The Bargaining Path Read online

  ***

  Adam insisted that he remain in the room with Brynna while he was being stitched back up. She was quieter, only whimpering softly now. It was after James had laid her down and covered her up with the blanket on the bed that I walked outside. Nothing could have calmed my nerves like breathing in the crisp night air, and once I was outside, leaning against the edge of the porch, I immediately began to feel my heartbeat slowing and my breathing steadying.

  “She is quiet now.”

  I didn’t even jump, because something told me that he would be coming. I turned around to find that he was sitting on the bench just outside, holding a black cigarette between his long, white fingers.

  “Yeah.” I said, and I walked over to sit beside him. “I think it’s almost out of her system.”

  “Yes. It will be soon once they suck it out of her. That is not pleasant, Violet. That is almost as brutal as all that she has suffered so far.”

  “I don’t care. I’m going to be there. I’ve come this far.”

  “Of course you have, Violet. And from what my father has said, you have done well.”

  “Your father…” I murmured in disbelief. “Adam is your dad.”

  “Yes.”

  “And Janna is your mom?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t think Brynna knows that Adam is married.”

  “Why should it matter?”

  “You know that it matters.”

  “Yes.” He admitted, and he took a long inhale on his cigarette. “I know that it does, but I do not know why. He and my mother have never seen eye to eye, as your lot says. Since I was a little boy, they have not lived together. I see him but once a year, but that is also because my work takes me all over our fair Purissimus. This is the most time that we have spent together, and is that not funny? Now that his beloved city is destroyed, he has no choice but to be where he should have been all along. But you know all about this, don’t you? You can sympathize with all of this?”

  “Maybe a little bit. My dad was around, but I kind of wish he hadn’t been now. He never did anything to me, but he was brutal to Brynn. God, I remember this one time about six years ago when he slammed her head into the floor so hard that Maura had to carry her to the car to take her to the hospital. So, see? We’re a little different. You wished your dad was around, and I wish he would have stayed away more. The only thing I can say for him was that he was good with my mom. She drank a lot, and she’d get really hysterical when she was drunk. She’d try to hurt herself, and she’d try to hurt him sometimes, too. He always managed to get her into her room and lock her in. He went through there every day to make sure she hadn’t hid anything to use to hurt herself. I’d always try to talk to her through the door, but he would make me leave. He knew she wouldn’t want me to see her like that. Or hear her when she was like that, I mean.” I stopped, and self-consciously tucked a piece of hair behind my ear.

  “I’ve never told anyone that.” I said, and he smiled slightly as he looked at me.

  “I think you win. That is far worse than anything I have experienced.”

  “I didn’t know we were competing.”

  “We were not, but if we were, you would win.”

  “No.” I said, and I shook my head, “It sounds like you’ve had it really rough, too.”

  “And you have never told your boyfriend these things?”

  I stopped and thought about it. With slight horror at the thought, I realized that I had never talked in detail about all that had happened in our family. He knew that Luc had died, our family blamed Brynna, and she suffered the brunt of their rage as a result, but I hadn’t told him how any of that had related to me. It was strange, to say it all out loud. It was especially strange to be saying it all out loud so freely to Caspar, whom I had only just met.

  “No.” I answered, “Maybe I should. But I just don’t want to.”

  “And yet you tell me.”

  “Well, sometimes people tell strangers things that they never tell anyone else.”

  “Am I a stranger? Truly? A stranger? Even after all we have experienced in our short time knowing one another?”

  I giggled at how jokingly offended he was.

  “I guess you’re not.” My smile faded, and I reached out and grasped his hand. “Thank you for helping me tonight. I don’t know what would have happened to me if you hadn’t come. And I know for a fact that Brynna would be dead. Thank you so much, Caspar. I don’t know what I can do to repay you for what you did…”

  “You will do nothing, darling. I am happy that I was able to help, and I am thrilled that I was able to kill the man who was harming you. If you desire for the others to be killed for encouraging him, I will gladly spill their blood for you. Or we may spill it together.”

  “No. It’s okay.” I said, “It’s just… I can’t believe Rene let them do that. I don’t think he was that drunk, and he’s James’s best friend. He’s been a constant presence in our lives since we moved into Don’s house last year. Maybe he was drunk, and for some reason, I just don’t remember…”

  “Was Rene the one whom I was able to grab before he scampered off? The one who lost control of his bladder?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I cannot say whether or not he was drunk, or how drunk he was, but I can say that you more than likely will not be seeing him around. I also believe, if I may be so bold as to say so, that your sister’s partner deserves a scolding from both you and your sister.”

  “That is not too bold.” I said darkly. “It’s true. I know he was drunk, and that’s why he didn’t help me. It’s not an excuse, but it kind of is, you know? He said that he had sex with someone else. He cheated on her. I have to tell her, Caspar. I can’t keep that a secret, even though God knows he’ll tell me to.”

  “Yes.” Caspar agreed, “You must tell her. But not now. Not until she is released from here. She is taking comfort in both him and my father, so he should remain with her until this is over.”

  “They just got back together yesterday, and he’s already messed it up. I love him so much. How could I not after everything? But I don’t know if I can keep forgiving him for hurting her. It seems like here of late, he hurts her more than he makes her happy. God, everything is so messed up…” I sighed heavily and sat back against the back of the swing. My eyes fell on the cigarette he was holding.

  “Would you like one?” He asked, “They are very relaxing.”

  “What is in them? Why are they black?”

  “They are black because the opian leaves within them are black, and because they are flavored with black berries. They are called Black Beauties, because it is said that the first time the two were mixed together and smoked at night, those who had smoked them could see every shade of darkness on all sides of them and above them, and yet it was not frightening. It was divine. Here.” He took the cigarette from his lips and handed it to me. Unsurely, I brought it to my lips—all the while trying not to think that his had only just been on it—and took a very small inhalation of it. Almost instantly, my muscles relaxed, and though my mind stayed perfectly clear, there was not a hint of any desire to keep moving, to panic, to think at all. I just felt so perfect right where I was. Leaning back, I put my feet up onto the wooden railing of the porch and looked up at the sky. The lights on the porch had dimmed, and there was a cool darkness all around us, and I could see it for miles. With just that one tiny puff, I could see it, and Caspar was right; it wasn’t scary in the slightest. In fact, a smile was on my lips, and there was a smile on his lips, too. We laughed softly, and passed the Black Beauty in between us, grinning as that darkness turned to light within our eyes and then turned back again, as the stars twinkled and extinguished, only to be relit again, and as we slept even though we were wide awake.

  Brynna

  You know what happened after I returned to Janna's village, but you do not know how I came to be in such a state. It began immediately after mine and Don's makeshift press conference, w
hich was more reminiscent of the town-hall meetings through which I used to love to watch my mother stumble. I had not stumbled, as you very well know.

  After the meeting had concluded, a large celebration came under way. That is when James and I slunk off to have what I knew would be a most spiteful argument, and spiteful it was, with me shouting in defense of my honor, saying that my meeting with Adam had been strictly business, and that I would never commit the same infidelity I had witnessed my parents committing for all the years of their marriage. He said that none of that mattered, and that the only thing that did matter was that I could not stay away from Adam.

  “Of course I cannot!” I had shouted, “He has a leash on Don. Don will allow this place to fall into a state of even more tumultuous chaos, if I do not put a stop to it! Adam will help me do that!”

  “Are you out of your mind?! Do you really think I believe that?! Yes, all of a sudden, you care so much for other people. No, baby, I've known you too long to believe that bullshit. I know how you are; it's you, Penny, Violet, and sometimes, it's me and Eli, and that's it. That's as far as your concern for other people goes, and you know what? Sometimes, it's just about you. In fact, most times, it's just about you. So don't pull this civil servant bullshit with me! You were with him because you wanted to be with him!”

  “You don't know anything about me if you believe that or any of the other things you have just said! And is that really what you think of me?!”

  “Yes, Brynna, it is! And you know it's true. You know that deep down, you're just a self-centered, cold-hearted bitch, and that is never going to change. And now, do you know what is really funny?” He had actually laughed slightly in his rage that he could barely contain. “Now, we can throw 'whore' on top of that! After all that time you spent holding off, now you're just a whore!”

