The Killing Jar (19 page)

It was dizzying and surreal, definitely one of the best anima trips I'd been on.

But then everything changed.

“Kenna. Look at me. Look at what you've done.”

The guttural, rasping voice sent a surge of chills across my skin.

I sat up and found Jason Dunn standing in front of me, Jason Dunn as I had last seen him. He resembled a human in shape alone. He had arm and legs, a head and a torso. But that was where the similarities ended. His skin was wizened like that of a rotting pumpkin, his eyes black pits sucked deep in his face. His mouth puckered against toothless gums, and his fingernails were long, brittle, and yellowed, grasping a mason jar filled to capacity with what appeared to be dead moths.

Jason's caved-in mouth moved and the voice it produced made me want to clap my hands over my ears.

“Look what you did to me, Kenna.”

My heartbeat slowed, but I could hear it in my ears, a sporadic, thunderous
ka-thunk! Ka-thunk!
I closed my eyes tight and told myself that when I opened them again Jason would be gone. This was only a hallucination. Nothing more. I was tripping out on the midnight glory anima. None of this was real.

But when I willed my eyes to open again, Thomas Dunn stood next to his son, wearing the same mummified features. The shriveled skin. Sockets and mouth like sinkholes in his face.

“Look what you did to my boy,” Thomas Dunn said, staring at me with those black pits that should have been eyes. “You were supposed to pay. Your family lives and my boy is dead.”

I clawed at my mouth and my eyes bulged so hard it felt like my retinas might detach. I searched around wildly for help, thinking Cyrus would know what to do. Cyrus would fix this. But Cyrus and the rest of the Kalyptra were gone. In their place were my mom and Erin, but they were as dead as Jason and Thomas Dunn. As dead as they had been in the basement, slashed and bloodied, Erin's face a swelling mass of black bruises.

“No, no, no.” I cowered against the wall of the yurt. “No, I saved you. I brought you back. I brought you back!”

“For now,” Erin said, her mouth pulled down at the corners in a hideous grimace, as though she'd had a severe stroke that paralyzed her face. “But nothing lasts forever. Not death and not life.”

The colors dripping from the ceiling bled to red, and began to rain down on my family until they were painted from head to toe, cocooned in blood. Jason and Thomas Dunn were washed red, as well. And then the blood found me. It drizzled down on me, hot and slick. I huddled with my knees against my chest, trying to hide from the crimson deluge.

“Nothing lasts forever,” Jason mimicked in his rasping raven's voice. “Not death and not life.”

Jason opened the lid of his mason jar, and the dead moths inside began to jitter and twitch, returning to life. With sudden velocity, they burst from the jar and flocked toward my face like off-kilter bullets, the combined murmur of the wings a roar in my ears.

I screamed, a sound that tore my throat, made it raw.

With the moths converging all around me, I bolted from the dreaming tent that had turned into a nightmare haven. I didn't know where I was going because I couldn't
see
where I was going. The moths surrounded me like a dark, trembling cloud, their wings shuddering and obscuring my vision. I ran and ran and I didn't know I had entered the forest until branches raked my skin and snagged my hair. I pushed through them, arms out in front of me, eyes blind with the palpitation of dusty wings.

I ran and didn't stop until I smacked headlong into a low tree branch that knocked me flat on my back.

Pain exploded in my head, turning my vision white, and then gray, and then black, and then starry.

Dazed, I stared up at the sky through a mesh of leaves and branches, and saw that the stars had all turned crimson and the sky, too, was shifting to the color of blood. My body clenched in expectant horror, waiting for the sky to turn to blood as the roof of the yurt had and fall on me. Then I felt warm wetness seeping over my cheeks, and I realized the blood was coming from my head, not from the sky. I touched the place on my brow where I'd hit it on the branch. An ache radiated down through my nose and cheekbones, and I felt a swelling lump and a deep, open laceration. I wiped the blood from my eyes and realized, suddenly, that the thrumming of the swarming moths' wings was gone.

And a far worse sound had replaced it.

Now there was only one set of wings beating the air, distant, but moving closer and closer. A sound that was at once as soft as a whisper and as loud as an approaching helicopter. My eyes, filling with blood again, searched the sky and found its source.

