Blood

A green Ford pulls into the drive just as I’m shutting the barn door. I recognise it, but I can’t seem to remember who it belongs to.

That is, until I see Lorna walking around the front of the car.

She looks upset, which I guess is to be expected. She hadn’t exactly been thrilled with me the last time I saw her, but I’d kind of hoped that after she’d sobered up she wouldn’t be quite as angry. But it seems my hope was insanely misguided.

I mean, I’ve definitely seen her angry, but the way she’s walking…even without seeing her face, it’s obvious that it’s something different.

Fuck.

I can hear her calling my name, frantically. I suppose it would be wrong to go back in the barn and hide.

Spirits, I’ve shot sidhe, I’ve gone through the Wood, and yet I’m afraid of Lorna Owens.

“Mallory!” I can hear her yelling, and then oddly enough, she also yells for my brother.

She doesn’t sound as angry as I thought she had. I don’t know what word I’m looking for. Possibly distressed, but I don’t think that’s exactly enough to describe how she sounds.

I go back towards the house. Lorna’s pacing in front of her truck. I don’t understand why she doesn’t try the house.

She keeps pacing without looking in my direction.

“Lorna,” I say, touching her arm.

She jumps. “Jesus fuck, Mallory!”

“I—”

“Where’s your brother?” Lorna asks.

“My…Justin? I dunno. In the house, I’d expect, why?”

She glances at the house anxiously. I follow her gaze and see that the door is open with only the screen to keep out the winter. I’m sure I didn’t leave it like that this morning.

“You’re sure he’s in the house?” Lorna asks, looking back and forth between me and the house.

Something isn’t right; with her eyes, with her face, with her voice. Nothing is right about Lorna Owens today, but I don’t know why.

“What? No. I don’t know. Lorna, what’s the matter?”

She looks at me, staring furiously, her cheeks red from anger and the cold. “Your fucking brother tried to kill my aunt! He might have for all I know…”

That cannot be possible.

“Justin? He wouldn—”

She shoves me, harder than I had thought she would be able to. “Well he fucking did!”

“I—”

I start to say something, but stop. Something crashes inside the house, immediately followed by a spine-chilling scream…or, at least it should have had that effect, instead, I feel excited, albeit slightly nauseated.

First the snow, and then the porch and all of its steps creak beneath my weight as I make my way towards the door.

Just before the doorway, a rusty horseshoe sits on the porch. I glance up and see the nail above the door empty.

“Mallory!” Lorna calls, seemingly having forgotten her anger for the moment.

I don’t look back at her, although she calls my name a second time. She is afraid, and I probably should be.

There’s nothing I believe more than that one of the fey is inside my home. What scares me is the idea it may not be in its own body.

There is a kind of faerie that my father calls change-skins. Unlike face-shifters and normal changelings that can take on a human’s appearance, change-skins steal human and animal bodies, driving the host’s soul deep away. Once a change-skin has a hold of you, you might as well be dead.

But no, there are other possibilities. Who says that it was Justin that hurt Lorna’s aunt? I mean, other than Lorna. There’s no denying that she is at least the slightest bit mad…albeit not as mad as I am, but still…maybe…

I reach for my knife, and feel the change as soon as I grasp its hilt.

My teeth mostly, the sharpening is almost painful, but what really hurts is all the extra teeth that are added, like little knives tearing at my mouth, although I suppose I’m used to it by now.

I can’t tell what my eyes look like, I never have been able to, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ve gone black.

And then there’s the voice,

Murderer, It purrs, laughing.

I try my best to ignore it.

There’s another scream, followed by a moment of maniacal laughter.

“Don’t you dare go in there, Mallory Fionn,” Lorna says, seemingly forgetting everything she’d said since she got here.

I turn to her, and she steps back, her eyes wide and panicked. Her heart races, and I hunger for it.

No, I tell myself, but my body doesn’t want to listen, until there’s another crashing sound from within the house.

I turn back and step inside.

The house is dark, darker than normal. I don’t know how that’s possible, though. There aren’t normally any lights on around this time of day, and it doesn’t feel like any of the windows are obstructed. Maybe it’s just that my eyes aren’t adjusting right.

I search the house with a kind of fervour, first the living room, where I see the old wardrobe knocked down, then smashed through the back, as though it had been stomped upon, but nothing of the living variety. Then I look in my bedroom, but there isn’t anything out of the ordinary there.

Just as I’m about to head back into the hall, I hear something, likely in the kitchen. Something like a human walking, except a little less even, almost like my father with his limp, except much faster.

As quietly as I can, which is almost silent, I prowl through my own house. It can only be a few yards distance, but it feels closer to miles.

“Uh, hello,” says my brother, looking down at me from where he’s standing. On the kitchen table.

