Chapter 42
The darkness inside the car seemed to shimmer.
Violet let her eyes track motes in the air, which floated and danced like the snow outside the windows.
It certainly felt like a dream, with the weird prickle of impossibility on her skin.
But it was so goddamned cold that her nose hurt and her nipples were so hard she could no longer feel them. So no, she wasn’t dreaming.
She stared at Jennie. “So that’s her story—”
“The one she told me,” Jennie corrected.
Violet took note of the difference. “Okay. What about you? We know you’ve traveled and studied these things. The occult. Witchcraft. You killed one. There’s a lot you seem to know, but forgive me if I say there’s also a lot you don’t seem to know.”
Sad-eyed, Jennie laughed. “You saying I’ve wasted my life?”
“Not at all. You saved our lives at least once. I’ll never call that a waste.
It’s just that Maggie treated me so kindly, and I know it was different because she wasn’t my mother, but I feel like she gave you an impossible task.
To give up any chance of a normal life, an ordinary quiet life, to put yourself in danger you didn’t ask for.
Danger you could avoid if you wanted to. ”
Jennie gripped the steering wheel. Eyes on the road. “If Malcolm can’t get this done, everyone’s in danger. There’s no avoiding that.”
“So she didn’t have enough faith in either of us,” Malcolm chimed in. “Nothing new there.”
“Besides,” Jennie said, “who wants an ordinary life? A couple of kids, a picket fence, a husband who wears a suit and tie and comes home smelling like his secretary’s perfume?”
That stung. Violet glanced away. “It doesn’t have to be like that.”
“I see. The nightclub chanteuse yearns for a cozy chair by the fireplace and a hubby who’s always home for dinner.”
“Is that so wrong?”
Jennie cocked her eyebrow. “Of course not. But for Malcolm’s sake, I hope this thing between you is about more than you wanting that life, and deciding one brother is a better bet than another.”
Cold as Violet’s face was, the words seared her.
“Jesus Christ, Jennie,” Malcolm said.
Violet held up a hand to still him. Stared at Jennie.
“You’ve been all over the world, I’m guessing mostly alone.
If you’ve never been in love, I’m sorry for you.
Your brother Elias knew how to be charming, but his charm was always for show.
Scratch the surface of that man, and there’s nothing underneath.
I never loved him, but I wanted to. Instead, I found kindness and love and all the things I hope you find one day, whether you earn them or not.
Because that’s the thing, Jennie … this kind of thing happens whether you earn it or not, deserve it or not, expect it or not.
As long as Malcolm wants me, he’s got me, and I don’t give a good goddamn what you think about us. ”
The rhythm of the wipers and the road were the only reply. Maggie had gone silent. Benjy kept grinning. Malcolm waited, maybe holding his breath.
“I mean, what the hell do I know?” Jennie said. “Your biggest mistake was marrying Elias in the first place, and he’s dead now, or near enough.”
The snow. The road. The wipers. The grin.
“Her story,” Malcolm said.
Jennie glanced over her shoulder at him. Violet kept looking out her window.
“What you told us about Maggie … Violet said that’s her story,” Malcolm went on. “But it’s not, is it? Otherwise, why is this happening to her now? One of us was with her every moment from the minute she died.”
“So she was bitten before then,” Jennie replied.
Malcolm had been turning it over in his head. “I think that’s true. I also think it’s not recent. What if she was infected with this thing a very long time ago?”
The tires crunched through deepening snow.
“You think she’s been carrying this inside her all along,” Violet said, never turning. Never looking back at him.
Jennie stiffened. “No way.”
“Think about our mother,” Malcolm said. “Think about Maggie Wise, the neighborhood witch. The woman who could never admit fault for anything, no matter how small. Loving and generous to the people around her, unless they dared suggest she might take the blame for something. Unless it might challenge the image she wanted to portray.”
“Mal.”
“If someone asked you to describe Maggie, how many words do you think you’d use up before you got to selfless or heroic, because the version of her story you just told us could easily include those words? Maggie Wise went to war against a breed of homicidal monsters for the good of the people?”
