WALES 2022
THE CRUSTED BLOOD HAD been cleaned out of Ceri’s hair, and his skin’s ashen pallor had warmed up. His eyes were no longer dazed; rather, they were utterly incandescent. The bleary concussion had made way for blazing anger.
At first he didn’t spot Arden tucked behind a bookshelf. ‘What the fuck, Bran? Do you know how much it hurts to be smacked around the head with a shovel?’
‘No worse than a musket,’ Arden muttered, making a curmudgeonly tutting noise.
At the sound of the second voice, Ceri swivelled on his heel, then narrowed his eyes at the sight of my accomplice.
‘You,’ he growled.
Arden made a little mock salute.
‘I’m so sorry, Ceri.’ There was a note of pleading to my voice, but it didn’t stop me from glaring pointedly at Arden. ‘We both are. I don’t know what else to say.’
Pausing as though debating whether to lunge at Arden, Ceri slowly turned back around. ‘Look, can we talk alone?’
‘I think you must understand by now that I can’t allow her out of my sight.’ Arden’s tone was bored, his finger running over the narrow spines in the poetry section, but his ambivalence didn’t fool me. I saw the way he stood up a little too straight, shoulders squared and senses heightened, the angles of him too sharp, as though waiting for an attack.
Ceri shook his head ferociously. ‘A lot of the aftermath was hazy, but I distinctly remember this guy threatening to kill you if you freed me. Then, when you freed me, he didn’t kill you, but he said he would if I went to the police?’
My stomach flipped. ‘And he will. You have to know that.’
‘I won’t. Providing you tell me what the hell is going on.’
A kind of exhaustion spread over me, and all at once I couldn’t fathom why I shouldn’t just confess to everything. ‘You want the truth? Fine. Here it is.’
Arden turned to me, grim warning on his face. ‘Don’t.’
And I hated that he was warning me. That he felt he had the right to order me around, after everything he had done to me.
‘Or what?’ My frustration was rapidly swelling into anger. ‘I’ve called your bluff once before. Or are you going to hurl all-new threats at me? Are you going to find all-new agonizing ways to take my life?’
The fury rose hot and biting in my chest, as though my body had suddenly remembered all the brutal and humiliating ends I’d been subjected to. How could I have been content to just stand here in a bookshop, idly chatting about old battles, with the being whose sole purpose was to destroy me?
Arden’s chest rose and fell in ragged peaks, meeting my rage with his own, but he tempered it. His blue eyes burned like the heart of a flame. ‘Him knowing the truth won’t undo what you did.’
I ignored him. ‘Ceri, you have a right to know.’
An idea struck me then, sudden and breathless. A plan far more concrete than the abstract desire to make Arden want to save me this time.
A real, solid course of action that might actually lead to my survival.
My phone lay on the counter beside the till. It would have been too obvious to go through the rigmarole of opening the voice-note app, but I subtly pressed the camera button on the home screen and swiped it to video.
I hit record, making sure my voice was loud and clear.
‘I can remember all of my past lives – or the last half-dozen, at least, though they go back much further. In each and every one, I’ve been murdered before my eighteenth birthday by the same killer who hunts me through every life. I still don’t know why, or how. But I’ve never made it to eighteen.’
Some of the tentative colour washed out of Ceri’s face once again. ‘Oookay.’
‘You don’t have to believe me.’ I folded my arms, feeling defensive, remembering the doctors examining me curiously in Vermont. The diagnosis of mania slapped to my chest like a scarlet letter. A patch of drool on a bleak collar. ‘The outcome will be the same, regardless.’
‘I think you must know how insane that sounds.’ Yet Ceri’s gaze darted between Arden and me, as though remembering the fraught negotiations in the stables.
I took a steadying breath. ‘The reason I shoved you outside the flower shop, and the reason I tried to restrain you in the stables, is because I thought you were that killer. That you’d finally arrived in Abergavenny to end it all again. And I needed to stay alive as Branwen Blythe a while longer to save my little sister.’
‘But I’m not a killer.’ Realization slowly dawned on Ceri’s face, turned it from fury to disbelief. ‘You think he is?’ He didn’t have to point to Arden for me to know who he meant.
‘Yes.’ The betrayal stung afresh. I still couldn’t process the fact that Dylan, my almost-brother, was the person destined to slaughter me. ‘We’ve known each other for a long time, so I should have seen it coming, but I didn’t.’ I took a deep breath, then said in a rush, ‘Do you believe me?’
Clenching his jaw, Ceri replied, ‘No. But I believe that you believe it. That you both do. And that’s what scares me.’ He turned to face Arden, a taut apprehension to his movements. The furious bluster of his entrance had evaporated. ‘So you really are planning to kill her?’
Please say yes. Please say yes, so I have proof.
After what seemed like an eternity, Arden said flatly, ‘It has to be done.’
Bingo.
‘But why?’ Ceri asked, mouth agape. He took a subtle but unmistakable step back, as though Arden might lunge at any moment.
‘Good luck with that line of questioning,’ I snorted. ‘It’s never got me very far. How are you going to kill me this time, Dylan?’ I made sure to use the name he was known by locally. ‘Have you made up your mind yet? Poison served you well last time. Though being hung, drawn and quartered looks like a wild ride.’
‘Don’t push me, Bran.’ His voice was a low, coarse rumble.
‘Or what?’ I goaded. ‘What could you possibly threaten that’s worse than death?’
‘I can certainly bring that death forward,’ he said, with the cadence of a quip – but, given the situation, it landed rather south of funny.
