The Scarlet Thread Read online

  Prologue

  The old woman appeared out of nowhere and limped down Templeton street with the support of a gnarled branch. Her skin was burned and her eyes bloodshot. Her matted hair writhed like a nest of snakes, and her floppy, basset hound ears disappeared into the folds of the dirty rags she was wearing. Protruding from her back were a pair of leathery bat wings.

  The woman split into two with a great ripping noise that echoed through the cookie-cutter houses of the suburban subdivision. The second woman split again into a third—a smaller, older, and uglier woman with a vicious gleam in her eye. The three of them stopped in front of an ordinary looking house with blue trim, gazing into the windows.

  “You can’t be serious,” Clotho said to her sisters, looking around disapprovingly. Lachesis waved her hands in the air and together they peered at the apparition; thousands of slender, silver threads that gleamed like stars against the dark night sky.

  “Look sisters!” she said, pointing at one particular thread. It glowed with golden light, pulsating with power. “This is the one. This one is special.”

  “You said that about the last one,” Atropos snorted. “Where is she now?”

  “But can’t you see how this one weaves and connects? This one will change everything. This one will restore balance.”

  Clotho sighed and shrugged her shoulders. “It’s not like we have any other options. He is getting too powerful, I doubt we’ll last another century.”

  “But we must,” Atropos said. “If he finds us—”

  “That’s what the girl is for,” Lachesis said, “in case we don’t make it. A final precaution.”

  “We’ll have to share our powers with her,” Clotho said thoughtfully. “It’s against the rules.”

  Atropos cackled, “Do you think he worries about following the rules? Anything is permitted if it brings him power.”

  “Then it’s agreed,” Lachesis said. “She was born three days ago. It’s time.”

  Together they snuck towards the front of the house. Clotho whispered a spell and the door unlocked with a click. They shuffled inside, and then up the stairs. Past the bedroom, where the parents were soundly sleeping, and into the nursery. As one body, they peered forward to look at the infant in her crib. She was awake, and watching them with silent, wide eyes.

  Clotho went first, pulling energy from the air and spinning it into a fine thread that shone in the moonlight. Lachesis took the ends and measured out a length in front of her, holding it up to her sisters for approval. They nodded, and together they chanted.

  In the midst of darkness, light;

  In the midst of death, life;

  In the midst of chaos, order.

  In the midst of order, chaos;

  Thus has it ever been,

  Thus is it now,

  and Thus shall it always be.

  The thread turned dark red as it was infused with their magic. Then Atropos took a pair of golden scissors from some secret pocket in her dirty robes. It sparkled in the dim light. Lachesis held the thread out over the crib and Atropos snipped it at both ends. Then Clotho took the scarlet thread and tied it around the infant’s left wrist.

  “What about the shears?” Atropos asked.

  “We’ll hide them somewhere,” Clotho announced. Somewhere he will never look.”

  “How will she find them?” Lachesis asked.

  “If she’s really the one,” Clotho said, “she’ll know where they are and reclaim them when the time is right.”

  “And if she isn’t?” Atropos asked.

  “Then we are doomed.”

  The baby started to cry, but now it was alone in an empty room, waving her tiny wrists.

  1

  The end of my world began like any other day. I woke up on the thin, dirty pad on the cement shelf of my tiny room, and let my fingertips pass through the streams of light that fell through the ten-inch window. It was a little game I played with myself, a way to check the weather. To prepare myself mentally for the day ahead. If my fingers cast shadows against the wall, I knew it would be sunny. There were no shadows that day. I brushed my teeth and put on the only clean clothes I had, a Sound of Music T-shirt and pair of thick black stockings. We could only do laundry once a week and I was down to my last pair of underwear. My dark hair was tangled but I’d stopped combing it years ago. Nobody inside the institution cared about that stuff anymore.

