Chapter 24
As Sylvia dragged her toward Wallace, Aster’s mind felt like an open wound.
Flits of memory were seeping out like bloodstains.
They were so brief, like one-second films. Sylvia’s face over the centuries — smiling, teeth bared, laughing, full-bodied, head thrown back. Sylvia in the dim light of a pub, in the broad light of day, blood on her face, murder on her hands.
Why are you showing me this now, she asked to her brain, seeing no red thread between the memories. The only thread was Sylvia.
“I think Yasmine’s magic messed with me,” Aster confessed.
Sylvia’s grip on her hand tightened but she did not look back. They threaded through men and women, shouldering through the crowd, getting nasty looks from every direction.
“How so?” Sylvia said quietly.
Aster could see Wallace’s broccoli-like curls now. He was standing on the outskirts of the service, leaning on the stone fencing, smoking a cigarette. It looked like it might as well have been his first cigarette ever from the way his mouth puckered like he’d just tasted acid.
“It’s like someone keeps rapidly changing the channel in my brain. I keep visualizing things I don’t mean to visualize.” As she said the words aloud, Aster frowned. “I think this has happened before but I can’t place it. Have we run into the Sokolovs before this?”
Sylvia didn’t reply, dragging her even more quickly towards the boy.
They skidded to a stop in front of him, and his eyes widened.
He panicked, throwing the cigarette to the ground and stomping on it with his dress shoe.
A dress shoe that was also too large for him, slipping at the heel.
His entire ensemble was like that — an unfitting tan coat, too-tight dress pants.
Sylvia rolled her eyes. “Jesus, kid. We’re not your parents.” She eyed his jacket pocket, which was bulging with the cigarette container. “Having a vice actually makes you almost likeable. Dampens the whole obsessive dorky thing. Now hand one over, pretty please.”
He mumbled, “You’re not supposed to smoke here.”
Sylvia rolled her eyes and ignored his hypocrisy, digging the cigarette packet out of his pocket, plucking a Lucky Strike out and then making a gimme gesture with her hands for a lighter.
He gave her a scandalized expression before finally handing it over.
She lit it quickly, tapping her foot anxiously as the smoke clouded. Aster gave her a bewildered look.
She’s nervous. Why is she so nervous?
“We need to talk to your step-dad,” Sylvia said, sans all her usual evasiveness.
She usually preferred to disorient her conversational partner into giving her what she wanted.
This time, it was straight to the point, no lubrication.
It was almost concerning. “We’ve talked to a bunch of funeral guests and it’s looking more and more like he’s our guy.
So we need to get some one-on-one time with him.
Think you can get us past those guards?”
Sylvia gestured toward the flank of human-beef in tuxedos that was standing nondescriptly at the far north of the reception, beyond the deacon and the body.
Wallace looked suddenly incredibly nervous. Which was saying something, because he always looked incredibly nervous. “You really think it was Richard who did it?”
Sylvia said something in response, Aster saw her lips move, but she couldn’t hear the words. And Wallace must have said something back, because he was giving a somber shake of his head, and beginning to turn on his heel to walk towards them.
Aster frowned.
What the hell is going on?
Why can’t I hear them?
Her brain was — it wasn’t working.
It felt like a slowly dying machine. She couldn’t hear the present. Like the audio cord had been snipped. Instead it kept showing her pictures of the past, over and over and over and over, like a rapidly flitting film reel. All the same moments, regurgitated, again and again.
Sylvia in dark robes at the peak of a mountain, Austrian alps at her back.
Sylvia next to her in bed in a cabin. Flush to her body. So close she could feel Sylvia’s breath on her cheek, Sylvia’s red lips curling into a smile.
Sylvia in Bucharest. In the night. They’re running from the guards.
Why are we running? They did something bad.
They killed a man — no, not just any man.
A very significant man. They killed him and now they were running for their lives.
They got out of sight, dodged into an alleyway.
Sylvia looked beautiful pressed up against the wall, her hands stained with blood, her hair wet from the rain.
Aster wanted to run her hands through it.
She refrained. Sylvia stared at her with a strange expression on her face, a deeply thoughtful one.
Then Sylvia said something Aster couldn't hear. And then Sylvia kissed her.
Back in the present, Aster dropped her cocktail glass. It shattered on the ground.
She kissed me.
Aster searched her mind like a feral hound for what came next.
