Chapter 54
Elias could hear a voice screaming inside his skull.
It belonged to the man he used to be, the boy he’d been, growing up with an older sister who sometimes tormented him but always loved him.
On a thousand unloved mornings, Jennie had made him breakfast when Maggie couldn’t be rushed, and he would have been late for school without his sister.
She’d been the one to defend him when his fourth-grade teacher had rightly accused him of cheating.
When Sarah Beth Kelley had agreed to go to the ninth-grade dance with him and abandoned him five minutes after arrival, snickering in the corner with her friends, it had been Jennie he’d sought for comfort.
Jennie who let him cry on her pillow and never said a word.
Jennie who told him to be careful who he trusted enough to love them.
He dragged her into deeper water, clutching her hair, and shoved her head under the waves. She tried to scream, but drowning silenced her.
The voice inside his skull could not be so easily silenced. The old Elias fought so hard that his body shook. He wanted to tear out his own throat, his own heart. Jennie needed to die, and he ached to drink her blood, rip her open, but also he wept black blood tears as salt spray soaked him.
“No,” he moaned.
Elias threw himself backward, landed in the shallows.
A wave washed over him, shoulder-height, and he watched his sister erupt from the ocean, coughing salt water.
Her eyes were bloodshot, her skin pale as she gasped for breath, staring sidelong at him, terror writ upon her face but confusion there, too.
The voice inside him wanted to shout at her to run, but he couldn’t even manage that. Need gnawed at him again. Disgust roiled in his gut, fury at his weakness. Jennie saw his internal struggle, glanced at Root, and started to wade to shore to help Malcolm.
Elias didn’t get up. He might not be able to warn her, but he could fight the urge to murder for a few seconds longer, stay on his knees, let the next wave rock him, and the wave after that.
But then he saw Root lying in the water, skull deformed, one eye missing.
The other eye stared at Elias, and he felt serpents of hate slither inside him.
Poison that rushed through dead blood vessels. Root pulling dark strings inside him.
Elias turned, lunged, and caught Jennie’s ankle before she reached the sand. Dragged her down, scuttled along her body, and bit the back of her neck. Flesh came away. Blood spurted onto his lips and face and spattered his eyes. He shook with the pleasure of it.
Jennie screamed, reaching around, trying to bat him off her.
He ran his tongue over his lips. Salt water, salt blood.
The voice of the old Elias whispered a plea inside him that he make it quick, that she not suffer.
Elias might have been able to give her that, but he wasn’t the only one inside his skull.
Root was in there, too, and it wanted to make Jennie suffer.
“Sister,” Elias managed.
She screamed as he bent to taste the wound again.