The woman shrieked, as Rebecca had feared and expected. She tried just once to yank her arm free, stopped, and stared down at her own skin. It wasn’t steaming or even reddening except where Rebecca clutched it. Not even around the puncture marks dotting the crook of the elbow, which Rebecca had not expected. They gaped, crusty and unscabbed, weirdly wet. Less like track marks than open mouths.
Silently, softly, the woman started to weep.
“I’m sorry,” Rebecca murmured, still holding the woman’s arm but gently, now. She’d been all geared up for an unmasking, a confrontation. Now she felt like she was stroking a dying cat, which was an absurd and incoherent association on all counts. Nothing about this woman was catlike, in either the cuddly or menacing sense. She wasn’t dying. And she clearly wasn’t burning in discomfort where the sun kissed her, either.
Not much, anyway. Not the way the monsters seemed to.
More than anything, the woman seemed embarrassed or ashamed. She also looked less afraid than Rebecca would have been under the same circumstances. Whatever those were. What circumstances are we all imagining we’ve got, here? Assuming Joel and I are even right about that woman … how had she even found this place? And why would she have bothered?
“I really am sorry,” she said again. “We’re all just … What’s your name?” She released the woman’s arm.
Instantly, the newcomer’s hand leapt to the sleeve of her shirt, but she didn’t tug it down. She’d slid forward in her chair, staring down at—or into—the holes in her elbow. Softly, then with increasing force, she pressed her fingers into the blue veins around the holes until little bubbles of blood surfaced in those open mouths.
The sight was as mesmerizing and also just plain wrong as anything Rebecca had ever seen. She felt as though she were watching film of a mother bird feeding chicks, except backward. So that the mother was extracting.
“Stop,” Rebecca snapped, grabbing for the woman’s wrist again to make her.
“Emilia,” the woman whispered. She was no longer crying. She pressed down harder, squeezing more blood out of herself. “My name is Emilia.” She sounded like she was reminding herself.
All Rebecca knew for certain was that she wanted to yank Emilia out of her chair and fold her into an embrace. Simultaneously, she wanted to recoil as far from her as she could get. She waited for her vaunted intuition to tell her what to do, and in its absence settled for a pathetic half-measure and echoed the woman’s name. Reinforced it.
“Emilia,” she said, and felt more than saw Jess start to move behind her. Rebecca stood up in her path.
Jess barely even hitched her step, just altered course to flow around Rebecca again. Rebecca blocked her. The question no one seemed to be asking leapt to Rebecca’s lips. She almost didn’t voice it, precisely because no one else had. The possibilities it suggested seemed too terrible even for this appalling morning. But someone had to say it.
“Jess. Where’s Trudi?”
At least Jess stopped moving. But she wouldn’t meet Rebecca’s eyes, and all she offered was a shake of her head.
“You don’t know? Are you kidding? You’re just leaving her and Eddie out—”
“She’s fine. He’s fine.”
“What? When did—”
“We … got a note.”
“What? From her?”
“Also, I texted. She practically texted back before I hit Send.” Finally, Jess glanced up. To Rebecca’s astonishment, she was almost smiling.
Reflexively, Rebecca smiled back. Almost. “Of course she did. That’s how Trudi rolls. She’s got Eddie? She found him?”
“She found him. I didn’t ask how. I didn’t ask where. I didn’t even know she’d left her room.”
“Well, I’m asking where. How the hell did—”
“No idea. But I told her to stay away. To keep Eddie hidden and away until we say it’s okay to come back.”
“What did she say to that?”
“A lot of ds.”
Jess’s smile had long since drained away. No longer meeting Rebecca’s eyes, she started again toward the tackle box full of screws and nails at the edge of the counter.
“Ds,” Rebecca murmured.
“Fuck if I know.”
Harder than she meant to—and she meant to do it hard—Rebecca grabbed Jess by the shoulders and spun her around. For a second, the two of them swayed in place and clutched each other, as though clinging to the sides of a collapsing rope bridge. It really did seem as if the whole Stockade were swinging beneath them, giving way as everyone here scrambled or leapt for their lives. Except Emilia. She was still staring down at the holes in her arm as though into the abyss.
