1.1

Mom set the knife down on a paper towel. The gash in her hand pulsed, blood filling her cupped palm, enough that I thought it'd spill over, but it didn't.

"Ready?" she said.

"A-almost."

I swallowed. It was just blood.

And that was a stupid thought. Blood was a lot more than just the red stuff inside you.

I shifted, fidgeting on the spot. We were both kneeling on the floor, and Mom had pushed the area rug aside, leaving us on the bare boards. It was pretty uncomfortable. Why we couldn't have used the cushy armchair in the corner, I didn't know.

But…

"If we do this really fast, can we finish reading Redwall?"

Mom laughed. "I think we can manage that. Tell you what, Taylor, if we finish up right now, we'll finish the book, and I'll let you read to me before your father gets home."

My jaw dropped. "Whoa."

I stared at her hand for a long moment. Her blood was so dark it looked almost black. The surface rippled. Like something was moving below the surface. Like it was moving.

It scared me. Moms shouldn't be able to bleed.

"Are you okay?" Mom said gently. "I know this is a little strange."

I met her eyes. Mom was still smiling, totally calm.

But that settled it. Mom would never hurt me. That was a fact.

I scooted in and cupped my hands under hers in case anything spilled.

"Good girl," Mom murmured. "One more thing though."

"Yeah?"

"This needs to be our little secret, okay?"

I nodded without hesitation.

She lifted her hand to my lips. The blood spilled out.

I drank.

I drank and-

The bus jumped, and I jerked, nearly falling out of my seat. The tubby man sitting beside me made an angry noise as my elbow struck his arm, but I barely noticed. The bus thudded up and down again as it hit another pothole. The motion had woken me.

I turned in my seat to peer out the window, taking in the upper-half of Sycamore Street. My watch read 12:07, but it could have been any half-past six and I wouldn't have known better. The world outside was gray; streets and sidewalks rimed with salt and slushy snow blending indistinguishably with the cloud-choked sky above. The sunlight that did manage to make it through only highlighted how drab and gray Brockton Bay looked in the winter.

I sighed, my breath fogging the window, and squinted to read the street sign as we passed it. Alberta Road.

Not long now.

I continued facing out the window, but stopped paying much attention. The dream was fading, but I remembered… something. Something about Mom. I'd been a kid and we'd been… doing something with knives?

Weird. Mom hadn't ever been much of a cook. But the finer points were already gone, and my interest in what I'd dreamt was rapidly being replaced with a flush of embarrassment. I'd fallen asleep on the bus like some kind of hobo. And - I glanced to the side - the man in the seat next to me glared. I found it hard to care about that. He wasn't exactly sparing the elbow to begin with.

The bus hit yet another pothole, bouncing everyone up and down and lurching my stomach into a queasy flip. My knee was beginning to throb again, growing a little more painful with every bump and jump of the bus. The medical brace around it kept my knee bent so I couldn't put any weight on it, with the side effect that if I didn't watch it, I'd slam knee-first into the seat in front of me whenever the bus braked too hard. Just sitting was an ordeal; I was constantly off-balance, holding my leg in the position that hurt least.

Stupid painkillers. Pills didn't do much for me, but Dad had insisted. I could take pain. What I couldn't handle was the haze at the edge of my thoughts. The narcotic fuzz that made me feel like my eyes were two sizes too big, that the world was constantly spinning just a little. The bus was too warm; the heater on full-blast, and a dozen passengers building the interior to a sickly heat. It added to the haze, making me feel dull and sleepy.

And I couldn't fall asleep again. I wouldn't think of it in school, not when someone would take it as an invitation to stick something in my hair or steal my things. On the bus? It would be insane. Falling asleep for as long as I had scared me a little. There were too many creeps out there.

The nausea kept me awake for the rest of the ride. Every time I felt myself drifting off, I'd concentrate on how my stomach was empty, all writhing, churning bile, the acid taste of vomit still faint in the back of my mouth. It kept the drowsiness at bay, if barely.

