We Ate the Dark

by Mallory Pearson

In Frankie’s traitorous memory, the empty space her sister took up blinked open and caught her watching.

She had done it all alone. Why couldn’t she do it again? Because she was tired. Because Sofia’s absence was still a monster that ate her up inside, no matter how starved and thin it became. And with Marya there—at least there was someone to witness her, a place to put the frustration.

The fact of the matter, the real meat of her hurt, was that she was always leaving something behind, even when she came home.

Soul-bonded. No one knew her like her women. No one would ever see into her like them, past the walls of her heart.

Pink for the bond we share, everlasting. White for a blank and purifying slate. Out with the old, in with the new.

wasn’t it nice, to see a physical representation of your hope in front of you?

Maybe she was hunting, now that it seemed it was the one thing left she could do. Her sister was dead, her mother was dead, the world was dying and breathing over and over again. But there was a killer walking the earth—she could ruin them.

that was the problem with pain—she hoped it would make her harder, ready her for inevitable collapse. She was still waiting to feel like it had worked.

“It’s never what they really want, Finder chick,” Mab said. “It just makes them both hurt more.”

“Fine. We’ll seek it out, since you crave death so badly.” She shouldered the door open. “But let’s have breakfast first.”

How she had understood in that moment that everything she wanted was just so slightly out of her reach. That it would never be hers to love, only hers to lose, and it would always be her burden to bear.

People loved to say things like this to her, always had—you look like your mother, you sound like your sister, you remind us of the dead, you’re here and they’re not.

“It’s like all this time, you’ve been standing in the dark, and now you’ve stepped into the light. It’s disorienting. We’ve all been there before, seen power like that.”

Control was a myth. There was no way to stabilize herself in this moment, everyone sliding away from her, away, away, away.

“You have to suspend your doubts and let your thoughts follow a bisect—death, and the rift before it. A fissure between us and the other side. We have tried to peer into that realm,”

“You are her mirror image, and no one can take that from you. You’ll remember her and spill that memory into everything.”

“I mean it. You have so many people here to fill in the gaps,” Marya said, fervently. “You can give parts of her to me and I’ll keep them safe. I don’t hate you at all, Frankie. I mean that, even if you don’t believe it.”

They weren’t my family. They didn’t watch me shift and change, didn’t know me in my most vulnerable time and still love me in the end.

Because she was supposed to be helping, not hurting. Because keeping it in made her feel like all she could do was inhale until her chest threatened to split. Because maybe she’d never seen anything at all but the projection of her own desires.

“Allow me to teach you something. Pain demands pain. Suffering demands suffering. Everything is an exchange, power given for power. That’s how magic works. You can’t ask for something without giving something away.”