Page 13 of The Bane Witch

13

Venery

I crash through the woods like a rabid bear, tearing at limbs and slapping at fronds as I try to keep up, shouting questions at her back. “What do you mean I’m a bane witch? What is a bane witch? Are you saying my mother just failed to mention this important detail during my entire upbringing? Are witches even real? Where did we come from? How does this have anything to do with me killing that man?”

Finally, she whirls on me. “Keep your voice down!” she hisses. She grabs my elbow and begins dragging me down the path. “Have you no survival instincts whatsoever?”

I trip along beside her, feeling for all the world like a seven-year-old child being scolded by her nanny. “You can’t just say something like that and then shimmy back up the ladder into the night like nothing’s changed!”

“I didn’t think you’d go screeching behind—” Her face suddenly falls. She stops so fast I bump into her.

“What the—”

She puts a finger to her lips, eyes wide as she stares into the blackness surrounding us. Then I hear it, the distinct rustle of leaves in the distance, steps that stop nearly as quickly as she did, as if we are being followed.

“Fool girl,” Myrtle whispers, pulling me toward the cabin with a burst of speed I didn’t know she had in her. She doesn’t stop until we are safely inside, the front door locked behind us.

I watch, bewildered, as she moves around the house, turning out all the lights and staring out the windows like she’s looking for something. Not thinking, I flip on a small lamp on the sofa table, and she spins around, flapping a hand.

“Put that out!” she demands.

I click it off, sheepish. “Sorry.” She creeps toward the glass, her eyes moving side to side. “What are you looking for?” I ask in a soft voice.

“Not sure yet,” she replies, still vigilant.

“How can you even see out there?” It’s so dark beyond the windows that I can barely make out the nearest tree, let alone anything deep in the forest.

When she glances at me, I notice the way her pupils constrict, abnormally large in the dark before shrinking. But it’s the way her left follows the right that unnerves me, leaving one eye black and the other green for a moment. “It’s hereditary,” she explains before turning back to the window.

I wrap my arms across my chest as we stand in silence, the night outside permeating the house around me until I feel like I might fall into it. The hush between us stretches paper-thin, the tension holding us each in place, taut and unmoving. Myrtle seems to be zeroing in on something. Her head inclines toward the glass before her. I feel like I might snap, the questions growing inside me with every passing second. I am on the verge of speaking—or screaming, I can’t be certain which—when a deer suddenly steps out of the nearby brush into a patch of starlight beside the cabin. Myrtle sighs. Her head drops. She turns from the window and sinks into a chair, heavy with relief.

By her behavior, she was expecting something else. A threat.

I make my way to the sofa and lower onto it, so flustered I can hardly draw breath. Myrtle clicks on the lamp beside her, the one she fussed at me for only minutes ago.

“You’ll have to ask your questions one at a time,” she says, pulling out her cell phone and laying it in her lap. “That’s the only way I can answer. And consider them well. I would like to get at least a wink of sleep tonight. I’m not staying up indefinitely to satisfy your curiosity.”

“Are we okay?” I inquire, nervous after the night we’ve had, after seeing her so panicked.

She sighs, a touch of exasperation in it. “Is that one of your questions?”

I shrug. “You seemed scared. What were you expecting to come out of those trees? Because it wasn’t a deer.”

“I don’t know,” she tells me, reaching for the photograph of the women I’d asked her about several nights ago. “Any number of things. The Strangler for one. The sheriff for another.”

“The Saranac Strangler?”

Her lips pull taut. “Is there another around here I should know about?”

I frown.

“He’s close,” she finally says. “Getting closer by the day.”

“How do you know?” I ask her.

Her eyes sharpen on me. “Tell me, when that man came in tonight, what did you see when you looked at him?”

I shrug. “An asshole.”

Myrtle frowns. “Beyond that. What did you see that no one else in the room could?”

“The woman,” I admit. “Bleeding. She lost her baby because he beat it out of her.”

Myrtle nods knowingly. “ That is how I know. Our magic has a way of whispering to us. It’s not always the same for everybody, but it is never wrong. I don’t know why the Strangler is here, but I have my suspicions,” she says with an uneasy glance in my direction. “And you can never be too careful, not when you’re one of us.”

