So just let me know what you think - your honest opinion - and I'll edit. Thanks for your time, guys. Hope you enjoy it.Thanks for those who have just posted their reviews
I wasn't aware of the repetition or the few contradictions, so thanks. Guess that's why YWS is so awesome. Oh, and yes, JetPack, I was struggling with the title. Anyone have any ideas?1
Mama said that there would be blood. She told me there would be a price to pay. But she never told me that it would be mine.
I can still remember the green of her gaze that morning. People had been telling me all my life that we had the same eyes. So when I looked into hers, I always felt like I was looking into a mirror. That day, her eyes were so bright. They reminded me of dew drops on a leaf.
Our cottage was small. On the day of the magic, Mama seemed to fill every corner of it. She muttered to herself, her skirt tangling around her feet as she paced. I watched her silently; I knew better than to ask her questions. I knew it would be soon.
Night fell so quickly.
She’d been making preparations for what had felt an eternity. There was the knife, sharpened and glinting. The book. I’d asked Mama where she had gotten it once, and she’d looked away, towards the hills where my father was buried. There was an expression in her gaze that I didn’t understand. “It’s not your concern, Millie,” she only said. Then, when it was utterly dark outside and the moon came out to illuminate the hours of darkness, Mama started the fire.
It was the biggest one she’d ever built. So big that I worried our cottage would catch fire and burn to the ground. I wondered why we didn’t go outside for the magic. Mama said she didn’t want anyone to see and ask questions. I should have known then. Or at least suspected. I did neither.
“Come closer to me, Millie,” Mama ordered. She picked up the book from where it lay open on my small stool, and as I edged nearer, I noticed the trembling of her hands. For the first time I felt a hint of fear. It was only a game, wasn’t it? I began to wonder what Mama had meant by prices and blood. I thought she had been teasing me, trying to frighten me as she sometimes did.
The fire crackled and climbed. Mama fed its hunger with the branches she’d sent me out to fetch earlier. “Soon,” she muttered to herself. “So soon.”
“Mama?” I said. She didn’t hear me; her eyes, normally so sharp and aware, were glazed and distant. And suddenly I didn’t want to do the magic anymore. Mama had promised me it would be fun. She said it would be an adventure we’d never forget. Why did I feel as if it weren’t all pretend?
Then Mama started saying the words. I listened to her, my own eyes wide and frightened. It was so hot in our home, and I looked up and saw the flames reaching up for our dry, thatched roof. I clenched Mama’s skirt in my fist, tugging at it and pointing. Mama didn’t seem to be aware of the danger and she kept chanting, chanting.
The air had thickened. Smoke clogged my throat and made my eyes water. And what was that whispering? It was close, almost right next to my ear, and I whipped my head around. There was nothing. Nothing but shadows. But, as I stared, I realized that the shadows were moving.
“Mama,” I whimpered. “Look.”
“Philip, Philip,” she moaned in response. “Come back to me.”
The whispers were louder now. They slithered and hissed and gathered round me. “The blood of an innocent,” I heard. My fear consumed me and I scrambled away, mindless of Mama’s clutching fingers.
But then she was grabbing me, pulling me towards her. I leaped at her and wrapped my arms around her neck. “What’s happening?” I sobbed into her warm skin. She smelled like smoke and sweat.
My mother’s grip was so tight on me that I couldn’t breathe. “It’s time,” she gasped.
“Blood of an innocent,” the whispers kept saying.
“Mama!” I cried.
She was saying the words again. The strange, jumbled words that had no meaning. And she was bringing me closer to the fire. There was a shape within the orange-red flames that I recognized. The shape of a man. I screamed.
“Philip,” Mama breathed. “Oh, Philip.”
Millie, I wanted to shriek. My name is Millie. Why don’t you hear me? I was so terrified and confused that none of the questions that should have been tearing through my mind were frozen into place.
“Blood of an innocent!”
“Philip!”
“Mama!”
“She is seven years of age today!” Mama yelled out, ignoring me. I was struggling against her hold now, feeling something in the tension of her arms that I didn’t trust. Didn’t know. “You promised me that today would be the day, and I have brought you what you want!” Mama gripped me tighter, and I felt some of my frail bones protest.
