Knife & Locket

The smell of death fills every corner of this place, a smell I'm familiar with; that I've known since I knew what a scent was. Some children learn by the scent of freshly baked cookies their mother made 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 cell bars. The echo of my footstep through the empty house, the corpses she left behind, lining the floor like carpet.

She's close, I can feel her, she's about the only thing I can feel. This slaughter has gone too far, there won't be much left of this town.

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

This was a small town in Kansas, nothing of note. Before she came here there were a few hundred people. She may have left only a dozen alive.

“So, you found me.”

My sister, Vivian is looking out the window, I can't see her eyes, but they must be glowing bright enough to blind by now.

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

“No, I suppose it wasn't.”

I lean against one of the bookcases and sigh, I don't know if I can kill her, but I know I'm the only one who has a chance.

“You need to let go now.” My words are 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 was right. Her eyes are shining with the power of the souls she's stolen. If I weren't protected by spells and enchantments, she really might have blinded me.

The power of the hundred 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 the heart.

I don't need to look at the bodies to know that the dagger pierced them all. There's no other point to stabbing them anywhere else.

How she got it doesn't really matter. How my father—our father—warned us of its power doesn't matter now. Nothing that came before matters. What matters is that Vivian 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 is distorted by the power barely contained in her body.

I watch as it almost pushes against her skin, attempting to get out, her stomach bulging, her left calf throbbing unnaturally. It's like there's a layer of slime trapped between her muscle and her skin, and 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 they are anything but. I have an ace up my sleeve, and I plan to make good use of it. My mother's small locket is tucked in my jacket pocket. A sliver one of old, with vines forming a frame to a respectable woman's figure in profile.

I don't move, I 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. Vivian 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 toward me, her bare feet making a squishing sound in the pools of blood layering the floor.

“No.” I've never thought I was better than her. Somehow she just assumed I felt that 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 didn't want to be better with time, 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.

“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 were 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. I have the strength of just me, just my empty body. If that's all I had, I'd for sure be 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.

Vivian'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 Vivian'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 had 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. With speed, 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. I plunge the glass dagger into her 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,” she begs, “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 twine 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 in my eyes for loss, for the pain, for the hurt, for the choices she made—we made—that brought us here. But I know I’ve done the right thing.

I take the dagger out, and release her, 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? That'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 Vivian has now wiped off the map. I can't do anything for them. But for Viv? I push some of her hair out of her face. Viv 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.

“Come on, let's go home.”