Slice Of Cherry (21 page)

Kit eyed the Woodsons, amazed, then grabbed another tray and looked at herself. “Why haven’t we changed?” she asked, disappointed.

“The tea’s meant to show what they’re like on the inside. So Datura can see for herself who’s good and who’s not.”

“We drank it too.”

Fancy shrugged. “This is who we are.”

“So then, we’re good?” Kit paused, as if listening to what she’d just said. “Is that possible?”

“
She’s
good.” Fancy nodded her head at Selenicera, who was waggling her antennae and stretching her wings.

“I think that goodness could be flexible enough to include
the two of us,” Kit insisted. “I think it’s possible.
We
didn’t turn into toads.”

“That doesn’t mean we’re saints.”

“It’s not about being saints or sinners or good or bad, Fancy. It’s about being both. You know? About being complete.”

“Can I fly?” asked Selenicera, either asking permission or asking whether it was possible.

Fancy nibbled one of the tiny sandwiches. “Try it and see,” she said absently, wondering why Kit was so fixated on goodness.

Selenicera shot into the air with a whoop, but Datura’s tongue whipped forth NASCAR-quick all the way from the end of the table and caught Selenicera in the chest, her gluey tongue holding her sister fast. Kit reached out, casually, and severed the link with her switchblade.

Once she was free, Selenicera shot into the air, laughing, flapping around the table, fanning the sugar out of the bowl.

Datura reeled in what was left of her bleeding tongue, knocking over teacups and tracking blood over the finger sandwiches. She cried for more tea, so obsessively thirsty she didn’t seem to care that the drink she was begging for had turned her into a toad.

The happy-place people returned briefly to clear the spoiled food—and the severed tongue, which was so gross not even
Kit wanted it as a trophy—and replace it with more sandwiches and cakes. Selenicera alighted in her chair and dug in, but Datura only wanted tea.

“Come on,” Kit coaxed around a mouthful of cherry tart. “Even common criminals get a last meal. It’s only right.”

“I’m not hungry.” Datura’s severed tongue made her words sound strange.

“What if I gave you a special type of fruit?” said Fancy. “It can only be found here. You like plants. Look at those trees over there.”

Datura studied the trees growing between the statues. The dancer’s tree had grown tall in the sisters’ absence and sported leaves of fire. But it was the old-man tree with its blood fruit that caught Datura’s eye.

“What kind of tree is
that
?” she asked.

“The horniverous oldmandia,” said Fancy.

Kit snorted into her teacup.

“The fruit of that tree stimulates an unholy appetite,” Fancy told her. “Wanna try it? You’d be the first.”

“I’ll get it!” Selenicera shot up, her emerald wings blowing Fancy’s hair this way and that, and flew to the tree and picked the fruit. She flapped to Datura’s end of the table and giggled as her sister ate as tamely as a dog.

After consuming the fruit, Datura immediately began eating everything the handlers held before her. They all ate in earnest, but shortly thereafter Datura began to moan and swell. Alarmingly. Her features stretching and rounding like a balloon.

“Is she gone change into something else?” asked Selenicera, nibbling a scone and watching her sister attentively.

Kit looked to Fancy for an answer, but though Fancy had great fun dreaming up murderous scenarios and setting them in motion, she never knew exactly how things would turn out.

“She gets any bigger,” Selenicera said, “she gone float away.”

But Datura didn’t float away.

She popped.

The damp explosion knocked the minions off their feet and blew the girls away from the table. They hit the platform hard, and it took several moments before they recovered enough to pick themselves up off the ground. Selenicera had regained her old skin, the blast having stripped away her winged form. The only thing left of Datura was the gore covering her sister.

Selenicera spoke first, wiping a glob of Datura from her mouth. “I’m officially full now.” She flung the glob away, and when it stuck to the air two feet away, she jerked back, startled.

“It’s nothing,” Kit told her. “Just means we’re going home.”

A few seconds later the walls of Selenicera’s strange garden room closed around them.

Fancy noticed the kinetoscope on the floor and picked it up, petting it like a faithful dog.

“Did all of that happen?” Selenicera wrapped her arms around herself as though she was cold. “Did my sister really explode?”

“Yep,” said Kit. “Are you okay?”

“I’m good. But this?” She looked at the goo coating her. “This ain’t so good.”

