Sawkill Girls

by Claire Legrand

  He swallowed, hard, his gaze flitting across her face, and then he looked away. “You know, right after you broke up with me, I was mad at you.”

  Her stomach dropped. “Mad at me?”

  “I couldn’t understand why you didn’t want to have sex. Everyone wants to have sex.”

  The words knocked Zoey’s breath out of her lungs. “Not everyone,” she managed.

  “I know.” He pressed her hands gently with his fingers. “I know that now. Anyway, I was angry, and confused, jealous. Basically I was an ass. I thought maybe there was someone else. I thought I’d done something wrong, or that it hadn’t been good for you—”

  She released a frustrated breath. “I told you before, that has nothing to do with it.”

  “I even thought for a while that maybe I should just stop seeing you. Completely. Even as friends.”

  Zoey closed her eyes. “God.”

  “But I couldn’t stand that, Zo. I tried for, I think, a day, and that was that. And then, over the past few weeks, with all of this going on . . . And then you left me on that boat, with no idea where you were going or what was about to happen . . .” A piece of his voice broke off and shattered. “Fuck, Zoey.” He dragged a hand over his face. “I thought I’d never see you again.”

  Zoey stared up at him, rapt. “Language,” she chided.

  His smile was soft upon her face. “I realized on that boat that I’d rather live a lifetime without sex if it meant spending even one more day with you.”

  Zoey couldn’t help it; she burst out laughing.

  Grayson pulled slightly away, frowning. “Well. That’s not the reaction I was expecting.”

  “I’m sorry, it’s just—” Zoey was doing that slightly alarming thing where she was laughing and basically crying at the same time. She wiped her eyes. “That was such a declaration. And so, like, final. A lifetime without sex, Grayson? There’s no need to punish yourself for me.”

  “I don’t even know if I want sex.”

  Now Zoey was the one to pull back. “Okay, but you told me you did want sex.”

  “I mean . . .” Grayson blew out a sharp breath. “I haven’t slept with anyone since you.” He paused, eyes dancing. Gently, he added, “I could have, mind you—”

  Zoey rolled her eyes. “Oh, of course, naturally.”

  “But I didn’t want to. Not if it wasn’t you.”

  “Grayson.” Zoey shook her head, recentering herself. “I don’t want you to become someone you’re not, even for me.”

  “And I don’t want you to become someone you’re not for me.”

  “Okay, so . . . Where does that leave us?”

  “Maybe it leaves us here: we’re seventeen.”

  Zoey raised an eyebrow. “An astute observation.”

  “Maybe we just . . . try it. If you want,” he added hastily. “If you’re not interested, then tell me to shut up and get over myself, and I will.”

  “Try it?”

  “A relationship. You and me.” He looked hesitantly up at her. “If you want.”

  A light, fizzy feeling bubbled up from Zoey’s toes to her cheeks. “Grayson, I’m serious when I tell you that I may never want to have sex again.”

  “And I may never want it again! Who knows? But you.” Now he cupped her face in his palms, reverent. “You, I want. However I can have you, Harlow.”

  Tears welled in her eyes. You, I want. “And if I never want to have sex again? And you decide that you do?”

  “Then maybe it won’t work out. But, God, Zoey, don’t you want to try?”

  His earnestness tore at her, and then remade her into a whole, shining creature that dared to embrace this moment—and not laugh, or run away, or spike it with barbs.

  “Maybe,” she said slowly, “I’ll find out that I want to have sex with you. On occasion.”

  “Maybe,” he agreed. “Or maybe you won’t. And that’s okay.”

  “Maybe I’ll transform overnight into a sex fiend.”

  “Maybe I’ll decide to take a vow of abstinence.”

  Zoey’s laugh came out faint and shuddering. She blinked, and tears fell onto Grayson’s stroking fingers. “Maybe you’ll go off to college and forget about me.”

  “Maybe we’ll just be a plain old slayer-school housekeeper-and-headmaster,” he said, his eyes so soft that Zoey had to close her own. “Best friends and colleagues. Nothing more.”

