emanating from the south side-the side where the large communal greenhouse was built-and so she started running across the yard, the rain-soaked grass saturating her canvas sneakers.
When she got to the greenhouse, she saw a window was venting steam from Clary’s cauldron, a massive wrought-iron pot that Reseda always viewed as a melodramatic affectation. But Clary loved it. A blacksmith had made it for the woman perhaps a decade ago, and she had an almost fetishistic attachment to it. Reseda gathered herself, unsure what she would say or do, and pushed open the glass door. She saw no sign of the captain, but there were the herbalists gathered in their robes, while one of the twins was teetering on her wobbly legs before the cauldron. They had pulled up the sleeve of her pajama shirt and were holding her naked arm above the kettle. Anise had the blade of the group’s ancient boline poised at the crux of the girl’s elbow.
“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 of herbalists closed in upon the two of them.
“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.
T here 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!” she wails. “Stop them! They’re going to kill them!”
For an instant, you recall something. Them. Garnet. Hallie. They’re going to kill your children. The instant passes, because they’re not your children. Your child is Ashley. But that still doesn’t give them or you the right to kill… anyone. The whole notion has left you muddled, confused, and you find yourself staring at the knife as if you have no idea how it got into your hands. And just as you are starting to regain a modicum of your focus and your anger smothers your momentary befuddlement, the men in the robes-some, it seems, very old yet strangely strong-have a hold of your arms and the knife, and the greenhouse is filled with their admonishments to drop it, to
