Archive of Our Own

“Drink your tea,” Mother says.

Dahlia risks a look inside the teacup. It doesn’t really matter what’s inside, though; she’ll drink it anyway. To drink is to survive, after all. It’s ironic, she thinks, to have to drink poison to survive, but that’s Kurain for you. A village where the living carry the dead with them. A village where family does not love each other. Kurain is a village of opposites.

And in this village of opposites sit two girls who could not be more opposite.

Dahlia glances over at her sister, resisting the urge to gag at the look of fear on her face, a mirror of Dahlia’s own. She has never seen that look on her own face before.

Iris peeks in her own teacup, hesitant. When she finally takes a sip, she isn’t quick enough to hide her pinched expression. It’s watching that which prompts Dahlia to drink her own tea all in a single swig.

“Well?” asks Mother impatiently, looking between the two of them.

That’s the advantage of having twins, Dahlia thinks. If one of them drops dead, you always have a spare.

“Bitter,” says Dahlia. “Would you like to try some, Mother?”

She sees the slap coming, but does nothing to move out of the way. Compared to what she feels inside her right now, the pain hardly registers.

Some people, like Mother, can tell the difference between poisonous plants by feel, sight, touch. Dahlia can tell by taste. More than that, she can tell by what they do to her. Nausea rises up within her — that’s crab’s eye, she knows, and maybe some horse-chestnut, too. White snakeroot as well, perhaps. Her mouth is burning; that’ll be the windflower. Her legs are swelling up. Flowering thistle. Her heart rate is rising. Mountain arnica. Convulsions. Kingcup.

Mother has gotten creative.

“Still alive, Mother,” says Dahlia, face stinging from the slap. “As always.”

Iris, having finished her tea, takes a deep breath at Dahlia’s side. Her face is shiny-wet with tears, and she’s doubled over with her forehead pressed to the mat, but she is alive as well.

Mother does not look pleased.

Her face turns red; if Dahlia didn’t know better, she would say Mother is the one who’s just been poisoned.

“Do you think this is easy for me?” she asks. Dahlia averts her gaze, staring instead at her sister, who has her eyes closed, breathing weakly.

Yes, she thinks but does not say. The thing about poison is that it only works if the target does not see it coming. It relies solely on the element of surprise — which you maintain by staying quiet and keeping your mouth shut. That doesn’t stop the way the blood in Dahlia’s veins thrums. What is poison without a target?

“Do you think I like seeing you both like this?” Mother continues. “My own daughters? Do you think I kill you every day for my own pleasure?”

Mother is fond of trick questions.

“No, Mother,” Iris murmurs, lifting her head ever so slightly.

Mother’s face changes, a sliver of pride making its way through the anger. “Tell me, Iris,” she says. “Why do I do this, then? Why do I have you two drink tea every day?”

Dahlia stays quiet.

“All things are poison, and nothing is without poison,” Iris quotes. “The dosage alone makes it so a thing is not poison.”

“Good,” says Mother. “And what is the most poisonous thing in the world? Dahlia?”

“Power,” says Dahlia.

No praise comes for this answer. Dahlia doesn’t care. She doesn’t need it.

“The Main Family is drunk on their own power,” says Mother. “It will be the thing that kills them. But you two…” She reaches out, cups both of their faces with her hand. Her nails dig into Dahlia’s chin. “You two will not be that weak. I won’t let you.”

“We know, Mother,” says Iris. “And we’re grateful.”

Are they? Just because they look the same doesn’t give Iris the right to speak for the both of them.

“We know you just want us to be strong, Mother,” she says, without a shred of gratitude. “To have the power and strength to protect ourselves.”

Like you couldn’t, she thinks but does not say. She does not have to. It’s obvious enough.

“Exactly,” says Mother. As though this same speech does not accompany every single cup of tea they drink. As though they have not heard it a thousand times before, as though they could not repeat it even in their sleep. “That might not be spiritual power, but in some ways, it is stronger. What good is channeling ghosts if you may become one yourself at any moment? But if you yourself are poison, then you are protected from it. It is offense and defense at once, sword and shield put together.”