Jennie’s hands flexed on the steering wheel. She stared straight ahead.
“Not likely, is it?” Malcolm asked.
Violet finally turned, looking at Jennie. “You don’t have to answer. We all know the answer.”
“So what’s your version?” Jennie asked.
“If I had to guess? The witchcraft is real, obviously. The Morák, the vampires, they’re trying to murder us, so yeah …
pretty real. It’s easier to believe in them than it is to believe Maggie put her life on the line for people she didn’t even know.
I’d guess they were hunting her the way her family had hunted them.
Or maybe it was sheer coincidence. She was living her life, and they found out whose daughter she was.
Either way, my bet is that she was attacked, infected or bled or whatever it is they do to make you into one of them.
She tried to use witchcraft to drive out the stain of evil they’d planted in her, to stop herself from dying and being resurrected like that.
But it went wrong somehow, had a power and reach she never imagined.
She was afraid and rushed and maybe dying, and she lashed out with the so-called old fire.
I think it’s all about survival for her. Selfishness.”
“Until now,” Violet said softly. “Her last wish … if it works, this is a pretty noble act, isn’t it?”
“I guess so, but what does it matter to her now? She’s dead.”
Malcolm bent to look into the eyes of his mother’s talking corpse. “How did I do, Maggie? Close to the truth?”
Loving her and hating her had always been like breathing in and out.
Inhale, exhale. Despite the surrealness and terror and grief that had transformed this journey and given it the frisson of lucid madness reserved for nightmares, she felt very real there in the footwell, slumped in on herself.
A monster. A dead thing. Still Maggie at the core of it all, still fighting the thing that must have been inside her, corrupting her, all this time.
But Maggie would have looked at him with scorn for daring to question her version of her history, her image of herself.
Instead, she looked at him with a vulnerability and sadness he’d never seen in her when she’d been alive. “Malcolm … sing.”
He blinked. Later, he’d think how stupid he’d been not to understand immediately, but he’d been lulled into thinking the need had passed.
“Sing,” she rasped, the way a child might say, “Don’t leave me.”
“Malcolm!” Jennie snapped. “Sing the goddamn song!”
Maggie flinched. Nostrils flared. Her eyes widened, red lacing the whites, pupils shrinking. Her upper lip peeled back from her teeth, not a sneer but a quiver of hunger.
He couldn’t sing like Billie Holiday. His voice cracked, but he sang.
Just two notes before she twisted in the seat and grabbed his throat, silencing him.
Tears slid from her eyes, tinged with red, and he could see the pain that racked her body.
Pain she’d inflicted upon herself hundreds of years ago.
She screamed.
Violet slid an arm around Maggie’s throat, yanked her backward, knocked into Jennie, who jerked the steering wheel.
The car skidded, sliding, thudded through the deeper snow at the road’s edge.
Violet shouted at her that they were going to crash, but Jennie threw her weight onto the wheel, kept it straight, got the Frazer back on the road.
Malcolm hammered at his mother’s wrist. Violet grabbed at Maggie’s eyes from behind, and when Maggie tried to claw at her, she lost her grip on Malcolm’s throat.
Twisting, thrashing, she tried to get at Violet while Jennie hit the brakes and they glided to a shuddering halt that sent Benjy slamming into the back of her seat.
Maggie the dead lashed out again. The fingers of her right hand hooked into claws, punched through the Frazer convertible’s roof, tearing rents in the vinyl.
The icy wind whipped into the car, but without her hand choking him, Malcolm could raise his voice again.
It felt ridiculous, this beautiful song, but he’d barely finished the first line when dead Maggie faltered, and halfway through the second line, she collapsed onto the seat.
Blinking. Staring. Expressionless. Yet still his mother’s spirit managed a few more words through dead lips.
“Jennie,” she rasped. “Can you go any faster?”
Malcolm slumped back into his seat. Snowflakes gusted through the rips in the vinyl roof.
“Not a chance,” Jennie replied, but she put the Frazer in drive and hit the gas.
They passed the WELCOME TO MAINE sign less than an hour later.