Sawkill Girls

by Claire Legrand

  “Once I finish speaking,” said Briggs, “you’ll have five seconds to surrender yourself to me, without any trouble, or I’ll tell Peters to kill your father.” Briggs tilted his head slightly to the left. “Don’t think I won’t do it, Zo. I don’t need him. But I need you.”

  “What, for your little ritual?” Zoey’s voice trembled.

  Briggs smiled. “Exactly. Five.”

  Chief Harlow choked out, “Zoey, I’m sorry—”

  “Four.”

  “I tried to stop them—”

  Zoey’s hand shook in the air. “It’s okay, Dad. I promise you everything’s gonna be fine.”

  “Three.”

  Mrs. Althouse let out a gasping sob.

  “I didn’t want this for you,” said Chief Harlow, tears tracking down his stubbled cheeks. “I’m sorry I let you come here.”

  “Two.”

  Then, beside Marion, Zoey went so tense the air started snapping around her like ice over glass.

  “You bitch,” Zoey ground out.

  Marion turned, following Zoey’s glare.

  There was Val, flying down the hill toward them in a nightgown and bare feet, her hair streaming like a golden banner. And even now, knowing what she knew, Marion could hardly bear to look at Val; her moonlit beauty was astounding.

  Then, before anyone could stop her, before Briggs could finish his countdown, Zoey dropped the bat and ran, flinging out her hands like she was slamming shut a door.

  With a cry of shock, Val flew away from her, landed hard in the grass some twenty feet away.

  “Zoey, no!” Marion cried, but Val was already jumping to her feet, running back toward Zoey with her hands—oh, her hands. They were on fire.

  Marion watched, dumbstruck, as Val sped toward them like a constellation knocked out of the sky—three stars, one in each palm, and one in her chest, burning bright like someone had stuffed Sirius into her rib cage.

  Zoey backed away, eyes wide. “Holy shit.”

  The third girl. Three extraordinary girls.

  SEMPER TRES.

  Val lunged at Zoey, knocking her to the ground. Zoey’s head smacked against the earth. Val pinned her to the mud and punched her jaw once, twice. When her fists hit Zoey’s face, they sizzled like meat against a grill.

  Chief Harlow cried out, struggling to free himself.

  Zoey screamed and thrust her hands up at Val’s chest. Val flew back into the circle of men. They caught her, trapping her in a nest of arms. Marion saw one of them bury his face in Val’s hair and inhale. Then they shoved Val back into the circle, back at Zoey.

  But Zoey was ready. She crouched, hands out and lip bleeding. Val flew at her, lighting up with every step. With twin furious screams, they collided. Val’s hands struck Zoey’s stomach like the crash of fireworks. Zoey spun, flinging Val to the ground. Val lay there, gasping. The light in her chest flickered out, and then flared back to life. Zoey straddled her and punched Val again and again.

  As for the men surrounding them, they did nothing. They tightened the circle, huddling closer and closer with eager eyes. They waved their guns like flags. They were laughing.

  “Wonderful!” Briggs crowed. “We hardly had to do anything at all. Do you see, my friends?” He raised his hands, addressing the surrounding men. “Even these extraordinary girls are susceptible to the same weaknesses that plague their entire sex. They want this. In their heart of hearts, they want to destroy each other.”

  Marion had been in a daze, watching the impossible unfurl at lightning speed before her eyes. At Briggs’s words she snapped.

  “Stop it!” She ran at Zoey, pulled her off a gasping, bleeding Val. “Zoey, stop!”

  She staggered away, Zoey in her arms. Zoey pushed free, spun on her heel, eyes bright and wild, and slammed her palm into Marion’s chest. The impact was like someone had thrown a brick at her. Marion flew back, hit the ground. Dazed, breathless, she allowed herself to be helped to her feet by two men with clumsy gloved hands. She felt a hand at her breast, another at her hip, and then they shoved her toward Zoey.

  “Stop!” Marion held her head, unsteady on her feet. She forced herself through the pain, grabbed Val’s arm, and tessered them both a few feet away.

  One of the men let out an appreciative sigh.

  Without Val’s body beneath her, Zoey fell to her hands and knees.

  At Marion’s side, Val panted, her face splattered with blood, “Thank you.”

