Page 19 of Of Blood and Banes
“I don’t want to keep practicing! I’m not good enough!”I shoot back.
“Here!” my brother barks and wraps his hand around mine. His hand is only slightly bigger, but he holds mine with a steady confidence while directing the pen across the page. When he finishes the signature, he releases my hand and I drop the pen to the table. With his guidance, the two words I’d continuously attempted to write are clear.
Katerina Blackwind.
“See?” He huffs. “Stop giving up so easily, and you might actually be good at something.”
I cross my childish arms over my chest and sink back into the chair.“You’re just better than me.”
“No—I’m older than you. I’ve been writing for four years longer than you have, so don’t compare yourself to me.”
I force myself to turn toward him. Fighting against some invisible barrier keeping me locked in place. I’m growing angrily desperate just to see his damn face?—
The memory shifts and fades, as if sand gusted away by invisible wind. Everything turns black again. But two pairs of panic-stricken breaths echo around me, along with the rising drum of my heartbeat.
“Don’t look, Kat,” my brother commands with a tight voice.
My hands are cold against my sweat drenched face. I open my eyes, and light leaks through the cracks of my fingers. A hand is gripping my shoulder, both comforting and alarming. I can’thelp it—I’m terrified yet still morbidly curious. I split my fingers apart slightly to peek.
“I said don’t look!” my brother snarls.
I flinch, terror creeping down my spine as I whimper,“What’s happening?”
“Nothing! It’ll be okay, don’t be scared. Just keep your eyes closed and stay here. Okay? Do you understand me? Just keep your eyes closed?—”
A glass-shattering scream rips through the unsettling silence, and I cry. A hand slaps over my mouth.
“Shh, keep it down, or she’ll hear you!” he whispers near my ear.
The scream tears through the room again. With my face buried in my hands, I curl inward and squeeze my eyes shut so hard an ache flares behind my eyelids.
“Stay here,” my brother whispers, and his warm hand over my mouth disappears before his footsteps hurry away from me.
Terrified of being left alone, I lift my face out of my hands and scan the room for him. Candlelight bathes my bedroom in dim, flickering light. I’m sitting on the floor, tucked back as far as I can be into the corner between my bed and dresser. I catch a glimpse of my brother’s back and his sandy blond hair as he slips out of my door into the hallway. I stare at the door as he shuts it behind him—the same one behind which I last saw my mother, when our house was burning down.
“Wait,”I whisper.“Please don’t leave me!”Crawling forward, I inch across my room toward the door. I pry it open a few inches and peek out into the hallway across to my mother’s room.
My mother sits on the floor against her bed, her arms crossed and fingers digging into her shoulders before scraping her nails down her bare arms, leaving angry red marks. Her eyes are round with a wildness and disheveled insanity I’d grown to know. But now, looking through my younger eyes, I don’t realizewhat it is. I see my mother, but I don’trecognizeher. It fills me with dread so heavy I’m struggling to pull in a decent breath into my lungs. A cold terror drips down my back as if it were water from melted ice.
My brother crouches a few steps away from our mother and rolls something into her direction, the itemclinking as it bumps over the floor. She snatches it, fumbling with it frantically before pressing it to her lips and swallowing.
My brother leans forward into her direction. “Mother…? Are…are you…are you alright?”
She snaps her attention up to him, her face contorting, and eyes almost bug-like. “I told you…I told you!”
My brother falls back off his heels and catches himself on his hands, crawling backward to reveal pools of blood around my mother.
Oh, Gods.
Now that I recognize it—it’severywhere. Crimson stains splash her pale throat and blonde hair, coating her nightgown in an unsettling burst of color. The red scrapes on her arms aren’t scratches—they’re blood.Strange twists and jerks animate her movements as she drags herself toward my brother, her head twitching and eyes rolling.
He holds out a hand, panic lacing his voice. “We’ll get you more, okay? We just need?—”
Willard, I want to whisper, but it won’t go past my lips. She needs medicine. And quick.
Black bleeds into the corners of my vision, threatening to overtake and drown out the memory. Everything dulls to a painful silence.
No, wait! No!
