Maybe if Zoey could get Charlotte home, the ghost would leave her alone for at least an hour or two.
“My dad and I went to check on her,” Zoey lied. “She was asking for you.”
Collin Hawthorne, cheeks flushed a splotchy red, said, “Harlow, what’s up with your arms?”
Zoey realized she’d been standing there scratching her wrists so hard she’d nearly broken the skin. But she had to scratch, or the spiders could find their way inside her.
“Come on, Charlotte,” Zoey managed, her stomach rolling. “Grayson and I will walk you home.”
Collin looked over Zoey’s shoulder, saw Grayson standing there, and gave him a bro nod. “Tighe, what’s up with your girl?”
“Her name is Zoey, Collin,” Grayson answered with a tight smile. “I’m not sure why that’s so hard for you to remember.”
“What’s going on?”
Zoey’s stomach dropped.
Val.
Charlotte and Collin made way for her like an ocean for its goddess. She wore a slinky sequined dress that clung to her lean curves and shimmered silver and would have looked ridiculous on anyone else.
What sane person wears a sequined cocktail dress to a forest party?
But Val’s hair hung long and windblown to the small of her back, and she was barefoot, one of her feet marked with a thin red cut, her crimson toenails like beads of blood. It was a look. It worked.
Val’s smile was brittle, wounded. Trying to make Zoey feel bad for the last party? For the ill-conceived murder accusation?
Fat chance of that.
“You came after all,” said Val, “even after what happened last time. I didn’t think you would.” Her gaze flicked up and down Zoey’s body, then to Grayson. “Hasn’t poor Grayson suffered enough? Let him go, Zoey.” Val’s voice slid low like a deep-sleep dream. “Have you come here looking for another heart to break? One wasn’t enough for you?”
Zoey nearly choked.
“That’s uncalled for, Val,” Grayson said.
Collin smirked and reached for the small of Val’s back. She batted him away like she would an irritating child.
Zoey couldn’t look at Val anymore, otherwise she’d erupt or cry. Either would be a fatal last move.
She waved at Charlotte. “Come on, Charlotte, let’s go.”
“I’m not going anywhere.” Charlotte moved away, teetering slightly. “Mom’s there if Marion needs anything. I just want to have some fun for once.” She grabbed a cup from an overturned crate and gulped down its contents. A leaf dropped down from the trees, coming to rest on Charlotte’s shoulder.
Zoey flinched, expecting spindly legs to sprout from the leaf and go crawling up Charlotte’s throat. She glanced back at the Droop. Nothing. No Jane, no Harry.
Zoey’s fingers tingled, like at the science museum in the static electricity room. Put your hand on the thrumming metal ball and watch your hair stand on end!
Charlotte wiped her lips with the back of her hand and laughed. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve had fun?”
“Yeah, yeah, your life is a tragedy, I get it, but come on.” Zoey didn’t look back at the Droop, but she could feel its unseen eyes watching her. “It’s time to go.”
Val hooked her arm through Charlotte’s. “Charlotte, babe, listen to me. Marion’s fine. She wouldn’t want you to leave a party for her. I mean, that wouldn’t be fair. You deserve to have a good time.”
Charlotte dropped her cheek against Val’s shoulder. “God, I really do. But if Marion needs me—”
“She doesn’t,” Val said, not so gently anymore. “She’s fine. Stay here, come on. The night is young.”
Red flags flapped in Zoey’s deepest gut like taut sheaths of skin. Val sounded a little too desperate, a little too prickly. And although Zoey hadn’t swallowed a sip of alcohol, as she stood there, sweating in the firelight, her head spinning, the soles of her feet buzzing in her sneakers, Charlotte became Thora, and Thora became Charlotte again, and Val stayed Val, sharp-eyed and clinging.
Suddenly, Zoey couldn’t help herself. She curled her hands into fists. “Evelyn Sinclair,” she began quietly, ignoring Grayson’s quiet plea to stop. “Fiona Rochester. Avani Mishra. Grace Kang. Natalie Breckenridge.” The blood in Zoey’s veins crackled. “Thora. Keller.” She glanced at Charlotte, eyes full and hot. “Those names ring a bell, Charlotte?”
