Chapter 53
Jennie breathed in the crisp salt air. The wind rushed through the pines.
Her body had gone without sleep so long she felt out of sync with the world.
Her skin prickled with life, more awake than she’d ever been.
She could hear the ocean crashing on the beach.
The tips of the waves glinted with the hints of dawn on the horizon.
She felt alive, as if she had arrived at the moment she’d been journeying toward since the moment she’d walked out the door of her childhood home.
Elias and Root had seen them now. Corrected course, darting across snow and sand. Jennie could still tell which monster had once been her brother, but there wasn’t much left to give him away. The shape of his eyes. The loping, ungraceful way he ran, even with the pain he now carried.
“Dig faster, Malcolm,” she said.
He said nothing. Kept digging, turning shovelfuls of dirt aside. The grave had to be three feet deep now. He should just dump her in and hope for the best, but Jennie knew he wouldn’t do that. Another six or ten inches maybe. Just to be sure. If they had the time.
“If she opens her eyes again,” Jennie said, “tell her I tried very hard to love her. Tell her all I wanted was for her to have a little faith in me.”
Malcolm started to reply, but Jennie wasn’t listening. She flexed her grip on the tire iron and ran toward the monsters, ran toward Root and the thing that had been Elias.
“You needed me, Maggie,” she whispered to herself. “But you didn’t deserve me.”
Her boots slid in the snow and sand. Heart thrumming, she fought the urge to stop and prepare to defend herself. The only way to survive this fight was with brutality to equal the monsters’. She expected Root to grin, expected it to relish its intent to murder.
Root didn’t grin. It sneered, mouth ragged. One side of its face drooped as if the pain had broken something in it. Its eyes held all the cruelty of the dark, devoid of mercy or human heart, knowing only malice and savage abandon.
Elias staggered and slowed, staring at his sister uncertainly. Struggling. Swaying.
“Jennie?” he rasped, voice pitiful, almost as if he wanted her help.
Root hissed and lunged for her. Jennie dropped lower, plowed into it shoulder-first, twisted, and slammed it to the sand.
She’d learned many things in her travels, and this was one of them.
Root tried to scramble to rise, and she put all of her strength into a kick to the side of its head.
Its skull caved in and it dropped, but she knew that wouldn’t kill it.
Jennie lifted the tire iron, knowing she had to obliterate its brain or its heart, separate them from each other. She hoped Malcolm could finish digging.
She brought the tire iron down with both hands, stabbing toward Root’s left eye.
Elias snagged her wrist, shook the tire iron loose, and it flew into the sand. Jennie saw the same struggle in his eyes, but it didn’t stop him. He backhanded her across the face. Blood sprayed from her nose, and she sprawled to the beach beside Root.
The waves crashed nearby, crawling up the sand toward them. One of Root’s eyes shifted to glare at her. A piece of bark jutted from its cheek, worked loose when she’d smashed in the side of its skull. As she watched, the bark fell out, and the flesh began to knit itself together.
Jennie’s ears rang. Blood flowed freely from her nose. A concussion would be the best she could hope for. How badly had that one blow injured her brain? Her vision blurred, but she tried to force herself up to her knees, on the way to rising, hoping she could find the tire iron.
Elias stood over her. “Sister,” he whispered. “I didn’t want this.”
But through his pain and this strange regret—feigned or not—he certainly sounded as if he was going to enjoy what happened next.