“It’s okay,” she said, steadying herself against the door, lowering him slowly to a sitting position. His bloodied hands slid off her shoulders and steadied himself against the ground.
“Room keeps tilting,” he murmured.
Rebecca felt fear—her oldest, truest friend—swooping down once more. “You’re okay. You’ll be okay.” She hadn’t meant that as an order. Unless maybe she did.
“I’m okay,” said Joel.
“You sound like you’re responding to a self-help tape.”
“That’s because you’re helping, ’Bec. You’re always helping.”
Of their own volition, his eyes flicked up the stairs toward the landing. That body, apparently, Rebecca would have to dispose of on her own.
“You, too, Joel,” she whispered, letting her tears trickle to nothing. “Okay.”
Not even sure what she was going to do, Rebecca blew out a breath, got steady on her feet, and moved toward the stairs. She could feel Joel watching, and Jess, too. For some reason, she felt grateful that Emilia was still talking, talking, talking. The sound of her voice somehow provided a sort of cover, or at least comforting background hum. She’d reached the foot of the steps, was telling herself to just keep going, head up and kneel beside the body of her last, best friend and hold her hand for a while, just in case there was still any vestige of Kaylene left to say good-bye to. Start to say good-bye to, somehow.
But Jess stopped her. As Rebecca had known, from the second she’d left Joel’s side, that Jess would.
“Hey, Rebecca. Do I look as tired as you?”
Rebecca didn’t want to stop moving. Even more, for reasons she couldn’t immediately fathom, she didn’t want to turn around. She heard the garage door close as Joel somehow dragged himself back out there to monitor and eventually extinguish the corpse-fire.
But this was Jess talking. What choice was there?
She turned. Jess’s eyelids had slid down over those icy-blue eyes, almost closed, almost crooked, like mispulled blinds. “You look even more tired,” Rebecca finally said.
“Then I look dead.”
Rebecca shook her head. “You look too tired to be dead.”
Briefly, she thought one of them might smile. Try to. They just stared at each other instead until Jess’s gaze drifted up the stairs. Her mouth turned down at the corners, and her throat jerked. Rebecca realized all over again how much she loved and was grateful to this woman. How much this woman had let herself love Rebecca, in spite of everything.
She was either going to say that or go over there and find the least painful way to exchange an embrace when Jess said, “Rebecca. You’ve got to go get Eddie.”
So many things she might have expected Jess to say, and that one most of all. And yet Rebecca hadn’t expected it. “What?” She glanced upstairs, saw Kaylene’s flowered tights, one purple shoe dangling off her toes over the edge of the stair. “Jess, just tell Trudi to—”
“Are you kidding?” Abruptly, Jess’s voice was all ice and edge. Or exhaustion and panic. All those things Jess kept frozen deep in the center of herself. “Sophie’s still out there.”
“Sophie’s not going to…” But even as she started, Rebecca shook her own head. Acknowledged her own inanity. What made her think she had any idea what Sophie might do? Sophie, whom’d they all just burned, stabbed, chained to a bed? Tried to murder. Again.
“Take the ax,” Jess continued. “Do you know how to use it?”
“Not well enough,” said Rebecca, watching herself move across the room, ease it away from Emilia.
“Then just … stay out of Sophie’s way. She’s hurt, I think.”
Rebecca nodded. “She’s pretty hurt.”
“For now. Maybe this is our chance. Our last one. Get Trudi back here. Get my daughter’s son. Please.”
At Jess’s feet, Benny stirred. “No,” he said. “Jess, that’s cra—”
“Okay,” Rebecca heard herself say.
“And if you get a chance,” Jess said. “If she really is hurt. If you find her, and you can do it … you have to finish this, Rebecca. For all of our sakes.”
Only at the front door did Rebecca turn. Ax in one hand, knife in the other, neither of which she felt confident she could use. “You realize Sophie saved us,” she said.
“She saved herself. Don’t be fooled. I sure as hell never will be again, I promise you that. And I care about you, and Eddie, and Trudi, and the memory of my daughter, and everyone else in this house too much to let any of you be fooled. It’s too dangerous. My daughter is dead, Rebecca. Your friends are dead. Your foster mom is dead. None of those are ever coming back. It’s enough. No more.”
