It’s Bram they should fear! Not death!
Yes. Death is final. It does not torture or twist or prolong…
They force it away! It’s forced to lurk in graveyards, in hospitals, in battle, in the darkness of the night. Just like me…
Yet it’s life that perverts. It’s life that drives me hungry to the ground like a dog. It’s life which pushes me to fringes, and allows men like Bram inside, stripping me naked for taking what belonged to no one.
I can show them. I have the power.
I can be that reminder.
I can be part of humanity.
I can be death…
Rawthorne entered. “You feeling better?” He asked without caring, tossing a bowl of broth before me.
In an instant, I was on my feet.
“You should take it easy. Don’t want to upset anything, if you know what I mean—”
“I don’t want to hide anymore, Rawthorne.”
“Don’t be stupid. They’ll hunt us down like rats.”
“No. I am the huntress now. I am not welcome among humanity? Fine. I will prey upon them. I will teach them the inevitability of death. They should not fear me, but themselves.”
“Posy? You’re talking awfully strange.” There were no rocks within reach, but Rawthorne moved his knife from his pack to his belt during the time I was out. It was sheathed beside his flask, and when he reached for the first he fingered the other. “You’re not thinking of doing magic, are you?”
“You let them hurt me,” I intoned. My power seethed through me. I did not need a knife. “You would have let them rape me, just to save your precious life. Don’t you know you’re going to die anyway, Thorny? Isn’t that what you wanted? To be free?”
“Posy, I—”
Like ice cracking in a river’s spring thaw, my magic erupted through me. Purple light fountained from my palm, dashing the knife from Rawthorne’s hand. Together we dove upon it, and though I was small and injured, my despair gave me strength. Little fingers closed around the weapon. I twisted, for my brother was on top of me, and I drove the blade up under his sternum and into his chest. I felt the handle jump four times in my hand as his heart beat its final beats.
“Don’t be afraid of the dark, Rawthorne,” I whispered, kissing his forehead. “Be quiet now. Don’t be afraid.”
His eyes darkened and grew glassy, just like mine, and the deluge of blood from his chest slowed to a trickle.
“Goodnight, my brother. It’s time for us to come into our legacy. For you, the halls of our fathers. For me, all the powers of death.”
I pushed him off me and swaggered to the mouth of the cave, where the darkness swallowed the sun.
“And I know exactly whose light to extinguish.”
PHANTOM SCRY
It took Mr. Henry Hayward’s daughter approximately one week, three hours and sixteen minutes to arrive back on his doorstep after she had died.
He couldn’t see her at first. He remembered peering out into the rain, hands gripping the chipped green paint of the stoop in front of the farmhouse. It was late October, and his breath crystallized in the air.
But Mr. Hayward couldn’t see her.
Still, Layla was always a bright one—a dear soul. She wrapped her phantom knuckles against the stonewall in such a melody, he knew it could be no one but her.
Layla’s ghost, a frightening vision the first moment she materialized in front of him, became an acceptable—and then comforting—sight. When Mr. Hayward returned from work in the evenings, tossing his trench coat aside in the foyer, she would be there to greet him, peeking out from behind the mauve colored curtains in the den.
After supper, he would stretch out his weary legs in front of a roaring fire, coaxed into life by his own careful hand. Layla would appear behind him, casting a tall, thin shadow on the wall behind the familiar silhouette of his worn leather armchair.
She would also show up at night, standing at the foot of his bed, a myriad of incessant whispers leaking from her mouth into the silent room. Layla, she always liked to talk.
During the first year of her deathly occupancy, Mr. Hayward still allowed company to come to their house. He would scramble to stash a bemused Layla into an unused room the moment he heard the doorbell ring. “Quick, in here!” he’d cry, frantically waving his arms at the thick mahogany door of the library.
Layla would always comply, but she did not enjoy being ignored.
Mr. Hayward recalled the day Mrs. Prickett came over, swinging her cane at her side as she marched into the den. Her eyes narrowed as she meticulously searched every nook and cranny she noticed, convinced Layla was sure to appear out of one of them.
At last Mrs. Prickett sighed, sniffed the air with her long, hooked nose and sat across from Mr. Hayward on the velvet green sofa. “It’s still so shocking,” she murmured. Her lips disappeared into a series of wrinkles.
“Absolutely shocking,” he replied tersely. He felt his shoulders haunch in dismay of their own accord. Grief was exhausting.
The elderly woman surveyed him momentarily, taking in his patched trousers, thick woolen vest, and threadbare linen shirt. For the first time since the funeral that morning which felt so long ago, she looked genuinely sympathetic.
“Dear Henry,” Mrs. Prickett tutted, and fussed with her grey skirt. “I imagine you sometimes think she is still here, you most unfortunate man. Who would have ever thought Layla was so unhappy, she would resort to such means?”
To which Henry Hayward opened his mouth to speak, but the two neighbors lost their train of thought when they heard the loud banging of a door on the second floor of the house.
Heavy footsteps charged across the floor above where they sat. Mr. Hayward watched as the brass chandelier shook and tinkled with the movement, dancing six feet above Mrs. Prickett’s salt and pepper colored hair.
Mrs. Prickett turned to look at him, a sharp eyebrow quipped in curiosity.
“I have a new maid,” he said, willing his face to appear open and relaxed. “She is still getting comfortable with her tasks.”
After the neighbor’s visit, Henry never let another person into the house. More than anything, he feared what would happen to his daughter should she ever be exposed.
No, Henry wanted his thirteen year old daughter to have a tranquil, thought-provoking afterlife, filled with sunny afternoons and Jane Eyre. Her ghost self would shape to be what her living self had been destined for—an intelligent young woman comprised of charisma and wit.
And ordinary life, as it were, resumed.
They lived in harmony, father and daughter. A year passed, and the sight of her transparent skin became less and less shocking to him. Beyond her milky white pupils, and bloodless skin, Henry saw his daughter, and came to love her all over again.
For one beautiful year nothing changed.
But all bouts of peace eventually come to an end. And Henry’s did on an extremely windy night in early November. He stood by the door in the kitchen, gazing into the night outside. Through the square panel of glass, he could see the curve of the dirt road, disappearing into the dark. Down his porch steps was a small apple tree, clinging to its roots against the harsh wind. Behind it stood the barn. He heard its wooden planks groaning as another gust rushed through them. Henry studied its faded red paint, and resigned to give it another coat the following spring.
That’s when he heard the crying.
It was quiet at first—like a distant echo ricocheting off a canyon. The cries were steady, and urgent, carried on the wind from the barn.
It was only at that moment Henry realized Layla had been absent for some time in the house. With a sigh, he adjusted the thick woolen sweater on his shoulders and hustled out into the chill. The cries grew louder as he approached the barn, the crunch of gravel providing a rhythm under his feet.