He shook his head. “I watched it happen—you being strung up.”
For a long moment she simply looked at him. All these years he’d known. And he’d said nothing to her. “But you didn’t stop him. You didn’t tell anyone.”
She didn’t have to take her eyes from Tommy to see the shift in the forest behind him. The pale ghost of white separating from the shadows.
“I was six,” he protested, throwing his hands into the air. “What could I have done? Who would have believed me if I’d told them there was a monster in the woods?” He moved around the table toward her, as though closing the distance would make her understand.
Behind him, the March Hare echoed his movement, stepping fully into the clearing.
“For years I thought I was crazy—that I’d made it up.” He shoved a hand into his hair. “But then Jack.” His voice cracked on his brother’s name.
Her mouth went dry. “He told you what happened?”
He shook his head. “If it had just been an accident, he wouldn’t have been so scared. He’s different now, Cassidy. And I finally figured out why.”
The March Hare loomed so close behind Tommy now that he filled the periphery of her vision. How Tommy couldn’t sense him, how his skin didn’t crawl with chillbumps, how the air practically vibrated, she didn’t know.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and to his credit he sounded sincere. “I’ve kept your secret for this long. But after Jack. After this—” He rested his hands on her shoulders. “We can’t let anyone else get hurt. We have to tell them the truth.”
The tears blurring her eyes turned the edges of Tommy’s outline fuzzy so that in some places it was difficult to determine where one ended and the other began. “Not all monsters are filled with darkness.” She wanted him to understand this so badly that her voice trembled.
He didn’t even hesitate. “This one is.”
She allowed herself a moment to admire Tommy, the way he stood so resolute, like a knight charging after the monster. He just didn’t grasp that this fight wasn’t his to wage.
“Exactly so,” she finally said.
Of course Tommy would think she was talking to him. He exhaled as though relieved and the start of a smile eased the tension around his lips. By the time he realized that she’d spoken the words to someone over his shoulder, it was already too late.
His eyes went wide. First with confusion, then shock, then pain. The March Hare had moved swiftly. Reaching from behind, he raked his claws across Tommy’s chest, flaying it open.
Tommy tried to suck in a gasp, but it gurgled in his lungs and came back out, speckled red. Death rolled over him like a storm building, at first soft and distant, then boiling dark and streaked sharp with lightning until it swallowed him whole.
His legs gave and he slipped to the ground so that there was nothing left between her and the March Hare. The front of the creature was a matted scarlet that looked almost black in the moonlight. The sharp claws on his hands dripped with it.
Cassidy still held the knife in her hand. With one swing she could bury it in the creature’s abdomen. But instead she sank to her knees next to Tommy. The way he lay on the ground reminded her of her Alice in Wonderland–themed birthday party. How he’d worn the jester’s hat and tumbled into a somersault, landing on his back in front of the girls from down the block.
Maybe if she’d invited him into the forest all those years ago, things would have ended differently. But she doubted it. Darkness grew where it would and took what it wanted. It staked its claim and never let go.
And no one else could pry you free of it.
She pressed a hand against his cheek, the vibrancy of warmth still waging a lost battle. “I’m sorry,” she told him. Carefully she slipped the knife into his hand. “I can’t go back to who I was yesterday.”
With a sigh she closed her eyes and dropped her head. As before, it would be her turn next. She’d known this from the moment she’d stepped into the clearing and seen the bodies.
Eight Years Old
Police swarmed the neighborhood, searching for the four missing girls, but since they’d last been spotted at school, the authorities had yet to turn their attention to the nearby forest.
It was only a matter of time, though. Cassidy understood this. Even so, she returned to the tea party in the clearing each successive afternoon. The girls had begun to decay, taking on a sickly smell that reached deeper and deeper into the forest with the passage of time.
Where in the beginning their skin had been ugly shades of brown and pink splotched with swaths of purple where the blood had initially settled, now their bodies swelled and stretched. There was no give in the fishing line wrapped around their wrists and the skin split beneath it. A glistening liquid oozed out, smearing on the table and dripping into their tea.
Their eyes were little more than slits, and their mouths, once a delicate shade of blue, were now black, stretched into gruesome O’s. They still saluted her when she arrived. They still nodded in response to her inquiries to their well-being. They still banged the table in appreciation of her riddles.
They still sat with her, permanent fixtures at a never-ending tea party.
But of course it had to end. It was on the fourth day that she’d heard the authorities planned to shift the search to the forest the next morning. Which made today her final tea party. And what a grand one it had been with singing and laughter and toasts of admiration.
Once the tea was gone and the light turned ashen, however, Cassidy grew anxious. She worried that once the police found the table in the clearing they’d figure out she’d been there and she’d get in trouble. They’d start asking questions and Cassidy wouldn’t have the answers. Because who would believe her about a man-sized white rabbit?
She plucked at the ruffle on her apron, the taste of tea turning bitter down the back of her throat. In front of her the girls collapsed against the table, one by one, as though their strings had been cut.
It would be her turn next. Somehow she already understood this.
