by Sonia Hartl
I touched a finger to one of the plastic bags. “What are these?”
“A little hemlock and some foxglove, plus oleander, castor oil seeds, and belladonna. All the classics.” She sprinkled them into the fire. “Watch the flame. It might throw sparks. The thermite can be temperamental.”
“Where did you find all those murder plants?” I was pretty sure oleander didn’t even grow in Michigan. Or anywhere we’d lived in the past decade.
“eBay.” Rose finished emptying her ingredients into the fire and tilted her head as she studied the flame for temperature. “The plants will kill the blood; the fire will kill the object. I’m not sure what the moon does, but Frankie said we needed it, so here we are.”
I kept my distance from the fire, mindful of the sparks. “It’s only mildly terrifying that we’ll be giving up our memories because of what Frankie said.”
“We don’t have another choice,” Rose said. “And he’s been on our side.”
Just because she wanted to believe it didn’t make it true. Frankie had proven himself, yes, but my gut kept warning me there was something off about him, and I’d survived best by trusting my gut. Ida felt it too. Nothing we could do about it now, though. And I had to agree with Rose on that point. If this was our best and only shot at killing Elton, we had to take it.
I wandered to the edge of the parking lot where a picnic table had been set up for those wanting outdoor lunch. Hundreds of initials had been scratched into the surface, much like the dollar-theater bench in the abandoned field. All those little moments captured in ways that went beyond individual recollection.
I’d be saying goodbye to my memories, but I was still here. I could still make new ones and let those be the ones I’d hold forever. One person in particular would be occupying a lot of my mind in the coming days, I had no doubt. I wondered if our paths crossed decades from now, how that would make me feel. Would I still think I’d done the right thing in letting her go?
But I couldn’t let uncertainty cloud my judgment now. Not on this night.
It would take an enormous amount of willpower to leave after we finished this, knowing Parker was coming back. It would be so easy to tell her I’d been wrong. That even if we only had a few years together, I’d take what I could get. But it wouldn’t do either of us any favors.
Rose laid a hand on my shoulder. “It’s ready.”
I shut out thoughts of Parker as I stood next to Rose and Ida and steeled myself for what would come next. Would losing my memories hurt? Would it feel like dying all over again? I didn’t have the answer to those questions, and maybe it was better if I didn’t ask. My hands trembled as I took off my locket and held it in my clenched fist.
Ida went first, as we agreed it would be best to go in order. “Tonight, I say goodbye to my sister, Bea. The sun to my clouds, the heart to my soul. She loved fully with the short amount of time she had, and I’m letting go of her to save countless other girls.”
She dropped the tiny silver-and-glass horse into the fire. It glowed brighter, hissing as it spit up sparks. A light in the parking lot popped and burned out. Both Ida and Rose had warned me nature might get twitchy during the process—killing someone who was already dead messed with the delicate balance of the universe—so we paid it no mind.
Ida took a step back, clearing the way for Rose, as the second, to take her turn.
“Tonight, I say goodbye to the life I could’ve had outside of my parents’ expectations, now that I know I would’ve been bold enough to live it.” Rose held her combs over the open flame, which reached up to lick her hand. Her skin dripped off her like melting wax and instantly grew back. “I’m letting go to find a new life in death. One of my choosing.”
She dropped her combs into the fire. Sparks flew from the cauldron as a bluish smoke billowed into the air. A raven fell from the sky and dropped dead at Rose’s feet, followed by six more forming a perfect circle around her. Their glossy wings lit with the reflection of the fire.
She took a step back and gestured for me to finish it.
I held my locket, wrapping the chain around Parker’s bracelet until they linked together as one. “Tonight, I say goodbye to my past. The choices I made will no longer define me. I’m letting go so the family I found in death might truly begin to live, and the girl—” My voice cracked, and I swallowed the hurt that followed my next words. “The girl I love might have the chance I never got to change.”
