Chapter 27
Clara
ANMARA
I don’t even know how long I’ve stayed in Blake’s arms while we were crying, sitting on the floor. The tears became increasingly rare, draining me of all the energy the breakfast had given me. My cheeks are now dry, leaving a salty layer behind. The memory of long-spilled tears.
The only thing that took me out of the state I was in was Lucas. Even though they, most probably, also found a body, he just asked me the location I was in, saying they’ll get here soon.
“Are you ok?” I ask Blake, sniffling in this shirt.
“I don’t know how to feel, Anmara,” he responds with his voice raw from crying. “How are you?”
“Is there a point in saying it?” I look deep into his eyes, and I watch him shake his head.
He kisses my forehead, and I put my head back to his chest. The place I stayed for what seemed to be an eternity.
It is calming, I’m not gonna lie, but I still want to feel another one’s warmth in this moment. I would’ve liked to find this image in Lucas’s company, however odd these thoughts can seem. He would’ve stopped my tears and would’ve moved more than a finger.
But Blake… seems as lost as I am.
From the moment she was brought home from the hospital, Blake was her favourite. The age difference was big, but the attraction between the two of them was even bigger.
Lucas was always jealous when he wanted to play with his little sister, and Blake was also in the room, she didn’t even seem to bother with his presence.
Blake suffered the most after her presumed death. At least, that is what I think. We were close in that period after the burial. It took him one year to open up to the people around him.
He talked to me the most. He used to speak freely, telling me everything that went through his mind, how much he missed his little sister.
I remember that when my grandma took me to visit him, and he was sad, I just hugged him, wanting to calm him down in silence. His grandparents even came to us pretty often because it was too quiet, and they were sadly smiling at me when they opened the door and caught us embracing each other.
When my grandma died, I didn’t have another shoulder to cry on.
I always thought about how it was for Blake to appear on my doorstep and hold me tight to his chest, but it never happened.
I had to handle her loss all by myself. As a result, my connection with Anora deepened.
She even took control of my body a couple of times.
Especially when I started stealing more.
I got a bit lost in my memories, which seemed more beautiful than what was happening in the present, and I start to feel my eyes getting wet again.
At some point, I didn’t even know who cried harder. It affected us both, even though I only saw her a couple of times. Her image remained imprinted in my head, however mature her body looks now.
If I process how she ended up like this, I can’t find a logical explanation.
The cops from back then said they identified the bodies of the three of them through the remaining bones found in the car that was destroyed by the explosion.
Now, I can feel that something more dangerous is standing in the way of the truth.
I have a feeling that the roots of the problem are way deeper than we could imagine, that it existed way before we were born.
I don’t know these things, but I learned in my 25 years of walking on this earth that my intuition has always been my best friend.
I could trust it in any situation, even in the ones that seem like fantasies from faraway worlds.
This makes the situation in front of us weirder because it makes no sense what is going on and why the girl in front of us, who was presumed dead ten years ago, was alive all this time. And now she has been sacrificed for who the hell knows what experiment or demonic ritual.
Or both, by the looks of it.
What kind of crazy people could do these things? Were their parents also alive? Could they be connected to this fucked-up operation?
I can only think of one person who perfectly fits that description: Cathal.
I mean, seriously, what were the chances that when Lucas and Paul arrived at the orphanage, he would be there and take them?
Please, let me do the honours when we find him.
With great pleasure. I’ll bring myself a massive mental popcorn bag and watch the show. Somebody needs to be punished for this.
“I don’t get who they could find to be more interesting than….” I hear Paul’s voice while he opens the door, but he stops abruptly, and I can hear how he swallows his words.
We both look at the two of them, slowly moving away from each other.
“No, no, no, this can’t be possible,” Lucas’s voice says.
It is going on trails I never heard from him, having so many tonalities and inflections in his voice in a way I never had.
He closes the distance between him and Clara and pushes her hair aside to take a look at her face. I then hear him sniffling. He manages to take out the nails from her hands and legs, a thing we weren’t capable of doing. I just couldn’t get closer to her without bursting into tears again.
