A number of days has passed since my last entry, and I’ve been back home for close to a week as I write this. I left off in the middle of talking to Rosalyn, who refused to answer any more of my questions for now, and soon left after telling me her name so I could confirm her identity with my mother. I didn’t know how much I trusted what she said, and the idea that my grandmother wasn’t who I thought she was…well, it shook me, but I didn’t know if I could ever believe that. And if she was wrong or lying about that, how much weight could I give to the rest? Still, I needed to try and talk to my mother again anyway, so this at least gave me a stronger purpose in doing so.
Two days later I was off the ship, and the following day I was back at my mother’s house in Atlanta. I had not called ahead, and there was some delay at the front desk as messages were carried back and forth upstairs, but ultimately I was escorted up and taken to my mother, who sat on a sofa reading a tablet. The room was likely intended to be a library of sorts, but without any books it looked bare and gloomy. It suited the woman that occupied it.
My mother had lost some of her fake glow since I saw her last. She looked up at me, not unkindly, but with a weariness that I wasn’t used to. Setting down the tablet, she patted the sofa next to her.
“Come on and sit down. I’m glad you’re here.” She looked at the guard. “We’re fine. Leave us alone.” The man hesitated. “I said go.” Nodding silently, the man ducked back through the door and closed it behind him.
The whole exchange was strange, but I wanted to get some things out before the conversation got derailed again. “Look, I’m sorry how things were left b…” She raised her hand to silence me.
“No, that was my fault. I overreacted, my guilt has given me a thin skin and a sour disposition. Those things aren’t your fault.” She reached over and rubbed my back with the palm of her hand. “There’s things I need to tell you. I should have told you a long time ago, and I certainly need to tell you now that you’re involved yourself.”
I nodded, by I felt like I needed to get something out first. “I met Rosalyn. I went on a cruise, and it was her ship. She told me some things, said she was your friend.”
Her eyes widened as I spoke, and as I said ‘friend’, I watched her face crumple into tears. After a moment she regained her composure and nodded. “She was. She was my best friend. One of only a couple of people I could talk to about any of this before I met your father. And I’m not sure what all she told you, but it’s probably much of what I am going to say.”
I broke in. “She said something happened, I think something bad, but she never knew what exactly and said it was for you to tell me, not her.”
I could see relief lighten her features as she relaxed a bit. “That sounds like her. And she probably knows more than she’s letting on. Her family has always been good at getting information on everyone. But in any case, I need to get to telling you. We have limited time.”
I nodded, wanting to ask more questions, but remaining silent.
“First, this room is the only room that isn’t bugged, and that’s only because I’ve disabled the surveillance for the moment. They check it every couple of days, but I waited to do it until I knew you were here to see me again. As for who the ‘they’ is, you need to understand that these guards aren’t mine. They aren’t really guards at all, they’re jailers. It’s the same reason I don’t have the same house staff any more, the same reason I don’t travel any more. Things have gotten much more restrictive the past few months.”
“But how? And why?”
Her expression grew angry. “There are other interests in play here than just us or even the other families that are marked like we are. So I don’t know all of it. But I know who imprisoned me. It’s the woman you know as your grandmother. She’s not your grandmother. She’s actually your great-great grandmother, Emily Burke.”
“How is that possible?”
Her eyes lowered, and her voice grew thin, the anger burned down to a smoky residue around the edges of her words. “With my help. I…When this all happened to me, Emily was there for me. She was my great-grandmother, and yes, she had always seemed far younger than her age, which was around 90 when I was 10, but I knew women in our family aged well, and when they introduced me to Rosalyn and her family, to the strange luck we carry, it explained why. At first it had sounded magical. Stay young and healthy forever, or at least a really long time, and have wonderful luck to boot? I was young and stupid, and I tried to ignore the downsides they were talking to me about.”
She let out a sigh. “Then when the luck came on me, I watched a school bus catch fire with half a baseball team on it. They were screaming, clawing at the windows as their skin stuck and slid off against the glass. I can still smell it a lot of mornings when I wake up.” She gave a shudder. “I would like to say I went crazy, but that’s an excuse. Seeing that, knowing I was responsible…it broke me a little. It gave enough of a crack for Emily to crawl in.”
“Over the next couple of years, her and Rosalyn were my world, my support system. I had never known my grandmother, though she was still alive, and my mother had always been a hard, distant woman that…well, she was a vicious, spiteful bitch. That made it easier when Emily came to me worried, saying that my mother was trying to kill her.”
I frowned. “How would that even work?”
“Well, what I was told by Emily, which was only a partial truth, was that if two people with the mark focus their hatred and anger on another marked person on the same night as they go to sleep, they would overcome that person’s protection and the targeted person would fall. She claimed that my mother was working with Rosalyn’s mother to kill her, and that she had barely survived two different accidents within the past few days.”
“But why?”
She looked at me closely. “Because if you kill a member of your line in that way, it makes you much stronger and younger. It’s why I look like this. You can get some small benefit from directing it towards other people—I’ve heard Rosalyn’s family does that a lot. I haven’t had the heart to direct it since everything that happened with Emily, but I can see the evidence of what I did every day when I look in the mirror.” She looked away. “I…this isn’t easy talking about. Bear with me. And try not to hate me more than you have to.”
I didn’t know what to say, so I remained silent. Then she went on.
“Emily was so earnest, so upset, so convincing. It only took a short time for me to believe her. And of course, she had worked in the benefits to me if I helped, and I’d be lying if I said it didn’t make it all more palatable. As much as I hated hurting people at first, as the months had gone by, I had gotten more numb to it. And I loved being beautiful. I loved the way people treated me, looked at me, wanted to be me. I was stupid and selfish and vain, and that is just what she was looking for.”
She paused, rubbing her face and seeming to have to physically force herself to go on. “After it was done, she told me the truth. That my mother had been conspiring to kill a member of the family, but it hadn’t been Emily, it had been Emily’s daughter, my grandmother. And she had been doing it with Emily. Emily had used my mother to kill her own daughter, and then used me to kill my mother. When I asked her why, she laughed. She said it only worked when two of the same family teamed up against a third, and she wanted to live a long time. She’d figured out over the years that if you occasionally ate some of your family’s lives, you could get by just fine and have less risk to yourself.”
“By this point, I had married your father and I was carrying you and your brother. I knew only you would make it, and I had somewhat accepted it. I was looking forward to having you, to loving you. You and your daddy were the only reasons I didn’t try to kill myself right then.”
“I cut all ties with her, of course. I did the same with Rosalyn, out of shame. Years went by and you grew up. You were such a wonderful child, I loved you so much. But I always kept some distance from you too. As though my dirt, my sin, might rub off on you. I hated myself so much, but I loved the two of you with all my heart.”
“As you got older, I got more and more worried because I knew your time would be coming. I ultimately broke down and told your father everything. He had known parts before, but he didn’t know about what me and Emily had done. He could have left me for that, or hated me. Instead, he came up with a plan to get away. Take you and disappear so that hopefully Emily would never find us again.”
Her voice cracked. “Somehow she found out. I never knew how. But that’s why your father died, because she killed him. She came to me later, telling me to never try to run again, that this family belonged to her, and as long as we stayed in line, everything would be fine.”
I frowned. “But why didn’t you loving Daddy protect him? I thought it can’t touch the one you love the most?”
She looked up at me sadly. “Ah, baby, that’s true. But the one I loved the most was you.”
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Credits
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