But after that kiss was a blank slate. Aster tried to find the next memory on the docket, but time seemed to skip forward, and suddenly she was in the North.
In Denmark. Norway? She was watching the Borealis.
They were underwhelming. She was writing letters to Sylvia while Sylvia was in Romanian prison.
Sylvia was in prison because she was found kissing another woman.
No, not another woman.
She kissed me.
She kissed me, and then I left, and she threw herself in prison.
That makes no sense.
Why did I leave?
Why did she kiss me?
Her mind hurt so badly. It was like she’d had a geyser suppressed under a pot lid, and with the lid gone, hot, molten water was spilling out like a fire hose. She squatted to the ground, jaw clenching and unclenching as she massaged her temples.
Then, a booming voice. “Wallace, what is the meaning of this?”
“Richard, these are my coworkers, Selene and uh —”
“Your coworkers? Your brother is dead. I am in no mood to socialize.”
“Aster.” It was Sylvia’s voice now, high and concerned. “Aster, breathe, breathe. It’s okay.”
A new voice echoed. A woman’s, high and lilting. “Wallace, there you are. I was looking all over for — Sylvia?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”
“Sylvia Maroven?”
“Maroven? Yasmine, what kind of filth did you drag into my son’s funeral?”
“Calm down, Richard.”
“Aster, we’re leaving. Aster, deep breaths. Come on.”
Aster had the faint notion that she was being picked up. Hauled into Sylvia’s arms and transported on foot through the crowds, pushing noisily past the body, possibly toppling over several flower arrangements.
Everything was a blur until she heard the sound of a taxi rolling up on the pavement, and there was that other woman’s voice again, following them around like the plague. She still couldn’t see anything, but she could hear what sounded like a budding argument.
“Sylvia, we need to talk.”
“Not the time, ginger Dracula. Get the fuck out of my way.”
Yasmine seemed to ignore her comments completely. “I heard rumors about the spell you had on Ms. Death Incarnate, but it was hard to believe anyone could have tamed the beast herself. Seeing it with my own eyes I’m still not sure I believe it. Murder herself, a thrall.”
“She’s not a thrall.” Aster could feel the tension in Sylvia’s hands as she held her.
“Do you want me to put you into the ground right now, or later? Because it’s looking increasingly like right now,” Sylvia spat.
Aster felt a wave of nausea, and began to groan.
Sylvia paused, panicking. “Oh god, she’s going green.
Oh god. Aster, breathe. Breathe. Fuck. Fuck. ”
“Her brain is melting. Did you unwind her?”
“No. She’s — I don’t know what’s happening. But her brain is not melting. I didn’t unwind her. She’s just… recovering.”
“Recovering from your tampering, you mean,” Yasmine said. It didn’t sound judgmental, but she did punctuate it with a click of her tongue. “Do you want my help or would you like her to die in the backseat of some taxi? I’d pick quickly, before fate picks for you.”
Nausea consumed her, and Aster threw up onto the pavement. Sylvia sucked in a breath.
“Baby, it’s okay. It’s okay.” Sylvia began to sound desperate. Aster’s mind spun around baby, baby, baby. “How in the hell are you going to help?”
“I can give you time to unwind her properly.” Aster heard the car’s engine rev. “Consider it a favor that I’ll cash in at a later time.”
“No, no, no. I – I can’t unwind her. It might kill her.
Don’t you think I would have done it already if I thought I could do it safely?
Do you really think I keep her like this because I want to?
” Sylvia’s voice broke. “I only did this once – once – on purpose. Every time after has been – has been out of my control. And then it stacks and it stacks. And the more it stacks, the deeper the lies penetrate the mind, the harder it is to – to — I can’t stop it, Yasmine. ”
“Sylvia.” Yasmine’s voice dropped lower. “The shell can’t contain her anymore. You don’t have a choice in the matter. Either you watch her die, or you at least say you tried.”
A long drawn out silence filled the air. Aster’s mind buzzed like a construction site. Black flashes paraded behind her eyes. She felt herself heading for certain destruction. Fast and fiery, like a racecar who’d lost a wheel, and was now dragging its metal body across the pavement.
“Sylvia,” Aster mumbled into the air. “Please.”
Sylvia swallowed.
“Okay,” she said. “Yasmine, do it.”
