by Trisha Telep
“Like a naughty puppy,” I said, numb, yet still shivering while I sipped my hot chocolate.
“I’ve only met one other mara, and she was old as dirt. Still scary as hell, though. You could have learned a thing or two from her.”
“Wait...” I interrupted, as something she’d said finally sank in. “Seventh daughter?”
“Yeah. You know, ‘And the seventh daughter of the seventh daughter shall be born a night-hag, and she shall feed from the fear of the innocent as they slumber...’” Greer stopped and raised both brows at me. “You haven’t heard that, have you?”
“No.” And I’m not a hag. I took another sip, then stared up at her, my mind spinning. “So ... I have six sisters?”
“Oh, no, not anymore.” She frowned, like that should have been obvious. “Not if they gave you up. Maras are always born to human families, and it’s really hard for humans to believe they’re not the top of the food chain. And that their precious baby girl is literally a thing of nightmares. So the seventh daughter is almost always abandoned.”
Abandoned? I’d known it, of course, but hearing it outright ... it kinda stung.
“A couple hundred years ago, there would have been others of your kind to take you in and teach you. But today ... well, with the popularity of contraception and termination, there are fewer and fewer of you born. Especially in the U.S. So you have to fend for yourself.”
She drank from her can and gestured with it. “You know, I knew there was something different about you. The others are like drops of rain in a puddle, but you’re a river of fear and resentment. Though based on the looks of you, I’d say that river has nearly run dry. Sorry ’bout that. Collateral damage.”
“You’re ... stealing their fear?” And clearly stealing what little I’d collected from them, as well as what I produced on my own.
Greer’s eyes flashed in irritation, and her gaze narrowed again. “I’m not stealing anything. I’m flushing out the negative energy and replacing it with acceptance and peace—exactly what girls like you need.” She hesitated, then gave a little chuckle. “Well, not girls like you, obviously. But the others...”
What they need? Who was she to decide what they—what we —needed?
“But that ‘negative energy’ is half of who they are! They’ve been through a lot. They’ve earned a little anger and aggression.” I know I had! “You’re turning them into ... zombies!”
Greer’s frown deepened, and another chill ran up my spine. “I’m turning them into respectable young women who finally have a chance to make something of their lives. How many of them would even be thinking about college and careers if they were still on the self-destructive paths that put them here in the first place?” she demanded, and I felt my temperature drop at least another degree. Goose bumps popped up on my arms, and I swayed on my chair.
She was draining me where I sat!
“This is a mutually beneficial arrangement, and I’ve made Holser the top halfway house for girls in the state. They should all be grateful to be here!”
Wow. Was she serious? Regardless, she was clearly pissed, and the angrier she grew, the weaker I felt. At this rate, I wouldn’t be able to stand up by the time Nash got there.
“What do you do with all the ‘negative energy’?” I asked through chattering teeth, trying to calm her down and buy myself some time.
“Well, I need some of it, obviously. A girl’s gotta eat, right?” She grinned and patted her flat stomach, as if we’d just shared a great joke. Nausea churned in my guts at the realization that I’d said the same thing to Nash. “The rest of it I sell, or trade for the healthier energies I’m replacing it with. Fortunately, the dark stuff sells for much more than the shiny-happy feelings, so I still pull in a tidy profit, even after expenses.”
“You can sell fear?” I asked around still-chattering teeth, trying to hide my growing revulsion.
“Of course.” She shrugged. “And despair and pain and anger and everything at the opposite end of the spectrum, too. Everything is food for something, Sabine. You’d know that better than most.”
“I guess.” But with her words, a new world had just opened up in front of me, and its dark, gaping maw threatened to swallow me whole. I didn’t know how to exist in a world where I wasn’t the scariest thing around. I wasn’t sure I wanted to. But the new fear that realization should have triggered in me was gone almost before I’d felt it, leaving me light-headed and hollow.
Greer was taking it—all of it—before it could even ripen. And along with my emotions, she was stealing my energy, my very life force, much faster than she took from the others. Whether she meant to or not, she was killing me.
Keep her talking, Sabine...
“So ... you’re like me?”
“I’m an empath, yes.” She looked irritated at having to repeat herself. “But not like you. I am an emovere. By replacing what I take with much healthier emotions, I’m making the world a better place, one rehabilitated delinquent at a time.
“You, on the other hand...” She smiled at me in nauseating mock sympathy. “You can’t help what you are, but the truth is that you provide no benefit to anyone but yourself. You’re a dirty little parasite, sucking people dry in their sleep. Like a giant bedbug.” Greer set her soda can down and leaned against the counter at her back. “You’re lucky, you know, Sabine. Most people wouldn’t hesitate to squash a bedbug that had burrowed into their home. But I don’t want to hurt you.”