He has a knife in one hand, and the wooden cross from above the window in the other. It looks like it’s been stabbed a couple dozen times.

The voice in the back of my mind laughs again. What you gonna do, Mallory? It asks.

Justin jumps down off the table, throwing the splintered cross at the wall harder than he should have been able. It breaks apart, denting the wall slightly. Change that to much harder than he should have been able to.

“I figured you’d come, sooner or later,” says Justin. He looks at me, directly at me, his eyes shifting from grey to black and back again. “But I thought I should have a little fun while I waited,” He continues, grabbing a clear spray bottle off the counter.

He sprays it all over himself, laughing. “If you notice, it don’t do nothing.”

The faerie that had once been my brother smiles. “What about you?” he asks as he sprays the bottle at me.

Thankfully, he was far enough away for it to barely touch me, but my left arm, the one that had been closer, stings half a dozen times. I clench my teeth and try not to let it show.

The faerie, change-skin, frowns and throws the bottle towards the door. “Well that’s boring. I suppose it means you really do have human skin, but you do have my eyes. Funny that, hey? We ain’t even related. Oh, but you consider yourself related to this wretch,” he says, gesturing at himself with his knife. “Fuckin’ traitor.”

I can’t move. Spirits, this isn’t right. This can’t happen. I can’t…not to my father, not to Justin. But what else can I do?

The sidhe laughs with my brother’s voice. “I suppose you’re wrestling with your, uh…what is that word you humans use? Mortal…Moral…it’s something of that sort, ain’t it?”

He expects me to respond, so when I don’t, he tosses the knife at me.

It goes over my shoulder, as I’m sure the faerie meant for it to.

Justin—No. Not Justin, the faerie. Spirits, save me.

The faerie turns around and goes back to rifling through our cupboards. When it turns back to me, it’s holding a spatula as though it were an angry snake.

“What the fuck is this?” It asks.

I walk up to the faerie, trying to steady my breathing as I do.

It goes to step back, but finds my knife at its throat as it does. My brother’s throat.

“You won’t kill me,” he says, laughing. “You can’t kill me!”

I watch as a bead of my brother’s bright blood forms and then runs down his neck, as though trying to escape the blade.

“You forget how easily humans bleed.”

The faerie’s heart rate picks up, and my brother’s dark gray eyes, eyes that half the island is in love with, turn as black as mine.

The spatula hits the back of my head once, twice, but it’s only a piece of plastic. Nothing like the blade I hold in my hand.

“You were a fool to throw away your knife,” I say, slipping mine deeper into his neck.

I can feel myself smile. I don’t think there’s anything that smells half as sweet as human blood.

No.

No, no, no, no, no.

But I was already so close to being my other self that instead of just hissing at me as he normally does, the faerie takes over, driving me into that little place in the back of my own mind.

The blade slides the rest of the way into what had been my brother’s throat, all the way to the hilt so that the fresh blood spills onto my hand. A stream of blood comes from his mouth too as it tries to cough. He coughs blood into my face, like warm water from a stream.

The world seems to slow as I watch the life drain from my brother’s body, and I can’t do anything to stop it. Just watch and fear for what the other me will do.

My knife pulls out of Justin’s neck. The faerie-me smiles as it for a moment before licking the blade clean. And fuck, it wants more so badly.

It wouldn’t bother him in the slightest that this body had hosted one of its own until their death—that it had black eyes. He just cares that there’s still human blood flowing within.

I want to throw up looking at my dead brother with faerie eyes, but I can’t tell myself to. I can’t get my body to do anything.

Somewhere in the house I can hear someone walking.

I don’t know what I’m more afraid of; that I will eat my brother or kill someone else.

Not-Mallory seems to be debating which he’d rather do, since he looks at the corpse and then to the door of the kitchen, then back at the corpse.

So what’ll it be…Mallory? The faerie thinks, then laughs aloud.

Not-Mallory looks towards the door then takes a step forward before stopping to listen again.

“Perhaps we’ll just wait here then, eh?” he says. “Maybe have a little snack.”

I want my stomach to turn and to feel violently ill, but I cannot feel either, I can’t feel anything except fear.

My foot kicks Justin’s lifeless body, as though to make sure he’s really dead. Then my head snaps towards the door at the sound of footsteps, almost in the kitchen.

I can see Lorna standing almost in the doorway, her eyes wider than should have been possible.

Run! I try to tell her. But I can’t make a sound.

“Hello, Lorna,” says my voice.

She takes a step back, although not nearly as large a step as she should have taken. She’s transfixed on whatever gruesome scene I’m a part of.

Her lips tremor as she tries to say something. No sound comes out.

“Come on, now. This ain’t the first time you’ve seen one of my kind. Hell, you see me all the time. ’Bet you regret that now.”