I still nearly missed my stop, nodding off for a moment and only waking when a departing passenger stepped on my foot. I grabbed my crutches, bag and flowers and limped toward the door. The aisle was narrow to begin with, and the other passengers not too keen on moving out of the way. I had to hop awkwardly along on one foot, balancing my bag and crutches on my arm, and supporting myself against the seats with my free hand. By the time I left the bus, my face was burning, and not from exertion.

If Emma could have seen me…

The wind outside cut through my coat in seconds, but I welcomed it, breathing deeply, clearing my head after the stuffy heat of the bus. I even managed to stretch, taking care not to bend my leg, but it got my blood flowing again.

The bus had let me off just outside the entrance to Brockton Memorial Cemetery. The iron gates were propped open to let in traffic, though no one was driving through today. Not with three inches of snow on the ground and more to come.

I slipped in through the gate without a backward glance. A small weight seemed to fall from my shoulders as I entered. The cemetery was… it was safer, somehow. No one here knew me or cared who I was. Beyond that, it was totally deserted.

My steps were a little lighter as I crossed the intersection just inside the gates. The cemetery was big, a couple miles on each side, but I knew where I was going. Dad had gotten lost during last year's visit, and I'd taken care to memorize the map afterward. There were paths, paved roads marked with colored dotted lines to lead the way.

Istepped onto the green dotted path and set off, flowers stuffed into my bag to protect them. The path was wet with melted snow, and rock salt crunched underfoot. It made positioning my crutches a little difficult, but they were capped with tough rubber feet, and gripped the ground better than I expected. They still felt awkward and unfamiliar in my hands, but I quickly fell into a rhythm as I climbed the path. Step, hop. Step, hop. Step, hop…

The path I was on circled around a small manmade lake before ascending a series of low hills. My destination was near the top, on the hillside overlooking the city. The walk shouldn't take more than a half hour.

The wind intensified as I hobbled along, strong enough to pull my hair out its bun to whip around my face. I tucked it under my hat best I could and soldiered on. It wasn't much further. I could make it.

I passed hundreds, probably thousands of graves on the way up. Only the tallest headstones stood out over the snow. Many more, little more than stone slabs, would be buried until spring. What was left over looked like a bizarre stone forest of crosses, busts, statues, obelisks, and other, more elaborate constructions that I couldn't name, peppered here and there with the solid forms of mausoleums.

The green path passed between two hills, intersecting with the yellow path. A stone angel loomed over the crossroads, its features softened by time and weather. I paused a moment, leaning on my crutches and looking back at the angel. Between the column it stood on and its outstretched wings, the gravestone had to be thirty feet tall. Someone had spent a lot of money there.

It was a hollow gesture. I understood why they had done it, but it was hollow. No statue, no monument could accurately depict the magnitude of what grief felt like. Part of me, the caustic part I'd gotten from Mom, would have called that melodramatic, but it was how I felt all the same.

I headed onward.

The path felt a lot longer on foot. People came here during nicer weather to walk and bike the trails, but there was none of that in the winter. I was alone, limping a little now as my right knee slowly filled up with fire. I wasn't using it, but just moving was irritating it, the constant up-and-down of crutching along jarring enough that not even my brace could help.

"Just a little more."

I forced myself around a bend in the road. It would curl around the hill twice before passing the grave on the far side. If I'd been in good health, it might have been faster to just climb directly up the hill.

If I'd been in good health. I couldn't stop myself from grimacing at the thought. If I'd been a lot of things, this trip would have been a lot different. I could have been here with Dad. We could have come as a family.

I could lay the blame for that at Emma's feet. No reason things were going to change once I went back to school. Sophia was gone, but what did that matter in the long run? Emma would just replace her.

As I came fully round the bend, something forced me out of the dark train of thought I was on. There were three cars and a truck parked on the side of the road. I crutched past them, peering down the hill as I went.

An area the size of a football field had been plowed, speckled with green where grass poked through the remaining carpet of snow. A small group of people were bustling around. Two were setting up folding chairs in long rows. Another was picking up loose sticks and debris from the area. Off to one side, a trio was putting together the metal supports for a huge canopy. Others were standing back, breaths misting the air as they talked.

