Chapter 42
It’s dark on the way back to the Den. Darker than usual, given the moon is a bare sliver in the sky, and the streaks of vibrant light haven’t come out to dance, obscured by wistful clouds.
Maybe that’s why I don’t see her coming until it’s too late to scream.
As if I would scream, anyway. As if my body would grant me the privilege of fighting back.
Vibrant blue eyes blink at me through long golden eyelashes, appearing just in front of my face, just as a hand clamps over my mouth. Long, jagged fingernails dig into my neck, already drawing blood, sending me back to the night she scratched my Mating Mark up with her claws.
The scars have healed over since then, but I’m not sure she’ll let that happen this time.
Scars don’t heal on a corpse.
I at least possess the presence of mind to struggle and thrash, which is more than I can say for the last time I was attacked. Perhaps stabbing that man to death changed me in more ways than one. Even so, Tink’s grip is firm, and before I can grab at my dagger, she plucks it from my belt and uses it to slit three gashes between the knuckles of my right hand.
This time, I do scream, though there’s no one to hear it. Not through her clamped fingers. Not over the roaring waves and the mournful wind.
Pain rips through me, and Tink knots her fingers through my hair as she gags me and drags my body across the wet sand. Loose pebbles jab at me as I struggle, but it’s no use. Even if my scream could alert anyone, it would only be the captain, who can’t help me in his drugged state.
Who wouldn’t help me anyway, I realize.
A few moments later, Tink uses the knot she’s made in my hair to thrust my face into the waves. When I try to flip over, the back of my head hits stone. The stars that pepper my vision are nothing compared to those that fill the murky void when my gasp, reflexive as the freezing water submerges my body, causes me to inhale a mouthful of water.
The salt burns on its way down, stinging my throat, corroding my lungs. I can no longer feel the rest of my body, but I trust that it’s thrashing. Making pitiful splashes in an already tumultuous sea that won’t even notice.
I’m dying, and it’s happening too quickly and too slowly all at once. Death is so painful, I want nothing more than for it to be over, but as the blackness encroaches, my body fights back.
Wanting so desperately to live.
Part of me reaches for the last bits of faerie dust left in my system from today’s dose, but the panic of my body is flushing it out, metabolizing it.
I’m going to drown sober.
I’m going to drown feeling every bit of it.
But then fingers jerk at my collar, dragging me from the water. I expect to find Peter, come to rescue me, but it’s still Tink, her short golden hair darkened from being soaked. Saltwater peppers her face, sticking to her eyelashes.
She stares down at me with lips curved in the shape of malice, eyes the color of ice.
“Why are you doing this? I’ve done nothing to you,” I whisper, though my voice comes out more like a croak as my body expels the saltwater. I spit some of it in her face, and Tink actually smiles. She cranes her head at me, silent as ever.
“You’re not going to answer me?” I ask. “That’s the least you could do.”
I’m shocked by my forwardness. The captain’s right. I’m not brave. Not one to speak my mind or have the right words pop into my head at the perfect moment. But something about my comment seems to land with the faerie. I glimpse it in the way her sternum caves in, ever so slightly, easy to glimpse on her thin frame.
For a moment, I think she’s going to shove me back under, but then the shadows creep up behind her. Panic swells in my chest as they stumble over her thin shoulders and slide down her collarbone until they’re dripping from her hands and all over me.
I can’t breathe, because now they’re slipping into my mouth, drowning me in a crueler fashion than the water, because at least the water couldn’t taunt me as I died.
Tink’s blue eyes shine through the shadows. As she examines them swarming her body on the way to get to mine, a sick pleasure overtakes her pale features.
For a moment, the shadows relent. Just long enough for me to ask, “You can see them too?”
I can’t tell if I’m desperate for them to be real, desperate for them not to be.
Tink’s grin is cruel, vengeful, but she nods ever so slightly.
With one hand still gripping my shirt, she takes the other and allows the shadows to coalesce on her palm. She brings the orb to her mouth, and with envy still glinting in her eyes, forms a circle with her chapped lips, then blows the orb into my face.
It crawls over me like a spider, and I can feel Tink’s shoulders shaking in laughter, though I can’t hear the sound over the splash of the waves. I claw at my face, digging my fingers into my flesh.
Tink drops me, leaving the waves and the shadows to fight over me like hyenas for a corpse.
Water splashes around me, rocks digging into my spine as shadow and water take turns plunging into my nose, washing my throat in scalding fire.
I scream, but they swallow the sound and wait hungrily for more.
Now that the shadows are inside me, they take shape, growing limbs and heads.
No.
