The Girl from the Well

Another nod.

She says nothing for some time. I imagine that conversing with the dead is always difficult for the living.

“Did you kill those boys that were in the news today?”

I smile.

“Why are you doing this?” She knows the answer but seeks to hear it from my own mouth.

There is a long silence before I surprise even myself by speaking with a wistfulness I thought I had lost and could no longer feel.

“I loved my lord,” I say in a voice barely above a whisper. It is not an answer to her question, but it is something I have wanted to say out loud for so long, and the truth of those words comforts me.

“Did you kill all those people because of him?”

“I am a servant. I had a simple life. A happy one. I contented myself with loving my lord without hope of return. But he betrayed me to his retainer, and in that moment, I realized I had wasted my life loving an undeserving man. I died with regrets. But I could not leave.”

“Tark’s been sick for a while now… Was that your doing?” The accusation in Callie’s voice is apparent.

I turn to look at her then. “No,” I say, a little angry that she would presume to think this. “I would never hurt him.”

She is quiet again, acknowledging the truth in my words. “What can I do to help you?”

“There is nothing you can do. There is only me.”

Another drought of silence.

“I take from them,” I finally say again, and the strength of my anger surprises me again, “because they do not deserve life.”

“Why do you help us?”

I finally turn my head to look at her. I do not know what she sees looking back. Calliope Starr is a strange girl, to be willing to face me when anyone else would have feared. But I have often found that people are strange because they have something most others lack. “Because I do not wish to see you or Tarquin come to harm. Because I…”

I trail off, unsure of how to explain other than this: I have no definite reasons, except that I do not want him or his cousin to die. Instead, I look down at my hands.

Callie swallows. “But I don’t know what to do. All I know is that Tarquin was used in a ritual to bind some…some ghost, and the secrets to undoing that ritual lie in Osorezan. But I don’t know what to do. I never asked to be a part of this.”

“Do you believe he deserves life?”

The young woman is taken aback. “Of course!”

“Then we are not so different, after all.”

Another pause.

“I am sorry if I frighten you,” I say, puzzled by the sudden hesitancy in my voice. “I am not used to…this. I do not often commune with the living.”

Callie blinks at me, then unexpectedly starts to laugh. “I apologize,” she gasps. “It’s just…well, with us, it’s usually the other way around.”

She giggles again. I do not quite understand but attempt to smile. Perhaps it is not a smile that she sees in my face, for she immediately sobers up.

“There’s…there’s something else I want to know. Why couldn’t you protect Yoko from that other woman—the woman in black?”

She shrinks from the sudden shift in my expression, the black stealing into my eyes, the way my skin now seems to sag and bloat, and the hair that begins to once more curl across my face, shrouding my cheeks. It is not a pleasant sight to watch a young girl turn into one of the dead. I do this not because of any mistake on her part, but because I remember that I have unfinished business with the creature in black, the spirit that seeks to hurt them. And when I speak again, it is nothing more than a hiss as my true self looks back out at her.

“I am sorry. But Yoko is not my

territory. She is not my

hunt.”