Page 21 of The Bane Witch

21

Flos Mortis

The light is thin in this part of the forest, dreamlike. It haloes the uppermost branches as if we are on sacred land. The black-throated wail of a loon rides the scattering fog from nearby Crow Lake, and I can picture those red eyes splitting the morning like heralds of hell. Myrtle leans down over a tangle of tree roots, her long hair sliding over a shoulder, ends grazing the dirt. She looks like some ancient earth goddess with that green knit scarf about her shoulders, a grandmother of trees. She points and turns her face to mine, smiling. “Yellow wart.”

I step closer and study the small mushroom, a golden scepter marked with rough patches. It is unassuming, a child’s toy among giants. Hard to imagine it’s just a part of something larger, something vast sleeping underground. A network of dread.

“An amanita. To be avoided at all costs. Except by us of course.” Her grin is infectious. It’s easy to forget we are plotting someone’s murder. “Most amanita are poisonous, though the effects vary. Still, in a pinch, an amanita will do. You can recognize them by this telltale collar—the annulus. When they grow, this tears away from the veil as the cap opens to expose the gills.” She tickles the fleshy skirt of the stalk with a finger. “They also have a volva near the base. This cuplike structure here that they erupt out of.”

She straightens, her mouth screwed up to one side, thinking. “The man in the café succumbed rather fast, even for a destroying angel exposure. I don’t typically get results that quick, and I have a certain affinity for Amanita bisporigera. Tell me again what happened in the car with that man.”

I sigh. I’m tired of recounting the details, of flashing back to the look of horror splashed across his face. But Myrtle attends with tedious scrutiny, as if she is a conductor listening to the homogeneous tones of the orchestra tuning their instruments, searching for that one off-key. “I told you. He forced himself on me, pushing his mouth over mine as I was struggling. A moment later he started wheezing. It all happened so fast. He turned purple and kind of seized up. He got out of the car and vomited. Then he was dead.”

She regards me thoughtfully. “I believe you might have a gift for concentration that is unique among our kind. Your work in the café was fast, but Don even more so, likely because your fear, your need to defend yourself, further amplified your magic. With my first mark in the deli, I had to sit there for nearly an hour waiting for the affliction to take hold. It’s not always ideal. I have since learned ways to achieve more immediate results, but it takes effort for me. Clearly not for you. Though, there are occasions where prolonging the effect is better. I know how to accomplish that, too. You will need to learn. You can’t be standing idly beside every mark that falls or you will start to look guilty by association.”

I gaze down at the mushroom, a sickly sort of gold now that I really look at it, like jaundice. The man in the café teeters in my mind, yellowing like an onion. “You call what we do magic, but magic is an art; it requires something on the part of the wielder, the right word or gesture, an elaborate ritual, a set of special tools. Knowledge or skill. Even TV witches have cauldrons and brooms and black cats to do their bidding. This doesn’t feel like magic to me. I don’t feel like a witch. I feel like a freak of nature.”

“Oh, Piers, you’re wrong,” Myrtle says, stepping toward me. She wraps her cold fingers around my arms. I feel them through my jacket like bands of ice. “We carry an ancient magic within us. You’ve only just begun to experience your power, but you’ll find there’s as much knowledge and skill involved in this as any other esoteric craft. Your body is the instrument, yes. The plants your ingredients. You don’t have to speak an incantation, it’s true, or point a wand. But your abilities will grow as your understanding and experience do. Your learning will inform your craft, just like any other. Do you think if you’d swallowed a fistful of radishes before that man kissed you that it would have had the same impact?”

I shake my head briskly, conceding her point.

She places a hand on my stomach. “When you feel that gnaw in the pit of your belly for something noxious and death-dealing, where do you think it comes from? That is your magic speaking to you, waking up your senses, your awareness, informing you of the things that move between sight and sound, the unseen world. That is your power, your teacher, your god. If you don’t trust it, if you don’t partner with it, you will not survive.” She drops her hand, stepping away. Her eyes are clouded, hard to read. “No, we don’t fly on brooms or work through black cats, but we aren’t normal witches. We’re bane witches—a different breed. Our magic is unparalleled, but it has its limits.”