  It was all girls in my wing, except for the guards, and you did not want to look pretty for the guards. I’ve seen girls make that mistake before. Afterwards, a committee would decide that the oversexed, “crazy” teenage girls had seduced the pot-bellied, grown men with their wanton ways and alluring nubile bodies. “They were asking for it,” the committee would say, and the guards would get off with a slap on the wrist, and the girls would sob at night for a few months, and then things would go back to normal.

  It would be different if this were an ordinary school. Maybe even a normal psychiatric hospital. But the JDRI—Juvenile Detention Reform Institution, or as we liked to call it, “Juicy Dames Reliably Incarcerated”—was neither. This was the place parents sent their children when they couldn’t stand to look at them anymore. That’s how I ended up here anyway.

  I took a minute to scrub the floor with a damp old rag—one of my most prized possessions—until the cracked stone floor practically gleamed. It was easier to see the spiders that way. I hated spiders. I’m sure I’ve swallowed hundreds of them in here. I imagined them crawling into my mouth when I was sleeping. All the ones I didn’t spot coming and flatten with a shoe or a book. Maybe that’s why my throat always feels so scratchy and tight. I’m filling up with dead spiders.

  I wish I could tell you I lived in a dungeon, with rusty bars across an open space so the administration could watch us sleep, or crumbling stone walls with chains hanging in the corners… but the JDRI wasn’t that bad. We were fed well. There was a big library of books for us to read. We went out daily to do community labor projects like picking up trash from the highways. We were encouraged to study and get a High School Equivalency Diploma before we turned eighteen and were released to our own care. They even gave us $10 of pocket money a week to spend during the weekend shopping trips.

  Things didn’t have to get ugly, if we followed the rules. And I always followed the rules. Which could have made me unpopular in here. Most of the other girls really were delinquents. Some of them were hard-ass bitches. But there weren’t many murderers. Just me.

  There were no mirrors in JDRI, but I’d stolen a metal tray for that purpose and quickly checked my reflection in its dull, scratched surface. Each month we got a pile of donated clothing, but it was mostly crap that either fit like a parachute, or was meant for toddlers. I’d learned years ago to make my own clothes. I enjoyed feeling the cold, hard metal of the needle against my skin, the repetitive motion of stitching fabric together. Even the unavoidable pricks of pain brought me a perverse pleasure. I’d watch the blood bead up from the wound before sucking it clean.

  My favorite sweater was a patchwork of different shades of inky, dark squares of colorless void. I made plain gray skirts that hung to my knees, with cute or funny T-shirts sewn in ironically. My cherished all-star high-tops were black and frayed—I’d saved up for months to buy them two years ago and I only took them off to sleep. I wrapped a black scarf around my neck and pulled my slender, black leather gloves over my pale fingers. I bought them in a vintage shop last year, and wore them even in the summer time.

  The only piece of color in my dark ensemble was the chunk of brightly colored lego blocks I wore around my neck. My little brother was working on it the day he died. It’s unfinished, so I’ll never know what it was meant to be. I wore it to remind myself of what life had
been like, before my curse ruined everything.

  I grabbed a pair of dark aviator glasses before leaving my room. People say the eyes are the windows to the soul, and I didn’t want anybody to know I was home. Pretty eyes are an invitation for people to start talking with you. Mine are teal blue, but with a dark ring around the edges that makes them distinctive. When I was young, people would say “my, what extraordinary eyes you have!” and then pat me on the head or give me candy. But that was before my brother died. Before they found out I’d killed him.

  The air outside was crisp and cool—October in the Pacific Northwest. Although it was overcast, the gray light was sharp and blinding. With my sunglasses, black clothes and tanged dark hair, I looked like a psychopath. Which is just how I wanted it.

  It helped fuel the rumors that people spread about me. That I’d butchered my family. That I’d torn the heart out of my boyfriend and eaten it. Jessie, my best friend in this place, had even started a rumor that I could kill someone just by looking at them. If I pulled down my shades even a little bit, the younger girls ran away in terror—and some of the older ones, too.

