The Killing Jar (30 page)

Following the trail on the map, I kept up a brisk pace, both to stay warm and to ensure I'd be able to reach the red X and make it back to Eclipse before anyone woke up.

It was unnerving, walking through the woods at this time of morning, which, as far as light was concerned, was still night. The lantern provided only enough of a glow for me to see a few feet in front of me, so every rustle of leaves or snap of twigs or yip of a coyote made me walk a little faster until I was practically running. Still, the sun was coming up by the time I reached the clearing.

I slowed to a halt, peering around for a moment before entering the circle of trees that surrounded a small, grassy meadow, set against a craggy expanse of rock face. Inside the clearing, all of the forest sounds seemed to cease, and I felt as if I'd gone spontaneously deaf.

I was reasonably sure I had arrived at the place the red X indicated, but I didn't know how to process what I was seeing because I'd never before seen anything like it with my own eyes.

In the center of the meadow was a rustic altar made from interwoven branches, and in front of the altar was a round, stone pedestal, surrounded by the remains of charred firewood. The whole thing reminded me of something that might have been handy during a pagan ceremony or a ritual sacrifice.

Rebekah's words echoed back to me:

An exchange is required. A sacrifice, if you will
.

Was this the place where my sacrifice would be made? What was it that Rebekah would ask me to sacrifice?

I rubbed my arms as my skin prickled.

Upon closer inspection, I saw the wood of the altar was elaborately carved with moths and moons, the same as the door to Rebekah's room back at Eclipse House. Next, I inspected the stone pedestal. It had been fashioned into a perfect full moon, and had been charred as black as the ring on an Eclipse moth's wing. I touched the surface. It was cold enough to make me shiver. Something made me shiver, anyway.

this is who we are

I wanted to leave the clearing and go back to Eclipse. If Joanna thought I was going to be scared away by this place, she was wrong. I already knew the Kalyptra had some strange, mystical beliefs and practices, that our gift derived from something old and archaic. So what? There was nothing wrong with a little ritual in life. What were Easter and Christmas and Thanksgiving and Halloween if not holidays of ritual? There were plenty of pagans and Wiccans still out there in the world, worshipping their ancient gods and goddesses of nature, and I wasn't afraid of them. And the Kalyptra … their worship, their magic and ritual actually worked, so it made even more sense for them to be involved in something as abnormal as this.

The whole thing made me want to throw my hands up into the air, turn right around, and hurry back to Eclipse before anyone realized I was gone. This was just a meadow where the Kalyptra performed some kind of ceremony they hadn't told me about yet, nothing more.

Except …

Except there was an Eclipse moth painted on the rock face, similar to the ones painted on the rocks at the lake, only this was much bigger, wings spread six feet high and wide. Only where the thorax of the moth should be, there was a long, narrow opening in the rock.

It was the entrance to a cave.

*   *   *

I had only been inside a cave one time in my life. When Erin and I were nine, Mom took us on an impromptu road trip to San Francisco. That was where we'd been headed, anyway. Erin started feeling too sick before we'd even crossed the border into California, so we had to turn back. The highlight of the truncated trip had been visiting the Oregon Caves National Monument. I went on the tour alone while my mom and Erin waited in the car. Inside the cave, it had been cool and surprisingly dry, and so quiet and calming it made my heartbeat slow like I might slip into a trance. At one point, the tour guide told our group to turn off our headlamps so we could experience what absolute darkness felt like. I switched off my lamp along with the others, and we were plunged into air as black as ink. For a moment I'd felt utterly at peace. Then a random thought—“What if this is what death feels like?”—ended my peace and began a panic-induced asthma attack at the idea that my sister might disappear into such darkness. Such nothing.

Such death.

Our guide had to cut the tour short and take us back to the entrance.

I didn't like caves anymore, and I didn't want to go inside this one. I listened at the entrance for several minutes, hoping I would hear some sound—a bear grunting, a mountain lion hissing, the maraca of a rattlesnake—that could send me running back to Eclipse none the wiser about what lay inside that cave.

But there was only silence.

I held up my lantern, took a breath, and crouched to enter the cave.

