The Killing Jar (27 page)

I will not let Joanna ruin my perfect night
, I thought.
My best night ever.

And almost the instant I thought this, a strangled bleat of terror cut through the night.

The music and dancing stopped, and we turned toward the source of the hideous sound. It had come from the field, halfway between the animal enclosure and the bonfire. Several pairs of eyes glowed in the darkness a hundred yards away.

The keening went on and on, and then I was running. Running toward those glowing eyes and that terrible cry of pain. I remembered what Cyrus had told me my first day at Eclipse, about how Bully was such a troublemaker, how he kept finding ways to escape and pillage the gardens at night. And how it wasn't safe to wander away from Eclipse alone because there were predators in the woods. Wolves and coyotes and mountain lions and bears.

The glowing eyes scattered when I was within twenty feet of them. I could see their shape by that point, a pack of doglike animals, too small to be wolves. Coyotes, then. They had to be. But even if they'd been wolves, I would have charged into the middle of them because I had a terrible feeling I knew who had made that animal squall of pain.

And I was right.

I fell to my knees beside the small, twisted body of the animal the coyotes had attacked. I let out a moan.

It was Bully. It was my wild, troublemaking little goat.

The leather collar around his neck had done a little to protect him from the coyotes' teeth, but they had ripped him open in a dozen other places and he was bleeding out, his blood black in the night. His dark eyes wobbled, searching my face as though begging me to help him.

And I could, I realized. I could save him just like I had saved Erin. All I needed was the anima of some other creature. Another goat. A horse or a sheep. Something potent that I could channel into him.

“Hold on, little guy,” I said, taking a moment to stroke the uninjured place between his eyes to comfort him. I wished there were more anima inside me now. If there were, I could simply infuse him, but the emotional shock of what had happened seemed to have sprung a leak in me, and the last of the anima that had filled me for the previous hour came rushing out like air from a punctured tire.

Resolved, I stood, ready to cull one of the other animals to save my pet. It wasn't fair to the animal whose life I would take, but I had to do something. I couldn't let Bully die.

Then I saw Rebekah and the rest of the Kalyptra coming toward me through the field, carrying lanterns, their expressions somber, as though they were part of a funeral march. Rebekah held a jar in the shape of a goat's head in both hands in front of her, and when I saw it, relief swept through me.

I wouldn't have to cull one of the other animals to save Bully. Rebekah would use one of her culling jars to save him. She would take care of him as she'd taken care of me after my bad trip in the forest.

Her eyes—all of the Kalyptra's eyes—were ink black as they formed a ring around Bully's mangled body. Rebekah, at their center, knelt in the place where I'd knelt a moment before.

She opened the lid of the jar and began to chant in a low voice, in a language I didn't understand, but which I thought might be Latin.

I was confused. The cloud of light that normally accompanied the opening of a culling jar didn't emerge, and neither did Rebekah's vena. Instead, Rebekah dipped her finger into Bully's blood and spread it around the rim of the jar, still chanting the same phrase over and over again, her eyes black as obsidian. And then I did see the light, the anima, only it wasn't coming from the jar.

It came from Bully, oozing from his mouth and nostrils, from his bloodied wounds like smoke from the windows of a burning building. Only this cloud moved with purpose. It snaked and funneled through the air, straight into Rebekah's jar.

Before I registered what was truly happening, it was too late. Bully's life slipped from his body into the jar, and Rebekah closed the lid.

For a long moment, I was too stunned to react. I simply watched as the ring around Rebekah disbanded and the Kalyptra headed back to the house. Finally, I regained enough presence of mind to do something.

I rushed at Rebekah and snatched the jar from her. She turned to me, her black eyes wide with surprise at my audacity.

“What are you doing?” she asked coolly.

“I'm putting his anima back and healing him,” I shouted at her.

She shook her head. “But why?”

“Because he's mine! He's my pet!” I realized I was crying, my cheeks soaked in tears and my chest hitching.

“Oh, sweet girl,” she said, shaking her head. “We don't have pets here. It's not our way.”

She held out her hands for me to give her back the jar. When I didn't, her mouth turned down in a scowl of disapproval. “Do you want to be Kalyptra?”

