Sawkill Girls

by Claire Legrand

  “What does this have to do with the queen?” Zoey interrupted.

  “Well, according to this text,” Grayson replied, beginning to pace, “the monsters all function in this world in the same fashion. They need an anchor to exist here, and to be able to take different forms. Otherwise they wouldn’t be able to exist outside the obscurae.” Grayson paused. “You know what those are, right?”

  Zoey gave him a truly impressive eye roll.

  He held up his hands. “I just wasn’t sure what you already knew.”

  Marion butted in gently. “We know what the obscurae are. Keep going.”

  “Well, according to the book,” Grayson continued, “the monsters attach themselves to a particular family, and the connection passes on with the birth of each generation. The family serves as an anchor, stabilizing the monster’s power and allowing him to exist in this world.”

  Zoey tensed, the lines of her body suddenly rigid.

  Grayson opened the book, flipped to a page displaying an illustration of a naked girl with a curved mark on her abdomen. “The queen.”

  Marion took the book from Grayson, ran her fingers over the illustration. “What does she do? And what is this mark?”

  “Others in the family may be connected to the monster,” Grayson explained, “but the queen is the one most closely bound to him. She obeys him completely. She doesn’t have a choice. Her will is consumed by his will. The mark is a scar left behind from when he . . . joins with her.”

  Zoey looked ill. “When he joins with her?”

  “Please don’t make me elaborate.”

  Marion shivered. The drawing of the naked queen under her fingers suddenly felt warm and alive. A flash of memory—Val’s soft skin under her trembling hands.

  “Grayson,” Zoey said abruptly, “do you still have that baseball bat?”

  Grayson looked surprised. “Yes . . .”

  “Can you get it for me, please? I don’t want to listen to this stuff without a weapon in my hands.”

  “What, in case the Collector shows up in the kitchen?” Grayson asked.

  Zoey stared him down. “Does that seem out of the freaking realm of possibility?”

  “You don’t need a weapon,” said Marion quietly, still staring at the drawing. “You are a weapon, Zoey. We both are.”

  The room fell silent.

  “Yeah, well,” Zoey said at last, her voice shaking. “Maybe I want an actual solid blunt object to wave around, just in case.”

  Once Grayson left to find the bat, Marion sat tense and frowning, the book like a two-ton brick in her lap, until Zoey said, “So what does all this sound like to you? Because I sure as hell know what I think.”

  Marion decided to play dumb, because, yes, she knew exactly what Zoey meant—but she wasn’t sure she could bear saying it aloud. “What does what sound like?”

  “Come on, Marion.” Zoey slapped the sofa cushion. “A family connected to the monster? A connection passed down from generation to generation?”

  Perhaps, Marion thought, if I just shut down my brain and refuse to listen to her, then nothing will change. The world will remain as it is. I will know nothing.

  “I don’t understand what you’re implying,” she lied.

  “Yes, you do. It’s the Mortimers.” Zoey grabbed the book from Marion and shook it at her. “Every Sawkill girl who’s died or disappeared over the past twelve decades has had a connection to the Mortimer family in some way. Val is freaky, and so is her mom, and Grayson said her grandmother was, too. They’re ice queens, a whole family of them. Beautiful and terrifying, and no one on Sawkill can touch them? Sounds like a monster family to me.”

  Grayson returned with his old wooden bat and held it out hopefully. Zoey took it from him, stretched up on her toes to plant a sloppy kiss on his forehead, and then started swinging the bat through the air, face screwed up in concentration.

  “Val wouldn’t,” said Marion, hating the sound of her own voice—how small and fragile it sounded, how her words dropped like stones from her tongue. “She wouldn’t. It’s not possible.”

  “You didn’t see anything like that marking on Val when you slept with her, did you?”

  Cheeks flaming, Marion flinched. Slept with her. As if it were as simple and meaningless as that. “That’s not something I want to just go around telling everyone, Zoey. And I think you know that.”

  “Grayson’s not ‘everyone,’” Zoey reasoned, though she didn’t meet Marion’s eyes. “If he’s going to know what’s going on, then he needs to know what’s going on. All of it.”