She looks between the two of them; it is obvious, Dahlia thinks, which one of her daughters is the sword and which is the shield.

Even after drinking, neither one of them has fallen. Their tolerance for the poison is increasing. Mother dismisses them with a huff, which Dahlia knows means that she will spend the rest of the day out in her garden poring over every single one of her plants, cataloging them and trying to figure out which ones to add in what ratio to the tea in order to make the strongest, deadliest concoction she can think of — until she bypasses it the next day, and the next day, and the next.

But that is what training is, Mother always tells them. And just because they may be Branch Family — just because they may have not a drop of spiritual power to speak of — doesn’t mean they aren’t Feys. They’re just a bit different, that’s all.

So that means while Cousin Mia gets to sit underneath a waterfall, gets to practice her calligraphy, gets all the pleasure and training and glory associated with being the future Master, Iris and Dahlia are choking on their own blood. They’re hobbling back to their rooms, using each other as crutches against the violent muscle spasms. They’re falling asleep to the sound of each other’s breaths — growing shallower with each day that passes.

“When do you think she’ll stop?” asks Iris that night, when they’re laying on their futons, back to back and their feet pressed up against each other’s. They don’t know any other way to sleep.

“Stop what?” Dahlia replies, not bothering to hide her scorn. It comes out weaker than she would have wanted it to — the hives at the back of her throat are worse than they were earlier in the day. “Killing us every day? Or keeping us alive?”

Iris is silent for a moment, long enough that Dahlia wonders if she’s surrendered to her usual cowardice — whatever it is that she’d had to fight through just to ask her first question. That was one thing Mother had never taken into her mind: when you make your daughters poison, it’s important to specify whether they should be poison to others or to themselves. Because the same sword is just as easy to turn outward as it is inward, and sometimes, a shield is not enough to guard against that.

But maybe there is something else at work tonight, because Iris speaks again.

“Both,” she finally whispers. “Neither.”

“You heard what Mother said. It’s for our own good.”

“How?” asks Iris, and Dahlia hears the rustling of the sheets as she turns around to face her. Dahlia stays where she is. “How is it for our own good? She says it’s to protect us, but—“

“But what, Iris?” Dahlia snaps. “If you don’t want the tea, don’t drink it. It’s that simple.”

“I have to,” comes the reply. "If I didn’t, I couldn’t resist you. If I didn’t…you would kill me.”

I could kill you anyway, Dahlia thinks but does not say.

Finally, Iris gets the hint that Dahlia isn’t going to respond, and she murmurs a “good night.” Dahlia listens to the sound of her shallow breaths grow more even, less pronounced. She knows what her sister sounds like when she’s asleep.

In the darkness, her eyes track motion along the floor: a fly. Dahlia watches as it rubs its little hands together before crawling forward slowly. She wonders if it knows what she’s thinking — if even the flies in Kurain have more spiritual power than she does.

But power is power, like Mother says. And being poison is only half the battle; the rest is about knowing when to strike.

Pursing her lips together, Dahlia gently blows out a steady stream of air, not more than a single exhale.

The fly shrivels up, convulses once, and then finally lays motionless.

Mother may have questionable opinions about a lot of things, but she has never been wrong about men.

Men, she’s always said, are weak. Predictable. You are what you grow up in the presence of, and a weak man makes a weak woman.

She’s right, for the most part. Even though Father lives with them in Kurain, he’s never noticed anything odd about their training. He’s never once asked, sat in, done anything. Dahlia knows that he’s uncomfortable — the elders aren’t kind to men, after all.

But neither are they kind to girls without spiritual power, and her father had never once been able to look past his own discomfort to notice that of his children.

It figured, then, that the way he would end up discovering the truth still had nothing to do with them. It was Mother’s mistake — though Dahlia could have guessed that from the beginning.

Mother was right: men are stupid. But there is a limit, it turns out, to how stupid they are.

The fault, technically, lay with Iris. She hadn’t drank her tea one day — and Mother, so blind, hadn’t bothered to check if the cup was empty. Father wandered in and saw the cup of tea. It was cold, and more importantly, not his. But that didn’t matter.

