by Dia Reeves
“Stay and help.” Stanton glanced over at the two of them. “Did you offer her something in return?”
“She doesn’t want anything,” said Sterling. “You know what she’s like.”
He didn’t mention his insane idea about making her a heart—for herself? that had never been used?—and it felt strange, this secret between them.
“Why’re you staring at Sterling so hard?” Karissa asked.
“I’m not. I can’t. Not with my weak feelings.”
Stanton got off the floor and helped her out of her coat. “Get her a box cutter, Aunt Grissel. Rue’s going to help you unpack.”
Grissel peeked her head from the closet. Her normally tightly drawn hair was unbound and swayed about her face like cobwebs as she pulled a box cutter from her pocket. “What will she give me for this?”
“Manual labor,” Stanton snapped.
“Or a taste of your soul?” Her screamingly sea-blue eyes burned into Rue’s. “Just a sip? Everything tastes like snow, but you look like you’d taste of fire.”
Stanton said, “Stop being weird and toss the box cutter, Aunt Grissel.”
She huffed and grumbled, but did as Stanton said.
“You’re going to get your own soul pretty soon,” Rue said conciliatorily. “You don’t need mine.”
A brief, stunned silence.
Grissel said, “How’d you hear about that?”
“Lemme guess,” Sterling said, wryly, “Drabbin?”
“He trusts me.”
“He trusts you to let him do whatever sick thing he wants in exchange for family secrets!”
“Sterling.” Stanton’s gaze was censorious, even though Karissa was bouncing her ball around the room, obliviously.
Sterling clammed up and set himself to opening boxes.
“I don’t understand Drabbin mouthing off the way he does,” Grissel said. “It’s disloyal.”
Rue cut open a box, “I’m glad you’re moving into Westwood’s room. Now you can have sex in bed instead of the backseat of his car or the cellar floor.”
“I know. I can’t wait to have a go in that bed; looks dead comfy, it does. Oh grow up,” she said over the twins’ groans. “I’m glad to finally settle in and make it official, but oh I got so much stuff.”
“How long have you and Westwood been a couple?”
“A few months after I lost my soul. Been holding out until I sold the house in Castelaine, but that’s finally done.”
“Does Dad know you brought these?” Stanton’s voice was so grim, he drew everyone’s attention. He knelt over a box that contained a severed head neatly nestled in white tissue paper like fine china.
Sterling said, “You made me drive all the way to Castelaine on a Saturday morning for this.”
Stanton and Sterling and Rue opened the rest of the boxes, but it was all the same: men’s heads with long gray hair that flowed over dead-eyed faces. Like the mover with the dolly, the one Grissel had so admired. Was his head among the...yes, there it was in the box Sterling just opened.
“You can’t nail heads on the wall,” Karissa told her aunt, bouncing circles around Grissel as she knelt on the floor trying to sort her shoes. “Mama wouldn’t like it.”
“Well, Mama ain’t here now, is she? And I need my comforts.” She swatted at Karissa until she bounced somewhere else.
“Why gray-haired men?” Rue asked.
Grissel smiled fondly at her morbid collection. “Gray-haired blokes are quite regal, aren’t they? Like my father.”
“Is his head in here somewhere?” Rue asked, and got a shoe thrown at her in response.
“Don’t be cheeky.”
One of the heads wasn’t old and gray. It had belonged to a young man with short brown hair and a heroic jaw. But the eyes were queer—bloodshot white orbs with no irises. The head was sealed inside a glass case like a priceless artifact.
“Who’s this?” Rue asked.
“My husband.” Grissel blew a kiss at the head. “Ethan was very sweet, but too interfering for his own good.”
“So you beheaded him?”
“No. The mister did—he hates being interfered with.”
“Did Westwood do that to his eyes?”
“That was me.” Grissel brushed her spider web hair out of her face. “Ethan was always staring at me, disappointed like, even after he was dead. So I popped out his eyes and put them in backward.”
Sterling stared at his aunt like he wanted to remove something of hers and not replace it, backwards or otherwise. But when he noticed Rue’s eyes on him, he went back to work.
