Gypsy Moon

Everyone looks like they’re now expecting her to shoot them with some more arrows. Arion looks as though he’s deflated, because he was clearly excited about revealing this monstrous secret to my mother.

I still don’t care or want to know.

After tucking a small throw pillow under Vance’s head, I go to the cabinet where Mom said her stash is, and start collecting the rare materials she seems to have a lot of.

Then I find the paper with the instructions and get to work chopping and doing, while they likely just glare at each other and deliver silent threats with their eyes.

I have the liquids mixing and almost coming to a boil, ready for the more…dangerous ingredients, by the time they finally break the silence.

“You know about Edmond and what he did?” Damien finally asks her.

“Of course I know. I—”

“This could get a little hairy,” I tell them in interruption.

Seriously, I don’t want to know this secret. I’ve got too much other shit going on.

I grimace at the very questionable intestines that belong to some fabled creature that surely can’t exist under the radar if all that fit inside it. “If you’re a respawner instead of an unkillable being, get out of the kitchen and at least a mile from the house.”

Mom assured me there’s a five mile seclusion radius.

Damien starts speaking to me, almost as though he’s too tired to deal with my tinkering right now. “Violet, that potion has to be fresh. There’s no need in—”

“You said there’s no time for them because you have to find Idun, but you’re all spending your time arguing about how to find Idun.”

“Idun takes more mind than action at first,” Emit explains. “She’s calculated and cunning—”

“Idun’s our problem, not hers,” Mom cuts in, looking at them like they’ve lost their minds.

For once, I agree with her; Idun’s not my problem.

“You really think Idun isn’t also Violet’s problem when she’s the omega underfoot?” Emit growls.

Arion predictably gets in on the Idun chatter. “Idun won’t be a problem, for fuck’s sake, if I can just—”

There’s a loud, bubbling, sizzling noise that cracks through the air, and I drop to the floor, as a pulse shoots from the pot.

Damien yelps, as he and Emit are thrown into one wall, and Mom curses seconds before she and Arion are launched almost into each other, hitting opposing walls instead, when they manage to twist in the air to avoid touching.

Everyone crashes to the ground at almost the same time. Groans and grunts and coughs of pain all ring out in annoyed unison.

“I warned you,” I call out, even as most of them narrow their eyes in my direction.

Damien shoots me a look of exasperation, and I shrug a shoulder.

“She did warn us,” Mom grumbles as she remains lying on the floor, while everyone else pushes to their feet.

“No one fucks up a potion better than I do. If I fuck it up enough, less power will be needed to raise them,” I go on, smiling over at Emit…who is just staring at me like he’s confused.

“But it’s the exact right ingredients,” he says warily, as he stands.

“She’s apples and oranges. You can’t compare her to anyone else using those ingredients for that reason,” Mom says dismissively, as I gesture to Vance.

“Take him with you; I’m going to be a while. That was just the first volatile ingredient. I don’t think you want to be here for the yacktite—”

“Ylacklatite,” they all correct in unison.

“You don’t want to be here for those gross, possibly toxic, hard-to-say, fabled-creature intestines. It’s going to probably get crazy up in here,” I say as I twirl my finger around, staying on the floor for a minute longer.

Sometimes there’s an echo.

“Raise your heartbeat. You’re not taking this seriously enough,” Mom scolds. “What are you doing letting your heartbeat drop so much?”

“You really should go. It gets unpredictable when—”

The echo pulse I worried would come knocks Arion, Emit, and Damien to the ceiling this time, and I cringe when I hear things crack.

When they drop, Arion and Emit land in a crouch, and Damien lands hard on his back, cursing the pot on the stove like it’s singled him out and has it in for sexual deviants.

Arion’s lips twitch as he stares over at me, likely thinking what sort of punch a pencil could pack with this concoction. But I’ll be damned if Shera steals any of this juice for his freaky pencils.

“Do you rip up those dolls to use them as a timer?” the vampire asks, as he stays on the floor, causing Mom to sneer in his direction.

Another pulse cracks some glass, but everyone is under the reach of it now.

Damien just shakes his head.

“You have drawers full of toxic pencils I don’t even want to know the purpose of,” I tell him dryly. “You don’t get to judge.”

His grin grows like he’s pleased with something. I think Mom is seconds away from a brain aneurism.

“After I finish a couple of batches, I want to go see the place where they are,” I tell them, causing all of them to clear their throats as though it’s a stalling technique they’ve simultaneously adopted.

“Violet, we can’t even step foot on that ground unless we—”

“I’ll take you,” Mom says softly, eyes meeting mine, as she cuts off Damien.