  Suddenly, Marion’s eyes were full and hot. Even now, the sensation of Val’s skin under her hands was lovely enough to crack open her heart all over again.

  “Marion,” Val began, reaching for her. “I’m so sorry—”

  Marion shoved her roughly away. “I should let her kill you.”

  Briggs withdrew a long knife from a sheath at his hip—a wicked, ancient-looking blade with a dark, elaborately carved hilt and a curved tip. He held it to the sky, flat on his palms.

  “God understands,” Briggs called out, “that these beasts are not supposed to be here. He has, in his wisdom, sent these girls to us. These girls whose power is contentious and self-defeating—except for in the hands of those strong enough to wield it. Our hands, my brothers. In our hands, these girls will be lifted up. Their sacrifice tonight will help us trap the beast while he is still bound to his queen. Their sacrifice tonight will ensure the safety of the world that depends on us to protect it.”

  Then he intoned a phrase in Latin, and the other men repeated him—a chorus of voices, low and masculine, uttering words Marion couldn’t understand but knew were meant to precede her death.

  Val turned away from Marion, launching herself at Zoey.

  A crack from the woods, a rustling of trees.

  Marion whirled, squinted past the swaying, chanting circle of men at the trees beyond.

  Was that a flicker of stars?

  Or a flash of white eyes?

  The bone cry escalated, climbing frantically up the walls of her skull.

  Marion turned, her mind scrambling to get a hold of itself over the baying howl of her panic. She locked eyes with her mother, who was straining away from the blade at her throat. Veins dissected her white neck into sections like countries on a bleached map.

  Val and Zoey wrestled in a tangled, snarling knot on the ground. One of Val’s nightgown straps had fallen off her shoulder. She had ripped off Zoey’s jacket and was now wrapping it around Zoey’s throat, trying to choke her. Zoey elbowed Val in the stomach, sending her flying back.

  The men, leering, rapturous, caught Val.

  Marion ran for the baseball bat, placed it in Zoey’s scorching, outstretched palms.

  “Zoey! Listen to me.” She caught Zoey’s face in her hands, forcing eye contact. “This is exactly what they want. You’re bleeding, and so is Val, and so am I. He’s coming.” Marion shook the bat in Zoey’s hands. “Remember Grayson. Remember the book.”

  Zoey blinked, then blinked again. Some of the fury faded from her eyes.

  “Oh, God,” she whispered.

  Marion turned and found Val in Briggs’s arms. He swiped his own hand across her bleeding lips, then smeared her blood across his face.

  Marion heard Zoey cry out from behind her, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  The trees beyond the circle moved, like black curtains parting to announce the next act. Darkness flitted across the world, climbing from tree to tree.

  The bone cry humming electric up her legs, Marion ran for Val and tore her from Briggs’s arms. She slapped her, to make the men think all was as it should be.

  “Val,” Marion gasped, pulling Val into the center of the circle, toward Zoey. She threw Val to the ground. “He’s here. The Collector. We have to leave. Now.”

  The bone cry was so loud Marion could hardly hear even the hoarse groaning cries of the men calling for her blood.

  Val nodded, wide-eyed. Her body jerked, yanked by forces Marion couldn’t see. Val’s jaw clenched; her muscles strained, as if she were pul
ling against the tide.

  She obeys him completely. As Marion remembered Grayson’s description of the queen, her veins flooded with ice. Her will is consumed by his will.

  “Stay down,” Val whispered harshly. “Hurry.”

  There was no time for second guesses. Marion grabbed Zoey and pulled her to the ground. Val crouched between them, bowed her head, and positioned her arms, ready to spring up off the ground and run.

  Then Val detonated.

  The ground shook under their feet, like it was a dead engine someone had jumped angrily back to life. The lights at Val’s palms and chest burst into an incandescent field, consuming Marion and everything around her. She faintly heard Briggs’s cry of dismay, the circled men falling to the ground like zapped bugs.

  An inhuman shriek rang out—bestial and rasping, a glottal flap of wet skin.

  Marion shielded her eyes. A hand slick with blood clasped her own—Zoey, her expression taut and afraid.

