She wondered if school would start up again in the fall like normal, considering all the tragedies of the summer. (Maybe they’d shut the hellhole down for good.)
She wondered what she would do until the next and last kill, to pass the time. For of course the last kill would happen, probably in a matter of hours, judging by the look of him—already peeling his glutted self off the ground, already looking human again. A new form, one she’d never seen: Like Dr. Wayland, but more overtly masculine, more muscled, his clothes barely containing his sculpted body, his smile toothy and his posture military and his pale hair cropped close to his head. He was the mirror-universe version of Dr. Wayland, one who could kick the last breaths out of anyone he didn’t like and would laugh while doing it. His bright white gaze flitted about the clearing, and his fingers twitched at his sides, like he was already scouting the woods for the next meal. Soon he would break free of all need for the Mortimers, and run off into the wild to hunt as he so desired, all because Val had failed to stop him and would doubtless fail again if she tried it.
She stared numbly at the carnage before her, tears filling her eyes.
Marion, I’m sorry.
She closed her eyes, desperate for the memory: Marion’s face, smiling up at her, her dark hair tangled and love-mussed.
Marion’s sleepy murmurings, drifting up from where she lay tucked beneath Val’s chin.
Marion, laughing. Marion, gasping. Tasting Marion, holding Marion, making Marion smile and cry out and gasp for breath—
“Who’s Marion?”
Val’s stomach shrank into a cold metal knot and plunged beneath the sea of her flaming blood.
The little boy stood before her. It was a relief to see that familiar form, instead of the monstrous, unstoppable Dr. Wayland. Blood stained the boy’s mouth and hands and angelic curls. His wide blue eyes looked up at her with a carefully fabricated ingenuousness.
“Tell me?” He sidled closer, placed two pudgy red hands on her leg. Even through her jeans, she felt the wet heat of his grip.
Val, fighting for calm and finding none, attempted subterfuge. Usually, his mind was fuzzy after a meal. Maybe, if she spoke carefully enough, she could dislodge his memory of Marion, alter it. “I— No one. I was just daydreaming—”
“You’re lying.” The boy’s voice was cold. His eyes flicked away, then returned. In his gaze turned a calculation. “The other girl. The second sister.” A slow smile spread across his face. “Oh, yes. I remember her now. Marion. Yes. I’ve been her before. I’ve played with her mother. Come. Let’s get cleaned up and go pay them a visit. It’s been too long.”
Val couldn’t move. Her panic was too complete.
Bringing him to Marion would be bad, but perhaps salvageable.
Refusing him would be disastrous.
Val took his hand and unsteadily led him out of the stones. Behind them, the remains of Quinn’s body lay scattered. The air vibrated against Val’s skin—the veil he used to keep the stones hidden from outsiders.
Val opened and closed her fists, thinking quickly.
“Marion’s nothing much, you know.” She kept her voice casual. “Kind of plump. Plain, really.” She dared to fiddle with his hair, rearrange a matted red lock. “She’s not your type, as I’m sure you’ve figured out by now.”
He smacked her hand away and twisted her arm so hard that blades of pain shot up to her shoulder.
“Wait,” she gasped, but it was pointless to plead with him. He didn’t stop until she was silent and on her knees before him.
“Oh, Valerie,” said the boy, tipping up her chin so she had to look at his baby-faced grin. “It’s too late for that. Any girl who could inspire you to betray me is special indeed.”
Marion
The Collector
Marion watched Zoey for signs of imminent combustion.
“You slept with Val,” Zoey said, lying on the floor beside Marion’s bed.
“Yes.”
Zoey nodded, her expression grim. “Where?”
Marion pressed her palm against the mattress. “Here.”
“In your bed?”
Marion shut her eyes. They were swollen from crying, itchy and raw, and her throat hurt from trying to hold back sobs so she could be strong for her mother. There was a hole in her heart, a Charlotte-shaped hole, that had been ripped cruelly asunder—but only the day before she’d been making Val writhe under her mouth, and Val had held her, after, with trembling hands, and she didn’t think it was right or fair for one girl’s body to feel so much chaos at one time.
