must go,” she said. “We have to get everything ready for your sister’s transformation. It’s going to be a busy day.”

  I peered inside the basket and saw three items. I pulled out the first. It was the green dress Illia had made for me, which matched my eyes perfectly. The next item was a white mask in the shape of an Eclipse moth’s wings, black holes where the eyes would look out. The same one I’d seen on Cyrus’s wall. That the people in Sunday’s paintings had worn.

  The third item was wrapped in a silk scarf. I lifted it out, held it in my one good hand. It seemed I could feel it pulsing like a heart ripped from a chest, radiating heat and life. The hunger in me opened wide, a ravenous canyon of a mouth waiting to be fed.

  “Now don’t waste that,” Rebekah cautioned. “It’s the last of our supply until after tonight. Get yourself healed and cleaned up, and someone will return for you at sundown.”

  She departed then, but left her candle burning on the ledge above.

  I set the jar on the ground and unwrapped the scarf from around it, revealing its true shape.

  A human skull.

  I thought of the items I’d seen in Cyrus’s trailer, the wallet and Leatherman with someone else’s initials. What had they been? A.L.P? I couldn’t remember, but I wondered if they were the initials of the person whose anima was contained inside this jar.

  I reached for the lid, and then pulled my hand back as though burned. Every cell in my body wanted what was in that jar, but how could I take the anima inside now that I knew where it had come from, and what it would do to me? There would never be a point at which enough was enough. I would want human anima forever, and I would hate myself for wanting and taking, and then I would want it all the more to bury what it made me feel. Or perhaps, eventually, I would come to think of it the way the rest of the Kalyptra did, as a necessary evil. The price of being extraordinary, of feeling things no one else could feel and seeing things no one else could see.

  The entitlement of being a superior being. A god.

  It took every ounce of willpower I had left, but I stood, clutching the jar. I hauled back my good arm, ready to throw it.

  But I didn’t.

  I couldn’t.

  I slumped to the floor among the bones, despair wrapping me like a cocoon.

  I cracked open the jar and a mist of shimmering, opalescent anima leaked out. Threads of energy emerged from the palm of my hand and reached for the anima, sucking at it and drinking it in.

  I couldn’t resist. I wasn’t strong enough.

  I removed the lid and took all it had to offer.

  TRANSFORMATION

  “Kenna, it’s time.”

  Cyrus’s words fell on me from above like drops of warm, summer rain. He lowered a rope ladder over the side of the pit, and I climbed out and stood before him. The anima had healed my wrist and ended the terrible catharsis that had shriveled and sickened my body. Now I was as glorious as a blazing sunset. In the dark of the cave, my skin shimmered with otherworldly light.

  Cyrus looked me up and down, his eyes coming to rest on my face, which was partially hidden behind the Eclipse moth mask.

  He nodded approval. He wore the same mask, and he was shirtless, his chest painted with branching white lines of vena.

  “I’ve missed you,” he said, and leaned forward to kiss me. With the anima churning through my veins, the kiss felt like being reborn. I closed my eyes and saw worlds spinning on the backs of my lids. I sank into the kiss, wrapping my arms around Cyrus’s neck and breathing him in.

  He broke the kiss before I was ready to let him go, then took my hand and led me from the cave.

  When we were near the entrance, I heard the Kalyptra’s harmonious voices singing in unison, a strange, repetitive chant I’d never heard them sing before.

  Matrem appellamus vobis

  Matrem appellamus vobis

  Sanguine et igni

  Matrem appellamus vobis

  I didn’t know the words—they were sung in another language that sounded like it might be Latin—but even though I didn’t understand them, I picked up the tune quickly and began to hum along. I was one of them, after all. I was Kalyptra. My voice belonged with theirs.

  When we reached the entrance, Cyrus kissed me once more and then ushered me through.

  I emerged, reveling in the smell of forest air, of cool night on my skin. The trees were frilly giants, bowing over the meadow, and the sky was a canopy of sapphires and diamonds.

  My eyes lowered to the meadow, where a bonfire blazed in a circle around the stone pedestal. Through the flames, I could see a woman lying on the stone, bound with ropes and gagged. I couldn’t see her face, but she was definitely a woman. The bonfire obscured my view of her, but I could make out the shape of her naked body and shoulder-length blond hair.

  The Kalyptra were arranged in a wide ring around the fire, the women wearing long dresses that appeared almost to be robes, the men shirtless, their chests painted with the same thin white lines as Cyrus’s. All of them wore masks in the shape of an Eclipse moth’s wings, their eyes peering out through the dark moon circles in the middle of the white.

  My grandmother was resplendent in a crimson gown with a neckline that plunged past her navel, her hair a golden cape that coiled to her hipbones. Her mask was more elaborate than the others, practically a headdress. She looked like a high priestess, an ancient goddess whose mere existence commanded devotion.

  But even Rebekah faded when I saw who stood beside her under the altar.

  Erin.