A single moth, its wingspan as wide as my outstretched arms, descended through the sky, wings bone white with bloated black moons floating in their centers.

I tried to scream. To move. To do anything.

My body was frozen.

It's not real, I told myself. It's not real.
It's not real!

But I felt the wind of its wings on my face, made out specks of dust shimmering in the air around those massive wings.

Then its tongue—its proboscis—unfurled, a glowing white whip as thick as my pinky finger, a swollen, tangible twin of the strands of energy that uncoiled from me when I took anima.

It wasn't real.

It was not real.

It was so close now I could reach out and touch it. If I had not been paralyzed with fear, I would have batted at it with my arms. Pummeled it. Clawed at its furry thorax. Instead, I lay prone and immobile, waiting for the moth to do what it would to me.

It touched down on my chest, heavy as a soaking wet pillow, its eyes black and empty as a crow's. Its wing beats slowed and its long lash of a tongue probed at the gash in my forehead, pressing into it like a man-eating vine, slipping beneath the skin. Then, without warning, as though it had tasted something it didn't like, the behemoth of a moth withdrew its tongue and beat its wings like a bellows.

It lifted into the sky and vanished into the treetops.

“Kenna!” I recognized Cyrus's voice, calling from somewhere nearby. Then he was at my side, falling to his knees. His hands checked my head wound, fingers gentle, but I shuddered at the memory of the moth's tongue worming through the seeping laceration.

“I'm so sorry,” Cyrus said, removing his shirt and pressing it to my bleeding forehead. “I never should have let you try that anima.”

“I should have listened to you,” I said, my voice weak, barely audible. I wondered vaguely how bad the injury on my head was, how much blood I had lost.

“Did you see it?” I asked.

Cyrus shook his head. “What?

“The moth. It was just here.”

Cyrus's brow furrowed, and he raised his eyes to search the sky. “No,” he said. “I didn't see anything.”

“It was as big as me, Cyrus. It … it was real.”

Even in the dark, I could see the concerned expression on his face. He said nothing, only gathered me in his arms and lifted me like I weighed no more than a sack of fall leaves.

He carried me all the way to Eclipse House. I hid my face against his chest, eyes shut tight, afraid to open them. Afraid the monstrous moth would change its mind and return for me. For my blood.

 

A
WAKE

The next morning I woke before dawn, but not in my bed. I sat up, blinking in the hazy, predawn light, the previous night's events shuffling into place in my brain.

The dreaming tent.

The midnight glory anima.

The dead.

The blood.

The moth.

I remembered everything. I wished I didn't.

I was in Rebekah's room, in her bed. Cyrus had carried me, fading in and out of consciousness, all the way back to Eclipse House and up three flights of stairs to Rebekah's room, where she had opened up her cupboard and brought out one of her culling jars for me. I didn't see the shape of this jar, didn't know what kind of anima was inside. Instead of letting me cull the anima herself, she culled it and channeled it into me, the way I had done for my family. Like she wanted to take care of me. And she had.

The ache in my head had vanished instantly, and I felt the flesh of my forehead knit itself whole—such a strange sensation, like closing a zipper on your own skin. And then my bad trip had turned into a euphoric, waking dream, my blissed-out body seeming to float several inches above the floor as color and light and soft sensation embraced me. I drifted on a warm river and eventually ended up in a sleep filled with safe, impregnable dreams.

I swung my legs over the side of the bed. Cyrus was crashed out on floor pillows, shirtless, one arm flung over his face. He snored faintly, which I found endearing. I resisted the urge to kneel down beside him and touch the bare skin of his back to experience the smoothness of it again. The warmth that radiated from him. As he'd carried me from the forest, I had kept my face nestled against his chest, breathing in his scent, warming my shivering body against his.

Seeing him so soundly asleep, I felt a surge of affection for this hippie cowboy. He had tried to protect me from myself last night, and I'd ignored him. But still he'd come after me. If he hadn't, I might still be alone and lost in the forest, afraid to move for fear of calling the attention of that
thing
. That moth with its curious, probing tongue.

But that monstrosity hadn't been real, had it? Certainly the hallucinations of Jason and Thomas Dunn, and of my family and the blood raining down on me weren't real. The moths in Jason's killing jar weren't real. So why should the mega-moth, that impossibly huge creature, be real?