Someone was going to have a massive funeral. It was only as I passed the lead car that it all came rushing back. The logo emblazoned on the car's door read simply, "PRT."

A cape funeral.

I stared up the road, pain temporarily forgotten at the sight before me. Just past another mausoleum, the blacktop disappeared under a carpet of snow, indistinguishable from the frozen grass around it. A thick drift of snow as tall as I was sat on the side of the road where the plow had pushed it, and apparently, stopped.

I groaned, sagging against the crutches. "Unbelievable."

The hill must have been too steep for the cemetery to risk it, but they couldn't have gone just a little further? Especially with the funeral coming up so soon. Typical Brockton Bay.

"Fine."

No sense going home when you're this close. But that was a lie. I wasn't turning around because they weren't going to take this from me.

I waded into the unplowed section. Every step was harder now; digging the crutches into the snow, making sure they stayed stable, and then throwing myself forward, trying to clear as much distance in one shot as I could. I'd balance on my good foot, jerk the crutches out and repeat the process.

By the time I made it around the next bend in the hill, my shoulders were burning and my knee felt like someone was hammering nails into it. The pain wasn't enough distraction to drive out the cold, and I wasn't moving fast enough to stay warm. It was creeping in, amplified by the frozen earth all around me. Twenty feet round the bend, I started shivering, my teeth chattering uncontrollably. Powder was sifting into my boots, my socks growing first damp, and then chilly; my steps slowing to a crawl as I dragged myself through the snow.

The next turn in the path brought the wind. There were no other hills or trees in the way on this part of the path to blunt it, and it came in with teeth. It hit me mid-hop, balanced precariously on my crutches, and I started tipping over backwards before my frantic flailing carried me forward. I stopped, bowing my head, waiting for it to subside. When a minute passed without the wind stopping, I started forward again, my steps sliding a little now as I was buffeted back and forth.

Just a little more. Mom's grave was just up the hill. Just around the next bend. Almost there.

I had to do this. There was no one else who could. Mom hadn't had any living family that I'd ever heard of, and not even her closest friends had stuck around after the funeral. And Dad… I hadn't told Dad where I was going. It was better if he didn't know. Coming out here would only upset him, and he was already under a lot of stress dealing with my problems.

The burst of anger from that thought lasted just long enough to get me through a drift heaped nearly knee-high by the wind. The pain in my leg was spreading in dull, ugly waves, my hops growing faster and faster as I tried to just get the walk over and be done. Every step still shot a bolt of pain from my knee to my spine, each one lingering, building up bit by bit to become something mind-numbing.

I stopped at one point, leaning against a headstone capped with a bust, trying to massage some feeling back into my leg. It might have worked if I wasn't so cold that I couldn't feel anything but the pain. And if my hands weren't little more than two pieces of ice wrapped in gloves.

"J-just a l-l-lit-tle. M-m-more."

I wasn't going to let them take this from me. I was going to honor Mom's memory come hell or high water.

The final curve arched up sharply, the slope steep enough that I could finally admit why the cemetery hadn't bothered with it. But I was so close. Mom's grave was at the top of the hill. It was- it- it-

My gaze swept up the path and I stopped where I stood. An unbroken field of white greeted me, bringing with it a realization I should have had before I left home. Mom's grave was a simple stone slab, barely taller the grass around it, no different from a thousand other headstones in the cemetery. And like those thousand headstones, Mom's was buried under three inches of snow.

It was impossible to find.

I couldn't find her grave even if I did make it up that far. And it was far. Practically miles, with my knee like this.

I'd lost.

In spite of myself, I took a step up the hill. My knee gave a furious throb of protest, and I stopped, supporting myself on the crutches.

There was no sense in going up there. Between the weather and my health, it might actually be suicide.

Mom wouldn't want this.

I took another step. This was stupid. So, so stupid.

Another step. And another.

If I'd had a good knee, I could have found it. I could climb the hill, dig in the snow, find the grave, and make it right.