  Instead of a mask, she wore a white blindfold over her eyes, along with a loose, white shift dress. She was frail again, her bare legs knobby and her arms pale and skeletal. The look of her must sicken Rebekah, I thought, but my sister wouldn’t be like this much longer. This time when Erin emerged from her chrysalis, she would be changed forever. We would finally be identical.

  Rebekah glided across the meadow toward me, her arms held out as though to embrace me. Instead, she took my hand and led me to the altar made from twisted branches, which also reminded me of vena. She gazed at me proudly, and I wanted to bask in that pride, to feel deserving of her affection and her love.

  But something had changed.

  I was filled with anima, heady and drunk with it, but somehow the effect was not as all-consuming as it should have been. The fatalistic thoughts and emotions that usually stayed buried when I took anima clawed toward the surface of my mind.

  This is wrong, I thought. It was all terribly wrong. Erin would never want this. She would never allow an innocent woman to die so that she could live.

  Matrem appellamus vobis

  Matrem appellamus vobis

  Sanguine et igni
/>   Matrem appellamus vobis

  All that lives must die, I chanted in my mind. All that lives must die.

  Rebekah raised a hand to silence the Kalyptra’s chorus. Then she lowered that hand to take Erin’s and stood at our center, linking us in a short chain. I peered over at Erin and saw she was smiling in a dizzy way that told me she had been given anima to keep her calm. To sedate her. Had the woman on the sacrificial pedestal been given anima, too? Beneath the haze clouding my brain, I wondered who she was.

  “Tonight we call upon the Mother to make this child one of us,” Rebekah intoned. “We offer blood and light to the Mother. In exchange, we ask her to bestow upon my granddaughter, Erin, the gift that will transform her. That blessing that will allow her to lift the veil and see beyond the mundane. To breathe the breath of life and become what she was meant to be.”

  The woman on the pedestal must not have been sedated well enough. She began to struggle furiously against the ropes binding her.

  Rebekah called to Cyrus, “Cut her! Let her blood call the Mother home!”

  Cyrus drew a knife and reached quickly through the flames to slash at the woman’s bare torso. The woman tried to jerk away from him and ended up rolling onto her side for an instant—

  An instant long enough for me to see the tattoo covering her back: a moth with wings laid across her shoulders.

  I sucked in a silent breath.

  The woman cried out as Cyrus’s knife sliced into her. He brought the blade back smeared with red, dripping blood onto the grass. Cyrus held the knife high in the air and called.

  Matrem appellamus vobis

  Sanguine et igni

  Then I heard, from above, the sound of wings brushing the air.

  I looked up and saw it.

  Her.

  “Matrem!” Rebekah said in awe, squeezing my hand and gazing up at the descending creature. “Isn’t she beautiful, Kenna? Isn’t the Mother magnificent?”

  “Yes,” I whispered, and I meant it. With the anima in my eyes, the Mother of the Kalyptra was not monstrous. She was moonlight made into wings. The sight of her dazzled me, stunned me, made me forget for a moment why she was here. Made me forget the tattoo on the naked back of the woman who was to be sacrificed in exchange for Erin to be made Kalyptra.

  But the other Kenna, the one smothered beneath a shimmering blanket of anima, knew who the woman on the pedestal was, and she fought her way to the surface.

  The Mother descended into the clearing and hovered over the pedestal, assessing her bleeding victim. Her thorax was the size of a child, her black, bowl eyes as large as fists, and her wings as long as my legs. For a moment she hung in the air, as though deciding between the blood and the fire.

  She chose the blood.

  She alighted on the body of the sacrificial victim.

  On my own mother.

  My stomach turned to ice.

  I glimpsed the Eclipse moth’s long, white ribbon of a tongue unfurling to suck up the blood it was offered, which poured from my mother’s stomach in a torrent. Its tongue plunged into the open wound and snaked under the skin.

  “Mom!” I cried, tearing my hand out of Rebekah’s grasp as the real me, the Kenna I’d been trying to hide from, charged forward and took control, swimming through the anima trying to drown me in exuberant joy while my mother died. I darted toward the fire and the stone pedestal.

  “Kenna, no!” Rebekah grabbed at my dress, trying to pull me back, but I wrenched free of her.

  I must have startled the Eclipse moth because it withdrew its tongue from my mom’s wound and juddered into the air, where it hovered over the flames, its black porthole eyes staring down at us.

  Cyrus stepped into my path and tried to grab me, but I darted around him. I didn’t know what I was doing. I only knew I had to get to my mom. I had to save my family.

  My real family.

  Then I felt a searing pain on the back of my head, and I was yanked backward. Cyrus had me by the hair, and he reeled me in like he was reeling in a fish. He held the knife smeared with my mom’s blood to my throat.

  “Let this happen, Kenna,” he hissed into my ear, sounding harsh but also pleading, as though some part of him was sorry for what was about to happen.

  “Rebekah knows what’s best for us,” he said. “For all of us. She’ll take care of you and your sister the way no one ever could. She’ll be good to you the way she’s been to me, and eventually you’ll forget the misery that was your life before. You’ll be grateful.”

