Chapter 15: (END)

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She lowered me to the ground with a care that was almost maternal. One hand behind my head. Her face serene.

She crossed to the heart on the floor and ate it in several quick bites, crouching over it, not looking at me. When she was done she wiped her mouth and turned back, and what I saw in her expression was not madness — that would have been easier. It was clarity. She had wanted this for a long time.

“Ivy.” She came and knelt beside me. “I love you. You know I do. Now I need to ask you a favor.”

The knife was still in me. I had left it where it was because removing it seemed like a worse idea.

о𝘳𝗴а𝗇𝘪𝗓𝖾 𝘆𝘰𝘂𝘳 𝗅𝗶𝖻r𝗮rу 𝗼𝗇 𝘨a𝗅n𝘰𝘃𝖾𝗅𝗌.с𝗼𝘮

“Your skin,” she said. “Give it to me. Please.” She touched my hair back from my face with her free hand. “I’ll remember you. Every day, I’ll remember.”

The heart had reached her fast. Her fingers were already moving differently — curling and uncurling in small, involuntary spasms, the joints bending at angles they shouldn’t. She rose and came toward me and her walk was wrong, all the articulation of her body reordering itself around the thing she’d swallowed.

I pulled the knife from my stomach. It hurt in a way that simplified everything — no room for anything else, just that, and the decision I’d already made.

I threw it at her.

She swatted it aside without looking, barely a delay in her stride.

The blade spun and skidded across the jade floor and came to rest against the wall. She looked at where it had hit, and then she looked at her own hand where the blood from the blade had transferred when she deflected it, and she paused.

She raised her hand and licked the blood from it — a gesture of contempt, nothing more.

But her legs were already failing. The thing she had swallowed was remaking her from the inside, and it was not gentle about it.

Her legs gave out.

She went down in sections — knees first, then hips, then the rest of her in a slow, helpless collapse, her limbs moving in directions her body no longer governed. She hit the floor and stayed there, and the sounds she made were not sounds I want to describe.

I tore the pouch from inside my robe and poured what remained in it over her.

I had prepared it over the previous three nights: slipping into the temple after midnight, working quickly — always after she had finished with my room and gone to hers, timing myself by the sound of her door closing and waiting until her breathing slowed through the wall — filling the pouch from the men’s veins while they slept. I had also, on the second night, had one of them take my virginity, which was not romantic in any sense of the word but was necessary, because the blood of a man who had been with a virgin was different from ordinary blood, and the difference mattered. I was not going to let the creature that had worn my grandmother’s face survive on a technicality.

The mixture worked. The original text of that particular piece of knowledge — whatever grandmother had been so careful to keep covered under her silver floor tiles — held.

My mother’s body dissolved. It took longer than grandmother’s had, and it was noisier, and I sat against the cave wall with my hand pressed to my stomach and watched it happen and did not look away. I owed her that much, at least. The courtesy of a witness.

When it was over, I poured the rest of the blood over the heart. It beat furiously for a moment — offended, almost — then went still. I mashed it with a stick from the floor until I was satisfied.

Then I climbed out of the cave and into the morning.

The mountains looked the same as they always had. The path was the same path. A bird was doing something unconcerned in the pines to my left, and the sky was the ordinary pale blue of early morning, and none of it knew or cared what had happened in the cave below.

This was either comforting or it wasn’t. I hadn’t decided yet.

My chest itched. I looked down: the cuts grandmother’s nails had made were shallow but they’d scabbed wrong overnight, the edges raised and slightly warm to the touch. I needed the village doctor. I needed to sit down. I needed, probably, to sleep for several days and then make a series of decisions about what came next — who would run the village, what to do about the men in the temple, whether the jade mine could be worked any other way, what to tell people about three separate deaths in one family.

I started down the path.

Halfway down, I noticed my heartbeat.

This is not something I usually notice. Your heart does its work and you don’t pay attention to it. But something about the rhythm was irregular — not racing, not faint, just slightly off. A doubling. As if two beats were arriving very close together, one on top of the other, and then separating.

I stopped walking and put my hand to my chest.

Thump-thump. Pause. Thump-thump.

Two. Definitely two.

One of them was mine. The other was faster, and getting faster, and it did not feel like something that was going to stop.

I stood on the path in the morning light with my hand on my chest and considered this new information for a long moment.

Then I continued down the mountain, because there was nothing else to do, and whatever was happening in my chest would still be happening at the bottom.

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The End.

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Message from Noa: Dear readers, today we have new releases, hope you like them. God loves you and Noa wishes you all the best. (ɔO‿=)ɔ ♥

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