She nods. “Come now, you think we don’t know, that Myrtle didn’t tell us? About your man? The one who used you, who controlled and tormented you? Tell me, did the courts protect you from him?”
My eyes fill with tears, face reddening, a blister of shame. “No.”
“No,” she repeats, watching me. “I didn’t think so.” Her eyes travel the room. “Azalea, tell us about your last mark.”
Azalea steps forward, radiant, a coy smile on her face. “Percell,” she purrs, drawing out thelsound. “Such a charmer.” Her sarcasm lights the room up with laughter. “He ran a multibillion-dollar corporation on the West Coast. He was a man of… how shall I put this?” She fingers the fruit charms on her enamel bracelet. “Discriminating tastes,” she finally finishes. “He had a cannibal fetish. One his money and prestige allowed him to move from the realm of fantasy to reality. He only indulged in female meat,” she adds when my face pales. “He had two sons also. I decided they were better off without that sick fuck guiding their lives. Now they’ll grow up rich and sad but otherwise normal. They’ll go to private school and work for hedge funds and maybe do a little coke. But they won’t eat people.”
“Thank you, Azalea.” Bella looks disturbed. “That was… vivid.”
Azalea nods and steps back, leaning against the wall as she grins.
Aunt Bella stares at me. “How would your courts handle that man? Hmmm? Where is his justice outside of this venery?”
“I—They probably wouldn’t,” I admit. “Because his money protects him. But that’s just one person.”
She smiles and raises a bent finger, pointing to Verna, whose pixie cut and boyish build make her stand out in the room.
Without a word, Verna begins. “My last mark was a judge in the district courts. He liked to film kiddie porn on the weekends for his hobby. When I found him, he’d already raped over seventy boys between the ages of six and fifteen, several of whom he paid for exclusive rights to after they were sexually trafficked. He was never going to stop,” she says, giving me a hard stare. “Never.”
“But you stopped him, didn’t you, Verna?” Bella asks.
She smiles bashfully. “With a tampon in his thermos.”
Bella’s eyebrows arch. “Creative…”
The young woman dips her chin innocently. “He was driving to his ‘summer home’ near the Canyonlands of Utah. He kept a special room there, a fitting place for him to die. They didn’t find his body for many days. By the time they did, the thermos had been scrubbed with oxygen bleach.”
Bella looks at me. “See? Even your judicial system is corrupted. But we are not. There isn’t a woman in this room who has taken an innocent life. Not a one. If your mother were still alive, she would be the only exception.”
Even I fall under this rule, I realize. Three men, every one deserving in their own way. But the urge to defend my mom, however new, beats hard in my chest. “Because she didn’t want to be a killer.”
“Because she didn’t listen!” Lattie hisses before Bella can respond. “If she had done her duty, your father would be alive, and in his place countless predators put out of commission. But she was selfish, just like you. She wanted anormallife.” She says the last line mockingly. I feel absurd.
My cheeks are wet, sticky with tears and heat; my mouth cannot form another word. It feels gummy inside, disintegrating. I’m so confused and sick and horrified I can hardly stand. I know when I’m bested.
“You stand there and judge us,” Rose says acidly, moving toward me, corrosive and sparking. “Your own kind. But where is your judgment for the men who rape and kill and hit and take? Who barricade themselves behind money and power and a culture that protects them, champions their aggression and narcissism? You are sick with poison, but it’s not ours, it’s theirs. It spreads in you even now, tainting your self-image, the way you look at everything, especially other women. The men we kill are not victims. Butyouare. And you should know better.”
Her words are like a chemical burn in my ears. I want to flushthem out before they scar. Why is it easier for me to point a finger at these women than the men who provoked them? Shouldn’t someone stand in contrast to the misogyny that has defined us for millennia? The vigilante in me has been hog-tied, wrists and ankles numb, circulation cut off. A banded appendage that fell off long ago. A vestigial tail.
Aunt Bella grips the wheels of her chair and rolls toward me. She raises a crooked hand to take one of my own. “We are products of their violence,” she says softly. “As long as they commit crimes against our sex with such impunity, as long as the imbalance exists, so will we.”
Myrtle steps forward. “Piers, I know this must be hard for you to swallow. Lily tried to shelter you from it, and it has only done more damage. But listen when we tell you, there is no other choice. It’s not fair, but it’s fact. You either live as a bane witch, or you die as one. There is no in-between.”
The soft pads of Aunt Bella’s fingers are cool against my own. “We have lost too many to count over the centuries,” she says sadly. “Many casualties in the first, stumbling generations of our kind as we adjusted to the weight of our magic. Women who weren’t careful enough, who miscalculated, who paid the price. Girls even, who simply paid for their mother’s transgressions. And then came the fires and the burnings. So many innocents lost we could never cleanse the world of that bloodshed. But among them, so many of our own, too. Now we are cleaner and clearer and far more careful, but safety is never a guarantee. If we are hard, sweet child, if we seem cruel…” Her hand grips mine with a force and dexterity I wouldn’t have known it still had, crushing my knuckles together. “It is because we have to be to keep you safe, to keep ourselves alive. There cannot be room for error without making room for death.”
I stare down at Aunt Bella, knowing I cannot escape again. Henry was one thing, but how many bridges can I survive? Is there one tall enough to leave the bane witch behind? My mother tried to evade her fate, and she was a resolute failure. The onlychoice I have is to go down the same doomed path she took or forge my own.
“But I died,” I tell them. “I died so that I could live on my own,asmy own.”
“You died to an illusion of weakness,” Bella says to me, “so that you may live your strength.”
Her words are the final swing of the hammer. My chest hitches and a sob erupts, laying my soul bare. I am cornered.
“It’s time,” the old matriarch whispers gently. “Take your place, Piers Corbin. You are a victim no longer.”
THE CABIN FEELSstifling. Everyone is crammed in for the after-party, wedged into sofas and chairs, clumping around the kitchen and near the windows, sipping the hot toddies Myrtle keeps passing out and munching on finger sandwiches. A bowl of dessert mints sits on the low table in front of me, little pastel pillows that melt in your mouth, making this look for all the world like just another wedding shower or holiday. My hands are pressed between my knees. To my left, Verna is hanging over the arm of the couch, chatting Misty up about Pilates; to my right, Ivy and Tina are discussing canapés. I feel as if I have fallen into an alternate universe. I have to remind myself that only weeks ago, Misty followed a man back to his car and offered to blow him in an empty parking lot, then stood back and watched him die, and that Verna grows deadly wolfsbane in her garage. There will be a moment where these contradictions come together to form a complete picture in my mind, where Pilates and wolfsbane make sense in the same sentence and I won’t wonder if the canapés are laced with shaved columbine root. But it hasn’t happened yet.
When Ivy gets up to go to the bathroom and Tina wanders into the kitchen to help Aunt Myrtle, Azalea plops down next to me. “You look positively green. What’s the matter? Is the pimiento cheese not agreeing with you?”