Once I was inside, the cave widened out quickly. I was grateful, since I was not about to crawl and worm my way through some underground cavern system. But it appeared that I wouldn't have to do more than duck to make my way through the tunnel. I couldn't quite see the end of it, so I didn't know how far I had to go. Instead of looking straight ahead, I kept my eyes on the ground in front of my feet so I didn't step into a hole and twist my ankle.

I had been moving steadily forward for what seemed like an hour but was probably more like ten minutes when I raised the lantern to check whether I was getting close to the end.

I should have kept my eyes down. I took a step forward and the surface beneath me disappeared.

I didn't even have time to scream before I clattered to the ground among what felt like a collection of oddly shaped sticks and stones. A lightning flash of pain tore through my arm and I felt the bone in my wrist—the same wrist Erin had broken—snap with a sound like a tree branch breaking.

I heard my lantern shatter at the same moment I landed at the bottom of the pit, and then there was absolute darkness. Darkness and terrible, pulsing pain. But just before my lantern went out, I saw all I needed to see.

Bones. A carpet of charred, human remains—the skeletons of countless people—filled the bottom of the pit into which I'd plummeted.

Clutching my broken wrist, my teeth gritted against hot stabs of agony, I scrambled toward the wall, trying to find a place to stand that wasn't ankle-deep in scorched skeletons.

this is who we are

My fingers scrabbled at the wall of the pit, but it was nearly vertical, and too smooth for my fingers to find purchase, even if I had the use of both my arms.

I was trapped down here. Trapped with the blackened remains of God knew how many victims.

My panicking mind rewound to the conversation I'd had with Rebekah, in which I'd asked her if she'd ever taken human anima, and she'd answered so shamelessly: yes.

It hadn't occurred to me to ask whether she'd taken the anima of more than one person.

this is who we are

In the darkness, I let out a scream of anguish. I didn't expect it to do me any good.

But a voice I knew came from above me, a voice nearly as anguished as my own.

“Kenna … you shouldn't have come here.”

 

D
ARKNESS

“Cyrus? Is that you?” I asked even though I knew it was him. If he had a lantern or any source of light, he didn't use it, so the darkness remained impenetrable.

He didn't respond to my question, and panic threatened to turn my mind into a cyclone of destruction. I took a breath and let it out, fighting to retain a semblance of calm. It was the only way I would get out of this alive.

Because the Kalyptra were killers.

this is who we are

I thought about the anima Rebekah had been feeding me from her culling jars, how insatiable my hunger for more, and more, and more had become, and now I understood why. She'd been giving me human anima. For how long I didn't know, but standing in a pit surrounded by human remains, I was pretty damn sure that was what she'd been doing, and that this had been going on for a long time.

I thought of what Cyrus had told me about my own mom's insatiable hunger for anima, how it had driven her to do anything to get rid of it, and I wondered what had really been going on. Had Rebekah been dosing her—all of the Kalyptra—with increasingly potent forms of anima? Had they not realized what was happening until it was too late? Until they were too addicted to ever stop, and they could never leave Eclipse, and they would be her children, under her control, forever?

Maybe they weren't all like Rebekah, and maybe they were victims, but I knew my mom would not have brought me to Eclipse if she'd had any idea what her mother was up to.

“I think I broke my wrist when I fell down here,” I said in a whimper to Cyrus when he didn't respond. “Can you help me get out?”

Still no answer.

“How did you find me?” Now my voice was shrill. I was on the verge of losing it. If he didn't say something soon, I would start to scream again. I wouldn't be able to help myself.

“I couldn't sleep,” he said finally, his tone deadpan and hollow. “I was at my window and saw you sneaking through the yard.”

“I wasn't sneaking,” I lied. He couldn't know why I'd come here, or that I'd seen what was down here. “I couldn't sleep either. I wanted to go for a walk.”

“A walk in the woods in the dark? A walk inside a cave?”

He had me there. “I like caves. I was just curious what was inside.”

He laughed, but there was no more humor in the sound than there was in a sob. “You like caves, huh? Well, I'm guessing you didn't find this one to your taste.”

