The Emilia she knew was a finder-outer. A records riffler, a nosy parker. One way or another—through reference materials, dogged research, or just up and asking—Butterfly Weed Emilia would have found out what was going on here long ago.
When the Queen finally moved—straightening, running an absent hand across her cruel, gorgeous mouth—Emilia startled, and the Invisible Man stopped fumbling. Somehow, he seemed to lean in with his chest and away with his waist, moving forward and back at the same time.
The Queen threw back her head and laughed. Not in delight or amazement. Oh, Emilia knew that laugh. She’d heard it all her schoolyard life from white boys and even more often, for some reason, from black girls on the cracked blacktop four-square courts of her dusty, rural Mississippi school. She’d started hearing it right around the time her classmates had given her her first nickname. Spic-Chick. The better, nastier name came later. Chica de la Nada.
This was their laugh.
“Oh, ’Bou,” the Queen said, while the Invisible Man bowed his head and dug his feet into the matting of pine needles as though trying to hold his spot in a floodtide. “I never knew you had a dreaming side.”
“I don’t,” he murmured.
Untrue, Emilia heard herself thinking, you do! Tell her!
Then she thought she might vomit.
“I always thought you were so practical. So … rigorous. That’s what I”—(Emilia could see her fashioning the next word, attaching the barb to it; an arrow not just pointed but poisoned)—“loved about you.”
“It’s true,” said the Invisible Man, exactly like a kid caught in a lie. But he wasn’t lying. “I was. And I am.”
“Dutiful ’Bou.” The Queen reached out as though to caress or pet, then slipped a single, crooked finger into the tiny gap in the bandages at the side of the Invisible Man’s mouth hole. Still sporting that terrible smile, she slid the finger along the side of his face and deeper under the bandages.
Emilia swallowed a yelp. The Invisible Man turned his head into the touch and bumped against it like a cat rubbing its scent on someone. If she wasn’t so sure he already knew—had to know—Emilia would have warned him: there was no love in that touch. Curiosity, maybe. Cruelty, definitely. Yet he was practically purring.
The Queen tsked, pursing her full, perfect lips. “My poor, glowing boy. Look what I did to you.”
What she’d done? She’d done this to him? And was he really not hearing the self-satisfaction in that question?
“It’s okay,” the Invisible Man murmured, squirming at once into and away from that probing, poking touch. “You couldn’t have known.”
The Queen burst out laughing. “When I lit you on fire, you mean?”
Even then the Invisible Man only bristled, started to lift a hand to his face to stop that finger. But the hand dropped back to his hip, and his voice came out a sigh. “None of us knew who Ju was. Not even you.” Now he wasn’t just squirming, but dancing. “You still don’t. It’s … that is, it was … unimaginable…”
Under the bandages, the finger seemed to be pulling, puncturing. The Invisible Man winced, and tears filled his eyes.
“What are you babbling about, ’Bou? I’m amazed and honored that you tracked me down. Truly I am. But then, that was always your particular—”
“You’re not going to believe it,” the Invisible Man said.
“Tell me.” Under the bandages, the Queen’s finger stopped moving, curled like a snake under a rock. Way down in her deep, dead eyes, something stirred or reflected.
As though she were emerging from a coma, too? A much older and deeper one?
Waking this woman up, Emilia suspected, was not a good idea. Was an even worse idea than finding her had been. Almost unconsciously, she took a step back at last. But only one.
“The thing is, Sally,” said the Invisible Man, smiling off one side of his face, “you’ll say I’m mistaken. But I checked. And then I rechecked. The way you know I do.”
Sally. What an absurd name for such a magnificent, malevolent thing. Emilia watched her just standing there, regal, listening to the Invisible Man’s story.
“I didn’t start with any theory. How could I? I was just looking for an explanation of what we all felt, as soon as we laid eyes on her. You felt it, too. It might even be why you felt you had to—”
“Don’t ever tell me what I feel. Or felt,” said the Queen. Sally. She did something awful with her finger.
