The Killing Jar (32 page)

I glimpsed the Eclipse moth's long, white ribbon of a tongue unfurling to suck up the blood it was offered, which poured from my mother's stomach in a torrent. Its tongue plunged into the open wound and snaked under the skin.

“Mom!” I cried, tearing my hand out of Rebekah's grasp as the real me, the Kenna I'd been trying to hide from, charged forward and took control, swimming through the anima trying to drown me in exuberant joy while my mother died. I darted toward the fire and the stone pedestal.

“Kenna, no!” Rebekah grabbed at my dress, trying to pull me back, but I wrenched free of her.

I must have startled the Eclipse moth because it withdrew its tongue from my mom's wound and juddered into the air, where it hovered over the flames, its black porthole eyes staring down at us.

Cyrus stepped into my path and tried to grab me, but I darted around him. I didn't know what I was doing. I only knew I had to get to my mom. I had to save my family.

My real family.

Then I felt a searing pain on the back of my head, and I was yanked backward. Cyrus had me by the hair, and he reeled me in like he was reeling in a fish. He held the knife smeared with my mom's blood to my throat.

“Let this happen, Kenna,” he hissed into my ear, sounding harsh but also pleading, as though some part of him was sorry for what was about to happen.

“Rebekah knows what's best for us,” he said. “For all of us. She'll take care of you and your sister the way no one ever could. She'll be good to you the way she's been to me, and eventually you'll forget the misery that was your life before. You'll be grateful.”

I watched, helpless, as the Eclipse moth touched down on my mom again and unfurled its tongue.

“Let her go,” Cyrus said close to my ear. He kept one hand fisted in my hair and the other holding the knife to my neck. “We're your people now.”

A part of me wanted to do what he said, to let the Eclipse moth have my mom. But that part wasn't the real me. That part was the thing I had become.

I heard my mom's voice in my head, singing.

Sweet girl, don't cry.

Sweet girl, I hear you sigh.

I'll be here when you wake,

So you won't be afraid

to dream alone.

To dream alone.

Now I understood what those lyrics meant. My mom's lullaby was both an apology and a promise, her way of telling me she was sorry for keeping me away from the one place where I didn't have to dream alone, and a promise that she would do her best to always be there for me when it came to real life. She had failed, but that didn't mean she hadn't tried.

Tears began to stream down my cheeks, and the love for my mom that had been tainted and distorted by all of our mistakes, by our disastrous history, came rushing back into my heart. It gave me strength.

I drove my elbow into Cyrus's stomach and felt his grip on me loosen just enough for me to make a break for it. Cyrus reached for me again, but a blur of dark hair flew at him and knocked him to the ground.

Joanna.

They tumbled to the grass and Cyrus's knife was jettisoned from his hand. The Kalyptra gasped and murmured, all of them high on anima, none of them seeming able to comprehend what was happening.

This would be my only chance.

Joanna scrambled for the knife, and when she had it brandished in warning at Cyrus she raised her eyes to mine.

“The Mother, Kenna. Cull the Mother.”

For a moment I was confused, thinking she meant my own mother. My mind was still fighting for clarity against the anima in my system.

Then it hit me: she was talking about the Eclipse moth.

Was it even possible? I couldn't cull another Kalyptra, but could I cull their goddess? It was the Eclipse moth's anima that had made the Kalyptra what they were, so maybe …

Maybe would have to be enough.

I reached both hands toward the Eclipse moth and hundreds of threads of energy extruded from my palms and whipped toward the Mother. The threads connected, but for a moment nothing happened.

Then the Mother spasmed as though hit with a bolt of lightning, and her energy poured into me and filled me. It consumed me as I consumed it. The Eclipse moth's anima made human anima seem like a sip of wine in comparison. This was the anima of a goddess, and I was taking it. Taking it all as the monstrous moth began to come apart, its wings turning to powder, its thorax shrinking and crumbling like old clay.

Around me, the Kalyptra cried out and fell to the ground, writhing in pain as though I were hurting them, too. And maybe I was. The Mother had made them. They were connected. So why was I not writhing in pain like them? Because I had taken the Mother's anima? I didn't know. My consciousness was being devoured by the anima of the Eclipse moth.