Rue wondered whether Sterling would be as upset if Grissel had put the other heads’ eyes in backwards too. So that it wouldn’t seem as if she were picking on his uncle. Humans had a weird sense of fair play.
Unlike Ethan, the gray-haired men’s heads had been handsomely mounted on wooden plaques and inscribed with things like Moroccan flatmate ‘96 and Greek taxi driver ‘11 and Romanian street busker ‘05.
“You must travel a lot,” said Rue enviously.
“Before I moved here,” Grissel agreed. “Sailing on the Nile, camping in the Alps—”
“Adele asked me to go camping for my birthday,” Karissa yelled, bouncing her ball off the ceiling.
“You’re spending your birthday with us,” said Stanton.
“Not on my birthday. The day after. Please?”
“He said no,” Sterling yelled. “And turn off that stereo!”
Karissa did and then threw her ball so hard it ricocheted around the room. She parked herself on a green circle in the corner with her back to everyone.
Sterling left the rest of the boxes to Stanton and Rue, and sat with his hands pressed to his forehead, as though his family had given him a headache.
“Who’s Adele?” Rue asked.
“Mama’s best friend,” Karissa said, “who doesn’t treat me like a baby. And how come there’s no pictures of me on the wall?”
Everyone took a moment to study the photos circling Elnora’s portrait. “Could be Elnora never took any,” Grissel said. “Too ashamed and that.”
“There’s plenty of pictures of Kissy,” Sterling said. “Hundreds. Mother just didn’t waste any on you.”
“Give me at least one.” Grissel went to the wall and rearranged the photos. “I’ll put it right here in this bare spot.”
Karissa jumped to her feet. “I’ll get it.”
When she ran out, Rue said, “Drabbin’s always complaining that he can’t feel anything. Can you, Grissel?”
“No and not because I’m soulless. I stopped feeling things when Ethan died.” She thought about it. “Sometimes I feel a glimmer of something when I go head hunting. Sometimes.”
“Did Ethan know about the heads?”
“No!” Grissel shushed Rue. “Ethan was sweet. I liked him that way. You can’t remain sweet if you know things. Knowing…curdles you.”
Karissa came back a few minutes later with a three-ring binder, from which she removed a five by seven photo.
“Fat but cute,” Grissel decided.
“I stayed fat until I was four then I got tall and skinny like the twins.” Karissa admired her brothers’ starveling physiques as Grissel scrounged for an empty frame in one of her boxes.
When Karissa’s photo was in place, Grissel said, “Break time!”
She spread Rue’s coat on the floor like a picnic blanket and set several tiny snacks atop it. “For Mama’s little helpers.”
The twins gobbled down the candy bars and potato chips. “God, it’s nice to eat something without skin, for a change,” said Sterling.
“I don’t like eating people,” Karissa flipped through the binder, sipping from her juice box.
“You don’t have to anymore. We told you.”
“I wish nobody had to eat people.”
“If wishes were horses,” Grissel said, “beggars would ride.”
Rue looked over Karissa’s shoulder at the photos in the binder. Unsurprisingly, the
re were numerous ones of Elnora, but not the Elnora Rue had come to recognize.
“She’s not smiling,” Rue exclaimed. “She looks absolutely miserable.”
“All the pictures of Mama in the house are doctored,” Karissa said, matter-of-factly. “Daddy liked to remember her when she was happy.”
Rue flipped through the entire album and found not one photo of Elnora smiling. “When was she happy?”
No one answered.
“Westwood must be crueler than I thought. Maybe I shouldn’t invite Nettle here after all. Not to live. Maybe an invite to the spectacular will have to be enough.”
Grissel laughed. “Fat chance you’ll get an invite from John, let alone your sister.”
“Dad would do it,” Stanton said, “for a price.”
Sterling added, “A price you don’t want to pay. We told you, you do not want to owe him.”
“I’m not afraid of your father. I don’t have to be—I’m not his wife.”
“Does Nettle like reptiles?” Karissa asked.
“She doesn’t dislike them.”