“Yes,” she whispered.
“Well,” said Zoey flatly. “Jesus H. Christ.”
“Are you mad?” A stupid question, Marion supposed, but then another possibility entered her mind. “Are you . . . jealous?”
“Frankly, Marion,” Zoey said, sitting up, “I’m really goddamn confused.”
“Okay . . .”
“You might even say I’m non-fucking-plussed.”
“Zoey—”
“To hear that you slept with my mortal enemy, my nemesis, the daughter of the sex-dungeon-haver—”
“I know—”
“The girl who probably killed Thora, who maybe killed . . .”
Zoey fell silent, looked away.
Marion sat up. “You know that isn’t true.”
“No. I don’t.”
“We know what killed Charlotte. It was the monster.”
Zoey glared up at her. “We’ve discussed this. Monsters don’t always work alone. Jesus, Marion.” She wiped a hand over her face. “I can’t believe you’d do this.”
Now Marion was the one glaring. “We agreed that I should get close to her. You thought it was a good idea!”
“And did you get any information out of her?” Zoey asked. “Any clues about the monster? Any answers as to how the hell some girl-eating creature lives for generations on an island without anyone finding it? Did you find out anything like that, Marion?”
Marion’s cheeks grew hot. “. . . No.”
“And why not?”
“I was . . .”
“You were maybe a little distracted?”
Marion fumbled for words, her fast-rising anger muddying her thoughts.
“Why’d you do it? Tell me.” Zoey wrapped her arms around her legs, mockingly thoughtful. “Really, I want to hear your reasons why you let this happen.”
“Because she’s beautiful!” Marion couldn’t sit still any longer. She climbed out of bed and started pacing. “Because she’s nice to me, and it makes me feel special. Like someone sees me. Like you see me, the real me, but, you know . . .” Marion waved her hand around. “With, like, sex involved. Because my sister’s dead”—Marion’s voice choked on the words—“and my dad’s dead, and my mom’s so sad I’m not sure she’ll ever recover and be the person she used to be. Because I wanted to feel something.” She smacked her palm against her chest three times, and each thud knocked her tears closer to their exit. “Really feel like I’m here, and alive, and I wanted not just to feel alive, but to feel good, for once. To feel really, really good.”
She turned to face Zoey, refusing to blink. “And because I wanted her, and she wanted me. And because I don’t think she hurt anyone. I think the monster did—not her, or her mom.” She blinked, and tears rolled down her cheeks. “Because she’s lonely, and so am I. Okay?”
Zoey considered her for a long moment. “You could have chosen anyone else, Marion. Anyone but her, and it would have been fine.”
Marion scoffed, wiping her eyes. “So I need to run my sex partners by you?”
“You know that’s not what I’m saying,” Zoey replied, her voice breaking. “I’m saying Val stole Thora from me, so I ended up being pissed at my best friend until the day she died. I’m saying not her.”
And suddenly the anger rising in Marion’s chest caught fire. “I know about you and Grayson,” she said. “Charlotte told me. And just because you can’t figure out how to have sex like a n
ormal person doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy it for myself.”
As soon as the words had been said, Marion regretted them.
Zoey’s body sagged, like some of the air had been let out of her.
“Zoey . . .” Marion shook her head. “Zoey, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. You know I didn’t.”
Zoey just looked at her.
“I wasn’t thinking. I was mad, and Charlotte—” Marion cut herself off. She would not use her grief as an excuse. “Doesn’t matter. I shouldn’t have said that. I didn’t mean it, and I don’t think it. That was the shittiest thing—”
“Yes,” Zoey burst out, her eyes vivid with tears. “That was the shittiest possible thing you could have said to me. Do you know how many nights I’ve lain awake wondering what’s wrong with me? Why I can’t enjoy sex like a normal person? Do you know how many cruel things I’ve heard said about me since Grayson and I broke up? That he dumped me because I’m black, that he dumped me because he just wanted a quick fuck, that asexual people are fundamentally broken—”
“Of course you’re not broken, Zoey,” Marion said, desperate to hug her but assuming this was a privilege she was no longer allowed. “No one worth a damn actually thinks that. I don’t think that.”
