12. Miss Marlowe With The Oar
Miss Marlowe With The Oar
Pike tore into Heather's arm and dragged her in, tail frothing the water to foam behind it. Blood streamed from the needle-teeth wound on Heather’s arm, strips of flesh dangling in the mud, and she made a choked, gurgling scream, fingers scrabbling along the shoreline.
Fins cut through the water.
Pike.
Disappearing in the lake.
Heather clawed at the shore in front of Marlowe, heaving her body out of the lake with one arm, the other held tight against her chest, legs kicking sporadically like there were weights tied to them. She crawled to the truck, sobbing, begging, leaving a dark smear on the ground.
Pike surfaced, tendrils snapping around her head, eyes rolled white.
She snarled from deep within, tongue writhing in her gaping mouth like a trapped snake trying to shed its skin, as her jaw swung, unhinged to her chest, and she pounded her webbed hands into the mud.
Her tail thrashed behind her and Pike lunged onto shore, jaw gouging a trail through silt under her as she crawled, her tongue lashing.
Pike would never make it to Heather before she found the keys.
Hand over hand on the slippery oar, wedging it in the ground, Marlowe staggered to her feet, swaying in place. Pike came back. Pike came back, and they needed help, and even though she was beaten halfway to hell, Marlowe was going to give it to them.
Heather snot-bubble sobbed as she glanced behind her, one leg thrown over the tailgate. Her ribbon was gone.
God, she wouldn’t shut up. Pike should have her at the bottom of the lake by now.
Heather disappeared in the truck bed, empty cans scattering in a clash of metal. Marlowe shuffled closer, hunched and twinging with each movement.
When she curled her fingers over the tailgate, careful to avoid the rust, she readied herself for Heather brandishing her tire-iron to bash her head in and end it all.
Pike snarled behind her.
Shallow, quick breathing filled the truck bed.
Marlowe bit back a groan and steadied her footing, using the oar to pull herself up.
Heather curled in a bed of beer cans, her shredded, venom-sticky hand bleeding a puddle onto her camp shirt. Red seeped into the outlines of pine trees. Only her eyes moved, pinning Marlowe in place with white, panicked flashes.
Pine and vanilla coated Marlowe’s tongue in a bitter memory. The reason for Heather’s escape—near escape.
Marlowe glanced behind her, but Pike had slowed to a crawl, jaw hinging back into place and tail going limp behind her. No telling how much of Kenny she’d eaten or how soon she would regain a burst of strength.
Marlowe lowered herself to sit on the wheel well, her oar balanced across trembling legs. “You almost made it.”
A brittle rasping sound scraped out of Heather’s mouth.
9 years she had hoped Heather’s absence would take away the hollow feeling rooted in her from that summer. She had planned and schemed to leave so many times, only to back out at the last second, and the chasm only grew.
Heather had to die. She’d known it forever.
Marlowe just hadn’t wanted to be the one to do it.
She cleared her throat and trailed her hands along the sweat-smooth oar, finding a weak spot less than a foot below the handle. “I’ve hated you from the moment they locked my cabin door. Maybe all the hookups were my own way of hating you. All the sex, all those years, all that sinning with me.”
The oar cracked against the side of the truck box and Marlowe hefted the small piece in her hand.
She knew her words were thick and slurred, but to her they were clearer than anything she’d ever said.
“You had a choice, Heather. You could have chosen to fix things. Or to leave me alone. You could have done better.”
Heather’s eyes flashed and a garbled moan wheezed from her lips.
Marlowe smoothed the sticky tangles of her hair back from her face and leaned in. “But you were always just like me. A degenerate little slut.” Marlowe found a vicious sense of peace when Heather’s cheeks paled at her own words used against her.
“At least I never hated myself for it,” Marlowe whispered.
Heather’s mouth trembled. She might have been praying. But Heather laboriously formed one, gasping word, grated from her raw throat like vomiting stones. “Please.”
Marlowe’s lips pulled back in a smile she knew looked more like Pike than anything human. “We should’ve both been locked away in that cabin,” she said softly.
Marlowe squared her aching shoulders. The jagged end of the oar hovered over Heather’s mouth. The night quieted.