“I’ll introduce her to Peppermint. She’ll like that. Peppermint knows how to make people feel real comfortable.”
“All moved in?”
Westwood’s sudden appearance didn’t comfort anyone. So tall and starched in his business suit, so out of place in the playful room.
“This is the last of it,” Grissel said in tones of relief.
Karissa jumped up and instead of disappearing, she ran to the wall of photos, beaming. “Aunt Grissel put my picture on the wall, Daddy, see? Right next to yours.”
Westwood passed Rue on the floor, smelling of warm air and sunny skies.
He joined Karissa at the wall. Ripped down the framed photo and smashed it over her head. Snatched all the photos from the wall, tossing them here and there, the whole room a tornado of smiling faces and breaking glass.
When Westwood was done, panting and smoothing his slick hair back in place, only Elnora was left, laughing alone on the wall.
Rue had remained on the floor, but the Westwood children had vanished, abandoning their pitiful picnic and Karissa’s yellow ball.
Shards of glass littered the floor, some of it embedded in Grissel’s feet as she crossed the room to Westwood and sat with him on his bed.
“That was all my fault,” Grissel said. “I thought it would be nice to have other pictures on the wall for a change. We like change in this family, don’t we?”
“Yes.” Westwood smiled at her like he meant it. “Change. New directions.” He stroked Grissel’s white hair. “Better directions.”
“Elnora would want us to be kind to Karissa.”
“Kindness to her is kindness to him and I will never—”
“Don’t attack Karissa again.”
Westwood blinked at Rue as though he’d never seen her before, had no idea why she was even talking to him. “Is that an order?”
“Yes.” Rue ignored Grissel’s startled expression and gathered the yellow ball and her coat.
“Is it your place to give me orders?”
“You’ve put me in that position. Karissa’s nothing to you. I could claim her as family just as easily as you. Easier since I actually care if she lives or dies.”
“The question is, who cares whether you live or die?”
Nettle cared, Rue reminded herself. Nettle was counting on her to ease the way when she passed on Dodder and their parents inevitably kicked her out. Nettle was counting on her not to get on Westwood’s bad side.
But Karissa was counting on her too.
Rue said, “You hired me to kill monsters. I suggest you don’t become one.”
Chapter 16
When Rue caught up with the Westwood children, they were on their way out of the house. She didn’t speak to them as they were clearly not in a talkative mood; she followed them into the blue Dauphine and from there to Evangeline Park, one of the prettiest parks in Portero, even during the dregs of winter.
The Westwood children marched straight through it to the residential area opposite the park, with an abandoned lot marring the neat row of houses like a missing tooth. They came to a stop at this emptiness and sat on a set of concrete porch steps that led to a large, irregular square where a house had once sat. Someone had spray painted Do Not Build Here in a vibrant yellow that hurt Rue’s eyes.
Surrounding the square was a mangy lawn overrun with pink and yellow teacups, late winter flowers that were a favorite of sweetbites.
The property was swarming with sweetbites.
“Are you sure you want to stop here?” Rue asked, eyeing the deceptively twee creatures as they flitted from flower to flower.
“Yeah,” said Stanton. He sat Karissa between his legs and picked through her thick hair to remove the bits of glass the picture frame had left behind. She was holding the yellow ball Rue had rescued for her and seemed more embarrassed than wounded. “Kissy likes sweetbites.”
“Do you like mosquitoes too?” Rue asked. “And fleas and ticks?”
“Don’t be stupid,” Karissa said. “Sweetbites are pretty. Pretty counts for a lot.”
“Don’t call her stupid,” Stanton said. “How could you let Dad catch you like that?”
“We were having fun.”
“That doesn’t matter. You can’t afford to let your guard down no matter what’s going on. And stop fidgeting.”
Karissa lowered her head, hugging the ball to her chest, as her brother searched through her hair for more glass.
When Stanton caught Rue’s gaze, he said, “I know you must think we don’t care, but the whole Dad’s-trying-to-kill-Karissa thing has been happening for years. Like how a tornado plows through once or twice a season and tears everything apart. Sometimes you just have to hunker down.”