The Mother's body hit the ground and broke apart like a sculpture made of dust. Its anima spread through me. Mania took hold of my brain and I was swallowed by a singular need.

Light …

Light …

LIGHT.

Distantly, I remembered what Cyrus had told me about moth anima being forbidden, because when it was in you the compulsion to go into the light was undeniable. Everyone knew a moth couldn't resist a flame, even if it would be its doom.

I had always been a moth, unable to resist those things that could destroy me. So this would be my well-deserved end.

I turned toward the fire, knowing on some level what was about to happen but unable to resist, because I wanted this, too. Not the moth part of me, but the real me. I walked toward the fire, ready for what was to come. Fire cleanses, and I needed to be washed clean of the terrible things I'd done. This would be my sacrifice. The payment for my many sins.

I was an inch from the licking flames when a hand grabbed my arm and the owner whirled me to face her.

Rebekah's face was livid, her once beautiful features pinched in pain. Her skin appeared to be both shrinking against her skull and melting off of it. Her hair began to fall out in handfuls and her lips pulled tight against loosening teeth.

She was aging, I realized. Aging rapidly now that the divine connection to her goddess was gone.

“Do you realize what you've done?” Rebekah shrieked in my face.

The flames called to me. I tried to turn away from Rebekah, to continue my path into the fire, but she dug her fingernails into my arms.

“You've destroyed everything!” she screamed, her eyes bulging like they were about to pop. The hair rained off her scalp, leaving gray patches of skull beneath. “We'll die now. We'll wither and die, and so will you and your sister!”

“All that lives must die,” I told her. “Even you.”

I shook free of Rebekah, and her legs buckled backward, bones giving way and snapping like ancient wood. She fell to her knees, wailing to the sky, and I turned once more toward the flames.

“Kenna, please! Don't move!”

The voice was one I knew better than any other. It had been with me for as long as there had been a me.

I looked back again to see Erin pulling the blindfold from her eyes. The dizzy smile was no longer on her face. Her anima high had faded fast.

She walked toward me slowly, holding her hand out as though inviting me to take it.

“Remember in the hospital, Kenna, when I asked you to say goodbye to me and you couldn't do it?”

I nodded.

“I get it now,” she said, tears shining in her eyes. “I can't do it either. I can't say goodbye to you, so you don't get to leave me. Do you hear me? You don't get to leave me!”

I felt wetness on my cheeks and realized I was crying.

The fire called to me. I wanted it. I wanted to be inside the light.

Still, I was crying and nodding.

“Deal,” I said, my voice so hushed I wasn't sure she heard it.

But that didn't matter.

I ripped the mask from my face and tossed it into the fire. I was through being the moth. It was time to be the flame.

I knelt beside my grandmother's broken, diminishing body. She was becoming the age she should be, I thought vaguely. A weak old woman. That was all she was.

She looked at me, her face a horror, eyes sunken into her skull and caved-in mouth opening and closing like that of a fish out of water.

“Please…” she croaked. “Please…”

I knew what she was asking, that I save her from the death she had avoided for so long. I nodded, and I gave her what she asked for.

What she had earned.

I put my hands on her and felt my vena emerge and connect to her body, and then the Mother's anima poured from me, and with it the compulsion to give myself to the light that would kill me.

Beneath my hands, Rebekah's body knit itself back together and she became beautiful once again. A goddess. The queen of her own small kingdom. Or maybe, merely, its Mother, albeit a tyrannical one.

When it was done, I stood, my head and my eyes finally clear. The world returned to normal, and I welcomed it. I welcomed the world as it was, and I hoped it would welcome me in return.

Erin ran to me and wrapped her arms around me. We held each other for the first time in years and watched as our grandmother walked into the fire. Rebekah cried out in exultation as flames gobbled her dress and hair first, and then began to boil her skin and cook her flesh. The sweet, smoky smell of burning meat filled the air.

