The Night Strangers - Chris Bohjalian [168]
“You’re killing her,” she said to them. “You’re killing a child.”
“Give her back to us, Reseda,” John demanded. “You know you can’t stop us. We’re going to finish this. Besides,” he wavered, his voice softening, “you’re one of us. You’re a part of us. You know that, too.”
They had, she realized, become animals. They were selfish, insatiable, violent animals. They needed blood, and they needed enough for all of them. She wasn’t going to be able to reason with them. Nevertheless, she said, “I’m not one of you. I was once. But I’m not part of this.”
“Reseda, really. The child is losing blood fast and it’s being wasted. Wasted! You’re a New Englander, how can you abide that? Besides: The more she loses now, the less she’ll have when we’re finished and the less chance she’ll have of—to use a term you’re fond of—going home.”
Anise was still holding the dagger, and so Reseda looked around for another weapon, her eyes scanning the tables and the floor of the greenhouse. On a wooden bench in the corner near her were a pair of one-handed garden clippers. There were shears just like them, it seemed, on most of the tables. The safety was open, which meant the clippers were splayed into a slender Y, ready to harvest herbs or trim dying leaves. With one thrust she could slam them into either John’s or Anise’s eyes, certainly blinding them and—if she drove the blades hard enough into the brain—in all likelihood killing them. The problem, of course, was that there were far more herbalists around her than only Anise and John. They would swarm upon her the moment she attacked either of their leaders, and she knew well how ruthless they could be.
Besides, she wasn’t built that way; she didn’t believe that she was capable of lodging the steel blades of a pair of garden shears in anyone’s eyes. Not even to protect a child. And so instead she did the only thing she thought she could do. “I’m a twin, too,” she reminded them.
“Yes, of course, you are. But you are also rather—and you’ll forgive me if this sounds ageist—old for our purposes,” John told her, his voice knowing and smug. “The tincture demands the blood of a prepubescent twin.”
“And you have some,” she went on, nodding at the cauldron. “You already have a lot. I know the recipe. Use what you’ve harvested from the child and then supplement her blood with mine.”
John turned toward Anise, his eyebrows raised.
“We’ll need a good amount, Reseda,” Anise said, a crooked smile on her face. Reseda knew that Anise did not especially like her, but she was unprepared for how happy the woman was to augment the tincture with her blood.
“I understand.”
Anise nodded and turned to Clary. “Put a compress on the child’s arm,” she said. “We have plenty of her blood already.”
Only after Reseda had watched Clary Hardin press a white hand towel against the child’s forearm for a long, quiet minute did she extend her own arm over the cauldron and allow them to roll up her sleeve and gouge a deep trench into the veins there. Anise made the incision, roughly and inexpertly, but Reseda didn’t watch. She focused instead on the moonstone at the tip of the boline handle. The cut hurt every bit as much as she’d expected.
There they are. There are the playmates your wondrous daughter deserves, standing perhaps a dozen yards apart, separated by a cauldron, each in the arms of those self-absorbed breathers. You stand at the entrance of the greenhouse as Reseda, looking uncharacteristically shaky, stares at something far away. Her arm is held over that massive black kettle, and the blood drips like water from a rusted-out rain gutter. They have not noticed you yet because they are focused only on Reseda and the girls, and they are in the midst of a euphoric chant about seeds and souls.
And so you charge, running across the greenhouse, oblivious to anyone and anything but the idea that Ashley will no longer be alone. But before you have reached the first of the girls, there is their mother, up and before you and throwing herself into your arms.
“My God, Chip!