Ceri shook his head vehemently, as though trying to wake himself from a strange dream. ‘This is nuts. This is all entirely nuts.’
‘I know. So go,’ I urged. ‘Walk away. Forget you ever got involved. Please.’
He fixed his eyes on me imploringly. ‘You can’t just … let this happen.’
‘I don’t have much choice.’
‘We can restrain him.’ His voice rose with desperation now, and I was a little touched at the fact he wanted to save me despite what I’d done to him in the stables. ‘Here and now. I have to help you, somehow.’ He eyed Arden nervously, as though my killer would turn on him at any moment.
‘Why?’ I asked, utterly aghast. ‘After what I did …’
He shrugged, but it was tense, urgent. ‘None of this quite makes sense, but I think you’re a victim of something bad. Psychological manipulation, emotional abuse, whatever. And for all her faults, my mother raised me right. You see someone in trouble, you help them. No matter what they’ve done to you in the past.’
‘Thank you, Ceri,’ I said, and I meant it. Humanity was full of goodness, as long as you wanted to see it. ‘But there’s nothing you can do.’
Silence settled in the store, yet it was anything but peaceful. It was taut, charged, like an electric cable slowly lowered into still water.
‘I can’t just walk out,’ Ceri said eventually, rubbing his face roughly. ‘You’ve just told me you’re about to be murdered by … by this sick bastard.’
A ridiculous defensiveness bucked in my chest. I knew with absolute certainty that Arden had never derived any pleasure or satisfaction from hurting me. He had a moral code, no matter how different from my own. He was no simple psychopath, no cold killer.
He did this because he had to.
I thought of the vision I’d had after escaping the asylum: a bone-white world, ash falling like snow. Pain larger than anything. Arden pleading at my feet. And that woman in the trenches, with her pale sheets of hair and her gnarled black fingernails.
This has gone on long enough.
Arden was just trying to protect me, even if I didn’t fully understand what from.
Yet I acknowledged, even as I thought it, how twisted that logic was. How any modern psychologist would have said I was trapped in an abuse cycle, suffering from Stockholm syndrome, romanticizing violence – none of it particularly flattering, nor particularly accurate.
‘Please, Ceri.’ The fight was deserting me once more, that righteous anger making way for existential exhaustion. A sense of utter futility. ‘Go.’
Another long, tense pause. ‘Fine.’ He turned to Arden, who was staring out of the window, lost in his thoughts. ‘But you’re not going to get away with what you’re doing to her. I’ll go to the police right now.’
‘The next time you or the police come near,’ Arden said, cold and slow and quiet, ‘I’ll kill her before you can even say hello. Do you understand? You trying to stop me will be the death of her.’
Ceri stared loathingly at Arden’s knit-clad back for a few more moments before storming out of the bookshop, the cheerful tinkle of the bell almost an insult.
I stopped the video recording on my phone, heart hammering against my brittle ribs.
‘So you’re just going full villain now?’ I asked, trying to inject a bit of levity into the atmosphere, but it landed dead at my feet.
Arden hunched to his knees, sank his head into his palms and let out a pained roar. I couldn’t tell what emotions were spilling over – frustration, hatred, terror – only that they were.
‘Arden …’ I whispered, half soothing, half fearful.
‘Don’t,’ he snapped, but the anger didn’t seem to be directed at me. ‘Just don’t, all right?’
We stayed in terse silence for the rest of the shift. Eventually he climbed to his feet and sat with his back to the wall, flipping through a copy of Ten Hundred Years of You even though he had one at home. His expression was impenetrable as he read. Were the flowery declarations of love from decades ago difficult to bear? Did he remember the emotions all too well, or were they like the musings of a stranger? And why was he reading them now? To remind himself of what we once were? What we could be still?
A few customers came and went, and as they asked for recommendations – an espionage thriller for an uncle, something funny for a bereaved friend, a literary masterpiece for a discerning daughter – Arden visibly bit his tongue. It was as though the child at the heart of him desperately wanted to talk about books, but he felt he couldn’t, because of the situation. How much of ourselves we had lost to this cruel fate, interests and passions gradually taking back-seats to the driving force of our existence – imminent death. We were ruled by the twin pillars of pursuit and escape, our souls reduced to Tom and Jerry, the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, the crude concepts of hero and villain, chaser and chased.
The phone recording burned in my pocket like a hot coal, and as I thought about what I was going to do with it, my blood filled with fire.
Furious, hopeful, righteous fire.
When I finished locking up the shop at the end of the day, my phone flashed with a missed call and a voicemail from a local number.
Something like dread flickered in my chest. Had Ceri ignored Arden’s threats and gone to the police anyway? Were they calling to check up on me? What would Arden do if so? He’d reneged on his threats back in the stables, but I doubted he’d do so again.
Hand trembling, I hit play, holding the phone up to my ear.
A familiar calm voice sounded through the speaker.
‘Branwen, hi, it’s Dr Chiang. Listen, I couldn’t stop thinking about what you asked of me. Playing it over in my head again and again, unsure whether I’d done the right thing. You seemed in such a dark place, and, truthfully, I’d never forgive myself if something bad did happen. So I explained the situation to my wife, and she’s willing to perform the procedure pro bono. Can you be in Newport this Friday afternoon? Give me a call back when you can.’
All the breath was sucked from my lungs.
Friday was the day before I turned eighteen.
It had worked . My blind optimism had not been unfounded after all. Validation surged through me, rich and potent and golden.
If I stayed alive for two more days, Gracie would get my marrow.
And after that, I was going to live.