Sawkill Girls

by Claire Legrand

  “Blam-o.” Zoey slapped her hands together. Grayson and Marion both jumped. “The girls’ power zaps the monster back to the hellhole from whence he came. And what’s worse? Apparently once girls start dying really quickly like they’ve been doing around here? It means the monster’s close to breaking free.”

  Marion looked up at her, eyes wide. “Breaking free of what?”

  Zoey drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly. Steadily she met Marion’s gaze. “The queen. And once he’s free, he’ll kill anyone. Not just girls. Anyone. And he won’t need help to do it.”

  “And once he’s free,” Grayson added, hands clenched in his lap, “it’s much more difficult for the Hand of Light to track him down. He can still be tempted by the ritual, by the combination of the three girls, but once he’s no longer contained to a specific area, it’s like the hunting equivalent of searching for a needle in a haystack.” He exhaled, rubbed his hands over his face. “At least, so the book says.”

  “Which makes me wonder if the Hand of Light would even care about hunting down these monsters,” Zoey muttered, “if no one else but girls were ever in danger. How much do you want to bet the Hand of Light formed because some old rich men figured out these monsters could develop a taste for man-flesh and wanted to protect their own asses?”

  “Can I once again apologize on behalf of men everywhere?” Grayson offered. “Because we can really fucking suck sometimes.”

  Zoey arched an eyebrow. “Sometimes?”

  “Most of the time.”

  “There it is.”

  Marion had sat quietly during their exchange, and continued to for two straight minutes. Zoey counted the seconds to keep from screaming.

  Finally, Marion looked up at her, clear-eyed and calm. “If we do what Grayson described, if we go through the ritual, then the Collector will go away, before he manages to break free of . . . of the queen? No one else will die?”

  This was so far removed from the words Zoey had expected to hear that she actually squawked.

  “What?” She scrambled away from Marion as if she had been burned. “If we do this? No. Hell. No.” She stood, fuming. “We are not letting some dickhead man-cult use us like this. There has to be another way.”

  “Okay,” said Marion. “And what would that be? This way has worked. The book says so.”

  Zoey spluttered, words failing her. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” she blurted at last. “Three extraordinary girls.” She pointed at herself, then at Marion. “One, two. We don’t have a third.”

  “So we find her. And then we begin the ritual, like the book says.”

  Zoey laughed, just shy of hysterical. “Nope. Nuh-uh. Not gonna happen.”

  Marion watched her patiently. “Then what do you suggest? We try to banish him all by ourselves? Unguided? Uncontrolled? I don’t know about you, but I don’t exactly feel like a pro with my power or anything. What if I can’t make it work? What if you can’t? What if we die trying, and then he’s still here, and he breaks free and starts killing everyone we’ve left behind?”

  Silence stretched between them, tacky and dense. The grandfather clock burst in with twelve brassy chimes, and Zoey growled through the din, “Grayson, permission to smash your clock with my baseball bat so it never bothers me again.”

  Grayson, head in his hands, said flatly, “Permission denied.”

  “So?” Marion watched Zoey, her eyes still swollen from crying, her lips pale and chapped. “What’s your other way, Zoey?”

  Standing in the middle of the room with her fists clenched, Zoey had not even a whisper of an answer.

  THE ROCK WISHED IT HAD the ability to stop the world from spinning.

  If only there was a way to keep its daughters safe from harm, even for only a little while longer!

  But this was a futile wish, and a waste of time. Ordinarily, to the Rock, time was a mammoth entity, boundless and malleable.

  But not tonight. Tonight, time was a cruel taskmaster. Tonight, the Rock was on human time.

  Tonight, the beast was on the move.

  The Rock was, too.

  Through its crown of trees, along its ridges knobbed like bones, the Rock sent whispers crashing like the endless envious waves.

  Find one another, instructed the Rock—white wings fluttering, black grasses rustling, forest creatures scrabbling with a panic they could not name.

  Find one another, and hold on tight.