  She nuzzled her nose against his chin, whispering, “Maybe this is a stupid high school fling.”

  “Maybe,” said Grayson, brushing his lips across her cheeks, “we’ll grow old together.”

  Maybe, Zoey thought, as she opened her mouth to Grayson’s kiss, has lots of potential.

  MANY HAD OBSERVED, IN THE last few blessedly quiet weeks on Sawkill, that a new beacon had appeared near the top of the old lighthouse.

  It was different than the familiar, cycling light that the island’s residents had watched for years.

  This light was smaller. It sat for hours, unmoving—sometimes at night, sometimes during the day. Sometimes on the east side; sometimes on the south, or the north. On occasion it glowed so dimly that the casual observer might mistake it for an optical illusion.

  Other times it flashed so brilliantly that anyone happening to glance out their window might think a meteorite had fallen to ground.

  Those were the people who went searching. If someone was fooling around on the lighthouse, then they really ought to find out. They would call the police chief, tell him what they’d seen. He’d listen patiently to their claims, tell them he’d been up to the lighthouse just that afternoon while out on patrol, and had seen nothing out of the ordinary.

  Everyone took the chief at his word. He’d arrested and jailed the awful men who’d killed those poor girls, after all.

  A cult of kidnappers and killers, preying on girls for decades? The residents couldn’t stop thinking about it. It was not an easy tragedy to shake. How could they have never noticed? How could they have missed the signs? The revelation made them stop and reassess themselves, made them take second looks at their mirrors and hold their breaths when the house settled at night.

  But still, a small curious few were not altogether satisfied with Chief Harlow’s reassurance about the strange light, and when they struck out on the lighthouse road, determined and square-shouldered, none of them knew that the Rock was watching their approach.

  Once they got too close, the Rock made sure every one of them was gently turned away—a washed-out path, a dead-end road, a soft sweep of wind scented like salt and fresh bread and home, which distracted the seekers and caused them to turn back. They gave up cheerfully, writing off their fleeting curiosity as a sign that they ought to pull out one of their old children’s books and give it a reread, for the sake of nostalgia.

  The Rock watched them go, venerable and untamed. It was protective of the old, tired lighthouse, and of the children waiting inside.

  Watching the sky and the water for their lost sister.

  Waiting, and searching, and hoping.

  The Rock hugged the lighthouse like a mother warms her young.

  Val

  The Lighthouse

  It had been six weeks and four days since Marion left them.

  Not died. Val refused to think of Marion that way, though when Mrs. Althouse told the rest of the island what had happened—that Marion had been chosen by the cult as their next victim, that she had fought her fate until the last moment, that Mrs. Althouse had faith Marion would reappear, somehow, someday—the people of Sawkill gave the woman who had lost her husband and both her daughters looks of actual, genuine pity. Not manufactured, not fleeting. They invited her over to their houses for dinner; they included her in family movie nights. It was an unspoken decision reached by the island’s entire population: Mrs. Althouse should never have to feel alone again.

  Especially not until she accepted the fact that her daughter, whose body had never been found, was not coming home.

  A fr
esh wind slapped its way up the lighthouse and whipped strands of Val’s hair around her face.

  Beside her, curled up on a sea-bitten bench, Zoey shifted in her sleep.

  Val adjusted the quilt around Zoey’s chin, then brought her own steaming thermos of tea to her lips. The tea slipped down her throat and heated her cold limbs. It was only mid-September, but up on the lighthouse observation deck, one needed a quilt, a hot thermos, a scarf.

  Setting down her tea on the old plank floor, Val decided it was time to turn on her light. She’d eaten her sandwich, she’d drunk her tea. Now it was time to get to work.

  She left Zoey on the bench and walked around to the deck’s western curve. She leaned against the metal railing with its chipped black paint—probably lead-based, probably carcinogenic, but honestly, when you’d fought a monster, when you’d been enslaved to one, when you’d watched your first real love disappear into a void you couldn’t understand, environmentally unsound paint was the least of your worries.

