Chapter 30
THIRTY
Every blink flickered from extreme darkness to the brightest light. Sleep and consciousness. Or maybe it was death and whatever happened if I survived to see another side.
He was inside now, flipping through my memories like folders jammed into a rusty file cabinet. I was helpless as he rummaged for images I’d long forgotten.
Here, he murmured. And here.
The memory he found was of me at five years old.
My plaits had come undone. Knees patched with dirt.
And fingernails stained with pink chalk.
I’d been drawing. Nonsensical shapes that meant something to a child and absolute gibberish to an adult.
The adult now was me, but at the time had been my Uncle Anthony.
“He’s here, too,” I said to the demon in my mind and Rae out loud.
I could barely see her after I woke up on my back in the stable. She was a blur of light I only sensed because of the gentle hint of vanilla underneath my nose. Rae held me in her arms, eyes rimmed red as she took me in.
“Who?” Rae’s voice floated a million miles away. Maybe even a million years. Time stretched, challenging me to a tug of war. I tightened my grip around her, but the more I squeezed, the farther she got.
Look. Forget her and look, he willed, clawing his nails into the back of my head and forcing me to focus on what laid in front of me. In front of us.
We stood in my stable, but it was barely built. Bare bones. An outline of an idea that would soon become Elmwood.
My uncle was next to me, drawing, too. His strokes were stronger than mine. Confident. While I create nonsense, he created something with so much intent it burned the wooden planks.
Little me laughed. “What’s that? It’s not a horse.”
“Luck,” My uncle pulled his hand away so I could take a closer look. “Do you know anything about luck?”
I shook my head.
“Well, some people are born with it,” he said. “Like your dad.”
“My dad?”
“Yeah, he’s free to wander. Ain’t worried about money.
And now, that luck’s rubbed off on your ma.
She can wander the world too without worrying about places or things or money,” my uncle explained.
“But the rest of us, well, we’ve gotta find luck all on our own.
We either gotta make it or take it. Like me and building this ranch. ”
“Okay.” I nodded because what else was there to do when I hadn’t known what he meant. What did luck matter anyway? It hadn’t bothered me. “But what’s that drawing?”
“Some call it the devil’s luck,” my uncle said. “It’s a request.”
“Request?”
He nodded. “For help. Like a deal. You know about deals?”
I shrugged. “Sometimes Mom makes me deals for bedtime. If I brush my teeth early, I get ten extra minutes with my book.”
“It’s like that,” my uncle assured. “I make a deal for luck and then do something in return.”
“What do you do? Brush your teeth early?” I wondered.
“Sure, something like that.”
The voices became muffled. I was in the dark again. He was there too, waiting and watching. I knew he could see me clearly. He could hear every erratic flicker of my pulse. Every nervous exhale I force past my parted lips.
“So, that’s where you came from?” I asked the void. “He called for you. He wanted to make a deal?”
“Yes, I’m all tied up and bound because of one flimsy human,” he lamented.
The lights were back. We stood in a field. The grass was too long and bright for it to be Elmwood now. Maybe Elmwood in the spring when everything would become overgrown and unwieldy.
He remained a black, amorphous figure. The grass wilted as he flopped down into it. What could be his face be turned to the cloudless sky, taking in its vastness.
“If this deal was with him, then why are you terrorizing me?” I tugged on my sleeves, exhausted but not desperate enough to join him on the ground. There was a vibration flowing from him, a disruption that made me taste blood.
“You are his only living relative, Octavia.” He pushed himself into a sitting position. “And look.”
The memory flickered in front of me again, a film on a small screen.
Someone called for my uncle. He left me in the stable, his voice clashing with someone else’s outside.
The adults were arguing. They always argued.
I’d learned to tune them out because I’d never get rest or peace if I let them pull my focus.
With my bottom lip between my teeth, I continued my wobbly drawing of two horses. My grip tightened on the chalk, nails cutting into its sides.
“I want one one day,” little Octavia murmured under her breath. “Maybe two. Or three. Four?”
Little me’s smile wobbled as I looked down at my doodle.
But it quickly faded when I considered maybe I should take some of my uncle’s luck, too.
After all, he said, Dad was lucky. And Mom, too.
But he didn’t say anything about me. I looked at his drawing and traced a line of chalk from my work to his.
