Zoey stared, eyes huge. “Keep going.”
Marion did. One book, two books, three books, four.
The bookcase swung a few inches loose from the wall, revealing a set of narrow stone steps that circled down into the earth. A wood-raftered ceiling dotted with naked light bulbs in black wire casing. Gleaming wood-paneled walls.
As she stood on the top step, looking down, the light bulbs flickered to life. The bone cry grew layers, harmonizing discordantly with itself. The whine of it hurt Marion’s teeth. Like one of her moths, drawn to the amber glow, she took one step forward. Then another, and another. The passageway was cold and dry. She exhaled; her breath fogged the air. She took another step.
Zoey caught her hand, the one the books had pricked. At Zoey’s touch, the throb in Marion’s finger lessened, like dipping overheated skin in cold water.
Marion glanced back at her. “You all right?”
Zoey nodded—wide-eyed, square-jawed, her other hand wrapped firmly around Grayson’s. “We’re all right. We’re with you. Keep going.”
Inside Marion’s frantically beating heart blossomed a tiny cautious warmth. She squeezed Zoey’s hand, then turned and continued down. She counted each step as she walked—three, nine, fifteen, twenty-one.
At the bottom of the stairs, they emerged into a tiny foyer, lit by a single light bulb and a thin moon-white window that looked up out of the earth and past a line of shrubs.
“What the hell?” Zoey murmured, peeking over Marion’s shoulder and into the room past the foyer.
The door was slightly ajar. Marion hesitated, then pushed it open. On the other side: nothing but a four-poster bed, piled high with red and plum silk.
The walls were bare. No art, no light switches. Just a single softly glowing lamp, stuck into the wall beside the bed.
“The lamp’s on,” Grayson observed tightly.
“Do you think it turned on when we opened the door upstairs?” Zoey whispered.
Marion didn’t answer. She stared at the other door, across the room—dark wood, heavy-looking and plain. Barely visible in the shadowed wall. Where it led, she couldn’t imagine.
But worse—
Zoey must have seen, too, at the same moment; Marion heard her soft gasp.
Grayson, panicked: “What? What is it?”
Claw marks.
Or were they tracks from fingernails?
Marion didn’t want to get close enough to investigate further. They crisscrossed the wall above and beside the bed. Tally marks carved by a lunatic, counting the days in this bedtime cell. They cut grooves in the tall dark bedposts. They even—Marion did dare take one step closer, squinting—yes, they even marked up the floor surrounding the ruffled red bed skirt.
She couldn’t ignore the fact of the bed.
Were the claw marks because someone had been having the time of their life?
Or because someone had been fighting for it?
Zoey put her hands in her hair, let out a shaky laugh. “What the shit is this?”
From outside and above, a distant car door slammed. Then another.
Marion whirled, looking wildly for the small foyer window. She half expected to see Val’s mother crouched beside it to peer through the glass, searching for them.
Grayson led them running back up the stairs, the lights switching off at their heels. Back in the library, they pulled the secret door closed. Marion tugged the four books back out of their grooves to match up with the others. Grayson tugged up the hem of his shirt and frantically wiped them clean.
“Fingerprints!” he hissed.
“You dumbass.” Zoey tugged him away. “The books were dusty, now they’re not!”
“Go!” Marion shoved them both toward the library doors, still standing ajar. “Out the front door. I’ll stall them at the kitchen.”
Zoey nodded, mouth in a thin line. She lunged forward and hugged Marion so tight and close that fresh tears sprang to Marion’s eyes.
Then Zoey fled, Grayson at her side—two shadows in a dark palace.
Val
The Fireflies
Val stepped out of her mother’s car and stood at the driveway’s edge.
She faced away from Kingshead, listening to the precision clicks of her mother’s heels against the pavement.
The mansion sat on a crest of land, the highest point on Sawkill, so in front of Val stretched the entirety of the island—first the stables, the training paddocks, the grazing pastures. Miles of black fences in perfect condition, dotted with gray barns full of sleepy Mortimer Morgans. On the horizon shimmered the amber windows of downtown Sawkill, and every now and then a pair of white lights marked a car winding its way across the island from wood to wood, farm to farm.