“Jess,” Rebecca said, and at long last, there it was again. A flicker of her old calm and clarity. Where have you been, Rebecca-I-used-to-be? I need you now. Come home …
“Rebecca, let go. They could be here any second. We’ve got to—”
“What? We’ve got to what, Jess?” She didn’t release her grip but loosened it. Turned it into an awkward caress. “What, exactly, do you think you need to do? Or can do?”
With a ferocious shiver, Jess shook off Rebecca’s hands. She’d come back to herself, too, Rebecca noted. Or at least part of her had. Her gaze was her steely one, the fighting mask so familiar, now, one could almost have mistaken it for her face.
Unless one knew her better, the way Rebecca did.
“What do you think I’m doing? Jesus Christ, Rebecca. Why aren’t you helping? Get a knife. Get a wrench. Get a fucking bobby pin and do something.”
“I am. I’m holding up a mirror.”
Just like that, Jess went still, clamped her mouth around the words she’d been about to spit and stared. It was possible, Rebecca thought, that Jess was going to punch her.
Instead, she said, “Okay.”
“What do you see?”
The sound that burst out of Jess’s mouth could have been a sob, a laugh, or a strangled shriek. Whatever it was, there was only one of it. For that instant, only, Rebecca thought Jess might implode, crumble to dust. But all she said was, “I see a woman born for this.”
“For killing? Jess, you are so not—”
“For grieving. For missing. Rebecca, I miss her so much. Every second I am alive, whether I’m asleep or awake, it makes no difference. I am an organ for missing.”
“With a hammer in your hand.”
“I’m not the idiot who invited them in,” Jess snarled. At Natalie, Rebecca knew. Through grief so all-encompassing, it could only express itself as fury. “But they’re not staying this time. And they’re not taking one thing more from anyone else I love. Ever.”
“We don’t even know it’s a they, Jess. And we have no idea what they want.”
“I’m pretty sure I know what they want,” Jess snapped, so hard that her mask slipped, allowing a glimpse of the face underneath. The same one Rebecca had first seen hunched over her daughter’s photograph in the perpetual gloom of the burned-out house in East Dunham, or stirring spaghetti at the stove to take up to her broken lover. Or turning in doorways to reach out, abruptly, and stroke Rebecca’s cheek. Gather one more lost girl to her because she just couldn’t help it.
Stamping her foot, Jess shook her head again. “What do you think they want?”
You trust me, too, Rebecca thought, through no tears. They both wore their masks so well now.
“I have no idea,” she said softly.
“Right. There you go.”
“How would I? Or you, either. But Jess, there’s one thing I do know: we can’t fight them.”
“We did last time.”
“We had help,” Rebecca murmured, and then she blinked, couldn’t help it, and there Sophie was, as always, right on the undersides of her eyelids, her mouth bloody and blooming and her eyes not quite wild enough, staring up at Rebecca as Rebecca slammed the shovel down.
Jess was neither smiling nor glaring, now. Just standing there saying nothing, because there was nothing
to say.
Except I love you. So Rebecca said that.
Jess nodded, grabbed a fistful of nails and another two-by-four, and returned to the sliding glass door. At the table, Emilia looked away from her own arm long enough to watch. Even Kaylene glanced up from the work she was doing on her bat. Sick and sad, helpless and small, Rebecca turned away toward the hall. So she was the only one who saw Sophie dance out of the shadows near Joel’s bedroom door, throw her arms wide, and grin.
That grin.
“So, I was in the neighborhood,” Sophie started.
Never in her life had Rebecca moved so fast, and even as she snatched out her hand and grabbed the nearest saucepan, she knew it shouldn’t have been fast enough. That she was a hypocrite and a knee-jerk fighter just like Jess, after all. Also a scared little girl.
But not an orphan, anymore.
Then the oil was flying and Sophie was screaming and crumpling, her hands clawing at her face as the residents of the Stockade whirled and swarmed her.