Rebekah stood under her wooden altar, a woman on fire, and screamed in delight until she couldn't scream anymore. She clung to the altar and it caught, too, and went up in flames. The triumphant smile never left her face, even when her lips were gone. Even when the skin on her face was charred to black.

The Kalyptra, all of them, remained crumpled on the ground, although they were no longer writhing. They were moving sluggishly, like people who'd been in comas, but were just starting to wake. Joanna raised her head and looked at us. I wouldn't have recognized her if it weren't for those black eyes of hers. Her hair had gone completely white and her face was a nest of wrinkles.

“What's happening to them?” Erin asked, her voice tremulous.

“I think they're turning the age they would have been if they hadn't become Kalyptra.”

“Anya,” Joanna said, reaching a hand toward the stone pedestal.

Erin and I went to work quickly, scooping dirt onto the fire and putting out enough so that we could lift our mom's body off the pedestal and onto the cool grass. She was unconscious from smoke inhalation, and blood continued to gush from her stomach. The wound on her side was deep. It could be fatal if we didn't act quickly.

But I didn't know if I could do what needed to be done.

Joanna crawled through the grass toward us. “Use my anima,” she said, her voice weak. “What's left of it … I want Anya to have it. I'm human now. Mortal. You can take it.”

Erin's eyes went to mine, huge and terrified. “Can you still…?” She didn't need to finish the question.

I shook my head, not sure what the answer was. “I don't know. I might not be Kalyptra anymore.”

“T-try,” Joanna rasped. “You're different from the rest of us. You didn't choose this life … you were born this w-way.”

I looked at her uncertainly. “Are you sure?” I asked softly, hesitant to take another human life. Or another life ever. I didn't want to be Kalyptra anymore.

But maybe I didn't have a choice.

“I'm sure,” Joanna said. “It's my choice.”

“Thank you,” I told her, and then I put my hands on her and sighed in relief when I felt my vena emerge and connect to her body. Her anima swelled through me, but I didn't let myself enjoy it. I closed my eyes as she withered and then I turned to my mom.

Erin had used Cyrus's knife to cut the ropes binding our mom and remove her gag.

Mom's eyes drifted open, and when she saw us she smiled. “My girls,” she said. “My babies.”

My vena connected to her like some alien IV and her back arched as Joanna's anima filled her and sealed up the wound in her side.

When it was finished, she sat up, and she hugged Erin and me tight to her. We wrapped our arms around each other, and the love I felt from my family—my true family—was the best anima I'd ever known.

Around us, the Kalyptra began to climb to their feet, with the exception of Joanna, her body a withered husk. For a moment I worried the Kalyptra might pose a threat, that they might try to kill us for what we'd done. But looking around at them, I saw how frail, how diminished they were, and I knew they were no danger. Their masks had fallen from their faces, revealing aged, wrinkled skin, eyes dimmed like dying light bulbs, some filmed with cataracts.

I recognized Illia, though her lava-colored hair was now a cottony, white cloud. She wore a cloak over her dress, and she removed it and laid it over my mother's naked frame.

Her eyes turned to me, and she said, “I'm sorry. I'm so sorry.”

Then she drifted away, not down the path to Eclipse, but into the forest in the opposite direction.

The other Kalyptra mimicked her, murmuring apologies and goodbyes before wandering away into the night. I cried to see what they had become, but I didn't hug any of them. I kept my arms around Erin and my mom, and I said my goodbyes.

The Kalyptra, it turned out, I could say goodbye to. My family, I could not.

Cyrus was the last to leave the clearing. His good looks had wilted with age, his chest sagging and his hair thinned to reveal a liver-spotted scalp. His hands were gnarled like claws.

He didn't apologize. Instead, he said in a husky, dry voice, “She was the only real mother I ever had. I would have done anything for her. I couldn't help myself.”

I thought of the scars on his back, and I pitied him. He'd been as lost as I was, maybe more, when Rebekah had gotten ahold of him. Then I thought of my passion for him, and the kisses we'd shared, and I marveled at how easy it was to mistake desire for love. But now another veil had been lifted from my eyes.