Our Wicked Gifts

1

I've never attended a party I didn't hate. The Winter Institute summer masquerade is no exception.

The theme is extinct and endangered animals, and everyone wears the face of something dead or dying. Siberian tigers, loggerhead sea turtles, monarch butterflies. Black tie from the neck down, creepy masks from the neck up.

Half-human, half-monster, my mother's guests prowl an oasis of greenery. The vast event space, with its sleek architectural lines and vaulted ceiling, has been crammed full of hundreds of freshly felled trees and cut flowers. Creepers loop down from above, creating lush curtains that ripple invitingly. Fabulous butterflies the size of both my hands flap against the walls, confused by the jazz band's bone-shuddering tempo. By morning, most of the butterflies will lie dead on the petal-strewn floor.

The overall effect is my worst nightmare.

No, that's not entirely correct. The Ruin is my worst nightmare, along with the knowledge that it's exactly where I, along with every other Winter, will be heading when I die. Pacts with the Devil come at a price, after all, even if the choice was made for me a hundred years before I was born, by my great-grandmother Edith.

But this party is definitely in my Top Ten Places I'd Rather Not Be.

The clammy pads of my fingers tap a rhythm on the balcony railing, growing faster the more anxious I become. There are too many people in this room and even watching them from up here makes me claustrophobic. I cringe as an actress with red squirrel ears stumbles into a music producer with a golden toad mask made of actual gold. Nearby, a sweaty tech billionaire with a thylacine's face is grinding against a panda with conspicuously fake boobs. I'm sure there's a metaphor in there somewhere, but I'm too distracted to work it out.

My biggest problem, in addition to the swarms of people, is that my own dress is literally the most uncomfortable thing I've ever worn. My mother had it custom-made for me, inspired by the union rustic moth, or Pabulatrix pabulatricula, if Latin's your thing. I should be pleased that she went to such an effort for me. I am pleased. Only, the fur bodice is making me sweat and one of my antennae has already poked a member of the Danish royal family in the eye. Also, I keep standing on the moth wing cloak. I despise cloaks, although my mother couldn't have been expected to remember that.

"You look like you're having the best time, all alone," my twenty-three-year-old brother, Felix, says, slouching beside me.

Felix is dressed in a white tux paired with a half-face wolf mask. With his sweeping golden locks and the casual confidence of an impossibly rich white man, his overall look is part playboy, part predator. When he smiles, though, Felix is so disarmingly beautiful most people at the party would willingly offer him their throat. His gift seals the deal. A single hair plucked from your scalp and wound round his little finger, and Felix will mold his personality into whoever you want him to be. The perfect friend, the love of your life, beloved brother.

I force my tapping fingers to still, and check his. No strand of hair. Felix is being himself. I like Felix best when he's real. The two of us used to be much closer, but Allegra's accident in the woods four years ago changed things between us. Since that day, our interactions often have an edge to them, as if we're both forever aware that we can only relax around each other when Allegra isn't looking.

"Don't have too much fun. Save some for me," he drawls.

I snort. Parties are the antithesis of fun, if you ask me. The only reason I'm attending tonight is because Allegra insisted. Usually, she allows me to stay home, where I won't accidentally offend someone by saying the wrong thing or pulling the wrong face, or ruin my family's sharp lines with my soft edges. But every now and again, I'm forced to show up for appearances' sake. So I'll find myself a quiet corner in which to hide, and I'll dwell on how no one wants to talk to me, even though it's not like I want to talk to them, either.

"It's a zoo down there." I gesture limply at the sea of bodies churning beneath us. They move as one, lost in a shared rhythm that makes no sense to me. I can't believe anyone's enjoying themselves. "Look at them all. They're pathetic."

Felix grins at me over the rim of his champagne glass. "They are also some of the world's richest and most influential people. The Winter Institute's most generous benefactors."

"The fact that they're rich doesn't make them interesting," I sigh. "If I had billions to my name, I'd not be wasting it trying to bring woolly mammoths back to life."