  Nobody knew my real story except Mrs. Taylor, JDRI’s principal and warden, and Jessie. I’d told her all about it our first year here, when we were both nine. That was almost eight years ago. Even the guards usually left me alone. They didn’t know the truth. That I felt guilty even for the spiders I killed. That the sight of blood made me queasy. That I was basically a huge wimp.

  Unlike Jessie, who was actually a badass. She worked out in the gym facility, was just about the tallest girl in the school, and met all obstacles with a flurry of punches. She ended up here after breaking her step-father’s nose. Most people thought Jessie and I were together, another notion we did nothing to correct. Better the other girls think I belong to Jessie than constantly getting hit on by all the lesbos in JDRI.

  “Kaidance!” Mrs. Taylor shouted my name during breakfast announcements. I froze, a half-eaten English muffin hanging out of my mouth. “You’ve got a visitor. Come with me after breakfast.”

  The whispering began immediately. There were 247 girls in the North Wing of JDRI, and weeks could go by without a single one of them getting a visitor. We were the unwanted dregs of society.

  My parents hadn’t come to see me in almost three years. During that last visit, I believed they might be coming to take me home. Maybe they’d finally forgiven me. Instead, they told me they were moving, and it would be hard for them to make the trip any longer. The following year just about killed me. It wasn’t that I was hurting myself, not deliberately. I just couldn’t be bothered to eat, to bathe, to roll out of bed. You could set me in a corner and I’d be furniture until you moved me somewhere else. I smoked whenever I could find a cigarette, and I was so thin you could hear my bones jangle together. They’d tried drugs, counseling, punishment—nothing worked.

  Jessie had saved me, by bringing me Sarah. She was nine, the same age we’d been when we got to JDRI, and had dark brown eyes and golden hair that reminded me of my brother. She had severe panic attacks and wild tantrums that were like a tempest. If something set her off, she would tear down the fucking building. Sarah had all the rage I felt inside but never allowed myself to release. Sarah was Kali, my little goddess of destruction. I became one of the few things that soothed her, and caring for her brought me out of my depression.

  “A visitor, huh?” Jessie kicked me under the table. “Expecting anybody?”

  I snorted, “Yeah it’s probably just my fairy godmother, come to take me to the ball.”

  “It could be a handsome prince,” Jessie smirked.

  “I’d settle for five minutes with the gardener,” I joked.

  Sarah cracked a smile, even though she wasn’t into boys yet. She was used to us talking about them. Then she raised her eyebrows at me, asking a silent question.

  And that ignited a tiny part of my brain apparently still reserved for hope. I hadn’t felt it in a long time, so I was kind of surprised it showed up at all. It could be my parents. After all, who else would it be? Nobody else even knew I existed. But I clenched my fists and squashed the thought. Hope was dangerous. Hope didn’t belong in JDRI. One brief moment of hope could lead to months of disappointment.

  After breakfast I was excused from chores and followed Mrs. Taylor into the guest lounge. It wasn’t like those things you see in prisons, with the glass wall and people speaking through phones. This room was actually one of the nicest places in the building. We used it for parties and game nights. They wanted to show visitors how comfortable we were in here. There were plush couches and antique leather chairs, but I knew they were just for show.

  We weren’t allowed to sit on them unless we had a visitor. In the center of the room was a line of tables. Mrs. Taylor had me sit down at one of these and wait for my guest. I scanned the bookshelf for any new titles but was disappointed, as I had been the last three times I checked. With a sigh I grabbed a dog-eared copy of a self-help book I’d read a dozen times and flipped through it.

  When the door opened and my visitor stepped inside, I took a sharp breath. He was wearing a tailored gray suit with a blood red tie. His hair was slicked back away from his light blue eyes. He saw me and flashed a dazzling smile, with teeth that were too white and straight to be real. He could have easily been one of the models Jessie and I drooled over a few weeks ago, when we found a GQ magazine in the recycling.

