“Dad?” Zoey’s voice broke. She was alive, wasn’t she? “Daddy?”
“I’m here.” He looked her square in the face, smoothed his hand across her hair. The lines around his eyes and mouth grounded her in the real, in the tragically finite. “I’m right here, sweetie.”
“Where’s Briggs?”
He frowned at her. “Briggs? He’s down at the station—”
“Tell him to get his ass over here.” Zoey clutched her father’s shirt. “We need to figure out a way to kill this thing. Fast.”
Then, as the memories returned to her—how that little boy had screamed, the sensation of the poker slamming into his cranium, the heat shooting up her arm when she flung him away—Zoey’s face crumpled. Wrapped in her father’s arms, she wept.
Later, near dawn, Zoey awoke to a quiet house.
On the other side of the living room, her father had fallen asleep in his recliner, his mouth hanging open.
Marion was sleeping, too, snug on the love seat.
Not surprising. If Zoey had zapped them both to the other side of the island, she’d probably be exhausted, too.
She considered Marion for a moment—how even in sleep, her mouth seemed tight with worry—and couldn’t muster up a single iota of good feeling. Maybe it was ungracious of her, what with all Marion had been through, and how she had possibly just saved their lives, but Zoey didn’t feel like making excuses for her behavior, for the hurtful things she’d said, so she didn’t.
She imagined folding herself into a suit of unbreakable armor and left the living room, headed upstairs to change out of her jeans, into something more comfortable. But once she entered her bedroom, she froze.
Sitting there, in the center of her bed, was her father’s black book.
A slow tingle crawled its way up her body.
Had her father put the book here? Or Briggs?
Or someone else?
Zoey sat on the edge of the bed, cradled the book in her palms, took a deep breath.
Opened it.
She flipped past the pages of text she’d already perused. Drawings of the Collector—dark and grinning, man and beast. The sketched girl with her sword and the words beside her: SEMPER TRES.
She’d looked up that phrase online, too: Always three.
She turned the page.
Here was another girl, her arms and legs rimmed in fire. Another smaller flame burned where her heart would be.
Zoey’s body hummed like bees were gathering along the underside of her skin. She turned the page.
A third girl stood, head thrown back to the stars, arms flung out on either side. The position of this girl’s body was open, vulnerable. Zoey wondered: Was she fighting? Or was she submitting?
Zoey turned a few more pages, each lined with neat labeled boxes of text and more illustrations of girls—a girl flying through the air, a girl with lightning shooting out of her palms, a girl with wings sprouting from her back.
Then, more writing. Diagrams of shapes. Formations that Zoey didn’t understand.
Then: Another girl. Different from the others. Not a silhouette, but naked.
She stood framed in darkness that reminded Zoey of the Collector’s shadowy form lurching through the Althouses’ kitchen. Above the triangle of hair between the girl’s legs, a black smile grinned across the pale skin of her pelvis.
Zoey stared. Was it a tattoo? Or a cut?
Beside the naked girl was one word: REGINA.
Zoey knew that one, from copious hours spent perusing baby name websites with Thora, finding the perfect name for this or that character.
Regina meant queen.
She glanced back at the girl. The queen? The queen of what?
Zoey gazed at the drawing with a hand over her belly, then held her breath and turned the page. The illustration that stared back at her made her utter a sharp cry:
A girl straddled another girl, plunging a knife into her belly.
A third girl clung to the stabber, drawing a knife across her throat.
And the first girl, the girl on the ground, lay with her wide mouth unhinged, her tongue long and rigid. A dark misshapen form, a furious cloud of blackness, swooped down from the sky, reaching for the dead girl. Its clawed hand grasped her tongue, and its nebulous inky frame surrounded them all, bearing down on them like a cyclone. Someone had illustrated the scene with so many pen marks, heavy and fat, that the darkened paper was ridged and shimmering, imprinted.
In the center of the reaching black cloud were two round white eyes.
Zoey flung the book across the room. It hit her wall of bookshelves and dropped to the floor.
This was bullshit.