  My first inclination was to slap him. Then, I would begin screaming in insane, uncontrollable fury all the terrible things I thought about him. He was a liar, with not one honest bone in his body. He was a coward, who had been unable to tell Adam outright that he could not have me, and had he ever actually said that Adam could not have me? But James was braced for both a physical and emotional attack when I walked towards him, but he need not have been, for something in those words had stung me down to my core, and I could barely find the will to keep that rage alive inside of me, let alone lash out in response to it. Strangely enough, the first course of action that my body wanted to take was to let some more long-held tears pour from my eyes. In horror, I realized that he had (do I dare?) injured my barely existent feelings. My emotions were still so raw and frazzled, banging about inside of my chest and skull in an almost elated frenzy; for some reason, they reminded me of a mental patient freed from a straitjacket, running through his cell, thrilled to be freed, but desolate, knowing that he was still locked inside of a dark room with limited space. Instead of yelling back at him, I sighed and shook my head slightly.

  “You and I are finished, aren't we?” I asked him after a long moment of silence.

  “Yes.” He hissed dangerously. “In fact, Brynna, I don't think we were ever back on. I should have left you on your own when you got back. Once again, I was too good to you. All that time, you were probably thinking of him, weren't you? Every time I touched you, you probably imagined that it was him!”

  “No, James.” I told him, and now, I was turning away. “Of course I did not.”

  “You're a liar. And I thought that lying was so far below you!” He laughed again, “Good luck to you, my dear. I warned you about him, and now he's just going to take from you until there's nothing left. He'll drain everything out of you, so you'll plead with him, and barter everything that you have ever loved until there is nothing left to give him but your life, and then he'll snatch that from you without hesitating, and all you'll be thinking is how stupid you really are; how you, the great and powerful Brynna Olivier, who is so smart, and so magically savvy, is just as stupid as everyone else. And I'm just going to sit back and watch it happen.”

  Now that anger had been prodded at and bothered for a long enough time, and it needed to make itself known once again but not in an explosion of rage. Rather, a quiet, razor-sharp insult would do the trick.

  “Well, you would know all about bartering everything you love in exchange for your life, wouldn't you, James?”

  When we say things that we know someone else will jump all over, we immediately realize it, and begin crafting a response that will remedy the hypocrisy or the obvious mistake. Sure enough, James had found his response, and it was one that ripped into me further, far more deeply and far more cruelly than I ever could have imagined.

  “No. I don't.” He said to me, in the same tone of quiet condescension and with an obvious desire to wound me terribly.

  It was so simple, and yet it ripped me apart. He stormed away with another loudly muttered insult about what a promiscuous woman I was, heading back towards the sounds of the party, which were growing louder by the minute as the festivities began to get under way.

  As if that argument were not enough, another man showed up to fight with me, and his rage could not be contained after mere moments of conversing. How could I have done it, he demanded. How could I have gone against everything he said? I demanded to know why she was in his mind. During the last seconds of our fight, I had begun to notice a shift in the forest surrounding the path. There was a whispering that I believed was the wind at first. But soon, I could discern the deep manly inflections, the high-pitched womanly ones, and the even higher-pitched voices of children. Together, they swirled and rose to a unified hiss, though the volume was still so low that I could successfully convince myself that my anger at those two men was making me hallucinate. The darkness and the eerie vastness of the trees surrounding me aided my imagination in dreaming up phantom voices and their spectral beholders.

  But then, after I said that no matter what, she would never want him, and his hands shoved me hard in the back, and I went hurtling with almost too much force over the ash-circle, only silence had greeted me. There had been no voices. Though his tennis shoes banging into the dirt as he ran away told me that my cowardly assailant had taken off on foot, I did not stand up to chase him, though I certainly wanted to harm him violently. Instead, my pupils expanded and then elongated so that I could see in the darkness. Movement ahead of me seemed to come from two different directions, and my head jerked back and forth almost by its own will to see who or what was trying to come towards me. Bracing for the attack, I moved up so I was standing crouched over, with my hands on the ground, still looking all around me for the appearance of a person or beast, or a combination of the two.

  When my eyes first fell on her, I startled so terribly that I actually gave a yelp of surprise. Her face was terribly swollen, and her burns made her almost unrecognizable, but her light red hair was enough of an indicator of her identity: Maura.

  “Brynna...” She cried, and her voice was clear despite her injuries, but seemed to float and expand to form strange, invisible layers that rose and fell seemingly with the wind that had begun to swirl.

  My throat locked up, and my breathing ceased immediately. My eyes that had been wide before found room to widen further. I stammered over her name when I attempted to say it aloud. Somewhere inside of me, my heart, which had broken free of the arterial restraints that kept it firmly locked in my chest, sent blood spattering erratically with every impossibly quick beat.

  It was impossible. She was dead.

  Wasn't she?

  “Maura.” I finally managed to whisper.

  “Please stop them. Please, they're...”

  A sound even more terrible than her worst scream (which I could still remember clearly and which drove me to experience terrible chills and a pitiless feeling of self-loathing every time I heard it echoing around inside of my head) escaped her when black shadow hands wrapped around her, and pulled her into the darkness with an abruptness and a force almost too impossible to wield. Beca
use a moment of weakness took hold of me then, and because I believed, despite the sheer impossibility of it that she might have survived, that someone might have pulled her out of the burning building, revived her, and then taken her hostage, given my new position and how important she was to me, I ran after her, putting space between myself and the village even though I knew, beyond any doubt that could possibly excuse my stupidity, that straying too far would mean that I would almost certainly meet my death.

  “Maura!” I screamed.

  “NO! NO! STOP!” She was wailing far off in the distance, and I should have known that it was a trick, and I should have known that she was dead. My head had been rested against her chest when her heart had stopped beating, and I had listened as her lungs expelled her very last breath. I had felt my anger at her abate as her soul left her, and I had believed that she had taken it from me. I had understood why what happened with Michael had happened, and though I would continue to carry the scars he had left, I would not carry the ones she had inflicted on me with her cowardice and self-interest. I had understood, finally, that she loved me, but she had been afraid, and though the latter was no excuse, there simply was no use holding onto my rage when she had struggled for so long to make amends. When she had been drunk, she had been spewing venom that she did not mean. When she awoke, she was always terribly remorseful, and I had always ignored her pleas for my understanding and forgiveness.

  All of those thoughts were ricocheting around my brain, hitting the part that drove me to run faster with startling accuracy. I could feel myself getting nearer to her, and I could hear her screams getting louder, so that when I finally burst into the clearing where I knew she was, I was already screaming at them not to hurt her.

  But there was nothing there, nothing except a large black house built from wood that had long since decayed. The only thing in tact was the black-shingled roof, but the windows were broken, their shutters hanging off or fallen down completely. The pillars on the porch were snapped, letting the awning beneath the windows hang down completely, partially blocking the entrance. In one of those broken windows, I could see a dim, flickering light. There was someone in there, and I could hear Maura sobbing my name still.

  “No.” I said aloud, “Maura is dead. She is dead. Her voice...”

  Her voice had not been human. Some terrible Pangaean creatures were trying to trick me and were doing so successfully. Adam had alluded to some danger lurking in the forest that surrounded Janna's village; the ash circle kept them out, whoever or whatever they were.

  With sickening dread, I realized by instinct, not from Seeing, that I had stumbled right into their nest.

  Her screams were still sounding loudly, pulling me forward, urging me to rescue her, even if I would only be saving her ghost. What if it was her spirit? Alice and Quinn had told me what had happened to her mother and father, how they had been trapped inside the Shadows, in some torturous purgatory of which I did not know nor wanted to imagine. The clawing, ripping, shrieking feeling of foreboding was pounding its fists into my fallen heart, but I could not shake that tremble in my body that had seized me as I listened to Alice's tale. If Maura was trapped, for whatever reason, in whatever creature, somehow, some way, I had to save her. I did not owe her, and yet I did.

  Like every fool in every fable ever written, I defied common sense. I ignored the instincts and enhanced Knowing bestowed upon me by God or the Gods. I climbed the creaking stairs of that house and pushed the door open.

  The wooden door was lighter than it looked. My hand only gently pushed it, and yet it banged back against the wall, revealing an endless blackness too unnatural to be of our world. My feet began to back away, forcing my body to retreat before my mind had even fully grasped that retreating was absolutely necessary. But before I could even begin to turn away, I was sucked inside by a backwards wind, and though my weight immediately dropped onto the floor just in front of the door, that wind did not cease. Ahead of me was a strange, swirling light, and in front of it were what appeared to be five and a half people. All around me, the house seemed to throb, ebbing and flowing with movement that was as alive as I was. The wood seemed to breathe out and in; in fact, those breaths seemed to make up the wind that had pulled me inside and was still churning savagely around me.

