Chapter 39 #2
Hands thrust from the back seat, hooked fingers digging into Malcolm’s face and throat.
Violet did not scream—she blanched white and reached over Benjy, trying to pry those fingers away from Malcolm, speaking the word no over and over as if something had broken inside her.
Behind Malcolm, Maggie hissed as she wrestled herself free of the canvas-and-rubber shroud.
She lunged over the seat. Yellow spittle and pink blood frothed from the tight line of her lips.
He felt malice radiating from her, an aura of malignance that unstitched the fabric of his adulthood, filled him with the certainty that all his childhood fears were real, reaching for him, crawling on his skin.
Malcolm gripped his mother’s hair. She ripped free, a fistful in his hand, slithered farther over the seat, racked his head to one side and thrust her mouth at his throat.
His mother. Maggie. Who’d done her best. Who’d trusted him.
Her lips spattered on his skin, and he felt something rough drag against his throat.
She shrieked in frustration, voice muffled.
Thread.
Paxon Keates had sewn her lips shut.
Her fingers clawed furrows in his neck. Drew blood from his cheek.
Violet fought her. Malcolm shoved his mother’s head into the window beside him.
A small titter of laughter came from Benjy.
Malcolm caught Jennie’s reflection in the rearview—wide-eyed, mouth parted, shaking her head, terror overwhelming all that she’d learned.
“Christ, Jennie, help us!” Violet cried as she finally reached for the glove box. With one hand, she tugged it open, rooting around for the stolen gun. The detective’s pistol had fallen to the floor at Malcolm’s feet, but he couldn’t have reached for it now.
Jennie inhaled sharply, blinking, and spoke softly. “Momma.”
She tackled Maggie. They crashed against the rear driver’s-side door. Violet scrambled on top of Benjy, trying to get back there to help. She lifted the gun, tried to get a bead on Maggie.
Neck and face bleeding, Malcolm popped his door open and fell onto the snowy road. He scrambled to his feet in a fog of the Frazer’s exhaust fumes and hauled the rear door open, thinking they would fall out.
They did not.
Maggie slammed Jennie against the inside of the rear windshield, which spider-webbed with hundreds of cracks.
Malcolm reached into the car and grabbed Maggie by the hair again.
She whipped her head back and forth, but he reached in, got his right arm around her throat, and dragged her onto the road.
Jennie spilled out after her.
The two of them fought their mother in the falling snow.
They’d put her in a beautiful yellow dress for burial.
She might have been a ghost seen through curtains of night and snowfall, except that her eyes gleamed in the dark like twin cigarette tips that reminded Malcolm of the raven standing beneath the willow, waiting for her to die.
She should have been dead.
Not one of these things.
How had they gotten to her? How had Root done this to her?
Maggie cracked his cheek with the back of her hand. Blood from his wounds spattered the snow. Her eyes were bright with hunger, and she stalked toward him.
“You really let us down, Momma,” he said, shocked by his own words.
Even in this monstrous form, she flinched. He’d touched a nerve. Malcolm backed off slowly, drawing her away from the Frazer. From Violet. And where the hell had his sister gone?
“Jennie told me about this curse, but you said I had until sunrise. I don’t know what’s happened to you, or if this is even really you, but obviously, you didn’t see this coming. So much for the great witch Maggie Wise.”
The wind blew her black hair in front of her face, made the yellow dress flap and furl.
Snow and exhaust fumes whipped around in a gust of wind, and he put up a hand to clear his vision.
Maggie struck him so hard that Malcolm felt a rib crack.
The impact carried them both out of the road.
He landed in ten inches of fresh snow with Maggie on top of him.
She weighed almost nothing but felt like iron on his chest. Her hands wrapped around his throat, glee dancing in her eyes.
The thread at the edges of her mouth tore through her lips thanks to the breadth of her smile.
Had she ever looked this happy for him, or because of him? Had she ever enjoyed being his mother, or simply his company, so much? He knew the answer.
Violet shot her in the chest. The bullet staggered Maggie, but only barely.
Maggie reached one hand up, thrust her fingers into the web of thread connecting her lips, and tore it loose, shredding her mouth.
A single drop of dark fluid spit onto his forehead, and her smile widened into nightmare.
The teeth were far too many and far too long.
Some twisted or curved, but all sharp. That yellow fluid sluiced from her tongue.
He couldn’t breathe. Her fingers dug into his throat, puncturing, drawing more blood.
His mother bent over him, face-to-face. The smell of rot and chemistry roiling on her breath made him gag on hot bile. Her tongue slid along those teeth.
She whispered, hushed as the snow, “Maggie Wise will take your eyes.”
She threw her head back and laughed as Violet shifted around, trying to get a clean shot.
Blackness swam at the edges of Malcolm’s vision.
All the damage she’d done to the boy he’d been and the man he’d become, and yet he’d always told himself she loved him as best she could.
The wisps of his consciousness insisted it even now, as she grinned her pleasure in killing him.
Her face stretched with hunger, her jaws opened, she lowered her mouth.
Jennie loomed up behind her with a tire iron and cracked her skull.
Maggie sprawled on her side in the snow. Jennie grabbed Malcolm by the arm and dragged him to his feet. His throat burned as he sucked in great gulps of air, and the cold helped dispel the darkness at the edges of his vision.
“Do something!” Jennie said as they slumped against the car.