Not-me takes another step towards Lorna.

I want to tell her that the holy water near her feet will near kill me, that there’s a knife on the floor that she could reach before me, but no matter how hard I try, my voice won’t sound, the same as every other time.

Lorna tries to speak, but it comes out broken. “You…all of…you’re all…”

“Faeries? I’m sorry, love, but it was just me. Always. Remember this burn?” The faerie switches my knife into my left hand before holding up my right. “You should have known, or at least thought, but you don’t think, do you, Lorna? And if you do, it ain’t with your fucking head.” My face grins.

Then I feel my eyes roll. “And even that doesn’t make you do anything? Run away! Fight! Do bloody something!”

I walk towards her, quickly. But still, Lorna takes less than a step back.

Spirits be damned, I think. I can’t hurt her. My brother’s dead at my hands, and now Lorna will be, too. It’s too much like a nightmare. There’s no way this can be real.

But it is, Not-Mallory thinks back.

Then he pulls up my knife, ready to plunge it into Lorna’s chest…

Except there’s a blinding pain at my temple instead. I can hear and feel myself screaming and try to get away from it, but the pain follows.

I can’t think, all I can do is flail my arms and try and escape, but I can’t.

And then I’m the one feeling the pain, and it’s me screaming, not the faerie version of myself. Me.

I try to say Lorna’s name, but I can’t make any noise. Maybe this is how I’ll die. It’s not like I don’t deserve it.

But just when I don’t think I can take it anymore, the pain is gone.

There’s a moment where I can’t tell if my eyes are opened or closed, since all I see is white, but eventually it fades, and I can see Lorna standing over me with her stone in one hand and my knife in the other.

“You should have slit my throat,” I say to her.

She’s staring at me, her eyes still wide and full of fear, even though she’s the one with both weapons. It’s amazing how afraid the Islanders are of the fey.

“I...still could.” Her voice is shaky, as are her hands.

I nod. “If you really want to.”

She takes a couple steps back. “Get up.”

It takes a lot of effort to stand. Funny how often that happens.

Out of the corner of my eye I see a leg on the floor, and I remember why I was like that. And-Oh, fuck, no.

I can see my brother, his face pale and his eyes black, lying in a pool of his own blood.

Finally, I retch, falling to my hands and knees. For once in my life, the smell of blood makes me ill, as it should.

I start to cry, which really is a cruel thing to do when someone is trying to convince themselves to kill you, but I can’t help it. My brother, one of the only people on the entire island that cared for me is dead, and it’s my fault. I killed him.

Why did I have to be so stupid? There has to be some kind of way to exorcise one of Them. There has to be. But no, instead of even considering it, I just plunged a knife into my brother’s neck. And it’s not just him. He and Cynthia were going to have a child. Fuck. Fuckfuckfuckfuckfuck.

“I’m sorry,” I say through my tears, although I’m not sure if I’m saying it to Justin or Lorna. “I’m so, so sorry.”

I’ve killed my father’s only real son. All he had left of his wife, who as far as I know died because of me, too. How could I have done this to Tim?

I don’t know how long I stay like that, crying and vomiting and apologising, but I do it for a lot longer than I should have, for Lorna’s sake, since when I’m able to think and see again, she’s put down my knife and is looking at me like I’m anyone who just lost a brother, not the monster I am. Why won’t she just kill me?

“Do you see why I didn’t want to be with you, now?” I ask her, quietly.

She nods and sits down on the floor, close enough that if I moved quickly I could knock the stone from her hand and strangle her. How could she be so careless?

“What are you doing? Why are you just sitting there?” I’m yelling at her. “Either kill me now or get out!”

She looks at me with pity, which just serves to anger me further. What is wrong with her?

“You saw what I am, Lorna! I was going to kill you!”

She’s shaking her head, like she’s disagreeing with me, like she wasn’t there a moment ago. “What was that?” she asks.

I don’t understand what she’s still doing here. “What was what?”

She recoils slightly.

I don’t want to hurt her. I was so, so stupid to let anything happen between us. Why am I so weak? Why couldn’t I have just sent her away weeks ago?

“How can you be both this and a…monster?”

I don’t answer for a long moment, feebly hoping that she’ll leave if I ignore her. Yet she doesn’t.

“My mother wasn’t stolen by the faeries,” I say in a low voice.

She looks at me, incredulous. She should be terrified. Stupid girl. “And Tim Fionn is still your father?”

“Yes. Lorna, leave. Now.”

For a moment, she doesn’t do anything, and I’m afraid she’s going to keep asking questions, and I’m afraid she’s going to convince me that I won’t hurt her, and I really cannot let her do that.

But she gets up and goes, leaving my knife on the floor and me alone in a room with my brother’s body.

If she was smarter she would have killed me.