Uncertain, Charlotte looked back and forth between Zoey and Val. “Aren’t those the girls who—”
“They used to be friends of Val and her mom and her grandma and her great-grandma. They used to be Sawkill girls. And now they’re gone, vanished without a trace. You want to be next?”
Collin Hawthorne flung his drink into the fire. He clenched his meaty fists. “You’ve crossed a line, Harlow. Do you really want to do this again?”
“Hey, listen,” Grayson began, holding up his hands between them, “she’s just a little bit tipsy, okay? She doesn’t mean it.”
“Oh yes, I do,” Zoey spat.
Val ignored everyone but Zoey, her eyes bright with unshed tears. “You piece of shit,” she said evenly. The wind off the water whipped her hair around her face. “I loved Thora.”
Zoey felt capable of breathing fire.
Instead, she snapped, “Yeah? Well, I loved her, too—”
And then, before Zoey could finish her sentence, before Val could respond, Charlotte strode forward, her eyes bright and hard, the air all of a sudden crackling like someone had infused it with venom, and struck Zoey across her chin. It was a sloppy hit, and Charlotte yelped with pain right after, but it was enough to light Zoey’s face on fire.
Grayson caught her before she could fall. “Jesus, Zo,” he whispered, pressing his handkerchief to her cheek. Sawkill boys and their handkerchiefs. What a world Zoey lived in.
Grayson snapped over his shoulder, “What the hell, Charlotte?”
Encircled by Val’s wolves, all of whom hooted and raised their cups in her honor, Charlotte stepped back, wide-eyed. She shook her head, cradled her punching hand against her chest.
“Zoey,” she whispered, her eyes filling with tears, her words slightly slurred, “I’m so sorry, I don’t know what came over me, I didn’t mean to—”
Val pulled Charlotte gently away, back into the pack. “Leave her,” Val suggested. “Let her walk it off.”
Jaw throbbing, Zoey turned away from them, stumbled toward the dirt road that led back out of the woods.
Harry and Jane emerged from the trees hand in hand. Spider-free and beaming, though Zoey saw them glance at each other once, shifty. Then it was like they came to an unspoken arrangement—who would believe them? Go easy on the booze, you two!—and moved on with their lives.
“What did we miss?” asked Jane brightly, only a tiny bit shaky. Harry ran his fingers nervously through his hair. Looking for stray arachnids?
“Zoey, stop, please,” Grayson said, hurrying after her.
“She changes them.” Zoey stormed through the trees. “I don’t know how, but she changes them. Thora, and now Charlotte.”
“What do you mean, she changes them?”
“Did Charlotte Althouse even for a second strike you as the type of girl to go off and punch someone she barely knows?”
“Well, no, but she had been drinking—”
“Grayson? Honestly?” Zoey whirled around to face him and had to glare way, way up to meet his eyes. For a second she remembered how sweetly her five-foot-nothing frame had fit against his five-foot-ten, how she’d felt protected in his arms but never diminished.
“If you’re not gonna believe me,” she said, tears shimmering at her lashes, “even after what you just saw, even after everything we’ve been through, then leave me the fuck alone for a while, okay?”
Then she turned and left him standing alone in the dark.
THE ROCK WAS A PIECE of the larger whole, indistinct from the tectonic plates and the shrinking forests and the bubbling magma deeps of the world.
The waves gnawed and lapped at the Rock’s edges. They groaned and longed and shattered and shifted. They sprayed and they wept.
But the Rock ignored the resentful cries of the sea and reached up into the trees that furred its hide, shaking loose a world of shadows.
Go, it instructed. Find them.
Marion
The Bone Cry
The noise was faint and shrill and out of tune.
Since her fall, the noise had infected Marion’s dreams; it had teased the edges of her waking thoughts. It had come and gone, elusive enough for her to rationalize it away.
