Queen Of Blood

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

The spoon slipped from her fingers and landed with a small thump on the little card table. It landed upside down, its meager load of mashed potatoes dumped onto the scuffed and scratched black surface. Ellen groped for the spoon’s handle again, managed to grasp it at an awkward angle, and raised it again to her mouth. This time the spoon actually entered her mouth. A sound of simple triumph issued from the back of her throat.

Marcy sighed. “That’s something, anyway. You didn’t get any actual food in your mouth, but hell, you’re getting there.”

She settled back in her chair and stared at the thing that was supposed to be her sister. The creature was the spitting image of Ellen. Marcy was impressed by what Dream had accomplished, this godlike act of forming life out of seeming thin air. It had been Alicia’s idea, to see if Dream could deliberately do what she’d done with her, recreating a dead friend from a synthesis of memories, spiritual essence, and, for lack of a better word, magic. Dream had been wary at first, and then curious, as she became increasingly interested in testing the limits of her abilities. Marcy had been so numb, so grief-stricken, and so willing to gr asp at any straw.

So one night on their way to this place they stopped at a cheap motel on the outskirts of a rural community. Dream and Marcy crawled into bed together. They wrapped their bodies around each other, limbs entwined in the most intimate ways possible. There’d been nothing sexual about this, just an instinctual understanding that they needed to be as close to each other as possible in order to effect this unique process of creation. The darkness and relative silence served to enhance their concentration. Marcy’s mind filled with images and thoughts of Ellen and nothing else. She visualized her dead sister so well Ellen seemed to come alive in her mind. She fell asleep in Dream’s embrace, and thoughts of Ellen followed her into dreams so vivid, so lucid, they felt as real as anything from her waking life. As she awakened in the dim light of the following morning, she heard a sound like the scared whimpering of a lost puppy. Then she’d opened her eyes and there was her reborn sister, nude and huddled in a corner of the dingy room.

She’d felt such joy in those first moments, a feeling subsequently tempered by the realization the creature they’d created was essentially an empty vessel. But the reborn Ellen did seem to recognize Marcy and the others in a dim way, and it was this little thing that provided the shred of hope necessary to keep going. Dream had pledged to work with her every day until Ellen was fully restored. Marcy had faith in her friend and believed this would eventually happen.

She looked into Ellen’s stupid, vacant eyes again and sighed.

Eventually…

Marcy didn’t doubt the sincerity of Dream’s intent. They’d formed a strong bond over the course of those long, frequently surreal months on the road. The complicating factor, however, was Dream’s near-constant state of inebriation. She’d stayed drunk or high much of the time during their travels, but the camaraderie of the road had obscured the extent of her problem. Now, though, the truth of Dream’s dependency was plain to see. She had the perpetually dour aura of the clinically depressed. She was obviously self-medicating. In a way, it was understandable. It wasn’t as if she could seek the aid of a psychiatrist or any other type of mental health professional.

But knowing this failed to alleviate Marcy’s frustration. Her friend was a god. Or something very close to a god. And that was simultaneously very cool and fucked-up to the nth degree. Cool because it allowed Dream and her friends a level of freedom few people would ever experience. And fucked up because Dream inwardly remained so quintessentially human and frail despite her gift.

Ellen was eating with her fingers again, stuffing mashed potatoes and meatballs into her mouth with messy abandon. Marcy refrained from slapping her wrist this time. She watched the girl eat and tried to imagine a future in which her sister was functioning at a higher cognitive state, a time when she might exist as a reasonable approximation of the sibling she’d known. She tried to imagine having actual conversations with her, perhaps reminiscing about things from their childhoods.

Ellen’s teeth chomped down on her fingers and drew blood. The girl let out a squeal of pain and stared at her mangled fingers in dumb disbelief. A thin trickle of crimson slid over the heel of her hand and down her wrist. It wasn’t the first time Ellen 2 had injured herself. Marcy very much doubted it would be the last. And now she’d have to clean the idiot’s hand and swab the wounds with disinfectant. Her mind did that forward projection thing again, saw years of tending to this creature, and a black despair seeped into her heart.

Then Ellen held her hand toward Marcy. Her mouth opened and emitted a single syllable:“Hurt.”

Marcy’s mouth dropped open. The word was the first intelligible thing Ellen 2 had uttered since the morning she was conjured into existence in that dank hotel room. Ellen seemed to misinterpret her sister’s astonishment as a rebuke and uttered a second word: “Ssssssorrrrryyyyy…”

Then tears were streaming down her face and her body began to convulse with sobs. Marcy was up in a flash, her chair toppling to the floor as she hurried to embrace her sister. The girl folded herself into Marcy’s arms and clutched at her clothes with her clumsy fingers, that second word emerging from her mouth again and again. Marcy stroked Ellen’s hair and made cooing sounds in her ear.

“Shush. Everything will be okay. I promise.”

Tears filled her own eyes as she prayed for that to be true. She remembered with horrible clarity how she’d felt in the aftermath of Ellen’s death, that gnawing, soul-shredding grief. She couldn’t imagine anything more awful. It would be better to be dead than have to go on feeling that way. The train of thought made her think of the friends she’d killed after the incident in the bar, all those lives extinguished because she’d snapped or gone temporarily insane. Even now, months later, she had no reasonable explanation for what she’d done, just that sense of fate carrying her toward a dark destiny. A mad whim. She remembered every detail of that day vividly, the twitch of the gun in her hands as she squeezed the trigger again and again, the specific damage each bullet had done to the bodies of her friends, and the way those bodies had fallen. But she hadn’t allowed herself to think about how these deaths must have affected the loved ones of her victims. But now she was thinking about it. Oh, yes. And now she imagined the grief she’d felt for Ellen multiplied dozens of times.

The first sob began somewhere deep in her gut and tore out of her throat with wrenching force. It was followed by many more.

The two sisters held each other and cried for a long time.