Heart thudding, she rose to face the March Hare as he stepped into the clearing. There was something important she should say to him, but the words wouldn’t come. Instead she curtsied, deeply. He bowed in return and Cassidy knew that if she wanted to end it in that moment, she could. With his head bent before her and his neck exposed, he was vulnerable.
But she did not take advantage of it. She could run. She could fight. But she could never escape the March Hare.
When he straightened she tried to meet his eyes, but even standing this close, they receded into darkness in a way she couldn’t understand. As though they simply did not exist.
After a moment, he motioned for her to lift her hands into the air between them. Overhead, two lengths of fishing line drifted from the branches, whispering in the wind like the filament of a spider’s web. The March Hare took one and wrapped it tight around her right wrist, until it bit into her skin. Tears stung her eyes and she winced when he repeated the action with her left.
He seemed careful to avoid touching her in the process, his claw-tipped fingers deftly tying complicated knots. But when he was done, he hesitated. Her hands hung in front of her, as though she were sleepwalking or a zombie. He stepped closer to her, until the tips of her fingers brushed against the fur of his chest.
She was surprised at the warmth of it. He took another step, so that her palm was pressed flat against him. Under the shifting muscle, she felt his heart. That he had a heart at all took Cassidy by surprise, much less the way it pounded ferociously.
“Exactly so,” she whispered.
He nodded, his crisply white ears falling forward before snapping back up.
The rest of it came swiftly and unexpectedly violent. His hands closed around her throat, claws biting into skin as he squeezed. As the light danced behind her eyes and her lungs turned insi
de out, she fought him.
But it was useless. He was larger and when he threw her forward onto her knees, the fishing line cut into her wrists, yanking her hands over her head. She didn’t even have enough air left in her lungs to scream or beg.
Panic began to drum a frantic beat inside her. Pain sent bright explosions rocketing through her body. It was hard to breathe, her throat bruised and her lungs spasming with sobs and terror.
Perhaps Cassidy had been wrong about the March Hare. Perhaps he was nothing more than a monster, a killer of girls. A wielder of fury and retribution.
Eighteen Years Old
She was everywhere in the clearing: her footsteps in the grass, her fingerprints in the blood, her hair caught in the branches. As before, the only way to erase her complicity was to involve her beyond any measure of doubt. The March Hare had understood this then, even if Cassidy hadn’t.
But she understood now.
The only difference was that this time there would be someone to blame: Tommy, raving about monsters in the woods. And, just as they had a decade ago, no one would ask too many questions because no one ever really wanted the truth.
They wanted the safe answer. The one that allowed them to fall asleep to the promise of dreams. The one that allowed them to forget about the white rabbit the size of a man and his clearing in the forest.
The one that reassured them that all monsters are filled with darkness.
“Make it convincing,” Cassidy whispered, standing to face the March Hare. He pressed the tips of his claws against her abdomen. She winced. “But not too much,” she amended breathlessly.
He nodded, one dingy ear falling forward and struggling to stand back up.
Eight Years Old, Eighteen Years Old
Cassidy was barely conscious when the March Hare, finally finished, gingerly lifted her onto her stump and gently slid a teacup onto her finger. She strained her senses and thought she heard a long sigh and the creak of old bones as he settled at the other end of the table.
He stayed there with her through the night. Every time she struggled to open her eyes, she’d see him, the ghostly outline of white ears against the threatening shadows.
Perhaps he had killed her after all. Perhaps he hadn’t. There was only one thing Cassidy Evans knew for sure: It had been a marvelous tea party.
EMMELINE*
CAT WINTERS
Northern France, 1918
Six feet from where I knitted, my bedroom came to an end and dropped to a cold, stinking pit of ash and bricks and shrapnel that was once our music room. Vacant eyes where windowpanes once hung stared out at the darkened countryside. The walls resembled Roman ruins, and stars peered down through a gaping hole where the roof used to protect my bed. Mon Dieu, that poor bed—now just a charred heap of wood buried down in the ground. Even on a clear summer night like this one, when warm breezes swept inside the rest of the house and delivered the pop-pop-pop of distant rifle fire, my ghost of a room suffered a bitter chill.
In the farthest corner, beneath the shadows of the ceiling’s splintered remnants, I shivered on the floor. I knitted my red scarf. I enjoyed the spectacle of moonlight pushing its way through the wreckage and dreamed of motion pictures such as Notre-Dame de Paris. The flirty old moon eased his way across the warped and sooty floorboards and kissed my bare toes, turning my feet as luminous as the skin of the cinema stars.
Ah, I thought with a pleased wiggle of my toes.
From somewhere down below, in the untouched part of the house, male voices and bursts of laughter rose into the night. My mother’s voice carried a welcoming calm, and silverware clanked genially on plates. Our benevolent troops.
Tipsy singing followed the meal—a war ditty bellowed in English, “Pack Up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag.” One of the younger children giggled, and my sister Claudine joined in with her off-key warbling. Poor, tone-deaf Claudine. She never could carry a tune, even when we performed our little pageants for the family, before the war.