Now it ripped her out of sleep, properly formed at last.
It crept into her quiet white room with the fluttering curtains, the window cracked open to let in the cool night air, the ceiling fan turning lazily around like the circling wings of a hovering jungle insect, mammoth-size.
Marion lay splayed and stiff on her mattress, pinned for inspection. She recited facts, to make sure she existed, in this bed, in this house, on this island:
It was Friday. Nine days since the Althouse family had arrived on Sawkill Rock. Five hours ago, she’d polished the floor of the Kingshead ballroom with her mother.
Her name was Marion.
She was sixteen.
She had hit her head.
She had liked horses once, but not so much anymore.
The noise remained.
It wasn’t in her ears as much as it was in her bones, working its way out from the inside. It vibrated in her marrow as though her entire self teemed with tiny burrowing bugs. Like summer cicadas buzzing in the trees at dusk, the cry droned. Escalated. One cicada. Four. Fourteen. Four hundred. Fourteen thousand.
Marion jumped up from her bed, dug her fingers in her ears. Root out the noise, right? Unplug those dirty canals.
Her head throbbed.
Her jaw ached like she’d been grinding her teeth as she slept.
She needed medicine.
She stood in the center of her room, eyes closed, breathing in and out. What had that therapist suggested, after her father died with his skull split open, alone in the dark with his car smoking around him?
Breathe in one nostril, then out the other.
Concentrate on the air passing in and out of your built-in breathing tubes.
Concentrate on the sensation of your two feet planted solidly on the ground.
You are here, in this world. You exist. The sensation of being alive and human—isn’t it a marvelous thing?
But standing still made her body itch to move, and when she did—pacing around the room, shaking out her arms and legs, stretching her fingers to the ceiling—this only made her body want to move faster.
That’s where the answer lay: Racing across the ground, chasms cracking open where her footprints used to be. If she did that, she’d understand. Everything would become clear.
Marion stumbled to the full-length mirror in the corner of her room, an old-fashioned ornament with a polished cherrywood frame and clawed feet holding it down.
She peered at her face, her sweaty nose nearly touching the glass.
She muttered to herself, “What’s wrong with you?
“Are you sick or something?
“What’s happening, why do you have to be this way?”
She gathered her damp black hair into a merciless ponytail, pulled shining and tight against her skull.
Still, the cry remained—a rattling in her bones, a vibration of wings and crawling tiny feet, a resonance of crunching teeth and a distant relentless turning, like the black water surrounding Sawkill.
And something else, something amid the cicadas and the rattling and the grinding that she couldn’t put her finger on.
A pull, she thought. In all the noise, there was a pull.
Something telling her: Follow me.
She stumbled to the bathroom down the hall, splashed icy water on her face.
The cry of her bones would not cease and desist, no matter how kindly she asked it to. She left her eyes closed too long; the ground tilted and lurched. She was on the back of a behemoth, knotted muscles rolling as it trudged its way endlessly along the sea floor.
She stood hunched over the sink, shoulders heaving as she forced deep breaths inside herself. Maybe that would drown out the screaming of her bones, right? That made sense. Flushing out poison with fresh air.
But wait.
Her head snapped up. She saw her reflection in the bathroom mirror—wide-eyed, gray-eyed, fuzzy shadows playing hide-and-seek across the soft pale planes of her face.
This wasn’t fresh air.
No, this was house air. Downstairs, her mother slept; down the hall, so did Charlotte.
There were chemicals in this cottage—bleach and hand soap and burning liquid to unclog your drain.
She gagged, thinking of dark, knotted hair.
Coughing, she threw up into the sink, but nothing much came out except for spit.
Something was stuck in her throat, that was it. Remove it, and everything would be fine. She’d enjoy silence once more, and she could sleep again.
She reached into her throat with two fingers, nearly scraped her tongue raw, searching.
Ah. There.
The end of a lock of hair—but thick and coarse, not as soft and slick as her own.
She tugged.
Something deep inside her moved, too—a dark piece of Marion’s gutty insides, jerking like a hooked fish.