Mother was right again: there is nothing that a man likes more in the world than to take something that is not his.

He didn’t drink it — which is to his credit, Dahlia supposes. All he did was bring it to his lips and dart his tongue out to touch the cup.

It had taken the doctor hours to arrive, and when she finally did, she proclaimed Father as “lucky to be alive.” The dosage he’d taken, she said, was enough to kill a dozen grown men.

Dahlia and Iris drink more than that every day. And he would have had the same effects if he had touched either one of his daughters — or at least been close enough to feel their breath on him. But then again, if he had been the kind of man, the kind of father, to do something like that, then none of them would be in this situation in the first place.

The second thing men love most in the world, Mother always says, is to be angry.

When he’s recovered, he goes straight to Mother and they both spend the day yelling at each other back and forth; it goes on for so long that they have to miss teatime, for the first time in years — for the first time in as long as Dahlia can remember.

She listens through the door, of course. Iris does not. To Dahlia, information is just another kind of poison; she can store it within her and use it when the time is right.

That’s why, by the time Father comes to her room to come and get her and Iris, her bag is already packed. Her sister’s isn’t; she watches Father press his lips together in barely-hidden disapproval at the fact that he has to wait now, that he can’t get out of this village like he’s wanted to for so long.

Father gives them both a wide berth when they leave together. As they’re walking away, Iris looks back. Dahlia does not.

His profession as a jeweler enables him to buy a big house out in the city. Their lives are much more luxurious now, and Dahlia feels like this is the life that she’s meant to live. Maybe this is what everything in her life and in the world — fate — was leading her toward; that’s why she didn’t have any spiritual power, because it was a fact that she never really belonged in the village.

Living with Father is nothing special. He lets them do whatever they want, for the most part, but Dahlia can’t help but notice how much time he spends out of the house and away from them both. Normally, she wouldn’t blink an eye; he’s never spent any time with them before, so maybe this is just him sticking to what he knows.

But there are other things that draw Dahlia’s attention and make her wonder about Father. Like the way he won’t make eye contact with either of them. The way he always maintains a certain distance between him and them. The way he won’t use any dishes and utensils that they have used, even after they’ve been washed.

He’d bought them both all new things when they moved here, and foolishly she’d thought it was him making an effort, signifying that this was the beginning of the three of their new lives together.

But no. Yet again, Mother is right. She isn’t even here anymore, and she’s right. Men are weak.

There is only one explanation for his behavior: he knows they are poison.

Having him know that wouldn’t come in handy for Dahlia. He would always be suspicious of her — even though she hasn’t given him a single reason to be. Not yet, anyway.

She’s wondering what the best course of action is to take now, but then something happens that only solidifies her belief that fate is making this all happen for her: Iris begins to make tea.

Out of the two of them, Dahlia always thought she was the one who was more like Mother, and that’s what everyone else said, too. That was never anything that she was proud of, though. It was just a fact about her, like her name or her status as a twin. Like her lack of spiritual power.

It seems Iris is determined to prove her wrong. Because she does everything that Mother used to do: she spends all day in the kitchen poring over some kind of special tea blend, and she serves it up at the designated teatime like clockwork.

Dahlia looks at the cup that’s been placed in front of her with barely hidden disdain. “What’s this? More poison?”

Iris shakes her head. “The opposite,” she says. “I think...I think I’ve found an antidote. Something that’ll make us normal again.”

Again, she says. As though the two of them have ever been normal. As though that’s something they can get back to, push this whole experience out of their minds and leave it behind them, just as they’ve done with the rest of their lives.

As Iris drinks her tea, Dahlia watches her. She’s used to watching this face that looks like hers drink tea — used to seeing it scrunch up in pain and deal with all of the effects that come. She watched for that to happen again.

It doesn’t.

Iris braces herself like she’s expecting the same thing to happen too. But instead, she breathes deeply and smiles. Does that mean it’s working?

She watches Dahlia, now that it’s her turn. There’s only one thing she can do: Dahlia pretends to drink the tea. She’d think Iris would catch on quickly, especially since she’d done the same thing before, but she doesn’t. Instead, Iris’s smile widens, and she reaches across the table and takes Dahlia’s hand.

