“No more,” I cried into the void.
I couldn’t take any more of the memories. I couldn’t take another moment of heartache, but this wasn’t a memory or a dream or a hallucination. I felt another presence in the chasm with me, prickling the back of my neck.
A crunching wet sound followed, like fingernails scraping the side of the rock wall.
“You are the vessel,” a voice behind me whispered.
I twisted around, staring into the dark. My mind stuttered as a curtain of gray static threatened to overtake my consciousness.
“You are the vessel.” The voice came from the right this time. I spun around, frantic to see what was down here with me.
“Please, stop,” I cried. I felt the light leaving me and the darkness taking hold, stealing away all hope.
“You are the vessel.” Like a bullet, the words ricocheted around my brain, until they settled deep inside me.
Images flashed in the darkness. The memory of Katia cutting into my mother’s palm—a vessel at last. But it wasn’t my mother’s blood she was referring to. It was mine, inside her womb.
“You are the vessel.”
The way I healed when Katia cut into me—my knee at the field—my slit throat—the cut at the gas station—and how I healed the deer.
“You are the vessel.”
All of the overwhelming feelings, the intrusive memories, had nothing to do with being a conduit. Teresa told me I wasn’t like her. I’d never been a conduit.
“You are the vessel.”
Katia had been there since I met her, maybe even before I was born, lurking in my bloodstream. This is how I was tied to Marie. Katia killed her to give me life.
I unwrapped my leg from the vine and let myself fall into the depths, hoping by some miracle, I would die.
41
FEMUR
I DREAMED I SWAM in the salty sea. Sunlight was streaming through the surface, but I felt no need to come up for air. My lungs didn’t need air anymore. Joyfully, I did a somersault, then dove down, plunging farther into the abyss.
Below me, my mother drifted in the deep blue with the silk ribbon dancing around her, like the blackest of ink. She’d never looked more beautiful. Her chestnut hair billowed in front of her face, momentarily obscuring my view, and suddenly everything changed. Every good feeling turned to dread—flooding my mind, suffocating my senses.
The black silk ribbon was squeezing her throat, pinning her to the bottom of the ocean floor— belly bloated, mouth open, dead eyes, her once-beautiful hair knotted like tangled seaweed. A living reef of blood and flesh and bones.
I turned away, kicking furiously toward the surface, but something tugged at me, pulled me down.
I glanced back. My dead mother shot toward me like a comet—arms stretched out, fingers reaching. In a panic, I pushed forward, but that feeling of being held in place seized me again. One end of the black silk ribbon snaked out from her neck and wrapped around my wrist, holding me to her like a tether. I tried to break free, but the harder I fought, the tighter it wound. I turned back and, to my horror, found that it wasn’t my mother’s face at all. It was my own, staring back at me with a rictus smile.
? ? ?
I came to, lying at the bottom of the crevice. There was no water, but I was fighting to fill my lungs with air. Something hard and jagged protruded from my chest.
I felt my broken body, every breath jolting me with searing pain. With each movement, a strange rattling sound echoed from the brittle rubble beneath me.
I cried out my mother’s name, though I knew she was probably dead. She had to be. She’d served her purpose. Katia had no use for her anymore.
I wanted to lie there and wait for Katia to come for me, but then I thought of Rhys. Dane could still bring my brother to safety. I had to get out of the chasm.
Digging through my pockets, searching for anything that might help, I discovered a match I’d swiped from Spencer’s hidden chapel.
With trembling hands I reached out and struck it against the limestone wall—phosphorous flared in my nostrils. Snatching a tattered piece of cloth from the ground, I wrapped it around a stick, and set the match to it. The torch illuminated a horrific scene.
The walls of the chasm were stained with old blood and viscera—beneath me, a bed of discarded bones. Even the torch I held wasn’t a stick—it was one of their bones; the cloth, one of their wreathing gowns.
These were the Larkin girls who came before me. The unchosen. They never made it to the outside world, because Katia had killed every single one of them and thrown them into the chasm.
Marie fought to find me, to show me the truth. She was trying to warn me about Katia. I wouldn’t let her death be in vain.
There was only one way out. I propped the torch against the side of the crevice and piled up the bones. Crawling on top of my ancestors, I stretched out my hand to Marie’s skeleton, and climbed her body.