by Dia Reeves
“I don’t have to imagine it.”
“Kill Westwood, if that’s what you need, but don’t hurt his kids.”
“She’s not his kid.”
“Don’t hurt anyone’s kids, especially your own. I’ll know if you do. I’ll find you.” She reached for the door.
“Where are you going?”
“Away. Finally.”
“Without a heart? Won’t you die?”
“Does it matter?”
Blackout
Rue awoke in a strange bed in pajamas with dolls’ heads printed on them. The twins and Walter stood nearby, and Karissa lay next to her, propped against the pillows.
“She’s back! Hooray!”
“I knew it wasn’t good for you to be walking around with no heart.”
“Whenever her soul thinks it knows more than Rue does about how to survive,” Karissa explained, “it takes over.”
Rue plucked at the pajamas. “What are these clothes?”
“You puked all over yourself,” said Walter, grimacing at the memory. “Chocolate. Your uniform is in the wash. I’ll stitch up the tear down the front when it’s dry, and you’ll be good to go.” He looked at everyone. “You will all be good to go.”
Rue glowered at the twins. “Why are you even here, instead of with your precious father? Where even is here?”
“My apartment over the shop,” said Walter.
“And shut up,” said the twins.
Stanton said, “What do you mean she has no heart? We saw her insert it.”
“She removed it. Violently.”
“Why? Because it’s shoddy and a piece of crap?”
“Because it was a bomb, Sterling. I didn’t want to come here. I want to leave town but…”
“But your soul won’t let you, not with a bomb inside. Good job, Rue’s soul. Well done.”
“It knows you need to stay where you are,” Stanton said. “With us.”
“She, not it. And I’m not with you. Why are they here?”
“I called them,” said Walter. “Got the number from your phone. I thought they’d know what was wrong with you.”
“The twins thought he was holding you ransom—”
“For ransom.”
“And I told them while they were fighting the Bastard, I could sneak you out the back way or something.”
“Everything’s James Bond with her,” Sterling said.
“I’m not sneaking anywhere. Certainly not back to that house.”
“You should, Rue. If you don’t want me to bomb John back to the Stone Age and his kids with him, why won’t you try to change his mind?”
“About bringing Elnora back?” Rue snorted. “Good luck.”
“Maybe the twins could convince John. He likes them.”
“Daddy likes me too,” said Karissa. “I can convince him.”
“No you can’t,” Stanton snapped. “I mean…you shouldn’t. Mother has the right to the life Dad took from her. It’s only fair.”
“You wouldn’t be doing her any favors. The problem is, John’s selfish. He wants Elnora for his sake, not yours, not hers. She hated him. If you brought her back, she’d only wind up here with me again. Only I won’t make the mistake I made last time. I won’t let her go. So either way, you won’t get to have her.”
Karissa said, “We want her back so we can be happy again. But I already am happy. Say! If we leave Mama where she is, we could still talk to her. I can read one of the books in Adele’s shop and find out how to talk to dead people.”
“No more books from Adele’s shop!” said the twins.
“And this is off topic anyway,” said Sterling. “First things first: Rue needs a heart.”
“Help us make a good one for her,” Stanton said to Walter, through gritted teeth. “A non-explosive one.”
“And you’ll talk your dad out of desecrating the dead?”
Stanton sighed. “We’ll try.”
“Deal.”
When the twins left with Walter, Karissa said, “That’s my real dad.”
“I know.”
“He’s a bastard.”
“So’s Westwood. So was my dad. Maybe all dads are.”
“Yeah.”
On the night table, Karissa found a photo of Elnora and Walter.
“That’s me.” She pointed to Elnora’s pregnant belly.” She removed the photo. “Mama’s smiling in these ones. Really smiling; not like in Daddy’s fake pictures. She was happy here. What if we bring her back, and Daddy makes her sad again?”
“The twins are going to talk Westwood into not bringing her back. They made a deal.”
“But what if it’s an unfair deal? If the experiment was to bring Nettle back to life, would you talk Daddy out of it?”