“It’s gonna be okay, Dahlia. We’ll do this together.”

Again, she speaks for the two of them — as though she has the right to do so.

The most important thing about poison, Dahlia knows, is the timing. That’s why she waits until she’s sure Iris is asleep before she sneaks out of bed. Father had bought such a nice house that none of the floorboards creek or anything — perfect for someone to sneak around.

Father is in the living room, and he looks startled to see her.

“What are you doing up?” he asks.

Dahlia can’t help but notice that he’s avoiding using her name. She knows why: he can’t tell his daughters apart.

“Father,” she says. “I have something to tell you...it’s about Iris.”

He looks wary, though she doesn’t know if that’s because of her words or because he now knows which twin she is. “What is it?”

Dahlia begins to cry. It’s necessary to fully convince him, but as everything in her life does, this too comes with a price: her tears are poisonous, and even she isn’t immune. The teardrop burns its way down her cheek.

She tells him that she’s the one who wishes to find an antidote for what Mother has done to them, but Iris refuses to help. It’s because Iris is dangerous, she says. She could kill any of them anytime she wants.

“Thank you for telling me,” Father finally says — and for the first time, he makes eye contact with her.

As soon as the sun rises the next morning, Iris is gone. Dahlia stays in her own room and doesn’t say goodbye.

She asks Father if she can start a garden, mostly to keep up the ruse that she’s searching for an antidote. He tells her that’s a good idea, mostly because she knows he thinks it’ll help her get her mind off of Iris being gone.

Spoken, she thinks, like a man who has never had a sibling.

It takes her a while to track down all of the plants that Mother used to have in her garden, but eventually, she manages — and Father’s money helps speed the process along.

Once she’s planted them, she spends most of her time out in the garden, running her fingers along all of the plants. They’re poisonous, just like her. Regular humans can’t approach them, just like they can’t for her. She and these plants are in their own little world.

In some ways, they too are her sisters. But they can’t press their feet against hers, so each night she lies awake and alone.

A weak man cannot live for long without a woman by his side. Father lasts a month before he remarries.

A wife and a daughter move in with them. When they look at Dahlia, there is no suspicion; nothing but disinterest in their eyes. Father hadn’t told them anything, then — more proof for Dahlia that he trusts her now. That’s good; that means he won’t see her coming.

She spends most of her day out in the garden alone, until her new mother takes it upon herself to ruin things, deciding to bring up the fact that Dahlia doesn’t attend school. That sentiment is only echoed by her new sister, jealousy lining her words.

Dahlia looks to Father; a small part of her wonders if he’ll defend her, but of course he doesn’t. She wonders if that’s why her stepmother brought it up in the first place — if she, just like Mother, has the ability to sniff out a weak man.

Father definitely has a type, then.

Dahlia wants nothing more than to refuse, but the more she thinks about it, the more she realizes she doesn’t have a choice. After all, Father thinks she’s cured — so what reason does she have to say she won’t go?

So she smiles and she nods and she agrees. Father hires a tutor for her so that she can get caught up before she enrolls in school. It’s funny, she thinks, that such a thing has never occurred to him before.

The tutor he hires is male; Father thinks it’ll be good for her to get used to being around boys. She never has before, after all, and she’ll have to once she’s in school. There’s nothing wrong with his reasoning, technically, but Dahlia can’t help but wonder how much of his decision was made just to be a slap in the face, one last defiance, against the rules of her old village. Not his; it was never truly his, and they all knew it.

Dahlia has had lessons and education before, and she’s all too aware of the pain that comes along with them. But Terry Fawles, she finds, is different.

Every day, he brings along stories and papers that he said were part of the required reading curriculum for school. Surprising even herself, she enjoys them, and even starts to look forward to his visits because of them. They’re filled with women like her: women who are trapped, women who seek out power in whatever way they can. They are able to perceive strangeness where others see none; and most of all, they are surrounded by useless men.

“Flower and maiden,” Dahlia reads from one of the stories — her favorite, “were different, and yet the same, and fraught with some strange peril in either shape.”