Damien looks over at her like she’s just sucking up, rolling his eyes.

“Of course we’ll take you for an outside look,” he amends.

“With any luck, these potions will be toxic enough to at least help them start digging out on their own,” I add, even though Mom assured me they aren’t like me and can’t stitch themselves together.

“Sure,” Damien goes on like he’s placating me.

Mom’s eyes stay on me, and Arion helps Emit lift Vance. The two of them start carrying the Van Helsing out the second I stand to put in the intestines.

When the intestines give an ominous wiggle all on their own, I elect to pull on the rubber gloves first.

I exhale harshly as I try to ignore everything Mom made so glaringly obvious in that annoying way of hers.

“They’re hers, Violet. You know it. You feel it. Or you would have told them more. You’re scared and you know what’s coming when they finally track down Idun like they’re so desperate to do.”

It was during one of her longer rants, and I focused extra hard on Tim-Tam—my new doll. Tim Tam is so adorable. She almost reminds me of Anna, considering she has the same bright red hair.

“Can anyone hear me?” I ask quietly.

When I glance out the window, I see Mom at the far edge of the woods, drawing something with a stick in the dirt patch just ahead of it. When no one darts in to answer or reacts to my words, I turn back around and start talking to Anna, while I have the chance.

“Anna, if you’re listening to this, and you’re really a decayed ghost stuck in a void, go to the burial ground. They don’t know what’s happening just yet, but if ever there’s a cosmic chance for you to return, it’ll be there as soon as I finish brewing a few of these,” I say quietly, narrowing my eyes on the ingredients, even as I stay lost inside my own thoughts.

“I need you here to tell me my mother’s wrong. To tell me that being cautious with them is the smart choice, but that I don’t have to let them go. I feel like I’m going to lose Arion immediately, and I knew that before I turned myself over to him. I don’t know what I’m doing right now, Anna. Snowballing downhill without slowing down to think things through is getting me in deeper and deeper. I can see the future storm coming fast and hard, and there’s no avoiding it, much as I’d like to.”

I’m not sure why my throat tries to close up, because I promised myself I wouldn’t care so much about them.

“It’s as though they’re just starting to thaw, and little by little I can tell they’re actually starting to care…in their own individual ways. Which is…not the point of this ramble. I’m not trying to hit you up for more boy talk again just yet.”

Mom’s words erupts into my thoughts once again.

“They’re already chasing Idun, Violet. They’ll say it’s to find her before she finishes scheming whatever it is she is or isn’t scheming, but at the end of the day, either they’re chasing her, or she’s chasing them. Forever and always…until the infinitive end. Their story will never end. You’re simply another pawn who will be crushed under their weight. The very second they cared about you—if they truly cared for you at all—they would have walked away. But they didn’t, even though they know they’re bound to eternal misery by Idun’s hand. You’re just more collateral damage in their undying wake. There is no ‘after Idun’ Violet. They brought this on themselves, and I’ll be damned if I stand by and let them drag you into their hell.”

“But to be fair, my boy talk is a little intertwined with the mess going on around me right now. Mom’s a badass, and she seems scared about what my future holds, so long as I’m ‘entertaining their fickle fancies.’”

I stop chopping the intestines, carefully add a few small pieces, and promptly drop to the floor, mentally counting backwards from ten and hoping there’s no blastoff at the end.

“Most disappointingly, she’s right. At the end of the day, I’m not meant for all four of them. I get too attached to the one I’m with and start drifting from the others. It’s harder to be with four men than you probably understand. The romance of it sounds wistful and downright fantasy-approved, but the reality of it is harder, especially when they can’t seem to agree about much of anything. No longer do they even agree about me in most cases, and it’s starting to feel like we’re all working too hard for something that just simply isn’t meant to be.”

I stay on the floor, even though there hasn’t been a blastoff just yet.

“But they do agree that they should all focus on Idun and not the promise to raise a lot of really innocent people, who are now hurting for no reason at all—people who are a piece of me I’ve never known. The forgotten monsters, who are still being forgotten even with me championing them from inside the inner circle.”

Braving the bubbling pot, I stand, somewhat underwhelmed by the anticlimactic intestines now.

“The intermission is almost over, Anna. Your regularly scheduled program is coming soon. If you want to see how the more interesting story of Idun and her Monstar quad goes, you should probably come back.”

I add another piece of the intestine, swallowing down the urge to gag.

“I’m going to need you to keep me calm through the worst of it,” I add on a hopeful whisper, as I adjust my little Van Helsing knife on my ankle.