Chapter 26
The days went by slower than Ember had ever known they could.
She had managed to keep time for the first two days, awake and screaming, tied by her wrists and ankles to her bedframe. But time wore on, and Acton didn’t come for her, and she was starving.
The ropes on her ankles were replaced with chains and padlocks, her wrists were released, and she was allowed a bucket to use as a toilet. Water appeared by her bedside when she slept, announced by the quick retreat of mouse-like footsteps as Thalia ran away.
They didn’t know. When they left, the pale woman came, and her face floated like a ghastly specter. She laughed at Ember’s pitiful state, but it seemed no one else could see her.
They had removed everything from the room except the mattress, the blankets, and the heavy wrought iron bedframe. The bucket was made of plastic, and too light to use as a weapon or throw through the window.
The sun rose, and set, and rose, and set, and soon, Ember wasn’t even sure how long it had been. She was nearly certain that she was going to die in her bedroom, and then Gina would burn her, bury her, and write the school that she wouldn’t be returning.
She didn’t have any friends. No one would look for her.
It was a cold day, late in the season, when Gina found herself looking up from the last of her tomato crop to see Ethel walking back towards the house with a young man in tow. He had grown since the last time she had seen him, but his face was the same. Round and gloomy, and shrouded with brown hair. He was taller than she expected him to be.
“Theodore,” she said, suppressing the surprise she felt and the urge to hug him. “You said you’d never set foot on this island again.”
Looking around and blinking grimly, he shrugged. “I made an exception when I found out it was Acton Knox. I’m not staying.”
“I wouldn’t let you,” Gina snorted, but smiled gently.
Theo nodded. “I know.”
Ethel’s voice was cold when she spoke. She didn’t bother asking what had happened to Ember, or where she was, or how she was. She had known all along that it would happen, but she wasn’t the kind of person to rub it in when someone else had messed up their kid. “Let’s just get it done, then.”
Gina nodded, looking at the ground. “They’ve left us alone since—“
“I don’t give a shit, Gina.” Ethel pushed past her and towards the house. “You’re going to let him do this, or you’re going to watch her die. I’m making that decision for you.”
With a long, apologetic look, Theo followed her. There was another girl, the spitting image of her mother years before, slowly stirring soup in the kitchen. She stared at the wall as if her life depended on it. She wasn’t lost in thought, or daydreaming. She only stared.
“Lia this is Theo,” Ethel said shortly. “Friend of the family.”
As she looked over, Theo saw the yellow side of her face, where she had taken a hard blow recently. Tulukaruk wasn’t a place for humans, the daughters of hunters or not. The girl nodded at him.
“Would you like something to eat, Theo?” she asked, her voice barely a whisper.
He shook his head, frowning. “No. No, thank you. I’m here to see your sis—“
Thalia turned away sharply, staring out the kitchen window.
Theo turned to look at Ethel, who bore the same stony expression that she had when she had come looking for him. She nodded toward the stairs, and followed him as he ascended. They stopped in front of the second door at the top.
Theo looked from the door to Ethel, and then clapped his hands together. He laughed nervously. “Well, I guess this is it, then.”
Ethel only eyed him seriously. “Good luck.”
Turning the handle, Theo stepped inside.
Ember was lying on the bed, staring at the ceiling in much the same way that Thalia had been staring at the wall. Her cheeks were sallow, and as she turned her exhausted gaze on him, he knew that she needed help. Bad things had happened to this one.
“Are you a doctor?” she managed.
Theo suddenly didn’t know what to do with his hands. He walked toward the bed, swinging them, until he put them under his legs as he sat at the foot of the bed.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I’m a psychiatrist.”
Even in her weakened state, Ember managed to roll her eyes. “Figures. She’s trying to kill me.”
“Who?” Theo asked.
“Gina,” Ember responded, licking her lips. “My mom. She tied me up.”
Theo turned around to look, moving the blankets from the foot of the bed. “Ember, you’re not tied up.”
“She must have taken away the chains last night.” Ember shook her head; she sounded so certain.
Theo thought for a moment, and his heart sank. “The demons still visit you, don’t they? Someone is making you hallucinate being tied up.”
“Who are you?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Theo said, giving her a long look. “I’m someone who can help you, but you won’t remember me. And that’s okay—just let me help you.”
It wasn’t until much later that Gina joined him, sitting on the bed with Ember’s head in her lap, slowly stroking her hair as she slept.
“Well?” she asked, eyeing the door warily as Ethel walked in.
Theo was holding his head in his hands. The service he offered was reserved for his most difficult patients, and he had done it many times over the years, but it never failed to make him tired in a way that no amount of sleep would ever cure. It burdened the soul to know some of the things he knew.
“Did you chloroform your daughter?”
Gina cringed. “I can’t think. I can’t think when she’s around, and when she looks at me—“
“That’s called guilt. You did terrible things to this girl, Gina.”
Gina scoffed. “I didn’t ask you to—“
“You didn’t ask me to do anything,” Theo snapped. “You were going to let it go…No. No, you had already let it go. You treated her like she was worthless. You couldn’t even do her the justice of giving her up for adoption. You just ostracized her, and then you fed her to the Knox family.”