“One of us …” I let my shoulders finally drop. “And what is that? What is a bane witch exactly?”

Myrtle’s lips tug up on one side in a coy smile. “What do you think it is?”

I rub my hands over my face. “Someone who can eat poison, I guess. Someone who is poison.”

She flips the framed picture over in her lap. “You’re a bane witch. So am I. So was your mother and her mother and so on. Yes, we can eat poisonous plants without feeling the effects. Our magic reserves the toxins safely in our bodies until it’s time.”

“ Time? ” I ask. “Time for what?”

She studies me as if she is evaluating whether I can handle the answer. “Time for them to be released.”

“I don’t understand,” I tell her. “How does that work? How is that possible?”

She purses her lips. “I’m not a doctor, Piers. I can only tell you what I know. Tonight, when you saw that man in the café, aside from what you saw, what did you feel ?”

I grip the cushion beneath me. “Angry,” I admit. “Edgy. I wanted to do something. I wanted him to hurt the way—” I pause, anxious about sharing this part of myself.

“The way?” she presses.

“The way I’ve been hurt. The way he hurt that woman.” I look down at my knees.

She nods. “What did that feel like in your body? The anger? The desire to do something?” she asks me.

I remember my stomach turning on itself, the heat and the sweat and the tremble in my hands. Like I was barely containing the feelings. Like I wanted to explode. “It felt like pressure.” I meet her eyes. “Everywhere inside me. Like something was building. It burned.”

She nods again, slowly. “Because something was building,” she agrees. “You were ripe—ready to release your venom. The prey was before you and you could sense it. This is what you were made for, born for.”

“Prey?” I shake my head, confused. “Rabbits are prey. Mice. Deer. That man was an asshole. He was no victim.”

She waves a hand as if brushing my words aside. “ Prey is a euphemism, that’s all. Don’t get hung up on the word. The point is you fed before that man arrived. Something in you knew he was coming. It wanted to be ready. And your magic drew him to you, left him vulnerable, provided an opportunity, so that you could do what you were put here to do.”

“Which is?” I’m almost afraid to ask because the answer is ringing through me before she forms the word, but I need to hear her say it.

“Kill.” Myrtle watches to see how I react. When I don’t immediately freak out, she goes on. “Or protect, depending on how you want to look at it. But in some cases, our case, the two are interchangeable.”

“ Protect. ” The word is awkward in my mouth. I’ve never been able to protect anyone, not even myself. Henry made that abundantly clear. And yet, isn’t that what happened with Don? I protected myself in that car somehow, or my magic did. Magic. An even harder word to wrap my head around.

“Our… instincts, Piers, are carefully synchronized. It might feel random at times, but it never is. You broke into my stash the other night. Don’t deny it,” she insists when I open my mouth to argue. “I was watching you, waiting in the dark to see what you would go for. I could read the signs on you the last few days, unable to focus or be still, you were practically vibrating. I knew you were feeling it—the hunger—and if I gave you an opening, you would probably take it. But I had to be sure. When that man came into the café tonight, that’s when I knew for certain.”

Her words feel like they’re racing ahead, answering a question I haven’t asked yet. I hold a hand up. “I don’t understand. Why not just tell me? Why not explain what was happening to me? If I’d known that pica runs in our family, it would have saved me a lot of shame over the years.”

She tsks at the word. “Forget that diagnosis. You don’t have a disorder. You aren’t deficient. You are operating exactly as the magic designed. But I couldn’t know that until I saw it for myself. I just wish I’d gotten to you before you spit in his coffee.”

I recall her blocking my path on the way to make his sandwich, how she insisted I go outside and cool off. The realization is cold like ice against the skin and bright with shock. She knew then what I was capable of. She just didn’t realize she was too late. I fall against the sofa’s backrest, reeling. “You knew. You could have stopped me.”

“I did try,” she says defensively. “My timing was off, is all.”

“You think?” I spit at her. “Why let it go that far, cut it so close? If you already knew about me eating the… the… whatever mushroom.”

“Destroying angel mushroom— Amanita bisporigera. A personal favorite of mine. It’s very effective, as you saw for yourself. Though a bit messy perhaps. Anyway, that’s neither here nor there. I couldn’t be certain everything was functioning normally until I observed your allure. Of course, now I’ve seen the full cycle, so there’s no room for doubt,” she explained.