A snuffling sound catches my ear, and I look over to where Bart, the black Lab, is pawing ferociously at the earth, having caught the scent of something beneath the ground. He presses his nose into the shallow hole and snorts, drawing back. He looks at us, ears cocked.

“And we always have Bart,” she adds with humor. “Though, I will say, he’s a sad excuse for a familiar.”

As if on cue, he twists away, hearing something in the distance, and bounds off into the underbrush. I hide a smile.

“There are unique gifts among us, specialties that come to light in time with care and practice, things only one or a few of us can do. Yours are only just beginning to show themselves. But you will learn. And then you will see, this is a calling, not an accident.”

“I see things, women, in my mind. You told me when I was a kid that if I thought very hard, I would know the man I killed had hurt someone else. And I did know. I saw her before he died, when he touched me.”

She smiles, her cheeks ruddy with life. “The sight is common among our kind. It is a kind of psychic connection with our marks. It’s one of the ways the magic has of revealing them to us, and of making sure we don’t take an innocent life.”

“Is any life truly innocent?” I mumble dryly.

Myrtle peers at me. “Yes, Piers. Whatever has happened to you, you must never forget that there are predators and there are prey. We hunt the former, not the latter.”

“I know,” I tell her, chastened. “Do you see them, too? The victims of your marks?”

“Sometimes,” she tells me, eyes scanning the forest floor. “Sometimes I hear their cries, smell their blood. It’s different with every mark, but I always know. ”

“What about the ones who haven’t come to pass? The ones they will hurt or kill in the future if you don’t stop them?”

Suddenly she stands stick straight, eyes boring into mine. “What do you mean? You see future victims? Potential victims?”

I nod. “With Henry I did.”

She snorts, a blast of air from her nose ruffling the leaves on the ground.

“Do you?” I ask her.

“No,” she says shortly. “No. This is unheard of.”

My breath hitches in my throat. “You mean, no bane witch has ever seen the victims their mark wants to kill, will kill, but hasn’t yet? Not a single one, ever?”

She bends over the ground. “Not a single one. Ever. Until now.” When I don’t respond, she says, “I told you, Piers. You are special. We are evolving. You are the key to our future.”

She squats beside the yellow mushroom and plucks it from the ground with a flick of her wrist, bringing it to her nose and breathing deeply. “ I can identify any species of mushroom in these woods on smell alone. Did you know that?”

When I shake my head, she goes on.

“Rose can shift her allure to make herself smell like any flower she wants. Sounds simple, but it’s come in quite handy. No need for perfume. She’s even used it to disguise her presence before. Verna can grow just about anything regardless of the conditions. I’ve seen her sprout morning glory seeds in pitch darkness. And my mother, Laurel, could make her marks see things that weren’t there. She stopped a man dead in his tracks one time by making him think an enormous tree had erupted in his path.”

“What about Azalea?” I can’t help asking.

Myrtle glances at me, a smile playing with her lips. “Azalea’s allure is so strong she can make any man fall in love with her in less than five minutes. They give her anything she wants, marks or not.”

I can’t say I’m surprised.

She turns away, pocketing the small cap before pointing out a striking copper-brown mushroom nearby. “Deadly cort,” she says happily. “Full of orellanine toxin. As bad as it sounds.” She plucks and pockets it as well, then points to a colorful patch of ear-shaped fungus on a nearby tree trunk. “Turkey tail. It’s medicinal—an excellent digestive aid. Useless to us except when used to slow our poison down.”

I want to ask how, but she’s already moved deeper into the trees, peering through the half-light, and I stumble to keep up.

She stops and points again, this time to an unassuming taupe mushroom jutting up through the moss. Its cap fans out across a slender stalk, and I can’t make out any truly distinguishing characteristics. “Tawny grisette. Another amanita, but unlike the rest, this one does not come with the annulus I told you about. And it’s not likely to kill anyone. But when dehydrated and combined with other amanita species, it can greatly increase gastrointestinal distress, speeding up expiration. The spew I’ve witnessed from such combinations is positively torrential.” She says this last bit with wide eyes, the way your grandmother might describe the size of a watermelon from the supermarket.

