Page 129 of She Haunts Me Still

“By design,” Penelope said. “Your mother meticulouslyorchestrated that relationship. Sentence by sentence. She moved in next door. Invited Saskia’s mother over for tea. She made sure you and Saskia played together every day, that you became the best of friends.”

“No,” Mallory protests. She almost covers her ears to shut out the nightmarish possibility that her mother would manipulate a woman with a terminally ill child to get her to agree to something as horrific as this. “I don’t believe you. My mother was a good person. She wasgood. She wouldn’t—”

“Mallory, this isn’t to say that the friendship between your mother and Saskia’s mother wasn’teventuallyreal,” Penelope says, leaning forward. “You play a role long enough, you start to believe it’s true. By the end of it all, your mother loved Saskia’s mother. And she loved her back. Saskia’s mother wanted to giveyouthe chance of life because every doctor told her that Saskia couldn’t be saved. She didn’t want your mother to lose you, the way she was preparing to lose her own daughter. I believe, with all my heart, that her love was genuinely earned.”

“You believe that?” Mallory asks, voice weak. “Or is that what you tell yourself to feel better about what you did?”

Penelope settles back in her chair.

“I think,” she says, “those two things are the same.”

Mallory heaves a breath. She closes her eyes. And finds herself thinking of Ezra. The way he knew before they even met that she’d die with her blood on his hands. The way he fell for her anyway.

You play a role long enough, you start to believe it’s true.

These terrible realities sink in. Her future. Her body. Her love for Saskia. All of it was predetermined. She never got to choose any of it for herself.

She wonders, distantly, if this is how Lily feels, too.

“Did Saskia agree?” Mallory asks. “You said the transfer can only happen with consent. Her mother consenting for her doesn’t count. Didsheagree?”

“She did,” Penelope answers, stunning her into silence. “I had a long talk with Saskia when you were here. I’ll never forget what she said, because it devastated me, hearing it from such a young child. She said she’d been preparing to die her whole life. That every night, she went to sleep thinking she might not wake up.” Penelope swallows. “She couldn’t bear you feeling the same way.”

“But Saskia gotbetter,” Mallory pushes back. Knowing that if she lingers too long on any of Penelope’s words, she’ll dissolve into tears. “Her cancer wentaway. Why would her mother send her for that experimental trial in the first place if she agreed to this trade? Why would she help Saskia recover if she knew she’d end up dying from the curse—”

The question evaporates as Mallory realizes she already knows the answer.

“There never was a medical trial, was there?”

Penelope shakes her head. “The ritual changed Saskia,” she explains. “It altered the cellular makeup of her body. Whether her leukemia went away because of previous medical treatments or her remission was a side effect of the spell, we’ll never know. But the magic transformed her—including her appearance.” She stirs her tea. “An experimental medical trial was an easier explanation when Saskia was old enough to ask why none of the other children at school had white hair.”

Grasping for another question, Mallory leans forward. “Why doesn’t Saskia remember any of this? She doesn’t recallanything from when she was sick. I barely remember the night we spent here, either.”

“You’d be surprised,” Penelope says, “the things the brain can forget in order to protect itself.”

Mallory chews her lip, considering. “What’s going to happen to me?” She gingerly touches the puncture wounds in her neck, the matching ones above her breast. “To both of us?”

“Well.” Penelope takes a careful breath. “You’ve been bitten by a blood demon, by way of a human host. Each of these wounds weakens you, makes you susceptible to full demonic influence. But I can arrange for a cleansing exorcism; one of my sisters performs them here at our meetinghouse. It should take care of everything, including any symptoms of bloodlust.”

“And Saskia?” Mallory whispers. “Can you do something for her?” She already knows the answer but has to ask. When she looks at Penelope, the older woman’s eyes have turned sad.

“I’m sorry,” she says. “The only thing I would ever be able to offer is time, but, Mallory, we can’t keep her in restraints forever.”

“But I killed the demon!” she cries. “I burned the church with Ezra inside, I—”

“You burned the demon’shost,” Penelope says. “Not the demon itself.”

“How do you kill it, then? How…?” Mallory’s eyes sting with unshed tears as she faces the question she really needs to ask, the one whose answer will hurt the most. “How much longer does Saskia have?”

“Hours,” Penelope says, and the small word is what finally does her in.

Mallory buries her face in her hands, unable to fight anylonger. She cries for all the lost time—the years she never had with her mother. She cries for Arden’s shattered trust. She cries for Ezra, the way they were doomed before they ever began.

But mostly, she cries for Saskia, and she cries for herself. For the blue-ember glow of a love that might not get the chance to burn at all. Where, she wonders, do you put all this fucking loss? Not just thewould’ve, could’ve, should’vekind of loss, but the loss of future memories—things that will never happen but you can visualize so clearly, they feel like they once belonged to you. In another life. In a dream.

And then an image of little Kiki blooms in her mind.

She couldn’t bear you feeling the same way.