Chapter 17 Darling #2
A strong feeling flashed through the woman’s face. “The child isn’t human,” she said. “It’s in her blood.”
“It’s of no matter. She’ll be loved anyway.”
In the garden, Darling watched her younger self bargain for Galilee’s life. “We knew from the beginning, you see,” she admitted.
“You were conceived and birthed beyond humans. I thought she was running away from your father.”
“You saw what she wanted you to see,” Celestial said softly. “A desperate woman with a baby in her arms.”
Darling glanced at Celestial, the creek’s witness and guardian. “And what did you see?”
Celestial gazed at the memoryscape, not that she needed it. She could always remember every detail of her past, no matter
how young she’d been.
“The lady wasn’t afraid. She was . . . exhilarated. The branches had torn at her hair and at her shift, and she didn’t care.
She didn’t have a scratch on her skin. The creek got so cold.” She looked at Galilee. “She held you like a prize in her arms,
cousin.”
Darling nodded. “I worried that it was already too late. You were so quiet, too quiet.”
Sure enough, the baby was still and silent and scarlet in the woman’s arms. “Is she asleep?” younger Darling asked.
“After a fashion.” The woman looked down at the infant with a terrifying indifference. “I hated all that noise, so I made
her stop.”
Darling stretched out her arms a quarter of a century ago. “Give her to me, child. I just want to see if she’s hurt.”
A calculating edge slid into the woman’s eyes. “What will you give me in return?” she asked, and Darling froze.
Galilee drew in a breath as she watched. “She wanted to cut a deal.”
“Yes,” Darling replied. “And that was when I knew she was telling the truth about being unnatural, because she knew. She knew enough to step into the creek on Kincaid land, to find me, and then to offer a barter.”
The Devil glanced at Galilee with a question in his eyes, and Celestial answered for her cousin. “Kincaid barters are . . .
different,” she explained. “More power, more consequence. Lifelines can change, so we don’t make them easily.” She shot Galilee
a look with her last words, and Galilee rolled her eyes in response but left it at that.
“Ah,” said the Devil. “I see.”
Darling looked at Galilee, her little honeyed child. “The consequences of our barters can shift worlds,” she said. “But what could I do? There was a newborn who needed a mother who wouldn’t drown her, and I had a daughter at home who needed a child’s love to stitch her back together.”
“The woods gave us a gift,” Celestial said to Galilee. Then, conversationally: “Also, it really did look like she was going to kill you.”
In the memory, Darling’s face drew up cold. “What are you?” she asked the woman. “You can quit pretending now.”
A sharp smile cut through the woman’s face, and she stood up straight, still holding the baby a little too carelessly in her
arms. Her belly protruded under the shift, curved and full. “I’m just a mother, like you,” she said. “You don’t think my only
child is worth a bargain?”
Darling bared her teeth back and took a step to shield Celestial from view. “What do you want?”
The woman laughed. “I don’t want your human brat, rest assured.” She pushed her wet hair out of her face, and her skin was
a soft brown underneath. “I’m happy to give you this child, the blood of my blood, for a fair barter.”
“Name your price,” Darling hissed.
The woman’s smile dropped, but she answered immediately. “A memory, Darling Kincaid. I’ll give you my daughter for a memory.”
Collette squeezed Darling’s hand in the garden, horrified. “Ma, you never told me this!”
“I always said the cost was high.” Even though Darling knew how the scene would play out, it still hurt so much to watch it
happen: the shock coursing over her own face, the cruel amusement in the woman’s. Memories were what made Darling Kincaid. Her younger self took a horrified step back, then braced herself. The woods were watching and silent around
them.
“You came ready for blood, I see,” she said to the woman, who shrugged easily in response.
“I’m not asking for a life or a soul, or for all your hope or your joy, or for any of the many things you’d give me in exchange for this small creature I hold. I hardly think a memory is such a high price, if you consider.”
“What will you do with it?”
This time, the woman paused before answering, and there was something softer in her words. “I will try to understand, I think.”
Darling nodded and began to close her eyes, but the woman stopped her, snapping her long fingers loudly.
“No, no. I choose which memory you give.”
Darling clenched her fists. “Which do you want?”