The Invisible Man gasped, talked faster. “For the longest time, I couldn’t find anything about her. I don’t just mean sealed court records from the orphanage. I couldn’t find anything about Ju at all. Not one mention.”
Ju. Emilia recognized that as a name, somehow knew it was a girl, realized the Invisible Man must have mentioned her at some point in his musings. But none of the research he had let her conduct had had anything to do with any girl. He’d had Emilia focus on tracing his Sally.
Again, Emilia experienced an absurd pang of jealousy, which made her angry. She edged one more step back, deeper into sunlight. She was barely fifteen feet from open road, now. Probably, she realized, her Invisible Man wouldn’t even care.
The Invisible Man seemed to puff up as he continued. “But I found her mother’s name. Eventually. It’s on documents the orphanage ladies went to their usual great pains to secrete away. She’s just some local teenager, no one we know and not important.”
“’Bou,” said the Queen. She leaned forward, almost giving his bandaged nose an Eskimo kiss. “You better get to what is important. I’m not at all sure I like you talking about Ju.”
The Invisible Man was smiling again, at least with the side of his mouth that wasn’t hooked through the cheek. “What’s important, Sally, is that before she got pregnant during her senior year and lost her scholarship to Mississippi State to run track, Ju’s mother loved to dance.”
“Last warning,” the Queen murmured.
The Invisible Man shuffled his feet, folding his fingers together and then apart as though pulling a pin on a grenade. “She loved dancing at the New Grace Holler Hop.” He gave a hop himself.
The Queen stood still, stared blankly.
“The New Grace Holler Hop,” the Invisible Man whimpered again, all but stamping his foot. “The ones they held in 2003? Those stupid hip-hop barn dances for ‘at-risk’ teens in that warehouse way out Route 49? Sally, New Grace Holler.”
“’Bou, goddamnit.”
“The place all your monsters went back to, remember? The place some of them had already been going back to, even before our little Policy game directed them to. To prey on the people there. To play with the people there … toy with. Dance with. Maybe even…”
The story had lost Emilia. Was Grace Holler another girl? No, wait … she’d heard of Grace Holler. Somewhere … in a song …
For the first time—not just in this conversation, but possibly, Emilia sensed, in years—the Queen startled. She took a long step back without withdrawing her hand from under the Invisible Man’s bandages. There was a wild glimmer in her eye, too; it could have been amazement. It could also have been terror.
“It can’t be,” she finally said, low and hard. “You know that. It’s impossible. Not once has one of us impreg—”
“You already know it’s true, Sally. You’re just having trouble admitting it. The ramifications are too great.”
This time, the probing finger didn’t just tweeze or tighten; it twisted, and the Invisible Man cried out.
To her astonishment, Emilia felt herself stepping back into the grove, hands lifting as though she were about to interfere. She had to force herself to stop. There was a brand-new voice in her head, or rather an old one, so faint that it took her several desperate blinks to realize it was her own.
Hello, she thought, all but crumpling where she stood. I thought I’d lost you. Tentatively, softly, Emilia slid one foot back, then the other. She even navigated a half turn toward the road.
But she didn’t run. N
ot yet. She knew she could, now. She wanted to hear the rest.
“’Bou,” hummed the Queen. “I’m about to tear your face off your face.”
Through his pain, still grimacing, the Invisible Man drew himself up. Even more hideously, he grinned. “Sally,” he said. “She’s ours.”
“Whose?”
“Ju! Is ours. Half New Grace Holler poor kid. Half monster we made!”
“I made.” The Queen twisted again, and the Invisible Man screamed. Held his ground.
“Yes. You. Of course. But she’s ours, Sally. She’s both. Did you know that could happen? Do you realize what this means, for all of us?” The Invisible Man threw his arms over his head, open to the sky. “She is something brand-new in the world. Together, we can—”
With a savage downward rip, the Queen dragged the Invisible Man to his knees in the pine needles.
But she was also trembling, Emilia realized. What a miraculous thing, to see this woman shake.