But that night Val could only watch the bobbing fireflies, moving slow and steady through her family’s woods. Flashlights that searched, but would never find.
“Charlotte!” a distant male voice cried.
The search teams had been out all day, and Val had dutifully manned her post at the police station—handing out sandwiches, coffee, water bottles. The teams would keep searching all night, all day, until Charlotte was found.
“Charlotte?” A woman’s voice, that time. “It’s okay, honey! We’re gonna find you!”
Val stared at the fireflies so long she could have sworn she felt wings kissing her eyelashes.
Then she turned and made her way inside, shoulders back and head high. The long day had made her tired; she could hardly keep her eyes open. She would sleep soon, and well.
So she told herself, as the plaintive calls followed her indoors:
“Charlotte!”
“Charlotte?”
“Charlotte, come home!”
Inside, Val found her mother sitting with Marion at the kitchen table.
The sight stopped Val dead in her tracks.
“Oh, good,” said Ms. Mortimer, blue eyes flicking up to meet her daughter’s. She smoothed back Marion’s hair and stood. Her own hair, in a tidy blond knot at the back of her neck, gleamed in the soft kitchen light. “Valerie, could you sit with Marion for a moment? I’d love to get out of these clothes.”
“Sure,” Val heard herself saying, like an idiot, because being alone with Marion Althouse was the last thing she wanted to do at the moment.
Val had managed to put Charlotte’s dying sounds out of her mind all day, but now, staring at Marion, the girl’s big gray eyes forlorn and red-rimmed, Val heard them again.
And again.
And again.
Ms. Mortimer squeezed Marion’s shoulder, and on the way out the door, her fingers brushed against her daughter’s. Every touch of Lucy Mortimer’s, every glance, meant something. This meaning was clear: Get her out of my house, as quickly as possible.
In the silence, Marion and Val stared at each other. Marion held a cup of steaming tea between her hands; it looked unsipped. She blinked. Two quiet tears raced each other down her cheeks.
Val, once again idiotically, felt inspired to ask: “Are you okay?”
But Marion didn’t scorn her for the question; she shook her head, her face crumpling.
“Come on.” Suddenly, inexplicably, knowing that this was not what her mother had meant, Val held out a hand. “Let’s go on a walk.”
There was a small overlook on the rocky cliffs behind Kingshead, facing the sea. Val took Marion there, leading her carefully down the switchback trail. Solar lights stuck throughout the rocks lit the way in soft white patches.
Marion’s feet were bare, Val realized about halfway down. “Do you want to go back?” Val gestured at her feet. “The rocks can get sharp.”
Marion shook her head. Her gaze was fixed on the sea; her windswept hair carved glossy black lines across her face.
“No, it’s okay,” said Marion softly, and offered a small, crooked smile that pounded Val’s murderous heart like hateful fists out for blood.
A bench marked the stretch of gray rock where Val liked to go when she needed
to escape from her mother, from Collin Hawthorne, from him. It was tiny and weathered, its paint a peeling sage green. It seemed transplanted from another, shabbier world, far from the regal one of Kingshead.
“Well,” Val said, gesturing pointlessly at the bench.
Marion sat, hands clasped in her lap. A blast of sea wind raced up the cliffs, and when Val saw Marion shivering, she knew she shouldn’t—she knew it—but she sat beside Marion anyway, scooted as close as she dared. Thigh to thigh.
“It can get kind of cold out here,” she explained. Again, pointlessly.
God help me, Val thought. I must be losing my mind. Get a grip, Valerie.
Then, at the idea of any god helping a creature like herself, she stifled a laugh. Stuck in her throat, the sound felt sad, like the start of a sob.
“I like it,” said Marion, hugging herself. Her fingers bumped against Val’s bare arm. “It’s quiet. Well, not quiet. The waves are loud, and the wind, but . . . no people. No one watching you or needing you. You’d be hard to find, if the person looking for you didn’t know about this spot. You’d be as good as gone.”