This was bigger than Thora, bigger than Grayson stuck at home translating a million words of nearly illegible Latin, bigger than her father and some random FBI agent.
They needed help.
And Zoey was going to go get it.
She found her backpack, began to pack. Jeans and boots, shirts and jackets, socks and underwear. Clothes for Marion, too—too big for Zoey, or not really her thing anymore—because they couldn’t return to the cottage, not ever again, no way. A few hand-me-downs from her mother that Zoey had planned on repurposing someday, into shredded, undefinable, middle-finger clothes that would no doubt make Val’s Waspy heart shrivel up and die.
They’d call Marion’s mom—oh, God, they’d left her with Val.
“Shit,” Zoey muttered. She retrieved the black book, shoved it in her bag, zipped it closed. They would have to go find Marion’s mother and pick her up, and Grayson, too.
“What happened to you and Marion?”
Zoey whirled. Her father stood at the threshold, arms crossed over his chest.
“I thought I locked the door,” Zoey said, blinking.
“What happened?”
Zoey slung her bag over her shoulders. “I’m going to get help, and you’re coming with me. You, Marion, her mom, Grayson. I guess Briggs, too, he seems all right.”
“You’re going to get help?” her father repeated.
“Look, this creature is too much for, like, five people to figure out alone. There are other members of the Hand of Light, right?”
“Zoey—”
“Honestly, maybe we should call in the military, too.” Zoey marched past him into the hallway, then looked back over her shoulder. “Have you guys tried that before?”
“Zoey.” Her father hadn’t moved. He stared out her window. “What happened to you and Marion? I was in the kitchen, and then the next instant, I heard this crash. I went into the living room, and there you both were. On the floor, like you’d dropped down out of the sky.”
He turned, his eyes bright and his mouth working like he was trying to keep himself stitched together. “Tell me what happened, Zoey.”
Zoey’s heart jumped into her throat. “Nothing happened. We just . . . we came in through the front door.”
“You’re lying.”
“Seriously, it’s fine—”
“Just tell me!”
“Okay, okay, chill, you’re freaking me out,” Zoey said in a rush. “We were at Marion’s, and the Collector attacked her. Marion, I mean.” She shook her head, laughing a little. “It looked like a little boy. It made this sound like, I don’t even know, like a horror-movie sound. A demonic sound. He tried to bite her.”
Her father stood with fists clenched. “And then?”
“I beat the shit out of him,” she replied, eyes filling up at the memory. “God. I took a fireplace poker and whacked him upside the head a few times, and it didn’t do a thing. He just hissed at me, and then . . .”
She stared out the window, watching the Eye of Sawkill turn.
“Tell me, Zoey,” said her father tightly.
“Then I went Jean Grey on him,” she answered.
A pause. “What?”
“I punched out my hand, and he flew across the room. Away from me, away from Marion.” She inhaled and exhaled. She threaded her hands into he
r hair with a tiny choked laugh. “Then Marion brought us here. She tessered us across the island, to safety.”
“Oh no.” Her father moved into her room, unsteady. He sat on the edge of her bed and dropped his face into his hands. “No, no, no . . .”
And suddenly everything became clear to Zoey.
The girls drawn in the book—wings on their backs, lightning in their hands. Flying girls, burning girls.
Girls who could tesser themselves great distances in the blink of an eye?
Girls who could throw a monster across the room.
She and Marion—or girls like her and Marion—were in her father’s black book. And now her father was slumped on her bed, defeated. Zoey’s eyes prickled. An electric hum vibrated through her limbs like the sensation of being watched, only ten times stronger.
She moved across the room and stood before her father. “You know what this means, don’t you?” she whispered. “What is it?”
A long beat, as the Eye of Sawkill circled through the brightening morning, and the branches outside her window whispered and clacked. Then her father raised wet eyes to gaze at her, and Zoey took a step back from him, because that look was not a good look.
It was the look of someone whose world was collapsing around him.
“Do you remember in my video,” he said, his voice ragged, “when I told you we had devised a method of extermination to kill the monster?”