  “Take us somewhere safe.” Zoey’s eyes flicked over to Val, her jaw jutting out sharply. “All of us.”

  With one hand in Zoey’s and the other gripped tightly in Val’s, unharmed by Val’s dimming light, Marion felt as if something incomplete had been, abruptly and utterly, made whole.

  She didn’t hesitate, or think of her mother or of Chief Harlow, or what had happened to Briggs and his men, or if the Collector was pouncing for them.

  She closed her eyes and pushed all the energy she contained out and down—into the black mud, into the stone beneath her feet, into the Rock itself. And the island—blazing, furious, trembling—rose up to meet her.

  God understands, Briggs had whispered, that the beasts are not supposed to be here.

  Marion couldn’t imagine a God like the one she’d grown up hearing about—some man sitting in the clouds, maneuvering the pieces of the world to suit his whims because he, of course, knows best.

  But she could imagine a God in the shape of an island crowned with trees, brooding in the middle of a black sea.

  Somewhere safe, she thought to the Rock, her grip tightening on Zoey and Val. She knew the Rock heard. She felt its ears prick and its great beastly heart awaken and its rage solidify, matching her own.

  She disappeared.

  Zoey

  The Purge

  When Zoey opened her eyes, she was flat on her back in a bed of moss, and the night sky above her rested in the narrow palms of many-fingered tree branches.

  Her hands tingled painfully; her head fizzed and rocked like she’d tumbled off a storming sea onto solid ground.

  “Marion?” Zoey found her bat lying in the brush and felt a fierce rush of gladness that Marion had retrieved it. “Val?”

  She found them, Marion to her right and Val to her left, each of them slowly coming back to themselves. Marion’s tesser had dropped them in a thicket choked with brambly undergrowth, and small bent trees coated in brittle, sea-crusted bark.

  Marion held her head, eyes gazing blearily at nothing in particular. Val crouched on her hands and knees, her arms and chest still rimmed in light. She glared at the ground and breathed evenly through her nose, her lips clamped shut. Then she pressed one of her glowing hands to her stomach. A few seconds later, she turned away to vomit.

  “Tessering’s no joke, is it?” Zoey tossed in Val’s general direction. She kicked herself free of the thorny bracken’s grip and made her way to Marion, ripped the turquoise paisley scarf from her hair, and dabbed her bleeding lip. “Where are we?”

  “I’m not sure,” Marion answered, her voice thin. “I took us somewhere safe, and that’s all I know. I didn’t think to tell it where to go.”

  “Hey.” Zoey ducked to look Marion in the eyes. “It’s okay. You did good.”

  Marion’s smile trembled. “I’m so tired, I . . . I don’t think I can get us home.”

  “We’re on one of the Smalls,” Val croaked, her voice rattling and sounding not entirely normal. She pointed through the trees toward a thin string of distant lights that Zoey now recognized as downtown Sawkill. They shimmered across the water, a line of mystics making their pilgrimage to the shore. “On Hare’s Tail, I think.”

  “Why are you here?” Marion asked, not looking up as she tended to Zoey’s hand. Her movements were gentle, but her voice was not. “Why did you come tonight?”

  Val, coughing, said weakly, “I wanted to help you.”

  Marion’s jaw clenched. “Like you helped my sister?”

  “If you try anything funny,” Zoey added, glaring at Val, “I swear to God I’ll blast you to the bottom of the sea.”

  “She saved our lives,” Marion muttered, staring at the ground. Her eyes held a bright sheen.

  “I don’t care.” Zoey pointed at Val. “Don’t think you’ll get any mercy from me, not even for a second.”

  Then, from Val’s spot in the weeds, came a low gurgle of laughter.

  “Mercy,” growled Val, but not really Val, for that voice was not hers, and vibrated with a malevolence that sent a shiver of fear sliding down Zoey’s arms. “Mercy is not a concept in which I believe.”

  Then Val’s head whipped around to stare at them, her eyes gone entirely white. Still on her hands and knees, she lurched toward them in an awful, unsteady crawl.

  “Shit,” breathed Zoey, grabbing her bat and jumping to her feet. “Marion, get behind me!”

  Marion scrambled to obey.

  “Marion, get behind me!” Val mocked.

