The Killing Jar (12 page)

“Kenna? Are you awake?”

It was a man's voice with a slight Johnny Cash twang.

I pressed my ear to the crack between the door and the jamb. “Who's there?” I asked.

“Cyrus. We didn't officially meet yet.”

Cyrus. The guy from the gate. The guy who made the back of my neck go hot when he looked at me.

“Just a sec,” I said, my voice thin and hoarse from my narrowed airways. There was a pitcher of water and a bowl on a little table by the window. I hurriedly rinsed out my mouth, and then noticed a rustic-looking toothbrush and a jar of what looked like jelly. I opened the jar, sniffed it. It smelled like mint, so I dabbed my finger into it and tasted it, decided it was some kind of DIY toothpaste, and quickly brushed with it, hoping I hadn't guessed wrong, that I hadn't just washed my mouth out with lotion or shampoo.

There was no mirror in the room, so I ran my hands over my hair and clothes to try to make myself at least semipresentable, and called it good enough.

When I opened the door, I found Cyrus leaning against the wall, cleaning his fingernails with a pocketknife. His guitar was propped against the wall next to him. He looked, if possible, even more beautiful than he had when I'd seen him the previous day, his shaggy mane all dark chocolate coils like he was Jim Morrison's hair twin, his eyes a stunning shade of jewel blue against his graham-cracker tanned skin. He must have been too busy to remember the top few buttons on his shirt, because it was open to the defined squares of his pectoral muscles. Looking at him made it even harder to breathe.

“Mornin',” he said, closing his knife and pocketing it in jeans that looked to have been worn as soft as an old T-shirt. He smiled a charming half smile and gave a little bow, one hand placed on his stomach, the other behind his back. “I'm Cyrus.”

“I know,” I said, wary. “Where's Rebekah?” I couldn't bring myself to call her Grandmother or Grandma or Nana or any of the things you were supposed to call a grandma. She looked too young for those labels. But remembering how much younger my mom had looked after I did whatever I did to bring her back from death, I couldn't believe Rebekah was actually the age she appeared to be, which probably meant that none of the other Kalyptra were, either.

“Asleep,” Cyrus told me. “She had a long night and needed to get some rest. She asked me to keep an eye on you today, show you around and introduce you to some of the folks since you'll be staying here a while.”

He must have seen my face change at the reminder of my sojourn sans expiration date, because he added quickly, “We're good people. Everyone's real excited to meet Rebekah's long lost kin.”

“One of them,” I corrected. “I have a twin sister.”

At the thought of Erin, my breathing constricted again. I tried to take a deep breath to calm myself, but the air seemed to hit a wall inside my throat.

Cyrus's dark eyebrows scrunched together in concern. “Are you all right? You look like you might pass out or something. Rebekah won't be too happy if you keel over on my watch.”

I shook my head, determined to relax and control my breathing.
It's all in your head
, I told myself, because that's what every asthma doctor who'd ever examined me claimed, despite evidence to the contrary. But it was true that the only triggers to my asthma seemed to be anxiety and panic, and I hadn't actually showed any symptoms until after Jason Dunn's death.

I took a breath through my nose and let it out slowly. My lungs eased a little, but only a little.

“I'm fine,” I told Cyrus, and then chewed the inside of my cheek in hesitation. “But I was wondering … I think I would be more fine if—”

“I know what you're going to ask,” he said, interrupting.

“You do?”

“Of course. We've all experienced what you're going through on one level or another.” He winked at me and crooked his arm, gesturing for me to follow him.

I did.

*   *   *

Cyrus led me across the sweeping belt of field that surrounded Eclipse House, where wildflowers speckled the long grasses with tiny starbursts of color: patches of vermillion, tangerine, lavender, and lemon. We passed the old A-frame barn and a grove of trees where a colorful webbing of hammocks connected the trunks, a brightly painted wooden wagon that would have looked at home in a Romani caravan, and a yurt, the panels cinched up to reveal an interior filled with lounging sofas, floor pillows, and a number of acoustic guitars propped on stands. Any other day I would've made a beeline for those instruments. The way some people were with babies or puppies—needing to hold them, paw at them, fawn over them—I was with guitars.