She looks up at Terry, then, and finds he isn’t making eye contact with her. His voice shakes, his face reddens, and a drop of sweat crawls its way down the side of his head. She can’t help but wonder if Father had told him the truth about her.

But the next time he comes, he brings nothing but love poems — and then she understands. Mother had told her much about boys and love. The dosage makes the poison, after all, and Terry’s love for her will be his poison.

Dahlia doesn’t need anything like that. Not when she has her own.

The world outside her house, she’s realized, is filled with more literature that she could love — and it is also filled with more boys like Terry. There is nothing more that Father can offer her now, especially not with the way he’s hanging on to every single word that comes out of her stepmother’s mouth.

It’s time to leave. And to do that, she’ll need money.

He’s been tutoring her for a few months when Dahlia asks, “Terry, do you love me?”

She’s watched him get braver over time, make eye contact with her, move his chair closer to hers. He still hasn’t touched her, though.

Maybe some part of him, even subconsciously, knows that she’s poison. Humans have an innate survival instinct, after all. She wonders if he can tell by looking at her. That’s part of the reason she dyed her hair red. The most toxic animals are the most brightly colored, after all — and Dahlia is the most toxic of them all.

“Yes,” Terry murmurs, and the way he blushes makes Dahlia want to rake her nails across his face.

“And if you love me,” she asks, “does that mean you would do anything for me?”

Her fingers rest on one of the love poems he’d brought over — his favorite, he’d said. If I am the grass and you the breeze, blow through me.

“Yes,” he says again. “Dollie, I’d do anything for you.”

His hand slides across the table, about to take hers, but she slides it away before he can. She doesn’t want him to touch her.

Not yet, at least.

That night, she fills her necklace with her own blood.

Dahlia has noticed the way Valerie watches her, her new sister. The eyes on her feel the strongest especially around her self-proclaimed teatime. No one else blinks an eye, though — because Father thinks she’s curing herself, and lucky for her, her stepmother thinks this ritual of hers is ’cute’.

“I understand your need for alone time,” she says to Dahlia one day. “It’s amazing that you’ve figured out a routine like that so young. I’m older than you and I still haven’t!”

That’s because you and I are nothing alike, Dahlia thinks. That, after all, is the difference between a stepmother and a real one.

Valerie had tried snooping around the garden, but that was the one time that Father, surprisingly enough, had put his foot down. Dahlia knows that all of that is only for the sake and safety of his new family, not out of any concern for his old.

That’s part of the reason she didn’t notice Valerie’s eyes on her, because hers were always on Father — or, more specifically, that diamond of his.

Valerie waits until their parents are out before she interrupts Dahlia at teatime one day.

“What even is that?”

“It’s tea, Valerie,” says Dahlia casually, taking another sip. Every new cup she brews burns more than the last, but she’s good at keeping her face neutral as she drinks. Pain is, after all, just another one of her sisters — certainly more of one than the girl glaring at her right now.

Valerie deliberately breaks their parents’ rules and slides into the chair across the table from Dahlia.

“No it’s not,” she says. “I’ve seen you grind up those plants of yours out in the garden. I did some research. I know what they are.”

Dahlia isn’t phased at all.

She just takes another sip and fixes Valerie with a look. Even among those that are poison, there is self-preservation. Whenever Dahlia used to give Iris this same look, her sister would always back off, knowing that she’d gone too far.

Valerie, it seems, has no such instincts.

“So,” asks Dahlia, “what is it you think you know?”

“I don’t know, but—“

“That’s right. You don’t know.”

The dosage makes the poison, after all. So far, since Valerie hasn’t outright said anything nor accused her of anything, Dahlia is willing to overlook this. As long as Valerie does not wield poison, this doesn’t have to be seen as an assassination attempt.

Then Valerie reaches out, lightning quick — probably that damn cop training of hers — and snatches the teapot from in front of Dahlia. It’s empty, and the cup with tea is still in Dahlia’s hand, but even so, she freezes.

“Okay,” says Valerie. “Then you won’t mind if I make myself some tea with these leftover leaves, right? I’m sure it’ll be delicious since you worked so hard to brew it.”