  The grandfather clock in the living room chimed nine times, and Grayson waited until it had finished to ask the question Marion had fervently hoped no one would ask:

  “So . . . you think the queen could be . . . Val?”

  Zoey looked evenly at Marion.

  “No,” said Marion, unable to meet their eyes. “When we . . . When we slept together, I didn’t see anything like that on her.”

  Zoey asked sharply, “Are you sure?”

  “Zo,” murmured Grayson. “Come on, ease up a bit.”

  “I think I’d know.” Marion blinked away a hot rush of tears. She rose from the armchair, grabbed her jacket and purse, and headed for the door. “I’ve gotta go. See you later.”

  Zoey followed her. “Marion—”

  “Shut up, Zoey.”

  She marched outside and down the porch stairs, shoved her hand in her pocket, and pulled out her car keys.

  “Let me go with you,” Zoey said, trotting alongside her. “Please, you shouldn’t go alone.”

  “No.” Marion opened the Volvo’s rusted blue door and slipped into the driver’s seat. “It’s not her. I’m going to prove it to you.”

  Then she slammed the car door shut and drove away, Zoey diminishing in the rearview mirror from a worried-looking girl in a pink coat to a lonesome column of shadow to darkness.

  Marion slipped into Kingshead using her mother’s keys and crept upstairs, her sweaty hand clutching the polished banister.

  It was as Marion crossed the landing from the east wing to the west that she realized she hadn’t seen Ms. Mortimer in a while. Not that she was complaining. The woman wasn’t exactly the most welcoming human to have ever lived.

  Still. It was odd, wasn’t it? For the mistress of Kingshead to have disappeared?

  The dark quiet of the house, the niggling feeling of unease that had sat curled on her shoulders since leaving Zoey and Grayson—it was making Marion paranoid. Ms. Mortimer probably hadn’t disappeared. She was most likely busy in town helping the volunteers, offering moral support to the community—

  Val’s bedroom.

  Marion pressed her fingers lightly to the dark wood, closing her eyes and biting her lip. Her body, warm and tingling, felt ready to float and drift. Amplified: her breathing, her racing blood. The door itself: cracked open, emitting a thin stream of light.

  Marion peeked inside.

  And what she saw was Val, clad in cotton underwear pale pink as new petals, golden hair flying wild down her back. She was examining the flat plane of her lower belly—across which stretched a black mark thin as a crescent moon.

  A ragged sound Marion couldn’t contain burst from her lips.

  Val turned, startled. “Who’s there?”

  Pushing the door open, Marion revealed herself. She watched in silence as Val’s eyes widened and her mouth parted in shock. Her hands flew to her belly, but the black grin was too wide for her to cover, and anyway, what did she think? That by hiding it, Marion would forget what she had seen?

  “Marion,” Val choked out. She took a step, halted, then seemed to realize that, wait, as far as Val was concerned, Marion didn’t know anything, she didn’t know a damn thing, and let her hands fall. “Let me explain.” Watching Val compose herself was like witnessing a maestro write her magnum opus. Her mouth melted into a rueful smile. “I was out riding and had an accident—”

  “Shut up, Val.”

 
; Val’s pale face grew paler. “Marion . . .”

  “Did it hurt her?”

  “What?” The word escaped her lips in a puff of air.

  “When he killed Charlotte, did it hurt? Was she in pain?”

  Val’s stricken expression told Marion everything she needed to know. Marion nodded, lips tight.

  Val said quietly, “Marion, please . . .”

  Remembering when Val had said just that—but sweetly, desperately, her fingers tangled in Marion’s hair, her hips arching off of Marion’s bed—Marion looked at the ceiling and snapped in half. She had to lean against the doorframe to hold herself up, trying and failing to grapple with the realization that the girl she had slept with—the girl she had begun, stupidly, to think she could maybe love—had led her sister to her doom.

  Zoey was right. Zoey had been right from the beginning.

  Val moved toward her, whispering her name, and Marion pinned her with a deadly glare.

