“No,” I look at my sister who is standing beside me, as solid as my father. “You’re the one who’s dead.”
“Look at me,” Nokosi orders, stepping closer but not close enough to touch me. “I’m not dead. I’m telling you; your father is alive and your sister, whoever or whatever you’re seeing right now, isn’t there.”
I reach out a hand and so does she. Our fingers touch.
But she’s cold.
I stagger a sob. “Are you dead? Did I kill you?”
When she nods, I break down. My body is pained with hysterical tears and agony. It’s too much. It comes flooding back so quickly and violently that all the grief slams into me, buckling my knees. I can feel my hands around her throat, squeezing the life from her limp body.
I’m sorry, Willow. I’m so sorry.
My dad takes the gun from my hand and Nokosi pulls me into his arms.
“I killed my sister,” I breathe. “I killed her. And my mom… she’d be alive if I hadn’t… I killed them. This is all my fault.”
“Shhh.” Nokosi strokes my hair as I cling to him. “It’s not your fault.”
“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, Willow. I’m so so sorry.”
The door opens and people enter the room. I hear their footsteps and their voices but I’m too deep in my hysterics to hear them.
I’m a monster.
“No,” Nokosi begs. “Don’t… don’t take her. Please.”
“We have to,” somebody replies softly as I sob into his chest, soaking his blood-stained shirt with my tears. “She’s sick. We’re going to help her get better.”
He holds me until he physically can’t anymore. Muttering promises that he loves me and that it’s all going to be okay.
How can he still love me when I’m not good?
Lilith
“It has been six months since the discovery of the School Sigil Searer in Las Vegas and two years since she claimed her first victim…” The TV goes blank.
“How does that make you feel? Seeing all of those families rejoicing over their justice?” Doctor Geraldine, my therapist, asks.
“It makes me feel… justified,” I respond honestly and the handsome doctor scribbles that down in his notebook.
I twist my hands in front of my lap and look at the window where Willow is standing, staring out over the grounds. I wave at her, flapping a hand as though wafting away smoke and she vanishes.
“Was she here just now?”
I nod and then ask, “Will she always be here?”
“Most likely,” he replies gently, smiling sadly at me. “But you’re in control now.”
I nod again and reach for my tea, sipping it after blowing on it. It’s good tea. Reminds me of Dasan’s. The only other place I’ve had tea in my entire life so maybe that’s why I immediately think of him.
“Why’d you kill your sister, Lilith? Do you want to talk about that?”
I know why I killed her, I remember wrapping my fingers around her throat as I sobbed and screamed, and she didn’t even move beneath me due to the drugs. I couldn’t leave her here alone. I couldn’t stomach it. Not when she was going to continue killing innocent people and I was dying. I couldn’t hand her in and leave her to face prison and her lingering rage and pain without anybody left to love her. Mom was useless, Dad was gone.
It was just us. I had to stop her. I had to.
“It was the nicest thing I could have done for her.”
He scribbles that down, eyes sad. “It must have been hard.”
“Harder than you’ll ever know.”
I look away, trying to repress the memories to a darker place. They haunt me, what I did, what I caught her doing, what she asked me to do for her, with her. I couldn’t, I’m not a good person but I couldn’t kill those men, I couldn’t trap them into death. But when she died, my brain somehow let me believe that that was exactly the path I chose. I rationalized it in my grief-stricken, fucked-up brain that she was doing the right thing and I had been helping her. I suppose as a way to take back the fact I killed her.
The guilt weighs on me so heavily there’s little room for anything else these days. I understand why I repressed it. It’s too painful to bear.
“Do you want to discuss…” He points at my stomach with his pen. “Because it can’t go undiscussed anymore. You might very well pass away before…”
“I know,” I say, biting my lip. “But we have to ignore it for the most part. She can’t know. I can’t trust her to do something that might hurt it before I can give it a chance to live.”
“You think you can keep it hidden from her?”
I nod again. “She only sees what I let her see. She only knows what I tell her.”
“And when it’s born?”
“Send her to her father.”
He reaches over the table and takes my hand. “You’re a very, very brave young woman, Lilith. You have been through so much. You don’t have to do this, there’s still time to end the pregnancy, have the surgery…”
“No,” I respond, pulling my hand away. “It should be this way. I’m not a good person, I’ll never be a good person and I have this demon inside of me that will forever put those I love at risk. Regardless of whether or not my inner Willow is my sister, she believes she is, and she believes she’s the School Sigil Searer. If she gets control. If she beats me… I’m terrified of that ever happening, and the weaker I get, the stronger she gets.”
He dips his head with understanding. “I’ll look after you until the end.” When he smiles kindly at me and holds out a tissue, I take it to wipe the tears I didn’t realize were falling.
“I just want to leave one good thing behind.” My hand strokes my rounded belly again and she kicks me, comfortable and happy in her cozy little bubble.
“Have you written to Nokosi? Have you replied to any of his letters?”
“Not yet, it’s better that he doesn’t know. Not until it’s too late.”
“You don’t think he should get a say?”
I allow myself to think of Nokosi for a fleeting moment and of how it’ll hurt him if I even consider telling him about the pregnancy, just for me to die before the baby is viable. Not to mention the fact that we have to be extremely careful. I have control of Willow for now, but I dread to think what she might do if she knows we’re pregnant. She’s unstable now more than ever.
Or I am…
I shake my head. “I can’t risk him talking about it. We should stop talking about it.”
How I want to talk about him and to him. How badly I want to love him, hold him, return to the forest with him and catch fish and live a simple life, just us. That will never be. Not anymore. It’s impossible.
“Is she coming back?”
I nod and remove my hand from my stomach. “Like you said, she always does, and she always will.”
“What did I miss?” Willow asks, grinning and sitting on the empty seat beside me. “You look so intense. What’s going on? Damn, that doctor is a hottie. Don’t you think, Lil?”