The Invisible Man had not stopped chattering. Through his tears, he blinked up at his queen, holding out his hands. “Sally,” he gurgled, “we’ve had so much wrong. Or maybe something in us has changed. Evolved. I don’t know. But now, together, you and I can usher in a whole new age! Can you imagine? We can raise her. We can…”
The next moment was the strangest of all. The Invisible Man glanced away from his queen toward Emilia. The bandages at the tortured corner of his mouth had unraveled and hung from his cindery lips like shredded spider-silk. His whole body trembled, and his eyes—those winking, desperate eyes—leapt for hers. Like a little boy reaching for its mother, Emilia thought. As if the Invisible Man were the last of her lost Butterfly Weed library boys, abandoned by fate to whatever worlds he could create inside himself and then hold up for her to see.
“That’s what you imagined,” the Queen purred. With the hand that wasn’t in the Invisible Man’s mouth, she patted his head. Stroked it. “That’s what you dreamed all these years under your bandages as you learned all of this, then tracked me down.” She made a kissing sound with her mouth. “That you—my sometime pleasure-toy, it’s true, and my very favorite crawling thing—would become my partner at last. The companion to help me usher in this bold new age. Ju’s…” The woman shuddered. Then, to Emilia’s horror, she giggled. “Father.” She erupted into laughter.
With a jerk—really more a flick of her wrist—the Queen yanked the Invisible Man to his feet, pulled his head around, bent forward, and—her finger still in his cheek—kissed him full on the mouth. A squeal burst from Emilia’s lips. Even she had no idea what it signified. But she staggered back, her eyes locked on the clenched creatures in front of her. The way they scrabbled and grabbed at each other, they might have been climbing one another, fucking, or fighting for their lives. Whichever, that kiss just kept coming, the Queen somehow burrowing, her face driving into and up under the Invisible Man’s bandages. The noises they were making—low and constant, half feral cat and half incoming hurricane—blended together, filling the grove as their faces mashed deeper into one another. Only slowly—but before the blood burst from between their lips, spilling down the Invisible Man’s bandages into his collar and spattering across the Queen’s cheeks—did Emilia realize what was actually happening. What the Queen was doing to her Man.
No! she realized, with a tremor so primal it seemed to stem from the very center of her, from the ghost of umbilical cord that had once tied her to her own mother in the only way anyone is ever actually connected to anyone else. It isn’t just the Queen. They’re doing it to each other. The Invisible Man, it turned out, had had an entirely different ending to his quest in mind. Even as she thought that, the moaning and yowling from across the grove got wetter, filled with horrid, sucking, burbling sounds. She saw the Invisible Man’s arms float up. They encircled his queen as the long, silver, serrated blade he’d probably had secreted against his skin for years slid from its sheath of gauze. And as his hand rose to strike, and his face caved in—dry as dust after that first blood spatter, like old drywall crumbling to paste under the bandages that had held it in place—Emilia had one wild idea, and an even wilder sensation, both terrible, both brand-new.
The sensation was another surge of sickening pride. Triggered, apparently, by the sight of her Man fighting back, the confirmation that he’d come all this way to avenge, not crawl.
The thought was that she didn’t understand these creatures at all.
The arm that encircled Emilia’s waist came from nowhere, tightened and yanked her backward so fast that she never so much as cried out. The last thing she saw in the clearing was the Invisible Man’s knife driving straight down between the shoulder blades of his queen, just as his entire head burst inside his bandages, crumbled to ash and collapsed.
And the first thing she saw when she rolled over in the dirt was a sweating, rake-thin black man with a smile on his face as ferocious as any she’d seen on the Invisible Man’s. Except this smile was also scared and sad and therefore human.
“If you want to live, you’ve got to run. We have work to do,” he said.
He didn’t wait. And once she was on her feet, the urge to look back slipped off her like snakeskin.
As in, the skin of the snake that had swallowed her whole. It was nothing that had actually ever been her at all.