  “I hope,” Marion said, fighting hard to keep her tears from falling, “that whenever you die, it lasts for a long time, and hurts you more than you ever dreamed possible. And I hope that as you lie there in agony, you think of me, and remember that wherever I am, when I hear of your death? I’ll rejoice.”

  Then, pushing herself off the wall before Val could touch her, Marion remade the trembling shards of herself into something like a girl, and fled.

  Zoey

  The Extraordinary

  Zoey sat on the floor in Grayson’s living room, her father’s book lying on the carpet in front of her. It wasn’t cold enough for a fire, but Grayson had built one for her anyway, in an attempt to stop her shivering. As she watched the flames, her eyes unfocused, she glimpsed in their shifting shapes the illustrated figures in her father’s book, now given new meaning.

  It was a ritual.

  According to Grayson’s translation, that was the “method of extermination” the Hand of Light had devised.

  A ritual soaked in blood. A ritual centered around sacrifice.

  Grayson was bustling about in the kitchen, wiping down the counters and dusting out the cabinets. The compulsion to clean was a trait he’d inherited from his father, and something Zoey had always appreciated because she could not have cared less about whether any kitchen cabinets, anywhere, were clean. But, she had to admit, it was nice when they were.

  Zoey had just pulled her legs to her chest and rested her chin on her knees when a quiet knock sounded at the front door.

  She shot to her feet and hurried to the foyer, Grayson right on her heels with a dishrag flung over his shoulder. A quick glance out the peephole revealed a Marion-shaped person, but night had fallen, and Zoey had to make sure.

  “Marion?” she called out. “Prove it’s really you. What’s Grayson’s professor name?”

  “Professor Asshole,” Marion said at once, her voice hollow.

  Zoey opened the door to reveal Marion standing on the other side, looking dazed and sickly pale, dark hair plastered to her head. It had started, softly, to rain.

  “Marion?” Zoey was afraid to touch her.

  At the sound of Zoey’s voice, Marion’s empty expression collapsed, and she staggered forward into Zoey’s arms.

  And just like that, Zoey knew.

  Grayson quietly closed and locked the door, and Marion’s sagging weight forced Zoey to lower them both to the floor as gracefully as she could manage. Leaning back against the door, Zoey held Marion close as she wept on her shirt. She stroked Marion’s hair, tenderly combing out the wet snarls.

  Standing a few feet away, Grayson shot Zoey a sad look and then moved to the kitchen to put a kettle on for tea.

  When Marion at last whispered against Zoey’s neck, “I thought I might have started to love her,” Zoey felt such a rage building inside her that she could have sworn she felt fire spark from the ends of her hair.

  The next time Zoey saw Valerie Mortimer, she would show her not a scrap, not a crumb, of mercy.

  After Zoey helped Marion back to the armchair, Marion stared at the fire for a while, drifting in and out of sleep. She lay wrapped up in Zoey’s favorite of the Tighe family’s afghans—an ugly, fluffy thing, orange and white and asparagus green.

  The first time Grayson had kissed her, they’d both been tucked under that blanket, watching but not really watching Alien. Normally Zoey would have been pissed at anyone coming between her and Ellen Ripley, but this was Grayson, and his kisses, although they hadn’t exactly set her on fire, had left her so soft and relaxed that she’d hardly noticed when Kane’s chest burst open.

  The first time she and Grayson had had sex, they’d lain on top of that same blanket, in the bed of his truck, serenaded by crickets and hugged by dusk—soft violet sky above, soft black grass below.

  And it hadn’t been bad. It hadn’t been great, either—at least not for Zoey—and as Grayson held her afterward, catching his breath and drawing circles on her shoulders with his thumb, Zoey had realized she could happily exist for the rest of her life without doing that ever again.

  Does that mean I’m broken? she’d wondered, tears pricking her eyes as she stared at the stars coming out to play, winking down at her like they knew things she didn’t.

  On the day she split with Grayson, she’d asked him that same question: “Does this mean I’m broken?”

  He’d answered immediately: “No. It doesn’t. And I don’t care about the sex, Zo. I want to be with you.”

