Chapter 5: Abominogenesis

Without light, Amity worked by touch. Her fingers moved slowly along the surface of her desk, taking in the grain of the wood, navigating around the beetle trap, the various porcelain bowls, and the oversized glass jar, until they finally brushed against the pile of blisterroot. She grabbed a handful, then carefully made her way to the darkest corner of her bedroom.

Faint gurgling sounds emanated from the open vat. Abominations often displayed early signs of self-awareness; this one was no different. Amity lowered the first bit of blisterroot into the batch. The gurgling subsided, replaced by a faint hiss as the rubbery herb assimilated into the abomination’s flesh. She swirled her free hand around in the vat; as the plant dissolved, the mix grew steadily more viscous. Getting the texture right was the hardest part: Too firm, and the abomination would become inflexible; too thin, and it would just be a pile of useless slime, like when Willow—

Nope, no, absolutely not: no thinking about Willow or anyone else or anything else besides this midterm project, and the essay she still needed to find time to write, and the extra credit assignment she’d begged her demonology teacher for even though her grades in that class were already flawless. Right now, the only thing that mattered was the viscosity of this semi-sentient sludge.

Once satisfied, Amity navigated back to her desk with slow, careful steps. Her stomach growled; she licked her hand free of blisterroot residue. It was, technically, edible.

Amity reached for the jar. Its silhouette loomed over the desk, visible even in the darkness. She unscrewed the cap, then plunged her slightly less dirty hand into the container; the gel squelched between her fingers, wet but solid, and the eyeballs moved whenever she touched them, and—Titan’s heart, this part never got easier.

Eventually Amity selected one eyeball from among the bunch. It squirmed between her ring and middle fingers as she felt around for another.

A loud knock sounded at her door.

“Mittens?”

“Mitteeeeens!”

With a flare of annoyance, Amity released the eye back to its horde, screwed the cap back on, and started to feel around the floor for the cover of the abomination vat. It couldn’t be exposed to light this early in the process: Abominogenesis required darkness.

“Open up, we wanna talk!”

“Amityyyyyyy!”

“We know you’re in there!”

She finally got the vat sealed, then threw open her door, blinking back the afternoon sunlight. “Would you pipe down? I’m trying to work!”

Emira affected a smile. Judging from their casual dress, the twins had cut class today. “Easy there. We just want to collect on a loan.”

“With interest, of course,” added Edric as he craned his neck to scan the room. “We’re interested in—ugh, it smells like shit in here. Are you doing drugs? Without us?”

He dropped his rehearsed tone for this self-interruption, which granted Amity a small measure of satisfaction. But his joke sent panic spiking in her chest.

“I’m doing homework.” She enunciated loudly, so that everyone could hear. “Just because you two don’t have what it takes for the abomination track—”

Em put a hand on Amity’s shoulder, silencing her. “Relax, Mittens. I disabled the spell. They can’t hear us right now.” Then she scrunched up her nose. “Ed’s right. You should open a window.”

Disabled it? How in the world…?

No. Knowing Ed and Em, they were probably lying just to get her in trouble.

“What do you want?” Amity demanded.

Ed kept searching the room. “Ah, there it is.” He flicked his fingers, and before Amity could get indignant about the twins invading her personal space, Ed’s copy of Advanced Potioncraft for Aspiring Minds floated off the floor and landed in his hand.

“We heard about what happened with the human,” Emira said.

No. Amity’s stomach sank. Absolutely not. Not now, not ever, and not with these two.

Em’s hand still weighed on Amity’s shoulder—a parody of sisterly affection. Amity backed away and shoved the arm off, smearing eyeball juice on the sleeve of Em’s jacket.

“At least, we think we did.” Ed pinched the textbook’s binding and let it hang open. “You know how rumors are.”

“Get out of my room.”

“We’re interested,” Em said, “in what actually happened between you two.”

“Aha!” Ed flipped to a page that Amity couldn’t see. “Got it.”

“We know you can be a mean-spirited snob sometimes,” Em continued, “but even for you, this is—”

Get OUT! Amity tried to yell, but instead she poured her heart and lungs into a full-throated scream. Something shattered behind her. A gooey purple hand crashed into the twins, and they tumbled into the hallway wearing matching expressions of shock. The door slammed shut as the hand returned to its demolished vat. It was dark again.

Amity breathed. In. Out. She did not trust herself to speak. Or to move. She could only hope that Emira had, by some miracle, been telling the truth—that they’d found a workaround for the spell which allowed Mother and Father to hear every sound uttered under the roof of Blight Manor—because a noise so uncouth hadn’t left Amity’s mouth since…well, probably since she’d been an infant.

It took Amity several minutes before she became aware, and horrified, of the tear pooling on the wing of her nose.

❀

Edric blinked away the spots in his vision. He reached to rub his head, which throbbed like nobody’s business, but found his right arm immobilized—stuck, he realized, to Emira. They’d gotten themselves glued to each other and to the floor, bound by a clot of purple, dripping shit. What a metaphor.

He cleared his throat. “Well, that could have gone a lot worse.”

“Seriously?” Em had taken the brunt of the blow; purple gunk oozed down her…everything. She tried to wipe her face with her free arm, but only succeeded in mixing together two different purples into a new and exciting third shade of purple. “When’s the last time we got a tantrum out of her?”

“Our fifteenth birthday party,” Ed said automatically.

“It was a rhetorical question.”

“You’re in a mood.”

Getting unstuck took ten minutes of tugging, pushing, scraping, bitching at each other, and fire magic. Ed survived with a ripped sleeve, a headache, and a ruined textbook. Em, however, still looked like an abomination herself by the time they were done.