Marion inhaled, her breathing ragged. She sat very still for a moment, then brought a shaking hand to her mouth.
Val watched her, an oily weight settling in her stomach. She imagined, for an instant, throwing herself off the cliff to the rocks below. Was hell real, and if it was, would whatever punishment she’d receive there be more bearable than this?
Was hell the Far Place he so dreaded? If Val did throw herself down into the sea, would she end up there, in the scorching company of devils even worse than the one she currently served?
“The night she disappeared,” Marion was saying, “I fell asleep wondering what it would be like if she didn’t need me anymore. If she . . .” Marion glanced at Val. “Well, if she was your friend, actually. If you got close. Then maybe you could take care of her for a while, and I wouldn’t have to. I started wondering what I would be without her crying on me all the time, and then I tried to remember what it felt like to exist before Dad died. When Mom was still herself, not this . . . shadow of who she used to be. When Charlotte wasn’t so needy. I tried to remember, and I couldn’t.” Marion shook her head, gripped her knees hard.
Val’s blood ran hot as the hellfire that licked through her dreams. All Mortimer women, since Val’s great-great-great-grandmother, enjoyed raging-hot blood—one of the side effects of being linked through the generations to a beast. Val could sleep naked in the dead of winter and awaken painted with sweat. She could plunge to the depths of the icy Atlantic and come up needing a cold drink.
But every time Marion shifted beside her, Val’s skin erupted in goose bumps. So enamored was she of the sensation—the slap-you-awake sting of it—that she didn’t realize at first that Marion had begun to cry again.
“Actually,” Val said, staring at the crashing black water below their feet, “I know what it feels like, to be trapped like that.”
She felt Marion look over at her. “You?” she asked, surprise in her voice.
“Long story,” Val said darkly, “but . . . yes. My mother has a lot of expectations for me. Ideas about what my future should look like, and the kind of person I should be. My mother is . . .”
After a beat of silence, Marion suggested, “Terrifying?”
Val laughed before she could think better of it. The brittle shell pressed against her skin, like glass ready to shatter, melted into something softer, something that sent a cautious warm glow spilling down her limbs. “You could say that. Everyone thinks I live this charmed life, that I can do anything I want to do, that the future is full of possibility, but the truth is . . .”
Val hesitated. The truth is, I’m enslaved to a monster, and so is my mother, and so was my grandmother.
The truth is, I’ve had chances to end it, to end the line with me, and haven’t had the guts to do it.
The truth, sweet Marion, would make you despise me.
Marion placed her hand between Val’s shoulder blades and drew small circles so gentle that Val hated her a little—but not enough to make her stop.
“What is it?” asked Marion. “You can tell me.”
Val’s smile was hard, her vision swimming with unshed tears. “The truth is, I’m an asshole who should suck it up and stop complaining to the girl who’s missing her sister.”
Marion let out a tired sound and leaned her head against Val’s shoulder. “You’re not an asshole,” she said quietly. “You’re being really nice to me. Thank you.”
With the soft weight of Marion’s cheek against her skin, Val’s throat twisted around itself until she could hardly breathe, and a tugging feeling like the fall of gravity got its hook in her gut. As if she were standing on the cliff’s edge and seeing how far she could lean out over the water before tipping over.
She stayed silent until the feeling passed, because if she opened her mouth to say anything else, it might very well have been a confession.
Zoey
The Push
The Tuesday after Charlotte disappeared, Zoey pedaled to the police station at eight in the morning with a bag full of doughnuts hanging from the handlebars. Because screw the haters and their cop jokes; doughnuts were delicious, and her father and his officers had been working around the clock for three days.
She chained her bike to the rack on the side of the building and was about to head for the front door when she heard a girl say, “The Collector? It’s just a story.”
Zoey froze in place. It was like a hidden electric cord had reached up through the ground and snagged her with its sizzling teeth.