He wouldn’t mind. Uncle always shared with me.
Our drawings overlapped, lines crisscrossed as we shared the wooden plank that would be nailed to the loft of the barn. The plank that would host all our luck.
I scratched a part of my palm on the wood. A splinter pierced my skin. Only a couple of drops of blood made it onto the plank before I covered the cut and dropped the chalk. I ran out of the stable, looking for someone to save me from the pain.
“That’s…that’s…” I shook my head as we resurfaced in the field. The sky was darker, storm clouds rolling in.
“You signed it, too. Sealed it with blood. The contract,” he said.
“Ridiculous.” I coughed out a disbelieving laugh. “I was…a child. I didn’t know that—”
“Your lines are entangled with his. The blood in your veins was his. The rules don’t care about what you don’t know.
Trust me, I wish they did. I’ve been trying to get them to care for decades.
They only care about what is.” He was closer now, hot breath on my face.
The smell of burnt rubber stung my nostrils.
“And here’s what is: your uncle made a deal with me.
Seven years of good luck. Prosperity, and then his soul was mine to do whatever I pleased.
Except he died before I could collect. Poor old man and that pesky disease of sadness. ”
His fingers stroked my cheek. I stilled under the cold and prickly touch. His nails were sharp enough to pierce skin at the slightest jerk.
“So when he killed himself,” he continued, voice softened at the fact.
I remembered his death. A phone call my mom had gotten when I was around ten. I hadn’t seen him since that last argument when I’d been drawing with the chalk.
“I was freed. So, I roamed. I lived. I fed on the souls of those who begged for salvation. No more isolation at Elmwood. I don’t know how you stand it.”
My stomach twisted as if it’d been starved for days.
“See, back then, I was new at this. I wasn’t good at…picking them. Didn’t think of long-term investments.”
Uncle Anthony was back. He sat at a bar, six shot glasses in front of him.
A sweating beer bottle in hand. Some woman wasn’t keeping eye contact as he leaned into her, talking faster than the local news cycle.
I couldn’t hear what he said, but that didn’t matter much because I became distracted by a thick, black aura outlining his body.
It was like oily sludge, circling him slowly.
“I thought,” the demon whispered into my ear, “that he looked absolutely divine. Far better than any of my other meals in Alpine. People here are desperate, but I’d never seen a desperation like his.
I could feed on that desperation and depression for a decade at least. And whenever he spoke of his family coming to visit him, well, that was icing on the cake.
I’d get to survive off you all because I could see how the sadness ran deep in each one of you.
So, I talked to him for the first time that night.
He told me he needed time. And I told him how to call on me whenever he was ready. I knew he’d be ready.”
He whipped his chained hand in front of my face. I jumped, falling back into the overgrown field.
“I didn’t have to fear being pulled back into the Pit.” He crouched in front of me, still in the cuffs. “If I fed well, then I’d stay strong enough to fend off those fucking hellhounds.”
“They take you back?” I asked in a shaky breath. Underneath his frustration was an echo of familiar panic. Fear. It’d wrapped around every one of his words like a barbed wire fence.
“Drag me,” he said with a dry laugh. “You don’t want to know what it’s like to be dragged by one of those things. To not be strong enough to fight them off. Octavia, we all owe someone something. And when your uncle died, he took an early exit, leaving me in the cold.”
We were in an apartment. The smell of old food and the poor attempt at masking it with fragrance spray had me coughing.
Fruit flies buzzed near my ears. I swatted them away, refusing to look up because I knew what this place was.
I’d seen the brown carpet underneath my scuffed, black Mary Janes.
People were saying sorry to me and hugging my mom.
I clung to her, waiting for a chance to ask her if I could call Wilson.
Because she’d lost her brother, I kept worrying when I’d next see mine.
“I get it!” I yelled at the demon. “Take me back. I don’t need to see this part; take me back!”
He opened his mouth as if to challenge me to watch again. But then, we were back in the field. Grass scratched at my wrists as I knelt on the ground.
“The contract should have been void. I couldn’t find that thing, but it shouldn’t have mattered because death should have voided it.
” He kneeled in front of me. The vibration floating off him had simmered to a gentle buzz.
Something that could have been nice if he wasn’t a demon picking through parts of my brain.
