Snow, Blood, and Envy

by Haus, Jean

  Once I’m between them, she says, “Put out your hands.” I compliantly lift my hands. If I don’t fight them, they may just leave Jai alone. “Wrists up,” she orders. I flip them over and Smith winds yellow plastic around them before twisting the bindings tight. He grins when I wince.

  Mali keeps an eye on the cabin door while he works. “Now, her ankles,” she orders. He winds the plastic around my legs loose enough for me to be able to wobble. As soon as Smith stands, she hands him the gun. “Go kill the boy.”

  “No!” I say, playing my part. I don’t want to give them any indication of a hiding spot. “You said you wouldn’t shoot him.”

  She smiles. “I lied.”

  Smith jogs to the cabin and I wobble after him.

  She yanks my arm. “What are you going to do now?” she asks with a snicker and pushes me into the snow.

  My face crunches against ice crystals. I roll over. Flapping around like a fish out of water, I struggle to get up while listening for the sound of gunfire. I’m hoping with every fiber of my being that Smith doesn’t find Jai. Arms folded, Mali smirks at me thrashing around in the snow. I’m kneeling when Smith comes out to the porch.

  “He’s not in here,” he yells. “The back door’s open and there are tracks. Do you want me to go after him?”

  I keep my face smooth. Inside joy bursts through me. Jai got out!

  Mali’s dark gaze studies the tree line behind the cabin. “No, we’ve better things to do.” She yanks me out of the snow. Her lips curve into a devious smile. “It appears prince charming has deserted you.”

  Chapter 44~Snow

  As soon as my butt hits the leather seat, cold fingers yank my wrist. Her needle finds a vein. The sting of the point comes then the rush of liquid. I don’t fight her, but I refuse to look at her. I’m going to die. So what if her drug makes the experience surreal?

  “Your hair is awful,” she declares, pulling the needle out.

  Unfreakin’ believable. On the brink of murdering me, she’s nagging me about my appearance. Stupid, crazy, money grubbing bitch. Ignoring her, I stare at the cabin. At least Jai will live.

  Smith starts the car.

  “Go up the mountain,” she orders. “When the road runs out, we’ll use the snowmobiles. Then we’ll wait for the dark.”

  Smith doesn’t answer. He just shifts into drive, looks straight ahead, and pushes the accelerator all in a robotic motion, which has me questioning just how much control my stepmother has over him. It seems like she has total control.

  I wonder why we’re going up the mountain and waiting. Why doesn’t she just kill me? As the trees grow thicker and the road bumpier, the real life detective stories Rosa likes to watch on TV flash through my mind. Perhaps Mali wants my death to go unsolved. Jane Doe’s remains found on the side of a mountain. Who will find my bones come spring? A hiker? A hunter? His dog? Or will they lay hidden in the woods forever? But what’s with her obsession of not leaving marks?

  She captures my wrist again. I yank back. She holds tight. I turn to her. Heavy wrinkles line her face. So many crisscross her skin, I forget about her cold grasp. How could I not have noticed how old she was before now? She looks ancient. She tugs at the bracelet still stuck to my wrist. With the flick of a long nail, she frees the chain and untangles it from the yellow plastic. She holds up the piece of jewelry in my face. My tied hands swat at the bracelet until I freeze. Her reflection stares at me. Since the bracelet is facing me, the bronze ovals should hold mine. Truth crashes down on me. She used the thing to track me. It wasn’t the GPS. It was the damn bracelet. She watched what I was doing through a piece of jewelry. First the mirrors, now the bracelet, what the hell is going on?

  “What are you, a witch?” I snap.

  Her response is a deep laugh. My hands clench. I lunge at her without thinking. With our noses almost touching, she says, “We could go back and take care of your friend.”

  Her words have the desired effect. I lean back and take a deep breath. My hands uncurl. I glance at the sun. I have about five hours to live, and with her threats to Jai and the drug running through my veins, not a chance for escape. I let the anger rush out of me because if I don’t, I fear she’ll keep her threat against Jai.

  “These are bones.” She fingers the white beads on the bracelet and a smile forms between her wrinkles. “Someday it will have yours on it.”