  Zoey, though, had recoiled at the idea. He would grow to resent her. He would break her heart, and she would break his.

  She’d backed away from him, shaking her head. “I’m not going to change my mind, Grayson.”

  “Zo, please, I’m not asking you to—”

  Zoey had left him then, unable to bear the gentle sound of his voice or the sight of his tears.

  And that was that. The end of Zoey and Grayson. Grayzo, she’d told him once, would be their ship name.

  RIP Grayzo.

  So as Zoey sat across the room from Marion, listening to the sounds of Grayson baking cookies in the kitchen (really, was the boy an actual saint?), she couldn’t help staring at that damned ugly blanket and stewing in a state somewhere between regret and not-regret.

  “Thanks for letting me cry on you,” came Marion’s soft voice. Curled up under the afghan, propped up by Mrs. Tighe’s ridiculous collection of throw pillows, Marion peeked out from under a wave of black hair and offered Zoey a tired smile.

  “Don’t thank me,” Zoey said darkly, which was probably not the best way to begin the conversation. But if Marion wanted a friend who made a point of saying the right things at the right moments, well, she’d have to look elsewhere.

  Zoey stood, the quiet panic she’d tamped down for a half hour now finally emerging. “Grayson?”

  He poked his head out of the kitchen, saw that Marion was sitting up, fully awake, and deflated. “Right.” He took a breath. “Right.” Then he disappeared, replaced by sounds of running water and dishes being stacked.

  Marion clutched the afghan at her throat. “What is it?”

  “What’s what?”

  “You’re panicking.”

  Zoey waved her off. “Only slightly.”

  “Zoey.”

  Stalking circles around the room, Zoey waited for Grayson to join them. Then she retrieved her father’s book from the end table and squeezed herself into the armchair beside Marion, and opened it to the pages Zoey wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to stop thinking about, not for the rest of her life.

  Marion looked at the pages, aghast. “What is all this?”

  Zoey glanced up at Grayson.

  Grayson took a deep breath and sat on the edge of the coffee table. “It’s a ritual the Hand of Light has devised. When completed, they’ve found it banishes the Collector back to one of the obscurae. Not forever. Their notes say that the monsters end up returning, maybe not always to the same place, but the banishment doesn’t kill them or anything. They always return. T
hey go into hiding, regenerate, and return. Sometimes it takes years, though. Even decades.”

  Zoey watched Marion’s gaze drop to the illustration lying open in her lap—three girls. One stabbing. One slicing. One being consumed by a black cloud with white eyes.

  “All right, so . . .” Marion shook her head a little. “What is the ritual, exactly?”

  “Semper tres.” Grayson flipped back to the page with one of the sketched superhuman girls—the girl brandishing a sword. He pointed to the words scrawled beneath the girls’ feet. “It means ‘Always three.’ That’s the key, it seems. They need three girls for the ritual. And not just any three girls.”

  Grayson glanced at Marion, and then at Zoey, his gaze worried.

  “Three extraordinary girls,” Zoey said for him, remembering her father’s words. She drew her limbs into a knot at Marion’s side. Even with the fire, even with Marion’s body squished against hers, Zoey couldn’t stay warm. “We’re supposed to fight each other, using our power. We beat the shit out of each other, and the Collector can’t resist the call of our blood. The call of our fury.”

  She rolled her eyes, scrambling desperately for levity. “It’s so dramatic.”

  “He follows the call to the site the Hand of Light has chosen for the ritual,” Grayson continued. “A controlled location. The Hand of Light has weapons. Guns, swords, knives. They make sure the girls can’t escape. They turn them against one another. The girls fight, the Collector comes, and he begins to . . .”

  Grayson’s voice dropped off.

  “He eats them,” Marion whispered, her eyes glittering. “Doesn’t he? Just like Charlotte.”

  Zoey swallowed hard. Just like Thora.

  Grayson nodded miserably. “The consumption of each girl weakens the monster, but he’ll be unable to resist. He gorges himself, and the Hand of Light ensures that until that’s done, neither he nor the girls can run away. Once all the girls are consumed—”