For years, my mother has been hosting events to rival even the Met Gala, raising funds for the Winter Institute's unextinction project. It's her calling in life: to rescue species from the brink of oblivion or outright bring them back from the dead. Under her leadership, the Institute has achieved feats of science no one believed were possible, and not a week goes by when Allegra isn't invited to appear on some talk show or give a prestigious lecture.

Her biggest dream is to resurrect the woolly mammoth. It's a tricky, expensive task but there's no shortage of donors wanting to be part of Allegra Winter's next triumph. It helps that, thanks to her gift, people find it extremely hard to say no to my mother.

"If you had her money, what would you waste it on?" Felix asks.

I try to come up with an answer, but I've got nothing. "Money's never been all that interesting to me." The power wielded by my family, though? The way all of them command the attention of every room they enter. Their confidence, their poise. How they seem to matter without trying. Well, I'd gladly take a little of that.

"I'd buy an island." Felix answers his own question with an idle pursing of his lips. "And I'd populate it with girls who'd feed me shrimp while I lie in the shade."

"Sounds hideous. For the girls, I mean."

He shrugs nonchalantly. "They'd be lining up to audition."

I swallow what's left of my drink. I can't argue with Felix. They would. "One day, you'll be able to live that dream," I tease. "You're the oldest and you're going to inherit everything."

Felix's flinches, although he tries to mask his discomfort with acerbic wit. "How could I ever forget? I've been in training as Allegra's heir since conception. I had a business and economics tutor when I was a literal fetus."

"How does that even work?"

"Headphones on the baby bump. To this day, I can only fall asleep to the sound of Jeff Bezos giving motivational talks."

I laugh. "Then why are you so terrible at business?"

"Because I'd rather live while I'm young, dear Cicely. One day, I'll be one of them, but not today."

A passing waiter pauses next to us with a bottle of champagne. I ignore him while he silently refills my glass, his head lowered. I turn my attention to the dance floor, where my eyes are immediately drawn to my lovely mother. She shimmies to the music, her face lit up with pleasure as every eye follows her graceful movements. Looking at her evokes a combination of pride and pressure in me. Pride that she's my mother. Pressure that she's my mother.

Tonight, Allegra's wearing a short dress covered in the green and orange feathers of an endangered sun conure parrot. Her mask is a stylized bird, inlaid with hundreds of emeralds and fire opals. She is surrounded by dozens of animal-faced admirers, vying for one of her smiles or laughs. And she doles them out generously, like the gracious host she is.

Allegra is the shining star around which everything else revolves, the center of gravity forever pulling you in. Sometimes, the weight of it makes me feel like I'm being crushed alive. Maybe if I were stronger, I'd settle into my own orbit. The rest of the family have managed to find where they belong, after all.

Felix occupies the Goldilocks zone, where our mother's light seems made for him. My younger sister, Octavia, performs a perfect aerial ballet as close as possible to Allegra, never setting a single foot wrong lest she burn alive in our mother's radiance. My Uncle Dorian, with his moon-ish wife Cynthia, is something of a Jupiter. His gravitational pull can't so much move Allegra as slightly alter her path. My cousins, Sebastian and Melissa, occupy the further reaches, safe from the heat but not from the cold.

"My theory, she wants to turn herself into a god with power over life and death," I say. "That's what this unextinction thing is about."

When Felix doesn't laugh at what I thought was a good quip, I flick my eyes over to him. He's pushed the wolf mask on top of his head and is frowning as he reads a note scribbled on a creased piece of paper. His hair still manages to curl into the perfect blond waves that Allegra likes to stroke off his forehead.

"What's that?" I ask.

"Nothing." He quickly pockets the paper and flashes me a cocky smile. "That waiter passed me a note. From one of my admirers." He glances over his shoulder, as if he's looking for said note-delivering waiter. "Got to go. Tell Allegra something came up."

"Are you serious? Felix, we're onstage in fifteen. For the presentation."

Ignoring me, he ditches his champagne on a table and marches away. Allegra is going to blame me for failing to stop Felix from leaving. Golden boy Felix can do no wrong in Allegra's eyes. His gift makes him the perfect son.

