beyond the rift } { who is the lamb and who is the knife

[thebeatofherheart]

“Mary, Mary quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells and cockle shells, and pretty maids all in a row.”

Marian Spencer likes a slow burn and a long kill. That’s one of the benefits of being a Charun—she can draw out the deaths as long as she likes, so long as the death is there in the end. She spends a hundred years thinking, learning, and trying to become better than she is, working to craft her masterpiece. She wants to be remembered for the brilliance, for the simplicity of it all.

She wanders from city to city, town to town (but not Chicago, never Chicago) making small kills here and there, but they were all just practice. She is waiting for the moment when she’ll find the circumstances will be just right,

She locks eyes With Mason Connor across a subway platform in the middle of a crowded New York station, and she knows within an instant that he’s it. He’ll be her grand masterpiece, and she loves him more than she’s ever loved anything before.

Maybe one day he’ll love her too.

They’re married six months after they meet, in Saint Peter’s cathedral, because that’s what Marian wants. She wears a long white dress, and smiles politely at all his friends, quietly plotting the ways she’s going to take them away from him. She wants everything that he can give her, is willing to drain him of everything he has, because the more he gives to her, the less he’ll have for himself.

Eventually, he’ll have nothing, and she’ll have the thing she wants the most.

***

“Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall. Humpty Dumpty had a great fall. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men couldn’t put Humpty together again.”

Things come to a head on their one year wedding anniversary. It all had to end sometime and while she had hoped to have had longer, none of that matters now. Mason Connor takes a swan dive off the top of his corporate building, body lying broken on top of a car that happens to be parked on the street. His grieving wife is left standing there, claiming she tried to talk him down. She gets away clean, and when she returns to her apartment, she practically throws a party in her honor.

Two weeks later, she finds out she’s pregnant.

The day Ava is born is the first time that Marian has seen her mother in fifty years, and she doesn’t want to see her. In fact, the last person she wants near her daughter is Elizabeth Spencer, but all Elizabeth has to do is tell the hospital that she’s the grandmother, and she walks right in. Two hundred fifty years-old, and one of the most fearsome Glaysa-Lebolas demons of her generation, no one messed with her.

Not even her own daughter.

“No!” She clutches the bundle to her chest as she meets Elizabeth’s eyes. Her mother’s death is the one she most wants to see, yet she never can. All she can do is set her jaw and for once, out stubborn her mother. Ava has now become the thing she loves the most, the trophy of her perfect kill, and she isn’t going to let her mother rob her of this. “You’re not taking my baby from me.”

“This isn’t a toy, Marian. This is a little girl. This is a life.” Elizabeth knows better than most that life isn’t something Marian knows the value of. She only treasures it when it ends.

“I can take care of her. I’ll do a better job with her than you did with me.” The words get spat back at her, violent and angry. She keeps the bundle pressed to her chest, where she can feel the tiny heartbeat, carefully pounding in time with hers. This is her child. She is her mother. “I’ll raise her the right way. You’ll see.”

Elizabeth could have used her Calling to get her way. She could have slammed her daughter with so many emotions that she wouldn’t have had a choice but to hand over the baby. But she doesn’t. Instead, she takes a step back, and shakes her head.

“If that’s the way you want to do this, fine. Raise her all you want. But a baby is not a toy, Marian. Just remember that.”

***

“Who saw him die? I, said the fly. With my little eye, I saw him die.”

Ava Lee Connor has never met her father. She’s only asked about him once. She’s seven and has to make a family tree project for school and doesn’t know who to fill into the father spot. Or the grandparent spots for that matter. The only family Ava has ever known has been her mother, and Marian tells her just that. Her family tree is small, but it’s hers and it loves her.

No matter what.

She sees her first kill when she’s ten. Marian believes that her daughter is going to be a Charun, like her, and if she is, she needs to learn early. She needs to be prepared to do what it takes for her Calling, because her Calling is not going to forgive. It’s not going to stop. It’s going to be a part of her whether she wants it to be or not. It’s probably the one useful piece of advice Marian ever gave her, even if she shouldn’t have done it in such a brutal way.