  Val

  The Arrival

  On the bench behind Kingshead, overlooking a sea full of abandoned bones, Val sat barefoot in a soft gray nightgown, staring at her hands.

  Inside her, the waxy blackness of his presence was squeezing each of her organs, sucking hard on the underside of her skin, anchoring him to this world. He shivered and gnawed at her veins, impatient to be free of her. It wouldn’t be long now. The weight of him inside her cells gave her a new sensitivity, like she’d sprouted tiny antennae of her own, coating her body like a velvet sleeve. She could read the state of him so much more clearly than she ever had before.

  And it was true: he needed only one more kill, one more meal, before he would be able to stand on his own.

  A tingle distracted Val—twin itches, burrowing into the hollows of her palms. She glanced down.

  Her hands . . . they glowed.

  Val closed her eyes and turned her thoughts outward—to the black windblown trees surrounding her family’s home, to the horse farms and their glossy dark hills, to the pebbled paths weaving through the five woods like veins.

  To the Rock itself.

  Why are you doing this? she thought, just as she’d done in the red room, when she’d asked the Rock to hide her light. She’d asked it, and it had listened.

  It had obeyed her.

  And now . . . would it answer?

  Out here, on her bench, hidden from the trees and facing the endless expanse of the sea, Val felt . . . well, not safe, she never felt that, but at least, for the moment, she felt unseen.

  What are you? she asked. She planted her bare feet on the sand-strewn black rock. She imagined that the blood coursing through her body would extend like a raging river, down into the island. It would gather information there and come back as a gentle rain, cooling her forehead.

  What are you?

  A pause. A beat of waiting silence. Val held her breath.

  Then she felt a blazing heat gather itself, as it had done in the library—right before she’d burned her mother—and in the red room, when he’d marked her as his queen.

  She smiled, faintly.

  That day, she had pleaded with this energy to hide.

  Now, she welcomed its return. It punched up through the rock beneath her like an electric fist.

  Hello, Rock, she thought.

  Then Val rose, only slightly unsteady, and the brilliant fist thrust up through the soles of her feet and into her torso, collecting around her chest and in the center of her clenched palms like white-hot stars pulled down from the heavens.

  Distantly, she recognized that she hadn’t thought this through very well. Experimentation was . . . not a good idea. He would sense the intrusion, the crackle of the white foreign heat against the blackness with which he’d slickly coated her insides.

  He would not be pleased. He would want to find the root of this foreign power and tear it out.

  But she heard nothing. She felt nothing. No displeasure, no punishment. He could, very easily, if he wanted to. He could cause her pain even from the other side of the island. She’d seen it happen to her mother a thousand times, seen her collapse and clutch her belly, soundless agony carving terrible shapes across her face.

  Val waited. She cupped his mark with glowing hands.

  Nothing. Only the waves; only the wind.

  She opened her fingers and then clenched them again, the sensation like submerging herself into a fizzing hot bath.

  Then, a flash of white, fluttering down from the gray sky: A moth, hovering a few inches in front of her face
—tiny and pale, black spots like eyes on its wings. It whispered gibberish as it flew, its tiny moth voice childlike and clear. With a contented sigh, the moth alighted on Val’s wrist, just beyond the reach of the brilliant light resting in her palm.

  So said the moth: This power is the Rock’s, and it is yours, too.

  Use it.

  They are coming.

  Val stared at the moth. “Who’s coming?”

  The moth fluttered up the trail back to Kingshead. Val raced past it, heart suddenly pounding. The back of her neck tingled, like ghost fingers were tapping out a sonata on her skin.

  She burst into Kingshead—such a tomb it was, with her mother gone, and she wouldn’t be able to deflect the questions for much longer: Where’s your mother, Val? Is she sick? Tell her we hope she feels better soon!

  Val hurried to the front parlor, used her buzzing fingers to part the gauzy curtains. Four cars, headlights off, moved slow and silent up the drive to the Althouse cottage. They parked, surrounding the house like points of a compass. People climbed out—men, Val thought, in dark coats and hats. They held guns. Some entered the cottage. Others stayed at the cars. A few of them moved down toward the trees, the edge of Kingshead Woods. Twenty men, maybe. They were moving too swiftly, too darkly, to count.