Today, a more pressing need had replaced my usual compulsion, but even my craving for anima couldn't entirely overshadow the bohemian idyll of Eclipse.

“You know, I thought Eclipse was like some backwoods cult compound,” I said to Cyrus. “But it's more like…” I trailed off, partly because I was out of breath, and partly because the word in my head seemed, for some reason, dangerous.

Paradise
, I thought.
It's like paradise.

“You sure wind easily,” Cyrus commented when I didn't finish, taking note of the whistling rattle in my throat. My airways had begun to feel like they were wrapped tight with rubber bands.

“I have asthma,” I said.

“Asthma…” he repeated, as though I'd spoken a word in another language.

“You've never heard of asthma?”

“It sounds familiar.”

“It's a medical condition. Tens of millions of people around the world have it.”

He shrugged, unconcerned in a way that irritated me. “Not here they don't.”

“Good for you guys.” I sighed and decided to admit the truth, both to myself and to him. “The thing is, I forgot my inhaler—my asthma medication—and I'm going to need it soon or I could be in trouble. Maybe someone could take me home, just to grab some of my things?”

He smiled, but shook his head. “I don't know what an inhaler is, but I'm pretty sure we can do better than that.”

He waited for me to start walking again, which I did after a petulant pause.

“Tell me about yourself,” Cyrus said, making me feel like we were on a blind date. Not that I'd ever been on a blind date. For some reason the thought of Cyrus and me on a date, even though we weren't, made flames bloom inside my cheeks. I had to turn my face away so he wouldn't notice and ask why I'd gone from pale to pink.

“Not really in a chatty mood,” I said.

“It'll help get your mind off the catharsis symptoms,” he urged. “What do you like to do? Do you have a job or go to school or something? Do you have a boyfriend? Who are you?”

Who was I? That was not a question I could answer truthfully. I was the girl who murdered a kid at the ripe old age of ten. I was the girl who almost did the same thing to her twin sister after bringing her back from the dead. I was the girl who was so out of control and dangerous her mom dumped her at a hippie commune and left without a goodbye.

“I'm a music snob,” I told him instead.

“Oh yeah?” He raised a dark stripe of eyebrow at me, seeming intrigued. “What else?”

“I'm a songwriter and I play the guitar. It's probably the only thing I'm actually good at. This fall I start senior year, but I hate school, and I don't want to go to college. I want to be a musician. And I'm not sure about the boyfriend part. I might have one. We haven't really figured that out yet.”

I wasn't sure why I decided to tell him any of these things. Once I started, the information poured out. Even though he was a stranger, I felt oddly comfortable around Cyrus. Maybe it was the southern accent, slight though it was. Southern accents just made the people who had them seem like they could be trusted.

And there was something about Cyrus's face, too. The more I looked at it, the more I saw. He wasn't quite as perfect as he'd seemed on first sight. His nose and chin were both slightly crooked, as though they'd been broken at some point. But the asymmetry only added interest and dimension to a face that would have been blandly flawless without it. My mom had claimed that true beauty was in the imperfections, but I'd always wondered if she only told us this because Erin and I were so very imperfect.

“Your turn,” I said. “Who are you? What do you do? Do
you
have a girlfriend?”

“Sure,” he said, grinning his crooked grin. “Lots of them.”

Cyrus halted at a wooden fence, an enclosure several acres wide and long, containing a flock of sheep and a herd of goats, and a dozen horses. He leaned his elbows on the fence and pointed.

“See that little one there?” he said, pointing to a shaggy, half-sized goat with brown and white fur. “He's our resident troublemaker. He keeps finding a way to jump the fence, then he gets into the gardens and eats as much as he can before we catch him.”

I watched the goat race through an obstacle course of his young friends, knocking one of them over, and bounding over the top of another like it was a hurdle.

“What's his name?” I asked, smiling and chuckling a raspy laugh.

