Page 35 of Curse of Immortality
“You felt you were too good for me and that I was below your station in life. But when you lie in bed at night, remember this moment with you on the ground kissingmyfeet.” Lifting her right foot, she kicked him away, leaving him to violently cough from the taste of ashes in his mouth.
Though James was in severe pain and had several broken ribs from being thrown around, he tried to crawl away to escape Maeve.
He didn’t get far before she once again continued to brutally destroy all his fine objects by throwing his body around the room and knocking over his expensive art and artifacts.
Deep inside Maeve, there was a voice that scolded her for inflicting harm upon another, but James had made her feel powerless and with each time she beat him using her abilities, it felt as though that power returned to her.
As Maeve approached James for the last time, he looked up at her with fear shining from his eyes.
“You’ve taken everything from me,” she said without blinking. “My innocence and virginity, my sister, and my aunt.” Her fingers dug into her palm at the mention of her aunt whose death she felt guilty for. “You took the happy girl I once was … and you killed her. In return, I will take something precious from you as well.”
James flinched at her words and though he tried to crawl backward, his body was far too weak and damaged.
“You took my bright future and now I’m taking yours. Never will you feel safe in your own house again. I can reach you anywhere and I promise you that I will. One day when you least expect it, I will show up and kill everyone you love.”
This was a promise Maeve didn’t intend to keep because she didn’t plan to live for much longer herself. But she had witnessed Rose living with constant fear and nightmares and knew it was a fate crueler than death.
James was crying now, but Maeve wasn’t done.
“And secondly, you have a problem with lying, don’t you, James?” She crouched down and leaned close to him looking into his frightened eyes. “I will give you the gift of eliminating that problem.”
Reaching for the silver knife that had been on the plate when she first walked in and now lay on the floor, Maeve held it to his face. “I’ll help you to never tell a lie again.”
It was a brutal moment when Maeve held James down and cut out his tongue.
Two maids had finally gathered the courage to come and investigate their master’s screams, but Maeve saw them and slammed the door to the study shut. They were too stunned and scared to run for help, and instead hid in the linen closet.
The excruciating pain of having his tongue cut out with a dull knife would haunt James for the rest of his life, but to Maeve, it seemed like justice well served.
Just as he had done to her in the forest, she left him sprawled on the floor in his blood. When the house was quiet, the maids came out from the closets where they hid to find their master lying unconscious with his tongue on the floor beside him. Despite losing a lot of blood and breaking a shoulder and three ribs that day, James survived. As Maeve had promised him, he never told another lie. Without his tongue, there wasn’t much left to say. Her second promise, however, was something that even if she had returned, she wouldn't have been able to live up to. The morbid fear that Maeve would return just as she had promised him drove James mad. Elizabeth’s family called off the wedding and with his silver tongue gone and several of his teeth missing, no other young women were eager to take her place. Not even two years after Maeve’s attack, James took his own life leaving behind no wife or children.
When Maeve walked away from the beautiful estate that she had once dreamed would be her home, she went straight for the cliffs behind the manor that overlooked the sea.
A gust of wind pulled her hair back as she reached the end of the cliff where few were brave enough to stand. Calling out, she yelled for Zosia to come and talk to her again.
“Why did you let the humans kill Rose? You could have extinguished the fire with rain or sent lightning to strike down all the humans hurting my aunt. Why do you let innocent Earthens get murdered? Why do you tolerate humans treating us this way?”
When nothing happened, Maeve turned to the nearby tree that had grown diagonally to hang out over the cliff side. Most of its orange leaves had been blown away and some lay by its roots on the ground, leaving the tree’s gray branches naked. In aggressive movements, Maeve kicked at the leaves on the ground as if she could get them to rise from the ground to form a female shape like they had the last time.
“Zosia, come and talk to me,” she demanded with frustration and kept looking around.
The silence felt like yet another rejection and added to Maeve’s feeling of loss and despair.
“You chose me because I’m strong enough to kill.” Throwing her hands up, Maeve shouted. “Did you see me kill all those people in town? It wouldn’t have happened if you had protected Rose. Why do you look on when humans persecute us Earthens? You called usyoursand yet you donothingto help us.” She shouted into the wind with a voice hoarse from yelling.
When Maeve stopped shouting it left only the sound of a few birds chirping in the distance and the sound of waves crashing against the rocks at the bottom of the cliff.
“Zosia!” she screamed from the bottom of her lungs, but still received nothing back.
Ever since Maeve came to live with Rose, she had learned about the greatness and goodness of Zosia, but now all those stories felt rotten and untrue.
“You should have protected Rose!” she accused and spun around searching for any type of sign that Zosia was listening. “You want me to go and kill for you, but I won’t,” Maeve yelled into the wind.
Refusing to do Zosia’s bidding was the only leverage Maeve could think of to get her to come and talk to her, but it still had no effect. Drying away tears with the back of her hands, Maeve felt Zosia’s rejection as yet another major betrayal and raged, “You’re no better than James. You both just wanted to use me to your advantage. He pushed me to do unspeakable things. I would have never killed all those people if not for him trying to kill me and then executing Rose… and you… you could have stopped it all, but you didn’t.” A sob burst from Maeve’s lungs as she stumbled a few steps to support herself against the tree.
There was too much noise and chaos in her mind. So much had happened in such a short time, and it wasn’t until now when she stood still that the pain finally caught up to her. Collapsing against the crooked tree, Maeve closed her eyes and tried to tune out the screams of the people she had burned that echoed in her mind. Falling to her knees, she pressed her forehead against the tree and sobbed. The memories came flashing back showing her the look of disappointment in Althea’s eyes. She remembered how scared the townspeople had been in their last moments of life, and no matter how hard Maeve tried to forget it, her mind kept showing her the faces of the children she had killed. There hadn’t been much thought behind it when she’d burned a young girl and her mother, other than the fact she wanted everyone else to feel the pain she felt. But now, the young child’s fearful eyes burned into Maeve’s mind, and she couldn’t help but recognize the same fear in the girl’s eyes that she herself had felt when she’d seen Ellen be executed. Only this time, Maeve had been the executioner who had taken everything from the little girl. A loud sob of regret escaped Maeve as she remembered seeing the young girl in the arms of her mother attempting to escape the town. They had been running to the forest to escape Maeve, but they never made it very far. Shaking her head, Maeve cried and wished she hadn’t followed the mother into the forest and hunted them down to burn them both alive. In that moment, it had seemed righteous, but now all she could hear were the screams of the little girl and her mother, and it burned into Maeve’s agony and made her hate herself all the more.
She didn’t want to be evil but the more she thought about it, she remembered how the same humans she’d killed had burned her aunt and celebrated her death. Even the little girl who was the essence of innocence and who reminded her of herself when Ellen died, would have one day grown up to be a woman that hurt others just as all humans did.
