The Psychic Legacy

Chapter 20: Alone

"Slipped into your memory?" Polly echoed. Her brow was folded deep over her rapidly-blinking eyes. "How the hell...?"

Something about Lillian's expression seemed guarded. "It can happen when you maintain such a close connection. We shouldn't keep this up for much longer. I'll try to be quick..." She rubbed at the bridge of my nose.

I watched her and wondered what it was like, reliving the last days of your life. It couldn't have been easy...

She started up again with a sigh. "I knew I had fucked up big. So, I decided that I would be the one to fix it. I made the mess, I'd clean it up. So I continued to, ah, borrow from The Gathered's archives as I tried to figure out what it was, what it wanted, and what I could do to stop it.

"It wasn't easy, of course. It took more than a few tries. But the Malix—as I had learned it was called by then—didn't like that. It—"

"Wait a second," Polly said, pointing her finger at her sister. "What in the fuck is a... a Malix?"

I leaned—floated—closer. I had a slight idea of what a Malix was—from how Matilda had spoken of it, I had figured it was the 'proper' name for whatever the Beast was—but beyond that, I knew nothing more.

"A Malix," Lillian began, "is the physical manifestation of a curse. It acts as both its will and its guardian, protecting it from being destroyed."

Polly stared back. "So a... a Malix isn't a symptom of a curse..."

"It is the curse," Lillian said, finishing her sentence. "And that's exactly why it didn't like me fucking with it. The more I tried to stop it, the more it tried to stop me. And that's when the attacks started."

Polly swallowed hard. This was the part that she lived through, alongside Lillian, though she had, at the time, been blind to what was really happening—she had just thought Lillian had lost her mind.

Lillian paused for a moment and closed her eyes. When she spoke again, her voice was small. "In the beginning it just tried to scare me off—it hurt me, sure, but nothing dire, nothing life threatening, nothing I couldn't heal on my own. But as time went on, it got tired of playing around. The first real attack was...." She squeezed her eyes shut as the memories flared up. "Brutal."

I caught a glimpse of her memory again. So much blood... The scene tried to pull me in but I did all I could to fight it off. I had enough bloody memories of my own, I didn't need to see hers too.

Eventually Lillian's expression relaxed and the pressing memory faded. Her voice was still soft as she continued. "I lost so much blood that I passed out. Fortunately, Luc came looking for me when I wasn't answering my phone. But he also found my collection of stolen items from The Gathered. Objects and books about dark magic that I had been using to learn about the curse and how to stop it...

"When I woke up, in The Gathered's care, everything had blown up. They knew about the stolen goods. They knew about my relationship with Luc. The only thing they didn't know about was that they were both related, and I wasn't about to explain it to them.

"The only thing was I couldn't explain it to Luc, either. He knew something was wrong. He wasn't stupid—he'd noticed the change in me after I released the curse. He saw the fear, the paranoia in me. And then, when he found me bleeding out surrounded by all that stuff... He began to fear the worst. But his idea of 'worst' didn't even touch on how bad it actually was. He thought I was practicing this stuff... And I-I couldn't tell him any different."

Her voice shook then, for the first time since she had begun her story. The same worry from before stirred inside me.

She cleared her throat—my throat—and continued, her voice softer than before. "He broke up with me, then. The Gathered kicked me out, too. Matilda couldn't even do it herself—she sent one of her lackeys to deliver the news while I was in the hospital... And so, I was alone."