“Cyrus, are you going to help me get out of here or not? I'm in a lot of pain. I need anima to heal my wrist.”

“Of course,” he said. “But first I want you to tell me the truth. What did you see down there?”

“See? I didn't see anything. My lantern broke and my wrist broke and my mind is going to break if you don't get me out of here!”

“You swear on your mother's life you're telling me the truth?”

I hesitated, even though I'd never put much stock in swearing on anything. “Yes, I swear. Now for God's sake, please help me.”

“All right.” I heard a scraping sound, and then an orange flame burst to life in the darkness, searing my eyes before Cyrus lit his lantern, illuminating the pit and its jumbled collection of charred bones. Illuminating the truth of what the Kalyptra were.

Cyrus met my eyes, and I saw the truth in them, that he didn't believe my lies. He had known even before he lit his lantern that I already knew what was hidden in the tarry darkness of this cave.

I clung to the side of the pit and stared up at Cyrus's face, a face I had kissed less than twenty-four hours ago. A face I had found irresistible enough to make me betray a guy I loved.

“Why?” I asked him. Begged him, tears of frustration and agony and rage filling my eyes, blurring my vision.

“You would have found out eventually,” he said, his voice somehow cold and affectionate at the same time. He reminded me of Rebekah, both loving and removed. “Besides, you were lying. That was obvious.”

My body shook. Cold sweat slicked my back and my brow, and my teeth chattered. I wondered if I was going into shock.

“What are you going to do to me?”

He hunkered down by the side of the pit. “That kind of depends on you.”

He stroked his chin for a moment and then rose to his feet, staring down at me with equal parts pity and sorrow. Then he turned and walked away.

“Cyrus!” I screamed after him. “Cyrus! Cyrus, come back!”

But he didn't return, and the farther he moved down the cave, the darker it became in the pit, until darkness was all there was.

*   *   *

In the pit, time crawled forward with a snapped spine and two broken legs. Seconds were minutes. Minutes were interminable. Hours were eons.

For a while I was in shock. I went numb, even to the throb of my broken wrist. I stopped feeling fear or panic or disgust at the press of knobby bone joints against my ankles when I tried to move. There was only a zombie-ish numbness in my limbs, a slowing of my heartbeat until it seemed I would slip into death, and death would be like I once feared—an absence of all light, all being. It would be nothing.

For a while I was dead. I was nothing.

But the scraping, insistent need for anima brought me back, reminded me that I was still alive, despite the hollowness in my chest cavity, like my heart had been removed. There was nothing living inside the pit from which to cull the anima that could have healed my wrist and sealed up the awful emptiness that was spreading through me.

Hours passed, or maybe it was days. It was impossible to tell. I didn't hunger for food or water. Anima was the only thing that could save me from the torment of dying cells and withering organs and the fluttering roar of wings in my ears. I imagined moths inside my head, beating against the walls of my skull, trying to worm through my earholes and escape.

A fever turned my temperature up until sweat poured off me, soaking my clothes. The fever shifted to chills, and I lay on the ground, curled into a ball to warm myself. I shivered so hard I made the bones in the pit rattle like they were waking up, coming to life.

Next came the sensation I was being eaten alive by army ants, pinching off bits of me and whittling me down. Soon I would look like my fellow residents of the pit. I raked at my skin with my fingernails until I was raw and bleeding.

When I slept, which I hardly dared to do, nightmares waited for me, harrowing dreamscapes in which I witnessed my mom and Erin being slaughtered, not only by Thomas Dunn, but by Jason as well. I tried to stop them from killing the people I loved, but they turned on me and tore me open with knives, and instead of blood, wriggling gray worms spurted from my wounds, worms that metamorphosed within seconds into white moths with round, black eyes on their wings, and the moths converged around me, probing me with the needle-thin ribbons of their tongues, penetrating the skin and sucking at my blood. When I tried to run from the moths, I slammed against an invisible wall, and I turned around and around until I understood that I was trapped inside a glass jar with a thousand madly fluttering moths. I was in one of Jason's killing jars, and I was never getting out, because this was truly where I belonged. Not at Eclipse, but in the jar.