She walked toward me slowly, holding her hand out as though inviting me to take it.
“Remember in the hospital, Kenna, when I asked you to say goodbye to me and you couldn’t do it?”
I nodded.
“I get it now,” she said, tears shining in her eyes. “I can’t do it either. I can’t say goodbye to you, so you don’t get to leave me. Do you hear me? You don’t get to leave me!”
I felt wetness on my cheeks and realized I was crying.
The fire called to me. I wanted it. I wanted to be inside the light.
Still, I was crying and nodding.
“Deal,” I said, my voice so hushed I wasn’t sure she heard it.
But that didn’t matter.
I ripped the mask from my face and tossed it into the fire. I was through being the moth. It was time to be the flame.
I knelt beside my grandmother’s broken, diminishing body. She was becoming the age she should be, I thought vaguely. A weak old woman. That was all she was.
She looked at me, her face a horror, eyes sunken into her skull and caved-in mouth opening and closing like that of a fish out of water.
“Please…” she croaked. “Please…”
I knew what she was asking, that I save her from the death she had avoided for so long. I nodded, and I gave her what she asked for.
What she had earned.
I put my hands on her and felt my vena emerge and connect to her body, and then the Mother’s anima poured from me, and with it the compulsion to give myself to the light that would kill me.
Beneath my hands, Rebekah’s body knit itself back together and she became beautiful once again. A goddess. The queen of her own small kingdom. Or maybe, merely, its Mother, albeit a tyrannical one.
When it was done, I stood, my head and my eyes finally clear. The world returned to normal, and I welcomed it. I welcomed the world as it was, and I hoped it would welcome me in return.
Erin ran to me and wrapped her arms around me. We held each other for the first time in years and watched as our grandmother walked into the fire. Rebekah cried out in exultation as flames gobbled her dress and hair first, and then began to boil her skin and cook her flesh. The sweet, smoky smell of burning meat filled the air.
Rebekah stood under her wooden altar, a woman on fire, and screamed in delight until she couldn’t scream anymore. She clung to the altar and it caught, too, and went up in flames. The triumphant smile never left her face, even when her lips were gone. Even when the skin on her face was charred to black.
The Kalyptra, all of them, remained crumpled on the ground, although they were no longer writhing. They were moving sluggishly, like people who’d been in comas, but were just starting to wake. Joanna raised her head and looked at us. I wouldn’t have recognized her if it weren’t for those black eyes of hers. Her hair had gone completely white and her face was a nest of wrinkles.
“What’s happening to them?” Erin asked, her voice tremulous.
“I think they’re turning the age they would have been if they hadn’t become Kalyptra.”
“Anya,” Joanna said, reaching a hand toward the stone pedestal.
Erin and I went to work quickly, scooping dirt onto the fire and putting out enough so that we could lift our mom’s body off the pedestal and onto the cool grass. She was unconscious from smoke inhalation, and blood continued to gush from her stomach. The wound on her side was deep. It could be fatal if we didn’t act quickly.
But I didn’t know if I could do what needed to be done.
Joanna crawled through the grass toward us. “Use my anima,” she said, her voice weak. “What’s left of it … I want Anya to have it. I’m human now. Mortal. You can take it.”
Erin’s eyes went to mine, huge and terrified. “Can you still…?” She didn’t need to finish the question.
I shook my head, not sure what the answer was. “I don’t know. I might not be Kalyptra anymore.”
“T-try,” Joanna rasped. “You’re different from the rest of us. You didn’t choose this life … you were born this w-way.”
I looked at her uncertainly. “Are you sure?” I asked softly, hesitant to take another human life. Or another life ever. I didn’t want to be Kalyptra anymore.
But maybe I didn’t have a choice.
“I’m sure,” Joanna said. “It’s my choice.”
“Thank you,” I told her, and then I put my hands on her and sighed in relief when I felt my vena emerge and connect to her body. Her anima swelled through me, but I didn’t let myself enjoy it. I closed my eyes as she withered and then I turned to my mom.
Erin had used Cyrus’s knife to cut the ropes binding our mom and remove her gag.
Mom’s eyes drifted open, and when she saw us she smiled. “My girls,” she said. “My babies.”
My vena connected to her like some alien IV and her back arched as Joanna’s anima filled her and sealed up the wound in her side.
When it was finished, she sat up, and she hugged Erin and me tight to her. We wrapped our arms around each other, and the love I felt from my family—my true family—was the best anima I’d ever known.
Around us, the Kalyptra began to climb to their feet, with the exception of Joanna, her body a withered husk. For a moment I worried the Kalyptra might pose a threat, that they might try to kill us for what we’d done. But looking around at them, I saw how frail, how diminished they were, and I knew they were no danger. Their masks had fallen from their faces, revealing aged, wrinkled skin, eyes dimmed like dying light bulbs, some filmed with cataracts.
I recognized Illia, though her lava-colored hair was now a cottony, white cloud. She wore a cloak over her dress, and she removed it and laid it over my mother’s naked frame.
Her eyes turned to me, and she said, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”
Then she drifted away, not down the path to Eclipse, but into the forest in the opposite direction.