“Y-yes,” I said, my voice barely a whisper.

“Then you have to respect our practices. Not some of them.
All
of them. I'm sorry you grew attached to that little goat, Kenna, but his anima feeds us, and that is a worthy sacrifice for any creature.”

“But I could have saved his life,” I said weakly.

“At what cost?” Rebekah asked. “Why should another of the animals give its life to save this goat? Do you really think that's fair?”

I lowered my chin to my chest and shook my head.

“Then give me the jar, Kenna.”

All that lives must die
, I heard Erin say inside my head.
All that lives must die, passing through nature to eternity.

I placed the jar in Rebekah's waiting hands.

And for the second time in recent history, my perfect happiness was cut short, and what would have been the best night of my life was marred by death.

I sank down next to Bully's body in the field and sobbed. I didn't know how long I'd been out there, but eventually Cyrus came to me and touched my shoulder.

“I should have listened to you,” I said, my voice hoarse from crying. “You told me not to name him, and I broke the rules. It won't happen again.”

Cyrus held his hand out to me and helped me to my feet. Only then did I see Stig and Yuri waiting nearby with shovels. Illia and Rory, Hitomi and Sunday and Diego were there, too. Their eyes had returned to normal, and I realized how terrifying they had looked with their black eyes. How inhuman.
Eclipsed
eyes, that was how the Kalyptra referred to them, but they resembled insect eyes. Moth eyes.

“We'll bury him together,” Cyrus said.

We dug a hole right there in the field and buried Bully and made a blanket of flowers on his grave. I cried and the girls hugged me and told me it would be okay, that all of them had been through this at one time or another.

“Let's go to the dreaming tent,” Hitomi suggested. “We'll take anima and get your mind off of this.”

But I shook my head. I didn't want to bury my grief for Bully. He deserved better than that. It struck me then how dangerous anima was with its ability to put away all dark and negative thoughts. Sometimes life called for such thoughts, and while I'd been at Eclipse I had swept mine into a safe and locked it.

I started walking back to the house alone. “I just want to sleep,” I said.

When I got back to my room, I climbed into bed and stared at the ceiling. I tried to close my eyes, but every time I did I saw Bully's mangled body, Rebekah's finger dipping into his blood. I lay there, unable to sleep for a long time as I wondered why everything good in my life eventually turned bad.

 

T
HE
L
AKE

I wasn't sure if I slept. At some point in the night I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again the sun's first rays had broken over the horizon. I was immediately aware of hunger, bone deep and urgent and not up for negotiation. My entire body felt like a mouth waiting to be fed, a stomach grinding with vacancy. Whatever anima Rebekah had given us last night, it had been potent. Maybe too potent, since it had awakened the kind of torturous emptiness I hadn't felt since my first days at Eclipse.

Last night I hadn't wanted to take more anima to drive away my grief for Bully. Now that sorrow was a raw wound on my heart, and it was the only thing I wanted to do. To escape the anguish of my thoughts, the dark, insistent magnet pulling me down into depression … that was what I needed.

I dressed in the jeans, T-shirt, and sweater I'd worn the previous night, and headed out to Cyrus's private wagon. It had been a gift from Rebekah, he had told me once, though when I asked him why she gave it to him, why he of all the Kalyptra lived outside of Eclipse House, he merely grinned and said, “Because I'm her favorite. Or at least I was until you came along.” That had made me blush with pride. Then I thought of my mom, and how she was, undoubtedly, Rebekah's favorite at one time. Still, that hadn't stopped Rebekah from turning her back on her only daughter completely when she defied Rebekah's will. I'd thought Rebekah's love for me seemed unconditional, but there was definitely one condition: that I follow her rules down to the letter.

I sniffed and wiped at my eyes, fighting back tears as I knocked on Cyrus's door. I figured he'd already be awake, but it took him several minutes to finally answer.

He wore jeans, but no shirt, and his shaggy hair was a silky, sleep-tousled mess. His caramel-colored skin practically glowed in the early light of the sun, and his eyes were iridescent and dazzling.