I dropped both my locket and Parker’s bracelet into the fire at the same time. It immediately erupted, shooting a wall of flame into the air. I stumbled back, coughing on the black smoke that now poured into the sky. My eyebrows had taken a hit, but they grew back before I could reach my fingers up to feel the singed hair. The cauldron had melted down to a pool of black liquid. It filled the cracks of the concrete like spilled ink.
“Might’ve overdone it with the thermite,” Rose said.
Dark clouds gathered overhead, moving in like floating specters and blocking out half the stars. A roll of thunder rattled the ground beneath our feet, despite the lack of moisture in the air. As quickly as the fire had burned out of our control, it died back down again, and through the murky air, we could see that our heirlooms were gone.
It started slowly at first, like the pages of a flipbook, working backward to the beginning. Things I couldn’t recall but my mind had stored, anyway. My mom holding me in the hospital after I’d been born, learning how to use the potty, eating applesauce off the end of a soft spoon. Things that meant nothing to me, so I let them go easily.
The memories moved faster as moments I recalled came into focus. Crying when a mean boy with a Popsicle smile made fun of my mismatched clothes at the park, laughing when I pushed a Slinky off the top of the stairs. My first day of school. The first time a girl told me I couldn’t sit next to her at lunch because she said her mom hated my mom. Every memory, good and bad, flipped by for an instant, and then it was gone.
I’d made it to the one where my mom had called in sick to take me to The Muppet Movie when I was eight. She’d also gotten me the Kissing Barbie doll as an extra surprise, and it never occurred to me until just now the kind of expectations she placed on me. I never got Doctor Barbie or Astronaut Barbie. I got the one who could kiss.
In the distance, as though I peered down the end of a long tunnel, I caught a fuzzy glimpse of Rose and Ida. Their expressions twisted with anguish or lit with delight over each new memory that passed in front of them. I turned my concentration back to my own life as it curled into ash and blew away.
I’d now reached the awful middle-school years, when Megan Bear ruled my world. I always thought she’d been destined to be a pageant queen or a weathergirl, not a hard-faced diner waitress who spent too much time in the tanning bed. All of my memories associated with her peeled away like layers of tissue paper, thin and barely visible. The days of relentless teasing. Picking spitballs out of my hair at night. Blowing up an egg in the microwave when my mom told me to make myself a sandwich for dinner, because she was going out with Mr. Bear again.
I had no problem letting those memories go.
The ones with Stacey were harder. The first time she sat at my lunch table. My entire body swelled with gratitude all over again, and a memory from my present layered over the top of it: The one where Stacey took me to where the dollar-theater bench had been abandoned in an open field, and she told me it hadn’t been a sacrifice to care about me. The memory from eighth grade dissolved, and with it, the feeling that I owed Stacey something. The one from my present remained, and a fondness for Stacey, free from guilt, took its place.
The last good memory I had of my mom came to the surface. It wasn’t an important one. I hadn’t even remembered it at all until now. She stood in our kitchen, with the cord from the wall phone wrapped around her waist, and she smiled at me. It wasn’t for any reason. She didn’t want anything from me. She smiled just because I was there, and she was happy to see me.
A present-day mem
ory layered over the top of it. From the nursing home. The old and confused version of herself slipped over the vibrant woman she’d been. They tangled together for a moment, then the past memory was gone. Wordlessly, I said goodbye to who she could’ve been if only she’d tried a little harder and seen her own worth.
When the memories of Elton came, I knew I only had minutes left with my living self. The girl I had been came down to a handful of moments in which I’d been so infatuated with a beautiful boy who promised me eternity, I couldn’t see the dark that gathered behind him. The wondrous and heady feeling of first love filled my senses, painting the world in soft colors and cloudlike textures.
And through it all, I could see myself as I was now, standing on the other side of that love. I saw a girl who became a monster but still managed to find her humanity. I saw someone stronger than I’d ever given her credit for. I saw me. As I had been, as I could be, as I truly was.
With that final memory, I let go of the regret I’d been carrying.
And finally learned how to forgive myself.
