The Last Warning
"When I die, Lily, don't let me into the house."
I stopped smoothing the blanket over my mother's knees. For a moment, the bedroom held only the soft hiss of the oxygen machine and the rain tapping against the window. Rose lay beneath the quilt she had stitched when I was little, her thin fingers curled around its faded flowers. I had spent the afternoon watching those fingers, grateful whenever they moved.
"You're already home, Mom." I tried to smile. "You wanted to come home, remember?"
"Look at me."
Something in Rose's voice made me obey. My mother's eyes were clear, fixed on me with an urgency that hadn't been there when the hospice nurse left an hour earlier. I pulled my chair closer. At thirty-one, I still wanted someone else to tell me what to do when my mother was frightened.
Rose reached for my wrist. "Whatever you hear after I'm gone, whatever you see, you must remember that I died in this bed."
I swallowed. "Please don't."
"I should have told you sooner."
Downstairs, a cupboard closed. Ivy was making the hot chocolate Rose had requested, measuring marshmallows with the seriousness only a ten-year-old could bring to such a task. I pictured my daughter choosing Rose's favorite mug and felt an almost unbearable need to keep this room exactly as it was until she returned.
"We can talk tomorrow," I said.
Rose's grip tightened. "There won't be a tomorrow for me."
I looked toward the bedside table, where the nurse's number lay beneath a bottle of medicine. Rose caught the movement and shook her head. "They can keep me comfortable. They can't stop this." With a trembling hand, she drew back her sleeve.
The mark sat on the inside of her forearm: a dark circle broken by three crooked lines that narrowed toward its center. I had seen it once before, months ago. Rose had called it a burn, and I had believed her because my mother spent so much time tending candles.
"This is what's killing me."
I leaned closer. The skin wasn't scarred. The lines seemed too precise, too deeply black, as though something had written beneath the surface. I reached toward it, but Rose pulled her arm away.
"Our family is cursed," Rose whispered. "When the person carrying it dies, it passes to the oldest in the next generation."
I stared at her. I knew my mother practiced witchcraft. I had grown up around dried herbs and bowls of salt, had learned to cleanse my crystals at Rose's kitchen table. But nothing in those memories explained the fear in my mother's eyes.
"You mean me?"
Rose nodded.
The oxygen machine hissed between us.
"Once you're thirty, it has a year. If you're already older when it reaches you, the year starts immediately." Rose struggled for a breath. "Mine ends tonight."
I stood so abruptly the chair scraped the floor. "Then tell me how to stop it. Tell me what you need."
"The attic. There's a cedar box beneath the little window. My journal is inside." Rose watched me carefully. "Read it. Even when you want to shut it and pretend you never found it."
A gentle knock came from the bedroom door.
I turned, grateful for the interruption. "Come in, baby."
"Lily?"
My mother's voice came from the hallway.
Not a voice like hers. Rose's voice, warm and steady, the way it had sounded before pain made every sentence an effort.
I looked back at the bed.
Rose hadn't moved. Her lips were parted around a shallow breath, and her fingers had gone rigid against the quilt.
"Open the door, sweetheart," the voice said. "My hands are full."
My own hand had already started toward the handle. I stopped.
The clear quartz pendant beneath my shirt pressed against my chest as I drew a breath. I closed my fingers around it, feeling its familiar edges through the fabric.
"Stay here," Rose whispered.
I backed toward the bed. The door remained closed, its brass handle still. I waited for footsteps, for Ivy to laugh, for anything that might make the voice belong to an ordinary explanation.
"I brought your tea."
Rose made a small, broken sound.
I remembered evenings when my mother carried two mugs upstairs, remembered that exact sentence. My stomach turned.
"What is that?"
"It knows what you miss."
The knocking stopped.
I stood listening until my legs began to shake. Then Rose tugged at my sleeve, and I sank onto the mattress beside her.
"Keep your crystal on," Rose said. "And listen carefully. If you don't end this, after you, it goes to Ivy."
"No."
"Her year won't begin until thirty. You have time to keep it from ever reaching her."
I shook my head, tears falling onto the quilt. Thirty sounded impossibly distant when I thought of Ivy downstairs in her unicorn pajamas. It sounded terribly close when I remembered how quickly my own childhood had disappeared.
"Why didn't you tell me?"
Rose's eyes filled. "I thought I could finish it before you had to know."
There were a hundred questions I needed answered. What had started it? Why my family? How long had Rose been fighting while I called to complain about bills or ask what to cook for dinner? But my mother's hand was cooling in mine, and every question felt like time taken from something more important.
"Mom, please."
Rose lifted our joined hands a little. "Find the journal."
I nodded because my mother needed me to.
"I love you," Rose breathed.
"I love you too."
I waited for the next breath.
The machine kept working. Rain kept touching the glass. Beneath my fingers, my mother's hand became still.
Then a sharp heat opened inside my wrist.
I gasped and pushed back my sleeve. Three black lines emerged beneath my skin, curling into a broken circle. On the bed, Rose's mark had faded to nothing.
I pressed my thumb over the new mark, hard enough to hurt. It stayed.
From downstairs came the scrape of a chair.
"Mom?" Ivy called.
I raised my head.
"Grandma's at the front door."