Taste a Thousand Deaths (Marionettes of Myth #3)

Chapter Nine

I couldn't sleep.

I laid so awake that my body hurt with sleeplessness. Staring up at the ceiling burned my eyes. The sheets chafed my skin. The air was too thin. The van had pulled up hours ago to let the masses filter off to bed, and then it was quiet again.

The house groaned with the wind. The curtains shifted. My pulse throbbed in my ears.

Why couldn't I have sleep anymore?

I sat up. If I left the bed again, Yuuhi would wake up, and then he'd refuse to sleep as long as I didn't. I wanted him to at least be able to sleep, because I was ready to claw my own skin off if it meant I'd pass out, and I didn't want him to become anything like me.

I hooked my legs over the edge of the bed and retrieved Solara's photo album. It was heavier than I remembered. It was always heavier than I remembered. With my back to the headboard, I rested the book in my lap. The first light of day percolated the dome of clouds outside, just enough for me to flip the cover and see colors.

One of Solara's birthday presents had been the Polaroid camera in the late eighties. She had loved it to death—literally until it broke—and took pictures of everything. Snapshots of the family were paired with photos of the garden, the flowers and the apples and vegetables. Carmi with his birthday ice cream, Carmi running wild from a sugar rush, Carmi passed out on the couch after the inevitable sugar crash. Toivo when he had first purchased his truck, Toivo brandishing the keys with a wide grin, Rajy telling Toivo he still had curfew.

Me.

Me speed-reading a section of the Ramayana minutes before Rajy would test us. Me polishing my new, lighter sword. Me as I realized she had snuck up to steal a picture. Me climbing to the top of a tree. Me as the branch broke. Me on the ground, half crying and half laughing. Solara as she posed in front of the camera beside me as I half cried, half laughed on the ground, the curve of her lips and the arch of her eyebrows and the tilt of her head suggesting only, 'Yep, this is my sister, she just fell twenty-five feet from a tree only to burst out laughing.'

There were plenty of photos of the rest of the family, but there were too many of me. Too many of the two of us. I had never noticed before.

But I noticed now that I knew what I was looking for.

"It's inside you, Kali. We are meant to be magnets. I can never stop doing this to you—I can never, ever stop. And as soon as it starts growing inside you, it will hurt you, too. It will destroy us both."

I pulled out her letter from the inside pocket, unfolding the flaps of sketch paper that she must have taken from one of Lio's books. The pads of my fingertips grazed the indentation of her smooth, looping cursive.

'Kali,

'I love you, and I've always loved you, and I always will. I need you to remember this, because it seems I'm starting to forget. I'm writing this because I don't know what's happening, and I don't know if something worse will happen, and I don't know if I'll be able to tell you again if something does.

'I may be leaving soon. I'm breaking. I'm not myself. I'm drawn to something in you, and I can't quite explain what it is, but it frightens me and I've tried to distance myself from you, but I fear I've only made it worse. There's something in me too, Kali. Something dark, and it craves the light.