“They cooked her! On purpose so I couldn’t eat her. I can’t bring her back and put her in a cooked body. With no head. I can’t bring her back and I can’t go away and it hurts.”
Blackout
Rue awoke, her head in Karissa’s lap. The twins and Walter stood in the room.
“She’s too cold,” Karissa said, as Walter threw another blanket over Rue. “Peppermint gets the same way when he’s too cold.”
“I’ll turn off the air.”
“This will help. The B—Walter gave us some pointers, and we worked up a prototype.” Sterling stood over Rue holding a paper heart, waiting.
Rue was too sluggish to move except to open her slit after Karissa unbuttoned her pajama top. Sterling put the heart into her chest, and when the slit closed around it, Stanton said:
“We should get home. It’s past our dinner.”
“When will you talk to John?”
“Today. We have time. He can’t use Aunt Grissel…because of reasons. He’ll need time to find a replacement.”
“Will you at least let me know how it goes?”
Stanton nodded, once. “I guess we owe you that much.”
“Is it working?” Karissa asked, after a time.
“Yeah,” said Rue surprised. But if anything attacked her, she’d be toast. No way would such a wisp of a heart allow her to withstand a hangnail, let alone a serious injury. It might not be able to withstand her current crying fit.
“Is it the heart?” Stanton asked, as she wiped her tears.
Karissa said, “She’s sad because she didn’t eat Nettle.”
“No worries, Rue,” said the twins. “We ate her.”
“You ate someone?” But everyone ignored Walter.
“We saw you keep trying and failing to eat her,” Sterling said, sitting beside Rue whose crying had ceased. “And we’re your family now; we figured it was our responsibility. So while you were out of it, we ate her.”
“It wasn’t like lamb, but it wasn’t bad. We thought we’d get sick, like with Thyme, but it was…okay. Not like lamb, but okay.”
“Did you eat her too?” Walter asked Karissa, horrified.
“The twins eat all the people so I don’t have to.”
“We couldn’t eat the bones, so we gave them to the Lazarus snake. We told him we were paying tribute.” Sterling rolled his eyes. “He liked that.”
“We didn’t eat the rest of your family. We didn’t think they were worthy. Nettle at least tried to be a good sister.”
Rue hugged them both and through them, she hugged Nettle too. As long as Rue remained close to the twins, Nettle would always be close to her.
“This is what your old family should have done,” Stanton said into her ear. “The minute you ran out, they should have chased you down and grabbed you like this. Problem solved.”
“Take me home.” And for the first time there was no doubt in her mind about which home she meant.
“Guys.”
Sterling’s tone put everyone on edge. He held up his phone.
“It’s Dad. He’s in the lab. He says everything’s ready.”
Chapter 38
When they made it back to the plantation, Karissa made a quick stop in her room to get Pep
permint—“He’ll want to say hi to Mama.”—and then they were rushing down the hall to the lab door.
“Who did he get to replace Aunt Grissel?” Sterling asked. “One of the servants? None of the servants look like Mother.”
“You think Westwood even cares at this point?” said Rue.
“Maybe he brought Aunt Grissel back to life.” Stanton laughed and the ghoulish sound made them all stumble a bit. “Drabbin too. Maybe the past couple of days never happened. Maybe I’m dreaming all this.”
“Don’t start losing it, Stanton. We need to be all systems go on this one. Especially if we have to talk Dad out of this.”
“He has a right to lose it, Sterling,” Rue said. “You all do. This is my fault. I shouldn’t have killed Grissel and Drabbin. It’s a lot to deal with on top of the whole resurrection thing. Maybe too much.”
“Forget it. All you did, really, was put Drabbin and Grissel out of their misery.” Stanton shivered. “Being soulless is awful.”
“We forgive you, Rue.” Karissa smiled at her. “And Daddy will too. When he gets Mama back, Daddy will forgive everything.”
“We promised the B— Walter that we’d try to talk Dad out of it.”