  First, she said hello to the Rock. She had decided over the past few weeks that it deserved politeness and most likely seldom received it.

  “Good evening,” she whispered to the wind, like the proper lady she was, and then she breathed in deep and unclenched her fists.

  Two delicate white flames flared to life in her palms. A third unfurled within her ribs; its warmth bled down her spine and pooled in her belly.

  Thus illuminated, Val waited.

  She sometimes waited alone. Sometimes she preferred and requested it. Sometimes Mrs. Althouse waited with her. Sometimes Zoey and Grayson brought up a picnic basket, a pile of coats, playing cards, and flashlights. They would sit on the floor and play Go Fish by the light of Val’s fire.

  They would coax her home, hours later, bleary-eyed and hoarse-voiced.

  “Marion wouldn’t want you to drain yourself dry for her,” was Zoey’s common refrain.

  Val gazed out over the water. Twilight dressed both sky and sea in fairy-tale shades. Amber honey and queen’s violet, the orange fire of a priestess’s flame, the effulgent blue of water lit from below by spirits.

  She withdrew the thin silver necklace from her pocket. Wearing Charlotte’s starfish was not a thing she would ever do; that line was etched in stone, and Val refused to cross it.

  But, since Mrs. Althouse had gifted it to her, Val had kept it always on her person. It was stupid, maybe, but considering everything that had happened, Val thought that if any physical thing in the world might show some sign of Marion’s return, this necklace and its tiny sea creature would be the first one to do so.

  She dangled the necklace from two glowing fingers and watched the starfish spin before her eyes, turning amethyst in the iridescent light. Then her eyes slipped across the sea—one more survey before settling back onto her bench for the long wait—and she saw, carving the pearled water in two, a long narrow band of ripples.

  Her breath caught in her throat. She glanced at the starfish—nothing—and then back at the water. The ripples did not disband, as normal ripples would have. They remained, shivering in place as if pinned there by a tremendous tug of gravity, somewhere deep on the seabed.

  Zoey awoke with a yawn, sitting up bleary-eyed. “Val? Do you feel that?”

  Val figured she would hate herself for this, more than she already, quietly, permanently, hated herself. She might even hate Sawkill for it.

  Playing tricks, old girl? she thought to the Rock. Is this how it’s going to be?

  Unable to move, unwilling to believe or deny what she saw, Val stood frozen in place—until she saw the moth.

  It floated down to her like a piece of shaved sky, catching the twilight on its wings. Only when it perched on her trembling hand did Val see its true colors—eyes black like the sea at midnight, white like the flame of her own heart.

  So said the moth, its feelers kissing her fingers: Go to her.

  Marion

  The Starfish

  Marion figured she was dying.

  She was not.

  First there was a nothingness. She was not a girl, or even a human being.

  Then she was stardust, examined by the cosmos.

  Distantly she heard terrible noises of punishment. A drop of memory: She had pulled a beast down with her. It had wrapped its tail and raging wet claws around her. It had strangled her. The word scream floated up through the dormant huddle of her consciousness, but even half-alive as she was, she knew that word was not enough to describe what she was hearing.

  But she let the screams pass her by and continued on her way, whatever that way was.

  Stardust cares not for the agony of demons.

  Her time in this Far Place lasted an age.

  She saw things: A planet blue like a child’s marble. A house vast and sad, ringed by horses who tossed their heads uncaring. Deserts plagued by phantoms that stole girls from their tents. Jungles haunted by monsters that no one could see. Cities full of lonely people so desperately unhappy that they sought out rumored beasts and exchanged freedom for power.

  Marion saw herself, a floating girl, wrapped in a galactic cocoon. Fetal, as she had been at the beginning, except her hair was long and her breasts were full. At her pulse points—temples, wrists, throat—shimmered a faint crystalline web of scars, pulsing faintly with pain.

  Not even souls who fought to protect the defenseless could emerge from the Far Place without cost.

  But Marion didn’t mind these tithes, nor did she mind the fathomless void surrounding her. She was not entirely alone, here.