“Does Westwood hurt her a lot?”
“Only when he catches me.” A thin line of blood dripped from Karissa’s head to the yellow ball. “Hardly ever. It’s not Daddy’s fault. I’m the one who messed up the family. I messed it all up when I was born, so I gotta work harder than other people.”
“Work harder for what?” asked Rue.
“The right to live,” said Karissa. “I gotta earn it.”
“What kind of way to live is that?”
“Temporary,” said Stanton. “If the spectacular goes well, it’s only a matter of time before everything’s fixed.”
“Westwood killed your uncle. Can that be fixed?”
“Everything can be fixed.” Stanton’s zealous conviction burned into Rue. “And Uncle Ethan’s death was his own fault. In part. He thought Dad wasn’t sane enough to be raising us.”
“Westwood chopped off your uncle’s head.”
“Because he was angry.” Stanton tossed another sliver of glass onto the lawn. “Not because he was insane. Dad always knows what he’s doing. When child protective services came around asking questions, Dad used one of his inventions on them to make them not care.”
“They actually didn’t care,” Sterling added. “Uncle Ethan was British, and Porterenes only care about Porterenes.”
“Dad made them not care,” Stanton continued, “and he made them tell who’d snitched. Dad was not happy with their answer.”
“I miss Uncle Ethan,” Karissa said. “He gave me Peppermint, and it wasn’t even my birthday.”
“That’s why Westwood killed him,” Rue decided. “Because he was a rival for your affection.”
“And Daddy wants to kill me,” Karissa told her brothers, “because I’m a rival for your affection.”
“Westwood wants to kill you because you’re not his kid. It’s like with male lions. They kill cubs that aren’t theirs. Kill them and then make new cubs of their own blood.”
“She’s our blood,” said Stanton. “And Mother’s. Dad’ll get over it.”
“Can I go play with the sweetbites now?” Karissa asked.
“I’d better check it first,” Rue said.
“We’ll both c
heck it.” Sterling sprayed himself with noxious gas from a can. “Need some?” He held out the can to her. “Or are you immune to bug bites?”
“I can make myself immune.” And so she did, her skin taking on a sharp herbal tang. When she was bug-bite resistant, she and Sterling searched the high grass for danger.
Kids were playing freeze tag nearby. Rue could hear them on the other side of a tumbledown privacy fence at the rear of the property. As they neared the fence, they spied a long lump that turned out to be a corpse. Female, shriveled, desiccated. Rue’s first reaction was to ignore it. To add to Karissa’s earlier truism that there was always blood somewhere, likewise, there were always corpses. But this corpse was different—what remained of the skin had turned an odd shade of rust.
“That looks like red clot,” Rue said. She and Sterling lifted their feet and looked around, but saw nothing untoward.
“Doesn’t mean anything,” Sterling said, worried. “That stuff creeps.”
“Not onto concrete. She’ll be fine if she stays off the grass.”
They continued their search, and despite his precautions, Sterling was bitten several times. “Cheap ass bug spray.” He smacked the sweetbite nibbling his neck. “Bloodsucking bugs everywhere. Some nice poison oak over there. And oh look at this: prickerbrush right at prick level.”
“So why’d you bring your sister here?”
“She loves sweetbites. She likes to pretend they’re fairies. And she never gets bitten. With bug spray, without; doesn’t matter. They can tell she’s damaged and don’t like the flavor.”
“She’s not any more damaged than you, and they’re eating you alive.”
“Don’t tell me she’s not damaged! Eating people, trying to stay two steps ahead of Dad every day. We’re all damaged—I don’t even know whether Stanton and I will still have souls when this is over.” Sterling was deeply angry, but not at Rue. “I never noticed how screwed up our home life was until I saw it through your eyes, thought about how we must seem to you.”
“So run away with me and Nettle. Have you ever been to Europe?”
“Yeah. It sucks. Every place sucks. Home isn’t a place, anyway. It’s people. My people are here.”
Rue sighed. “Wish I had people.”
“You could. If you wanted.”
