Joki turned her head sharply toward the speaker, more irritated with her failure to detect anyone approaching than the intrusion. The boy Creed had gotten into countless fights with their first year at school stood in the door of the car. What was his name? Lucian . . . that was it. She shrugged and replied, her tone flat and expressionless, “do what you want.” Not waiting for a response from him, she turned back to the window and pulled her hood low over her face. In a few minutes she was asleep.
A short time later the train shuddered and began to slow as they approached Platform 9 ¾. The whistle blast and the sound of brakes being applied caused Joki to wake with a start. She pulled on her gloves, keeping her gaze on her hands and then the floor in case Lucian was still on the seat across from her. She was hardly in the mood for conversation. Pulling her duffel bag from under her seat, she pushed the car door open and headed for the train exit. She could see her parents on the platform, the familiar haughty set of her father’s shoulders, her mother’s slight rigid form. An almost overwhelming despair caused Joki to stop in the aisle for a moment. Her bag slipped off her shoulder to the floor as other students pushed past her. Then she remembered her resolve: They would not get to her. Nothing would. Re-shouldering her duffel bag, she pushed her hood back from her face, squared her shoulders, and walked to the door of the train.
Several days into her vacation, Joki’s armor of indifference was chipped and battered but still in place. Having endured countless lectures on everything from her behavior to her schoolwork to her hair color, she was mentally counting the days until it was time for her to go back to school. One week left. Her parents had rented a house on the Scottish coast for their ‘family vacation’. The only peace Joki had found during the long days was in the rare times when she was able to slip down to the beach unnoticed. There she would sit in the shelter of giant black rocks, smoking or thinking. When she grew tired of that she would walk by the water’s edge, the constant wind tearing at her hair and blowing into her face with a force that caused tears to run down her cheeks. She hated water, but there was anger and sadness in the roaring ocean that corresponded with some wild part of her.
It was after one of these excursions that she had returned to the house with her hair a mess and her cheeks flushed from the wind to find her father waiting for her in the sitting room. His face was a dark mask of anger that caused her to pause in the doorway before entering the room.
“Explain to me, if you can, the meaning of this?” Alexander Wilde threw a pack of cigarettes to the floor at Joki’s feet. Joki took off her gloves and put them in her pocket, along with her hood. Taking off her cloak, she laid it across the back of a chair without looking at her father or the cigarettes.
“Pretty self-explanatory I would think,” she said shortly.
“I will not tolerate disrespect, Josephine! Not from the person who-” he stopped mid-sentence and turned his back to her, his tall figure cloaked in black robes and silhouetted in front of the fireplace.
Joki stared at his back, knowing what he had been about to say but unable to quite believe it. The dark sickening anger that had been a part of her for so long was finally roused. When she spoke it was with a deadly calm voice, her eyes narrowed and every muscle in her body tensed. “Not from the person who murdered your son?”
Alexander whirled around and covered the ground between them in two swift strides. “How dare you!”
Joki looked up at him unflinching. “How dare you, Father. For four years I have had to live with your coldness and your insinuations. Accuse me openly, try me, and then exact the punishment you see fit. But I tell you now, I will not live with the burden of your ignorance for another day.” They stood facing each other, their mutual fury and grief the only thing that held them together while simultaneously tearing them apart.
“Hold out your hands,” Alexander grated out, his voice hoarse and unnatural.
The old punishment. Joki remembered it well, but never had she met it with the cold animal grin that slowly pulled her lips away from her teeth as she did now. The grin stayed in place as Alexander’s wand came down bitingly across her palms, again and again until the wand and Joki's hands were slick with blood from the gashes that covered her palms in a crimson criss-cross pattern.
Finally Alexander brought his wand-arm back to his side. His fury had spent itself, leaving him empty and stunned.
Joki dropped her hands to her sides. “May I go now?”
Alexander turned back to the fireplace, leaning his head on the mantle and seeming not to hear her question for several moments. Joki waited patiently until his answer came.
“Yes . . . go.”
Joki picked up her cloak from the back of the chair with her teeth and draped it over her arm to keep from touching it with her bloody hands. Without a look back she went up the stairs to her room. She’d promised Creed a letter- tonight she would write it. Memnoch, Joki's black panther, lay stretched on the floor beside her bed. Smelling the scent of his mistresses’ blood, the great cat rose to his feet and approached her, his body undulating side to side in its graceful rhythm. Joki automatically held her hands out toward him, knowing the beast would not rest until she let him tend the lacerations. Methodically the cat licked the blood from each palm, stopping every few minutes to growl his displeasure at whoever had dared to raise a hand against his mistress. Finally when most of the bleeding had stopped, Joki tore strips of cloth from the silk bed sheets and bandaged her hands as best she could. She was no longer angry. It had not occurred to her to be sad. Even the stabbing pain from her damaged hands was barely more than a dull pressure at the corners of her mind. The blessed numbness that was her self-preservation had taken over.
Sitting at the desk in the room, she rummaged through the drawers and found a quill, an inkwell, and some parchment. Holding the quill clumsily because of the lashes and the bandages, she began to write. The words ran across the page, drawn from some buried wellspring that heaved forth its contents without Joki's direction, and for once without her protest.
Creed,
I am writing because you have to know. I told you one night that I lost someone- I did not tell you who or how. He was my brother. Adam, my twin. Every hope and dream my father ever left unfulfilled rested on my brother’s shoulders. We adored him. I loved him more than life.
Four years ago Adam and I left our house without the knowledge of our parents. We were meeting the boy who lived down the street. He was a mudblood, and a friend our parents did not approve of. His name is unimportant. That particular day we met at a creek that ran behind the boy’s house. He said he had something special to show us, some muggle item. It was a pack of cigarettes. The same brand you and I smoke now. The boy and I tried one. Adam refused, knowing how angry and disappointed our father would be if he found out. He cared so much what father thought of him.
The boy was angry, thinking Adam would tell our parents and he would get into trouble, though Adam never had any intention of telling anyone. The boy was bigger. He dragged Adam to the creek and threw him into the dark water. He didn’t know Adam couldn’t swim. I couldn’t either. I went in after him anyway. Too late the boy saw his mistake and came in after us. He saved me, but the water had already taken my brother. The boy had to choke me until I lost consciousness to get me out of the water. If I could have, I would have killed the boy there on the bank then, the smell of the water all around and the taste of cigarette smoke in my mouth. But I couldn’t kill him. I wasn’t strong enough then.
I knew that day that memory would be the cruelest torture. For both of us, all our lives. So I made the boy an offer. In exchange for keeping me supplied with cigarettes, I wouldn’t tell anyone of his part in Adam’s death. I know it makes no sense, but I wanted to be sure he would never forget. I wanted him to live with the choice of either being constantly reminded of what he had done, or having the whole world know. And it worked. He still lives with his parents, nearly insane from that daily choice. And I go on.
This is why you have to know.
I will not stop searching for a way to find my brother. I cannot. No matter where I have to go, no matter what I have to do, nothing will change that fact. No one will stop me. No one. I have been told that no such magic exists. I will not accept that. So this is the only warning I will give you.
I will not turn from this path, Creed. So if you want no part of it, which I hope for your sake you do not, then this is goodbye.
Fresh blood still seeped from the gashes on her palms, soaking through the bandages and dripping a few bright splatters onto the page as Joki signed her name. She clumsily folded the letter and sealed it before handing it to the owl who perched on the desk, waiting. Taking the letter in its beak, the owl stared at Joki with its round eyes, then shook its head and ruffled its feathers before flying out the open window.
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