The target is a man in his thirties, a titan of industry. Normally Marian would go for a longer kill, but she needs Ava to see, to understand, so it ends in a quick and dirty mugging, where the man is shot twice in the chest over a wallet and a watch. Marian stands at the mouth of the alley with Ava, hands on her shoulders, holding her in place so she can’t run. Ava doesn’t even know if she could run, all of ten years-old and meeting Death for the first time, hearing the gasps of the man, as blood red spilled down the front of the dress shirt.

He can see them. Ava knows he can. He can’t do anything but lie there and Marian holds her daughter in place, whispering encouraging words and trying to make her see that this is a gift. This is the gift their family can offer.

To her credit, Ava doesn’t cry. She has nightmares for weeks, seeing the man’s face and the way it haunts her, but she doesn’t cry out or seek comfort from her mother. Even at ten years-old, she knows that her mother wouldn’t understand.

She also calls the police.

They catch the mugger by the end of the week.

***

“The Queen of Hearts, she made some tarts, all on a summers day. The Knave of hearts he stole the tarts, and carried them clean away.”

Her mother always prepared her for her Calling in the practical way, preparing her for when she would be a Charun and need to be able to kill without remorse, even if she never could manage to understand how. That man in the alley wasn’t the last death she saw before she turned sixteen, and she still felt the guilt of each one. Logically, she knows that her mother would have killed them even if she wasn’t in the picture, but she can’t help but think that these shows she put on were solely for her, trying to convince her that Death was part of their family now.

What Marian doesn’t prepare her for is the transformation itself. The pain that wracks through her is unbelievable, crawling up through her and making her want to scream until the wings burst from her back, snow white like a dove’s. When that happens, her mother tells her she’s beautiful, that she’s just like her now.

Once the pain subsides, she knows how wrong her mother is. Marian has always been a chess player, thinking several steps ahead to find the way the kill would provide the most satisfaction. However, she never anticipates that her daughter could be anything but a Charun.

Instead, Ava has these emotions flooding her senses, drowning her every time she opens her eyes. Her nightmares of death are more intense, stronger than ever before, and her mother keeps waiting for her first target, waiting for her to tell her that she and Death have finally made that connection.

It takes Marian putting her in that alley again for everything to break, only this time, she can feel the dying woman’s pain, her fear. It calls to part of her like a drug and her Calling rises out of her like a monster, anger and fear and desperation all in one go, but she doesn’t turn it on the unfortunate victim in front of her. She turns it on her mother.

“Stop!”

Her emotions come to a narrow focus, honing in on her mother like a laser. There’s a moment of shock at first, Marian not entirely understanding what’s happening, then recognizing it for what it is. Her daughter isn’t a Charun. She’s a Glaysa-Lebolas, just like her grandmother.

That is the moment when Marian stops loving her more than she’s ever loved anything else.

***

“Wednesday’s child is full of woe, Thursday’s child has far to go.”

Elizabeth Spencer is toted as one of the most powerful demons of her generation for a reason. It isn’t because she’s perfect, because she’s never killed or because she has an unfathomable sense of control right from the beginning, but because she understands her Calling far better than anyone ever should. Some people simply have the emotional control to learn balance, and Elizabeth is one of those people.

She’s not a perfect mother. She certainly managed to screw the pooch with her daughter, but when Marian unceremoniously dumps Ava at a police station in Chicago and Elizabeth receives the phone call to come get her, she does what she has to do. She comes, picks her up, and brings her home.

At first, Ava avoids the other woman, her mother’s horror stories echoing through her mind at every mention of the fact that she loves her grandmother, but when she nearly takes someone’s head off at school, nearly loses it because of her Calling and the fact that teenage emotions in high school are like another hit of that drug, pulling her deeper and deeper into a darkness she doesn’t want to face, she knows she needs Elizabeth’s help.

She needs control.

“You listen to me, Ava Lee Connor. This isn’t like a light switch you can flip on and off. This is all day, every day to make sure that you don’t snap and kill someone. I can’t even guarantee that you won’t. But I can help you try.”

It’s not much of a promise. In fact, it’s not one. But it’s something entirely different. It’s hope that she and Death won’t have to be friends, that she won’t have to welcome him to her the way her mother insisted she should.

She doesn’t say anything at first, but eventually she nods. Whatever it is, it’s at least something.

“Where do we start?”



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