“Flos mortis,” I whisper.Flower of death.
She does not meet my eye.
“Why not eat the yellow wart you collected?”
“It wouldn’t do.”
“The tawny grisette then,” I suggest. I’ve seen her stores, overflowing with specimens from around the country. Even without them, she must have dozens of options living out here in unspoiled wilderness, no one around for miles to catch her foraging except the occasional moose or porcupine.
“No, it’s even less useful,” she says with more force than needed. Her jaw grinds. It’s getting to her, the craving, the need to feed. “Besides, no fungi. Not this time.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Why ever not? It’s abundant and effective. You said so yourself—” And then it sinks in. Because of me. Because of the man in the café.
She sees the truth steal across my face and throws out a hand, letting it slap her thigh as it drops. “Exactly. I can’t risk alerting Sheriff Brooks with any…overlap.This kill must look wholly unrelated. He’s already got mushrooms on his mind. This will need to be cleaner, less obvious. Poet’s daffodil is unexpected, not terribly toxic. I can combine it with another emetic and something to draw them both out. With any luck, they’ll pass it off as a terrible case of food poisoning. We’re miles from any hospital out here. It wouldn’t be the first time someone died of an otherwise perfectly treatable condition in these mountains.”
“Who’s the mark?” I ask, willing my voice not to cave.
Her eyes slide to mine. “I don’t know yet.”
“You said we often have a class, a type. What’s yours?”
She folds her arms beneath her breasts, clutching her elbows.“I have two.” Her eyes flicker away and back again. “Most of my marks are incestophiles.”
I drop my head into my hands. “Like the man who built your shelter?”
“Yes.” She drags the chair across from me out from under the table. The legs make a loud juddering sound against the wood, echoing my discomfort. She sits down. “And my first mark. The one in the deli.”
There’s a sick twist of poetic justice to an incestuous father being killed by a girl barely old enough to have entered puberty. But the weight of her life’s work sits over me, ugly and squalid and stinking, a carcass of deeds. The horrible things she must have seen in their eyes, in her own mind. “Oh, Myrtle.”
“Don’t feel sorry for me,” she’s quick to say. “I have no qualms about what I do. I put an end to a particularly virulent strain of suffering for many children that will not come any other way before they reach adulthood. In some cases, not even after.”
My stomach flops and my mind starts looking for exit points. “You saidmostof your marks.”
“I have a second class,” she admits, a touch wary. “It’s unconventional.”
I laugh humorlessly. “Isn’t all of this unconventional?”
Her smile is tight, hovering at the height of her mouth. “It’s not a class any other bane witch has shown a leaning for. It’s a first among our kind. So, it’s been controversial, you could say.”
I imagine Rose and Barbie and the rest gathered in some back room raking Myrtle over the coals for whatever she’s about to tell me. “Go on.”
“Mercy killings.”
I don’t know what I was expecting—pipe bombers, dog fighters, those guys who put rat poison in envelopes and mail them to government buildings to create anthrax scares—but it wasn’t that. I blink, too stunned to comment. After a long pause, I gather my wits enough to mutter, “I don’t understand.”
“It goes against the nature of our…creation.We are defenders,protectors of the vulnerable. That has always been women and children. Some have argued that killing a man for hisownsake, to end his own suffering, is a distortion of our duty,” she tries to explain.
“Let me guess. Rose?”
She looks taken aback. “No. Rose has been a staunch supporter of mine, in fact. It was my grandmother, actually, who protested the loudest—Hellen.”
Her own grandmother? The betrayal had to slice deep, but she sits before me, discussing it as if it were a disagreement over a family pot roast recipe. “And you? What do you say?”
She shrugs as if it’s simple. “Remember how I told you we were evolving? All species do it. They adapt to survive. Why shouldn’t we? We no longer live in the time or country where we began. Our justice system may leave much to be desired, but it certainly deals out more punishment than was seen in thirteenth-century France. Women enjoy freedoms unheard of in past centuries. Including access to defenses once inconceivable to them. Obviously, there is still work to be done if our venery continues. But we’ve seen one line die out already. And perhaps it is time for some of our gifts to shift, to meet the calling of the times.”
“But these men—the mercy killings—they’re innocents, right?” I blink at her.
She smiles softly, as if remembering a caress. “Yes. They are effectively innocents. Maybe the most innocent of all. Wounded, hurting, chewed up by the world and spit back out. Desperate for release. I give that to them. The rules are different, of course. When the intent changes, so do the parameters. Never too young, too strong. The life force must have already waned to an irrecoverable point.”