“That’s not true.”
He sneered. “From the moment she first met him—”
“And when was that?” Gina demanded. “Tell me. Tell me what she saw. I compared stories with Ethel, and neither of us agrees. So go ahead and tell me what you think I’m guilty of.”
He told her. And she laughed.
“Gina, this is very serious.”
She shook her head, looking disgusted. “Theo, if he threw a rock through the window, don’t you think I would have heard it? You saw that happen and you honestly believe I didn’t try to intervene? Ember spent her first night in the living room with us, and I did her hair after I finished with Lia’s. We talked about why she didn’t want to be away and school and I said I would see about letting her come home more often. I saw her talking with Acton and a stranger, who I later learned was named Joseph, the next day in the garden. It was all down hill from there.”
They had taken all of the lights out of the room, but there was enough light streaming through the window to illuminate Gina’s pale face as her hard eyes softened, and her hand stopped to rest on Ember’s brow.
“I love my daughter, Theo,” she took a deep breath, shaking her head. “I had one job to do. Just one. I promised to give her a life, and keep her safe. And I couldn’t do it. She came back, and I need your help. I need to train her—“
“No,” Theo said flatly. “You don’t deserve her. She doesn’t deserve the life you want to give her. I took my family away from all of this to keep them safe from the Acton Knoxes of the world. She can come with me.”
Gina looked down at her lap, breathing, and trying to steady herself. She didn’t remember it that way; in the moment, it had all made sense. Since figuring out what was happening, she had spent days trying to convince herself that neither of them had said or done some of t
he terrible things that she remembered. “I saw Amy a few years back. She stopped and stayed for a few days, passing through on her way to Russia.”
“How many years?”
“Four. Maybe five.”
“It’s been six since I’ve seen her,” Theo said plainly, cracking his knuckles as he looked to the window. “You know why? She died in Russia. Some man whose name I don’t even remember, who I had never seen before in my life and who I have never seen again since, showed up in my office to tell me my little sister had been ripped to pieces. And he was sorry. That’s what happens to hunters, Gina. They die for the cause.”
Without looking at him, Gina carefully wiped her cheeks on the back of her hand and slid out from under Ember’s head, resting her carefully back on the mattress before walking from the room. Theo glared as Ethel walked in, her arms crossed, nodding slightly to herself.
“That make you feel better about it?” she asked, crossing her legs and sitting on the floor. “It’s not her fault.”
“It’s not?” Theo said in mock disbelief. “This girl is a renegade, Ethel. I think you know what she did to her. Her life isn’t about duty. She felt that rejection very keenly.”
Ethel only shrugged. “I made her send her away. She wanted to keep her, but I know better than most that renegades make piss poor soldiers. As you said, her life isn’t about duty, and Gina doesn’t understand that.”
In disbelief, Theo shook his head. “You do fine.”
“We create our own chaos,” Ethel said calmly. “That’s what she means when she says she can’t think. This island only has room for one renegade hunter, and it’s me. If I have to suffer so that she can have a normal life, I’m going to do it.” She leaned forward, holding his gaze. “Gina won’t tell you to do it, but I will. I want you to take it all away from her. Erase it all, and give her an excuse to never come back here, and she can go and became a psychiatrist in Arizona. One with an unlisted number, who’s impossible to find when someone needs her.”
Theo didn’t even crack a smile. “You want me to rob her of who she is. You want me to take away all of her memories of what Gina did, and make you out to be a model family?”
Ethel snorted, smiling and shaking her head. “You just don’t get it, do you? Theo, Gina really didn’t do those things. I’m saying it isn’t her fault, because whatever Ember remembers isn’t what really happened.”
She gave Theo a hard stare before continuing. “Ember came back on a clear spring morning. She dropped her bag in the water and Gina had to help her fish it out; it just about destroyed all of the books she brought, but she didn’t care because she was so happy to be back. The weight from the damn books is the reason she dropped it in to begin with. They came home, and we all cooked dinner together. Ember sat in the living room and taught Thalia how to braid her hair some fancy way, and then she taught Gina how to braid Thalia’s hair, and then she got really quiet. She asked why we sent her away, and Gina told her. She told her about the demons, and the life we lead, and the danger. She told Ember she wanted her to leave again, to stay safe, and Ember got very upset about it, and then Thalia got upset about it. Gina, being Gina, got weak and told them that they could talk about it when summer was done. We tucked the girls into their beds upstairs, but they stayed up talking anyways. Life went on, and it was almost like she never left.”
Ethel paused, shaking her head and furrowing her brow.
“What?” Theo asked; he was still frowning, but his expression had become distant. He had seen the cracks and odd seams in her mind, but had assumed it was because of her dealings with the demons.