Heather’s eyes shot wide as her teeth scraped against the wood sinking into her mouth, and scarlet bubbled from her lips.
Marlowe tasted blood spatters on her tongue.
Flesh separated around wood and crusted under Marlowe’s nails. She bore down and drove the stake down through rubbery ropes of cartilage. It slipped away from the inside of Heather’s knobby spine and thunked wetly against the rusted truck bed.
Heather never made another sound.
Marlowe froze, hands clasped around the oar.
She should feel something, staring at the spike through Heather’s face.
Judgment she’d wrongfully placed with her own hands, when she’d always been told forgiveness was for humanity, judgment was for God.
Only peace bloomed stubbornly in her cavernous chest.
Marlowe couldn’t accept grace and forgiveness, because there wasn’t a part of her feeling sorry for what she did. So she’d rot in her resentment along with Heather’s body, and if her anger sent her to the hell Heather believed in, Marlowe would gladly go.
She sank back on her heels and wiped a tired, damp arm across her forehead. Miss Marlowe, with the Oar, in the Truck. This time, she smiled.
Frogs croaked again, gentle in the quiet.
Another noise filtered into Marlowe’s cottoned ears.
Gravel dug into her bare knees as she crawled to the tailgate and let it free with a bang, shattering the delicate silence.
Pike bared needle teeth at her.
Marlowe coughed and spat over the edge. “Get in line.”
Her body ached in ways she didn’t know it could and she was two teeth short and probably had a few broken bones, but it was over. Marlowe could breathe again, and she did. Deep, calming breaths. A smoke. That’s what she needed. In a minute, once she caught her breath.
Through the swelling and bruised ache of her eyes she caught a glimpse of the lake, once again peaceful. Good luck explaining what happened here tonight to anyone. She’d make up a story for the folks at work about getting jumped behind one of the sleazy bars she frequented.
Living life on the edge had advantages.
Marlowe dug out a crushed, soggy pack of cigarettes and fumbled for her lighter. Truck springs groaned and wheezed when knobby fingers grasped the edge and Pike began the slow, laborious haul into the box.
Marlowe’s stretched-thin muscles burned and her back felt like hot pokers had been shoved between her vertebrae. She might have broken ribs, if the throbbing pain in her side when she inhaled tobacco was any clue.
Forgiveness had been beaten into Marlowe until she was bruised from all the mercy.
Her parents hadn’t known any better; but after they came to pick her up from Camp Atonement, they never stepped foot in another church until.
Marlowe had known the damage was already done, and knew she was rotten from the inside out when forgiveness never truly took root in her.
As Marlowe tapped ash off her cigarette and watched it sizzle in the pools of blood, she didn’t feel rotten. She felt perfectly happy. At least she would be, after a couple of strong painkillers, chain-smoking a pack, maybe taking a nap.
Pike’s arms roped and bulged as she crested the edge of the tailgate, clumsy on land but still fucking beautiful and deadly.
Marlowe’s lips twisted in a smile around her cigarette and she held out a hand. “Took you long enough. I had to kill her myself.”
Webbed hands hesitantly slotted into hers and burned at Marlowe’s wounds. She braced herself and pulled, hauling Pike further into the truck.
Marlowe didn’t let her go. Pike snarled softly, teeth flecked with blood and bits of flesh.
“You talk a lot of shit for a little monster who just got two bodies to eat.” Marlowe stubbed out her cigarette on Heather’s shoulder and leaned in, letting the backs of her knuckles skim over Pike’s chest. “I bet you’d like to bite me again.
” Pike’s snarl froze on her face and she stayed perfectly still.
This close, her eyes snapped in different shades of black and gold.
Marlowe’s voice dropped to a soft, coaxing cadence. “Are you gonna rip my heart out and eat it while it’s still beating?” Marlowe flicked her tongue out against the narrow gash of Pike’s curled lips. She tasted familiar now. “Or are you going to keep me, sweetheart?”
Pike huffed sweet, fish-gut air at her and blinked slowly, the membrane shuttering her eyes.
Marlowe leaned in and kissed her.