Chapter 56
Jennie wanted to help Malcolm, but she could barely stay on her feet.
Waves crashed around her legs as she staggered from the surf and reclaimed her tire iron from the sand.
Her fingers were numb from the frigid water.
She’d barely felt it when she’d been fighting, but now the ache in her bones made her hunch like the Morák in their agony.
Blood trickled down her back from the wound Elias had given her.
Something splashed behind her. Ten feet ahead, her brothers fought on the sand, but she turned, her stomach tight with dread. When she saw Root staggering from the waves, its misshapen skull still knitting itself back together, she nearly collapsed in surrender.
Jennie shook her head, as much to clear it as to refuse fate. She lumbered toward Root. The monster opened its mouth, and the shriek that came out sounded like nothing she’d ever heard. Something from a prehistoric beast, a thing not meant to be there on the sand in Maine in the twentieth century.
“We will not be made to hide in the ground again,” Root snarled. “Never.”
“Well, you won’t.”
Jennie threw herself at Root. Exhaustion, blood loss, shock, and numbness left her with no better control of her body.
No agility, no coordination. But Root had little enough of its own.
She drove it into the shallows, and it managed to claw the left side of her face as she brought the tire iron down again, only wanting it to die.
At last, to die.
She smashed its already ruined skull, but that hadn’t killed it before, so she used the flat end of the tire iron to stab its throat.
Jennie dug in, stabbed again and again, ripped its neck open until sand and sea started filling the gap.
She dropped the tire iron, no longer caring when it was swallowed by the water, and sat astride Root’s chest. Hands on either side of its soft, shattered skull, she bent to the task, pulling and twisting until, with a final crack, she separated Root’s head from its body.
The vampire stopped moving then, finally.
She heard a scream and turned to see her mother splashing toward her in the shallows. Root’s head dropped from Jennie’s hands into the water. Without her, Malcolm would have been dead half a dozen times. Even with Violet at his side, he’d never have gotten this far.
“You needed me,” Jennie told her mother.
Maggie drove her down into the waves. Jennie had no fight left in her. When her mother’s teeth tore into her throat, she heard the sound of Maggie drinking her blood and found she hadn’t the will even to be surprised.
As she slid into darkness, she knew she had proven something, but only to herself.
It wasn’t enough.