Poison Malice Twisted: Paperback

1
AISLING

It all started with the crack.

Aisling noticed it at breakfast; a jagged fissure snaking its way across the dining room wall, splitting apart the faded wallpaper. She walked over and peered inside the crack, searching the blackness within for some clue, some sense of what lay on the other side. She longed to thrust her fingers into those black depths and probe their secrets.

She itched to poke the bear. And by bear, she meant the
unfathomable darkness that yearned to swallow her.

Aisling cupped her hands behind her back, fighting against the urge. She knew if she stuck her hand inside, all she’d be left with was a bloodless stub.

And what’ll that do to my chances of becoming a world-famous juggler?

Even inside her head, Aisling was a mouthy bitch.

This particular crack was low on the wall, and it must’ve
been growing for some time. It was quite long and wide, and had already begun pulling in the furniture. It had taken a corner of the armoire already. Around the fissure, the walls were blackened, rotting away as the void gnawed at the house.

Cracks in the walls of old houses weren’t that uncommon.
When Hollythorn House had been just a house, a lattice of cracks marred several of its once pristine walls, causing Aisling’s father great concern over the house’s structural integrity. Grandmother June had brushed off her son-in-law’s protests. “These cracks are like the lines on my face.” She had rubbed her withered cheeks. “They’re part of the history of this house, the wisdom of its twilight years, the natural decay of its life. Let her grow old gracefully, just like me.”

Of course, Hollythorn wasn’t just a house anymore.

The crack’s presence was a bitter end to a beautiful moment, one of the first they’d shared together in months. Bethany – the younger by six years – was barely talking to Aisling anymore. Call it teenage hormones or post-apocalypse depression, I’m calling it ‘my kid sister is a pain-in-my-ass.’ Before the war, they had always shared everything. Bethany would take the train into the city to stay with Aisling for the weekend, and Aisling would sneak her into clubs and fill her teenage head with strawberry daiquiris and big dreams for the future.

Now, Bethany spent hours sitting in the blue drawing room in the east wing, watching out the bay window as the house swayed over the edge of the precipice, eyes unblinking as lightning snaked from the swirling miasma below and crashed against the icy sky. Aisling knew she had to do something to bring her back from the edge. Bethany was the only family she had left.

That morning, Aisling found just the thing – a jar of strawberry jam hidden behind the beans in the pantry. She thought they’d used up the last of the jams two months ago, and it was supposed to be several months before another jar appeared. Grandmother June’s pantry enchantment had been slowing down over the last year. Food now took months to replenish, and Bethany’s gardening experiments in the frozen greenhouse attached to the kitchen garden had been a failure. You couldn’t grow strawberries in sub-zero temperatures without sunlight, so their dreams of daiquiris in the drawing room remained only dreams.

Aisling clutched the jar to her chest, stroking the lid as
though it were a precious jewel.

She set the dining table with the nice china and collected
some fabric flowers from Grandmother June’s sewing room – which today contained an ornate staircase that had never been there before – to place in a vase in the center. She even opened one of their few remaining bottles of grape juice and poured them each a glass. Widdershins – their grandmother’s soot-black kitten with white socks who’d survived in the house as long as they had – crept inside and curled up on the rug under the table.

Everything looked perfect, like a scene from their childhood – one of Grandmother June’s make-believe fairy picnics. Aisling fingered the jam jar and had to bite her lip to resist throwing it across the room.

I want cocktails and dancing. I want friends with mundane problems – cheating partners, bosses making lewd comments, secret drug addictions. I want a mortgage and a vacation to the beach and fucking student loan payments. I want to go back to the club and have my Dom spank me until I’m crying. I want little white pills to transport me somewhere else.

I want out of this house.

Instead, our world has shrunk so small that I’m excited about a jar of jam.

Bethany entered the dining room just as Aisling was folding the napkins. She tossed her brown ringlets over her shoulder. Bethany had their mother’s unruly hair and petite build, her heart-shaped face and pixie features, whereas Aisling took more after Grandmother June – olive skin, narrow nose, huge brown eyes, long everything; long face, long legs, long fingers good for scratching down her Dom’s back…

No. Don’t start thinking about kink, or you’ll be excusing yourself for the bathroom, and Bethany needs you.

“What’s all this?” Bethany peered at the table. “Is that jam? I didn’t think we had any jam.”

“I found some at the back of the pantry. I thought we’d have a celebration.”

“What are we celebrating?” Bethany pulled out her chair and started spreading a thick layer of jam across her cracker. Aisling wanted to tell her to use less, to ration the jam so it would stretch further, but she didn’t have the heart. Not when Bethany was smiling her first real smile in months.

Instead, Aisling sat down opposite her sister, spread an even thicker layer on her own cracker, and took a big bite.

The jam was almost thick enough to disguise the stale taste of the cracker. Aisling took a swig of juice. Oh, it was heavenly, like swallowing a rainbow. Maybe she didn’t need little white pills after all. Maybe she just needed to count her fucking blessings.

Jam, check. Sister, check. Cat, check. Two available hands to flick the bean as much as I like. Check and check.

Aisling glanced up at the calendar she had pinned to the
wall. She’d made it from pages torn from a book on butterflies she found in the library. It was a pretty crude tally, just numbered boxes with crosses through them over pictures of red admirals and holly blues. She didn’t even bother with the days of the week anymore. What was the point?

“We’re celebrating survival.” Aisling made a quick calculation in her head. “For thirteen hundred and twenty-two days, we’ve kept this house safe.”

“What good is survival without life?” Bethany set down her cracker. She stared at a spot behind Aisling’s head. “We have nothing inside these walls but a library full of books about things we’ll never experience.”

