The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [167]
“Anise, don’t do it!” Reseda commanded, aware that her voice could be firm and it could be cryptic, but rarely—if ever—was it menacing.
John Hardin took a sip from the chalice he was holding and then handed it to Peyton Messner. “I am one hundred and three years old,” he said quietly. “You know that, my dear.”
“And all of your extra time was at the expense of a twelve-year-old boy. I know that, too.”
He waved a single finger, correcting her. “All of our extra time,” he said, and then he motioned with his arm at the Messners, his wife, and Anise.
She looked at the group—the whole group—at the way their eyes were glazed and their skin was burning with anticipation. None of them would ever get any younger, that was a fact; but they all believed they could stall further aging for … years. The first tincture, built from the blood of Sawyer Dunmore, had given all of them who had gluttonously drunk from the chalice an extra three and a half or four decades. For someone like Clary Hardin, the best to be hoped for now would be to survive another three or four decades feeling seventy—but she was prepared to strike that bargain, especially since, like her husband, she was in fact well over one hundred years old. Meanwhile, someone like Celandine, the young state trooper? She would remain thirty, and what woman wouldn’t accept the energy and strength and firmness that came with being thirty for an extra third of a century?
“Where is Emily?” she asked.
Anise nodded toward the rear of the greenhouse. The woman was sitting in a wooden chair, slumped over, with Alexander standing behind her, his hands resting heavily on her shoulders. She stared at John, reading him, and saw in his mind what had occurred a few moments earlier: She saw Alexander throwing Emily to the ground and knocking her unconscious for a brief moment. The girls’ mother was still stunned. John looked away, but before he did Reseda thought she saw also what had happened to Michael Richmond last month: She hadn’t seen John’s entire recollection, but she saw that the old lawyer had used the very same knife on the psychiatrist that Anise was about to use to slice open a little girl’s arm.
“You can’t do this,” she said, speaking to everyone and to no one. She knew in her heart that they weren’t going to listen.
“Enough!” Anise told her. “This is not your decision. It’s ours.” And then she took the boline and scored the child’s arm from her elbow to her wrist, flaying the skin and allowing it to dangle over the cauldron as the blood spurted like a water fountain—Sage Messner, who had been helping to restrain the girl, dunked her mouth into the stream and swallowed a mouthful voraciously—before slowing to a steady rivulet.
“Blood meets seed!” Anise declared.
“And seed meets soul!” the herbalists raved.
And then as one they edged ever closer. The child was so drugged that she only looked down at her arm, a little curious as her blood trickled into the cauldron, but clearly she had felt very little pain. Still, Reseda rushed forward and wrestled the girl from Sage and Ginger’s grip, pushing the child’s thin arm into a V to try to stop the bleeding. But it was doing nothing, nothing at all. She needed a trauma dressing and stitches. Eventually, the child’s knees would buckle and she’d collapse onto the greenhouse floor. Still, Reseda wrapped her own arms around her, trying to protect her, as the circle