Chapter Twenty-Six
By the time the fire had settled to shallow embers, I had no memories from my living years. Nothing left to remember the person I’d been before. The emotions lingered, like an afterthought. I could poke at those dark and empty places, and they would poke back, making me hurt in ways I couldn’t name. As the minutes passed, even those began to fade. The way a bruise would hurt for a few days after impact, then eventually disappear.
A sense of relief settled over me. The heavy weight that had lived on my chest for my entire existence was no longer there. I could breathe. But at the same time, the little things that had given me joy were gone. I remembered talking about some kind of doughnut-eating contest with Stacey, but I couldn’t remember participating, or even what doughnuts tasted like. I knew what cats looked like but couldn’t remember ever petting one. I’d gone swimming as a vampire, but knew it felt different when I was a kid. I didn’t know how or why, just that it was. I had a large expanse in my mind where things used to be, and without them, there was just nothing.
Stacey approached us. Her scarf had gotten twisted around in the uproar of wind. “That got wild for a minute. Do you remember anything?”
I looked at her and blinked. Pale skin, frizzy black hair, amber protruding eyes. I shuffled through the memories I had left. On the surface, I knew she’d been my best friend, but I had nothing specific to solidify it. As if someone held up an apple for me and told me it was blue. It was a reality I didn’t recognize but had to accept. I had the memory of turning her so many years ago, then the last few weeks. That was it.
“I remember my time as a vampire,” I said. “I know from a factual standpoint you were my best friend, but I’m sorry, I’ve got nothing beyond that.”
The devastation on Stacey’s face had me turning away in shame, like I’d done something wrong. We had no other options, though. I couldn’t allow myself to feel guilt for losing something I no longer knew how to miss, but I cared about Stacey. Not, I suspected, on the level I’d cared for her before the fire, but we’d become friendly over these last few weeks.
“It’s fine,” Stacey said. “I told you I’d remember for you.”
“Okay.” I probably should’ve felt gratitude for that, but I didn’t care. My life before I’d been turned was gone, and knowledge of those days wouldn’t bring them back. Part of me didn’t want to hear about the old days. I couldn’t miss what I didn’t know.
“I remember that I had a sister.” Ida touched her temple, like she could still feel the ghost of her memories wiggling around in there. “I remember going to the funeral home, and feeling sad, but I don’t remember anything about when she’d been alive.”
The hollow way she spoke about Bea made my heart ache. The cadence of her words held none of the feeling, the joy and despair, of having known her sister. Like she’d become a character in a book Ida had read about once but had no significant emotional attachment. She frowned, as if she knew she should’ve felt something for Bea, but couldn’t quite touch on how or why she’d been so undone by her death.
“It’s so strange.” Rose stared up at the school in wonder. “Logically, I know I went to this school, but I don’t have a single memory of walking those halls while alive. I know the names of the people in my photo album, but I couldn’t tell you a single thing about them or even recall what they looked like outside pictures.”
“Does it make you sad?” I asked. I wanted to understand what Rose and Ida were feeling, so maybe I could begin to understand what I was feeling. “Because it doesn’t make me sad, or happy, or anything. It just is.”
Ida nodded. “That’s how it is for me too. It’s an absence of the past.”
We let our new sense of reality settle over us, adjusting to the idea of having always been like this as far as our memories were concerned. Eventually, those empty spaces would fill with new memories. The shadowy clouds had cleared, revealing a glorious expanse of stars. Moonlight bathed the parking lot in a peaceful glow.
“It’ll take some getting used to.” I probed at my mind again, and it was like reaching into a pitch-black room and watching my hand disappear. It made me feel fuzzy and disconnected, so I let it go. The memories were gone. I had no way to recall them.
“You all still want to kill Elton though, right?” Stacey shot a worried glance over her shoulder. “Because now would be a really bad time to change your mind about that.”