Cyrus snorted in derision, and then realized I was serious. “Oh, we don't name the animals.”

“Why not?” I asked, and then decided it was a stupid question. This was a farm, and these animals were livestock, not pets. Did people eat goat? I was pretty sure they did, and the idea of anyone slaughtering this little goat was unthinkable to me.

“I'm going to call him Bully,” I said decisively. “Bully the Kid. Baby goats are called kids, right?”

Cyrus frowned at me, ignoring my question. “That's not a good idea.”

“Too late. It's already done.” I called to the goat, “I hereby dub you Bully the Kid!” Maybe Bully's name would stick and the Kalyptra would start to think of him as a pet instead of just an animal. You couldn't eat a pet.

I watched Bully race across the enclosure and then spring into the air for the sheer joy of it, releasing a bleat of triumph when he hit the ground. I'd never envied a goat before, but at that moment I really, really wanted to be Bully, to feel what he was feeling. Even a few seconds of simple happiness would suffice.

I was comfortable existing in a mild state of malaise, and I'd always accepted that was who I was. My melancholia was like the vines that wrapped some decrepit structures, holding them up, fortifying them. Besides, I figured, not everyone had to be happy-go-lucky. The world needed miserable artists, too.

But after what I had seen in the basement—my family slaughtered, their blood, their death—I wasn't sure I wanted the darkness anymore. I wanted to tear off the vines that used to keep me from falling apart. To find some other way to exist, even if it meant becoming a whole new person.

Tomorrow you start over,
Rebekah had said to me last night, like I didn't have a choice. Like that was just how it had to be, and I was both surprised and relieved to realize I was okay with that. I didn't want to be me anymore. I hadn't for a long time, but now that I was at Eclipse, separate from everything that made me me—my mom, my twin, my guitar, even Blake—I wondered if I could cast off the person I used to be and truly start fresh, like Rebekah said. The people here didn't know anything about me. I could be someone else to them. Someone better than who I'd been for the last seven years. For the last seventeen, for that matter.

I knelt and held out my hand to Bully the Kid, trying to get him to come to me. He started toward me.

“Best not touch him just yet,” Cyrus warned. “You're still a bit raw. Wouldn't want you to cull him now that you've named him.”

I withdrew my hand quickly, and Bully gave me an offended look and a frustrated bray, which sounded almost identical to a baby crying, before darting off to play with his friends again.

I straightened and turned to Cyrus, my lungs tighter than ever as anxiety swelled in me. “Is it always going to be this way?” I asked, terrified of the answer.

Cyrus turned his back on the animals and leaned his elbows on the fence, his posture relaxed and casual. All he needed was a wheat straw sticking out of his mouth.

“Nah,” he said, seemingly unaware of my angst. “You learn to control it. The catharsis only comes after you cull too much anima.”

“Cull?” The word sounded so much like
kill
, I wondered if I'd misheard him.

“Right. Culling is what we call it when we harvest anima from another living thing. Catharsis is what happens if you escalate the amount of anima you cull too quickly, and your body can't handle it. But we'll get you sorted in time, don't worry.”

“But how?” I asked. “How do I control the need?” The need for more, always more.

As though sensing my agitation, Bully raced toward me, braying a sound like insane laughter. This time I couldn't manage a smile, and he stopped at the fence, gazed at me with his black eyes, and then turned and raced away again.

I sighed.

Cyrus tilted his head to consider me, eyes squinted against the sun. “How much do you know about what you are?”

“Umm, let's see … pretty much nothing.”

“So you're a clean slate, huh?”

I laughed humorlessly. “Yep. Squeaky clean. That's me.” My laughter died, and I turned to him. “Tell me everything.”

His eyes slid from mine. “I can't. Rebekah … she said she wants to be the one to tell you, but not until the time is right.”

“When will that be?”

He shrugged, still avoiding my eyes. “You may be able to do what we can do, Kenna, but you're not one of us yet. You can't expect us to tell you the secrets we've kept from the world, and then release you back to that same world.”

“You don't trust me,” I said, shoulders sagging.

“We don't know you is all.”