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jokes as I set the knife down onto Oma March's bedside table.
    "Maybe," I answer.
    Rosie laughs, but it's cloaked in melancholy. It's hard to really laugh in here; the room is like a tomb, thick with dust and trinkets and still, heavy air. All the shades are drawn, the bed is made, clothes folded in the drawers. We don't come in here. At least, not often. Rosie clutches a silver picture frame. She looks up at me from Oma March's squashy mattress like a doe uncertain if she should flee.
    I lower myself to the bed and lean over her shoulder to see what picture she's looking at--it's an old black-and-white shot of our mother and grandmother, taken just weeks before our mother literally ran off to join the circus. Who'd have thought that a country girl from Georgia could become a star trapeze girl? The photo is like looking into a mirror--Rosie and I look uncannily like our mother. Dark hair, grass-colored irises, sharply tapered eyebrows, and bodies straight like boards.
    "I like that picture. It's like a before shot," I say aloud. "Before they started fighting and Mom started, um... dating." That's putting it kindly. It's never been a secret that Rosie and I likely have two different fathers. In fact, we suspect we may have another sibling somewhere, but since Mom
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    hasn't been here in more than two years, it's hard to know for certain. She came back after we were attacked but couldn't handle it--couldn't handle Oma March's death, could barely look at my scars... It was easier for her to skip out of town for a week, a month, a season, now years. Easier to leave her daughters to carry the weight of death alone.
    Rosie exhales, a discouraged sigh. She sets the picture in her lap and looks around the rest of the room. "How long till we have to start selling off this room?"
    I sigh. "Not for a while. There's still plenty of Mom's things in the attic to get rid of."
    Rosie and I have sold everything from antique clocks to vegetables from the garden to make extra cash; she tried working at a coffee shop once, but it's impossible to have a job and hunt. We had college funds, but our mother drained those on liquor and drugs just after Oma March died. We've hardly touched this room, though I know that there will come a day when we'll have to decide to keep Oma's things or hunt Fenris. And of course, we have to hunt; it's our responsibility, now that we're out of the cave.
    That doesn't make seeing our dead grandmother's things disappear hurt me any less. What if I lose my memory, like Pa Reynolds has? Will there be anything left of Oma March to remind me she existed at all? Anything left to remind me why I've dedicated my very being to the hunt?
    "I guess it doesn't matter. I hardly remember some of this stuff anyway. It's like I know it's important, though," she says.
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    "It is important." I lean into her a little. "It's important because you can't remember."
    Rosie shrugs. She stretches her toes to the floor and flips up the corner of the woven blue and white rug. I look away. The rug is the only thing in the room that Oma March didn't put here. We had to buy it to cover the rust-brown stain that no amount of bleach or hot water would remove. I don't like to look at it, but Rosie brushes the rug away every time we're in this room, as if seeing the mark where blood puddled--some mine, some the Fenris's, some Oma March's--will make her remember the attack better. It's all a haze, from what she's told me. She remembers the Fenris, him charging us, and his teeth.
    I remember more. I don't need to see the stain to remember the sound the Fenris's teeth made when they popped through the skin on Oma March's stomach. Or the way it felt to see out of my right eye for the last time, the image of a claw careening toward my face, the exploding sensation. The strong vengeance and turmoil that rushed through my body, the desire to be the last thing the monster ever saw. The blur of red blood and crimson rage that changed me forever. I wait until