A statement unsupported by my steadily dropping temperature.
“But you can’t stay here, obviously.” She shrugged, like we were friends again. Greer gave new meaning to the word “unstable.” “One more night, and I might have accidentally drained you dry.”
“What?” Her alternative to killing me was to kick me out of my court-mandated halfway house?
“I think the best thing would be for you to leave tonight. Go find some sleeping drifter and have a good meal. The staff will report you missing in the morning, and when the police pick you up, Gomez will send you to Ron Jackson. Problem solved.” She brushed her hands together, like she was brushing dirt off her palms.
Was I that dirt?
No. And she couldn’t brush me off either.
“Hell no.” I said, my hands curling into fists around the edge of my metal seat.
“What?” Greer looked genuinely confused by my refusal.
“I’m not going.” I stood, struggling to keep my jaw from chattering, but my legs were steady, since she seemed to have stopped actively draining me. “I’m not going to prison just so you can keep selling stolen emotions on some weird-ass black market. This is where the judge sent me, and this is where I’m gonna stay, until the director decides to release me.”
Greer’s jaw clenched in fury, and the blue of her irises darkened rapidly. “I can make your stay here very unpleasant, bedbug. And very, very short.” Her eyes narrowed to mere slits, and pain exploded in my center. If felt like the air was being sucked from my lungs. But Greer wasn’t taking air. She was taking the very last of the energy generated from my emotions, and when that was gone, Ron Jackson would be the least of my worries.
“Leave her alone, or I’ll make sure you’re never seen in the human world again,” a familiar, masculine voice said, and I turned to see Nash walking toward us from the cafeteria.
“Nash, no! She’s an emovere.”
“You should listen to your girlfriend, little bean sidhe,” Greer growled, her eyes almost solid black now. But my pain ebbed when she focused on him. “Your honey-voice won’t work on me.”
But somehow, Nash was unfazed. “Leave her alone and back the hell off, or you’ll spend the rest of your short life in the Netherworld.”
Greer laughed out loud. “Take one more step, and you’ll spend tomorrow night at your own funeral, little boy.”
Nash glanced at me and winked, like he had a plan. Then he took one step forward.
“No!” I shouted. He’d forgotten to actually t
ell me the plan!
Greer focused a wicked black-eyed stare at him. Nash crumpled to the floor.
I dropped to my knees at his side, and the minute my hand touched his face, I realized he was still alive. She hadn’t completely drained him. His fear called to me like a lighthouse on a foggy night, but I pushed past that to his periphery emotions. The ones I normally wouldn’t touch. Even unconscious, Nash was still furious at her—and still in love with me.
“What is wrong with kids today? You never do as you’re told,” Greer lamented, as I leaned down and kissed Nash. And this time I fed from his other, stronger emotions though they tasted bitter compared to his sweet fears. And when I sat up, I was no longer shaking. My teeth no longer chattered.
“Take your boyfriend home before I drain you both,” Greer said. “And consider this your one and only warning.” She twisted to reach for her soda, as if we weren’t enough of a threat to interrupt her caffeine fix. The moment her back was turned, I lurched to my feet. I grabbed a lunch tray from the stack on the counter and rushed her.
As she turned toward me, I swung the tray. The edge slammed into her cheek. Bone crunched. Her soda can went flying. Kate Greer fell backward and landed face up on the linoleum. Her head smacked the ground, and her eyes fluttered shut. She was out cold.
For a moment, I stood in shock. Not over what I’d done—it wasn’t my first time wielding a lunch tray—but that it had worked. Then I dropped onto her chest, put my hands on either side of her face—the right side of which was now soft and lumpy—and drank long and hard from the well of fear she’d filled earlier that night.
She was glutted with it. Fat and lazy on the inside, and high on her own power. She was also delicious, and I was a poor kid in a candy store, stuffing myself because I knew I might never get a second chance. How often does one even meet an emovere?
The more I drank, the better I felt, physically. But the angrier I got. She’d hurt those girls, who couldn’t defend themselves from a predator they didn’t understand. She’d tried to send me to prison. She’d threatened to starve me if I didn’t go. And she’d tried to kill Nash.
So I drank. And I drank. I fed until I had all the fear she’d amassed. I fed until her cheeks went cold beneath my fingers. I fed until her breathing grew ragged and labored.