  That swirling light was mystifying, because it was not of either world I knew. The multiple colors inside of it renounced all things I knew about the “heavenly” light, but then, I had never believed those stories, anyway. I did know, as only I could, that the light before me was a portal to death, and to something else, too, but what that something was, I could not quite discern. What I also knew was that from it, those five and half figures had been thrown. Not only had they been thrown, but they had been thrown back.

  I am sure that you have guessed their identities. The one closest to the throbbing wall on the left turned to face me first. It was Maura, and I have already described to you how horrifyingly deformed she looked, with her burns and bruises. The second was my mother, whose face was obscured by a bag that had been placed over her head. I recognized her by her nature, and by the fact that I could see a piece of her chestnut brown hair beneath that hood. Her hands were tied behind her, and I could have sworn, though this was impossible, that I saw a rope tied around her neck, not like a noose, because it was too sloppily tied, but certainly similar to one. I had only seen her cry when she was drunk, and when that happened, her sobs were boisterous and deafening, and I had always been terribly irritated by them because she looked and sounded like an overgrown child. Plus, the display had been utterly pathetic. But now, as she cried softly, I could hear desperation and terror that were plain and utterly gut-wrenching; they were the last and most vicious desperation and terror experienced by those being tossed from the world by the hands of others instead of being taken gently by the hand of He or She or They who had put them there.

  My heart, still fallen, screamed with the rawest, most despairing pleas to save her, and I wanted to, so much that the thought provoked what felt like unstoppable tears to rush into my eyes until they froze, petrified, on the brim. I was petrified, my whole being, knowing now what I had only guessed at before: She had not died quickly.

  A male voice seemed to emanate behind her, and it was trembling, too. Though I could not see him, because there was only darkness behind her, despite that bright, colorful light, I knew that it was John, and he was telling her softly and tremulously, through tears of his own, that she was going to be alright, and that he loved her, and that he would be right behind her...

  The third person was the smallest one, and he was still dripping wet and shivering, and his face was contorted to show that his sobs would be loud if only he could stop choking on the torrents of water that were gushing from his mouth, where his lips had turned blue and frozen into that endless cry of terror. Lucien. The sight of him brought me to my knees, and those tears that had somehow stopped themselves before began to fall.

  One was no worse than the last, but the sight of the next person provoked the most primal terror in me while also shocking me the most harshly.

  He was still in his prison uniform, but it was covered in his blood and even more disgustingly, parts of his dripping skin. On his face, parts of his skin had fallen away, leaving nothing but fatty, bloody tissue to look at; his nose had completely burnt off and only a hollow space remained. Even from where I was standing, I could see that the whites of his eyes had turned completely red. His dark hair had fallen out, and his breathing was heavy and labored, but still, he managed to smile at me the way he always had, with satisfaction and with lust, both so disgusting and so harrowing that it caused bumps to rise over every inch of my skin and chills to caress me dreadfully. His voice was ragged, indicative of how sick the infection from his burns had made him, but I heard distinctly what he was saying over and over again:

  “My pretty girl.”

  And the last was my father, pulling his belt off and shouting at me, though I could b
arely hear what he was saying over the whir of the vortex behind him. It was strange, that I could hear what remained of Michael's voice, but that I could not hear my father's shouts.

  But my father was not dead. I knew that, because every time I pictured his face, my heart recognized a very real, still very dangerous threat to my safety. My instincts sprung to react, unlike when I pictured Michael; during those times, I felt nothing but a repulsive cocktail of the most treacherous feelings, including fear, disgust, regret, guilt, sadness, and self-loathing, just to name a few. But there was no urge to change over, to fight even though the threat was not in my presence. And in knowing that, I knew that what I was witnessing was not real. The owners of that moving house were playing tricks on me. They were feeding on my fear, and as I looked at and contemplated the fate of each person and the role I had played in each, those owners began to pull out of the wooden walls, to take their true forms again. They were the “tree-people” that my sister had described. They were who Janna and her people feared and kept out of their village with that circle of ash. Here, though, they were only shadows; they had no need to take their strange form when I had strayed right into their trap.

  Quickly, they were all around me, slowly moving closer and closer, restricting the space that I had to breathe.

  “Brynna... Brynna...”

  Only my mother was addressing me in a voice that did not echo.

  “Run!” She screamed.

  And that was all it took to break that terrible spell they had put me under. I barreled past two of them that were blocking the door, and though they merely stumbled sideways slightly, it was enough space for me to squeeze through. The air outside had never smelled, tasted, or felt so wonderful; I had not realized it, but the air inside of that cabin was tight, hollow, and reeked of death.

  With every bit of my non-human strength, I had run. Feeling their presences behind me and hearing their whispering voices all around me only drove me to move faster. I did not know where I was running, but I knew I just had to find the ash circle. I had been so distracted by my fear for Maura that I had not marked my path. The creatures were not running; they were moving from tree to tree. I could see their faces emerging from the trunks all around me, and the branches of those trees moved with a natural, albeit very quick, movements to reach down towards me.

  When the torches that lined the path into Janna's village came into view, I somehow managed to draw in a deep breath, and my legs managed to move even more quickly. But just as I was about to jump over the line, one of those things emerged from the tree closest to it and reached out one of its hands, on which its long fingers were capped by jagged wooden claws. The rip I heard as loudly as the scream that left me was not from my shirt ripping; it was my skin. I knew that whoever found me would find four long, parallel scratches down my back. I tripped over my feet but managed to stumble over the ash circle, knocking over one of the torches in the process and landing with a hard thud on my stomach. I was aware of a sickening crack, and a sudden outreach of pain in my midsection that expanded so quickly that my breath was stolen by it. But my adrenaline was pumping, and I stood up quickly, reaching behind me to assess the damage done by the claws of the one tree-man that had managed to attack me. Though there was blood, there was not enough to worry me. Surprisingly, there was very little pain, as well. I wondered if perhaps his claws had only grazed me, and if perhaps I had imagined the sound of my skin ripping. Because I felt perfectly well, except for the suddenly very dense air trying to travel down my suddenly very thin throat, and the loud, powerful thumping of my heart in my chest, I vowed to think nothing of my injuries until I had reason to do so.

  I stumbled my way back up the path, my legs still shaking and my mind still reeling from what I had seen. But strangely enough, a docile calm came over me, and a small, unrecognizable voice in my head told me that what I had seen had been a lie, and that it was not all that scary, and that I needn't think of it anymore. Perhaps later, if my mind continued to return to those things I had seen, I would return to the house and investigate, only so I could remedy my anxiety...

  It was while I was speaking to Violet that I began to experience the after-effects of being poisoned by the venom they carry within their claws. The gradual ascent to total panic was effortless, but once I reached the peak, the rolling waves of it sent me into that episode in the field. While Violet was gone, searching for help, I rolled about, feeling the circle of trees that surrounded me closing in, hearing the whispers of those creatures that were watching me from those trees, and also, the voices and cries and pleas and angry shouts of those people who had confronted me in the house. My fear of Ray had been the most potent I had felt since the last time Michael had raped me, but the fear I felt there in that field, while I was alone—sick, in awful pain, and alone—was child-like, so full of confusion and incomprehension, as well as blind terror. For that reason, it was worse.

  That boy and Violet had carried me back, and I could feel Adam's great, unthinkable worry. Even in my delusional state, I saw him pacing back and forth, clutching the stitched wound in his stomach and leaning heavily on his cane. In unison, my heart and mind began to sob, urging my body to move on its own accord so I could reach him. I needed to feel his arms around me, and I needed to hear his voice whispering to me, assuring me that I was going to be alright. When we had faced our deaths together out in the woods, he had instructed me to lean to him, and when our foreheads had been pressed together and he had been whispering to me, and kissing me so gently, I had not been afraid.

  “Adam...” I was crying, and the boy, who was in front of me, heard the soft sound and whispered back to me that he was near.

  I could feel him coming closer and closer, and I could feel the heavy pain in his abdomen that he was ignoring so he could reach me quickly.

  “Darling, you cannot...” Janna had told him, but he had taken me from the boy and Violet, lifting my slight weight into his large, strong arms. My arms flew up to wrap around his neck, and I whimpered there, only able to speak just barely. I could only whisper his name.

  “You are alright, my love. Oh, my sweet love... Why did you go over the circle?” He had asked me softly once I was laid down on the bed, his bed, and he was knelt beside me with his face level with mine. His rough hand rested on my face, and his thumb stroked my cheek as more tears fell from my eyes. “No, shh...” He whispered, “It is not your fault, I know. I am sure that you did not mean to do it.”

  “Pushed me...” I managed to gasp out just as Violet, the boy, and Janna came into the room. “Pushed me... and ran away.”