19
Swerving and stumbling, cursing and laughing, Aunt Sally swept through the woods, wild as a wind off her beloved, far-off Gulf. Branches, leaves, and the shadows of branches and leaves leapt from her path. She kept trying to straighten as she plunged ahead, but she couldn’t get her spine around the goddamn knife Caribou had stuck in her, and she couldn’t reach it, either, so she gave up trying and hurtled onward. Like a harpooned marlin, she thought, the very air foaming in a wake around her, her skin glistening against the gloom. Running not to get away—since she’d already ripped her harpooner overboard and out of his life—but just to run.
Poor, sweet ’Bou. How well she’d chosen, all those decades ago, on the night she’d somehow singled him out and elevated him out of his ordinary, servile life into living. At least, to the extent that she’d actually made that choice, because she hadn’t planned to do anything other than feed, really. But somehow, blood, fate, perhaps even Policy had chosen for her. Matched him to her.
Policy. At the beginning, that had just seemed a game she’d dreamed up, a method for attaching numbers to dreams, thereby randomizing decisions she saw no need to make consciously. Eventually, to her monsters, it had become almost a religion, and even Sally herself had had fun trying to decide whether she was more High Priestess or Living God. At the very end, during her last years in camp, Policy had sometimes even felt like religion to her. A system for being, if not a reason. In all her years of living and preying, she’d never before had either.
If Policy had chosen Caribou for her, it had done so superbly. He had served her for decades. He had helped her keep their monsters safe. He had mapped out a whole new Monster Landscape to lay over the existing maps of the disappearing Delta, giving their evolving world form and landmarks and names. Every now and then, for rare, fleeting, and spectacular seconds, he had fucked her into forgetting (though exactly what she forgot in those seconds, she could never have said. Any more than any other living thing could, she supposed).
Finally, he had brought her Ju. Today, as his last gift, he’d told her who Ju was. In so doing, he’d tripped a lever not even Aunt Sally had imagined was there, dropped a gate she’d long since forgotten had contained her, and set her free.
Unleashed her.
Hello, world, she thought, throwing her arms wide, catching spots of sunlight on her wrists and ignoring the sizzling sensations. Loving the sizzling sensations. Thank you, ’Bou. I’ll never forget you.
Nor, apparently, would she jettison his taste anytime soon. No matter how many times she spat, it stuck to her gums and furred her tongue: rancid blood; fetal, half-formed skin-graft skin; bandage thread; and antiseptic.
Still. Having Caribou-residue in her mouth seemed a small price to pay in exchange for his final, magnificent offering. That last revelation, unveiled in that elegant, cultured voice he’d cultivated, or invented, because what culture had he ever known or been part of? Half closing her eyes as she rushed on, she called up his voice again. Listened to him tell her what he’d learned.
Ju is ours … Something brand-new in the world …
Brand-new in the world.
Her Ju. The truth was, Sally had known it, instinctively, right from that initial glimpse of the girl in the backseat of the Le Sabre as Caribou delivered her to camp. Certainly, she’d known by the time she settled the girl on her lap and fell into those winking, bottomless green eyes for the first time.
Yes. She’d sensed it all then. She just hadn’t let herself believe or even imagine it.
Now Caribou had confirmed it. His final sacrifice, and his most profound thank-you for the bonus life she’d bestowed upon him. She hoped he’d considered it worth it as she’d sucked him through his imitation skin and into her.
She was sure he had.
Approaching the edge of the forest, beyond which daylight raged like a brushfire at the lip of a break, Sally forgot the knife, somehow drew herself all the way straight, and let out a bellow that set squirrels screaming and birds flapping and fleeing their nests all around her. The tip of the blade jabbed at the back of her throat with every lunging step, burying itself deeper in or through her spine. Like Excalibur, she thought, denying the instinct to slow or wait and instead accelerating toward the light. Excalibur, lodged in the Lake of Aunt Sally, to be withdrawn only by the new, true Queen of the World.