Her voice had risen steadily, but now, with a visible effort, Jess controlled it. Partly, she did that by jerking her dangling arm against her ribs, which wrenched a gasp from her clamped lips. But the pain worked its dark magic. Suddenly, she was Jess again. Exhausted, heartbroken, full of love. “I adored that girl, Rebecca. Even when I hated what she and my daughter got up to together, I adored her. I will treasure her memory. But that thing isn’t her. And this has to stop. I will not let her do to anyone else what she has done to us. I’ll take care of her myself, if you won’t. I should have done it five years ago.”
“I’m going to try not to find her,” Rebecca said.
“Fine. That’s what I want. I want you to come home. But Rebecca. I want you to do that with our kids.”
Our. Kids.
After that, there were no more arguments to make. “Okay,” she said.
“I’m coming,” said Joel, staggering through the garage door with smoke from the extinguished fire billowing around him. He got two whole steps in her direction before slumping against the wall and staring at her with his head lolling and his eyes tearing.
Rebecca quieted him with a single glance. “Stay here. I’ve got this. Pops.” Her gaze left his and floated across the room toward Emilia. That person, she thought, can handle an ax.
At least, she could when she wasn’t sobbing into a phone. She was actually more whisper-singing, now, as though cooing a lullaby to a baby. Except she was the baby, newly reborn. And she was singing the song to her parents. Some sort of lilting, South American–sounding thing.
This wasn’t Emilia’s fight. And Emilia had been through enough.
“Well, don’t just stand there,” Jess said. “Get out there and bring our family home.”
Rebecca settled the ax against her hip and took two steps up toward the landing for a last look at her dead best friend. From where she stood now, she could just see Kaylene’s body. Not her face, which was turned down into the still-spreading pool of itself on the floorboards, but her hair spilling across the floor. One stripy-dressed arm flung wide.
Apparently, crying really was over for now. There were kids to rescue. People she loved to fight for. How astonishing, really, to find that she still had anyone left, after everyone the world had already taken. One could almost believe there always would be, if you allowed there to be.
“You know where you’re going?” Jess asked when Rebecca turned.
“Trudi said ‘cave,’ right?”
“Yeah.”
Rebecca shook her head. “The one place we never thought to look. How did we never think to look there, Jess?”
“We’re not five years old.”
“Or sock-puppet masters.”
“Or monsters,” Jess said.
“Rebecca, I still don’t think you should do this by your…” Joel started.
But she was already gone, slamming the front door shut behind her, shutting her family safely inside.
Overhead, the sky had sucked all the mist back into itself and unleashed the moon. It glowed all over everything, glossing the grass, the leaves of the trees, the very air. Was it even midnight yet? Rebecca wondered. Was this … just another Saturday? Was this a Saturday night?
Just another night, yielding yet another dead loved one to tell stories about someday or every day.
Another set of memories that would scream through her dreams for as long as she dreamed. Another something she’d somehow survived to share and mourn over with other survivors. The essence of living.
Even in the trees, moonlight permeated everything. It felt almost wet as Rebecca brushed through it. Owls swiveled silently in the branches above her, watching in her wake for night squirrels, moles, any little scurrying thing her passing might have jostled into the open.
Stay down, little things, she thought. If you can.
Hold on, Eddie.
Watch him, Trudi.
I’m coming.
27
How did that happen? Sophie wondered even as it did.
Partly, she supposed, she’d been distracted by the pain in her leg, which she’d remembered from the last go-round as searing almost beyond imagining, and which turned out to be worse. Knowing from experience that both she and the leg would survive did nothing to lessen the anguish.
Partly because of her wounded state and the distance from cliff top to cave mouth, she’d had to concentrate harder than usual to assert influence over Princess Sock Puppet down there, who’d proven a challenge to control even when they’d been face-to-face. How that girl would squirm.
Partly the Little Orphan That Could had gotten a little too good at going silent, making no sound and leaving no trace as she ghosted through everyone else’s world.