  “Who did?” That darkness I had seen before and feared greatly was evident in his eyes again. I did not fear it because I worried for my own safety, but rather because I feared what he would do to another, to the one who had hurt me. “Tell me that it was him, and I will...”

  The darkness in his eyes expanded until it enveloped me and the room I was in. I fell backwards into it, tumbling end over end, watching him get further and further away and screaming out for him to grasp my hand and pull me back before I was consumed by that darkness completely.

  I am sure that you have gathered what I experienced as I rolled within that space of utter misery. I was in that house, moving from dark room to dark room, confronting the people whom I had so wronged. Either that, or I was facing the worst horrors of my life. The hallways were endless, and every door within them opened and pulled me inside. In the first, I saw Michael, and the fear that rose inside of me as he sauntered towards me was exactly as I remembered it: cold, unforgiving, utterly paralyzing. Even as a child, when I did not understand, I had known how wrong it was. I didn't understand, and yet I was so sick; I was so disgusted with both of us. Even at such a young age, I believed that it was my fault.

  Maura had gone nearly catatonic the day after it happened the first time. In the back of that dark room, I saw her, the same way I saw her then; sitting up, staring straight ahead, eyes wide, one hand grasping her ches
t. Her being frozen that way had frightened me, and I had pulled on her arms and begged her to look at me, and as I had those thoughts, my mouth formed them, and I could hear myself saying them in the little girl's voice I had once possessed. All the while, Michael circled me, and the predatory hunger in his eyes sent shivers down my spine, and I knew that I couldn't stop him, just as I had known it then. I knew that even if I tried to run, he would catch me. But just because my attempt would fail didn't mean that I would not attempt it. I threw my body upwards and ran towards the door, screaming over my shoulder to Maura that I would be back for her.

  When he grabbed me, he didn't say anything. He just pulled me back towards him, and drew in one deep, heavy inhalation with his nose pressed into my hair.

  “Michael...” I whispered, and my voice trembled.

  After the first time, I had never called him “Uncle Mike” ever again.

  “You're not a little girl anymore.” He told me, and somehow, I knew what he was telling me. I understood and dreaded the implications of that.

  With no further words, he ripped my shirt up the back, and a scream erupted from me; it was so loud that Maura snapped out of her daze. When Michael pinned my arm behind my back, I screamed in pain, knowing then that what I was experiencing was real; though one can feel another's touch in a dream, one cannot feel pain. If I were merely dreaming or hallucinating, I would not feel as though my shoulder were about to pop out of its socket or that my wrists were about to break within his hard, unyielding grip.

  When he turned me around and forced me down so that I was lying on my stomach, I saw Maura look right at me, right into my eyes and very slowly bring her hands up to cover her ears. It was such a calculated movement, and yet I knew that she was not only being malicious; she also could not stand to hear me screaming. As usual, she was too petrified to even listen, let alone act.

  “JAMES!” I screamed, but my heart plummeted immediately. Our fight had been vicious, and had ended worse than any we had ever had before. He would not come for me. And yet, I saw him bathed in the warm light from the dwindling bonfire, sleeping sitting up with a chaotic fluttering in his chest. He was drunk, and he was snoring loudly, but there was no peace in his unconscious mind. His instincts told him that I was in danger, and despite his anger at me, he wanted to run to my voice, and find me, and stop whoever or whatever was causing me such terrible pain. His unconscious being ran towards me, searching for me. Soon he would come, and soon, Michael would be dead.

  “Together, we'll kill you.” I snapped at Michael, and that last defense, my animal fury, roared to life inside of me. “Once he pulls you off of me, I'll rip out your throat!” I kicked my foot up and back, and heard him grunt. His grip released, and I crawled frantically across the floor until I managed to get onto my feet. I ran out of the door and was so thankful when it slammed behind me.

  The next room that pulled me in was where I found Lucien, trembling, crying, and choking on pool water.

  “Luc...” I managed to whisper, and I was aware that my legs had given out beneath me. I was crouched on my knees in front of him, and he was tentatively walking towards me. Worse than the visual evidence of how he had died—the water, the way he was choking, the way his mouth was contorted to show that he was crying, the gash in his head—was the look of fear in his eyes that had nothing to do with the fact that he was in the process of dying that terrible death. His fear was of me, and me alone, and his mind screamed the very same panicked thoughts I had long dreaded he had been having as he died.

  “BRYNNA!” I heard him screaming in that little voice of his that I remembered so well. “Brynn, help me! Brynn! Why won't she... where? Brynna!”

  “Luc, I'm so sorry. I'm sorry.” The words were barely audible over his screaming thoughts, which were reverberating through the room like the cruelest aural torture imaginable; it was able to drive me out of my mind, and I would never return. The sound was able to do that far easier than any horror I had faced so far or would face later. I had suffered many things in my life, many injustices, many pains that were so far beyond my age, many that were far beyond the understanding of anyone. But Lucien's death was the event in my life that stole every God-given ability I possessed. As I tried to find the words to assure him, I stammered. As I tried to breathe, I could only choke out sobs that twisted my stomach into tight, agonizing knots. The only thing I could do was reach out my arms to him. The only action I could take was to hold him, and to find the mental words somewhere in my chaotically panicking mind to pray that holding him would soothe his fears. Before that even, I would pray that he would come to me, at all.

  But he did. And the moment he fell into my arms, the sounds of his thoughts quieted to nothing, and he could breathe again. His slight weight registered inside of my arms, and it was so real, so amazingly real; he was right there, alive again in my arms, calm and alive. I could feel his heart beating against mine, and that beat slowed from a steady gallop to beat at a soothed, lightly treading two-step. Somehow, he trusted me. Somehow, he knew he was safe with me. In response to that, and in response to how real that dream of him was to me, so much so that I believed it was not a dream, I cried until not a sound could be made from me, until not a breath could be taken. Whenever I managed to draw in a shuddering, half-breath, it fell from me again as I said his name. Once, I managed to say, “I love you,” before I was crying too hard to manage any more words.

  The house was a cruel place of emotional torture, and my reconciliation with that spirit of my brother was not meant to occur there. It was not in the plan of those terrible things that were causing me to see and experience every horror I had ever faced. Far off in some other place that I believed I had never even visited, I heard Violet telling me that it wasn't my fault, and I realized that I was saying the opposite aloud, over and over again, and in my tone, I could hear such regret and guilt that it could not have been me saying them; surely no living creature could feel those things to such a degree of intensity. Surely that intensity would be too much.

  My arms collapsed in on themselves, and he was gone. Before I could even cry out in protest to his sudden disappearance, to the fact that I could no longer feel his small arms clasping onto me tightly, I was pulled backwards out of the room by one of the house's unexplainable inhalations, and this time, it was abrupt and furious, because those beasts knew that a part of their plan had misfired, and I had felt something other than utter terror, regret, and guilt, even if only for a moment. When I landed on my stomach with a crash that knocked the wind from me, the floor jerked upwards so that I was forced to throw myself up to avoid being smashed in the face by the planks as they split apart and then resealed themselves perfectly.

  My feet carried me forward until the door to the next room was beside me, and this time, I did not exclaim or gasp when I was pulled inside but rather, just squeezed my eyes shut and curled up on the ground.

  “No, you get back in there!”

  It was my father, and when I opened my eyes, I saw my ten-year-old self staring back at me, eyes wide, tears streaming freely, with my tiny hands covering my head protectively. When I heard the whizzing of his belt through the air, I cringed, and watched as she began to squeeze her eyes shut, just as I did the same.

  I had forgotten how painful it was. It was so much worse than anything he was capable of with his hands. When I screamed, it was the same sound that I had made at ten, when he would come home from work, and find something, anything that I had done wrong, even if it was something so simple as not moving out of his way fast enough.

  “You do it on purpose!” He yelled, and he hit me again. “You do a lot of shit on purpose, don't you?! Get back in your room!”

  He was not shouting that last part at me, I realized. At ten years old, when I was in such a state of terror and experiencing such breath-stealing pain, I had not heard her screaming at him. But my mother had tried to stop him once or twice, but only when he got out of hand. And that particular time, the one that I was rel
iving right then, was one of the worst. I still cannot tell you why; I do not remember what I did that was so terrible; I do not know what caused him to feel such strong ire for me on that particular day. But whatever caused it does not matter; all that matters is that even in unconsciousness (which, quite unmercifully, came fifteen minutes after the first blow from his belt) I could still feel the sting of it.

  I also remember that I was unable to return to school for three weeks, and my mother had stayed home during that time but had not cared for me. That job had been left to Maura, who had still not looked me in the eyes, even though Michael had been jailed for almost a year.