“Sabine!” Nash pulled on my arm, but I barely heard him. “Sabine, stop! You’re killing her.” But that was the point. She’d tried to kill him, she would have killed me. Poetic justice.
“Sabine, I said stop!” That time Nash hauled me off of her, then pulled me away. He wrapped his arms around me and turned us so that his body blocked hers from my sight.
For several long moments, I could only breathe deeply and ride the high surging through me, like bolts of lightning striking me over and over. It was unlike anything I’d ever experienced, and it felt good. I felt hot and alive and powerful. Scary -powerful.
Did Greer feel like this every night? No wonder she wouldn’t leave! Who could give up that kind of power and ... feast? And if I hadn’t wound up at Holser, she never would have been caught. She could have gorged forever, convinced that she was shaping the next generation, while stuffing herself and her wallet on the emotions of neglected, abused delinquents.
And now, so could I...
No. That was my stomach talking. The sweet, succulent fear. But I didn’t need anywhere near as much as she had taken, and neither did she.
Nash pulled something from his pocket, and distantly I heard him speak into his cell phone. “Tod? I need you to get Mom and bring her to Holser House.” He paused, and his brother said something over the line. “Well, wake her up! It’s an emergency. An emovere just tried to kill me and Sabine. Mom has to take her to the Netherworld before she wakes up, or we’re all in trouble.”
Tod cursed over the line, then said something that sounded like an agreement. Nash hung up and shoved his phone back into his pocket. His hands slid beneath the back of my shirt, and his skin was blessedly cool.
“You’re burning up, Sabine. What happened?”
I took several deep breaths, and when I could speak—when I could think straight again—I pulled away to look at him. “I took too much. And it wasn’t just fear. She was so full of anger! Everything she took from them, and I drank it.” And that’s when it hit me. “I would have killed her. Nash, I would have killed her if you weren’t here.” Then I would have gone after the girls. All of them. Not just what I needed to survive. Because it felt so good. They were going to shun me anyway, so why not give them a reason to?
Because you’re not a monster. Not really. Not yet, anyway. But I could be...
I saw my own true fear in that moment. I was afraid of myself. Afraid of what I was capable of. Of what I still wanted to do, with the power still buzzing through me.
Was Greer right? Was I just a parasite, feeding on the weak in their sleep? Was I nothing but a monster?
No. Not as long as Nash saw something else in me. Even if I couldn’t trust myself, I could trust him. To see the truth, and to hold me in check. But without him...?
“Promise you won’t leave me, Nash,” I whispered. “Promise me.”
“You know I won’t.” He whispered it in my ear, his cheek cool against my overheated face.
“Say it.”
Nash stepped back and lifted my chin so that my gaze met his. “You’re stuck with me forever, Sabine.”
“Good,” I whispered. But in my head, I heard what I didn’t dare say, even to him.
Because I’m not sure what I’d become without you...
Vermillion
BY DANIEL MARKS
“This is Amie Shin.” The Station Agent gestured in the direction of a petite Asian girl bunched up at one end of the settee like a snowdrift.
Unlike so many in Purgatory, where a quick rub of ash sufficed to dim the glare of their souls, this girl was immaculately painted, her face powdered white, her brows dark with kohl, a deep spot of crimson dotting her tiny pert lips. If it weren’t for the bold glow of memory burnishing her eyes, she might have passed for living.
She untangled her legs from underneath her and crossed the slickly polished stone of Manny’s office, her ornately embroidered robe fluttering around her and slippered-feet softly shuffling. Extending her hand and nodding sweetly, she said, “I’ve heard much about your thievery.”
Velvet slipped her hand into Amie’s and squeezed. “Pleased to meet you ... I guess. I won’t lie, I’ve never heard of you.”
She noticed a sinister assessment in the girl’s eyes that traveled all the way down to a grip that lingered longer than any handshake known to man. Velvet jerked away and rubbed at her hand uncomfortably.
She spun toward Nick, widening her eyes to indicate that they might be dangerously close to a crazy person. “Um ... this is my boyfriend,” she said.
Ever the people pleaser, Nick stabbed his arm between them, a big Prom-King smile plastered on his lips, but not for long.
“I’m Nick,” he said.
His hand hung in midair. Amie recoiled from it for a moment like he’d slapped some roadkill onto the floor between them. A smile flittered on her lip, brief as a facial tic, and then it was gone. Nick withdrew and gave Velvet a quick glance that verified her assessment that the girl was likely criminally insane.
Amie backed away and curled up again on the couch, glaring at them both. Velvet shivered. Nick gulped audibly.