I watch Felix as he crosses the dance floor, effortlessly parting the sea of guests. Felix strides through life without ever questioning his own worth. The sun shines for him and the entire universe exists to be his backdrop. I never know if I'm disgusted or plain jealous of the longing stares that follow in his wake. Tonight, it's not only admiration that trails behind him. It's a secret.

I don't need my gift to see that he's hiding something big. That note from the waiter has scared him, and apex predators like Felix don't scare easily. In fact, the last time I saw him looking this terrified was the night I nearly killed our mother as we banished that boy to the Ruin. It's been four years and I can still picture every little moment. Soren's fear-stained bravado; the sound the knife made as it struck my mother in the chest; Felix's anguish when we returned from the woods carrying Allegra's limp body.

None of them have fully forgiven me. Allegra spent two weeks in the hospital, another eight slowly recuperating at home. To this day, the scar still causes her pain, as if a shard of my betrayal remains in the wound, preventing it from completely healing. We told the press that she was attacked by a stalker; the police even arrested someone for the crime. My family knows the truth: I stabbed my mother in the heart.

These aren't memories I want to dwell on. I try to wash the thoughts away with my glass of champagne. They stubbornly don't budge. One of the butterflies alights on my arm. It shudders as dark magic takes hold, the Ruin determined to lead me to a secret even if I'd rather ignore the pull. The butterfly flutters off after my brother, its wings already trailing glitter as it burns up from the inside. My gift claws away at my resolve, desperate for me to follow the unwilling insect guide to the Ruin, and to the note hidden in Felix's pocket.

Here's the thing with secrets: they're everywhere. Like insects, secrets exist in both worlds at the same time-because what is the Ruin if not a world of lost and hidden things? The vast majority of secrets that seep through the cracks go ignored. One thing the Ruin does seem to care about is chaos. Upsetting the natural order. Altering the course of fate. If it discovers a secret that's capable of changing the status quo, you can bet it's going to try to make sure I find it, against my will if necessary.

Felix's secret must be a weighty one. What I don't know is if my uncovering it will help or harm. In my nineteen years on earth, peeking behind my family's veil of perfection has rarely ended well. No one likes someone casually discovering the things they try to hide, especially the things they hide even from themselves; little reminders that they're not the people they want to be, laid bare for all to see. It's hard to be a sister, daughter, niece, cousin and the self-righteous voice pointing out my family's flaws.

The sensible choice would be to forget about the waiter and his mysterious note. The sensible choice would be to walk away.

My gift's not going to let me walk away. It's going to pull, and pull, and pull, until I give in.

Resigned, I take a single step after that cursed butterfly, and the world hidden beyond our own immediately drifts into view. The creepers overhead coil into snakes. Trumpet-like mushrooms squeeze through the gaps between the walls and the flooring. The walls bubble and I can see things moving beneath the cracking layer of paint. They're my own nightmares, I know that. But the harder I wrestle to control them, the more they fight against me.

I focus on the butterfly. It tethers me to the living world, ensuring my physical body remains where it's supposed to be while only my consciousness drifts. If I were to walk into the Ruin untethered, all of me would slip inside this place of nightmares. As long as I keep my attention on my little guide, I won't stray that far. I follow it downstairs onto the dance floor.

Everything immediately becomes too hot and too loud. The live jazz band has kicked up their tempo and the Ruin twists the partygoers into leering monsters. The masks are gone and I'm surrounded by people with jagged scars encircling their necks, where their human skin becomes an animal's pelt. Muzzles and snouts growl and grunt as I pass. This was a mistake. Controlling the Ruin's magic is too hard when it comes to my family members' secrets. They bring out the worst in me, because they have the power to hurt me.

The butterfly dissolves into dust, the magic too much for its tiny body to endure for long. Felix's secret is too far away for me to follow. I immediately try to step back into the real world but the Ruin won't release me. I can still feel my tether, but I can't pull myself free of the magic. It clings to me and refuses to let go. As a kid, I had a recurring nightmare about being trapped beneath ice in a frozen river, my lungs screaming for air, palms slapping the unbreakable surface. That panic is how I feel now.