  In his presence, the guest lounge, which I’d always thought of as classy, was revealed for what it really was: cheap furniture with a faux-antique gloss. Mostly mass-produced stuff from bargain stores. The suit this guy was wearing looked like it was worth more than everything else in this room put together.

  He sat down across from me, sliding into the chair with the grace and power of an athlete, and very carefully set a polished leather briefcase on the table. I clenched my teeth together to make sure my jaw wasn’t hanging open. I’d never been this close to a guy this hot before.

  “Kaidance Monroe.” It wasn’t a question, so I nodded my head.

  “Would you mind…?” he tapped at the corner of his eye.

  I removed my sunglasses. Suddenly self-conscious, I reached up and smoothed out my tangled hair.

  “And the gloves,” he said, nodding at my hands.

  “I don’t take these off,” I said.

  “Indulge me,” he said, “I’ve come a long way to see you.”

  I considered refusing, but now I was curious. Who was this guy? Whatever he was doing here, I wanted to know what he had to say. I pulled off the gloves, one by one, and set them on the table. His eyes flickered to my arm, drawn to the dark red line that wrapped around my wrist like a bracelet. I pulled the sleeve of my sweater up to hide it, my cheeks heating up. It looked like a scar, and people usually thought I’d done it to myself—that I’d tried to cut my whole hand off. I’d had it as long as I can remember, but I hated having to talk about it.

  He smiled at me again, and my heart fluttered. His skin was perfect and smooth. He looked way too young to be dressed like a stock broker. He reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out a small notepad.

  “You were admitted nine years ago after the death of your little brother, after a court found you guilty of his murder, is that right?”

  I shifted uncomfortably in my seat. So much for prince charming. I hadn’t talked about my brother’s death for years. Why bring it up now? I realized I still had a smile on my face—an involuntary response to the one he’d given me—and I let it drop. For some reason, I didn’t want this guy to think I was a psychopath.

  “But you always maintained, according to court records and the psychologist’s report, that you were innocent, that you were trying to save him, not push him in front of the car. Correct?”

  “Not that it did me any good,” I muttered. He nodded sympathetically, making a note with an expensive looking pen.

  “And the reason that the court decided against you,” he said, reading his n
otes, “was that you told your parents about the red Toyota that was going to kill your brother several months before it happened. Since they couldn’t understand how you’d known the color or model of the car in advance, it was concluded that you must have planned out your brothers’ death and taken action when you saw a car that would support your claims. As the psychologist put it, you were acting out for attention and desperate to make your parents believe you by “proving” your lies. You were tried as a minor—you were only nine years old after all—and they decided you’d be better off in facility where you could get the supervision and care you needed.”

  “My parents couldn’t even look at me when they said goodbye,” I said. “They just left me here.” I felt emotions that had taken years to bury begin to stir in my stomach. Not good. What did this guy want? Why was he bringing up all this ancient history? Were they going to open an inquiry? Would they re-open the case? I let my fingers curl around my lego necklace. It had become a security blanket of sorts. Touching it reminded me that bad things could result from good intentions.

  He reached down and opened the latches of his briefcase, and lifted it up slowly. I squealed when a gray kitten with crystal blue eyes crawled out. I hadn’t seen a kitten since I was a little girl. I loved kittens. And for just a second, I let down my defenses. Before my brain knew what my hands were doing, I reached down and scooped the kitten to my chest. I rubbed my cheek against the soft fur on his back.

  Then I realized, with horror, that I’d taken off my gloves. I felt the warmth of the tiny body through my pale fingers, and that’s when I saw the vision. My face scrunched together, trying to block it out, but it filled my brain—until nothing else existed but the kitten and the hammer. The strong blows crushing its poor little skull. The blood. I yelped and dropped the kitten, my heart pounding. It meowed and sunk its razor sharp little claws into my arm, holding on until I could set him down on the table gently.

  My visitor watched this whole exchange smugly, a smile playing on his lips. And that’s when I knew, this had been a test. And I’d just failed.