Her eyes teared up. She gagged around her questing hand.
What was this, lodged at the turn of her throat, where mouth turned to esophagus turned to stomach?
She tugged, and up it came—a long dark clump of hair, sliding up her throat.
She gagged once more. She was pulling out her very essence. She’d reach the end of this dark foreign string and find her own fleshy, pulsing heart.
Finally, she stood, panting, her eyes leaking tears, and stared at it—a clump of tangled hair resting in her palm.
She was no expert, that was true. But she’d never forget how Nightingale’s coarse cropped mane felt, clutched between her fingers as he flew down that hill.
This was horse hair.
Marion’s fingers fisted around it, and the buzzing cry in her bones—now flapping wetly between her ears like a beetle’s damp wings—told her to leave. Get out, or you’ll regret it.
Follow me.
So she did, slipping out the cottage’s back door and down the gravel path that led through Kingshead’s manicured gardens. The rocks cooled her bare feet. Her shorts and sweater were nothing against the nibbling sea wind.
But her bones screamed, Faster, and she had to obey.
Zoey
The Dead Fish
An hour after leaving Val’s party, Zoey made the trek through the Kingshead Woods, pushing past tangled weeds and nearly tripping on the clusters of charcoal-colored rocks spilling down her path.
In the near-dark, for the moon that night was a mere sliver.
Hauling a net full of dead fish.
It wasn’t her idea of fun, but the aftermath would be.
“Screw Val Mortimer,” she grumbled, “and screw Collin Hawthorne. Screw these rocks, screw these trees.” For emphasis, Zoey whacked a low-hanging branch out of her path. “Screw this island, screw these fish.” The net of fish slapped against her back.
“Screw Charlotte Althouse,” she went on cheerily, “and screw Harry Windemeier.”
She stopped her little dark song.
Harry Windemeier. Jane Fitzgerald.
She heaved the net to her other shoulder. Spiders could fall from trees. That wasn’t a strange thing. Horrifying, obviously, and conveniently timed, but nothing to fret about. Nature being nature.
She made it out of the trees and onto the edge of the Kings-head estate. She set down her fish, wiped her brow, and stared up at the imposing e
difice that was the Mortimer family palace.
Every time she saw it, Zoey felt a little like Maria in The Sound of Music, the first time she saw Captain von Trapp’s mansion. But instead of muttering, “Oh, help,” Zoey thrust both her middle fingers at Kingshead and danced around like she’d just scored a touchdown.
She was right in the middle of this when she realized someone was standing in the trees a few feet away, watching her.
Zoey shouted, “Shit,” and staggered back, almost tripping over the net of fish.
“Sorry,” said the someone, and Zoey realized it was Marion Althouse, who looked sketchy as hell standing there in the trees, her skin freaky pale, her hair dark and wild. Just standing there, arms at her sides. “Didn’t mean to scare you. What are you doing out here?”
Zoey aimed for wry nonchalance, to cover up how obviously chalant she was. Was that a thing?
“I’m about to go dump some fish into the back seat of Val’s Lexus,” she replied. “Want to come?”
Marion didn’t answer. She turned, staring into the trees. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“It’s like . . .” Marion shook her head, gripped it between her hands. Her eyes glinted, full of tears. “It doesn’t make any sense to me, but I’ve been hearing it on and off for days, and it’s the worst it’s ever been tonight. I think the accident might have shaken loose something inside of me. Something important.”
Zoey shifted awkwardly. “Hey, it’s okay.”
Marion shook her head. “I can’t make it stop! I’ve tried everything.” She laughed—a high, soft burst. “Almost everything.”
Zoey grabbed Marion’s hands and pried them away from her skull. “What is it? What are you hearing?”
But Marion didn’t answer. She went rigid, her neck elongating as she whipped her head around to search through the darkness. A deer that had heard the snap of a twig beneath a hunter’s boot.
The funny thing was, in that moment, Zoey felt it, too—a sudden heaviness, as if another person had entered a dark room and now stood waiting beside them.
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