Mostly, though, Sophie had let herself get mesmerized just sitting here atop this cliff, watching Ju snare Eddie. The second that girl had looked up and spotted Sophie, she’d swayed to her feet and danced away from Sock Puppet’s side, gliding across those rocks bathed in moonlight, wreathed in sea spray. It was the joy in her movements—the dancing and swaying as much as the way Eddie fell into her gaze and went quiet—that drove home the revelation at last:
That girl is like me.
Ju is like me.
Rather than providing clarity, the discovery confused Sophie more. Ju was like her when? Before the Whistler? Or now?
Or both?
Whatever the cause, Sophie somehow neither saw nor heard Rebecca coming until the handle of the ax slammed straight into the small of her back, driving her half off her wounded leg and very nearly over the cliff before her face smashed into earth.
* * *
For Trudi, the moment was weirdly familiar, almost nostalgic. It reminded her of leaping up from behind banisters at Halfmoon House, right into the teeth of Amanda’s scowl or Danni’s taunts, and scurrying for her room.
One second, she’d been crouched on the rocks, unable to move or even think about moving, really. She’d been holding her breath, trying to render herself so small that both the green-eyed girl by her side and the Sophie thing up on the cliff might forget she was there. Relax their hold, or whatever the hell it was they were doing.
And the next—as Rebecca bludgeoned Sophie into the ground and Ju whirled to look—Trudi seemed to pop up behind her own eyes, lock back into place inside her skull and skin. Five feet away, twitching like a butterfly pinned to the air, Ju stared up at Rebecca, then over her shoulder toward Eddie, then back again. Eddie, too, had surfaced—Trudi had literally seen that happen—and now looked frantically toward Trudi.
Then Ju had him again, or else he saw her coming and ducked for cover. Certainly, he went still once more. Vanished into himself.
As Ju swept past, Trudi felt that gaze brush over her like the skirt of a fire. Sparking and dangerous, yes, but too cursory to catch her, this time. Instinctively, Trudi tensed to hurl herself at the girl, knock her over, rip out that red hair in clumps. Do something.
Do it now! she was screaming inside her own head. Drive her over the edge into the sea. Even if you have to go with her.
But she didn’t move. Somehow, faster than her consciousness could track, her brain was making calculations, chattering to itself. The math didn’t add up. Not yet. Sophie on her own was still way too much for Rebecca and Eddie. And even if Trudi survived the fall, somehow drowned Ju in the Strait and got free and crawled back onto land—assuming there was land to crawl onto down there—she’d never make it back up here in time.
What she did instead, as she watched Ju’s arms slide under Eddie’s shoulders, was the hardest, most desperate thing she’d ever done or even considered doing.
But she did it.
* * *
Swinging the ax had almost knocked Rebecca over, which would have been disastrous even if she’d somehow managed not to land on the blade, which she’d used as a handle, striking Sophie with the wooden part instead.
Why had she done that?
Somehow, scrambling, she stayed on her feet, got centered, leapt sideways to stand straddle-legged next to but not quite over Sophie with the ax flipped right side up, blade end this time.
Swing! she thought as her muscles tensed all on their own. Now, while she’s down. Last chance.
Sophie rolled over, stared up. There were tears in those wild-animal eyes. Pain tears, Rebecca understood even as she eluded Sophie’s gaze. The only kind the thing beneath her could or would ever cry, now.
Swing!
“So this is you, then?” Sophie said, her meaning clear, her tone so closely approximating a human one. Half knowing, half taunting.
And maybe sad? Wild-animal sad?
Oh God, swing.
“Rebecca the ax murderer,” Sophie continued. “Sophie-smasher, for the second time. Killer of the defenseless.”
Don’t answer, don’t look, don’t engage, Rebecca thought, even as she heard herself snort. “Defenseless.”
“Too much?” Sophie grinned. “Overplaying it, am I?”
Grinning. The thing was actually grinning.
That helped, watching it grin while thinking about Kaylene’s hair on the stair. Kaylene’s striped foot with her shoe dangling off it. A snap sounded in Rebecca’s ears. At first she didn’t recognize it, didn’t even realize it was a memory.