From this distance we could only make out his outline, standing atop the hill beyond the school grounds with his long coat billowing around him like a windswept hero in a regency romance. My heart gave a little lurch at the sight of him. I couldn’t wait to sever this miserable connection, though it didn’t hit me quite the same way. My draw to him wasn’t nearly as powerful. With all the memories of falling in love with him gone, it eased the tension that squeezed at me every time he was near. The possible silver lining.
On his right, Gwen walked like a willow in the wind. Her delicate frame and stunning face disguised her cruelty well. Frankie lumbered along on Elton’s left. Rose and Ida still thought he was our spy and confidant, even if I had my doubts. Though he did make good on his word to bring Elton to the parking lot. Unless …
I grabbed Ida’s wrist. “What time is it?”
She checked her watch. “Ten-thirty.”
“I thought the plan had been for him to come at midnight,” I said.
Ida’s face twisted into a snarl. “He was going to let Elton ambush us.”
“I knew it.” I’d been so right not to trust Frankie completely. If we hadn’t come here before our intended time, there was no telling what Elton would’ve been able to do to us while we’d been lost in the past. “We never should’ve listened to him.”
“At least he hadn’t been wrong about the moon,” Rose said. “It worked. Our memories are gone. It doesn’t matter that he sold us out. We did our part, and we can still end this.”
She made a good point. Frankie’s loyalties were irrelevant. Elton constantly underestimated us, sent out his coven to confuse and distract us, but we’d come out on top in the end. With the heirlooms destroyed, the final stand was upon us.
Elton turned his head to look behind him as he drew nearer. His marble-white face could’ve been carved by the masters, and he gave me a cocky grin as he approached. I couldn’t wait to wipe that expression off his face. There was nothing worse than a boy who held the world in his hands and knew it.
“Ladies. I heard you sent me an invitation to your little party.” He looked at the puddle that had once been our cauldron, where our fire burned on, cracking over the ruin of our living memories. “It’s such a shame you wasted your time on all this ceremony.”
“What are you talking about?” Dread curled in my stomach, like a sleeping snake, ready to wake up and strike at any moment. “We beat you here. The ritual is done.”
“He’s just trying to buy time,” Ida said. “He k
nows he doesn’t have much left.”
“We tried to negotiate with you.” Rose stepped up beside me. She glared at Elton with seventy years worth of built-up resentment. “This all could’ve been avoided if you hadn’t been so selfish. If only you’d given us the same choices you got to make without consequence.”
“Funny how you insist on calling me selfish, when you only have the life you’re enjoying now thanks to me.” He examined his nails. Ever groomed, presenting as a flawless prince of the dead. “It’s no matter. You didn’t accomplish your end goal.”
Gwen rested her elbow on Elton’s shoulder and blew me a kiss, as if to say she’d already gotten a chance to play with Rose and Ida and she wanted a turn with me. Her catlike eyes lit with pleasure when I scratched the side of my cheek with my middle finger. If she wanted to play, I’d be more than happy to play. I couldn’t wait to crush her skull to dust.
“You didn’t really think we’d trust the word of your coven, did you?” Ida glared at Frankie, who shuffled his feet as he stared at the ground. “We burned the heirlooms already. We can’t remember anything from before. You’re too late.”
“But did you burn them all? That is the question of the hour.” Elton gave her a razor-edged smile and the snake in my stomach peeled open an eyelid. “Because I was under the impression that everyone who I turned had to destroy their heirlooms,” He moved to the left, while Frankie moved to the right. “Hey, Parker. You can come out now.”
Parker stepped out from behind a large tree trunk, and approached us. There was no telling how long they had left her there to wait. Her skin had turned the color of the plaster rotting off the walls of Stacey’s old house. Her sun-kissed cheeks were now pale as the moon, making her freckles stand out even more. She had a stillness about her that hadn’t been present before. The kind of poise that could only come from eternal death.
She’d become one of us.
I dropped to my knees, my heart pounding in my throat. It beat so hard, it felt as though it were trying to claw its way through my skin. Everything we’d done had been to prevent this. All of it wasted. I’d given away my memories for nothing.
