Strike.
Then they were all flying. Rebecca and the Night Sky mashed themselves together like some brand-new, two-headed bird whose wings beat only itself. The rest of them hurled themselves into and over each other in a heap of rakes and arms and knives and teeth and screamed names and shrieks of pain.
Sophie considered staying, if only for the entertainment. She also mulled floating down the stairs and helping.
But helping whom? And to do what?
And after all, she’d helped already. She’d driven both the Night Sky and Rebecca off their feet and leveled the playing field to the extent it could be leveled.
Also, thanks to Rebecca, her goddamn legs throbbed with pain and barely functioned. Her burned eye kept tearing up and was possibly bleeding; everything she saw through it looked haloed in red haze like figures in an Impressionist sunset painting.
The kind of painting Sophies would paint if they painted. Maybe they would someday, she thought, and grinned.
While the battle raged—while wails and screams erupted and got snuffed out, while blood spurted and sharp things whistled—she floated downstairs and through and past them all. Really floated, it seemed, barely touching feet to carpet so as not to jar her poor thighs. Like the Ferry Godmother I am, she thought. Or Fairy Godmother. Like a real goddamn Fairy Godmother. So real, they can’t even see me.
At the front door, she paused and glanced back. It was almost beautiful, this writhing, howling haze she’d made.
Then she slipped into the dark and limped away, fast, toward the sea cave.
24
Jess was startled by the speed of her reaction. Apparently, all she’d really done these past five years was wait. Everything else—opening her shop in the mornings and lingering at the window to wait for the sun, creating the Stockade, weaving cocoons of near-normalcy around Eddie, Rebecca, Kaylene, Trudi, and even Joel, settling into a sort of playacting marriage with Benny so threaded with actual feeling that even she sometimes mistook it for real—felt dreamed, now. All this time she’d believed she was moving on, grieving, recovering. But in reality, she’d just laid herself flat in the blue rye grass like a rusted trap. She’d thought she was still Jess, but was really only springs and teeth.
Even as she swept knives into her hands and leapt at the thing swarming over Rebecca at the base of the steps, Jess marveled at her own readiness, which in truth was closer to outright enthusiasm.
In truth, she couldn’t wait to fight.
And die.
Yes. That, too.
Midair, knives plunging down, she realized that she’d been leaning over this particular abyss since the moment she’d stared, for the last time, into her daughter’s living eyes. The moment Natalie murmured “Mom” through her tears, by which she’d meant yes, and given Jess permission to pull the trigger.
Commanded her to, really.
The monster’s arms swallowed her. They were horribly cold, slick, so much stronger than seemed possible, the constriction instantaneous even as Jess stabbed, the crack of bones audible even over the screaming around her. Somehow, with her vertebrae bulging and her shoulders popping free of their joints, Jess got at least one knife raised again, not enough to plunge, just enough to shove it deeper into one of the holes she’d made in the monster’s ribs.
That was the moment Jess understood how useless this fight was.
The creature who’d come for them in Virginia and killed Sophie’s Roo … the Whistler in the woods … those had been monsters, sure enough. But this thing was a rogue wave. A gale tearing back and forth across the Earth forever, sweeping away everything it touched.
As consciousness flickered, as Benny flailed uselessly into the fray to try to free Rebecca and Joel lunged in with his rake, Jess experienced one last surprising surge of feeling. Not fury, not hope—obviously—not even sadness.
No. More than anything else, she was disappointed. In herself. As it turned out, she’d made the coward’s choice after all: she’d chosen fighting and dying. And she’d done that precisely because fighting and dying were so much easier than staying. Grieving. Loving. Functioning.
Parenting.
* * *
It took the sting of yet another knife in her back to awaken Aunt Sally to revelation. As it seized her, she almost burst out laughing, half considered holding up a hand and telling the Little Fighter on the floor and the dervish with the knives to hold up just a second, just so Sally could properly appreciate the experience. Feel the wonder.
She’d never actually been in a fight!
