I shake my head. “I don’t understand. These women live to kill men like Don every day. Why am I so different?”
She takes a breath and sits across from me. “Consider this your first lesson in being a bane witch. We are the venery—all of us together, every witch of our line. And we act with mutual interest, you understand? We do not act alone. This is not an every-woman-for-herself mentality. We survivetogether.A witch on her own is a dead witch.”
“Those who hunt alone often starve.” I repeat the words I heard her say to my mother so many years ago, words that sent my mother into a rage.
“That’s right,” she says. “It’s a saying of ours. It means we are stronger together.Safertogether. You understand?”
I nod my head.
“There are four things that are never tolerated in the venery.” She raises a finger. “Men—no husbands, no sons, no long-term lovers.” Her eyes bore into mine as if she can smell him on me, and she raises a second finger. “Secrets—full transparency is the only way we can know we are truly safe. If you are caught hiding something, you better hope it’s worth dying for.” She raises her third finger. “Exposure—we operate in the shadows. It’s the only way. The world as we know it has long festered a hatred for women, let alone witches, a hatred for everything we are and stand for. There is nothing it despises more than a woman with power. We are everything they want to eliminate. And we exist by living and killing covertly.”
I look down at my hands. A curl of skin sprouts beside my right index fingernail, parts of me peeling away. I pick it off and look up. “What’s the fourth thing?” I ask, almost afraid to hear it.
“The killing of innocents.” She appraises me. “You accused us of being murderers, and maybe by the standard definition that’s true. But we take only a certain kind of life, the kind that’s rotting from the inside, that breeds evil and pain and preys on those weaker than it. We do not take an innocent. To do so is to step away from being a bane witch and step toward becoming a monster.”
This will be my future. A sun-parched horizon looms before me, loveless, without exclusive possession. I belong to the venery; nothing belongs to me. My mother’s mulish assertion of independence, however damned, takes on a polished cast, like tarnish clearing from silver. Gerald, I am becoming achingly aware, was never the prize. Her own sovereignty was.
“Myrtle,” I ask, knowing I can no longer afford to live in the dark. “What happened between my mother and the venery?”
“Do you really want to know?”
“I think so,” I tell her honestly.
Her shoulders slump as her eyes fall from mine. “Your mother had a bright future with us,” she begins. “Lily was strong, so much stronger than you give her credit for. And our numbers weredwindling. There was a second venery here in the United States, but they’d died out a decade before, unable to keep their line safe and fertile. So, when your mother showed such early signs of a power beyond what any of us had known, the venery was ecstatic. We believed we were being given the power to do the work of both lines. But my sister, Angel, was a poor teacher. She’d fallen in love young with a politician’s son. It was a doomed match for many reasons, not least of which was his life in the public eye. She was persuaded to leave him against her will, but she came away pregnant. It was all the venery could do to get her to hold out for the birth, telling her this child would fill the hole her lover had left behind. Angel gave birth to twins—your mother and a little boy. She clung to him, even as your mother wailed in her bassinet. In the end, they had to pry him from her fingers. The loss sent her over the edge. She was never the same after that. She raised Lily, but her heart wasn’t in it. And she did only the bare minimum to keep her own gifts from destroying her. Honestly, we should have taken Lily away, but we feared how Angel might react. She wasn’t as strong or as early to bloom as your mother, but Angel was already more powerful than most of us.”
I can’t imagine how much longing and loneliness my mother must have felt, knowing she was always the consolation prize, the unwanted child. And yet, my childhood wasn’t all that different. “And Mom? What did that do to her?”
