All Her Secrets

Last Words - Pigeon (redone)

A/N: As a warning, there will be violence in this chapter. Also, don’t worry about the “magick” words, all will be revealed in the end.

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    I watched the knife glint in the flames and my breathing sped. Whatever spell she had put on me to make me trust her was gone, and I felt the flood of fear with my heartbeat in every fingertip, and my sight going black at the edges. But while my fear returned, I could not move any part of myself. 

    I couldn’t twitch my toes or my nose. My eyelids seemed to be the only thing still under my control. Blinking frantically, I tried to ask her another question, only to find that I couldn’t. My mouth would not open, my teeth still caught on my bottom lip, and my voice was gone. No matter how I tried, I could not yell for my brother or my father. My chest burned, and I felt like I was being squeezed into one of Mom’s bone-crushing hugs again.

I want Mom!

    Pain lashed through my heart as I thought of Mom. An empty casket buried six feet down, with a stone. Black clothes, Carter holding me close. Dad's quiet sobs through the thin walls, followed by the c***k of a seal on another bottle. Carter's screams for Dad to wake up when he saw the news story first.

    He could never look at me without seeing Mom- we looked almost exactly alike. I could never stop hoping she would walk through the door and everything would be okay again. The grief, and guilt had destroyed Carter completely. He'd even broken up with Taryn, the girl he'd loved for forever.

    He still talked to her in his sleep sometimes. He always woke up crying.

     I came back to reality, or at least this twisted version of it, when the woman began speaking in her strange language, and that still quiet part of my mind told me that I would need to remember her words. I couldn’t say them back to myself, which was how I normally tried to remember things, but I could repeat them in my mind. Listening carefully to each word and syllable, I found it calming to have something to do.

    “In hac nocte in Lulii, Libet stringatur rationale humanum pueri, Columbam, et verba mea. Libet sicut custos fecit sibi secretum hoc. c*m sanguis ipse et sui, ad mortem, et a se me non erit istud portare quis debeat.”

    The knife shone, a dark light coming from it. Moving over to me, the stranger ran her hands over my stomach, tracing a shape. Speaking in English now, she told me- “I’m going to cut you a few times now. It will hurt, but this is important.”

    I took a deep breath to steel myself for the pain. Bringing the blade down, she drug it across my lower chest and stomach, making a deep cut. Blood came rushing to the gash, and I smelled iron and salt. I ground my teeth, as well as I could while being paralyzed, pressing down until my jaws ached, trying not to scream and stay awake with the same movement. 

    As the rivers of red slid down my sides, she gathered it in a small glass cup. Once the cup was full she pressed her burning hot hands onto the cut and whispered “Hoc sana vulnus. Minimum relinquere nobiles maculis ferunt.” When she removed her hands, I watched, fascinated, as my skin reformed and the blood on me was absorbed into my body. Where my skin was growing back, a long, thin, silvery scar was all that was left of my pain.

    She repeated this process four times. Each of my palms and the bottoms of my feet had been cut with her glowing knife and healed with her hot hands. Leaving her knife on my white rug, she gathered the small glass cups with my blood and went back to her candle, which was beginning to burn low. Dragging a fingernail along the tops of her collarbones, cuts as deep as the ones the knife had made bloomed, and she gathered her blood in a larger glass cup. There were words and symbols carved into the cup, and as she poured my blood into it with hers, my eyes widened. As the liquids mixed, they glowed, turning an iridescent white and seeming to swirl together.

    She spoke again in her language, and I began repeating the sentences as she said them.

    “Hunc puer ut inplerat ab isto Garnet tenetur in silentio et in secreto servando. Argentum, et spinam, Draco scriptor sanguis, casia, murra et indissolubili vinculo copulatae cohaerentiae studeret. In tantum ut plenius conformaretur Filio suo iudiciis illa sit mors, et per dimisit. Huic sacramento sanguinem mortis tenemur.”

    A cold chain wrapped around my neck, contrasting with her warm hands. When she laid the charm on my chest, I could feel it was heavy, and alive. The charm buzzed with the dark energy of her words.

    I stared at her with half-closed eyes. My body felt heavy, and I could barely stay awake. Kneeling beside me, she whispered in my ear, “Done. And with that gem binding us together, I can tell you what you must be so desperate to know. I can tell you this secret, and because of this necklace, you will not be able to speak. This is the only way to ensure our secret is kept safe, and there is but one last step…” Her hand moved, and I flinched, closing my eyes.

She must be crazy, but at least now she’ll kill me.

    Instead of killing me, she laid a hand on the necklace and the other on my heart. Her last words ruined my life, and they dictate it still.

     "Et hoc monile ut non sit remotum est. Sic et in morte facere consequuntur."