In the darkness, I feel for the pebbles beneath my hands, grounding me, mercifully warning me which way is down. I push myself up. As soon as I’m upright, relief swells through me, making room in the haze of the shadows. In the distance, I spot the trees.
And I run.
Feet against pebbles,formed under the weight of waves. Sand spiking through my toes, then pebbles again, this time rounder, more bulbous.
I welcome grass at my heels like water to a parched throat. Like air to drowning lungs.
Groping for my way back to the Den through the shadows, my fingers slam against bark. It’s not much to go off of, but it’s enough.
I run like that, hurtling myself from tree to tree. The shadows are wrapping their fingers over my eyelids like a lover from behind, whispering, “Guess who” into my ears. My stomach is queasy with dread and sloshing brine, the remnants of what didn’t make it into my lungs.
I stumble forward, tree by tree, praying I’m heading in the direction of the Den. But the further I run from the beach, the more the shadows begin to dissipate. Eventually, the last one of their tendrils slips away, leaving me alone in the dark woods.
My entire body shivers with mingled relief and cold. I’m not sure why the shadows stopped following me. Perhaps they’re like the shadows at the shed, which seem to like to congregate in a single place. Perhaps they’re bound to a specific area.
The relief doesn’t last long. I’m soaked and shivering, and my thin clothes are clinging to my body, sucking away any heat I have left.
That, and I’m lost.
The shadows might have fled, but with the moonlight barely lighting my path, there’s nothing to indicate where I am. Just the tall trees of the forest, all looking the same with their red-tinted bark.
There’s no landmark in sight. Until, that is, my bare foot steps on something cold, and moist, and pliable.
The instant urge to retch spikes my stomach, especially when the spongy substance beneath my feet makes a popping sound, a horrible stench filling my nostrils.
I know what it is before I even look down. Fighting back a disgusted sob, I pull my foot from a purposefully shallow grave.
Dizziness overwhelms me when I make the mistake of looking down. Thomas’s killer has met the fate Victor wished for him. His eyes are plucked out, probably by a murder of crows. Judging by the way something white and opaque still glows within their sockets in the moonlight, I’d venture to guess larvae have taken up residence. The man’s cheeks are sunken in. There’s barely any flesh left on him.
It’s shameful and awful, and I want to vomit, because I did this to this man with my dagger. If Peter or the captain or Victor or John were here, they’d tell me I shouldn’t feel guilty. That the man murdered a child and deserved what he got.
But I’m so tired of being told how I feel.
I have a hard enough time determining that for myself without everyone in the world inserting their opinion, confusing me and muddling my mind.
It’s half shame and half anger that propels me as I thrust my fingers into the soft dirt and begin throwing clumps of it on the body. Victor’s had his time to mourn. His time to stew in anger. It’s not healthy for him to sit and watch this man’s body rot every day; I don’t care what anyone else says. It’s not good. Not natural.
Not natural. That’s what my mother’s alienist had said about me. When he showed me those vile sketches and I didn’t shed a tear.
I cover the man’s face first, the face where Victor spat. I don’t want to have to look at it anymore, don’t want to have to know it’s out here.
When I move on to the chest, I discover a bulge in the man’s front coat pocket. I didn’t notice it before, not when the man was alive and his body filled out his clothes. Now that he’s decomposed, every bulge in his clothing seems more noticeable.
I slip my hand into the pocket. My fingers brush against parchment. My memory goes back to the closet, to finding the sketch of Thomas and the other boys. Wind ruffles the tattered parchment’s edges as I pull it out.
Unfolding it proves to be a task, my fingers trembling, but as I open it, the moon shifts into a window in the canopy, illuminating its contents.
My heart trembles. It’s another sketch of Thomas’s, except this one’s just of him and Victor. It’s not nearly as advanced as the one I found in the pantry. This sketch is done with less precise hands, the shading overdone, leaving both his and Victor’s faces looking warped. It shouldn’t surprise me that the murderer picked this, too, off of Thomas’s body after he killed him. I used to read stories about serial murderers who kept trophies from their victims. Why take just the bracelet when you could take this, as well?
Still, I find it odd that Thomas would have kept this one on his person, when it’s clearly not his best work. Maybe it was the first he ever felt proud of. Or maybe he just liked to keep it with him because it’s of him and his only family.
Either way, I stuff the parchment into my pocket. If Victor’s pain is at all like mine, I think he might appreciate keeping this. Especially if it was special to Thomas.
I finish burying the man, then, my limbs worn with exhaustion, stumble back home, no longer lost now that I have the starting point of the shallow grave.
On the way, I find myself tapping my fingers against the parchment, the beginnings of a dreadful idea tugging at the back of my mind.