But they'd taken that from me. First Emma, then Sophia. They'd done it. Sophia's last fucking hurrah had taken Mom's memory and tainted it. It was worse than what they'd done to her flute. Worse because they'd reached into my life and fucked up something that was ours- something that meant something. Something that-

I slung my crutches forward and hurled myself into the next step.

My foot came down on ice. And suddenly, I was pitching to the side, my left crutch sliding as it too hit ice. I tried to hold on, tried to stay upright, but the crutch jagged, digging into my armpit, my arm twisting painfully in its socket. I toppled, crutches spinningaway as I threw my hands out in one last-ditch attempt to break my fall.

My hands hit first, but any pain I felt there was nothing, eclipsed in a heartbeat as my knee struck the icy tarmac.

The world went white.

Doors were opening. Old doors. Doors long forgotten. Doors locked and scabbed over with memory.

Doors were opening.

The door at the back of the house – the door to Mom's room was opening. I stared down the hall at it. A beam of sunlight shone from the window inside, lighting the hallway. For an instant, the square of light flickered as someone moved in front of it, but I saw no one.

-this'll be our little secret-

I walked, and my steps were short. Child's steps. I approached, and the door swung wide.

The door swung wide and-

…

Cold.

Cold deep enough to blot out everything. Every breath hurt. It was only the pain that gave me boundary, showed me where my body began and the cold ended.

"Taylor."

Something brushed my face, and I moved without thought. My hand rose up to knock the thing away and I jolted, my eyes opening wide as something crunched wetly against my cheek.

The world was split in two, half gray, and half white. I blinked, my eyes thick with tears, and the scene sharpened. The sky was on my right, a single mass of gray clouds stretching to the horizon. I blinked again, slowly realizing that the white I was seeing was snow.

My face was half-buried, the left lens of my glasses opaque, my cheek numb. A thin trickle of melted snow slid past my lips where my breath had melted the snow. I rolled over and sat up, wiping globs of sleet away from my face with clumsy hands.

Reality reasserted itself once I was up, memories returning. Where, how, why. The pain streaking through my veins diversified, becoming a sickly mix as I catalogued my injuries. My knee was thunderous, kept from being agonizing only by my being too cold to feel it. The brace had twisted to one side, and I fixed it. The act relieved a tiny fraction of the pain in my knee, only to awaken new pangs in my hands.

I'd ripped open the palms of both gloves when I fell, and the insides were soaked. I poked at the holes and hissed as the raw, scraped skin stung. The dampness inside my gloves was more than just snowmelt.

Something fell into my lap as I examined my hands. I picked it up.

-isn't it pretty, taylor?-

A dead moth, one wing bent, its furry body limp. Its wings were brilliant with black, red, gray, all twisting together like a Rorschach. Something heavy sank in my stomach at the sight of it. It had woken me, and I'd accidentally crushed it.

"Sorry."

-don't cry, darling. there are plenty-

I put it aside and pushed snow over it. It just seemed… appropriate for the location.

One crutch sat near enough for me to stretch and grab it. The other was… I looked around, twisting in the snow to search. It had fallen farther away, too far to reach. My bag was closer, and the flowers sat in the snow where they'd fallen from it. I used my crutch to tug them to me.

I rose slowly, bracing against my remaining crutch, climbing up it until I was fully vertical. It took an awkward bit of balancing to stump close enough to grab the second crutch, but I managed. I probably wouldn't be able to get home without it, and I didn't want to explain to Dad where and how I'd lost it.

But that was all later.

No. What mattered now was the grave.

I stared up the slope one last time, searching in vain for some glimpse, some clue to where her grave was. The wind howled, blowing a mist of snow across the hillside.

One final insult.

I pulled the bouquet out of my bag. One of the lilies was bent, and the daffodils were missing half their petals. It didn't matter anymore.

I turned, looking out over the edge of the hill. The view ran for miles; a sea of snow-covered rooftops and gray buildings all the way to the edge of sight, where they broke up for Downtown's skyscrapers.