Under the table, Dahlia’s nails dig into her thigh. “What do you want?” she asks carefully.

Valerie, too, takes the time to consider the question. It’s as though she hadn’t come prepared, as though she never thought she would even get this far in the first place — that is a slap in the face to Dahlia.

The entire time she thinks, she keeps running the edge of her fingernail around the lid of the teapot — ready to open it at any second. Dahlia stays deceptively still. The tea left in her cup is cooling, but that’s the least of her concerns, right now.

She waits for Valerie to say something. Maybe something about how she’ll tell Father, get Dahlia sent away.

But instead, she says something Dahlia wasn’t expecting. She says, Diamond.

Poison is as poison does. Poison adapts, and poison survives.

And poison is all about timing. About biding your time and waiting for the perfect moment.

If Valerie wants to have tea so bad, then one day, she will.

Poisonous plants go by many different names, and it is easy for Dahlia to do the same — after all, she’s one of them.

Now she is Melissa Foster.

But changing the name does not change the poison. She is and will always be Dahlia, regardless of what other people call her.

She’s had an encounter with Cousin Mia, the first in many years. She was surprised to find that Mia was a lawyer, and not even a very good one at that. Mother was right again: there are other forms of power stronger than spiritual power, and all the spiritual power in the world can’t help you win sometimes.

Guess Aunt Misty never taught Cousin Mia about how stupid men are; otherwise, Mia would have seen Terry’s death coming a mile away. Dahlia certainly had.

With a new name and money in her bank account, Dahlia’s living a good life, now — the life she was always meant to. She’s in university, where no one knows her or her past. No one knows what flows through her veins.

College, she learns, is all about improving yourself. Staying stagnant means you’re weak. Only growth shows progress.

It’s time for her to apply that to herself.

She’s been making tea every day still, her trusty garden plants lining the edges of her apartment in pots, but at some point, there’s only so much they can do. She’s mixed them together in every single possible combination, but they can’t increase her poison level anymore.

Dahlia is good at discarding her sisters when they’re no longer useful, though. And when the pots are all smashed up, she throws them all away and sets her sights on something new.

The best way to get what she wants, she knows, is with the help of a stupid man.

That’s how she meets Doug Swallow of the Pharmacology Department. She’s gotten better at flirting, too; all she has to do is flutter her eyelashes, drag the tip of one gloved finger along his arm, and he’s telling her all about his new research. All about the poisonous chemicals he works with — and especially how potent they are, up to thousands of times more than simple plants.

It isn’t hard to fake interest, especially because she isn’t faking anything. It’s even easier to convince him to let her into the lab — saying that it’ll be a great place to be alone, that it’ll be romantic, and a dozen other things that he laps up like the fucking sucker he is.

He lets her in, and Dahlia swipes some pills; the ones with the most complicated-sounding names. She could take the pills plain, she knows, but there’s something almost poetic about turning them into tea. Besides, she’s too used to her routine at this point to even try to do anything else.

The resulting cup of tea is the most painful one yet. She’s being burned alive, frozen solid, breaking into a thousand pieces, before she passes out.

But when she wakes up, despite the pain, she’s happy — or actually, it would be more accurate to say she’s happy because of the pain. Because pain leads to growth, and growth leads to improvement. This is what she needs: to push her own boundaries. This is what it means to grow up; she doesn’t have dear old Mother to do it for her, so it’s time for her to do things for herself.

Dahlia can feel the change in her body. The chemicals are not her sisters, not the same way the plants are, but they’re still not so different from her. They’re more like distant cousins — better than the ones that she has, after all.

Just like when she was young, she sees a fly walking on her bedspread. She purses her lips, but does not blow.

She already knew that she was strong enough, potent enough, to kill a fly. So how will killing one again tell her anything?

No, she needs to move on to something stronger. Something that should be, in theory, harder to kill than a simple fly. Something that’s just one step above a fly on the food chain.

And lucky for her, she finds that something: a defense attorney.

Killing two birds with one stone is Dahlia’s specialty; now the attorney’s off her back, and Cousin Mia’s little boyfriend is in the hospital.

