“So I’ll be able to kick it,” Anita said, her words beginning to slur. Her hair was plastered to her forehead in oily ropes. “I’ll get clean. Don’t you see, honey? Bringing you up has been so hard, and I’m just not that strong. I give and give, and you take and take.”
“Mom, that’s not true!” She didn’t know what she felt more, fear or rage. “I’ve done everything. I’ve cooked and cleaned, I get food, I—”
“I know,” her mother said, and her voice rode on a sudden growl, all weepy sincerity forgotten. “That’s because you’ve drawn on my strength. You’ve always taken what you wanted. What do you think a baby is? Huh? A little parasite, that’s what. You’ve got no control. The baby’s inside, growing and taking and swallowing, needing …” Her mother’s features twisted to a monstrous gorgon’s. Rima turned her face to one side, but her mother’s claw-hand shot out and clutched a handful of Rima’s hair, twisting until Rima’s scalp burned and she cried out; until she was forced to look back at her mother, and nowhere else. Anita’s face cramped with fury. “Well, what about me? Who takes care of me? Who gives me back what you’ve stolen?”
“I … I didn’t m-mean …” Rima’s voice came in a broken, hitching whisper. “Momma, I was just a baby.”
“Just a baby,” her mother spat. She fisted the knife, holding it in a perfect vertical, the point quivering an inch from Rima’s right eye. “No baby ever drew the dead.”
Rima’s mouth dried up. She went still, although her mind was gibbering: No no no no.
“You started even then, filling me up with death-whispers. I could hear them inside, like beetles scratching in a paper sack, scratch, scratch, scratch, scratch.” Anita’s face twitched as if hearing that terrible sound all over again. “Now’s the chance to let all that blackness out of you, out of me—because you’ve touched me, you’ve been inside, scratch-scratch-scratching my soul with your filth.”
“Not yet.” The priestess wrapped her skeletal fingers around Anita’s wrist. Rima drew in a sudden gasp as the knife wobbled. “Only the blood work,” the woman said. “Blood binds. Kill her too fast before the blood draw, and the blackness stay in you, stain you, doom you.” Small, straight knucklebones cored through the woman’s earlobes, and a long necklace of bird skulls chattered and clacked. “Spill the blood, and the black flow out and the spirits drink. You drink, and then the blackness leave because the girl’s blood is strong.”
There was a long, breathless moment, and then Anita wrenched free. The blade whickered, shaving air above Rima’s face, but Anita was stumbling to her feet now, and Rima remembered to breathe. The bottle winked in the candlelight as her mother drank again. Watching the white length of her mother’s throat convulse and swallow, move and slide, Rima thought back to the fight on the snow and what Tania had become: the way her throat had pulsed and heaved before that bloom of jointed legs erupted from her mouth like a gruesome black rose.
Oh my God. She felt a bubble of hysterical laughter pushing against her teeth. Tania was Anita: one and the same. Like Lizzie’s crazy quilt, names made out of letters rearranged to be both different and yet parts of a whole. Her mother was the monster. She was every monster Rima would ever fight, and always had been.
She thought of poor little Taylor—where was her parka now, anyway?—and how shocked that little girl had been when her father morphed into a monster capable of hurling his child from a balcony. Taylor blamed herself, but what had happened wasn’t her fault.
And this isn’t mine. Rima felt the sting of tears and then the slow trickle as they rolled down her temples and soaked into her hair. The real poison is if I let my mother convince me that it is.
She watched as the priestess began to dance: a slow, rhythmic shuffle. Her mother followed in a drunk-stumble, slashing the air with that knife. Have to do something. Rima’s heart battered her ribs. Can’t just lie here until Anita decides she can’t wait. But what did she have to fight with? She wasn’t stupid enough to think she could will this away; this wasn’t like the fight on the snow, and even then, once set in motion, that story would unravel to its conclusion. She suspected only Emma had the power to jump through one space and Now to another. So what could she do? All she had was a touch that soothed and took away whispers.
Wait a minute. She felt everything inside, even her breath, grow still. I take.
She had to call twice because Anita was that lost, that out of it. “What?” Anita said. Her mother’s words were mushy, and that anger, fiery and a bit insane, had died a little, but Rima knew the embers of her mother’s resentment wouldn’t need much coaxing.
So she chose her words very, very carefully. “Mom, I won’t fight you anymore. I can’t. You’re my mom, and I know you’re only trying to help.”
“Thass righhh, baby.” Anita’s slushy voice went maudlin. A rill of shiny snot slicked her upper lip. “Thass righhh.”
“I know, and I love you, and I’m scared.” She was aware of the priestess’s coin-bright eyes, and somewhere, overhead, the ceaseless churn of the birds, but Rima fixed her gaze on Anita and did not look away. “I’m scared, and I need you. So, please, would you hold me? Would you please hug me just this one last time?”
BODE
Either Way, You Lose
1
BATTLE WAS GONE—and what the hell was that about?
It had happened back at the house, right before Emma did her crazy … well, whatever that was. Soon as Casey touched him, Bode felt the sergeant go, just whoosh away like Bode’d gotten a sucker punch to the gut.
That tripped him out. After, Bode had been distracted, worried about what the sudden silence in his head meant. So when they’d materialized in the dark, Bode hadn’t been on top of his game. Just said the first damn thing that came to mind. Stupid. Like popping out of a spidey hole without tossing out a rock first, seeing if anything up there took the bait and blasted that rock to itty-bitty ones. You never made that mistake twice, because after the first time, you were dead.
Emma’s shout still rang in his ears, but Bode felt the change happening a split second later. The darkness collapsed in a rush, the black slamming down, flattening the space above and all around as if the barn were being squeezed by four giant palms: above and below, right and left.