The woman tilted her head, and her wet hair fell to one side. “There was a man once, yes? The one you loved, the one you couldn’t
keep because your land doesn’t allow them.” Color leached out of Darling’s face, and the woman nodded sympathetically. “Yes,
that’s the memory I’ll take. Everything of him, please.”
“I can give you others.” Darling’s voice was hoarse with pain, but the woman smiled, as if it was exactly what she’d expected.
“No, thank you. I’ll take those alone, and you’d better hurry. This child grows colder and colder in my arms.”
With a sobbed curse, Darling shut her eyes in the woods and wept in the creek as her memories fled from her head, their faint
tendrils floating over the water to the woman, who received them with rapt interest on her face. When it was done, Darling
cried out and doubled over, gasping in pain.
“Take them all!” she screamed. “You must take them all!”
The water around the woman calmed and softened, and she walked over to Darling, fish scurrying away from her every step. Celestial
watched from her rock, tears coursing down her small face.
“I think not,” the woman said. “How would you know what you lost if you didn’t remember that the loss had happened? That’s
hardly a sacrifice, Darling Kincaid, and you know that’s not how bargains work.”
Darling screamed and dropped to her knees, sobbing wildly.
The woman looked at her without pity. “Do you want this child or not?” she asked.
Celestial slid off her rock and waded over, then held out her little arms. “To me,” she said. “Give.”
The woman glanced at an inconsolable Darling, then shrugged again and handed the bloody newborn over to Celestial. “She’s
your problem now,” she said, and then she laughed. “What a glorious sin to have.”
Celestial cradled the baby carefully as she made her way to the bank of the creek, then wrapped her in a blanket. Both she
and the baby were smudged with dirt, wet with creek water.
In the garden, tears filled Galilee’s eyes. She reached out to the present Celestial, and her cousin grabbed her hand, holding
it tightly. Darling wiped her face as she watched her past self scream and sob in the creek as the woman watched, her arms
hanging oddly by her sides now that she wasn’t holding the baby.
“I must leave,” the woman said. “But I will leave you with a warning at no cost.” Darling paid her no attention, consumed
by her grief, but little Celestial nodded solemnly, and so the woman continued. “Tell her nothing of this, until the time
comes when you will have no choice. If you tell her any sooner, I’ll come back myself and break her neck.”
Little Celestial flinched, and the woman smiled.
“Keep her safe, as the bargain states. I don’t need to tell you what happens if you break a bargain made here, by your kind.”
She threw one last look at the weeping Darling, then shook her head and waded away, down and down the creek, until she was
a speck of white, and then until she was nothing and nowhere.
In the garden, no one spoke as they watched the rest of the memoryscape play out. Celestial cradled the baby, singing softly
to her, until Darling stopped sobbing and climbed out of the creek. She kissed Celestial and took the baby, wiping the blood
off her face. “Let’s go home,” she said, and little Celestial put her hand in her grandmother’s, and Darling Kincaid walked
out of the woods with a creek deal in her arms.
The memoryscape ended. Collette was crying quietly, as were most of the other Kincaids.
Darling folded her hands in her lap, even as she was reeling from the pain of memory and the lack of it.
“I took you home and gave you to Collette. We named you Galilee and you became a Kincaid, and all we have done since then is try to keep up our end of the bargain, to keep you safe.”
Galilee was staring at her mother. “That’s what Ma told me when I asked.”
Darling reached out and caressed Collette’s cheek. “Kincaids don’t lie.”
“I wish you had told us all of it,” Collette said, her eyes dark with grief. “You suffered so much, and the only person who
knew was Celestial?”
“I’m the only person who knows a lot of things,” Celestial quipped. “Don’t take it personally, Aunt Collette.”
Galilee let out a shaky breath, looking around the garden as if the memory would show itself again. “She never came back,
did she?”
Darling shook her head. “For that, I’m grateful.”
The Devil’s jaw was tight, even as his hand made soothing circles on Galilee’s back. “But you don’t know anything more than
what we saw? You don’t know what Galilee’s father was?”
Darling understood the question he was really asking, saw it mirrored in her granddaughter’s eyes.
“I’m so sorry,” she said to them. “I truly have no idea what Galilee is.”