  I stare in horror at the chain dangling from her fingertips. Those bones had been on my wrist for over a week. “You’re demented.” The words come out in a whisper.

  She laughs again.

  The sound echoes through the vehicle and back through my ears. At the sight of her wrinkled face stretching and melting, I turn to the window. Outside, trees shift and blur and bleed into the snow. I close my eyes.

  Strange patterns and colors flicker across my lids. My body feels weightless. My mind calm. I know what’s coming. I welcome the absence of reality. It will make facing death much easier. As the world under my lids turns into a dark kaleidoscope, the full dose of the drug lures me into unconsciousness.

  *****

  I open my eyes and blink at the dark sky spotted with white. I’m flying through the snow. White against the backdrop of night speeds by. Everywhere. Snow on the ground. Snow on the trees. Snow falling on my face. Snow wetting my lashes. I close my eyes, and see snow dotted with blood.

  *****

  I wake kneeling on an incline. My knees dig in the cold snow. My arms throb and something thin pokes along my spine. Though it’s freezing, heat licks my face. I force my lids open. The world is hazy, my senses dull, though I can detect a fire, huge and hot, roaring mere feet from me. Popping and sizzling echoes in my ears. Melting snow pools around the flames. Water trickles past my bent knees as it runs past me. I struggle to move, but other than my head, I’m stuck. Rope crisscrosses my chest and snakes around my arms extended before me. My hands are tied face up as if waiting for drops of water, as if waiting for something to be put in them.

  Through the fog in my head, I recall my silly voodoo fears. They seem entirely possible now. Yet the fear that’s been my constant shadow of late is absent, only a memory. Tied up like a sacrifice before a fire, I should be scared, but calmness, almost acceptance, flows through me. Logic tells me that should scare me the most, but I remain serene. I lift my chin and pain shoots down my spine. Though a moan escapes me, at least I can physically feel something.

  “Shut up,” Smith’s voice says from somewhere above. Even his presence doesn’t ruffle my tranquility. Snow crunches near then my head reels back from a slap. The taste of metal pools in my mouth and I spit blood out as my head wobbles. My jaw pounds with pain.

  “I told you not to touch her!” Mali shrieks from somewhere behind the fire.

  “The bitch deserves a beating for the shit she’s caused,” Smith grunts.

  While I’m realizing his monotone is somehow gone, he smacks me again. My lip splits. My head spins. I can’t move even to spit out the blood. Pain now pounds through my entire head.

  “You’re going to pay for that!” Mali’s hysterical voice is next to me. The zing of a steel blade being released rings in my ear. “Since my power’s shifting for the change, I should have done this as soon as we got here.”

  A haze of white and black tumbles between the burning fire and me, a rush of air, a thump, a gasp, a groan from the fire, followed by a male scream that cracks through my head like lightning. Pops and sizzles mix with screams of agonizing pain. The scream goes on and on. The smell of burning flesh fills the air and I gag. Sour bile rises in my throat. The smell, the screams, the heat, and the cold make my breath come out in pants.

  The screams stop.

  On the edge of darkness, I can’t open my eyes, can’t lift my head, but I know Smith is dead.

  Chapter 45~Snow, Blood, and Envy

  When I come to again, I hear the scrape of metal from across the fire. I lift my head. My vision has almost cleared. The moon shines through the trees ca
sting long shadows while the fire blazes bright. She stands against the darkness sharpening a long knife. Her face droops with wrinkles. Dirt and grime mat the fur of her coat. Sleek black hair is now a tangled mess. Her eyes are beady black coals. Looking like a witch, she stares at me while her withered hand pushes the knife back and forth across a stone.

  I suck in smoke filled air and tremble. The haze of calmness has diminished and I’ve woken to a nightmare, a place somewhere between reality and fear. I swallow dread and it lodges in my stomach.

  From across the flames, the witch smiles at the girl’s tremble and satisfaction coils through her body. Soon. Soon. Soon. Her curved finger touches the blade and blood, almost black, wets the edge. Grinning, she sets the knife on the seat of the snowmobile and reaches for a log. The fire must be hot.

  Born of fire and ash, fire fuels her power.