But I couldn't see much of it at the moment. My eyes were burning too badly.

The gale picked up, carrying away a few more daffodil petals with it. It was cold, but it seemed distant now. Only the sting where it froze my damp cheeks felt real.

Without thought, I hurled the bouquet out into the wind. The flowers spun wildly, petals and loose blossoms scattering in their wake. They struck the ground, tumbled, and then finally came to a stop at the bottom of the hill, a tiny bundle of color slowly sinking into the snow.

How I made it back to the bus, I didn't know. There was no memory of it. I simply was on the bus.

Things were too bright, too warm, too everything.

The trip passed like a dream. I stared out the window, not seeing anything we passed.

All the while, my thoughts were drifting, swirling around and around and around and-

The seat in front of me was empty. I put my arms on the backrest and laid my head down.

Closed my eyes.

The thoughts were worse now, because there was no world to see. No world slowly blurring as I tried not to cry. Just thoughts. Ugly, black thoughts that blurred and bled into each other until they melted into a continuous haze.

I'd lost. They'd taken something from me. Not for the first time, or the hundredth. It wasn't even the first time they'd taken something irreplaceable. And that - the thought of Mom's flute rusting at the bottom of a landfill like so much trash - had me curling up in my seat, guilt rising up like bile.

It was their fault.

Every last one of them.

And what now? So what if Sophia was gone? Her parting shot had cost me more than anything before it. She took Mom from me.

With a good knee, I could have made it up the hill. I could have put flowers on her grave. Without them, I could have talked to Dad. Would have talked to Dad more, instead of being a stranger in my own house.

We could have gone together. Put flowers on her grave together.

Been a family. Together.

But no. They were going to take and take and take until there was nothing left of me.

Homework. Hair. Flute.

Leg.

I clenched my hands into fists, fighting the urge to lash out, to do something, do anything to let it out.

A sudden nail-point of pain and-

A drop of red fell from my hand and splatted against the bus floor. A second, third, fourth drop joined it.

No matter what else happened. No matter what. Things were going to change. It wasn't a happy thought. This was a simple fact.

They wouldn't take anything else from me.

Not because I wouldn't let them.

But because I couldn't.

I spent the rest of the bus ride watching blood ooze across the grimy floor.

The house was empty, the rooms cold and dark. Dad was still out, whether at work or elsewhere, I didn't know.

I limped in and locked the door behind me. The pain in my knee had dulled to something low and grinding, spiking when I moved too fast. My hands were throbbing, my gloves still damp in a half-dozen places where I'd bled into them.

I tugged them off and tossed them straight into the trash. They were unsalvageable. I checked my jeans as well. They were scuffed and dirty, but thankfully undamaged. The knee was almost painfully tight though. It was only as I adjusted my brace that I realized the problem.

My knee had swollen up like a grapefruit. My jeans were pulled taut around it, and the brace was digging in in places.

I needed to get some ice on it before it got any worse. I tossed my bag aside and stumped toward the stairs. I was just through the doorway when I stopped.

Ice it. I needed to put ice on the knee I'd bashed against the ice.

I groaned, but the thought still made me smile. Mom would have

-taylor-

laughed.

I adjusted my crutches to keep moving.

-taylor-

What was I smiling about? They'd crippled me. I couldn't get around my own home without assistance.

I grimaced, looking away from the kitchen. Something glinted at me through the dark, and I stopped. What was… it was something at the end of the hallway running parallel to the stairs. There was a small powder room underneath the steps, and the hall ran all the way to the back of the house where…

Mom's room.

I took a step back to look.

-doors were opening-

The door at the end of the hall was ajar. I'd seen the light glinting off the doorknob. But that room shouldn't be open. It just wasn't. Not since she'd died. Neither of us went in there anymore. It was her room. Her sanctum sanctorum. There were too many memories there.

But…

It was hers. An idea spread in my chest with sudden warmth, wiping away my anger like rain.

I turned on my heel and started down the hall. Distantly, I felt a smile cross my face, a real smile that dwarfed the one from a moment ago. I didn't have any flowers left, but that was okay, I could honor her memory in a different way.