The casual way she discusses the gory death I just witnessed—a death I caused—is unnerving. I push my horror aside to focus on the facts. “My what?”

“Your allure, dear. It’s how we call our victims, what drives them to us. How do I explain this?” She taps a finger against the back of the photo frame in her lap. “Like magnets!” she finally says. “You are one pole, he another. It’s an invisible force mostly, but sometimes when they are close, when they need a nudge, it kicks into overdrive, overriding their senses. They’ll experience you in a particular way that appeals to them—a smell or a feeling, even a feature of your face or hair.”

Don’s strange comparison of me to the gardenia bushes of his childhood home floods my memory, the way he kept leaning toward me, like he was drinking in my scent. Understanding washes over me, prickling across my skin in eerie waves. I don’t know myself. I never have. How much of my life has been lived in the shadow of what I am, my ignorance creating a disconnect that I filled with shame and doubt and pain?

I meet Myrtle’s eyes. “But I didn’t call him. I don’t even know him. I just know his type—” Something in my mind begins to turn, an engine igniting in the cold void. I can’t quite bring the pieces together on my own, but I can see how they fit. I furrow my brow.

“Don’t you, though?” she asks darkly. “A bane witch knows her victims the way a mother knows her baby before she’s ever held it. It’s intimate, primitive. You knew the moment he stepped through my door who he was, what he was capable of. You knew what he had done and would likely do again. And everything in you responded to it. That is your gift working, Piers. That is your destiny.”

I wrap a hand across my forehead, stunned. I consider the way the man looked up at me, full of vanity and pride and rancor. The way he spoke with spite sharpening his words. The way he took up space that didn’t belong to him, like a challenge. The way he reminded me of Henry, even though on the surface they were worlds apart. But the core of him was the same kind of rotten. And I knew that particular stench. I smelled it the second he arrived.

Myrtle is right. I called him. I don’t know how, but I did. And now I know why.

If I drew that man to me tonight, did I draw Don? Was he more than a random man in a parking lot, an easy ride, a means to an end? And what did that make Henry? Had I married someone I was supposed to destroy, allowing him to destroy me instead?

“If it’s any consolation”—I hear Myrtle cut through my thoughts—“my first died in a spray of bloody emesis on the floor of a New York deli. That was before I made it this far north. I was young then, only fourteen.”

I look up at her, my jaw slack and face pale, full of revulsion.

She grins. “I licked his spoon,” she says with a wink. “Dunked it right into his bowl of soup. Then sat in a nearby booth with my lunch until I could be sure the job was done. That was the best pastrami on rye I’ve ever had,” she adds wistfully, popping open one of the little latches that hold the back of the frame on.

I visibly gag and her face falls. “TMI?” When I don’t respond, she leans forward. “Bend your head over your knees, dear. That’s it. Wait for the nausea to pass. This will all feel like second nature in no time, you’ll see.”

I sit up, taking a deep breath. “You were fourteen?” I manage to get out. “When you killed your first man?”

She pops another latch on the frame. “Nearly fifteen. Of course, Angel—my sister, your grandmother—was thirteen when she took her first. She was always showing me up. Your mother was even younger. Too young, really. It’s not good for us to bloom before puberty. I think that was the root of a lot of her problems. And then there’s you. Five is unheard of, perilously young. I’ve kept that little detail to myself. I couldn’t know how they would react. But you’ve survived against all odds, even with Lily never training you. There’s something extreme that runs through your line. A defect, if you ask me. Too much power isn’t healthy. To think you just kept feeding and feeding after that. All that poison and magic building up with nowhere to go. It’s a wonder you didn’t explode.”

Her words shatter me. I didn’t explode. Instead, it all turned inward. I learned to hate myself for what I was. I poisoned myself instead of someone else and ended up in the arms of a man even more toxic than my family line. A man whose idea of love is deadly. There is a strange irony to it. A horrified laugh burbles out of me. “You wanted to take me,” I say, my eyes wide and disturbed. “All those years ago. I heard you ask her to let me live with you, to let you teach me.”

“I did,” Myrtle confirms. “But she refused.”

“You should have taken me anyway,” I grind out, tears forming at the corners of my eyes. One leaks out and rolls down my cheek. “It would have been better. For everyone.”