Fancy shrieked with frustration when she saw her clothes, having just realized that Selenicera wasn’t the only one covered in gore. “This is really starting to irk me out.”

“Let’s go get cleaned up,” said Kit, her lighthearted manner at odds with the wads of skin matting her short hair.

Selenicera showed the sisters the bathroom, much more subdued than she had been in the happy place.

“That’s a huge tub.” Kit put her hand on Selenicera’s head. “Since it’s your house and all, we’ll let you shower first, kid.”

“I don’t like showers. I don’t like . . . being watered.”

Kit slid her hand to the back of Selenicera’s neck. “You don’t have to bathe if you don’t want to. I could drown you instead.”

Selenicera shook her head vigorously.

Kit laughed. “Your head says no, but your eyes say yes. Don’t they?” She turned Selenicera to face Fancy, who was watching her sister with growing concern. “Look at her. Doesn’t she look miserable?”

“Of course. Her sister just exploded all over her.”

Fancy went to the sink to scrub her hands clean. “What’s the point in helping people, just to kill ’em afterward?”

“You wanna know what the point is? The point is, I have
no fucking idea
why you brought me along!”

Fancy was so stunned by her sister’s outburst she didn’t even chide Kit for swearing.

“You promised that this time I could stab someone,” Kit continued, “but here I am! Covered in blood and yet completely unsatisfied.” She considered Selenicera, who’d once again wrapped her arms around herself. “But I don’t have to stay unsatisfied. How long do you think this kid’ll survive, all alone with no family? I’d be doing her a favor.”

“I have a brother,” Selenicera said in a small voice. “He’ll take care of me. He said he would.”

Kit smiled at Selenicera reassuringly. “I could make it so that it wouldn’t hurt, if that’s what you’re worried about. You wouldn’t explode or—”

“Please.” She was shaking her head, shaking all over. “He’s got a den. He said I could stay in it.”

Fancy pulled her sister away from Selenicera. “Kit, I told you, there’s no need for that. We can kill people without stabbing them or getting our hands dirty.”

Kit held her bloody hands in Fancy’s face.

Fancy grimaced. “I just gotta work out some kinks.”

Kit looked at herself in the mirror. Fancy had no idea what her sister saw, but whatever it was seemed to depress the hell out of her.

“I guess there
is
no need to stab people anymore.” Kit took Datura’s tooth from her pocket and tossed it in the garbage pail by the toilet, but Fancy hurried forward and fished it out.

She waggled the tooth in Kit’s face. “There’s also no point in having the happy place if you’re gone leave evidence out like Christmas cookies for anybody to find!”

Kit sighed all the way from her toes and sat on the edge of the tub. Then she smiled at Selenicera, who was eyeing the two sisters nervously. “No worries, kid. I won’t kill you. I’ve decided to quit while I’m ahead.” She looked down at her own gore-streaked body appreciatively. “Be a shame if all this good stuff turned into a toad.”

M
ADDA TOOK US TO A CEMETERY FULL OF
D
ADDY’S VICTIMS.
K
IT GOT MAD EVERY TIME ME AND
M
ADDA PUT FLOWERS ON THEIR GRAVES.
S
HE KEPT SAYING, CAN’T YOU HEAR THEM SCREAMING DOWN THERE?

The sisters made it home fresh and clean and just in time to have breakfast with Madda. They’d brought Selenicera with them, since it was on the way to the bus station, and hid her in their inner room while they visited with Madda and picked at a breakfast they didn’t want. After Madda finally bedded down for the day, they snuck Selenicera out of the house and walked her about a mile down El Camino Real to the bus station, a tired wooden building that was more of a hut than a station. After Selenicera called her brother in Houston and told him to meet her at the bus station there, Kit paid for her bus ticket and even gave her extra cash in case she wanted to buy a snack on her way to her brother’s house.

The sisters would have left then, but Selenicera had about an hour to wait. She was a different girl from the one they’d rescued from Datura’s weird garden room: a butterfly—even without the wings—healthy, but scarily fragile. So without saying anything, the sisters settled on a bench to wait for the bus. Kit went into the station and bought a pair of pink hair ribbons and passed the time playing with Fancy’s hair while Selenicera amused herself by hopscotching in and out of the sunlight.

When a dusty bus finally wheezed to a stop before the station, Selenicera hurried onto it. Fancy wasn’t surprised that she was in such a hurry to quit them, but she was surprised when Selenicera opened a window and leaned out to say thanks.

