“Your allure, dear. It’s how we call our victims, what drives them to us. How do I explain this?” She taps a finger against the back of the photo frame in her lap. “Like magnets!” she finally says. “You are one pole, he another. It’s an invisible force mostly, but sometimes when they are close, when they need a nudge, it kicks into overdrive, overriding their senses. They’ll experience you in a particular way that appeals to them—a smell or a feeling, even a feature of your face or hair.”
Don’s strange comparison of me to the gardenia bushes of his childhood home floods my memory, the way he kept leaning toward me, like he was drinking in my scent. Understanding washes over me, prickling across my skin in eerie waves. I don’t know myself. I never have. How much of my life has been lived in the shadow of what I am, my ignorance creating a disconnect that I filled with shame and doubt and pain?
I meet Myrtle’s eyes. “But I didn’t call him. I don’t even know him. I just know his type—” Something in my mind begins toturn, an engine igniting in the cold void. I can’t quite bring the pieces together on my own, but I can see how they fit. I furrow my brow.
“Don’t you, though?” she asks darkly. “A bane witch knows her victims the way a mother knows her baby before she’s ever held it. It’s intimate, primitive. You knew the moment he stepped through my door who he was, what he was capable of. You knew what he had done and would likely do again. And everything in you responded to it. That is your giftworking,Piers. That is your destiny.”
I wrap a hand across my forehead, stunned. I consider the way the man looked up at me, full of vanity and pride and rancor. The way he spoke with spite sharpening his words. The way he took up space that didn’t belong to him, like a challenge. The way he reminded me of Henry, even though on the surface they were worlds apart. But the core of him was the same kind of rotten. And I knew that particular stench. I smelled it the second he arrived.
Myrtle is right. Icalledhim. I don’t know how, but I did. And now I know why.
If I drew that man to me tonight, did I draw Don? Was he more than a random man in a parking lot, an easy ride, a means to an end? And what did that make Henry? Had I married someone I was supposed to destroy, allowing him to destroy me instead?
“If it’s any consolation”—I hear Myrtle cut through my thoughts—“my first died in a spray of bloody emesis on the floor of a New York deli. That was before I made it this far north. I was young then, only fourteen.”
I look up at her, my jaw slack and face pale, full of revulsion.
She grins. “I licked his spoon,” she says with a wink. “Dunked it right into his bowl of soup. Then sat in a nearby booth with my lunch until I could be sure the job was done. That was the best pastrami on rye I’ve ever had,” she adds wistfully, popping open one of the little latches that hold the back of the frame on.
I visibly gag and her face falls. “TMI?” When I don’t respond, she leans forward. “Bend your head over your knees, dear. That’sit. Wait for the nausea to pass. This will all feel like second nature in no time, you’ll see.”
I sit up, taking a deep breath. “You were fourteen?” I manage to get out. “When you killed your first man?”
She pops another latch on the frame. “Nearly fifteen. Of course, Angel—my sister, your grandmother—was thirteen when she took her first. She was always showing me up. Your mother was even younger. Too young, really. It’s not good for us to bloom before puberty. I think that was the root of a lot of her problems. And then there’s you. Five is unheard of, perilously young. I’ve kept that little detail to myself. I couldn’t know how they would react. But you’ve survived against all odds, even with Lily never training you. There’s something extreme that runs through your line. A defect, if you ask me. Too much power isn’t healthy. To think you just kept feeding and feeding after that. All that poison and magic building up with nowhere to go. It’s a wonder you didn’t explode.”
Her words shatter me. I didn’t explode. Instead, it all turned inward. I learned to hate myself for what I was. I poisoned myself instead of someone else and ended up in the arms of a man even more toxic than my family line. A man whose idea of love is deadly. There is a strange irony to it. A horrified laugh burbles out of me. “You wanted to take me,” I say, my eyes wide and disturbed. “All those years ago. I heard you ask her to let me live with you, to let you teach me.”
“I did,” Myrtle confirms. “But she refused.”
“You should have taken me anyway,” I grind out, tears forming at the corners of my eyes. One leaks out and rolls down my cheek. “It would have been better. For everyone.”
She pops another latch and appraises me. “Perhaps. Perhaps I failed you as much as she did. But I couldn’t cross your mother. I had to play my hand carefully.”
I wipe at my eyes. I don’t want to cry for her knowing she kept this from me, let me believe I was broken, leaving me with nothing, not even the barest understanding of who I am. But mymother is a wound in my heart that will never heal, no matter how I resent it. “Why? She couldn’t have been that powerful. She never killed anyone. She was weak, mixed-up. And she abandoned me.”
Myrtle looks pained. “Whatever passed between you, Piers, your mother loved you.”
I shake my head. “No. You misunderstand. I’m not talking about our estrangement. She abandoned me long before that. Don’t you get it? She let those doctors poke and pry at me. Let them gawk at me like an exhibit, a puzzle they couldn’t solve. Let them pump me with medication until I finally became so destitute that I decided there wasn’t any point and stopped taking them. By not teaching me to kill, she left me to die. And all the while, she knew. And she never said a word. Not. One. Word.”
Myrtle pops the last latch on the frame and looks up. “Lily was many things,” she says ominously, “but she was never weak. Confused, yes. Even deluded. But she was so much stronger than you know. This life, Piers, is not without suffering. Your mother had more than her fair share. It was a testament to her strength that she didn’t crumble sooner, that she held on to some sliver of dignity and sanity, of herself, until the bitter end.”
I grind my jaw. “She had no dignity. She gave it all to Gerald.” Was it really any wonder I ended up with a man like Henry?
Carefully, Myrtle lifts the back off the frame. “You’re wrong,” she says quietly. “In the end, she proved that.”
My head shoots up, eyes slitting at her words. “What does that mean?”
“Your mother believed she washelpingyou. It was misguided, I know. I did try to warn her. But she was experimenting with things we’d never had access to before. I couldn’t know that she was entirely wrong. For many years, I thought she’d figured something out. That she’d spared you. At least, that’s how she would define it. I lied when I said I didn’t come for you after she died. I’ve kept close tabs on you and Lily over the years. The internet has made that much easier of course, but we’ve always had our ways in this family. But I saw you living a life free of allthis. Unburdened. Unhindered. I knew the drugs Lily was taking hadn’t done enough to change her, but I thought maybe she’d gotten to you young enough—”
“What drugs?” I glare at her.
She looks surprised. “The same she gave you. The ones the doctors prescribed. Of course, she fed them a lot of malarkey about fake symptoms in order to get them, but it didn’t seem to matter. They’re pretty eager to hand those particular pills out these days.”
“My mom was taking Ritalin? She was taking Paxil?”
“Among others,” Myrtle supplies. “They helped, I suppose, for a time. But you—you seemed to lose all sense of the hunger, you stopped blooming, no longer ripe. The allure wasn’t even working. You moved away, got an education, found work, made a name for yourself. You seemed…happy.If I had shown up on your doorstep, told you that you were an ancient weapon magically designed to be a defender of women and children by taking the lives of predatory men, an instrument of justice and vengeance older than time, a poison eater, I would have ruined it all. I would have devastated you. I couldn’t do that. We decided it was best—safer, even—to leave you where you were, keeping a careful eye of course.”
Not careful enough,I think. But then, that’s Henry’s genius: hiding the rot behind a mask of charm, a veneer of carefully crafted perfection. “We?”