“Promises to Walter don’t matter,” Stanton said. “He tried to kill Dad. Tried to turn Rue into a bomb. But since he helped us with Rue’s heart, I’d say we’re even.”
He unlocked the lab door and the Westwoods filed through nonchalantly. Rue felt extremely chalant, but followed: numb and deafened, pulled taut as taffy, squeezed. And then she was standing in another world.
The same burning hot world she’d seen before. She climbed the steps of the House of Pain, dead wasps no longer marring the entrance. They passed through a gate fashioned into the shape of a man, and the inside of the building was almost as hot as the outside. There was an air of abandonment, paintings hanging crooked on the walls, a reception desk with no receptionist, and it smelled like a zoo.
They entered an elevator; Sterling’s Porterene key sent them to the top floor where a lovely view of the horizon met them, the green planet hanging above that Frida had once mentioned. Everything below the planet, however, was unlovely and desolate; a vast stretch of whitish bedrock as far as the eye could see.
“What is this place?” Rue said.
Stanton shrugged. “Some world Dad found. The Mayor has a way of knowing what people are up to in town, so Dad figured if he left town, he could keep his secrets.”
“He couldn’t have just gone to Castelaine?” Rue said, as Stanton opened the door at the end of the loggia and waved Rue and the others into an antiseptically white laboratory.
Westwood stood before them, dressed in a lab coat, so white it made his hair look jaundiced and dingy. His eyes blazed feverishly at the sight of them. “You came!”
No one returned the greeting, too caught up in the sight of the gurney where Westwood was working. The body atop it.
“I knew it,” said Stanton.
“It was too late to find a replacement.” Westwood put the final stitch into Grissel’s neck.
“But Aunt Grissel’s dead,” said Sterling. “And rotting.”
“A little rot. And not quite dead.”
“I chopped off her head!” Rue reminded Westwood.
“It was easy enough to pop it back on. And this machine is forcing her to breathe. That’s all I need. As long as she can breathe in Elnora’s soul, everything will be fine.”
“But Mama won’t like living in a rotting corpse.” Karissa chewed on her fingers, Peppermint wound his tail around her hand and made her stop.
“It’s only temporary. Until we find the right replacement. A woman who looks enough like Elnora to pass. A woman who won’t mind cosmetic surgery. A woman who’s willing to give up her own soul.”
“Yeah, the world is crawling with women like that,” said Rue.
“Exactly,” said Sterling. “Dad, it’s okay to…wait until—”
“I’ve waited five years! I’m tired of waiting. Tired of being interfered with. Who put the idea of waiting into your head? Was it Rue?”
“Not me,” she said. And then nearly added, “It was Walter’s idea,” but thought better of it. “You were right about the Bastard. He wanted to sabotage you. The heart he made for me was a bomb. But just because Walter’s a bastard, doesn’t mean he isn’t right. You said at the spectacular how traumatic coming back from the dead is. So imagine coming back and waking up inside a corpse. What do you think that will do to Elnora? It will be hard enough as it is.”
“Maybe you’re right. But I have to try. To make sure I can do it. I won’t…keep her.” Saying that seemed to hurt Westwood deeply. “I won’t make her stay. I just want to make sure I can do it. Everything is set up! I’ll say her name, and make sure it’s really her, and then I’ll turn off the apparatus.”
“Maybe that’s how we can get her acclimated to coming back from the dead,” said Stanton. “Just a series of short visits so that she can get used to making the transition.”
“After we find the right body for her,” Sterling added.
“Of course, of course.” Westwood rubbed his hands together. “Now that we’re all on the same page, let’s begin.”
He gestured toward the chairs in the middle of the room “Please sit. No, by the shaded windows. The sun is unbearable on this world; you’d burn over there, and I don’t want to stop to administer first aid. We’ve had to wait too long as it is.”
“Don’t you need us to help?”
“With what? You’ve done everything. I could never have gotten as far as I have without you. Just sit, and I’ll bring forth your mother.”