“But then, you signed that deed. Elmwood’s deed.
And I was forced back here,” he said through gritted teeth.
“The contract re-upped because I owed your bloodline seven years. Except…Octavia, you’re going to love this, your goddamn uncle figured out how to seal a contract before he signed.
I can’t touch it to destroy it after the deadline, which means even after time’s up, I will remain chained to you and Elmwood.
Every year that passes the seven, you will keep a piece of my soul.
You will bleed me dry and not the other way around, like nature intended. ”
I blinked away the burning tears. “Sealed?”
Was he kidding me?
“Are you…I could have gotten it! I could destroy it. All you had to do was ask—”
“You think if it were as simple as asking, I wouldn’t have already done it?
” He laughed so hard that he fell back into the grass.
The storm clouds that’d been rolling in stopped a few miles away.
“When he figured out how to make a trap for the contract, he also found out how to link it to your bloodline. I’m locked to you like one of those Ancestral creeps.
Except I can’t feed off generations because it’s just you.
No one’s fear will ever satiate me like your bloodline can now.
Nothing will keep me as alive and strong a Daniel’s fear will.
Everyone’s else’s may as well be a couple of drops of water.
A fucking stale cracker every other day.
“You will own a part of my soul forever. With each year that passes, you’ll own another, taking my power. I used to be able to talk to people after resting for a few hours. Now it takes weeks!”
“Sorry…I can’t empathize with stealing your power when you’re threatening everything I love,” I muttered.
“Of course not. I don’t expect empathy. I’d never offer it to you. That’s not how this world has ever worked. We don’t care unless we have to.” He sighed, quiet for a moment.
“Why can’t I destroy it? If you give me time, I could figure out how to break—”
“You can’t destroy a contract bound in blood,” he said. “It’s the oldest rule. It’d be like an attempt to destroy the Earth with a plastic spoon.”
“Then what do you want from me? Why did you bring me here?”
“So I could see how he did it. Confirm what it took and ensure it could never be done to me again,” he said. “So I can make sure killing you will end this blood bond.”
I knew this would be the finish line, but crossing it is more of a burden than the race. Because everything that’s been demanded of me disappeared along with the infinite string of possibilities.
“Or, I could revise it,” I whispered.
His laugh was dry. “Revise it?”
“People revise contracts all the time. If both parties agree…that’d be doable.”
“You’re forgetting something.”
“What’s that?”
“I don’t fucking trust you. After what your uncle figured out, I don’t trust anyone with your blood running through their veins.
I’m bound to a life of deals, but I refuse to play the game with humans who bend the rules.
As far as I’m concerned, you both entrapped me.
And I’d be ridiculous to take a chance and leave my fate in the palm of your trembling hands. ”
“Then you will have to fight,” I reminded him. “You will have to fight Rae and whoever else she can call if you want to kill me. You will have to fight me.”
He scoffed. “It’s not that hard.”
“Your months-long track record says otherwise,” I said in a cutting tone. I clasped Rae’s necklace that was somehow still around my neck. It warmed underneath my touch, offering me strength and the comforting reminder that she was still with me even now.
Negotiation was over. I’d spent months worrying about my ranch, fighting off nightmares he fed to me, living in fear that I’d have to leave another place because it didn’t belong to me.
But I was sick of flight. Sick of hiding.
I’d rather go kicking and screaming than let go of a home again.
Because to hell with the thought that I didn’t deserve a place to call my own.
I was wholly human, part of the ground I walked on, the air I breathed, the stories I lived through.
If worthiness came from something more than simply existing, then perhaps it itself was a myth.
And I had no interest in chasing fairytales.
My dreams were solid; I’d built them and possessed the calloused fingers to prove it.
A vibration echoed off my body, originating from my fury and projected by Rae’s necklace.
It shoved against his energy. In no way was mine as strong as his, but it shielded me enough to offer a distraction.
A chance to see the cabin on the edge of the field where we stood.
The cabin I’d been having nightmares about since I was a child.
I stepped closer, and he shrank back, confused by the nudge of my energy. “I will either find a way to drain you completely as the years go by. Or I will find a way to free you. Whichever comes first. And since you’re not working with me, well…I suppose I’ll have to take my pick.”
“I don’t have a choice,” he argued.
“We both do,” I promised.