Then, downstairs, the doorbell rang.
Val’s faint voice called out: “Marion? Are you home?”
Zoey raced out the door and downstairs.
Marion’s heart dropped. “Zoey?” She ran after her, but Zoey was fast, and Marion’s feet were still tender. Hobbling toward the stairs, she heard the front door opening, and then Val’s voice, surprised: “Zoey?”
Zoey’s chipper reply, free of tears: “The one and only!”
“What are you doing here?”
“Hanging out with Marion.”
“Oh, right. You two are . . . friends.”
“Righto, Valerie. Do you want to come in?”
That’s when Marion heard the rapid clicking noise moving along the wall, down the front foyer, into the hallway, and deeper into the house, like the skittering of claws across a hard surface.
Marion’s eyes refocused. A sharp twang inside her resounded, like a finger had plucked her ribs electric, and a voice had whispered, Pay attention now.
The bone cry began, a shrill dissonant grind beneath her skull. A moth appeared, wiggling out of the dark hallway light fixture and drifting toward the stairs.
Marion followed it slowly down.
Val: “Listen, um . . . Don’t take this the wrong way, but I think you need to leave.”
Zoey, innocently: “Oh? Why’s that, Val?”
“I need to talk to Marion, privately.”
“Because you’re such good friends now?”
Marion reached the bottom of the stairs, and as soon as she turned the corner to face the hallway, she saw it—a patch of darkness, oddly shaped, like a child’s angry scribble. It scurried across the ceiling, away from Marion, and gathered in the farthest corner of the living room, above the couch where her mother slept.
Two white eyes appeared in the darkness, wide and unblinking. Then the shadow slid down the wall, behind the arm of the couch. Waiting.
The words of the rhyme crawled up Marion’s arms: Beware of the woods and the dark, dank deep.
She crossed the hallway to enter the living room, her frantic heartbeat flooding her mouth. Beyond the shriek of the bone cry, the others’ voices came faintly.
Val, seeing her: “Marion? Hey—”
Zoey, turning: “Oh, Marion! Just in time. Valerie here thinks I should leave. Maybe I should, so you two can have some alone time?”
Marion moved slowly across the living room, her breathing high and thin. The television was on low volume, an old black-and-white movie flickering from frame to frame.
She spoke into the shadows. “Hello?”
Her mother shifted in her sleep, smacking her lips.
A little boy’s voice replied from the unseen corner: “Hello, Marion.”
He’ll follow you home and won’t let you sleep.
Marion hesitated, hardly able to swallow. “Who are you?”
The lone moth hovered above where the thing hid.
You know the answer, said the little moth voice.
“Some friend you’ve got,” said the boy, and just as Val and Zoey entered the room, a tiny fist thrust out of the corner, grabbed the moth, and disappeared.
The bone cry, abruptly, ceased.
Zoey jumped back. “What was that?”
Some friend you’ve got. Not Zoey, Marion thought, her bile rising, because she could hear the monster’s jaws grinding, tearing the moth’s body to shreds.
It wasn’t talking about Zoey, or Val.
It was talking about the moth.
“They help me, sometimes,” said Marion, approaching slowly once more. She had to get him away from her mother. “The moths, I mean.”
“How curious,” came the little boy’s voice.
Zoey grabbed Marion’s wrist. “Who is that?”
“Marion, don’t go over there,” said Val, her voice strained. “Please, it’s not safe.”
Zoey, sharply: “How would you know? Val, who is this?”
“She’s right,” giggled the little boy. The plump child’s fist returned, caressing her mother’s pant leg. “I’m not safe.”
“Get away from her!” Marion meant to run over, as any girl protecting her mother would, but instead, she vanished from one spot and appeared in the other—right there, in the corner, looming over a tiny blue-eyed boy with white-blond curls.
Val gasped, her voice full of tears. “What the hell?”
Zoey grabbed a poker from the fireplace. “Val, get her mom out of here.”