  “I'm sorry, Daddy! I'm sorry!” I was screaming, “I didn't mean to! I'm sorry!”

  “He's dead! You’re sorry?! You think I care that you're sorry?! My little boy is dead! My son is dead!”

  Somehow, in the present, I managed to get onto my knees and turn away from the scene. When my shaking legs finally would support my weight, I ran from that room and pulled the wooden door shut behind me, only to be jerked backwards into yet another room. This time, though, it did not look like a decaying room in a decrepit, breathing house. I was outside, in the bright sunlight. The air was warm, but I could not smell it. I was sopping wet, and my tears added to that, as they cascaded down my face. Elijah was beside me, crying hysterically and grabbing clumps of his hair in his hand as I banged on Lucien's chest, trying to scream at Elijah to call 911 but only able to scream.

  Words came, but they were useless.

  “Eli, he's not breathing! Oh, my God! I can't wake him up! Eli, I can't wake him up! And he's not breathing! He's not breathing!”

  I still do not know why I said this, because at the time it made no sense at all, but in that present moment, when I knew in the back of my mind that I was just experiencing another terror within my own personal living nightmare, I understood.

  “I want to wake up!” I had told Elijah then, “Oh, my God! This isn't happening. Eli, I want to wake up. I want to wake up.” And I repeated myself, even though I was barely able to breathe.

  My father had been the first one home, and when he had thrown open the door, the glass had shattered. He had demanded to know what had happened, and after he realized that Lucien could not be resuscitated, he had grabbed my face and looked me over, and there had been concern in his eyes. There had been fear that I had somehow almost drowned, too. It was not until after Eli said that he had found me unresponsive, though those certainly were not his exact words, that my father's gaze had iced over, and I saw nothing, truly, but the deepest wrath and above all else, great hatred. Lucien had been his favorite, because Lucien had looked just like him. It seems like a ridiculous reason to love one child over the others, but from listening to other people's thoughts, I have discovered that it is the most common reason amongst parents. My father had seen himself reflected in Lucien, and losing him was too much to bear. When there was no one to blame but me, he blamed me. And I deserved it. I know I did.

  “My love...” Adam's voice reverberated through the house, and yet his tone was so gentle. Frantically, my heart beat, begging me to find him. I threw myself backwards, away from that day that had forever changed my life, and I was dry once again. With the last store of my strength, I began to run, searching for Adam.

  “Brynna, come to my voice, darling. Just follow my voice, and you will find your way out.”

  It was his language in which he was speaking, but I could understand him perfectly. The terror that was so undiluted sent searing pain through my chest and pumping through my veins. But Adam's voice slowed its rapid spread, and I was able to focus. After whipping around a corner, I began to see a light at the end of the hallway. It was from that light that Adam's voice was emanating.

  My body needed no second command; instantly, it jerked forward to run towards that light. But the house was angry, and that anger made it stronger. When another door banged open, and that wind began to suck me backwards into it, I grabbed onto the door frame and pulled, gritting my teeth and screaming with effort as I tried to pull myself back out.

  The force was too strong, and I flew backwards with that wind and slammed against the back wall. Coughing, gasping, and struggling to stand back up on my feet, I swiped at my eyes and kept them cast to the floor, so afraid of what I would see. I just could not handle anymore.

  Rachel Lilien.

  What is your name again? I heard myself asking her curtly on that day so many years earlier, when I was eighteen and even more rude and angry than I had been at twenty-two.

  Rachel. She had answered, and she had smiled. Immediately, I had been affected by that smile; it landed on my heart and left a tiny impression.

  Rachel Lilien, I had said, and I knew why she had come. During election years, the press camped for days outside the gates of our garishly Addams family-like mansion. That year, I had been forced to move out, and somehow, Rachel Lilien, an online journalist whom I have discussed in this re-telling of events before, had discovered my whereabouts while the other press had been searching madly.

  That’s your name, isn’t it? I heard myself asking her.

  That’s my name.

  “Rachel…” I said to her, and she smiled that smile at me again. “Rachel, I…”

  Her spirit was too good. It was too perfect. The house could not corrupt it. I could sense in the minds of those creatures their plan for her ghost; they wanted her to admonish me for letting my parents have her and her best friend and partner killed. They wanted her to tell me that she knew that I had known about it, even though I had only suspected. But my slight suspicion should have been shared with her, as it might have saved their lives. She had died clutching her chest, gasping for breath, and once, just once, she had wondered if maybe I had done it.

  “Not true.” She said to me, and she shook her head slightly. “I knew.”

  “Did you?” I asked, and tears leaked from my eyes, “I always hoped you did.”

  “I did.” I reached out to her, wanting to take one of her beautifully shapely hands in mine the way that I had so many times over our three years. But when her hand was wrapped in mine, all the guilt I had so long suppressed regarding her death stole my temporary calmness away, and my knees were giving out, and she was catching me.

  If there was one death about which I forced myself to feel nothing, it was hers. Somehow, I knew if my parents even suspected I was grieving for her, they would believe they were triumphant. And Rachel’s spirit, I always liked to think, was glad that I had not grieved.

  While I was in her arms, I had looked up at her.

  “I never said ‘I love you,’ but I did. I did, Rachel.”

  The house wanted her to scream at me that all she had wanted after three years was to hear those words from me. But instead, because she was so good, and so perfect, she nodded, smiled again, and touched my face.

  “I knew. I always knew, sweetheart.”

  I cried harder when the house pulled me from her arms. She watched me go, still smiling, so unfazed by the darkness all around her, and right before I was pulled completely from the room, she said to me words she had said to me so many times:

  “You’re a fighter, baby. A survivor. Don’t forget it.”

  I tried to hold onto those words, and I did for a long moment, but when I was thrown into the next room, the feelings of peace I had felt with her—indeed, the feelings of peace I had always felt with her—disappeared, and something else was brewing within me. I had already experienced rage and sadness at a level that would surely kill human beings. But someone was speaking to me reassuringly, telling me that everything was going to be alright, that I was alright. That person's accent was vaguely British but slightly different. I could only assume in my state that it was Maura, but instead of pitying her, or feeling that forgiveness and emptiness of pain that had taken hold of me after she had died, I felt only the most animalistic, blindly wild rage. And luckily for me (but quite unfortunately for her) it was her who was ther
e in that room. She was just standing, telling me softly that it was alright. She did not try to approach me, but she was genuinely concerned. There was no way that I could pretend that I did not see that concern in her eyes.

  “You!” I screamed, and my fangs shot out. “You didn't stop him!”

  “I know.” She cried, and she covered her face. “I was afraid, Brynna. I was so scared of him. I'm sorry.”

  “You were afraid!?”

  In a blur of movement, I had rushed forward and pinned her against one of the breathing walls. I was aware of the fact that my fangs had come out and of the overwhelming desire to bite her.

  “I was afraid of him!” I shouted. “Uncover your ears!”

  I punched the wall beside her head.

  “Uncover your ears!”

  In both hands, I grabbed her wrists and pulled. Once her hands were off of her ears, I grabbed a handful of her hair and pulled her head sideways, opening my mouth, baring my fangs...

  “Brynna!” Penny's voice screamed down the hallway, just as I prepared myself for the glorious moment when I could rip into Maura's throat.

  “Penny?” I asked, and my fangs retracted.

  It was almost as though I had never been angry, or like I had never seen Maura at all. The two fistfuls of her shirt I had been holding as I pinned her to the wall disappeared, and after glancing back just briefly over my shoulder, even though I did not care what I saw, I discovered that all of her had gone. The room was empty.

  “Brynna!” Penny was wailing, but her voice was changing. Not only was crying now instead of just screaming, but her voice was getting more mature. She was becoming someone else, as well. I was relieved by that; the last person I needed to see being harmed was Penny, as she was, to put it far too simply, the greatest love in my life, and to see her in pain or in her moment of death would stop my heart quite literally. I would never survive if I lost her.

  By the time I reached the door, her voice had changed over to my mother's completely. This time, nothing pulled me inside; I had the choice to bypass whatever cruel emotional torture lay waiting for me within the confines of that room. If I wanted to keep walking and continue looking for an escape, I could. Though it is quite disgusting, a large part of me wanted nothing more than to abandon her all over again, for reasons that did not reflect well on my character; I did not want to see what was happening to her because I did not want to feel that great guilt, and another fraction of that large part of me just did not care, as she deserved plenty of pain, in the darkest part of my soul's view, for her abandonment and ignorance all those years ago. Seeing Lucien dying and remembering her stupors and drunken rages were enough for me to forget the horror of seeing how the house purported she had died.