18
To Rebecca, leaning against the dining room table with one hand on the back of a cracked wooden chair and the other in her hair, it felt horribly like waking up. As though the last five years—the whales and cormorants, the Stockade and Jess’s windmill shed, Sock Puppet and the sea mist on the sweetly rolling Strait—had been not just sleep, but self-protective coma. Now everyone’s eyes had come open at once, and here was the world just as they’d left it the day the Whistler came to Halfmoon House.
She couldn’t make herself join in, yet. Partly, she couldn’t quite believe what was happening. That is, she couldn’t believe the efficiency of it all. Jess had dumped all the knives out of the woodblock onto the counter, then ducked into the garage just long enough to grab a set of long-handled garden implements Rebecca had never seen before and drop them on the kitchen floor. Next, from under the pans in the back of the cabinet under the sink, Jess withdrew a stack of already cut two-by-fours. She took those straight to the nearest window with a hammer in her fist and nails in her mouth.
Meanwhile, Joel—who hadn’t fled, after all, or who’d fled and come back trailing a stumbling, gaunt-faced Latina with a motionless mouth and screaming black eyes that suggested she knew exactly what all this was about—sat at the far end of the table, away from the glass sliding door to the backyard, cleaning and loading his revolver. On his face was some sort of approximation of his old smile, the first Rebecca had seen in years, like fire reflected in metal.
Kaylene, insanely, had donned the Whistler’s hat and produced an aluminum bat from somewhere, and now was taking practice swings hard enough to behead the couch in the middle of the living room. Jess had glanced her way long enough to note the hat and nod approval.
Benny was at the stove monitoring the oil he’d set bubbling in all three saucepans.
For a collective last meal? Pre-apocalypse stir-fry? Last-ditch Peace Summit banquet? Had all of them forgotten just what it was that was coming?
Had there been meetings she’d somehow missed? Of the Go Down Swinging (and Also Raking and Hoeing) Club, Far Northwest Chapter?
Finally, Rebecca couldn’t take standing still anymore, so she moved to the kettle to bring the Latina some tea. Benny leaned away from her as she approached. Now that she thought of it, since the second Joel had burst through the front door with the Latina and his news—which had happened scant minutes after Rebecca had reeled away from her encounter with the woman who’d knocked at that same front door and shown her the Whistler’s photograph—everyone in the Stockade had been haloing around her, surrounding but not demanding anything from or even including her. Keeping their distance.
Becaus
e I’m the only one who has actually killed somebody, she thought, and even as she thought it, she remembered it wasn’t true. Jess had killed her own daughter, for God’s sake.
Which might or might not have been necessary. Or right. In the same way—and with even more devastating consequences—that Rebecca’s murder of Sophie might or might not have been necessary or right. At least that murder probably qualified as collateral damage. To anyone who was keeping a ledger.
Wincing at the spatters of oil leaping from the saucepans to her arm, Rebecca dropped a spoonful of jasmine pearls into Jess’s Frank Robinson Day Orioles mug, added steaming water from the kettle, and took a second to watch the pearls unfold into the heat like blossoms into light. Then—avoiding Kaylene, who’d swept past to get a bread knife she seemed to think might work as some kind of bat-bayonet—she brought the mug to the table. The new woman didn’t look up until Rebecca sat down.
She was younger than Rebecca had first supposed. Not even thirty, most likely. Possibly no older than Rebecca and Kaylene. Her skin stretched threadbare across her cheekbones, almost transparent despite its duskiness. Her lips looked drained not just of color but texture, worn completely smooth like runoff grooves at the edge of a record. And then there were her eyes. Those silent, screaming black eyes …
Understanding broke over Rebecca the way it always had, in a single burst. She hadn’t experienced a flash like this in years—God, she really had been asleep—and now she only prayed this one had come in time to save them all.
In one motion, as the woman reached mechanically for the mug of tea, Rebecca seized her wrist, shoved the black sleeve of her sweater up past her elbow, and yanked her whole, bare forearm into the sunlight still spilling through the unboarded half of the sliding door.
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