  I watched, helpless, as the Eclipse moth touched down on my mom again and unfurled its tongue.

  “Let her go,” Cyrus said close to my ear. He kept one hand fisted in my hair and the other holding the knife to my neck. “We’re your people now.”

  A part of me wanted to do what he said, to let the Eclipse moth have my mom. But that part wasn’t the real me. That part was the thing I had become.

  I heard my mom’s voice in my head, singing.

  Sweet girl, don’t cry.

  Sweet girl, I hear you sigh.

  I’ll be here when you wake,

  So you won’t be afraid

  to dream alone.

  To dream alone.

  Now I understood what those lyrics meant. My mom’s lullaby was both an apology and a promise, her way of telling me she was sorry for keeping me away from the one place where I didn’t have to dream alone, and a promise that she would do her best to always be there for me when it came to real life. She had failed, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t tried.

  Tears began to stream down my cheeks, and the love for my mom that had been tainted and distorted by all of our mistakes, by our disastrous history, came rushing back into my heart. It gave me strength.

  I drove my elbow into Cyrus’s stomach and felt his grip on me loosen just enough for me to make a break for it. Cyrus reached for me again, but a blur of dark hair flew at him and knocked him to the ground.

  Joanna.

  They tumbled to the grass and Cyrus’s knife was jettisoned from his hand. The Kalyptra gasped and murmured, all of them high on anima, none of them seeming able to comprehend what was happening.

  This would be my only chance.

  Joanna scrambled for the knife, and when she had it brandished in warning at Cyrus she raised her eyes to mine.

  “The Mother, Kenna. Cull the Mother.”

  For a moment I was confused, thinking she meant my own mother. My mind was still fighting for clarity against the anima in my system.

  Then it hit me: she was talking about the Eclipse moth.

  Was it even possible? I couldn’t cull another Kalyptra, but could I cull their goddess? It was the Eclipse moth’s anima that had made the Kalyptra what they were, so maybe …

  Maybe would have to be enough.

  I reached both hands toward the Eclipse moth and hundreds of threads of energy extruded from my palms and whipped toward the Mother. The threads connected, but for a moment nothing happened.

  Then the Mother spasmed as though hit with a bolt of lightning, and her energy poured into me and filled me. It consumed me as I consumed it. The Eclipse moth’s anima made human anima seem like a sip of wine in comparison. This was the anima of a goddess, and I was taking it. Taking it all as the monstrous moth began to come apart, its wings turning to powder, its thorax shrinking and crumbling like old clay.

  Around me, the Kalyptra cried out and fell to the ground, writhing in pain as though I were hurting them, too. And maybe I was. The Mother had made them. They were connected. So why was I not writhing in pain like them? Because I had taken the Mother’s anima? I didn’t know. My consciousness was being devoured by the anima of the Eclipse moth.

  The Mother’s body hit the ground and broke apart like a sculpture made of dust. Its anima spread through me. Mania took hold of my brain and I was swallowed by a singular need.

  Light …

  Light …

  LIGHT.

  Distantly, I remembered what Cyrus had told
me about moth anima being forbidden, because when it was in you the compulsion to go into the light was undeniable. Everyone knew a moth couldn’t resist a flame, even if it would be its doom.

  I had always been a moth, unable to resist those things that could destroy me. So this would be my well-deserved end.

  I turned toward the fire, knowing on some level what was about to happen but unable to resist, because I wanted this, too. Not the moth part of me, but the real me. I walked toward the fire, ready for what was to come. Fire cleanses, and I needed to be washed clean of the terrible things I’d done. This would be my sacrifice. The payment for my many sins.

  I was an inch from the licking flames when a hand grabbed my arm and the owner whirled me to face her.

  Rebekah’s face was livid, her once beautiful features pinched in pain. Her skin appeared to be both shrinking against her skull and melting off of it. Her hair began to fall out in handfuls and her lips pulled tight against loosening teeth.

  She was aging, I realized. Aging rapidly now that the divine connection to her goddess was gone.

  “Do you realize what you’ve done?” Rebekah shrieked in my face.

  The flames called to me. I tried to turn away from Rebekah, to continue my path into the fire, but she dug her fingernails into my arms.

  “You’ve destroyed everything!” she screamed, her eyes bulging like they were about to pop. The hair rained off her scalp, leaving gray patches of skull beneath. “We’ll die now. We’ll wither and die, and so will you and your sister!”

  “All that lives must die,” I told her. “Even you.”

  I shook free of Rebekah, and her legs buckled backward, bones giving way and snapping like ancient wood. She fell to her knees, wailing to the sky, and I turned once more toward the flames.

  “Kenna, please! Don’t move!”

  The voice was one I knew better than any other. It had been with me for as long as there had been a me.

  I looked back again to see Erin pulling the blindfold from her eyes. The dizzy smile was no longer on her face. Her anima high had faded fast.