  Twisting the doorknob, I was prepared for whatever I saw. The house made me believe that she had survived the blast and the flood and had been killed by angry survivors for the role she played in the destruction of the world they all shared. If I were to open the door and see her being killed by them, surely my heart would be struck with supreme horror, and my knees would buckle and collapse, but I would just turn away and crawl from the room if that was what it took. The sight would be traumatic for me, but I would not allow myself to be tortured by it the way everything else the creatures of the house had shown had tortured me.

  Even though she was screaming my name before I opened the door, once I was inside, I saw that my mother was sitting with my nine year old self, talking to her calmly and grasping both of her hands. I could see my young, tear-streaked face clearly, but I could not see her because she was sitting with her back to me. When I walked to the side so I could watch them, she turned her head, almost as though she knew I was there, though she did not address me directly.

  The memory was one I remembered just vaguely, as it had seemed so trivial after she had pledged her allegiance to my father in the great war that had engulfed my family.

  “You can tell me, honey. You can tell me everything, and I promise I won't get mad. Just tell me what happened.” Her slender hand reached out to touch my face; I was amazed by how much Penny looked like me. When my features were younger, and my eyes seemed so round and full of a mixture of perpetual terror and wonder, she was my spitting image. My mother wiped my tears away and gently assured me again that I could tell her everything, and no harm would befall her, or Dad, or Maura, whose name she had said with a very slight edge that I had not noticed at the time but was hearing clearly now.

  My words were jumbled, and skipped over themselves, almost like when one plays a record that has been scratched deeply, and the song that had been playing clearly lurches forward and skips with jumps and shudders that startle the listener. Though her face was still shrouded in shadow, I could feel the slow bloom of ice inside of her, like a stillborn rose being born black and rotted. That blooming flower held venomous barbs that pierced her inside; she literally felt sick. Somehow, at that age, I knew how she felt, and my tears intensified, and I began to apologize. The shame was beyond anything that I can describe to you with words that accurately depict it.

  “No, don't apologize, honey. It's not your fault. It's not.” She pulled me to her, and I did not cringe as her arms encased me, nor did I attempt to pull away. My small, fragile body sunk into hers, and my skeletal arms wrapped around her back and squeezed.

  “Why didn't you tell me, honey?”

  I had not realized it at the time, but she was fighting tears by biting her lip. I could only see that particular action; the rest of her face was still missing.

  “Because I was ashamed of it, Mommy.”

  The words fell from my lips just as the little girl said them.

  As if those words were the key that unlocked it, the door at the far end of the room swung open and pulled me forward. I did not fight it this time, as I was losing my ability to fight. Every part of my physical and emotional strength had been stolen away.

  Penny had just fallen asleep, and I was reading a book that Maura had given me earlier in the day. The lights on the Christmas tree were lighting up the pages, and though I was so wonderfully absorbed in the words I was reading (I remember it was the sixth book of my most favorite series of all time, and that though the book had only been in my possession for mere hours, I was three-quarters of the way finished) that I barely noticed the knock on the door. My foot had been absentmindedly rocking Penny in her little swing that she insisted on sleeping in even though, at three years old, she was far too big for it, and I slowed the rocking down delicately as the person knocked again, this time more urgently. Carefully, I had stood up and walked over to the door, opening it only a little, just to be safe. No one was there, and with a heavy sigh, I threw open the door completely, hoping to catch in the act the obnoxious little boys from down the hall who had taken it as their God-given job to aggravate me. But it was not them.

  I looked down to find a large Christmas bag full of presents, and when I looked up the hallway, I had seen a flash of red disappear around the wall where the elevator was. I did not hear the bell ringing to signify that the person had pushed the button that called the elevator up, though. That flash of red had been a woman's coat, and I knew which woman it was. I did not hear her light footsteps going down the stairs, and I could feel someone's presence in the hallway with me, which told me that she was still standing there, waiting for something, but for what, I did not know.

  I glanced back over my shoulder to make sure that Penny was still sound asleep, and then checked to make sure that my keys were still in my hand. After letting the door close behind me quietly, I knelt down and dug through the tissue paper on top of whatever was in the bag. If my mother really had delivered it, I entertained the thought that it probably contained the decapitated head of some animal, maybe a horse, like in The Godfather. She and my father were trying to horrify me on Christmas, as I had horrified them by “murdering” my brother all those years ago, or by engaging in an unholy romance with one of their greatest adversaries, who just so happ
ened to be of my same sex. Honestly, I had experienced very many horrors in my life, as you very well know, and not many things could startle or rattle me, including severed heads of livestock.

  What awaited me at the bottom of that bag was far more horrifying than that, anyway. There were three boxes, one of which contained a pair of knit boots that I had circled in a magazine several months earlier; I had been at the house picking up Penny and had grown bored while Maura was getting her ready to go. Violet and I had been talking and looking through the magazine. Just as my mother came in the door, I had gasped and exclaimed, “These will be on my far too overcrowded shoe rack within the day!” And Violet had giggled, because she still found my overly intricate sentences amusing in those days. But in my haste to leave once my mother had made her entrance, I had forgotten all about those beautiful knit boots and had just taken Penny's carriage from Maura, shied away from the hug she tried to give me, and left, ignoring Maura's statement that if I needed any help at all, to call her.

  “Just leave her alone.” My mother had said to her, but she had murmured it, thinking that I could not hear.

  “Oh, would you like to say goodbye to her? To your daughter?” I had returned to the kitchen, holding Penny on my hip, and turned slightly so Penny was facing her, and my mother could see her beautiful, cherubic face.

  “Brynna, darling, just go home.” Maura had urged me gently. “Don't start this again.”

  “No?” I asked my mother in a tone of lightness and apathy and cruel teasing. “Aww...” I shook my head back and forth in condescending shame. “It is quite alright, Mother. She barely knows who you are, and thank God or the Gods for that!”

  And I had left, laughing to myself at how very pathetic she was.

  I plummeted back to the present memory, as my hands began to open the second box. The present inside actually elicited a gasp from me. It was Ariel by Sylvia Plath, and because the binding creaked when I opened it, and because of the overall old-fashioned look of it, I knew that it was a first edition.

  “Oh, my God...” I muttered, and believe me, not adding “or Gods” onto the end of that was nearly impossible for me back then, so obviously, I was very shocked and quite thrilled. A blue sticky bookmark was placed on one of the pages, and when I flipped it open to the page, I found that it marked Plath's most famous poem. The previous owner must have marked it...

  The third box was smaller, able to be held with just one hand. When I pulled the top off, I gasped again.

  The bracelet was made by two silver circles that were clasped together by a charm at the end. It glinted beautifully in the dim hallway lighting. From this bracelet hung seven tiny charms, all made of pure silver or gold, all seemingly random: an apple, a double-decker bus, a tiny bearded man with a sword and shield, an oval-shaped bead with swirls of light pink and white within it, a Buddha, a cupcake, and a baby carriage. They were all so random, and yet they were not. Perfectly, they hung together on that bracelet; I know that they looked perfect together because I turned it over many, many times there in the hallway, so mesmerized by it. My eyes drunk in the sight of it the way a dying man drinks in miraculous salvation, truly; I don’t think I had ever seen any material thing that was quite so beautiful or so alluring to my eyes. I was so transfixed by it that I did not notice the silence in the hallway. I did not notice it until it was no longer silence; at the end of the hallway, around the corner, I heard movement.

  I threw myself upwards and ran forward, my feet thumping hard against the creaking wooden floorboards. When I came hurtling around the corner of the wall, I saw that she was standing on the first step going down. The elevator door opened, telling me that she had only begun to take the stairs when the elevator did not come quickly enough for her to escape me.

  “Hey.”

  I had not known what else to say. She nodded in response but kept her face angled away from me.

  “I, um...” I ran my fingers through my hair and became aware of the fact that I was trembling. “Thank you. I, um...” I cleared my throat and tried to cross my arms and lean against the wall to show that what she had done had not affected me too much. “I love them. All of them. Thank you.”

  She had nodded again, and muttered something about John that I did not hear. My heart sunk, though; it sounded like she said, “John wanted you to have something,” which insinuated that John had made her do it, or that John had gotten all of it on his own, which I knew was highly unlikely, and yet I still allowed myself to begin believing it.

  Despite that belief, I had said what I said next, knowing that the rejection would sting when it came, not if.