Rebekah stood on her balcony, looking out at the green mountains and the silver sky, speckled with a few tenacious stars. She turned her head when I stepped outside. The morning air was dewy, and clung to my skin like wet silk.

I came up beside Rebekah and leaned against the railing. For a moment neither of us said anything. I wanted to thank her for healing me and bringing me fully out of my bad trip, for taking care of me like I was her responsibility, her own child. But I was embarrassed to bring it up, embarrassed that I couldn't handle the midnight glory anima. I didn't want to be a burden to Rebekah.

Rebekah saved me the trouble of figuring out what to say by speaking first. “Cyrus tells me you saw the Mother last night,” she said.

I blinked at her, thinking I must have heard her wrong. “No, I didn't see my mom,” I told her. A hallucination of her, yes, but not my actual mom.

Rebekah shook her head. “Not your mother.
The
Mother. The Mother of the Kalyptra.” She smiled. “In a vision, of course.”

I shook my head at her, utterly confused. “Who is the Mother?” I would have thought she considered herself the mother of the Kalyptra.

“Our goddess,” Rebekah said. “She is our maker. The Eclipse moth, the Kalyptra anima.”

I noticed that Rebekah's pupils were slightly enlarged, and wondered if she was on anima. She sounded dreamy and slightly disconnected. But it was early in the morning, so maybe she was just groggy.

“I saw a moth,” I said hesitantly, not sure whether I wanted to admit what I had decided could not be possible. “It—she tasted my blood.” I touched my forehead, where the laceration had been. “But she didn't like it.”

“That's because you're Kalyptra. The Mother doesn't drink the blood of her children.”

“But it wasn't real,” I said, sounding a little desperate, wanting Rebekah to agree with me. “It couldn't have been real.”

“When the veil comes down, you see what others can't,” Rebekah said, which didn't really answer my question. “Did you know a group of moths is called an eclipse?” she asked, and I was somewhat relieved that she diverted the conversation away from the reality or unreality of what I'd seen.

I shook my head at Rebekah's question. “Why are they called that?”

“Because moths are obscure. Their coloring helps them blend with their surroundings so they can hide in plain sight, like the silent sun when the moon masks it in an eclipse. The sun is still there, only you can't see it. Moths are expert at disappearing, just like us. We disappeared right in the middle of the world, yet people rarely happen upon us here, and when they do they don't know who or what we are. To them, we're merely people. They have no idea they've just encountered superior beings.”

The disdainful tone she used when talking about regular people put my back up, but I tried to brush it off. She probably didn't mean to sound as condescending as she did.

“Do you know why I built this place, Kenna? Why I gathered this family and introduced them to a new way of living?”

I said nothing, only looked at her expectantly and shook my head.

“When I was a little girl, I had a large family,” she said. “Three brothers and four sisters, one of whom was my twin, Anya. She was your mother's namesake.”

Her stiff tone told me she considered naming my mother after her twin a mistake.

“Anya and I were the eldest of our siblings,” she went on. “Our mother and father were quite wealthy, so they could afford to give us the kind of lives most people only dream of. We lived in San Francisco and attended school there, but we spent our summers at our mother and father's country home, where we passed every day playing together from sunup to sundown, swimming in the river, riding horses, gardening, caring for animals, reading fairy tales beneath shade trees, taking music lessons. During those summers, it was as though we existed in a place without time, another world separate from the one that waited for us in the fall. Our own daydream realm where we would be young forever. Young and happy and free.”

She paused, her mouth quivering at the corners.

“When I was seventeen, my youngest sister, Gillian, came down with influenza. We did all we could for her. My mother and Anya and I nursed her night and day, and my parents called in the best doctors, but it made no difference. Gillian died, and soon after, my mother came down with the fever. And then my father fell ill. One by one, my brothers and sisters sickened and their fevers drowned them in sweat, and they coughed until their throats tore. They writhed and twisted in their sheets, fraught with delirium, as I tried to hold them down and pour medicine into their throats, which they only coughed up, along with blood. I was there with each of them when they died, because by the end I was the only one still well enough to care for them. I took care of them. But it made no difference.”