Marion had half a second to notice the scraps of moth wings dotting the boy’s lips before he jumped up, latched on to her torso, and climbed up to her shoulders, his pudgy cheeks red with rage. She staggered back and fell, hitting her head on the floor. Her vision blacked out and returned. The boy smacked her across the face and bent to her throat with his teeth bared.
Zoey’s poker flew, smashing into his temple. He didn’t budge, the skin unbroken. His head snapped up and he snarled at her, the sound issuing from his throat not a sound that any human child could make.
“Val,” Marion gasped, searching, the boy’s hand tight around her throat. Dimly, she saw Val guiding her mother into the other room. Her mother was still half-asleep; the sleep aid Dr. Wayland had prescribed to her, to help her find rest even in her grief, was damn good. She murmured, “Val? What’s going on?”
Zoey’s poker flew once more. “Get off of her, you son of a bitch!”
“Jean Grey,” Marion croaked, reminding Zoey. She felt an electric mightiness gather underneath the hardwood floor, pooling beneath her own shuddering spine and Zoey’s feet. “Do it again.” She clawed at the boy’s fingers, dodged his gnashing teeth. “Focus! Hurry!”
Zoey dropped the poker. The floor sizzled and snapped at her approach. She grabbed the boy’s collar and threw him—twenty yards, across the house, into the kitchen. He crashed into the refrigerator, howling like a kid having a tantrum. At the impact, the boy disappeared and the dark shape returned, a rageful shadow that engulfed the kitchen cabinets in blackness. The childish fury became an unearthly one, and its howl—both guttural and piercing—smashed every piece of glass in the house.
Zoey dropped to her knees between Marion and the kitchen, her trembling arm outstretched, her palm rigid.
“What is it?” she cried. “Marion? You okay?”
Gasping for breath, Marion rolled over to face the kitchen. A creature, earless and head on backward, vaguely lupine, vaguely masculine, composed of shifting shadows and a slippery, scaly hide, scrambled toward them. Bumped into walls, knocked over chairs—a disoriented but determined crab.
Its white eyes stared, unblinking. Leathery wings sprouted, slapped wetly against the walls. When it screamed, Marion thought she heard her name.
Th
at gave her the jolt of fear she needed.
You tessered, Zoey had said.
“Hold on,” she instructed Zoey, and Zoey grabbed on to her hand, right as the creature started dragging itself across the floor, right as the sharp electric force thrumming beneath Marion shot up and consumed her.
She held tight to Zoey with one arm, thought of Zoey’s house, planted her other palm flat on the floor—a conductor between her body and the island’s rocky guts.
Because she had decided that this strength surging up her body belonged to her, yes, but also to Sawkill Rock—to the moths and to the sea, to the horse that had shattered his bones in the water, and to the black shivering trees where the police had found her sister’s hand.
“I hear you,” she whispered, wondering what, exactly, was listening—and then shoved hard at the ground.
An inhale. Zoey’s terrified sob. The snap and jolt of the world turning inside out.
An instant later, they landed in the Harlows’ quiet, warmly lit kitchen—hard, on their hands and knees—and the last thing Marion knew before she passed out was Zoey latched on to her, face buried in her hair, whispering over and over, “Hold on, hold on, hold on,” like a rosary prayer, or a spell crafted to ward off the devil.
Zoey
The Wall
When Zoey came to, the first thing she did was try to call out for Marion, but she only managed a cough.
“Hey, hey, it’s okay,” came her father’s voice. The couch cushion sank under his weight. “I’ve got you.”
Zoey now recognized her surroundings—the brown fabric of the couch, stained but worn smooth and soft. The exposed wood rafters outlining the vaulted ceiling. Gentle yellow lamplight, orange-and-blue-striped rug on the dark hardwood floor, framed sepia photographs on the marigold yellow walls (her grandparents, her aunts and uncles and father when they were young, and Zoey when she couldn’t even crawl).
Across the room on the love seat, Marion slept soundly, a blanket tucked around her.
“Zo?” her father murmured, stroking her cheeks. “Zoey, look at me. You’re okay.”
Sawkill Girls Page 21