But it was. That was the sound of Danni’s back breaking over the Whistler’s knee in the Halfmoon Lake woods. Jack and Marlene already dead by then. Amanda about to be.
And still, Sophie kept talking. “Fine. How about this? Leaving aside the issue of whether I actually am defenseless—instead of just, let’s see, one-legged, effectively one-eyed for the moment, beat to hell by every implement in Jess’s fucking house, and seriously pissed—I’m just lying here. I’m not attacking you. I was actually running away from you. And yet you’re about to kill me. Again. So. I say again: Rebecca, meet yourself. Ax murderer. Killer.”
“I have no choice,” Rebecca snapped. Tears boiled from her own eyes. For Kaylene, Amanda, Jack, Marlene. For Jess’s daughter, Natalie, whom Rebecca had never met, and Jess, who wasn’t even dead but would rather have been. For Danni, who had barely even gotten to live. For her parents, who’d had nothing to do with this, and who’d been gone twenty years now. Did she really still have tears left for them?
Propping up on her elbows, Sophie dropped the grin. “Here’s the one thing today’s events make definitively clear: that’s you. But it isn’t me.”
A whirl of thoughts almost swept Rebecca off her feet and over the cliff. This one had more memories in it, thousands of them, plus lightning flashes of feeling, bursts of confusion. The ax handle seemed to thicken in her fists, gain mass, and she nearly dropped it. But she didn’t. She held still until her head cleared to the extent that it ever did or would.
“Maybe so,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
Sophie stayed on her elbows, trying to catch Rebecca’s gaze. Or maybe just looking. “Not as sorry as I’m about to be, apparently.”
She really did seem sorry, or sound that way. Possibly, she had just understood what Rebecca had already realized. Had known all along: Rebecca really was going to do it.
“I’m sorry. Sophie.”
Flinging the ax overhead, closing her eyes but then forcing them open, Rebecca coiled her whole body into the swing. The ax had just reached its apex when a new voic
e trilled up from below and stopped her.
“Hello?” it said. “Yoo-hoo.”
Ax still raised and trembling, Rebecca edged one step closer to the cliff and looked.
On the ledge near the cave mouth down there, arms locked as rigidly to her sides as if she’d been chained, Trudi knelt, staring straight out over the water at nothing. Five steps to her right, a wispy, red-haired, green-eyed girl Rebecca had never seen stood right at the edge of the rocks, dangling a motionless Eddie by his elbows over empty air, the black and roiling sea below.
“Hi,” the girl said. “I’m Ju.”
* * *
Not for one second, as Rebecca rolled into her swing, did Sophie consider closing her eyes. The last time her own death had come flying at her face, she’d been too distracted to process or enjoy it. She’d had the Whistler’s brains in her teeth and his crazy keening in her ears.
This time, she wanted to see what it looked and sounded like.
Which turned out to be the starry night sky, wind in grass, and a song surfacing pointlessly in her ears. Some old Natalie fave, nothing Sophie had really loved except when Natalie sang it. “Take Me to the River.” How like herself, really, not even to hear her own music at the end.
She was mouthing words, gulping wind, swallowing the sky for a good few seconds before she realized she was scared. For real. And that the blow hadn’t fallen.
A voice—not Rebecca’s, not Natalie’s, not her own—repeated itself on the breeze.
“Hello?”
Slowly—painfully—Sophie pushed to a sitting position. Rebecca was looking over the cliff. Her killing mask had slipped. The Little Orphan That Could and Did suddenly looked dangerously orphanish again.
Dangerous for the Little Orphan, that is.
Swiveling carefully so as not to remind Rebecca that Sophie was there, she took in the tableau: Princess Sock Puppet on her knees, looking either dazed or hypnotized; Ju with her red hair dark and rippling as a bloodstream; and Natalie’s boy—Eddie—in Ju’s arms, dangling motionless over the ocean.
“Hi, Ju,” she called, before she was sure she had anything to say. “Maybe you should—”
Nothing to Devour Page 23