Mittens’ little outburst had pushed them almost to the end of the corridor. Abominable stains decorated the formerly pristine hallway, with its perfect silent walls and perfect blood trim and perfect tamed carpet. Mom and Pop wouldn’t be happy about the mess—but that was a problem for tomorrow’s Edric.

“So.” Ed worked his newly unstuck arm in circles as he addressed his better half. “You wanna get back in there, make amends, see what’s actually going on?”

Emira looked at him like he’d just suggested they go frolic in the boiling rain.

“Oh, come on,” he pushed. “I know you care. Deeeeep down.”

“Sure. And if she decides to stop being a brat about it, maybe I’ll care a little more.

“I’m taking a bath,” she declared, then stalked off in the direction of the nearest washroom.

Ed clucked his tongue. “Such a defeatist.”

Emira flipped him off without looking back. The gunk on her person had mostly dried, so she didn’t leave too many new stains in her wake. And the ones she did…hm. An illusion big enough for the whole hallway would be too taxing to maintain for long, even with Em’s help. Maybe something mirrored?

Tomorrow’s Edric, he reminded himself. He’d have plenty of time to figure out a solution, as Mom and Pop wouldn’t return from their business trip for another few days. Today, he needed to fix a bigger mess.

Ed knocked on Mittens’ door. No response.

“Amity?” he tried. Probably best to lay off the nickname—for now.

“What?” Even through the closed door, her voice sounded hoarse and strangled.

Ed counted to ten in his head, for dramatic effect. Then, “Sorry.” In response to another, even more severe silence, he continued, “We’re just looking out for you. You know that, right? We’d never do anything to hurt you.”

The seconds turned into minutes. Ed began to worry that he’d run out of luck. His exposed arm itched, and he scratched at it absently.

The door creaked open. Amity had washed herself, but only hastily; purple flecks still clung to her forearms and elbows. Despite her short stature and bloodshot eyes, she loomed large in the doorway of her lair.

“That is demonstrably false,” she said.

Edric wanted to argue the point, but now probably wasn’t the time. “Can I come in?”

Amity jerked her head in the direction of the desk chair as she withdrew into the room. Ed took a seat—Titan’s tits, it smelled rancid in here, like vomit and wet mulch—while Amity climbed onto her mattress. Ed did not look at all the esoteric ingredients arranged on Mittens’ desk; he especially did not look at the jar of disembodied eyeballs, at least a dozen of which must be staring at him right now. Instead he watched Amity smear bits of abomination goo onto her perfectly made bed as she shifted around, trying to get comfortable. Finally she lay on her back, arms placed awkwardly across her chest—almost but not quite a hug. Even with the light spilling in from the hallway, Amity looked half-shrouded in shadow.

Edric waited for her to settle down before he spoke. “You and Luz were such good friends.”

Amity winced. “Don’t—I’m not—I mean, did Emira actually…?” She trailed off, and it took Edric a second to realize what she meant.

“Oh, yeah. Totally. She figured out a way to feed false info into the web without setting off the countermeasures.”

Amity looked doubtful.

Just as well. Edric cleared his throat; he’d been waiting for a chance to use this line. “I cordially invite anyone and everyone eavesdropping on this conversation, but especially stuck-up sycophantic bureaucrats whose names rhyme with ‘Rodalia’ and ‘Malador,’ to suck my—”

“Okay I believe you.”

Ed grinned. Amity, however, was not in a laughing mood; her gaze went distant. So he sighed, loudly, hoping that he sounded the right mix of exasperated and compassionate.

“Can you tell me what happened? Please?”

Mittens took her sweet time answering—and when she finally deigned to speak, she did so only haltingly, as if straining against tears, and she didn’t look at Edric. “I tried a reversal spell. On a love potion. Make it so that. I could stop being so. Fucking. Head over heels for her.”

It took Ed a second to process his sister’s confession. That was…okay, wow.

He waited for the rest of the story, but Amity had gone silent.

“I…see. And it made you hate her instead?”

“No!” Amity said quickly. “I mean, maybe. I don’t know. But it didn’t. It wasn’t me when I—” She took a deep, quaking breath. “Remember when you and Em set a feral ghost loose at one of Mom’s galas? And it possessed a bunch of people?”

Ed smiled. “Of course.”

“It was. Like that. As if this. Other person was inside me. And I couldn’t. Do anything, I just. Watched.”

Edric nodded, beginning to understand. “Uh huh. So you screwed up the spell, turned a love potion into, what, some kind of ‘tell your crush you hate her’ syrup?”

Amity flinched into herself: shoulders tensing, fingernails digging into the skin of her arm. “Yeah. Something like that.”

Oh, Mittens.

A lot of complicated emotions happened inside Edric all at once. The realization and shock that Amity had grown up, that their difference in age mattered less now than it ever had. Anger at their parents, and he didn’t even know why, just that they must be at fault for her misery, somehow. And above it all, tenderness. The sudden urge to walk across the room, brush the hair from Amity’s eyes—or fuck it, hug her, let Amity bury her tears in Edric’s chest and not in the back of her throat.

A long silence stretched between them. Ed stayed on his chair; Amity kept her eyes on the ceiling. He scratched self-consciously at his arm.

“What if…” Amity’s voice was so small, Edric almost didn’t hear it; maybe he’d imagined it.

The silence soldiered on for another moment, until he finally addressed the giraffe in the room. “Have you thought about, you know, explaining everything to her?” 

“I…” Amity started, then trailed off again. She turned over on her side, looking to Edric with unmasked desperation. “Can I ask you a favor?”