Was that true? How could that be true?
But it was, and she knew it. Burning the rest of her monsters alive … that had been a cleansing, an act of volition and participation in her own fate.
Hardly a fight, though.
If she were honest, she’d hadn’t even done much killing, all things considered. Given her hungers and the length of her life and all. She’d had Caribou and her monsters to bring her edibles. Platters of flesh and beautiful bones. In the wandering days before Caribou or Mother, before her monsters … she’d killed then, of course, and often. But nothing she’d killed had so much as raised its voice, let alone a fist. They’d simply bowed and snapped before her like grass.
She’d been so, so many things: life-ender and then both life-giver and life-ender to her monsters; sister to Mother, who’d abandoned her in the end and died alone; lover, sometimes, though without any particular partner or any actual love; creator of a whole riverside world in the Delta where her creations hunted and danced; inventor of Policy; judge of all who came before her; avenger; God.
Victim. Yes. Hard as it was to remember, now, she had most certainly been that.
Devourer of everything.
Destroyer.
And now … bereft of monsters, and having murdered Caribou for the second—no, third—time, if one counted the night she’d created him … and with these gnat-people flying everywhere around her and wielding knives, so consumed by whatever drove them that they didn’t have the sense to curl up and yield to the inevitable … with all the Earth and whatever meager bounties it offered spread before her … Aunt Sally discovered, to her amazement, that she still had sensations to discover.
The complete absence of Hunger, for one thing. In all the years she’d lived—in either of her lives—she couldn’t remember ever feeling less hungry than she did right now.
And something else. Something even more primal and harder to name. She hadn’t come to this house planning to do damage, certainly not to kill.
She’d come to find Ju. A totally different sort of hunting.
Was Ju the reason for the absence of Hunger, too?
For one moment, realizing that, Aunt Sally went still while the dervish-woman poked her in the back with her knife a few more times.
Ju. The one creature alive that Sally would never devour or allow to be devoured. The one creature she’d ever met who was actually worth savoring instead. Pale Ju of the witchy eyes. A person to savor and save. No one and nothing to devour or allow to be devoured.
Which made Aunt Sally … a mom?
With a single convulsion of her arms, Aunt Sally dislocated both of the dervish’s shoulders and flung her aside, flashed out a hand and caught the neck of the man with the rake and ripped a hole in his throat.
Her first fight!
As she dropped down on the Little Fighter, simultaneously catching the flailing little hairy man in both hands and snapping one of his arms as though harvesting corn, she wondered if she’d be any good.
* * *
Yet again, Rebecca thought as that horrible weight drove her seemingly straight through the floor and the hatred radiating off this new and even more terrible monster flooded her nostrils and mouth. I am reduced to watching. Story of my life.
Mercifully, she supposed, her head still hadn’t cleared from the plummet down the stairs. Stars whirled in her eyes, so that the flying faces of people she lived with and loved seemed to wink in
her own firmament. Comets arcing past and away. Joel hanging frozen with his rake in his hands like a constellation in the instant before the monster hurled him across the room. Benny’s white whiskers seeming to fly off him as he tumbled backward and collapsed into himself. Benny-supernova.
From somewhere far away—on the other side of the sky, of the cavernous thing engulfing her—Rebecca heard a pop, then a scream. She couldn’t make sense of either until Jess staggered back into the periphery of her vision, one arm dead at her side. The other, which she must have yanked back into its socket somehow, raised the butcher knife. One last time, Rebecca watched Jess’s face appear over the monster’s back like a moon. Bright and savage moon. Jess-rise.
The knife slashed down. Rebecca forced herself into motion, did some flailing for form’s sake. For Jess’s sake, really, because Jess had to see the knife was doing no good, that nothing anymore could do any good, and yet she kept driving the blade up and in, up and in, her mouth twisted and eyes screwed to slits. Remote as she could be, Jess was no moon, never had been. She was a pumping piston of fury and grief, desperation and love.