“Angel filled your mother’s head with all her fantasies of love and marriage and normalcy. She poisoned her against the venery, against her own self. Lily was mortified when she began to bloom. She tried to hide it, but you know how impossible that is. Eventually, she was convinced to ease into her cycle. But she was so young. I think it traumatized her. She met Patrick just out of high school. Like her mother, she fell hard. They tried to run away together. It was a terrible mistake. No matter how we pleaded, she wouldn’t break it off with him. When he died, she was inconsolable. It was her fault, you see. It can happen so easily; all it takes is one careless second. She’d been feeding after months of starvingher power because she was having violent nightmares, the cravings building inside her like compressed air. She tried to avoid him, hoping she could take her mark quickly and be done with it. She picked a fight, locked herself in another room, slept alone. But Patrick came to her in the night. By the time she woke up, he was lying beside her, kissing her neck. It was a hot summer that year. They were near the Gulf Coast. The humidity was through the roof, and they were a couple of kids with next to no money. The place they were renting didn’t have air-conditioning. She’d been sweating in her sleep. You can imagine what came next.”
“That was my father?” I asked, my throat closing on the word.
Myrtle nodded. “She renounced us after that. But then you were born. You were right about her wanting a boy, even though she could never have kept him. A son wouldn’t have tied her to us. A son wouldn’t have carried on our legacy, everything she hated in herself. A son could have had everything she wanted and never got. But she loved you in spite of herself. She wanted better for you than she’d had. It was misguided, but it came from a pure place.”
“Why?” I ask her. “Why did the venery let her live? Why did they let her keep me?”
Myrtle shook her head. “We thought with time, we could win her over. Get at least the bare minimum out of her. We thought it would grant us access to you, allow us to carry the line on through you. But Lily never caved. How she found the will to hold so much back for so long without destroying herself and you in the process, I’ll never understand. But the drugs played a role. It’s a wonder neither one of you killed Gerald by accident in all those years.”
“Believe me, I wanted to kill him on purpose plenty. I just never knew I could.”
Memories drift back to me, like reflections on the surfaces of bubbles, tenuous and faded, the colors off, the symmetry transposed. Gerald’s ashtray, always resting on the arm of the recliner, like a loyal pet. My mother treated it with reverence, a holy relic never to be touched. If I strayed too near, she would smack my hand. The dishes I wasn’t allowed to wash. The piles of laundryshe tended alone, her hands encased in lime green latex, like alien attachments. I never saw them kiss, or even hug. Twice I saw him press himself against her from behind, the kitchen counter biting into her midsection as if it might cut her in half. He liked her near, focused on him, like a lady-in-waiting. But he was too fixated on himself—his game, his beer, his meal—to want anything more than a servant or a security blanket. And she let that be enough for her. I understand why now. “Bad joke,” I admit.
Myrtle gives me a lame smile. “The man you did kill, the bad thing when you were five—that’s unheard of in our clan. Once that happened, I imagine your mother knew exactly the crosshairs you would fall into. She didn’t know how the venery would react, and she wasn’t willing to take the chance. She had her issues, but she also did a lot of what she did to protect you.”
“And you?” I ask her. “You never told them. Why?”
She smiles. “Because when I looked into your eyes that day, child, I saw the future staring back at me. There’s a force in you, Piers. Something we haven’t seen before. I knew you were a wild card, but I was willing to take the gamble. And I still am.”
I reach out and squeeze her hand, grateful.
“Anyway, Lily threatened to expose us if we crossed her. In the end, it wasn’t worth the risk. A witch like her, we knew she could do it and probably would. There was always a certain desperation to her, like a person living on the edge of a cliff. One shove in the wrong direction… We drew our line in the sand, and then we watched and waited.”
“Gerald,” I say plainly.
“He was a dull man. And cruel. I’ll never know what she saw in him, other than a whisper of Patrick—”
“He was safe,” I cut in, my voice threadbare. Narcissism coupled with stupidity made him oblivious. She was playing out a fantasy, like a doll. Middle-Class, Doormat Barbie.
Myrtle pulls her lips in, swallowing words. “Well, he caught on eventually. Your mother was careful, and she could go years in between, but shedidfeed and shedidkill. And he figured it out.How is anyone’s guess. Or maybe she finally grew tired of his bullshit. I don’t know. I just know she upheld her promise and killed him before we had to. After Patrick, and whatever falling out you two had, Gerald was all she had left. I wasn’t surprised when she took her life after. She probably thought we’d come for her anyway. She would have hated that—letting us have the final say. At least this way, she died the way she lived, by her own rules.”