  She felt a presence neither kind nor cruel. It observed her. It allowed her to pass.

  For a second age, she walked a lightless path.

  There was a ground beneath her feet. At first it felt dry. Sand? That was a word she had once known. Then her feet moved through water—an inch at first, and then a few. It rose to her knees, her thighs, her belly.

  She was frightened, but she tried not to be. The path was hers, and she trusted it. Whatever watched her in this place, she sensed it would be pleased if she kept on—and aggravated if she did not.

  She walked until the water rippled just beneath her eyes.

  Then she glimpsed a light. Tiny but untiring, it rested on a faint white line, some distance away.

  A horizon?

  She took a breath and plunged deeper. The water consumed her.

  She walked until the soles of her feet tore open. She swam until her lungs burst, until her burning limbs snapped off from the force of her desperation, until her belly swelled with water and deep-sea silt formed a dark crust over her eyes.

  But then her lungs re-formed. Arms and legs, new and uncertain, clawed clumsily along the ocean floor. Her feet—size eight! she remembered now—repaired themselves, paddled left right left right. Her eyes saw gaping luminescent creatures, the carcasses of ships, and deeper, more secret things in the black depths below her that she didn’t understand.

  She realized that she was being remade.

  The light was growing larger, and her new lungs scorched her insides. She needed to breathe. Stars don’t breathe, but girls do. This was obvious to her now.

  She followed the shining white light ahead of her and cried out for it, voice muffled by the churning salt waves. She hoped that it wouldn’t burn out before she could reach it.

  The path ended. Before her was an indistinct expanse, sloping up into a world that frightened her for a reason she could not explain.

  Her feet sank into wet sand, and she gasped, inhaling water. She stumbled; her knees crashed against a cluster of shells. Coughing, she scrambled to regain her balance. Her hand landed on something hard and prickly.

  Her stinging eyes opened just enough to glimpse a familiar five-pointed shape at her fingertips, half-buried in shifting dark sand.

  Something essential returned to her—the final piece.

  She burst up into the world that the light called home.

  Her first breath hurt.

  Her second fe
lt divine.

  She touched a beach—she knew this, the word returning gently to her—and the beach felt familiar.

  Pebbles as big as quarters and as small as needle eyes.

  Coarse dark sand.

  Tiny shells that wriggled back underground once the waves had returned to their maker.

  The second thing she touched was a hand, reaching for her.

  And the third? A tiny silver starfish, dangling from a white flame. Marion touched her own neck, felt a slender silver chain around it.

  My little starfish.

  Sisters two and sisters true.

  “Marion,” called a voice, so loud that it hurt her tender ears. Yet she turned toward it, blindly seeking.

  “Marion, we’re here, we’re right here.”

  “Marion, oh my God . . .”

  She knew those voices.

  “Can you breathe?” asked one. “Shit, is she breathing?”

  “Don’t leave me again, Marion,” said the other voice. “Please, God.”

  The voice started sobbing, and if Marion’s squinting vision wasn’t telling her lies, then this second voice belonged to the light that had guided her home.

  A name floated to the surface of her mind.

  Val.

  “Val,” she croaked. Her first word.

  “Yes, yes.” Marion’s finer senses returned to her: Val’s fingers stroking Marion’s hair out of her eyes, lips hot and frantic against her brow. The light Marion had followed home burned in Val’s chest, quiet and matter-of-factly warm. Of course this light had guided her home.

  Of course this light belonged to Val.

  Which meant . . .

  Marion glanced left: Zoey’s black-and-orange curls, her bright brown eyes, her wide smile. She hooked her arm through Marion’s, pressed her forehead against Marion’s shoulder. She was laughing; her tears warmed Marion’s chilled skin.

  “Zoey,” Marion whispered, with a shaky smile.

  Val touched her cheek to Marion’s own. “Don’t leave us again,” she pleaded.

  And Marion looked up at Val, to show her unequivocally that this was no joke, no dream, that she had come home, and replied, “I’m not going anywhere.”