My favorite person, Rebecca thought as the monster gashed her sides, as blood bubbled out of her ribs. Person I most wished I could have been and least wanted to be.
We are such ridiculous, tangled, strangling things.
She watched Jess’s knife pump, pass uselessly through, as though Jess were stabbing water. One last time—for Jess, and also Trudi, wherever she was, and for Eddie, Amanda and Danni, Marlene and Jack, Kaylene and yes, fucking goddamnit, for herself—Rebecca fought free of her thoughts. She actually felt herself rise from her own roiling insides. I am the Lady in the Lake, she thought, fists rising to do who even knew what, eyes closing because what use was seeing, now? Also Excalibur. Lady of Halfmoon Lake, with the world cascading through her.
She opened her eyes just in time to see it happen.
Directly overhead, above Jess’s stabbing arm, the newcomer appeared. Emilia. Rebecca had forgotten she was even in the house. And she couldn’t even begin to imagine where Emilia had found the ax.
A song popped into Rebecca’s head. More accurately, a song title, stuttered out in that crazy Internet-ghost voice, the one from Joel’s favorite-ever show. The voice that had turned out to be ghost, the stitched-together ramblings of Jess’s dead daughter. “Be Care-Care-Careful … with THAT Ax … Eugene.”
In a concussed daze, but with her senses returning and her vision clearing, Rebecca watched Emilia’s dark hair flying as she swung the ax high. She moved like she didn’t need to be careful, had used an ax before. Right at the apex of the swing, Rebecca caught a glimpse of her wide-open eyes, which looked drained of color, a fainter black than they should have been, than they always must have been. Drained of Emilia, maybe. Filled, instead, with the murmurings of the monster that had come for her. Her Invisible Man.
Only then did Rebecca wonder whom, exactly, Emilia planned to kill.
25
That fairy godmother feeling carried Sophie all the way to the trees. Her feet barely touched grass; the film of tears and burnt eyelash through which she peered hazed the moonlight, fashioning a gossamer bubble around her. For those few moments—for maybe the first time in her entire life, or lives—Sophie felt magical: a gliding, glowing thing that winked in and out of being, grazing lips with kisses, breaking hearts. Tearing open a throat or two when she had to before vanishing again.
Then—as though her body were a magic carpet she’d been riding, but the magic had gone—gravity yanked her Earthward, and she dropped back into herself with a thud. Her left leg spasmed again along the old suture scar at the top of her thigh. She had to grab it as she tumbled over, crimping the skin like the rim of a piecrust. A wet crust at that, with all the inside Sophie-filling sloshing around and seeping through. At least it wasn’t pumping, that would have been a disaster. Her foot swung too far sideways, as though fleeing her, and she had to yank as she fell, hold her leg to her leg and topple into the leaves and shadows just to stay whole.
Get back here, foot.
More pain. Lots of it, on both sides of her ripped-open wound. Pain was good, right? A sign that her nerve ends and tendons were still talking to each other, even if they were no longer touching. Again.
Goddamn Jess and Rebecca both. What was left of them. Which probably wasn’t much, by now.
Was Sophie sad? Did she have any fucking reason to be sad?
Pushing to a sitting position, she dragged her leg straight and stared down into it. What fascinating insides you have, Soph, she thought. A white pillar of bone among the rubble of muscle and tangly reddish bits, like the last standing column from a tipped-over temple. As she watched, her tendons stirred, stretched toward one another. They reminded Sophie of the figures in those paintings of Dante’s hell, forever reaching out of the canvas toward the world they’d left.
The same way I keep reaching out for Jess’s trailer, Sophie thought. Except unlike the dudes in those paintings, Sophie had never actually lived in Jess’s trailer. Had only kind of been welcomed there, and the worst part was, that had felt so good, at the time. What a sniveling, stupid-grateful little girl she’d been. Oh, how lucky I am to be given leave to visit your double-wide Paradise, Jess and Natalie. Sometimes I can even sleep over! Just as long as I understand that in the end, I belong elsewhere.
