“Orpen?”
I don’t breathe.
Mam raises herself till she can rest on her elbows and look at me. I am across the room, frozen, staring at her. I swallow.
“Mam?”
“Love.” My mother’s eyes are wincing against the half-light in the room. She looks around, confused, and then looks at me and tries to smile through cracked lips. “How’s my warrior?”
I am crying. I should call for Maeve, but instead, I say, “How do you feel?”
“I have the worst headache.” She grimaces and swallows thickly. “Be a good girl, get your mam a drink of water,” she says, her voice breaking, looking at the jug and glass beside me.
She hasn’t noticed the strings around her wrists and ankles, and I don’t want her to. I know how that would upset her. I stand up out of my chair, and I put my hand to the jug, fill up a glass with warm water.
“I was having awful dreams,” Mam whispers.
She sounds so sad.
She sounds all right, though, nearly.
“It’s okay.” I turn to say to her, “You’re okay now.”
“Orpen,” she says. “What happened?”
“You’re home,” I say. “You’re safe.”
“Orpen, come here. Come here to me.” My mother lifts a hand to reach out, but it’s caught suddenly by the twine. Her hand snaps back. She moves her other hand, her feet. “Orpen?”
“Mam,” I say, “it’s okay. Everything’s okay.” I can barely get the words out through my teeth.
I wonder as I put the water down next to her, will she go for me? Will the skrake in her try now to get me?
I don’t care too terribly. I just want to feel her arms around me.
“My child,” my mother says.
I reach for her, and she reaches for me.
“Baby,” she says once more, and she smiles, and I see her teeth, smell her dead breath.
Those teeth. I don’t want those teeth on me.
I pull back just as her jaws crash together. I feel them in my ear, feel the warm breath of exhalation just at my neck. I step back, away from the bed, trip over my own feet and land hard on my arse. I try to push myself back toward the wall with my feet, but they keep slipping on the floor. I can’t get them to grip.
My mother is not my mother.
She bites the air wildly, her eyes mad. She pulls against her restraints, the muscles and tendons in her neck standing out. I take it all in. I watch her—it—as I try to get away and cannot. Everything happens in seconds, and lasts an age.
My bare heels dig into the floor at last, and I push myself away from the thrashing thing on the bed till my back hits the wall, but it isn’t far enough, not by some way. I’m breathing hard, and I can’t think. I can’t even scream. She’s still coming, pulling everything she’s got toward me. Her hair is in her face and her knees draw up toward her torso under the blankets, but they can only go so far and the bed rattles with the effort.
I try to get a hold of myself, but I can’t catch my breath. I’m too frightened to move. I should get out of the room.
Maeve, I think. I need Maeve.
Mam looks down to her wrists and I look too and see how the skin has come away. She’s pulling away from the bed so recklessly that the twine is biting into her gray skin, through the muscles, and it keeps going. A thick wine-colored mess is leaking from her—from its—wrists, but Mam keeps coming and something gives way. I don’t know whether it is the string that breaks or my mother’s own flesh and bone, but she—no it, it—it has an arm free and it reaches—
I find my voice and I scream.
I know Maeve’ll be close.
And only now, at last, do I remember my knives, and I pull one free from its sheath and I drop it, but my clawing fingers pick it up off the ground and I tell my shaking pathetic legs to stand, to stand, to—fuck and I’m up, quivering but moving. I get to the door, inch by stupid inch, which has been open anyway this whole time, and I know I can leave this room and vault the stairs and be out of the house in the time it’ll take her to get the rest of the way free and to come for me.
Still, I stand there, the tip of the knife cool between my fingers, my body falling at last into a guard position, and I wait for Maeve to come and tell me what to do.
One of her legs is free now and she’s half off the bed. The metal frame moves with her as she bites the air and reaches for me with clawed hands. I back up slowly, one leg moving quietly behind the other, light on my feet now, but my eyes never leaving it, the enemy.
“Maeve!” I shout again.
If I let loose this knife, would she go down? Can I do this violence?
I hear Maeve at last, at the bottom of the stairs, coming up. I won’t take my eyes off the skrake even to glance at her, but she puts her hand on my shoulder, and I feel her looking me up and down to see how close I let Mam get, to see am I bitten.
“All right?” she says. Her voice is not flat. It’s not emotionless, but it’s calm. It makes me feel angry.
“No!” I say, the tears starting again. “Maeve, help her!”
“You don’t need my help,” she says smoothly, answering a whole other question I haven’t asked.
I lift my eyes up off the target, and I look at her.
“Keep your eyes on the skrake,” she says, nodding toward my mother, still snarling at us, making slow progress, the twine on the hand that’s still tied to the bed cutting her badly.
“Loose your weapon,” Maeve advises, and I feel her look at me when I don’t line up my aim. “Go on,” she says, her voice hardening.
“No,” I tell her. “I won’t.” I fall out of my guard and let my throwing hand drop.
Maeve looks at me again, and I look back at her, trying to match her hardness, her steadiness. After a while she looks away and sighs.
She steps into the bedroom, toward the skrake.
“Maeve!” I shout, and bring my knife up again, ready to throw.
The skrake reaches for her with its one ruined arm, and Maeve deftly sidesteps and stabs the skrake in the neck with a blade I didn’t even know she had in her fist. I scream loud and hard and good, a scream of shock and grief, but my mother doesn’t die. She falters and gurgles and chokes. She keeps reaching for Maeve, who takes one step back toward the door and looks at me coldly.
“Now, will you kill it?”
I am sobbing. I shake my head in squeamish revulsion, so hard I might be trying to loose water out of my ears. My stomach twists. Maeve moves forward lightly and stabs again, quick and hard, in and out like breathing. Mam writhes and screeches.
“Now?”
I’m crying too hard to speak, so Maeve steps forward again and plunges her knife into the heart of the skrake, straight through the soft material of the cleanish shirt I’d put on her only yesterday. My mother roars and twists. She sounds just like herself. The knife wedges for a moment, but Maeve pulls hard and is free, and as she pulls out her knife, the blood pours out of the wound and my mother seems to moan.
“Finish this,” Maeve says.
I take a half step forward without meaning to, but I’m still shaking my head—I can’t, I cannot.
Maeve steps forward again toward her and stabs again, and then again.
With each new injury, my mother looks more frightened. She screams.
I take another step forward, and another, while Maeve brutalizes my mother and shouts at me to kill her.
I cannot kill her; I must make this end.
I bring my knife to the string that tethers my mother’s wrist to the bed.
“Maeve,” I say, and I see her eyes widen as she watches me cut through. My mother lunges forward, three feet closer to Maeve in a heartbeat, and it is all she can do to jump back. She gets her hand to my mother’s head, avoiding her fingernails narrowly, and she smashes her stabbing knife into Mam’s skull.
The skrake, my mother, sighs as she dies, and I listen for my name but do not hear it. I am kneeling beside her ruined, ragged body, half in and half out of the bed, too frightened to touch her or let her rest again on her bloody mattress, but unable to leave her. Trapped, as usual.
After a little while, I begin to hear the silence in the room, and then Maeve’s jagged breathing in it. Our eyes meet for a moment, and I’m nearly surprised by the sadness in hers before they fall away from my face and on to the floor. Maeve gives a nod, one small movement of the head, and I know that she’s taking in now what she’s done, what I made her do because I could not.
I think somewhere beneath the tang of shit and the coppery scent of blood, I can smell Mam’s scent: lavender, mint, and earth.