***
Aster woke up in their Airbnb. All the shades were drawn, so it was completely dark. She could feel a warm compress laid over her forehead. Her entire body was beaded with sweat, sticking to the couch cushions. Her surroundings filtered in slowly, and then all at once.
She took in a sharp breath.
“Fuck,” she breathed. “I’m alive.”
The last thing she remembered was Yasmine and Sylvia’s conversation at the car.
She felt instant, deep-seated relief that she remembered that at all.
Because that meant she also remembered everything else.
Well, everything was incredibly relative — she had begun to understand that there were holes the size of craters in her mind, and they weren’t of her own making.
She had always assumed that it was time that eroded her memory — but now she couldn’t tell the difference between life’s natural degradation and the surgical scars Sylvia had inflicted on her over the years.
She could hardly believe that was the truth, that Sylvia had really cut her mind open and stitched her back, placing falsity after falsity, laying blankets over the wrinkles of her brain. Over and over. For who knows how long.
Aster expected to feel disgust at what Sylvia had made her into.
Raw and vitriolic. She expected to feel a rage that filled her chest to the point of flowing over.
But instead she just felt empty as a carcass.
Like her brain had been put in water, and was floating, floating.
She got the sensation that if it wasn’t for Yasmine’s magic, she’d be somewhere else right now. In the beyond.
But she wasn’t there yet. Instead, she was here, feeling close to that tether — but not quite there. Death’s doorstep, her hand on the knob, but the door remained firmly closed.
It reminded her of something one of the priests in Galicia said to her. One of the old men in robes that liked to lurk at the bakery and bother her with a life lesson. She’d thought him silly then, but she saw his point very clearly now.
His point about how, at the end of one’s life, we resent people not for what they did to us — but for the lacking nature of their explanations.
We resent the parent who neglected us without reason, yet we pity, and sometimes even adore, the parent who neglected us while he toiled for money for our food. While he pursued his passions at our expense. It is not the action, it is the reasoning behind it.
Aster did not fancy herself a psychologist. But she couldn’t resist the notion that what burned in her chest was not anger, but a curiosity — a need to know — as fierce as the sun. She gripped her fingers around the back of the couch, and began to lean forward.
I have to believe she didn’t do this on purpose.
This was Sylvia. This was the girl who learned how to Suggest by un-suggesting.
This was the woman who would break thralls out of their stupor because she hated to see someone innocent put under that kind of spell.
She isn’t her mother. She isn’t Catrina.
“Don’t get up. Please. Just stay on the couch.”
Sylvia’s voice gave her a jolt. She sounded incredibly exhausted, more exhausted than Aster had ever heard her, even when they’d been near-death in the woods outside Bucharest.
She disobeyed Sylvia’s instructions and leaned upward, cringing when her entire body ached in response. Still, she made it to a seated position just in time for Sylvia to round the couch, brows knitted in worry as she set down a tea cup by the table.
“I told you to stay still.”
“And I don’t know if listening to you is the best idea for me.”
Sylvia froze at that, at Aster’s tone.
“Aster, I —”
Aster shook her head. “Sylvia, I don’t want an apology right now.
I’m sure I deserve one. Knowing you, I potentially deserve thousands.
But you are terrible at them, and I am flirting much too comfortably with death, so please spare me my time on Earth for other, more useful things,” she finished, then grabbed Sylvia’s palm, tugging her toward her.
Sylvia, eyes wide, fell to the side of the couch, and just stared, and stared, like a frightened child. As if Aster was the thing that consumed her—and not the other way around.
And maybe that’s how Sylvia saw it. Maybe Aster had been the one terrorizing her, somehow. Maybe Sylvia had been protecting herself from something Aster couldn’t understand.
Maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybes were the problem here.
Aster did not know what words she was going to say until she was saying them, “I want you to tell me everything, from the beginning, right from the moment we met, until now. Everything you suppressed. Every reason why. And then I will decide if I want to kill you, or kiss you.”
Sylvia stilled. Blinked. A single tear streaked down from her eye.
“Releasing it all —” Sylvia paused. “It might kill you.”
Aster knew very well that could be true. Sylvia had told her what happened to that one thrall she released from Catrina’s control. How Sylvia had been trying everyday to forget it. Aster knew what could happen when you tampered too much.
And yet.
“I’d rather die knowing you,” Aster said, “Than die feeling like I never did.”