She pops another latch and appraises me. “Perhaps. Perhaps I failed you as much as she did. But I couldn’t cross your mother. I had to play my hand carefully.”

I wipe at my eyes. I don’t want to cry for her knowing she kept this from me, let me believe I was broken, leaving me with nothing, not even the barest understanding of who I am. But my mother is a wound in my heart that will never heal, no matter how I resent it. “Why? She couldn’t have been that powerful. She never killed anyone. She was weak, mixed-up. And she abandoned me.”

Myrtle looks pained. “Whatever passed between you, Piers, your mother loved you.”

I shake my head. “No. You misunderstand. I’m not talking about our estrangement. She abandoned me long before that. Don’t you get it? She let those doctors poke and pry at me. Let them gawk at me like an exhibit, a puzzle they couldn’t solve. Let them pump me with medication until I finally became so destitute that I decided there wasn’t any point and stopped taking them. By not teaching me to kill, she left me to die. And all the while, she knew. And she never said a word. Not. One. Word.”

Myrtle pops the last latch on the frame and looks up. “Lily was many things,” she says ominously, “but she was never weak. Confused, yes. Even deluded. But she was so much stronger than you know. This life, Piers, is not without suffering. Your mother had more than her fair share. It was a testament to her strength that she didn’t crumble sooner, that she held on to some sliver of dignity and sanity, of herself, until the bitter end.”

I grind my jaw. “She had no dignity. She gave it all to Gerald.” Was it really any wonder I ended up with a man like Henry?

Carefully, Myrtle lifts the back off the frame. “You’re wrong,” she says quietly. “In the end, she proved that.”

My head shoots up, eyes slitting at her words. “What does that mean?”

“Your mother believed she was helping you. It was misguided, I know. I did try to warn her. But she was experimenting with things we’d never had access to before. I couldn’t know that she was entirely wrong. For many years, I thought she’d figured something out. That she’d spared you. At least, that’s how she would define it. I lied when I said I didn’t come for you after she died. I’ve kept close tabs on you and Lily over the years. The internet has made that much easier of course, but we’ve always had our ways in this family. But I saw you living a life free of all this. Unburdened. Unhindered. I knew the drugs Lily was taking hadn’t done enough to change her, but I thought maybe she’d gotten to you young enough—”

“What drugs?” I glare at her.

She looks surprised. “The same she gave you. The ones the doctors prescribed. Of course, she fed them a lot of malarkey about fake symptoms in order to get them, but it didn’t seem to matter. They’re pretty eager to hand those particular pills out these days.”

“My mom was taking Ritalin? She was taking Paxil?”

“Among others,” Myrtle supplies. “They helped, I suppose, for a time. But you—you seemed to lose all sense of the hunger, you stopped blooming, no longer ripe. The allure wasn’t even working. You moved away, got an education, found work, made a name for yourself. You seemed… happy. If I had shown up on your doorstep, told you that you were an ancient weapon magically designed to be a defender of women and children by taking the lives of predatory men, an instrument of justice and vengeance older than time, a poison eater, I would have ruined it all. I would have devastated you. I couldn’t do that. We decided it was best—safer, even—to leave you where you were, keeping a careful eye of course.”

Not careful enough, I think. But then, that’s Henry’s genius: hiding the rot behind a mask of charm, a veneer of carefully crafted perfection. “ We? ”

She picks up her phone, punching in a number she reads off the back of the photo. “The venery, of course.”

Her speaker is on, and I hear the other line ring through the room. There is a click, and a hushed “Myrtle?”

Aunt Myrtle sags into her chair, her age suddenly showing in a way I hadn’t noticed before, in deep grooves around her eyes, the slack of her arms. “Lattie. Get your mother,” she says. “I’m calling a conclave.”

“Now?” the other woman chirps.

“You have a better time in mind?”

The woman clucks her tongue. “Fine, fine. What am I to say this is about? You know Donna, she’s loathe to leave California without a damn good reason.”

Myrtle smiles. “Oh, I’ve got a good reason all right. Tell her it’s about Piers.”

“Lily’s girl?” the woman drawls.

“She’s with me,” Myrtle says, meeting my eyes. “And she’s taken her first mark.”