“Combined with other species?” I recall her mortar and pestle in the room above the café.

“You know, eaten, ” she says. “Though, when I find a blend I like, I do sometimes mix them together in one of my jars for easy feeding.”

“Right.” I take a breath, my shoulders falling. “Am I supposed to remember all these?”

She watches me as she collects the tawny grisette. “Not right away. But it will help to know what’s around you. You will find the cravings come easier—”

“Easier?” I step toward her, hopeful. I have no desire to experience the intense “feedings” of my youth, deadly potations that were all-consuming.

“Softer,” she says with a sympathetic smile. “When you are ignorant, the plants must work extra hard to draw you to them. The magic compels you to eat with such intensity because without it, you never would. But when you know what you are, what you do—when you practice —it gets easier. Less force is required to direct you. The cycle informs, it doesn’t demand. Do you understand?”

“I think so.”

“Here.” She holds the tawny grisette out to me. “Take it.”

I let her drop it in my palm, light and damp. “Do you… do you want me to eat it?”

Her hair wafts around her as she shakes her head. “No. Just feel it.”

I look down. The cap has split into ridges along the edge where the gills are. I run my fingertip against them. “There was a mycology club at my college,” I tell her. “Maybe something like that would help.”

“No.” She curls my fingers around the mushroom, holding my hand in hers. “You can never be seen with your flos mortis, Piers—your flower of death. Do you understand? The risks are too great. If a kill is traced back to you… They have no mercy for our kind.” She shudders, as if remembering the heat of a pyre personally. “No books. No classes. No clubs. No internet. Not even a misplaced documentary. You must learn from here.” Her hand goes to my chest, over my heart. “And here.” It drops below my navel. “And here.” A finger between my eyes. “Let the magic teach you. Or another bane witch. Never the outside world.”

I swallow anxiously. How many times have I stood beside pokeweed with admiration in my eyes, chest swelling with longing? How many mistakes have I made? The suicide note I left behind for one. Don’s death for two.

“Now,” she says. “Close your eyes. Feel it.”

At first, it’s hard to vacate my mind, the jewel-bright berries I love so much like Christmas lights beside the shabby, nondescript exterior of this mushroom. I must wait out my thoughts, my breaths. Until finally, like a light in the distance, I begin to feel a moldering undercurrent beneath my ribs, velvety and unobtrusive, nuzzling. My nose fills with the aroma of fresh rain, a passing draft against my skin, and my tongue tingles along the sides, expectant. It’s not a voracious hunger but a cultivated appetite, the simple, grounded knowing that if I ate it raw, I would savor something delicate and terrestrial, with a bitter, buttery twinge. Until the stomach cramps set in. Which, of course, would never happen for me, but could put another through an unfortunate evening at best, and result in a trip to the ER and possible organ failure at worst.

I open my eyes and meet Myrtle’s. She has seen it find me, her smile echoing my own wonder. “And now you know,” she says, scooping the mushroom from my hand.

“Is it the same for you?” I ask. “How it feels; what it does?”

She grins, eyebrows lifting. “Finally beginning to ask the right questions, are you? There are variances among us. How the toxins manifest in a mark can shift from one bane witch to another. But we don’t alter the fundamental properties of the plant. You can think of it like two people getting the same virus but displaying differing symptoms. One may run a fever. Another’s cough may linger. You get the idea. The marks themselves can have impact, too, depending on their current physical condition. You will find you feed more when your mark is young or strong.”

A patch of sunlight draws me like a spotlight to red stems. A shrub, chest high with flat, green leaves and white berries—I want to scratch my fingernail down to the pith, watch it bleed, suck the sap. Myrtle comes to my side.

“You found poison sumac. Go ahead, pick some,” she says.

I break off a stem and hold it to my chest, the wetness on my fingers a strange comfort. “It would take a lot of this to kill someone,” I tell her. “Unless…”

She cocks her head and waits.

“It would be extremely irritating to the mucus membranes and could lead to dehydration. Properly concentrated or combined with a diuretic or allergen, it could do the trick.”