My knee protested the effort with a jag of pain, but I ignored it. I could turn this around. Salvage something from this day.

My foot touched the floor of the hallway. I could-

could

could

"I can do it!" I said, glaring up from behind a stack of books.

"I know you can," Mom said. "Just humor me." She bent down and took the books out of my arms, balancing them on her hip with ease before walking down the hall toward her book room.

"Mooom!" I stamped my foot. I was a big girl, I could have made it.

"It's okay," Aunt Judi drawled from behind me. "You can help me out."

I turned, just in time for her to hand me a- a-

"Wow," I whispered. "What is it?"

Aunt Judi raised my hands with hers and then pulled. The thing in my hands split in two. It was a knife. A weird knife with a blade made of bone.

"Judi!" Mom hissed. "Don't give her that!"

Aunt Judi rolled her eyes. "Taylor, you know how to handle a knife, right?"

"Of course I do," I said. Mom had shown me.

I hesitated. When had Mom shown me anything like that? Who was Aunt Judi? Who-

I took another step.

A moth landed on the wall beside me. It looked just like the one from before. I hadn't seen where it came from, but it was here now, twitching its antennae back and forth.

Now that I looked at it, it looked familiar. More familiar than just having seen it earlier.

Familiar like something seen long ago, half-remembered.

Familiar like-

I kept staring. The bug had a pattern on its wings. Like… like a face. It was weird looking though. Its whole body was black, and it had lots and lots of legs. More than a bug was supposed to.

"Taylor," Mom said again. "Listen to me. This is going to be our little secret. Okay?"

"Okay."

There was more I had to say, but as I opened my mouth, the bug took flight with a papery rustle. My knee was throbbing again, my hands burning, but the pain was distant, someone else's.

-the door was open-

The hallway was… had to be miles long. Hard to tell when it kept listing back and forth.

Or was that me? Doesn't matter, I thought, the words coming with dreamlike slowness.

Am I dreaming? Was this just another dream like I'd had on the bus?

A third step. A fly buzzed around my head, and I waved it away.

A fourth. Something with a hundred, hundred legs skittered away just before I stepped on it.

A fifth, sixth, seventh step. The world was shaking, buzzing, vibrating; the hall slowly filling up with insect noise. I was humming, though when I had started I didn't know. But I was, and the sound seemed to drive away the pain, let me take the eight and ninth steps.

The door at the end of the hall was ajar, the gap hazy with flying bodies.

I took the last steps forward, ignoring the insects crawling over my skin, my wounds, my hair.

The door was ajar.

The door swung open.

The door closed behind me and

It was warm, sunlight shining across the hardwood floor and turning all the books gold.

I was standing in the center of the room, Mom kneeling in front of me, her dark hair dangling down in a way that made me want to reach out and touch it. She held the butterfly in her hand.

"It's going to be just like with the blood. You remember that, don't you?"

"Yeah. But that was…"

Last week. A long time ago.

When had that happened?

"Say 'ah.'"

"Ahhh." I stuck my tongue out, my mouth open like a baby bird.

It was silly. Silly enough that I couldn't help giggling.

"Be serious now," Aunt Judi scolded. But she had a little smile on too. She wasn't very good at being a grownup.

Mom frowned. "Taylor."

I nodded, doing my best to shake out the rest of the giggles. It was all weird, but Mom was using her 'I mean business' voice, and that meant I had to get with it.

"Okay," I said seriously.

Aunt Judi leaned forward, her smile a little smaller now. "Just take your time, darling. All you need to do is-"

Copper.

I tasted copper. Something stiff rubbed against my lips, my tongue, my teeth. Fingers, my mind supplied.

My fingers were bleeding again, and the blood was hot and metallic in my mouth.

It was dripping down my hand onto the floor, spreading into the dust like rain in the desert.

The faint gray light coming through the window glinted off it.

Brightest thing in the room.

I swallowed.

Copper.