The other Kalyptra mimicked her, murmuring apologies and goodbyes before wandering away into the night. I cried to see what they had become, but I didn’t hug any of them. I kept my arms around Erin and my mom, and I said my goodbyes.
The Kalyptra, it turned out, I could say goodbye to. My family, I could not.
Cyrus was the last to leave the clearing. His good looks had wilted with age, his chest sagging and his hair thinned to reveal a liver-spotted scalp. His hands were gnarled like claws.
He didn’t apologize. Instead, he said in a husky, dry voice, “She was the only real mother I ever had. I would have done anything for her. I couldn’t help myself.”
I thought of the scars on his back, and I pitied him. He’d been as lost as I was, maybe more, when Rebekah had gotten ahold of him. Then I thought of my passion for him, and the kisses we’d shared, and I marveled at how easy it was to mistake desire for love. But now another veil had been lifted from my eyes.
“We all have a choice,” I told him.
He nodded, and then, like the rest of the Kalyptra, he disappeared into the night.
Rebekah was dead, and the fire that had consumed her under her altar had nearly burned itself out. My mom, Erin, and I stayed to scatter dirt on the flames and douse them completely. My mom wept as she covered the remains of her mother with dirt, and I decided Rebekah was wrong.
Love is not a choice.
We love who we love, and our hearts want what they want. We can’t help that. We’re only human, even the Kalyptra.
I was Kalyptra still, but I was also, simply, human.
I had made so many terrible choices in my life, and I had lived for a long time filled with regret for the things I could not change. But it wasn’t too late for me to change. It was time to move on.
To move forward.
“Let’s go home,” I said when the fire was out and the smoke had cleared. I knew where home was now, and it wasn’t a place.
It was people.
It was love.
And love was as good as anima.
And that
was life.
EPILOGUE
LIFE
“Are you sure you’re ready for this?” Blake asked, slowing his 4Runner and pulling to the side of the highway, where the overgrown road to Eclipse snaked through a rippling, golden sea of grass.
A month had passed since I’d last traveled that road, but then I’d been heading in the opposite direction.
Heading toward home.
“I think so,” I said, biting my lip. A sense of déjà vu gripped me, and I recalled the last time Blake and I had sat idling in his car, at Folk Yeah! Fest. So much had changed since then, some things good, some bad. Some in ways that had yet to be determined.
The day after I came home from Eclipse, after I almost lost everything and everyone I loved, the festival coordinators called to let me know they had good news and bad news. The bad news was that I had not won the contest, though I’d been a close third. The good news was that one of the other bands had heard my song and wanted to acquire the rights to it for their next album.
The recording session had been that morning in Portland, and I’d been invited to listen and meet the band. The whole day had been like an out-of-body experience. I still felt high from it. Not anima high. Not lose yourself high. Just … up. Just good.
Blake had driven me to Portland and watched the session with me. He and I hadn’t figured out the romantic part of our relationship yet, but our friendship was alive and well, and that was what mattered most to me for now. During the drive back from Portland, we talked about everything and anything with the exception of my time at Eclipse. I’d already told him all there was to tell about that, leaving out not a single detail, not even the parts about Cyrus. Blake had been understandably hurt and angry, but he also understood that my brief life with the Kalyptra had been complicated. It wasn’t a black or white situation. It was very, very gray.
I looked over at Blake. Worry made a little tuck between his eyebrows. “You don’t have to take me,” I told him. “I can drive out with my mom another day.”
Mom visited Eclipse several times a week now that she owned the land and everything on it. Despite Rebekah’s claims that my mom was dead to her, she’d never cut her daughter out of her will. Maybe because she didn’t want to bother with going into the world to deal with a lawyer.
After coming home, Mom and Erin and I had spent hours discussing what to do about Eclipse and the land and the livestock living on it, and we finally decided to trust Detective Speakman with as much of the truth as we dared. We delivered to him a revised version of the events that had taken place at Eclipse, and let him take care of the rest. He knew there were things we’d left out of our story, but for some reason he let us get away with it, maybe because it turned out he was a fan of The X-Files and he understood there were some things in the world that didn’t look good in a formal report. Besides, he had his hands full dealing with the bodies from the cave at Eclipse, searching for their identities, and notifying the victims’ families.
I’d thought Mom would want to sell Eclipse as soon as the police turned it back over to her, that she would remove all ties to her past with the Kalyptra, but Mom surprised Erin and me when she announced she’d decided not to sell Eclipse. Mom wanted to convert it into an artists’ colony. My initial response to this idea was bleak. Eclipse had such a dark past. People had been killed there. They had lost their souls to a narcissistic, misguided woman there. I thought it might be better if Mom had the place boarded up and we never set foot on that land again.
But then I thought of my own dark history, and the terrible things I’d done. There was darkness in me, but there was more light every day. I didn’t want anyone to give up on me because of my past, and I couldn’t give up on Eclipse for the same reason. Mom’s artists’ colony would create good to take the place of bad. Art and beauty and music in the place of greed and addiction and death. We would start over, rebuild, do things differently this time around. Nothing lasts forever. Good is superseded by bad, and bad can be steered back toward good. The world is always in flux. Light falls to dark, and dark surrenders to light, and life moves on.