  Zoey put up her hand, concentrated on the solidity of her feet planted in the mud, imagined hot electric rods spanning from her calves down into the earth and the rock and the sea.

  Her hand surged to life, every finger buzzing with a current of power.

  Val hesitated, cocked her head violently to the side like a rabid dog.

  Zoey beckoned. “Just try it, you piece of shit.”

  “What did you do with Val?” Marion demanded.

  “Val has made me angrier than I ever believed possible,” said Val, and then sprang up from the mud, teeth bared. Her lovely face elongated and darkened, like ink was collecting beneath her skin. Her eyes blazed white.

  Zoey let out a battle cry and thrust her palm at Val’s leaping form. The air rippled, slammed into Val’s abdomen.

  A sound emerged from her throat—part monster, part girl. Her body jerked at the navel. She flew back into the trees and out of sight.

  Zoey thrust the bat into Marion’s hands, and together they plunged past the nearest line of trees into darkness.

  “If I end up having to kill her,” Zoey muttered, “just know that I’m sorry. Not for her. For you.”

  Marion said nothing.

  They found Val writhing at the base of a squat black tree, her body twisting in a cradle of roots. Her ragged screams cut the air into pieces; her illuminated palms flickered in and out, like light bulbs in a gale.

  She turned at their approach, her eyes shifting from storm white to ink black, to an ordinary, pleading blue.

  “Please,” she gasped. “Help me.”

  Her back arched and then flattened, slamming her first into the air and then back down onto the roots. Her hands, ribboned with blood, tore at the bark as though she were fighting toward the surface for oxygen.

  Zoey froze. She didn’t want to grant Val mercy, but her stomach turned at the sight of Val convulsing, her body being used and flung and ravaged like a doll’s.

  She remembered Grayson’s voice uttering the translated words from her father’s book:

  She obeys him completely.

  She doesn’t have a choice.

  Her will is consumed by his will.

  Beside Zoey, Marion let out a choked sob. “Oh my God . . .”

  “Oh my God, oh my God.” Val heaved herself into a sitting position, her bloodied fingers still digging into the roots. She fixed Marion with a flickering, scornful stare, her shoulders and legs jerking. “You know, Val only liked you because you were an easy target.”

  “Don’t liste
n to him, Marion,” said Zoey. “He’s a liar and a murderer.”

  “She needed a quick screw to take the edge off,” taunted Val, her voice caught somewhere between the Collector’s and her own. “And she knew you were desperate for it.”

  Marion’s reply rang out steady and clear. “That’s not true.”

  Val pressed her glowing hands to her nightgown. They burned holes through the thin fabric, then met her skin and sizzled. Val screamed in pain. Her eyes flickered to blue. She gagged, gasping for breath.

  She looked at Zoey, pleading. “Help me! Please . . . Hold down my hands.”

  Val slammed her palms onto her stomach. At the impact, fresh black bile oozed from Val’s lips and nose, down the shuddering front of her gown.

  Marion let out a soft, anguished cry.

  Zoey realized what was happening with such a sharp stab of disgust that her stomach turned over.

  Then, with a rasping roar, Val sprang up from the roots and leaped at them.

  Zoey sucked in a breath and flung out her fists.

  Val flew back from them, slamming into the fat black tree. She dropped to the roots and didn’t move.

  Zoey and Marion ran to her. Zoey kept her hands out, her arms rigid. She imagined sending all the energy contained in her body to rest against Val’s glowing hands, keeping them flat against Val’s belly.

  “Please, I’m trying . . .” Val gazed up at them with a film over her pale blue eyes. Her body seized with a violent cough. More black liquid bubbled out of her lips. Her eyelids fluttered; her palms flickered, dimming. “I’m trying to . . .”

  Marion knelt at her side. “You’re fighting him.” Marion covered Val’s hands with her own. At her touch, Val’s hands swelled softly back to brightness. Her body twisted in pain. Tears leaked from her eyes.

  “Marion,” came her true voice, hoarse and desperate. “I’m so sorry. I should have jumped.” She gasped, blinking. “I should have ended it . . .”

  “No.” Marion shook her head, mouth in a tight line. “No, you shouldn’t have. Don’t say that.”

  A crack, a snarl, and then Val’s body jerked away from them.