The Girl Who Would Be King(155)

I throw my fist into her with everything I’ve got and it sends her shooting backward with incredible velocity, back into the sharp wreckage of her mother’s old car. I follow her into the charred metal and pin her down, some of her mother’s bones bright in the sun beside us. I put my hands around her neck.

It feels wrong and also right, and I can’t seem to help myself from squeezing harder.

Tears slide out of the corners of my eyes hitting her on the face and in her dark blonde curls. “Please Lola, please,” I beg, wishing that none of it had to be this way, begging her to just slow down, to listen, to talk to me, to just stop and be still. “Lola please,” I say my voice breaking with sobs. “Please, just let it go.” And as I say this I realize what the women meant by ‘it cannot be unlinked without desire.’ Lola has to want to give it up. It’s the only way for me to kill her, it’s the only way either of us can be killed, we have to want it. We have to truly want to be released from The Morrigan.



•

She’s crying and her tears are falling on me, enough so that I can’t tell which are hers and which are mine. Behind her, miraculously unburned, is the Dodgers cap I put on my mother the day I killed her. I blink at it. A deep and powerful sadness seeps into my bones. Bonnie is begging me to let go. I have no interest in letting go for her, but for me, suddenly for me, it feels like there’s nothing to hold onto anyway. This power has been killing me almost since the day I took it and I just don’t want it anymore. Letting go seems like the most powerful thing I could do.



And so I do.



I just let it all go.



And it feels glorious.



°

“Please just let it go, Lola,” I cry, our faces damp with tears. And then suddenly…

…she does.

And once she’s powerless, my hands just squeeze right through her neck, and her head comes off in my hands. Her whole body goes limp under me – the struggle and life just falling out of her, the light in her eyes going dark so quickly I can’t believe it. I collapse backward onto the melted seat, Lola’s head in my hands, her body sitting next to me in the car like some kind of unfunny comedy routine. There are so many things to think about. My baby, and Lola’s death, and what any and all of it means. I’ve got so many emotions from elation to sorrow that there’s no time to stop on just one. And then it overcomes me…



°•

At first it’s just unbelievable power washing over and through me.

I feel like I can eat the sun.

No, not only eat the sun, but eat it and crave more, snacking on stars and whole planets afterwards.

The blood that I have felt since I can remember, the blood boiling through my veins is so intense, so palpable, that I feel it’s going to start leaking out through my skin, unable to be contained in my basic and oh so human body. I know what they meant now about gods. About being a god. I reach up to my cheek to brush away a tear and pull back a bloody hand, the blood is leaking out of me, pouring out of my eyes and stretching my body to unheard of shapes and lengths. I stop crying, hoping that I can hold everything inside. There’s a literal vibration inside me as the power takes root, moving things around and making room for itself. My chest feels filled beyond capacity, ready to burst with power. I press on the bones of my ribcage as if I can hold it all in through sheer willpower alone. It’s agonizing pain, feeling the power try to find a home in a body that was already full, but as my body bends to the power, shaping itself around it, I also feel myself enveloped by all Lola’s memories and Delia’s. Aveline, Hedy, Barbara, Amelia, so many names – all of Lola’s ancestors. They break over me so fast that I can’t count them all. With the names and faces comes a wave of darkness, redrawing the lines in my head that have brought me both such comfort and such frustration. I can feel the lines as they pick up from their comfortable, worn places in my mind and lay themselves down in new places, places they have never been before.

I’m horrified to realize my fears coming true inside me, the consequence my mother spoke of. The geis, the prohibited action. What was prohibited was joining the power. It will change everything. Now I understand.

Of course killing Lola will change me.

It has to change me. There can’t be such a wild imbalance in the world. There cannot be me without Lola and there cannot be Lola without me. This is what she didn’t understand, or maybe she did. Maybe she understood it better than I ever would have.

So everything changes in this moment. Not only for me, but for my daughter and all the other daughters that will come after her.