“You learn fast,” she tells me. “That’s good.” She plucks the stem from my hands and folds a leaf into her mouth like its chewing gum. “Delicious.”

“It’s okay even if you aren’t feeding?”

“We’re never vulnerable to the plants’ toxins, but when we’re in bloom, we’re driven to them so they can build in our system, discharging as soon as we kill.”

She’s started back to the cabin when I place a hand on her elbow, tugging her to a stop. “At the conclave, when they gave me a time limit, you started to argue. You said I’d only just bloomed, just killed. That it was impossible to know something about the cycle.”

Her face falls.

“Tell me,” I insist.

“We can’t dictate when a mark will come to us. The bloom is not something we force. The cycle tells us when to feed, when to kill, not the other way around. And I have a suspicion about your class. ” She pulls the scarf tighter about her shoulders, like a hug.

“My class?” I dart between her eyes, as if one will give the secret away over the other. “What is that?”

“It’s like having a type. The way certain women choose certain lovers again and again, specific traits and features of physicality or personality. We tend toward a particular kind of mark. It’s not a hard and fast line, mind you. You will deviate from it, taking the marks the allure calls to you. But you will find a kind of pattern begins to emerge.” She scowls, as if this annoys her. “It takes time to reveal itself, but I have a theory when it comes to yours. And if I’m right…” She shrugs the rest off like dead weight.

“What’s your theory?”

She doesn’t answer at first, but her eyes pucker at the inside corners, pitying.

I yank her arm. “Myrtle. What’s your theory?”

“Your husband.” It comes out like a huff, like she’s pushed him through her nostrils.

“Henry?” I step back, wanting the shadows, the dapple of light, to camouflage me. As if speaking his name has brought him here, to this hallowed place, infecting it. “What does he have to do with any of this?”

She puts her hands out, trying to calm me, but her fingers spread like webs, and I flinch away. “Hear me out, Piers. What if you didn’t choose him? What if you called him? What if your power, strong as it is, was still trying to work through the drugs and the ignorance? What if he was never supposed to be your husband but your mark?”

I grip the sides of my head, shaking it. It’s a thought I’ve already had, but when it arises it distorts everything I know. All my memories, my feelings, the suffering I endured. It somehow becomes worse, wrong, in a way I can’t tolerate. As if I did it to myself. “I don’t want to talk about this. I don’t want to talk about him. ”

The trees elongate, suddenly menacing, beasts with leaves. The air gathers close, rushing into my mouth and nose, an invisible swarm of molecules. Why did I come here? This forest will suffocate me.

“It would mean your class is an uncommonly dangerous one. Not just domestic abusers—killers.” Her fingers clench the air. “ Stranglers. ”

There is a long pause between heartbeats where my chest flat tens out like pie dough, something rolling over me. The feeling in the clearing at Beth Ann’s surfaces, foreign and familiar— his, mine—when the twig broke.

“Piers!” Myrtle is in front of me, shaking. “Are you all right? Piers?”

I realize I am clutching my chest, that I’ve stopped breathing. My eyes meet hers and I inhale. The woods stream into me, powerful and antiseptic like medicine. My lungs burn with life. “It’s me.”

She blinks, eyes round and bright like an owl. To our left, a flutter catches the air. A ruby-crowned kinglet alights nearby. His red patch makes him look scalped.

“It’s me,” I say, turning to her. “That’s why he’s here, isn’t it?”

“Who?”

But she knows. I see it written in the veins of her eye, gliding behind the fissures of her iris like a doe in a thicket.

“The Saranac Strangler.”

Her arms drop to her sides.

“I’m the reason Beth Ann is dead.” I have committed the venery’s ultimate sin. I have killed an innocent.

“No.” She puts her fingertips to my mouth. “No, you mustn’t say that. He was here. She was alone. It was too easy.”

“But he came for me? Didn’t he? I drew him to Crow Lake. My allure.” There is a high-pitched buzz between my ears, the onset of tinnitus, like mosquitoes in the brain. For a second, I think I might pass out.