“You’re welcome.” Kit shuffled her feet, a sheepish grin on her face. “Sorry about trying to kill you back there. Nothing personal.”

“I know,” Selenicera said gravely, turned slightly toward the sun. “You’re like rottweilers—they protect you from burglars, but nothing protects you from them.”

Fancy found that hilarious, but Kit didn’t.

“A rottweiler?” she exclaimed as the bus pulled out of sight through the trees. “Is that how people see me?”

The sisters ditched the road and took the long way back
down Sayer’s Trail through the woods so they could eat the ripe, shiny blackberries that grew along the path.

“You’re more like a golden goose than a dog,” said Fancy. “Letting everybody get rich off us.”

“Huh?”

“We shouldn’t be shelling out money, paying our clients’ expenses—”

“Clients?”

“We provide a service.” They had to walk single file over the wooden bridge that spanned the creek below as squirrels dashed across the branches over their heads. “
We
should be getting paid.”

“Forget money, Fancy. We’re supposed to be helping people.”

“Doesn’t mean we have to end up in the poorhouse. And that’s another thing: Why’d you take all that money from the treasure chest?”

Kit’s steps faltered guiltily.

“You think I wouldn’t notice that we’re short over
two hundred dollars
? What’d you spend the money on?”

“Just some . . . music stuff.”

“Music stuff like what? The Dallas Symphony Orchestra?”

“It’s my money too.”

“
Our
money. And I got my own plans, you know.”

Kit snorted. “You still trying to sail the seven seas?”

“The
South
Seas. And shut up.” They left the bridge, Fancy in front, wishing it was always as easy to lead Kit.

Behind her Kit said, “Maybe instead of sailing we could do something normal. Like get after-school jobs.”

Fancy whirled and walked backward to watch Kit in disbelief. “Doing what?”

“I could teach piano and you could . . . what
can
you do?”

“Kill people. Same as you.”

“Maybe it’s time to do something else.”

Fancy tripped over her own feet and fell backward into a patch of gory Annas. Kit had already knocked all the wind out of her, so the fall was anticlimactic. As Kit came forward to help her up, the ground exploded in a billowing cloud of petals. A pair of hands bloomed in the middle of the path like grisly flowers—more grisly than the gory Annas themselves, which resembled flaring white skirts with red dots like blood at the hem—and latched hold of Kit’s bare ankles.

Kit screeched and tried to skip backward, but the hands were holding her too tightly, were in fact climbing her legs hand over
hand, as though she were a rope dangling from the school gym ceiling. As the corpse rose, Fancy noted more details. Its bones were visible in places, and the flesh that remained was a mottled gray color. It was wearing a tattered black dress.

Fancy scrambled forward in the dirt and grabbed the corpse to try to pull it off her sister, but couldn’t. Instead she came away with a handful of dress, which crumbled to dust in her fist. She grabbed the legs but let go in disgust, rubbing her palms on the front of her jumper. The corpse’s skin had felt wet and somehow loose.

Kit, however, after that initial screech, stood oddly silent in the literal grip of a nightmare. The corpse was standing, holding her by the shoulders. Its fingernails were painted a glittery blue. It looked Kit in the eye, although the corpse’s own eyes were gone. It opened its lipless mouth and spoke:

“Will you ease my pain?” A ghostly feminine voice soughed in the woods, as if the air itself spoke instead of a corpse whose lungs some animal had long since nibbled out of existence.

Kit had to swallow before she could answer. “Yes.”

“My mother doesn’t know where I am. She cries for me.” The wind blew its dress to dust and made Fancy cough.

“What’s her name? How do I find her?”

“Amelia Dandridge. 824 St. Teresa. Tell her where I am. Tell her I didn’t run away.”

“I will.”

As though Kit’s promise were magic words, the corpse sank back into the ground. Fancy thought of the spongy earth in the Headless Garden and felt a moment of surreality. “We didn’t accidentally wander into the happy place for a few minutes and then wander back out, did we?”

Kit laughed, a skittering sound that revealed that she wasn’t as calm as she seemed. “I should be the one asking you that.” She collapsed on the path, rocking herself and smothering her giggles until tears stood in her eyes. Fancy knelt beside her, not liking to kneel over the corpse but having no choice. “Kit, shh. It’s okay.”