They sat in the folding chairs while Westwood wheeled the bone machine out from beneath a table. Elnora’s teeth glistened faintly in his hand before he tossed them inside where they rattled briefly when he powered it up, but in the silence that followed, what remained of Elnora’s soul drifted up through the mouth of the bone machine and formed a tiny glowing ball.
Westwood grabbed the lidded jar from the counter behind him, freed the beetle inside. It flew at the bit of soul, fluttering its golden wings in figure eights.
“Hourglass beetles like souls almost as much as they like clockwork,” Westwood said, “which is unfortunate. You know what happens when a moth flies into the sun?”
Even as he spoke, the beetle burst into flames.
“Turns out hourglass beetles aren’t immortal, as people believe. It would be better if they were, as their deaths tend to disrupt time and space.”
As the beetle burned away into nothing, the air ripped open, a thick tearing sound that was painful to hear, as though reality had skin and could be ripped into bloody pieces. The tear was wide and jagged. And not bloody. Black.
“That,” said Westwood, “is eternity. Not another world like this one, but a place beyond all worlds. Beyond time, even. We can’t see it because we’re mortal. Our minds have no way to process it, and so all we see is black.”
Rue nodded. She understood all about the blackness.
A white light oozed out of the tear and engulfed the smaller ball of light hovering over the shaking, struggling bone machine. Westwood switched it off and waited, the only sound Grissel’s mechanized breath. When she inhaled, the light was immediately swallowed by the void of her soulless body.
“Elnora?” Westwood bent over the gurney. Stroked Grissel’s pale hair.
Grissel’s eyes opened, and Westwood began to weep.
“Mama!”
“Shh!” he said. “Don’t frighten her. Let her get her bearings. Darling, look. Your children.’
Grissel’s eyes rolled their way.
“Don’t worry about anything. We won’t keep you long. It’s just…we wanted to see you again. We’ve waited so long to see you. So long…to apologize.” He touched her cheek. “I’m so sorry, El.”
Grissel’s head turned and swallowed Westwood’s hand to the wrist.
And ate it.
Ch
apter 39
“Dad!”
Westwood fell back, stunned, holding what remained of his arm as blood gushed from his wrist. Sterling raced forward. Froze. Raced to the cabinets instead. Grabbed bandages. Made a tourniquet. Stanched the bleeding. Stanton stayed back, holding Karissa who was screaming.
“She’s eating Daddy!”
“Don’t worry, Karissa,” Westwood said as the thing tried to get up from the gurney despite the tubes and straps restricting its movement. “Your mother’s just hungry. Is that it baby? Are you hungry?”
The thing snapped its teeth—so many rows of wicked teeth—at Westwood’s face.
“We just need to feed her.”
“What, Dad?” Sterling said. “You? That thing is not our mother.”
Westwood shoved Sterling back into the counter, knocking over flasks and a surgical tray full of shiny, sharp tools.
“Don’t talk about her like that. You’re the one who found her soul, and that”—he pointed at the thing on the gurney—“is what it attracted. It works! It even worked for that goddamn snake.”
“It’s obviously more complicated than we thought. Let’s go home and—”
“And what? Start over?”
“Or let it go.”
“What?”
“That thing came from there. That thing and our mother wouldn’t be in the same place.”
“I don’t smell lavender from the rip. Mama’s not in there.”
“She is. I’ll prove it.”
Westwood grabbed a bonesaw from the counter. “Forgive me,” he said and sawed through Grissel’s foot.
“Dad!”
Westwood ignored Stanton and through the foot into the rift.
“What are you doing?”
Before Westwood could answer, the foot came flying out of the tear, smacking into the window.
“See? Because it's your mother. She doesn't want to go back. She wants to stay with us.”
“Is that what it means?”
Karissa took off her shoe and threw it into the rift, with the same result.
“Daddy, I don’t think that’s what it means.”
“Don’t contradict me. I’m telling you this is your mother. Are you going to sit there and let her starve?”
