Knife & Locket

The smell of death fills every corner of this place, a smell I've known since I knew what scent was. Some children learn by the sweet aroma of freshly baked cookies their mother makes them. I learned by the gun powder residue on my father’s hands and burning witch sage in our kitchen sink.

Each step closer to my sister feels like the ring of a baton against prison bars. The echo of my footstep through the empty house, the corpses she left behind lining the floor like carpet.

I clutch my mother’s small silver locket, tucked away in the pocket of my leather jacket, grateful that any horror I might have felt is muted. It’s a silver one of old, with vines framing a respectable woman's figure in profile.

My sister’s close, I can feel her, she's about the only thing I can feel. Her slaughter has gone too far, there won't be much left of this town if she's not stopped.

I walk into what once may have been some rich snooty man's library. Bookshelves line the far wall, an oak desk on my right, and a bay window to my left, looking out over the suburban street. There are bodies of the dead family that used to live here, bleeding out on the floor.

This was a small town in Kansas, nothing of note. Before she came here, there’d been a few hundred people. She’s left only a dozen.

“So, you found me.” Sylvia is looking out the window. I can't see her eyes, but they must be glowing bright enough to blind by now. Vines of power are already pulsing along her back.

“Wasn't hard.” I walk in further, not paying much heed to the blood staining my leather combat boots. They're already plenty stained from blood and worse.

“No, I suppose it wasn't.”

I lean against the entry way to the office and sigh. I don't know if I can kill her, but I know I'm the only one who has a chance. I don’t really care about the ticking clock I set in motion to be able to stop my sister’s madness or the multiple insistent warnings of my father as he enacted the spell.

One or both of us will die today, but not neither. No warning he could give would change that.

“You need to let go now.” My words my last-ditch effort that she'll listen to me. To anyone with sense. “That blade's no good to anyone.”

A heartless laugh, “No good to a goody-two-shoes like you, maybe. But to me, to those of us who aren't afraid of power, it's the gods greatest gift.” She turns to look at me now and I’m right. Her eyes are shining with the power of the souls she's stolen. If I wasn’t protected by my everyday spells and enchantments, things most humans don’t even know exist, she really might have blinded me.

The power of the trapped lives fills her own body as if she were a nuclear bomb, the knife in question clutched in her hand. The handle is a gorgeous, carefully crafted cherry wood, with witch's sigils carved throughout. The blade though is made of crystal glass and enchanted to consume a person's soul with a single touch to their still beating heart. I don't need to look at the bodies to know the dagger pierced them all.

How she got it doesn't really matter. How my father—our father—warned us of its power doesn't matter now. What matters is that Sylvia killed a town, consumed their souls, and now is a nuke of magical power ready to go off.

And it's my job to stop it.

“So now you’re here, sister.” Her voice distorted by the power barely contained in her body.

I watch as it pushes, pulses, against her skin, attempting to get out, her stomach bulging, her left calf throbbing unnaturally, like a layer of glowing slime trapped between her muscle and her skin. Yet she speaks as if she doesn't notice, as if she doesn't care.

“What do you plan to do? Kill me?”

“Yes,” I respond simply. I've never been a big talker.

She smirks, perhaps thinking my statement just bravado, but it is anything but. My mother's locket, giving off a warm amount of heat, a constant reminder of the giant risk I took to get this far.

I don't move, don't say anything. This isn't a fight I'll win quickly, nor rashly. Though both are what she wants, and I know it. I just have to wait.

Wait.

Sylvia never could stand the quiet. Always had to be doing something, making noise. She never understood the value of stillness, of patience.

“You think you're so much better than me?” She steps forward, her bare feet making a squishing sound in the pools of blood layering the floor.

“No.” Somehow, she just assumed I thought I was better than her from a young age. She's not my blood sister, adopted into our family when she was twelve. She hated when she couldn't shoot her gun as well as me after a few weeks of practice, but father had been teaching me since I could walk. It made no sense, her feelings of inadequacies. I was better cause I’d had more time; with time she would get better too. But for some reason that wasn't enough for her, she wanted to be better now.