“It was a few weeks later.” Ethel looked back at him. “It was the middle of the night, and we found her screaming on the doorstep. I don’t know why she went outside, or what happened out there, but that was the beginning of the end. That’s when things stopped matching up, and that’s close to the time we learned about Joseph. I don’t know how long he had been here. He might have been here all along. Gina figured it out, and she claims she caught him, and burned him, but Theo…” She shook her head. “I looked in the fire. There weren’t any bones. We fought, and that’s when I went for you—you have similar abilities. I thought you might be able to catch him, because maybe you’ll cancel each other out. Zinnia Knox told me that Acton burned him when Gina left, and made a gift of the bones to Isaac, but Jesus, I still haven’t seen the bones. He’s probably still here, screwing with all of us.”
“A meddler could do it.” Theo nodded, leaning forward. He crossed his arms, looking out the window as he thought. “You’re saying he erased her memory, and gave her this illusion to further his goal of luring her away. Ethel, is all of that true? Gina welcomed her back?”
Ethel’s expression turned sarcastic as she smiled. “Maybe it is. Or, maybe I’m just saying it to win your cooperation. Does it matter, if none of us will ever know the truth?”
Theo stared at her for a moment, but Ethel only continued to smile serenely. He threw his hands in the air and stood up, starting to pace. “Of course it matters! It matters a great deal.”
“It doesn’t,” Ethel spat back at him, leaning back against the wall. “Because the other day, I found myself standing in front of the house, and I had no clue what I was doing out there. And that’s the truth. It’s never happened before.”
“You’re senile.”
“Hunters don’t go senile, Theodore,” she said, without the slightest bit of humor. “Acton has used his tricks on Gina more than a handful of times, and even if she doesn’t want to kill Zinnia’s little boy, I would have no qualms about it if I could catch the bastard.” She pointed to Ember’s sleeping form on the bed. “He’s using her to cut his teeth on puppeting renegades, and if he manages it, we’re up the creek. I’m the only one who still immune here, and that means he’s one kill away from running the show if he ever gets the edge on me.”
Theo frowned as he turned back to Ember; most of the community looked upon renegades as unmanageable flukes, but Ethel was right. The vast majority of hunters lost their human emotions when they changed, and it was looked upon as a strength to be so cold and decisive. But renegades kept their human emotions, even after becoming hunters. It made them chaotic, but their chaos made them harder targets for demons.
But it would be just like Acton Knox to step up his game. While most hunters were bound by animal instinct to hunt and kill demons, renegades were more human in their emotions; more often than not, it got them killed. Most hunters looked upon them as a runt of the litter. If one wanted to study them, a young and inexperienced renegade would be the place to start. Ember hadn’t awakened to her calling yet, so it made sense that Acton would want her for practice.
“I’m not asking you to do anything extreme, Theo.” Ethel stood to face him. “I’m just asking you to erase the summer. Give her something better, or boring, or…anything, really, that isn’t what she went through. We’ll send her back to school, and she’ll go on to live a decent life.”
“You can’t.”
They both looked over. Gina had returned to the room. Her face was still paler than the moon, and she used one hand on the doorframe to steady herself, but her resolve had returned.
Ethel’s frustration was beginning to show. “Gina—“
“No,” she said. “I mean, because there’s another reason.”
Just within earshot and just out of site, Thalia had crept away from the soup in the kitchen several minutes earlier. No one had told her what was happening to Ember, or what Theo proposed to do to make her better. She only hoped that he could do it. Sitting on a step, she clutched a washcloth in her hands, twisting it tightly and wrapping it over her knuckles again and again.
“A reason?”
Ethel sounded upset. It wasn’t often that she stepped up to take any kind of lead, but when she did, she was usually right. The results weren’t often good, though. Thalia gulped. She had been afraid for too long, and her whole body shook when she didn’t hav
e something to steady her.
Gina’s next words put a knife through her heart. “I think she might be pregnant.”
Thalia felt a strangled sound escape her throat as she tried to remember to breathe. She was sure they had heard her, but no one came.
“Is that even possible?” Theo was asking.
Ethel remained determined. “It doesn’t matter. Give her a memory of a rape, and we’ll get rid of it.”
“Ethel!” Theo sounded disgusted. “I am not going to—“
But sitting on her step, her throat gone dry and her vision going funny, Thalia didn’t hear the rest. Her world had narrowed to a buzzing noise, and a memory of a wish she had made as a little girl.
Ember had never been well-behaved, and she was wild, but she had been her sister. Even from afar, they had been sisters. Thalia had always thought that one day, they would be adults together. They would fight the monsters together, and have their children together—two little girls—and they would raise them together, just as Gina and Ethel had raised them.
Well, just as they had raised Thalia, anyways.
She ran from the house and outside, into the woods. Determined to find them, she ran into the dangerous place, where the monsters lived.
It was a childish thing to think, she realized, because now her sister was pregnant by the monster. Thalia was seventeen that year, and finally an adult. Ember had something growing inside of her that was part of him, and it wasn’t a child that she could ever look at without knowing it.
She felt the tears running down her cheeks. They were the last tears that she would ever cry. They were for the sister she had lost, because Ember wasn’t having a baby.
She was having an abortion or an abomination, and it made Thalia sick to her stomach.