  Terror bubbles up inside me and I long for the calming intensity of the drug that now just keeps me tranquil enough not to scream and spit and swear at her. As she walks around the huge fire while tossing in logs, I pull at my bindings. The flames cast shadows in her deep wrinkles and light her face to an orange hue. The forest behind her is a shadowy backdrop of tangled branches and deeper shadows that move and breathe with the flicker of the growing fire. Dread builds in my chest as my bindings hold tight. I’m stuck, a frog pinned for her ghoulish dissection.

  She lifts a small bowl—the one from eight thousand years ago—from the ground and her dark silhouette moves past the bright light of the fire until she stands before me.

  I force myself not to flinch. Though my heartbeat accelerates at her nearness, somehow I defiantly meet her gaze. Her smile is slow. It slithers across her face like a snake and a tooth drops out of her mouth. I stare at the jagged, rotten thing lying in the snow while she cackles above. The feeling I had about her mirror collection intensifies within me a hundred times. Something is very, very wrong with my stepmother.

  Her deformed fingers set the bowl in my upturned hands. “Look inside and behold your destiny,” she says in a brittle voice.

  I want to smack those folds of skin. Really, I want to run to the farthest corner of the earth, but hog-tied to a stake, I say, “Ah, something to spit in.”

  Her coal eyes narrow, causing more wrinkles to crease her face. “It wouldn’t do to desecrate your eternal home.”

  I don’t know what she means. It can’t be good. I curl my lip at her, ready to tell her off, but the bowl warms in my hands. The stone nearly scorches my skin. In the polished surface instead of my face, another face is pictured, and then another. Faces change each second. Female features of every shape from every race. Totally terrified now, I try to shake the heavy bowl out of my bound hands. The stone doesn’t budge. I try to look away. I can’t.

  At first, their voices are a quiet whine, overlapping like their features. As the whispers grow louder, I understand what they say. “Wel-come Niv-ea. Wel-come Niv-ea.” Over and over again, their voices ring in my ears until the words seep into my skin, into my soul. Their chant pulls at me and beckons me to join them under the polished stone reflection. Stay with us for eternity. The meaning behind their welcome reverberates within me. “No!” rips from my throat.

  The witch lets out a loud cackle. This, their sudden awareness, has always filled her with triumphant joy. They think death is coming. Now at this moment, they become aware that there’s more than death. Though they don’t fully understand yet, they feel the coming eternal torture. If only she could stretch out time, hold their initial horror and bask in it longer. How lovely that would be.

  I tear my gaze from the bowl’s images. “What—why—me?” I stutter.

  The wrinkles in her neck stretch as she glares down at me. “Mostly your pretty face, secondly your father’s money, and lastly, though unimportant, your name,” she says with an exultant tone. “Some tales are based on truth. The name has never matched before.” She cackles again. “Until now.”

  Her words hit me harder than Smith’s smacks. Much too late, I understand. The mirror collection, the girl behind the glass, and the antique dealer’s words all swirl in my mind behind the meaning of Nivea. In Latin, it means Snow White. It was my mother’s favorite fairy tale since her father took her to see it as a little girl. Her love of the movie had sparked my interest in animation. Now, her favorite movie, my name, is going to kill me.

  I look at the hag in front of me while the whispering faces call again. I recall her different faces in the mirror and my fate becomes clear. The new clothes in my closet aren’t for me. Nor was the regiment of healthy eating. They’re for her, for her as me. In this tale, Snow White is going to die—well, having one’s soul trapped in a mirror is pretty much death—and this witch will take my body and life until she needs another.

  With the weight of the knowledge pushing on my chest, I gasp out, “How?”

  “How?” she repeats. “I told you. Beauty is power.”

  Her words make little sense to me, but my entire body now shakes in horror, a body that will soon belong to her.

  The witch looks into the shadows remembering long ago when tools were stone and magic part of life. She’d been ugly and small, but wise and powerful. She doesn’t mind sharing her past. The more they understand, the more they suffer.