He takes her down and sits her against the wall. Two of his fingers go to her neck through her hair, hoping to find something, and then he shudders abruptly.
“Oh my God!” he says, starting to shake her body. “Wake up, Clara!”
I get up and end up next to Lucas in an instant. A ray of hope rises in the dark labyrinth, buried way too deep.
As we saw her, we didn’t even think about checking her pulse. She looked dead. She didn’t seem like she was breathing. We were such idiots, with our brains too fried from what we’ve seen in front of our eyes.
Clara’s body, now 18 years old, isn’t moving at all. When Lucas turns his gaze to mine, I see in his tearful eyes a profound confusion, but also hope.
He takes her body into his arms and runs out the door without saying another word. We follow him quietly, thinking about how stupid we could’ve been that we didn’t check her pulse and let her hang there while we poured our hearts out.
?
A bird that seemed lost?
It is as clear as day that she means Clara. That’s logical, but I don’t get her relation to Cathal. Or Bianca. She surely knows Paul’s story, but I don’t get how little Clara ended up a tortured teenager, especially in the haunted place she’d been held.
The perfect sacrifice?
I don’t see how it’s perfect when no one was actually sacrificed. Yes, it looked like a sacrifice, but it makes no sense.
No, more than that.
Maybe she means the cadaver Lucas and Paul found? I make a mental note to ask them after I process all these poem lines.
The second-to-last part scares me the most.
A successful experiment.
I think about so many possible options that I don’t even know what should be true and what's only in my mind.
All I know is that we need to find Bianca’s location before her actions become more disastrous.
She knew we would find Clara. She strategically put her in the first building we would be looking in. She knew me too well. She was aware that I always started solving a problem from its origin.
The only logical possibility was that she injected Clara with some drug made by her. But, I don’t know what to fucking expect from that crazy woman and Cathal, especially after the shit…
“I’m also waiting for something to happen, but I think you need to know what we found out,” Paul says, sniffling his nose in a tissue and getting me out of my thoughts.
We used the tunnel to get to the hotel so as not to attract too much attention. The glares received until the tunnel entrance were enough. I didn’t need the stupid questions asked by the reception staff. Especially not Raymond. That man was too big an accomplice, and not just for Marshall.
Now we are all sitting on chairs surrounding the bed in my room from my apartment, in which Clara has been put.
That is after we bandaged all of her wounds.
I raise my gaze to Paul, as to say he can talk and get over with it.
At least, with that piece of information, we can complete this fucking puzzle.
“Shoot. It can’t get any worse than this anyway,” I tell him.
“Cathal is dead,” Paul says in one breath.
He looks so peaceful after he tells us, like his brain wasn’t able to contain it for much longer. It’s seen in the way he was agitatedly playing with his fingers.
It takes me a couple of seconds to process, fluttering my eyelashes.
“Wait, what?” I ask, looking at him and Lucas. “What do you mean, Cathal is dead?”
“Dead, with half of his brain taken out, no eyes, the kind of dead man you only see in the movies!” Paul screams.
I exchange gazes with Blake, and none of us seems to understand this.
Pff, someone was faster. It even looks like they had lots of fun. I’m jealous that I didn’t think of that. The brain seems a…
Anora, fuck off!
Never.
“Well, for whom does Bianca work then? What is her deal with Clara?” I ask, extremely confused. “The perfect sacrifice didn’t refer to her, but Cathal,” I manage to put some information that went through my mind piece by piece.
And I thought I had the complete puzzle… I now have to erase it all with an abrasive sponge and start over.
“I don’t have the slightest clue…” Lucas starts by saying, but he can’t continue.
Clara raises at 90 degrees and looks at each of us.
Her eyes get bigger and bigger, the tears already starting to go down her pale cheeks, until she stops at me and keeps my gaze without even blinking.
I’m too surprised to look away, so I stare into her deep black eyes, which seem to read beyond my face. A lot deeper. And that isn’t what really scared me, but the word her vocal cords bring to our ears.
“Anora,” she says, closing her eyes and falling back on the bed.