  Marion?

  Val didn’t grab her boots. She wanted to feel the Rock between her toes.

  She slipped out the front doors, and ran.

  Zoey

  The Rock Speaks

  Zoey should not have fallen asleep.

  Pumping her legs, pedaling her bike faster than she’d ever dared pedal it before, she raced across the island from Grayson’s house to Marion’s. Her phone vibrated in her pocket. Grayson, probably. He’d no doubt woken up by now and found her gone.

  He would have to wait.

  Zoey had awakened twenty minutes ago, having fallen asleep on the couch in Grayson’s living room, to find Marion’s chair empty, her purse and jacket left behind.

  She’d gone—but where?

  Home, Zoey assumed, or Kingshead. Back to Val?

  Later, she would yell at Marion. Later, once she’d found Marion safe and alive, and not ripped to pieces or fed to a monster as Val watched, cackling.

  Zoey tightened her grip on the handlebars, Grayson’s bat wedged under her arm like a rocket launcher. The air vibrated around her, buzzed against the back of her neck, snaked between each of her fingers and toes. When she focused her eyes on the road before her, the edges of her vision shimmered like a mirage on a sun-drenched plain. If she decided to jump off her bike and then turn and blast it into the sea with her bare hands, she thought, maybe, she could do it. If not into the sea, then pretty damn far.

  Despite everything, Zoey smiled.

  You are a weapon, Zoey. Marion had said it, and now Zoey said it, a tiny chill skipping up her sides: “I am my own weapon.”

  It was like something out of one of the wild fantasy stories she and Thora had written—several binders’ worth of original epics that they had both sworn to each other would never again see the light of day.

  The pain of Thora was like a splinter in Zoey’s heart. If she picked at it too much, it would dig in deeper, so she only ever looked at it sideways. Look at it dead on, and the pain might just sear her alive.

  But tonight, with dawn still two hours away and the wet world glittering black like an evil queen’s wood, Zoey faced Thora unflinching. She opened up her chest cavity and welcomed in the raw night air. It plucked at her splinter, shoved against it, and shifted it. Her heart ached, and she relished the bite of pain.

  She relived Marion’s words—Just because you can’t figure out how to have sex like a normal person—and let the memory slap her up and down her ribs.

  Over and over, she pictured the heartbroken expression on Grayson’s face as she’d told him she could no longer be with him.

  Zoey turned her bike sharply left and plunged into the edge of the Kingshead Woods, plowing through a cluster of bushes. A cloud of tiny white wings erupted, thumped lightly against her face and arms.

  Moths, whispering: Faster, Zoey.

  Faster.

  Zoey pedaled past the Mortimers’ pastures, dimly noticed horses running alongside her. They matched her pace on their side of the fence, tossed their heads, snorted into the night air. The tires of Zoey’s bike carved a blazing path through the mud. Branches whipped against her, and she didn’t mind their sting. They encouraged her; they pushed her on. They were ancient mothers, wise and tired. They had witnessed unfathomable joy and unbearable pain.

  A moth alighted between Zoey’s knuckles, clung to her with furry feet. Its tired wings quivered—two unblinking black eyes.

  Be ready, it warned her.

  Ahead, the dark peaks of Kingshead emerged from the trees.

  Then Zoey heard a scream.

  Marion

  The Martyr

  Marion followed the bone cry’s path through the Kingshead Woods, her palms bleeding, preparing herself to die.

  It seemed to her the most logical decision to make. There was no need for anyone else to die but her.

  She had cut open her palms with a knife she’d stolen from Grayson’s kitchen, and now she wandered through the woods, smearing her hands across the trees. The Collector, she hoped, would catch her scent. She would be irresistible to him. An extraordinary girl, right? He’d hunt her, and then, ignoring the bone cry rattling in her ears, urging her to run, Marion would let the beast grab her. Once in his clutches, she would tesser. She would think of the snow-covered beach, the strange lavender sky, and bring them both to that obscura, hidden somewhere in the deep of the world.