  “When the craftsman laid his masterpiece, the first mirror ever made into a shaman’s hands, it whispered to her…’beauty can live forever’.” The witch looks at the girl’s pretty face, a gift of luck not of merit, and a snarl twists her lips. “Because she knew magic, the shaman recognized the magic in the mirror. Reflection is magic, but the first mirror… soon you will understand the power of the first. It reigns over the rest.”

  She lifts the lid of a box and pulls out another mirror. Small and etched in gold and silver, she had to have it handmade—the craft of mirror making has waned in this age. She smears a strip of her dying blood across the surface. “Blood powers the magic.”

  Blood? I watch her walk towards me and that word has me thrashing again. The ropes hold tight. Saggy Mali has the knife in one hand and a new mirror in the other.

  She lifts the small mirror. “I commissioned this last year from a jeweler in Italy.”

  I stare at her cruel smile as her words scorch my brain. Last year, last year, LAST YEAR—

  “Yes.” Her dirty fingers trace the edge of the mirror. “Who would have guessed that the father and daughter I spotted at a quaint restaurant would be so perfect.” She smiles again as raw knowledge and fury pound through my veins. “A car crash formed from a bribe.”

  “Ahhhhhh,” I yell and thrash against my bindings. This woman killed my mother. Every part of my body aches with the need to attack her. My fingers dig into the volcanic bowl in my hands. I never truly wanted to hurt another person until now. My breath turns harsh and rage rips through me. I imagine ripping out her eyes, pulling the sagging skin from her face, and plunging the knife into her wizened form. My fingers itch with the vindictive violence of it until I remember someone else and the rage turns into fear. “My father’s next isn’t he?”

  “Of course,” she says, showing her now toothless mouth in another grin. “First, I need the power of your soul and the youth of your body…then his wealth.”

  I shake with indignation. We’re just a drop in the long line of her victims. She’s like an ancient serial killer.

  She sets the new mirror in the snow by my knees and deep inside I feel her power, feel her taking control over me. She moves her lips. I can hear the mumbling, but I can’t make out the words. A low hum comes from the bowl. Their whispers match her chant. Louder and louder, the strange words come at me. Her eyes now glow red. They are brighter than the fire. The rise and fall of the flames match the beat of her chant. Although the foreign words mean nothing to me, they’re scaring the hell out of me.

  Nasty magic words to suck out my soul.

  My body twists, jerks on its own, anything to get loose from the stake, anything to get away from her
. She lifts the knife. It glows in the light from the fire. Her triumphant eyes form into slits. Her shadow, long and hunched, across the snow repeats the truth of her form. She is a witch.

  A scream catches in my throat.

  A surge of exhilaration fills the witch as she looks down at the cowering girl. Blue eyes, large and filled with tears, stare up at her. Eyes that will soon be hers. Eyes that should be hers. She lowers the knife with a slash and continues the incantation as the power of envy swirls within her.

  I flinch as the knife slices my wrists. In one swipe, she draws blood on both of them. Red liquid drips onto the snow beneath—scarlet on a white backdrop—and the building scream rips out of me at the sight. Long and high-pitched my voice fights with the wind until I slump forward.

  Ignoring my scream, she uses the bowl to collect drips of liquid from my wrists before setting the blood-smeared bowl into my hands. Slumped forward I watch her throw off the dirty fur coat. Underneath she wears a plain brown shift over her twisted form. She chants again and I feel it. My spirit moves. Rays of light shine out of the bowl in my hands and the voices inside call out to me. “Come,” they say, pulling me. Her never-ending chant pulls at me. Even the beat of the flames pull at me.

  A wet stream runs down my face. Soon, I’ll be forever behind glass. There are no happily-ever-afters. The proof—their souls—lies in my hands. Like them, I’ll be a slave behind glass. There is no prince. In hysteria, I think I’d kiss a million frogs to be free. There will be no kisses. No one will wake me from my stupor ever again.

  Staring at the pool of blood in the ancient mirror, I gaze at death and the memory of Jai’s kiss burns bright. I use his kiss to shut out the cold at my back, the heat of the fire on my face, the despair growing inside of me, and her chant above me. Desperate to remain myself, I imagine the touch of his lips. I can’t stop her from taking my body, but at least its last sigh will be for him, my eternal thoughts under glass of him.