Myrtle toes the ground, looking everywhere but at me. She couldn’t act more guilty if she tried. “That’s my suspicion, yes. Your allure was probably working on him before you ever started eating pokeweed in Charleston, moving him in the direction you would take rather than the one you were in. It’s a funny thing—our magic. It often knows us better than we know ourselves.”

I feel Henry’s fingers curling around my throat, stripping me of the safety of the trees, the miles between us. The Strangler may be a different person, but he’s the same man I left behind. And he’s here. For me. My insides quake with panic. The longer he is here, the longer I endure him, our connection like twine laid across the forest, the closer Henry feels. I have a sudden urge to shake him off like a dog with a tick.

I hold out my hand. “Give me the yellow wart.”

“What? No.” The shock sits crooked on her face, like it doesn’t quite fit.

I tear off into the brush. I’ll find more.

“Where are you going?” She chases after me, plucking at my jacket. “Piers, stop!”

“I’m going to kill him.” It’s the only way I can be free. A hemlock branch palms me. I smell bracken, a break in the trees. Somewhere a marsh is idling, spotted with geese. I can sense it all. “Two birds with one stone. He can’t hurt anyone else because of me, and I’ll get the venery off my back.” And I won’t feel Henry’s shadow stretching across five states to persecute me.

She forces me around. “You’re not ready.”

“I have to be.” I can’t let another woman die in my place. I can’t let Henry win. Even if I’m terrified. I try to brush her off.

“Don’t be rash!” she hisses, her grip tightening like talons on my wrist. “You can’t let your fear guide you, Piers. Not anymore. You must let the witch guide you now. And the witch is fear less. She is power and she is cunning. She is instinctive, not impulsive.”

I inhale sharply, unsure if I can manage that.

She shakes my arm. “Listen to me. He is not killing because of you. He would be doing that anyway. He is only killing here because of you. Which is fortunate, whether you’re smart enough to see it or not.” She lets go of me, certain I won’t stalk off again. “You wouldn’t even know where to find him.”

Part of my bottom lip sucks in. I pick at a spot of lichen on the slender trunk next to me.

She steps so close I feel her breath on my face. The stale coffee of the café. I suddenly long for its warm, orange lights and cedar tables. “Would you?”

“Something… happened, ” I admit. I tell her about being at Beth Ann’s place, leaving Regis out of it.

She grips her elbows, walks a few steps away. With her back to me, she says, “The hunt has begun, then.”

“So, I’ll be okay? I mean, with your guidance I can get him before the venery comes for me, right?”

She turns to me. “He’s dangerous, Piers. Practiced. Experienced in ways that you aren’t. This isn’t Henry, the man you left behind. This is Henry ten, twenty years from now. A man who’s gone from toying to executing. Who has made killing his life’s work. A master of le jeu sombre, the dark game. He won’t be easy to take down. Not in six weeks, not in a year.”

I peer at her. “You don’t believe I can do it.”

“I don’t believe anyone else can,” she replies.

Suddenly Bart comes crashing through the darkness, tearing up the earth as he lopes toward us. There’s a fresh scratch on his face beneath one eye, a new battle scar from a match with a fox or a raccoon. He grins from ear to ear, tongue lolling, unaware he is the loser.

Myrtle reaches down to rub his head. “What mischief have you been up to, huh? Come on, Ed’ll have a coronary if I let anything happen to you.” She turns to go, the dog at her heels.

“Myrtle!”

She stops and angles toward me, face hidden behind her hair.

“If you’re right, if my allure called Henry to me, but I didn’t know it, then what happens now?”

Her face turns to me slowly, the dark curtain of hair hiding one eye.

“Will it call him again?” My heart is peppering my chest with adrenaline, pumping panic through my veins. The idea of Henry in these woods frightens me more than the Strangler ever could, and that’s already turning my guts to jelly. It would make no sense to someone else, but I know Henry. The way the Strangler kills is clean, orderly, violent but efficient. Henry is not interested in efficiency. Henry likes to draw it out. He lives for the suffering. Maybe he hasn’t taken the final step to committing murder like the Strangler has, but what lives in him is even darker, deadlier. I’ve seen it.

“I don’t know,” she says. “We’ve never had a witch spare a mark before.”