“You tell it to kids to get them to stay out of the woods or whatever,” the girl kept saying, her voice floating from around the corner of the building. Zoey knew the spot: Two picnic tables, a small gas grill, a hammock, a small stone wall on the top of a ridge, with a good view of the ocean. A popular lunch break destination for the police department staff.
Zoey crept to the corner, peered around it to see who had gathered. She scratched her itching calves hard enough that they started to hurt, wondered distractedly if she was allergic to something.
“It’s because of the girls who’ve gone missing over the years. One of those urban legend things.” The girl, Zoey now saw, was Quinn Tillinghouse, one of Grayson’s friends, and only slightly abhorrent. She and three others—John Lin (moderately abhorrent), Peter Von Neumann (a bona fide dick), and Grayson himself—gathered around the picnic tables, dressed for the woods. Ready to join the next shift of search teams, Zoey assumed.
And standing near Grayson, arms crossed over her middle, listening intently to Quinn, was Marion.
“Do you think it’s real, though?” Marion asked. “I mean, could it actually be true?”
Peter, a broad-shouldered white boy who looked like he could be an inept security goon on Star Trek, took a sip of his coffee and shrugged. “Oh, sure. The world is just full of actual, real-life monsters. Big ones, with scales.”
Quinn hooked her arm through John’s and giggled.
Grayson glared at Peter. “Look, you need to take this seriously.”
“No, I don’t think I will, Grayson.” Peter tossed his empty coffee cup on the ground. “You know, you’ve been really annoying since banging Zoey, I have to say.”
“So sorry to have disappointed you,” Grayson replied.
“Beware of the woods and the dark, dank deep,” John started chanting against Quinn’s neck.
“He’ll follow you home,” Marion whispered, “and won’t let you sleep.” She looked at Grayson. “What do you think that means, though? Are there clues in the rhymes?”
“Let me text Zoey again.” Grayson grabbed his phone from his pocket. “I think she has all of Thora’s notebooks. Maybe there’s something useful in there.”
“The Collector eats girls,” John whispered next to Quinn’s ear, licking his lips. “Get it?”
“You’re such a disgrace.” Quinn rolled her eyes with a l
ittle grin. “Stop being gross.”
Grayson, Zoey thought for the millionth time, had way too many friends.
Peter leaned against a picnic table, looking at Marion like she was only a somewhat interesting oddity. “If you’re serious about investigating this like it’s some kind of paranormal monster hunt, you’re both certifiably insane. No offense, Marion, I know your sister’s dead and all, but—”
“Shut the fuck up, Peter,” said a new voice. Val was coming down the slight hill from the road with a cardboard carrier of fresh coffees in her hands. And taking the words right out of Zoey’s mouth, to be perfectly honest.
Peter shrank back at Val’s approach, just enough for Zoey to not completely hate her for a few nanoseconds.
But then Zoey saw Marion backing away from the group, her eyes wide. She brought her hands to the sides of her head, the heels of her palms digging into her temples, and Zoey’s heart sank.
It was happening again. The bone cry.
“It’s happening again,” Marion whispered, squeezing her eyes shut.
Grayson followed her. “Marion?”
“Whoa, is she okay?” John asked.
Marion tripped over a crack in the patio and fell, hard, before Grayson could catch her. “It’s so loud,” she moaned. “Holy shit, it’s never been . . .”
She cried out sharply, huddled against the ground like a burrowing animal.
Zoey pulled free of the electric bite shooting sparks up her ankle and marched forward. “Everyone back off. You’re freaking her out.”
“She’s already pretty freaky to me,” said John, hopping off the table and moving away as if whatever Marion had was contagious.
Quinn’s voice came out shaky. “Is she having a seizure or something?”
Zoey ignored them all and crouched beside Marion. “Is it saying anything this time?”
Marion nodded, rocking back and forth. “It says run.” She looked up at Zoey, pleading. “It says run.”
Zoey’s skin thrummed, like her whole body had fallen asleep and was now waking up in an explosion of pins and needles. “Come on, let’s get out of here. I’ll take you to my house.”
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