  And if he killed her there—which, of course, he would—then, well, she would die.

  But no one else would. And then he would be trapped there, banished, hopefully for years.

  It was the most logical decision to make.

  As she trudged through the trees, the dissonant metallic whine ringing in her ears, Marion told herself that this decision was not only logical; it was the fate she deserved, for failing to keep Charlotte safe, for not suggesting other places for them to live, for not immediately sensing the horrible truth about Valerie Mortimer. It was also, maybe, a little bit brave.

  She did not feel brave.

  She closed her eyes, shutting out the sights and sounds of the woods so that the only thing she knew was her own body—blood roaring, heart pounding so fast she feared she might scare herself to death before she even found what she was looking for, and the call of the bone cry.

  She almost started to run. It would be easy, to run, to hide in some dark hollow until someone else took care of the situation. Someone mightier.

  Marion opened her eyes and returned to herself—feet planted in the mud, wind-bitten trees bowing over her like naked hags foraging in the weeds for hidden dark treasures.

  “Go out a hero,” she muttered, limbs shaking as she started climbing up a ridge woven through with roots and crested with scratchy brush. “Isn’t that what people always do in the movies?”

  She wiped her sleeve across her face, stumbled over a knot of weeds. It would certainly feel more heroic if she could stop crying.

  God, how long had she been searching these woods? Dawn was still a ways off, she thought. The world inside the woods was dark and muted, painted in shades of graveyard gray and rot brown. Every tree looked the same, and the bone cry was a loud, uninterrupted drone banging against the sides of her skull, a persistent warning.

  Where was he, then?

  Marion stopped in a small clearing, not fifteen feet across, and threw up her hands. “Where are you? Huh?” she shouted to the trees. “Come get me, you sick bastard!”

  As if in answer, a scream pierced the night.

  Marion whirled, searching through the dark woods.

  It came again, and this time it said a word, and this time Marion recognized the voice:

  “Marion!”

  Her mother.


  Marion

  The Circle

  Marion didn’t stop to think beyond the simple fact of her mother in danger.

  She ran, keeping the looming bulk of Kingshead in front of her, like the north star gone haunted and dim. She heard branches crack behind her and wondered if the Collector was in pursuit, but she couldn’t bring herself to look.

  One lonely thought drummed through her body, riding the roar of her blood and the high whine of the bone cry: Not Mom. Not her, too.

  But when Marion burst out of the woods, and then ran up the sloping ridge to the perimeter of shrubs and grasses that ringed the cottage’s backyard, she realized her prayer had been uttered in vain.

  For there stood the Hand of Light—twenty men, black and brown and white, wearing dark coats and hats. Marion hadn’t yet met all of them, but she knew at once who they must be. They stood in a circle within the cluster of oak trees in the back corner of the yard, which was thick enough to hide them from any prying eyes up at Kingshead or down on the road to town. Silent and still, they looked like the tall stones of ancient England, arranged pleasingly for the gods.

  One of them had a gun pressed to Chief Harlow’s temple.

  And another had Pamela Althouse’s arms bound behind her, and a small blade pressed into the skin of her throat.

  “Marion?” Her mother’s lips trembled. “What’s going on? Who are these people?”

  Marion’s throat was so choked with fear that she could hardly speak. “It’s gonna be okay, Mom.”

  “Hello, Marion,” said Briggs, stepping forward. “I’m so glad you came. I figured you would.” Then Briggs peered past Marion into the woods. His smile widened. “Ah, Zoey! Welcome.”

  Marion turned to see Zoey emerging from the woods, her arm raised in the kill position—straight out in front of her body, palm flat and rigid. Her other hand gripped a baseball bat.

  Marion rushed for her. “Zoey, get out of here, run!”

  Zoey ignored her, instead taking a defensive stance right in front of her. “Let him go, Briggs. And Mrs. Althouse, too. Or I start fucking up all your shit in a major way.”