“Seven is the number, seven is the day, seventh is the year that your love was taken away…” an old, withered voice moaned. Mama’s eyes took on a fierce, triumphant glow.
“Yes!” she shouted. “Yes!”
“The blood, the blood,” the voice moaned on.
“Yes, the blood!” Mama reached for the knife, which lay at her feet. A whirlwind of emotions tore through me: Horror, uncomprehending, mistrust. My throat was so dry from the smoke and the heat that I couldn’t croak out the word that lived in my tongue: Mama. I remembered yesterday, when she’d taken me out to the fields to help me pick a bouquet of my favorite flowers. I remembered how she’d watched me skip through the tall, golden grasses, that odd look in her eyes. And when I’d brought the flowers to her, and she’d taken them, I remembered the gleam of that single tear in her eye.
What was this doubt? What did it mean? She was my mama—I’d never known her to hurt me. And she wouldn’t. I remembered the day that I’d fallen down and cut my knee. How she’d bandaged it and kissed it. We had always been two leaves on the same branch, two petals on the same flower, two stars in the same sky. I knew that whatever was happening, whatever these voices were and where they came from, she would protect me.
“Here is the blood and the flesh that you require!” Mama shouted, bringing me back to the then and now. It was so hot… her grip was so tight…
“Mama,” I finally managed to choke out. “Mama…”
As I spoke, everything seemed to slow. The air, the voices, time itself. I felt Mama freezing, her chest constricting. “No,” she whispered. “I can’t. I won’t. Don’t.”
I didn’t know what she meant. All I knew was that my voice, soft and broken, had wriggled through her barriers “Mama, help me,” I croaked.
She was wavering. Her body trembled. “I was prepared,” she whispered. To whom, I did not know. “I waited. I can’t…”
“You have grown attached, I see,” that strange, ancient voice observed. “Didn’t I advise you against that?”
“She was so small,” Mama cried. “And her eyes. How could I not acknowledge my own child?”
“You knew this day would come,” the voice murmured. “You made the bargain. Would you break it?”
“No.” Mama shook her head instantly. “But I—”
“Mae.”
It was his voice that did it. She looked up, stared straight into the flames where that shadow still stood, and I felt her fists clench, her resolve harden. “Philip,” she said, such love and awe in her voice that I ceased my struggling for an instant to listen. “Philip, I have waited for this day…” She sobbed.
“Then finish it,” he said, that deep voice that I held no recognition for. “Spill the blood and hold me in your arms.”
“Blood of an innocent, innocent!” The whispers began once more.
“Mae?” A knock at the front door of our cottage.
I was so startled I screamed. Mama’s head swiveled around to stare at the door, her green eyes, my eyes, wide with alarm. I could see the whites of her eyeballs and the red, spindly veins.
“Finish it!” the man in the flames shouted.
“Sacrifice the child!” the old voice shrieked.
“Blood, blood,” the whispers moaned.
“Is everything all right, Mae?” asked the person at the door.
“Mama!” I broke free and squealed. “Help!”
So much was happening at once. The voices pounded at my head, so many all around me. The man in the flames was reaching out, struggling to touch my mother. I tried to shrink back. The flames were too high, and when I looked up, I saw that the roof was beginning to catch fire. The knocking at the door continued—then it turned to pounding—and I noticed for the first time the thick wood Mama had put across the door.
“No!” Mama howled. “Philip!”
“Finish it!”
“Millie!” Mama gripped me even tighter, if that were possible, and it was then that I felt one of my arms snap. “Millie, I’m so sorry!”
“The blood, the blood!”
“Give me the child!”
And then the sensation of that knife slicing across my own throat. It was so unexpected, so startling, that I froze. There was the distant, fuzzy feeling of pain. Then it brightened and intensified. White flashed across my vision. “M-Mama?” I whispered.
She only sobbed and let me fall to the ground. “I’m so sorry,” she said again.
The cottage was on fire. We would burn quickly. But Mama would never notice. For as she turned her back on me and as my lifeblood spilled to the floor, the man in the flames stepped out. His eyes were a bright red, his hair a beacon of gold. He was beauty personified.
The man and my mother in a final, passionate embrace was the last image I ever saw in that lifetime.
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