“Yes,” Zoey whispered, heart pounding in her ears.
He dropped his head, squeezed his eyes shut. “I wanted to get you off the island before the others arrived, but it wouldn’t have mattered. It had already begun. Oh, God. Zoey.” Her father cried out into his hands. “I should never have let you come here. What the hell was I thinking?”
“Dad, calm down and talk to me.” Zoey gripped her father’s shoulders, trying not to recoil at the anguish on his face. “What’s happening? What’s the method of extermination?”
“A select few have the power to slay the beast,” he replied. “Girls, always. Extraordinary girls. There are always three.”
SEMPER TRES.
Zoey started slowly backing away. “You mean . . . we can fight him?”
Her father’s shoulders slumped, his face sagging. Slowly, he was deflating. “You can try.”
Zoey pressed her hands to her stomach. “Do we have to?”
“You don’t have to fight. But you do have to stay.”
“Stay where? Sawkill?” A distant buzz hummed along the horizon of Zoey’s existence, inching ever closer.
“I don’t know why it happens. But it happens every time, every place.” Her father closed his eyes. “Once a girl’s power has awakened,” he said, as if reciting a well-known scripture, “she is bound to the land on which the beast crawls, and there she must remain, until the work is complete—”
Zoey marched back over and slapped him.
“Did you draw them?” She stood over him, palm stinging from the impact, her whole body rigid and her eyes blazing with tears. “Those pictures of the girls killing each other? The naked girl with the cut on her abs?”
“No,” her father replied, his voice tired and thin. “That book is the collected observations and teachings of all the knights who have lived on this island, since long before I moved here.”
“Knights? Christ. Is that what you call yourselves?”
He looked at her helplessly. He held out his hands, beseeching. “I never should have let you come to Sawkill.”
“No,” she snapped. “You shouldn’t have.”
“I thought you would be safe near me; I thought that if I kept you close—”
“Well you were really damn wrong, weren’t you?”
Zoey stormed out the door. Downstairs, Marion was sitting up, blinking sleepily. Briggs sat beside her on the couch; as Zoey approached, he dropped Marion’s hand.
Zoey’s stomach curdled at the sight of him.
“Zoey?” Marion’s voice was hoarse. Shadows ringed her eyes. “What’s going on?”
“We’re leaving.” Zoey grabbed her arm, pulled her from the couch. “We’re getting your mom, and Grayson, and we’re going to the mainland to get help.”
“Not a good idea, Zoey,” said Briggs, vexingly calm.
Marion stumbled after her. “Wait, Zoey—”
With every second, Zoey felt more certain that Briggs would jump off the couch and tackle her. A select few have the power to slay the beast.
Yeah, well, that sort of thing sounded nice in stories, but Zoey didn’t so much like the idea of her and Marion having to face off against some monster by themselves.
Except . . .
SEMPER TRES. Always three.
But who was the third?
Outside, on the porch, Marion pulled Zoey to a halt. “Hey, slow down. Talk to me. What happened?”
“We’re getting the hell away from here,” said Zoey. “That’s what.”
Marion stared at her. “I’m not leaving this island until I find justice for my sister.”
“This isn’t about finding justice, Marion. This is about the island being owned by a monster who, a couple of hours ago, almost killed us. Or don’t you remember?”
“You’re just going to run away? Leave everyone here to fend for themselves?”
“I’m going to get help,” said Zoey, “so that the people on this island actually stand a chance.”
Zoey turned to walk away, only stumbling for a half stride when Marion grabbed her backpack.
“Zoey, wait!”
But Zoey slipped loose of the straps, panic roaring loud and hot in her blood, and ran.
A car was making its way up the road toward her house—three cars, headlights on—and Zoey ignored them. She made it to shore, followed the boardwalk down to the beach, found her father’s tethered rowboat. Pushed the boat out to the gray churning sea, jumped inside, grabbed the oars.
How many mornings had she and her father spent in this boat, navigating the tiny coves on Sawkill’s western coast? Dozens. A hundred. He’d taught her how to fish, how to row.
