Chapter 29 The Walk-In #2
“I’m stopping the curse!” Sumner shouted. “Giving the Forest King another was the only way!”
“According to who?” I shouted.
“The spirits. I hear them…” He looked up into the trees, his eyes rolling white. Jesus, he was hearing voices. “The spirits are all around us. He’s here, now…watching.”
I didn’t turn around. I did not want to see if the Forest God was here, haunting this place. I thought he was gone. I thought…
“You’re going to pay for what you’ve done.” Jasper’s voice was cold and even.
Sumner turned his manic glare on me. “Shoot him. I’ll give you whatever you want…money, power…I can make it happen. You and your boyfriend can go free. I swear.”
“You’ve been helping out the meth heads with some Vapozene, to cook up some meth? Using them to do your dirty work? They took Viv. And dumped some more chemicals in the river.”
“The costs of industrial-waste disposal are fucking astronomical. I’m operating on the edge of bankruptcy. I had to cut costs somewhere.”
“You fucker.” Rain dripped down my chin. “And Viv cursed you. She thought she raised the Rusalka.”
“Viv cursed us all. She woke something up. The only way to kill the curse was to give another offering.” He was batshit mad, crazier than Viv. Maybe even crazier than me.
“And Nick?”
“Finding your boyfriend was an accident. We wanted to give you to the Forest King. But, y’know…the more the merrier.”
“The spirits told you this?” I demanded.
“This place is full of them.” Sumner laughed, spreading his arms out. “They’re fucking everywhere. Can’t you feel it? All that power…”
“I’m gonna kill you. All of you.” Jasper said it without inflection, cold as a fish.
I turned on Jasper. “That guy’s a babbling idiot, but you…did you kill those people?”
Rain swept down in sheets, and Jasper had to shout to be heard above it. “Go home, Koray.”
“Fred, did you kill those people?” Rain hammered my scalp and arms.
He refused to answer me. “Koray, you’re a good cop. You don’t need to be a part of this.”
“I can’t let you do this, Fred.” I said it listlessly, though. I was supposed to say it, right?
“I’m supposed to be dead,” he said quietly. “We can all disappear into the night.”
These fuckers deserved it, didn’t they? I looked down at the water washing over Viv. They’d almost killed Nick. They killed the Carson sisters. They were complicit in the abuse of those girls. Nick’s career and mine were dead; I wasn’t a good cop anymore.
Jasper gestured to the water. “Sumner, Lister. Both of you, into the river.”
He marched them into the water. Sumner was cackling, and Lister made a grab for Jasper’s gun. But Jasper shot him in the arm, and he howled.
“Get in the water,” Jasper said.
I turned my gun on Jasper. “Fred, stop it.” But I only whispered. I don’t think he heard me.
The Kings of Warsaw Creek were knee-deep in water.
That song—the song of thunder rolled over me, through me.
I let go of my thin protestations. Fuck that.
Fuck what I was supposed to be doing, all the rules I was required to follow.
I wasn’t a cop anymore. That authority had been stripped from me.
I came to this place, this haunted, sacred place, not as a cop.
Not as Nick’s fiancée. Not as my father’s daughter.
But as myself, something dark and terrible, and powerful beyond all the identities given to me by men.
I was. Alone…I was.
Water swirled around my knees, and the Rusalka whispered in my ear, “Give in.”
“What are you?” I asked.
“I have always been here. I wore Dana’s skin for a time. I would wear yours if you’d let me.”
She whispered to me of the forest, of this land I belonged to. I was what I had always known, deep in my dark dreams in the middle of the night, when my breath caught in my throat. I was an elemental power of my own, and I decided what I would do. I was beyond the judgment of these men.
But they were not beyond my judgment.
I cast the shotgun into the water. I had no need of it. There was nothing stopping what was coming next, a wall of floodwater, full of debris, bearing down on us. Roaring water swept down over the island, obliterating Dana’s grave.
I inhaled, and the Rusalka stepped into my skin as easily as if she stepped into a dress.
Water washed around my waist and swallowed the men before me.
I was buoyant, not touching the earth. I splayed my hands in the current, approaching the men.
The floodwater caught me, roaring, pulling me down and under.
A gunshot rang out in the water. Someone screamed.
I laughed, with Rusalka’s voice.
I was suspended in the maelstrom. It was silent here, beneath the water’s surface; I could hear only my own heartbeat.