With a scream like none she’d ever uttered or caused, and with Caribou’s revelation pumping down her veins, so fierce, so loud—like a goddamn heartbeat—Aunt Sally erupted from the woods into the sun.
Her plan was to race straight into the open and along the top of the cliff, defying the daylight, and continue racing all the way back to the abandoned barracks where she and Ju had set up camp. In her current mood, fueled by what she knew, Aunt Sally believed she could have withstood even a full-Delta summer sun, and this limp, mist-wreathed thing was a pale approximation of that, about as much true sun as Caribou’s burned and scabbed-over face had been the one she’d remembered. Compared to the jabbing and scraping between her shoulders and at the top of her lungs, the pain from this light barely even registered.
At least, that’s how it felt for the first hundred steps. Sometime in the second hundred, though, she caught herself glancing down at her forearms, checking for bubbling, liquefaction. She found none, of course. She knew the sun’s actual effects on her were sensory only, and possibly not even physical at all but entirely psychological. A warmth from back when it was possible to be warm; an array of colors from when her eyes could hold and process color, triggering memories of remembering, of clutching at moments as they thundered past. Yet that feeling of burning always proved virtually impossible to fight or ignore. Even on this mist-shrouded island, during this cloudless day that remained the color of drizzle. Even shielded and swept aloft by the marvels of this morning.
With a snarl of frustration, Aunt Sally staggered to a stop, tried to straighten again but felt the knife grind deeper into the notches in her bones. Sun spattered over her like sparks from a fire. Far ahead—too far—she saw the grassland. She’d have to get all the way there, then down the other side to reach the barracks and Ju, who didn’t know yet just how miraculous she actually was.
Aunt Sally could make it if she willed it. She could do anything, after all. She was the mother of monsters, bestower of Policy, dreamgiver. Lifetaker and lifemaker.
But she’d be a shuddering, weeping, staggering wreck by the time she got there.
Except she wouldn’t. The moment mattered too much, demanded the pomp and gravity only she could bestow.
Like a coronation. Because that’s what it was.
Throwing back her head, Aunt Sally let out one more savage scream. Of frustration, yes. Of hunger. But most of all, of unimagined, unbounded, limitless freedom.
Then she stumbled forward again, accelerating into a trot, then a sort of ducking, loping gallop. Here I come. To say hello. To touch the face of my reward, my most exquisite gift. To introduce you to
you.
By the time she reached the top of the rise and started down toward the barracks, she was flat-out running, shouting Ju’s name.
20
In the cave, while Eddie splashed in the not-so-shallows at the edge of the rocks and Ju lingered in the shadows along the wall, Trudi kept reaching into her pocket and checking her phone. She didn’t need to look at it to know there weren’t new messages; she’d become as attuned to those vibrations as the twitching of her own muscles. The gesture was more reflexive, conversational, the equivalent of her Bellingham Harbor friend Eliana pursing her lips and blowing her forever-damp hair out of her eyes.
After the first few times, she even stopped pulling up that last text from Jess just to make sure she’d read it right. She had, she knew. And it was definitely Jess who’d sent it, because everyone else with Trudi’s number actually understood how to use a cell phone, and why not to disable autocorrect.
StaywhereyOu are wher e ver yo are don’t come back illsay when stay eddiehiden hide
The fuck, Jess?
On the back of her neck, Trudi could feel Ju’s gaze lingering. Meanwhile, in the not-so-shallows, Eddie kicked up spray and chattered to his hands or whatever he had in his hands. Shells and stones. Trudi knew those conversations too well and respected them too much to interrupt.
She also knew, somehow, that she wasn’t supposed to text Jess back. She was supposed to stay right here—whereyOu are—and wait. She’d feel the vibrations signaling whatever she was meant to do next when they came.
What the actual fuck, Jess?
Then vibrations did come, and she fumbled the phone out of her pants so fast that she almost spilled it into the Strait.
The texter wasn’t Jess, though, but Raj, doing his signature Frog Prince backward-text babbling, today.
Langing hoose. In hy mouse. Quinking thietly. Trere, oh Trere, is Whudi?
Nothing to Devour Page 17