She knew it was ridiculous to row the little dinghy all the way to the mainland, especially with her arms already shaking. Stupid superpowers. Stupid Jean Grey.
But what else was there to do? Sit around and wait for the late-morning ferry to leave? No, thanks. She’d row until she hit kinder soil; she’d row and not look back. She’d find soldiers, missiles, rockets. She’d ride back to the island on a battleship, waving a flag with Thora’s face sewn onto it in fiery colors.
She gasped, nearly faint from having fought so hard to hold in her sobs that she’d seriously, literally, forgotten to breathe.
And now the boat wasn’t moving.
Looking back, she saw the Rock sitting between the dark sky above and the dark water below, its lumpy back hairy with trees, its Eye standing tall and lonesome.
Zoey turned around and searched for the mainland. She squinted, shivering. There—lights, tiny and fairyesque, blinking through the dawn.
She gripped the oars once more and rowed.
With a jolt, the flat paddles hit a wall. A low thud resounded through the oars, up Zoey’s arms and into her shoulders. The boat shuddered, and it didn’t move. The waves rocked her, sent her bobbing like a buoy, but her boat stayed put. More accurately, it drifted side to side, it even inched back a little closer to shore—thanks, Tides, some friends you are—but the boat wouldn’t move forward.
“Nope,” Zoey said, refusing to believe it, and rowed.
The boat shuddered once more. And again, and again. Each time Zoey tried to move, the boat disobeyed. Some fool had erected a damn wall in the middle of the ocean.
“Fine, you sick bastard,” Zoey muttered to Sawkill.
She slid out of the boat and into the frigid black depths.
I’ll swim it if I have to, she thought, her teeth chattering, her body stiff and unwieldy. I’ll swim it, and you can’t stop me.
She swam, clumsy, already spitting
up seawater. She was good at swimming, but she couldn’t breathe that well and cry at the same time.
“Pull it together,” she told herself, and swam until she hit the wall.
It pushed her back, gentle, like she’d bumped not into brick but rather a fleshy membrane.
She tried again and again, and each time the wall blocked her. She swam to the right, shivering, shuddering, and tried again. No good—membrane. Invisible and impermeable. She sucked in a breath and dove, as deep as she could go, so deep that her ears hurt and the weight of the ocean nearly pulled her all the way down.
Eyes stinging, lungs burning, she groped in the darkness—and met only that same warm, supple barrier.
Goddamn it, goddamn it. She screamed underwater, using all the rest of her air. She heard her own muffled voice and panicked. The instinct to survive was a powerful thing. She found strength, somewhere, and kicked herself toward the surface.
A hand grabbed her arm and pulled her the rest of the way up.
“Okay, it’s all right,” said a voice—a stranger’s voice, male and tenor, much thinner than her father’s.
Zoey blinked, saw a narrow, light-brown face smiling down at her. He was reaching out of a pontoon boat; Zoey heard the churn of a motor.
“It’s okay,” he repeated.
But Zoey was pissed. The wall had thwarted her escape, and the wall belonged to the Rock, and islands didn’t get to tell her what to do. She got to tell herself what to do.
She drew in a ragged breath, choking on water, and let out a crackling roar of fury.
The man released Zoey and flew away, flung off into the water. The waves crested and broke, ripples shooting out from Zoey’s trembling body. The pontoon boat nearly tipped. Someone inside it yelled: “Jesus!”
Zoey knew she couldn’t tread water for much longer, and when the next hand reached down to pull her up, she let it.
“I’ve got you,” said Briggs, reaching down out of the boat. To her sea-clogged eyes, his eyes sat dark and hollow in his pale square face. “Everything’s going to be okay now.” He squeezed her shoulder. “We’re here to help you. You don’t have to worry.”
Zoey let herself be pulled aboard, her mind scrambling to catch up.
“We?” she rasped, and then saw, huddled in the boat behind Briggs, a few men she didn’t recognize—hatted and faceless, coats slick from the sea. Her father sat among them, struggling to get to her.
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