Sliding around in the current like an eel, I dodged the branches of an uprooted tree.
There was no fighting it; there was only surrendering to the black water sweeping down.
At that moment, it was a greater force than all of us.
I was not afraid. Rusalka had made me almost boneless, twisting my body in the current, around tree branches, past the debris of a wrecked boat.
Rocks scraped my cheek. My fingers curled into claws slashing into the dark, where the water was unexpectedly warm. I was a passenger in this, her element.
Sumner was clinging to a piece of flotsam. He saw me.
Face twisted in rage, he lifted a gun in his cuffed hands. Dimly, I realized he must have taken Jasper’s gun from him.
He fired.
I reached out to embrace him. I dragged him down, down into the depths, feeling his pulse under my fingers wrapped around his neck.
I thrilled in feeling his muted scream, the vibration of bubbles, the thumping of blood in his throat.
I thrilled in feeling him still as water flooded into his lungs, making him heavy as stone.
—
A green flash washed over me. I remembered my mom and me, coming up against that polluter in the forest all those years ago.
I stared at the interloper. He was in his twenties, thin and stringy, his hands blackened with grease. My mom stood before him with a handgun, and his fingers twitched as he lifted them.
“What should we do with him?” Mom asked me. “Should we let him go?”
I looked at the oil slick staining the ground. A little milk snake slithered out of the puddle, gasping.
That infuriated me. I plucked the snake from puddle and tried to clean it off with my shirt.
“No.” I said it with the haughty authority of royalty passing sentence upon a peasant. I was queen of these woods, after all. “He deserves to die.”
Mom peeled her lips back and smiled at that man.
She gestured toward the chemicals with the muzzle of the gun.
“Drink it,” she ordered.
He blinked. “Are you crazy? I can’t drink that.”
She pulled the hammer back with an ominous click. “Drink. It.”
He shook his head. His weight rocked back and forth, from his heels to the balls of his feet, as if he was thinking about rushing my mom.
The gun’s muzzle flashed white, and I jumped at the clap of thunder. The man cowered on the ground before my mom.
“No more warning shots,” she said. “Drink up.”
The man crawled toward a barrel, pouring sweet-smelling liquid into the ground. He cupped his hands to capture the poison and took a drink. He gagged.
“Drink,” my mom ordered. “Drink it all.”
He didn’t even come close. He drank until he retched, vomiting it up, and then Mom made him drink more poison. He begged her to let him go, but she was unmoved. She made him drink until he passed out.
I watched, fascinated. I knew what she was doing was right; my dad wouldn’t have permitted anyone to defile his beloved forest. But I was fascinated by my own power, that I could visit this punishment upon this vile person. I felt a bone-deep sense of satisfaction in that.
When the man had passed out, my mom dragged him to the river and shoved him in. Face down, he floated down the river.
In the distance, the Hag Stone looked on, her profile sharp against the sky.
“She likes blood,” Mom said, as she’d said when I’d sat with my bleeding feet in the sand.
The Hag watched silently as the man’s body floated to her, for her to devour.
I was my mother’s daughter.
—
I floated for a time, in the black between Rusalka and myself, in the water’s roar.
Eventually, she let me go. I had a sense of being pulled to shore, of the murmuring of women.
I felt solid ground on my back. Consciousness was fuzzy, and I knew I had to get help. Water shimmered before me, looking a lot like the fluorescence of pollution under a UV light. In the distance, I saw burning. The river…the river was on fire. I could see the red and feel the heat from here.
“Hold still,” a voice said.
Tree branches swayed above me. I was being carried to higher ground by many sets of hands. I had the same feeling I’d had when I played Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board at a slumber party as a kid, unsteady and weightless at the same time.
“Stay still,” a female voice said. “You’ve got a head injury.”
I reached behind my head, and my fingertips came away with hot blood. “How did you find me?”
“We heard the singing.”
That sounded like an entirely reasonable response.
“I’m so sorry about Viv. I was too late.” I turned my head to look upstream. “She was at the oxbow…with the men.”
“The island’s gone. All of it,” another female voice said.
“Jasper? He was here. Sumner and Lister, too…”
“They’re all gone.”
I squinted at the river. The roaring power I’d felt in my head and my lungs was gone. I stared down at my hands, pale and ordinary and bloody. “So is Rusalka.”
I sank into darkness.