At home, color was starting to return to the woods around our house, shoots of green thrusting up through ashen ground.
Life shaking off death.
Blake reached across to me, took my hand, and wove his fingers through mine. He never hesitated to touch me anymore, and I was glad. I was tired of keeping people at arm’s length, tired of holding back.
* * *
When Blake pulled up in front of Eclipse House, my mom and Erin emerged from the big front doors and came down to greet us. The two of them had been busy over the last month, going through all of the Kalyptra’s belongings and deciding what to keep and what to remove. The Kalyptra themselves had not returned to the house. There had been stories on Oregon news blogs about a bizarre number of bodies—all of them belonging to elderly people—that had been found throughout Oregon, Washington, and Northern California. The bodies were dessicated, and crumbled to powder when they were touched, rendering them unidentifiable. I couldn’t decide how to feel about that. I’d loved the Kalyptra, and I was sure they’d loved me. I missed them, but they were starting to seem like friends I’d made many years ago in another life. In a way, that’s what they were.
Sometimes I dreamed about them, and those dreams were good. And some nights I dreamed the Eclipse moth was hovering over me, and I woke, wondering if there were other Eclipse moths out there in the world, and if the others would go in search of them, or if the Mother was the only one.
I decided not to worry, to just let life be good.
Erin leaped off the porch and wrapped me in a fierce hug that nearly knocked the breath out of me. I kept forgetting how strong she was now. She’d decided to let me infuse her every day with a little bit of anima to keep her healthy. She’d accepted what I was, and we’d both accepted that we could not leave each other alone in this world. Neither of us would ever be normal, and we would always need each other. We would always be together, and we could live with that.
“How was the recording session?” Erin asked. “Tell me everything.”
Mom leaned against the porch and smiled down at us. There was sadness in her eyes, same as always, but it seemed, for the first time in as long as I could remember, like something that might pass, a storm that might blow over. She had cried a lot over the past month, but it was better than what she’d done before, holding her sadness inside and suffering alone. Now Erin and I were there for her. We were there for each other.
“Okay,” I told Erin. “I’ll give you the full report. I just … I have to do something first.”
Alone, I headed out across the yard, toward Bully’s grave. The blanket of flowers the Kalyptra and I had laid over the small mound of earth had dried up, so I picked a new armload of wildflowers to place on his grave. I kept hold of one poppy, my eyes burning with tears. The urge to cull the flower was strong, but I resisted. I fought every day to control my cravings. It wasn’t easy, and it would never be, but I had found a way to master my need. There was only one thing in this world that was better than taking anima, and I had it now. I had the love and acceptance of my family and Blake, who had seen the worst in me, and still loved me. I couldn’t change what I was, but I couldn’t hide from it either. Anima was a fixture in my daily life, and it would be for as long as I lived. But I needed to feel my feelings, the good and the bad, instead of burying them.
So I cried over Bully’s grave, and I told him I was sorry I couldn’t save him, and then I dried my eyes and took a few deep breaths and headed back to the house.
Blake, my mom, and Erin sat in the porch chairs, chatting. My mom had brought out one guitar for each of us, including her old guitar and the one Stig had made for me. Along with drawing his wonderful, weird art, Blake had practiced while I was at Eclipse, and had improved quite a bit, and now that Erin’s fingers were strong enough, my mom and I had started teaching her to play, too.
“Are you okay
?” Erin asked softly. It was obvious I’d been crying.
I nodded and took the seat next to her, picking up my guitar. “I am,” I said, and meant it. “What are we playing?” I asked.
“I heard a really great song this morning,” Blake said, grinning, his hair falling across one eye. He began to pick out the notes of my song, and when it was time, I sang.
We all did.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’ve long dreamed of forming my own bohemian commune and inviting all of my favorite people to live there with me. We would grow our own food and bake our own bread, and there would be goats. Many, many goats.
I don’t have a real commune yet, but there is one that exists in my head, populated by the wonderful people who helped me bake this book. Someday I will show my gratitude with a commune invitation and goats. For now, words will have to do.
Thank you to my early readers and purveyors of wisdom, Jessica Brody, Sara Wilson Etienne, Gabrielle Zevin, Jamie Weiss Chilton, and Elizabeth Fama.
Thank you for the unwavering support: Julia Shahin Collard, Gretchen McNeil, Nadine Nettmann, Erin Bosworth, Laura Bjergfelt Nielsen, Melissa Bosworth, Edith Cohn, Leigh Bardugo, and Lamar Giles.
Thank you to my agent, Doug Stewart, for loving my weird work, and for being wonderful.
Thank you to my editor, Janine O’Malley, for her patience and for helping me grow as an author.
Most of all, thank you to my true commune, my family. To Ryan, Berlin, and Nero for the only thing that really matters, even more than goats …
Thank you for the love.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jennifer Bosworth lives in Los Angeles, California. She is the author of the young adult novel Struck and is the writer half of a writer/director team with her husband, Ryan Bosworth. You can sign up for email updates here.
ALSO BY JENNIFER BOSWORTH
Struck
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