“Morning,” he said, grinning sleepily and rubbing his eyes like a little boy waking on Christmas morning. He stepped back, opening the door wider.

I hesitated. “I should probably just go. My mom is going to freak out when she finds out I'm gone. Actually, she probably already knows. She's an early riser.”

“If she's already going to be angry with you, you might as well make your time here worth it,” Cyrus reasoned.

He made a logical point, and the thought of going home and starting to pack up my stuff made my heart feel like giving up. Despite what had happened last night, I still loved Eclipse and the Kalyptra. I'd made a mistake getting attached to Bully, but it was a mistake I wouldn't make twice. I wanted to be worthy of the Kalyptra, and of Rebekah's affection.

I stepped into the wagon and gazed around. There wasn't much to the small living space, but I could see now why Cyrus had decided to make this his place instead of the house. It was incredibly cozy, with intricate woodworking on the ceiling panels and cupboards. The polished plank floor was covered in colorful rugs and the bed at the back was an inviting jumble of quilts and blankets. It smelled like Cyrus, like leather and sandalwood and spices.

Cyrus closed the door, and what had been a cozy space suddenly became scarily intimate.

“What do you think?” he asked from behind me.

I was afraid to turn around; he was standing that close. The heat reached out from his body to mine. I eyed the tangle of his blankets and thoughts of him and me wrapped together in his bed flashed through my mind.

“It's nice,” I said, keeping my back to him and leaning against the long counter jammed with candles, copper pots, and ceramic dishes. “Very, um … private.”

Cyrus moved toward me and put a hand on my hip. Where he touched me, it burned. I began to feel out of breath, like I used to when an asthma attack started, only this was both scary and exciting.

Had I felt this way with Blake, too? Was my attraction to him as powerful as it was to Cyrus? Yes. No. Yes. Maybe? My mind was too foggy to recall.

My eyes darted around, searching for an escape even though I wasn't sure I wanted one. There was a small, round table up against one wall. On it sat a basket that contained a variety of objects: a packet of guitar strings, a wallet that didn't look at all like something Cyrus would carry—or even need to carry—a Leatherman tool with the initials A.T.P. engraved on the outside. Was that some relic from Cyrus's former life? Was Cyrus his real name? Or had he simply bought the Leatherman from a secondhand store or a pawn shop?

My gaze moved upward and landed on a piece of art hanging on the wall over a small, round table. It was some kind of cutout in the shape of an Eclipse moth. Instinctively, I reached for it and took it down from the nail on which it hung. There was a string attached to the back. It was a mask, I realized. Where the black moons on the Eclipse moth's wings should have been, there were holes for eyes to look through.

I remembered Sunday's hidden paintings, depicting people wearing moth masks, and I shuddered.

“What's wrong?” Cyrus asked close to my ear.

I held the mask up to my face and looked through the eyeholes. It didn't mean anything, I told myself. It was just a mask. So why did it leave me feeling unnerved?

I removed the mask from my face and hung it back on the wall. “Nothing,” I said, turning to face him. “Nothing is wrong.”

“Then spend the day with me,” Cyrus said, his voice a rumble that called to mind impending disasters, earthquakes and landslides. His neck was so close to my eyes I could see his pulse ticking away, feel his energy, his anima, a subtle vibration. His right hand stayed on my hip, and his left rose to my chest, where he flattened it above my heart, which was thudding hard and fast.

He smiled at me. “Your heart's racing.”

Then, suddenly, he lowered his hands and stepped back. I braced myself against the counter, not trusting my legs. Last night I had buried my pet, and now I was simmering under Cyrus's touch. But I had to stop thinking of Bully as mine. He was just an animal. He was just an—

“Spend the day with me,” Cyrus said again.

My chest was still heaving as I responded with, “What did you have in mind?”

*   *   *

“How much farther?” I stopped hiking long enough to guzzle water from the canteen Cyrus had brought. When he'd suggested a walk in the forest, I'd almost balked, remembering the last time I'd been in the woods around Eclipse, when I'd seen—no,
hallucinated
—the moth creature. The illustration I'd found online of the massive moth feeding on its bound victim floated to the surface of my brain, but I did my best to drown it.