The only time she’d actually lived in Jess’s house was in that creepy attic in New Hampshire in the weeks before the Whistler came, after Natalie was already dead. And the worst part was, she’d let herself feel grateful for that, too. At times, she’d almost loved that attic. Mostly, she’d loved being left alone in Jess’s house, in her own room with the door closed.
Almost like a real daughter.
Whose daughter was she now? Not her dead, drugged mother’s. Not Jess’s. And certainly not that thing’s. God help that thing’s daughter.
But … what a thing! Not just a monster like the Whistler and his horrible Mother but something more. On her fingers—to distract herself from staring into her yawning thigh—Sophie started counting personifications of Death she’d seen in books and art: the sickle guy in that movie who sucked at chess; the gothy girl in that graphic novel who’d reminded her a little of Natalie, though Sophie would never have dared say that to Natalie; some wanker on a pale horse, unless in that one Death was the horse.
Amateurs. All of them.
But if I live long enough, Sophie thought. If I work hard enough at becoming … me … could I become that?
The thrill she felt then flashed so hard, it left phosphenes streaking in her eyes. Not once, ever, in her whole life, had Sophie had real power. Not over school, which she’d sucked at. Not over her home, because she was never sure where that was. Not over her junkie mother, or her brilliant best friend, or her best friend’s mother. Not even over her own son while she’d had him, because who was she to mother anyone?
Until this exact second, she’d simply accepted all that. She’d believed it all the way down to her bones. She was Smiling Sophie, born to lose, and she always would be.
Unless she was finally becoming—had always been becoming—something else. Until tonight, she hadn’t even known there were more monsters out there, more creatures like the Whistler, like her. But now that she thought about it, that was ridiculous. There had to be.
The last two times she’d met other monsters, she’d … well … Won wasn’t quite the word. She’d devoured the Whistler. She’d driven the Night Sky down the stairs and given Jess and the remains of her pitiful Jess-crew a chance. Okay, not a chance exactly, that was ridiculous. But she’d gifted them a few more seconds to be themselves, and the luxury of ending their lives fighting, imagining they were still the people they’d always been.
Sophie had given them that. Not that they would thank her for it, even in the unlikely event that they got the chance.
But somehow, until tonight, Sophie had still imagined herself more like them. And that was sim
ply another version of the same stupid, self-negating notion she’d clung to her whole life. Right now, the idea that she was like Jess or Rebecca or Natalie seemed the most ridiculous and harmful misconception of all.
Digging her fingers hard into the ground, she began dragging forward yet again through yet another woods. This time proved more painful than the last, at least physically, because she had her legs with her instead of laid out neatly in Jess’s car, which meant they could let her know in a thousand different ways how much they weren’t enjoying themselves.
Even so, this movement—the clutch-and-drag, the monkey-like swinging except across forest floor rather than through branches—came back so fast, and so easily. Like riding a bike, or returning to an earlier, more natural version of herself. NeanderSophie. SlothSophie, only fast. So fast. So much faster than she’d been that night with Jess in Concerto Woods, where they’d buried her best friend and her son.
George William. Little Roo.
It was his absence, she realized now, that haunted her every single waking second and most dreaming ones. Somehow, from habit or as a protective measure, she’d convinced herself it was Natalie’s. How could she ever have thought that? Certainly, if their roles had been reversed—as, in some pathetic way, Sophie had always secretly believed they should have been—and Sophie had wound up in the ground holding Natalie’s son, and Natalie had been left out here to roam, Natalie would never have spared her a thought. Would have thought only of Eddie.
That would only have been right. Yet Sophie had practically resurrected Natalie. Cut her voice out of mounds of cassette tape and freed it to babble forever in the ether. Convinced herself Natalie would have done the same. She’d let herself imagine, again, that people she herself assumed were smarter, classier, had better musical taste, more style, more knowledge, more soul, more humanity than she did, would have use for a Sophie. Or love.
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