My room grew colder. I drew my knees to my chest and pulled my half-finished scarf around my waist. Still my teeth chattered. My bones ached. The moon sidled closer, but its cinematic beams, all glamour and trickery, carried no warmth.
Three more songs into the evening, when moonlight bathed my entire skirt in a brilliant shade of white, footsteps approached the craggy opening where my door once stood. I grabbed a hunk of rubble—brick and a wedge of old plaster that made my hands chalky—and lifted my arm, ready for whichever sibling stalked down the teetering hallway to try to catch sight of me.
Someone taller than my brothers and sisters climbed the toppled black fragments of wood and entered my room. It was a soldier, a young one, with blond hair that was almost brown and eyes that looked to be blue or even gray from where I sat. His uniform was a little baggy in the hips, stern and tight in the tunic, olive green in color. Not a German. Thank heavens.
He wore tall leather boots that ended just below his knees. The thick soles made a loud shuffling as he inched and creaked across the floorboards, toward the jagged drop below. He leaned forward with his arms slightly out for balance and surveyed the annihilation—what was once a beautiful buttercup-yellow room full of Mama’s piano and Grandfather’s violin and music, music, music. The soldier’s lips formed a small O, followed by a low whistle.
In the shadows, I tilted my head, considering. This stranger in my broken bedroom, with his ethereal skin and striking eyes, cut a handsome figure in the moonlight. Handsome enough for motion pictures. His nose and jaw looked strong and well-proportioned. His body was lean yet muscular. And warm. I sensed the heat of him from across the room.
I slid my feet farther into the light and cleared my throat.
The boy gave a start. “Who’s there?”
He squinted into my dark corner, craned his head, took a single step toward me.
“Hello?” he asked in English, and after another step, he straightened his neck and grinned in a dopey sort of way, just then discovering he was alone with a seventeen-year-old girl.
I shifted my gaze downward, a small smile on my lips, and set the chunk of brick and plaster aside.
“Do you speak English?” he asked.
“Oui.”
“You do? Wait”—another step—“did you say yes in French because you understood me?”
“Oui.”
“Or do you answer oui to any question you don’t understand?”
I shot him a glare. “I would say no if a foreigner came up here and asked me a question I did not understand. Or nein if you were one of our damned Boche occupiers.”
“I didn’t . . .” He put up his hands. “I’m not a German.”
“My grandmother was from England”—I returned to my silver needles and yarn—“but you sound nothing like her. I bet you’re a Yank.”
“That’s right.”
“Ah. Our noble American saviors.”
He shifted his eyes back to the pit. “Did the Krauts fire this shell through the roof?”
I shrugged. “Does it matter who dropped it there?”
“I . . . Well, I guess not. Unless it makes you feel better to blame someone. I bet anything it was the Krauts.”
I shrugged a second time. I didn’t know which troops shot the shell into our house, and I didn’t want to know. I blamed everyone for it.
The soldier peeked at me again. “What’s your name?”
“I’m not going to tell you.”
“Why not?”
“Because—” I bit down on my lip.
“Because what?” he asked.
“Well . . . sometimes a girl should keep a trace of mystery about her, no?” I glanced up at him from beneath my lashes. “It’s part of the games men and women play.”
His big American boots clomped to the sturdier side of the room, where he leaned his hand against the blacke
ned wall. “I don’t have much time for games right now.”
“Hmm.” I fussed with a long piece of scarlet fuzz. “What is your name?”
“Well, that’s not fair. Why should I tell you mine if you won’t tell me yours?”
“Because you’re an intruder in my bedroom.”
“Christ! This was your bedroom?”
I nodded with my lips pursed tight. “It was. It still is, as long as I watch out for the fall to the first floor and don’t mind the soot. The bed’s long gone, although I swear I can see my headboard under all the bricks if I look down in the right light. My favorite pair of shoes too. Black ones, with two little straps and fancy buttons.”
The soldier plopped his back against the wall and fished for something in one of the deep pockets on his chest. “All right, I’ll give you a hint.”
“A hint?”
“About my name,” he said. “I’m named after an author.”
“Hmm. What nationality?”
“American.”
“Of course.” I wound the yarn with nimble fingers and rummaged in my brain for Yank writers. “Poe?”
“No.”
“Twain?”
“No.”
“Ah”—I cast a glance at his brooding posture—“you could easily be a Lord Byron. Moody and passionate.”
“Byron’s British.” He shoved a cigarette between his lips and ignited a flame with the flick of a dull brass lighter.
“Hey!” I sat up straight. “What are you doing?”
“Having a smoke. What does it look like?” He tilted his head toward the wavering wisp of orange and blue, and all I could see was my room engulfed in a crackling inferno.
“Don’t!” I sprang from my corner and blew out the light with a force that shook through his hair and lashes. He froze and stared at me with wide smoky-gray eyes, his pupils swelling, his eyebrows arched. The unlit cigarette teetered on his lips.
I slunk back two feet, closer to the shadows. “Why would you light a match in a burned-up room that stinks of fire?”
Slasher Girls & Monster Boys Page 6