  “Do you...” I had cleared my throat again, “Do you, um...” I turned my head on the side the way I did when I was feeling either puzzled or emotionally frazzled, both of which were accurate descriptions of me in that moment. I never reached out, not to her, not to anyone, and I did not want to reach out to her then. Surely, if she said no, I would be so angry and humiliated that I would never be able to regard her with the cool indifference I had worked so hard to build. Every time she was in my presence, I would feel inadequate, and more unwanted than I already did. Whatever was left between us, if there was anything, would be shattered, irreparably, all because I broke free from my typical behavioral trends and reached out to her. Still, I asked.

  “Do you want to come inside?”

  Now, in real life, she had given me a curt shake of her head, and murmured, “Take care of yourself,” under her breath before walking away. But for some reason, the moment shifted and changed there in the creatures' house, and she turned back to me and reached out to take my hand. I grasped hers in my own, and though I tried to suppress it, I smiled, and she did, too.

  I still cannot decide if that moment with her, when she grasped my hand and agreed to come back to the apartment with me (however unreal it might have been) was like waking from a terrible nightmare to be soothed by reality where there are no monsters, tidal waves, or bombs to end one's life, or if it was like experiencing that strangely comforting feeling of being within the best dream, where one dreads the moment when consciousness returns, because then one knows that that feeling is a lie, that it was all just in the mind. I am inclined to believe that it is the latter, as the feeling that I get right now as I am writing these words is very similar to the feeling I awoke with this morning, when I saw another person in my dreams, and felt his arms around me, and his eyes gazing into mine with such love and also, such longing... It is nostalgia, I think; it is the discovery of some new non-reality coupled with memories of beautiful times spent with the person one encountered. When it is events and not people that provoke that feeling, it is no different; it is the mind's recognition of a moment or a memory that might have been real, at one time.

  Whatever one wishes to believe, it is peculiar. I just know that I could feel my mother's hand grasped in mine, and that as we walked down the hallway, I laid my head against her shoulder, and she had turned her head so she could kiss mine.

  Violet says that she heard me mutter about loving something. She also heard me ask someone if they wanted to come in. She said that I had smiled, and yet tears were falling freely from my eyes. In that moment, she says, Adam stopped talking to me, and she sensed that he was allowing me to experience whatever it was that had brought that smile to my face.

  The possibilities of that moment were endless. As we walked back to my apartment, I could see them all. We were going to start speaking again. She was going to start visiting. Penny would have both her real mother and me. Mom was going to leave my father. She was going to forgive me for what had happened...

  “LIE!”

  The deafening unanimous shout of all the beasts in the house broke the manufactured memory into pieces. Penny's deafening scream ripped into me as punishment for changing what they had thought would weaken me further; the original memory was one of the saddest I could recall.

  When Adam had asked me to recall the last time I had shed tears, it was that
memory on which I had allowed myself to dwell just briefly. I had shut it down quickly because at even the thought of it, I could be devastated; when she had left me there, I had returned to my apartment, and though I tried to keep it down, I cried so loudly that I awoke Penny.

  For some reason, hearing her shrill cries that were in response to my own had frightened me. Hiccupping, I had returned to her and lifted her tiny, delicate body into my arms.

  “It's okay.”

  My voice had trembled and jumped as the tears struggled to return. But I knew that I had upset Penny, and as you have gathered by now, Penny's life, happiness, and well-being were far more important than my own. The tears stopped abruptly because I could not stand that I had scared Penny.

  “Shh...” I had kissed her forehead, “It is just you and me now, baby. She is gone. It was nothing.” I shook my head as I cradled her. “It was nothing.”

  I had vowed in those moments to burn the gifts that she had given me in the fire that was burning away in my fireplace. But I could not. Like a fool blinding herself to the harsh truth of it all, I told myself that I was simply attached to the items, not to the person who had given them to me. I pretended that I did not want to see the hard work of the people who had made those gifts go to waste. Sure enough, even there in the present, in the house, that bracelet was around my wrist still, where it always was. The boots, so worn out on the bottoms that if I stepped in a shallow puddle, my socks would be soaked, had been thrown away a week before I met James in the bar, and the book had been one that I had thrown into my book bag and taken with me, on that day when James and I had left my apartment, when I had chosen, with actual tears in my eyes and a hollow pit where my stomach had once been, the books that I would be taking with me.

  “I’ll leave you all alone.” James had told me as I surveyed my massive bookshelves, swallowing the lump in my throat that I had not felt for a year. He had left, and I had run my hands over the spines of the ones I could reach, and one… just one… solitary tear had fallen from each of my eyes.

  I was running after Penny in the house, hearing those shrill wails once again. She was crying in the voice she had possessed as a baby, and yet I knew when I found her, she would be as she was in the present.

  “Brynna!”

  James's voice. He was outside.

  “James!” I screamed, and I could feel him coming closer. I heard the door to the house go crashing through the decrepit foyer after he had kicked it down.

  The house froze. The breathing stopped. Silence left me covering my ears.

  “Brynn? Baby, where are you?” James asked.

  “I'm...” My voice could not rise above a whisper. I cleared my throat impatiently and struggled to keep it steady long enough for me to get the words out at a volume that he could hear. “I'm here!”

  First, I heard the sound of his feet landing on the first creaking stair. Then, the house began to breathe and writhe again, and the whispers resumed, deafening us both.

  “James! I'm up here!”

  A whirling wind wrapped its cold, merciless hands around me and pulled. I was dragged into the last room, the darkest, the one where they all were waiting. Every horned devil of a memory I had racketing about in my head played out before my eyes, every fear I had ever contemplated, however briefly and at whatever intensity, was felt at full blast in my heart, the deepest sadness one could possibly fathom forced tears from my eyes, and Penny was screaming, screaming, screaming... Her tears were my tears, and I was begging them to let her go, to let her run away, to take me instead... Michael was on top of me, grinding against my fragile, shaking body; my father's fists rained hard blows on me, my mother was screaming, begging them to spare her life, begging me to take her with us, begging to know why I had left her behind... Maura was dying in my arms and sitting beside me covering her ears, and all the while, Penny was screaming, and my nine-year-old self was screaming, and so was my ten-year-old-self, and my eleven-year-old self, and twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen… I was screaming through every year of my life, and through eternities, and Penny was screaming right along with me…

  Somewhere, in some other place, I was running. I could feel it in my legs, and yet my body was paralyzed on the floor of that house. But in my mind, I could see the trees surrounding some village, and I was getting closer to them, seeing the creatures that dwelt within them dragging Penny off... I had to reach her, but I wasn't actually moving...

  “Brynna! Brynna!” James had finally arrived, just as Michael grabbed the back of my shirt and began to pull me away.

  “James!” I wailed, and he dove forward to grab my hands. With one strong jerk, he pulled me away and up into his arms. I cried into his shoulder, still screaming and fighting despite knowing that I was safe now that he was with me. My body wanted to fight so badly that it did not realize who it was fighting.

  The proverbial ghosts of my past, though they were quite literal in that shadow world, had frozen again. The voices had silenced. My body slumped against his as my fists squeezed two handfuls of his shirt, and my eyes let tears rain down on his shoulder without pause.

  “Alright. Alright, come on. Baby, we have to go.” He was whispering, his eyes fixated on the images that were projected from both the darkest parts of my memory and the most sadistically creative parts of my mind that tortured me with all the possibilities of what could have been and what could still occur. They were all around us, frozen in time like grotesque statues in a graveyard.

  Even after he had lifted me, he was still staring at them. When I looked, I gave one cry that was also three: a cry of sadness, a cry of fear, and a cry of rage; all the emotions that had so tormented me for however long I had been in their snare. Amongst the images of my family members that I have described, there were perfectly replicated models of my sisters, brother, James, Adam, Alice, Quinn, and Nick, lying dead before me. The room was overflowing with my worst possible thoughts, all made tangible and real for me to see.

  “I want to go.” I whispered, and my hands that were around his neck tightened. My torso turned so I could feel his strong heart beating against my own. When it pounded away against my chest, I only cried harder; the physical contact between us was calming me, telling me that he really was there; from that, I knew that I was finally going to be alright.

  “We're asleep. You know that, don't you?”

  “I'm not, James.” I shook my head at him, “James, I think I might have died.”

  I had not meant to say it. The words had tumbled from my mouth. In my throat, I could almost feel small fingers working my voice-box so I would speak the words that the mysterious puppeteer wanted me to say.

  “What?” He looked down at me, and I could feel my back beginning to seep blood onto his arms.

  The terror in him was quick, unyielding. It snatched his breath and brought him to his knees. Keeping me laid against one of his arms, he brought his other hand up to touch my face.