“Lier! You were always better than me!” She rushes forward, and I dodge, trading places with her. The wall of books to my back.

I don't say anything, silence can be torture. Emptiness can be torture. I feel the locket, the meaning of empty sending my mind on a momentary loop. The irony makes me smile. Something empty for too long can never last.

“Bitch!” She comes at me again, dagger raised.

I block her with both my arms above my head, gripping her wrist and keeping her away from me. I can feel the gained power from the captured souls. It's not the same as our sparing sessions, or any fight I've ever had against a witch gone wild. It's as if the strength of dozens of people are fighting against me with her single blow.

I buckle under the weight. I have to put up a good fight. I have to make her believe she's winning, which won’t be hard. And if all I had was the strength of my own body, I'd for sure be a goner. Just like all the others my father sent to kill her when she began going mad. I suppose he wanted to spare me the pain of killing my sister. Then again, our family is made of pain.

I collapse to my knees, my arms still above me, clutching her hands that are wrapped around the knife's hilt. The sigils glowing with excitement, the prospect of collecting another soul.

Sylvia's cheek is bulging with power, but her eyes, her blindingly bright eyes, are focused only on me. A crazed grin on her face.

“Please," I beg. She is still my sister.

“Who's the best now, sis?” She plunges through my hands and buries the glass knife in my chest to touch my heart. The stab causes me no more pain than if I sliced my arm on a piece of barbed wire. Nothing. As I knew it wouldn't be.

“What the…?”

In Sylvia's confusion, I fall over, bringing the knife sticking out of my chest with me.

“What is going on?” She yells, her anger manifesting as a raging wind so intense, the windows she’d been silhouetted in the moonlight when I arrive shatter.

I smile at her as I pull out the knife. “Can't steal a soul, if there's not one to get,” I say softly. Arm raised, I rush toward her and use the surprise to push her against a wall.

“What did you do to your soul?” I hear the worried concern of my sister come through the question. And it almost makes me pause. Almost.

“I protected it,” I reply. Knowing my soul is safe and sound in my mother's locket, at least for one more hour. A body can’t survive without one forever, no matter how powerful a witch their father is.

I plunge the glass dagger into my sister’s heart. The hundreds of souls drain from her into the blade and she screams as they are ripped from her.

She's panting, pinned to the wall, only one soul left inside her. “Please,” now she's the one begging, “I won't do it again.”

The knife is now the one glowing with power instead of her. She is weak, defenseless. But not truly, as she still has her words, her words that can twist and wrap around even the most prickly of persons and make them open up. I gave her my soul, my love long before this moment, long before she ever stole the knife. And she betrayed all of that.

“No,” I answer, commanding the knife to take the last soul left in her body. As it does, ripping out the original, the scream is one of pure horror and pain.

I let the tears build behind my eyes for the loss. For the pain, for the hurt, for the choices she made—we made—that brought us here.

All of it dulled due to my lack of soul, though I can feel the grief waiting for me with it’s return. As if just now I only took a sip of the pain, knowing the entire mug is still left to drink. Even so, I know I’ve done the right thing.

I take the dagger out and release Sylvia, letting the empty corpse drop to the floor. I watch it fall, her skirts pooling awkwardly around her, beginning to grow red.

“You should have listened to the lessons of our father,” I tell her.

I look at the knife, vibrating and shining like a beacon in my hand. Power is never the answer.

I speak several words in the forgotten language and the souls are expelled from the knife and returned to the natural order. Going where ever souls go next. Heaven, hell, reincarnation? Whatever it is, it's not our jurisdiction.

I kneel down, the blade in my hand, and look at my sister's still form. “I'm sorry,” I say, not entirely sure what I'm sorry for.

Her arm is crooked, and her head tilts backward to a degree that her spine may have broken.

I look at the bodies of the strangers and remember the town that Sylvia wiped off the map. I can't do anything for them. But for Sylvia? I push some of her hair out of her face. Sylvia is my sister.

I sheath the knife on my belt, making sure it's nowhere near the locket with my soul safely inside and pick up my sister's dead body.

“We’re going home.”