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“Let’s go,” I tell Emmanuel.
My brother walks at my side, our shoes loud on the white-painted wooden stairs leading to the porch. The light goes out upstairs as the front door is opened. I don’t acknowledge the man standing there but stride into the house as if it were my own.
I take a look around at the space. Cozy, as I expected, with lamps lit in both living and dining rooms. Books are piled along a bay window with a half-moon cushioned seat that looks out over the backyard. Moonlight glints off the water of a swimming pool in the garden. It is a tidy, lived-in and loved house. A home.
“This way,” the man who opened the door says.
I follow him to where I assume the sisters will be waiting. For a moment, I wonder if they’ll try to ambush us. Kill us. End the curse. The thought, as dark as it is, makes me chuckle, and Emmanuel glances at me. I slow down to take in the prints hanging along the walls, family photos documenting lives lived–commemorating them, immortalizing them. They’re artfully done, mostly black and white with only the red of the Wildblood hair standing out. Five girls who look very much like their mother. Five children, four of whom are now women.
Cordelia is the youngest. Winter and Aurora are closer in age to Raven and Willow, but still distinctly younger. The oldest two I can’t tell apart just yet, but there’s one particular photograph that makes me stop. It’s the two of them, arms around each other. One is laughing; the other is pretending to. I lean in for a closer look.
There’s something dark in the eyes of the sister who is attempting to smile that her sister does not share. Something that seems to carry centuries within itself. This is the difference between them, and this, I know, is the Wildblood from my dream. The one whose face replaces Elizabeth’s at the end.
My throat tightens. I rest my hands against it, but when I realize what I’m doing, I draw them away. I almost push them into my pockets but stop when I remember what I found in the pocket of my dream self. I look at the girl again. All that hair, just like Elizabeth’s. It’ll be her. She’ll be the one to bear the mark.
I know it, and it’s suddenly hard to swallow.
“You’re good, Az. You can’t do anything bad. It’s not in you.”
Rébecca’s words play in my head. Was she trying to convince herself or me?
“You okay?” Emmanuel asks, rescuing me from the moment.
I draw a tight breath in and remember Grandmother’s words. “She was right about one thing,” I say, trying not to look at the girl in the photograph. “Abacus couldn’t do what I’m about to do. Not because he was a coward or weak. Because he was good.”
I miss my brother. Losing a twin, one I was so close to and especially given how it happened, it was like I lost a piece of myself. I still feel the empty space. I think I always will.
“He was born into the wrong family,” Emmanuel says.
Footsteps have us turning, and we watch Clara and Barrett, the parents of the sisters, enter. They stop when they see us, a sob breaking from the woman when she lays her eyes on me as if, out of the two of us, she knows it is me who is here to take her daughter. Not my brother.
Her husband draws her closer, his embrace practically holding her up.
I don’t speak but instead turn away from the couple and gesture to the man standing at the door that divides me from the sisters to open it. He does, and I straighten up to my full height and enter. Now is not the time for sentiment, for conscience. Neither has helped us in the past.
Now is the time to take what is owed.
6
AZRAEL
The sight that greets me is not what I expect.
There are five girls, almost identical in appearance.
But where they should be presented in white, these sisters are wearing black silk. Where their hair should be tied back in a neat, respectable style, it is loose and wild down their backs. Their faces, which should be scrubbed clean, are not; their eyes are accentuated dramatically with dark liner and their lips are painted a red that would rival the red of their hair.
I almost laugh, and that is what it takes to break the spell of whatever the fuck was happening out there. If I have any hope of saving Rébecca, of ensuring nothing happens to my brother, then I must follow the course laid out for me. This curse, the tragedy upon tragedy that marks the passing of time for my family… It has been proven over centuries that taking the chosen Wildblood girl and making the sacrifice is the only way to end it.