  “Brynna!” He managed to gasp out, as my body shook violently. I was fully aware of myself, and yet I could see how I looked; my body was seizing and retching as the venom coursed through me, grinding every bodily operation to a brutal, sudden stop.

  “Brynn! Baby!” He exclaimed, but I was dead. I could not answer him. My head had turned sideways, and my dead eyes stared out, watching only what was immediately in my vision. I could not turn my head to see anything else, and inside, I struggled and screamed and fought, begging my body to move, begging God or the Gods to return my soul to my body so I could tell him that all he was about to experience was not real.

  “Oh, no, no, no...” I had never heard him cry that way, and in my chest, my stopped heart still managed to rip into two bleeding, jagged-edged pieces that fell deeper into me to cut into my frozen organs, causing old, useless blood to flow freely. It made no sense; I was alive enough to feel pain, but I was dead enough to be paralyzed. I was alive enough to think clearly, but my limbs would not answer the calls my mind was placing frantically.r />
  The claustrophobia of it all was worse than I can describe, and from every part of my heart, I begged to return. I bartered. I pleaded with whatever trinkets were valued in the land of the dead, though obviously I cannot remember them now. Adam's voice was whispering to me, but it could not soothe me as it did before. All I wanted was to reach out to him, to him and James both, and beg the former to help me return to my body, and assure the latter that I would return.

  “Oh, baby… Oh, my love...” His lips kissed mine, and translucent tears fell from my blankly staring eyes; I could feel them, but he could not see them. I wanted to tell him that I was alright... I wanted to grasp his face and comfort him, to tell him I loved him so, so much, and that I was so sorry... Things would be different. We would find a way to resolve our differences. We would be what we had been at a time that seemed so far off in the past, and yet so close, as well...

  “I love you so much. Oh, God...” His tears grew more hysterical, and even though I was no longer living, I could still utilize my gift or rather, my gift could utilize me. I heard the guilt as it spread like a plague through his mind, infecting every thought, even the ones rationalizing that all of this was a dream.

  “Oh, God, it's all my fault... I'm so sorry. I shouldn't have left you. Brynna, I'm sorry!” He cried harder, and kissed my face wherever he could. I could feel his tears against my skin that was growing colder by the second; his tears warmed wherever they touched.

  Beneath us, the ground gave a rumble that was slight at first. As it intensified, the walls began to slowly breathe in and out. James looked up, and his own nightmare began.

  His hands never released me, but when my life sprang back into my body, he did not realize it, as he was staring straight ahead at his own demons.

  His wife. Her eyes stared at him as blankly as mine had, and her head stayed tilted at a disturbingly sharp angle; her cheek was rested against her shoulder, and at the top of her head, a large, open wound was festering. Still, black blood bled from that wound onto the floor in rapidly falling drops that exploded almost deafeningly. A few of his lovers, whispering that they would never tell her, that they loved him, and in his heart, I felt his urge to run away from them, to cut off all ties, even though he had made them care for him. He felt so guilty; he had not thought it possible to feel any more guilt, but he did. Knowing all the lives he had left ruined in his wake during his many years of taking lovers and dropping them shortly after the taking. To know that he had to hurt them simply because he could not bring himself to feel the same way sickened him, and yet he could not stop himself from behaving that way.

  His mother was holding suitcases, a burning cigarette hanging from her sloppily lipsticked mouth. Her blue eyeshadow was applied far too generously, and her foundation was several shades darker than her natural skin tone.

  “You keep 'im. You wanted 'im.” His mother spat. “Dragged me halfway 'cross the country to get 'im. So you keep 'im.”

  My parents had not wanted me after Lucien died. James's parents had never wanted him, period.

  In those moments I was not supposed to see, I learned more about him than I had in a year. I finally learned a few of James Maxwell's deeply guarded, dark secrets. Finally, I glimpsed his skeletons, after he had seen every last one of mine.

  I jerked up, and he jumped. Then, he was holding onto my face, looking at me in disbelief.

  “But you were...”

  “That's what they wanted you to think. It's what you're afraid of. Come on!” I grabbed his hand, and pulled him up onto his feet. “Just don't look at them!”

  He was still staring, in utter horror, at those scenes from his memories he had so long suppressed.

  “James, honey, come on!” I urged him loudly, “We have to go!”

  The house roared its response to that, and he and I both could tell that the creatures were protesting the idea of their victims escaping. When we tried to run out of the door, it slammed shut. They pulled away from the walls and took their individualized forms. Slowly but surely, the terrible black house fell away, and we were surrounded by them. The whispering was so loud that my head spun; the non-ceasing rumble of noise was enough to deafen me temporarily.

  “Baby, run!” He yelled over them.

  “What? No!” I screamed back, and because I was covering my ears, I could hear my own voice; I was utterly frantic and utterly resistant to that idea.

  “RUN!” He ordered, and so many of the creatures rushed forward to grab him that I could not possibly count them all. When they tried to grab me with their freakishly long, pointed fingers, I ducked down to the ground and crawled out, suffering more scratches in the process.

  “JAMES!” I wailed when I stood back up.

  They were dragging him away. More were surrounding him. Soon, he would be destroyed by them. Soon, he would be reborn as one of them.

  “JAMES!” Tears cascaded down my cheeks, and Adam's voice was in the distance, calling me back to him.

  “Run! Brynna, run! Run!”

  Sobbing, retching, and shaking, I obeyed, and my voice could only say his name. Through my tears, I could only say his name.

  The pain that had taken hold of my body was unbearable. It stemmed from my back and radiated throughout me, ripping away any other thought I could have besides ones that begged to know what was causing such agony and why it was being inflicted so cruelly upon me. In those woods, I wandered, listening to the whispers of those creatures and James's screams, and searching for Adam's voice, searching for some light that would lead me to the place where I would realize that all I was experiencing was a dream.

  God was in those woods, my mind told me. The Old Spirit God. The one that wreaked havoc. The one that destroyed. The one that gnashed its teeth and demanded pain and sacrifice. But was my own? Was He or She, or were They there?

  “Oh, God...” I slunk to my knees, knowing that the labyrinth of trees went on forever. The shadow-forest was merciless in its endlessness, and endless in its mercilessness.

  “My dearest Brynna...” Adam's voice whispered, “The darkest evil has not yet broken the horizon.”

  And it was those words, which, as you know, were spoken in reality, that jolted me back to my senses. That was when I had seen that James was alright. That was when I had begged them not to argue. That was when I had tried to run back to Penny, after being plunged back into that hellish world and seeing what I had seen earlier, with the tree line and Penny being dragged over it by those creatures.

  After I was laid back in bed, the doctor instructed them that it was time for the poison to be extracted from my system. Even in my delusional state, I knew that it was James who did the honors first, as they say. When he had sucked all of the black, foamy substance out of two of the cuts in my back, I heard him spitting and gagging. Adam took over after that; only so much of the tree beast's venom can come into contact with any part of a human's body before they begin to experience side effects. The pain of having the venom removed was as breathtaking as when it had been coursing through my body, but once it was over, I collapsed onto the sheets, drenched in sweat, only moaning softly. Not crying. Not screaming. Just moaning in exhaustion beyond physical, beyond mental. As insane as it sounds, my very soul was in need of rest.

  “That's it. It's all over, baby.” James was whispering to me gently. I was still lying on my stomach, and he had gotten down on his knees beside the bed so he could look into my eyes. “You're going to be just fine.”

  I nodded and whispered to him that I wanted to turn over onto my back.

  “What, sweetheart?” He asked me gently.

  I whispered it again and only Adam understood. Very delicately, he turned me over onto my back. Using sign language I had learned in one of the only college classes I had actually attended, I signed to him weakly my thanks, to which he responded in sign language. A weak smile pulled at my lips, and I looked over at James. My hand reached out to him, and I stroked his face once.

  “Like it was?” I ask
ed, and I believed that he could not understand.

  But tears brimmed in his warm brown eyes, and he nodded.

  “Yeah, baby. Everything's going to be like it was.”

  I nodded and kept my hand rested on his face. With the other, I grasped Adam's hand. For a long, blissful moment, I looked at both of them, at their handsome, blatantly manly features: strong jaws, stubble, chiseled noses. I studied James's beautiful light brown eyes that glowed with the warmth of the love he felt for me. I observed Adam's coolly glistening sea-green eyes that never failed to steal my breath or consume me in curiosity and passion (because the two are very close, and connected very frequently, if one can believe it.) My grip on their hands tightened as I began to drift into an almost celestially peaceful sleep.

  “Stay... with... me.”

  And almost simultaneously, almost hilariously, they both kissed my hands.