I reached out and took the bug in my chubby hand. The bug flapped its wings slowly, its legs twitching. I caged it with my fingers, but it didn't try to fly away.

"It's scary, but I know you can do this," Mom whispered. "It'll keep you safe."

The bug made a harsh chirruping noise. It was… it was kind of ugly, really. And pretty gross. But it was also a little sad. It couldn't even see. It was blind.

And it was fuzzy.

Sort of.

"Taylor," Mom said. "Do you understand?"

"Y-yes." My words came out slurred.

It was hard to talk. Hard to see. The world wouldn't stop tilting, and the insect noise was building to a crescendo. A shadow passed over the window, and the room was suddenly pitch black around me.

And the dark was full of movement. My hand

held the bug.

"I promise you on my name, Taylor, that it won't hurt you." Mom took my hands in hers, pressing the butterfly closer to my heart. "Trust me."

"I do."

"You drank before, now you have to eat. That's how it works."

I looked at the butterfly for a long moment. And then I looked at Mom. There were lines in her face that I'd never seen before, and she was biting her lip. Aunt Judi was still against the wall, but she was quiet, watching, waiting.

Why was I hesitating? I'd trusted Mom with the blood, and I'd trust her with this.

I nodded my head, and the word came with certainty. "Yes."

Refusal would mean going back. Back to that life.

Back to dying slowly.

I opened my mouth and crammed the bug in. It fluttered furiously, dry wings buzzing against my lips, but I closed my mouth around it. It had a moment to squirm before I bit down. The bug's insides, hot and sweet, spread across my tongue, and I gave a muffled cry of delight.

Something hard (nail) shell broke under my teeth, and I bit down again, grinding it

to bits. The taste just got better and better, like (blood) candy. A third bite pulped the bug and

smashed its shell to pieces, little bits of (bone) carapace sluicing through the guts. There was pain, but it was far away and barely noticeable.

Good girl," Aunt Judi said, looking relieved.

"Very good." Mom agreed.

I swallowed. The insect's guts were burning hot, running down my throat like fire. I could feel it go all the way down.

Mom used her thumb to wipe away a bit of insect goo from the corner of my mouth. She popped the thumb into her mouth, closing her eyes with relish. I

licked my hand clean. The blood had left sticky lines all down my palm and wrist, and I cleaned them slowly and methodically. The pain had stopped though, replaced with a gaping sense of loss. The wound in my hand, the gap between my index and ring fingers, was burning, aching as the air touched raw meat and exposed bone.

"You don't know what a relief this is," Mom sighed.

I shrugged. "Why did I have to eat a bug?"

Aunt Judi snorted. "Your mother is weird that way."

"Hush! It's nothing like that," Mom said dryly. She reached out suddenly and ran her fingers through my hair, working through the kinks and curls with soft motions. I leaned into the contact.

How long since Mom had done that? Not since before she-

"It's… well, it doesn't matter," she continued. "I need you to do one more thing for me."

"Okay."

She nudged my chin up so she could meet my eyes. Hers were pretty, a green so bent it was almost yellow. It was one of the few things I hadn't gotten from her- I had Dad's brown eyes instead, and-

"Taylor, look at me." Mom's eyes were deep. I stared closer, picking out the little flecks of color. They weren't really green, were they? I'd been thinking of it wrong all along. They were yellow, and the little flecks of green only made me think otherwise, but the flecks were moving now, and-

"Until the time is right… Forget."

The word unlocked something in me. I had the sudden sense of mental gears creaking into life, something there but unused, forgotten until now.

A final door opening.

"Speak your name."

The word came to me.

I spoke.

And the insects covering every wall of the room boiled forward.

YEARNYEARNYEARNYEARN

This is my next, and likely last big fanfic. I'll be updating as often as I can, which is usually 1-2 times a month at most.

Some of the formatting is likely getting eaten by FFN's format, and I'd recommend reading the original postings on Spacebattles as they come. I post there under the name 'Ziel.'

Beta credit for this chapter goes to Hellgodsrus, for knowing exactly how much suffering is enough.