“The world in those books doesn’t exist anymore,” Aisling
said.

“I don’t care!” Bethany slammed down her glass so hard,
grape juice splashed across the tablecloth. Widdershins sprung to his feet in alarm and darted from the room. “I want to swim in the ocean again, or feel grass between my toes, or fall in love. At least you got to leave home and get a job and a boyfriend. I never got those things, and now I never will.”

“Be grateful for small mercies.” Aisling squeezed her knees together as she thought of Guy leading her around on a chain at the club with his long black coat swishing, and his snakebite piercings bobbing as his mouth curled up in a wicked smirk. Guy, who refused to leave the city with her because he wanted one last party before the end of the world. “It’s more to miss.”

“I can’t stand seeing the same walls day in and day out. We’re prisoners here, Aisling, as surely as we would be if they got in and took us. We might as well be dead.”

“Don’t say that.” Aisling’s heart hammered. The jam on her tongue tasted too sugary, too sticky. She tried to swallow, but it wouldn’t go down.

Bethany’s thoughts were too similar to hers.

We have each other.

“Why not? It’s true. Grandmother June has trapped us here, and for what? To save this house? She loved Hollythorn House more than she loved us—oh, no…” Bethany’s gaze landed on the wall behind Aisling. Without turning around, Aisling knew from her sister’s stricken expression what she would see: the dark fissure slowly opening across the wall.

The crack.

“Bethany, I’m sorry.” Aisling squeezed her eyes shut, fighting back the urge to cry.

“I’ll get some boards.” Bethany rose from the table, pushing her half-eaten cracker away. Aisling reached for her, but Bethany ducked around her outstretched fingers. As she swung open the heavy door to the hallway, Aisling glimpsed her sister’s eyes – they were empty. If Bethany didn’t feel anything about the crack…

Her own eyes pricking with tears, Aisling cleared away the dishes and ate the rest of her sister’s cracker. It tasted like cardboard. She pushed the dining table closer to the door, away from the crack. Bethany returned a few minutes later, carrying several pieces of a mahogany bookshelf they’d chopped up last month.

“This is the last of it.” Bethany dropped the wood in front of the crack and pulled out her hammer, all business now. Her cheeks were dry of tears, her eyes dead. Her no-nonsense demeanor frightened Aisling more than her outburst of emotion. Bethany had been morose for weeks now, but this was different. This was as cold as the winter outside.

“Let me help.” Aisling picked up one of the wooden boards. Bethany snatched it from her hands.

“I’ll take care of this. You get the sealing stones.” Bethany held the wood up to the wall and started nailing it in place, her strikes cool, efficient, the sound jolting through Aisling like thunder.

Not wanting to upset her sister again, Aisling ran from the
room. She found the sealing stones in Grandmother June’s desk in the blue drawing room, alongside other magical implements she didn’t know how to use. The drawing room was toward the front of the house, overlooking what would have been the front yard but was now a barren, icy field between the house and the iron fence encircling the property. They’d chosen this room as their safe store, as it was furthest from the known locations of the void, and would be one of the last rooms to crack. Aisling grabbed the velvet bag of stones from the desk drawer and ran back to the dining room.

“Bethany, I’ve got them—”

Aisling’s heart stopped beating. Bethany wasn’t standing
behind the table. Instead, she lay facedown on the floor in front of the wall. Her face was turned toward the doorway, frozen in a look of such intense horror that Aisling’s stomach turned.

Her sister’s left arm had been completely torn away.

Bethany wasn’t bleeding. The burning darkness of the void had staunched the wound.

Her severed arm was nowhere to be seen.

Aisling turned from her sister and threw up on the rug.

“Bethany?” Her sister’s name dragged against her raw throat. Aisling dropped to her knees and pressed her fingers to her sister’s wrist. Bethany’s skin felt clammy. She had no pulse. Aisling rolled Bethany over and tilted her head back, trying to remember everything she’d learned about mouth-to-mouth on that first-aid course she’d taken for work. But it was a lifetime ago now and she couldn’t exactly get a refresher course.

Bethany’s glassy eyes stared back at her, open but no longer seeing, and Aisling knew it was too late. Whether she was dead from the shock of losing her arm or from making contact with the void, Aisling would never be able to ask.

Behind Bethany, the fissure had opened even further along the wall – a gaping black tear all the way from the gilded portrait of their grandfather above the fireplace to the small cameo of a cat along the right edge of the wall. The gap at the midpoint was the breadth of Aisling’s outstretched hands, and it tapered to a point at the ends – like a pair of black lips curling up in a mocking grin. The two boards Bethany had nailed up were its crooked teeth.

On the edges of the crack, inky black tendrils curled
outward, giving off an acrid, smoky stench.

Bethany’s hammer lay on the thick carpet in front of her, a
single nail poking from the board above it, only half nailed in. One of her shoes had rolled off under the table. A thin trail of black smoke rose from the insole.

Did she accidentally touch the void, or did she throw herself into it?

Both answers sucked.

Aisling sank to her knees in front of the wall, her heart
breaking inside her chest. The pain of her loss was physical – a searing heat burning through her body, as though she’d been set on fire. She pounded her fists against the floor, her cries of desperation echoing through the heavy, silent house.

Seconds, minutes or hours later, Aisling rolled over, her
eyelids drooping, her nose stinging and her face sticky with tears. The grief ebbed, still sitting beneath her skin but no longer burning her alive. She rubbed her eyes, and her gaze fell on her sister’s shoe, sitting empty and lonely where she’d left it under the dining table.

Now I’m the only one left.