But he’s only in a coma, not fully dead. That means she isn’t yet strong enough.

Since he isn’t really dead, what will happen to him when he wakes up? Is it possible, she wonders, that he could be poison too?

She wants to say that’s impossible — but it’s not, is it? Not really. Because she was a regular girl too, long ago, before Mother made her like this. Why isn’t it possible that she could become someone else’s maker?

With every fiber of her being, she hopes not. A defense attorney who’s too stubborn for his own good is one thing. Take that guy and make him poisonous? Dahlia might as well have just slit her own throat then and there.

The next day, Doug Swallow breaks up with her. She doesn’t know if it’s because he’d found out about the missing poison or if it’s something more — something that he’s found out about her. She doesn’t really care either way. She’s gotten everything she needs from him, and honestly, she kind of respects his self-preservation.

If he thinks she’s dangerous, that means he thinks she’s powerful. That means he recognizes that for the fact it is.

So she leaves Doug Swallow, and she sets her sights on a new boy.

This will be the biggest mistake of her life.

The world is filled with stupid men, Mother said — and of them all, Phoenix Wright has got to be the stupidest. Dahlia would drink a thousand more cups of poison tea if it meant she would be done with him.

This is all nothing more than an experiment, she reminds herself, and he is nothing more than her beloved little lab rat.

The longer that passes, the more impatient she grows to figure out the results of her experiment — to slit her wrist and have him drink from it, to take off her glove and press her hand up against his chest, just so she can feel the very moment his heart stops beating.

She forces herself to be patient. That’s why she kills Doug Swallow, to get it out of her system.

It’s easy, all things considering. She just takes off her glove, places her hand on his chest, and pushes. But she hadn’t factored in the electric pole, so he ends up dying of electrocution before she can even see the effects that her poison has on him.

Dahlia leaves him with a parting gift, though: a bottle of that Coldkiller X. She wants to see if her little Feenie is a worthy lab rat, or if he’ll be broken before the poison even reaches him. Before he takes up the necklace around his neck himself.

This, she knows, is the main event. Terry was nothing but a step on the path.

But it seems Cousin Mia has a few more tricks up her sleeve than last time. She hasn’t been skipping her daily teatime either — though her tea is laced with law books and contradictions. Maybe that isn’t so different from Dahlia’s. The dosage makes the poison, after all.

Mia thinks she’s winning; she waits until the right moment to bring up all of her evidence. She, too, knows the importance of timing.

No matter what she does, though, Dahlia is still winning. She has her secret weapon, and she knows her Feenie well enough by now to know how he’ll react.

And then he eats the necklace — the moment she’s been waiting for. Dear, sweet Feenie. Dahlia didn’t think he would eat it, but she supposes it still gets the job done.

She waits and she waits. She will enjoy watching him die. One more second, and then—

…Feenie does not die.

He stands, clad in that sickening pink sweater she made him, bawling his eyes out. What? Why didn’t it work? Why didn’t….

Dahlia stares at him for a moment. At the way his fingers twitch. The way he coughs, the inside of his mask stained red with blood. She knows these signs. She’s lived these signs.

“Well, Ms. Hawthorne?” asks Cousin Mia. “What do you have to say to that?”

She didn’t hear the question. She doesn’t care. It doesn’t matter. Dahlia throws back her head, and she laughs.

It is loud and high-pitched, so strong that she can feel the way it reopens the wounds on the back of her throat. Mother, as always, was right.

You are what you grow up in the presence of. If a weak man makes a weak woman, it must follow, then, that a strong woman makes a strong man.

“Thou hast filled my veins with poison,” quotes Dahlia. She looks at Feenie — and she sees them all. Him, Doug, Terry, Valerie, Mia, Iris, Father. Mother. “Thou hast made me as hateful, as ugly, as loathsome and deadly a creature as thyself — a world’s wonder of hideous monstrosity!”

As they lead her away, she blows one last kiss to Feenie. A final gift from a mother to her son. From a maker to her creation.

Nothing left to do. When a woman reaches this age, sleep is her best friend.