2. #3
Ash slammed into the driver’s seat, cranked the key, and pressed the gas.
They flew out of the driveway with a screech and burn of rubber on asphalt.
Some metal band blasted from the speakers, apparently left over from the last time someone had driven this car, and Claire didn’t have the presence of mind to turn it off.
“Get to the mainland.” Ash said it like a mantra, his blue eyes wide and dazed. The car beeped at him frantically as he weaved over the traffic lines, momentarily dulling the music, but he paid it no mind. “If we get to the mainland, you’ll be OK.”
“What about you?”
He didn’t answer.
They flew down the road, nearly tipping up on two wheels. Past the empty beach houses, and yes, those were bars on the windows, past the incongruous green lawns. The causeway appeared, a line of white in the dark. A name was printed on the strut. Rhodes-Hodge Infrastructure Solutions.
“Claire. Baby.”
A quiet voice from the back seat.
Elias.
He looked just like she remembered, all the memories snapping into place the moment she laid eyes on him, the fuzzing edges of her vision brought back to focus again. The flop of his dark-blond hair over his forehead. The crinkle at the corners of his cerulean eyes as he gave her a smile.
Another dream, surely. One more way to torture herself, now that she knew the truth of their relationship, how it had always been pointing to this. Maybe all of this was a dream, and she’d wake up in the cloister room, or even back at the house in Connecticut.
He’d called her baby. He never did that.
Something about him glowed, a light in the dark, drawing her closer. She moved his way on instinct, leaning back over the seat, an animal part of her pulled close. But she didn’t look directly at him. She didn’t dare.
Ash didn’t hear him, or at least didn’t seem to. His eyes were glued to the road, his hands glued to the steering wheel. His headlights were electric blue.
Claire reached out, touched Elias’s shoulder.
Choosing not to think about the impossibility of this moment and just to live in it instead.
Choosing not to think about how wet and slimy he felt beneath her palm.
That sense of predestination, of a promise coming home to roost. Claire felt like she was floating, weightless and senseless in warm water.
When Elias’s hand came up to wrap around her own, and it wasn’t exactly a hand anymore, she couldn’t find it in herself to be surprised.
Still, she balked, self-preservation kicking in against whatever strange lull had overcome the rest of her.
It was useless; he held her fast as a cage.
Beside her, Ash sped over the causeway, dark water gently lapping at the pylons.
She thought of the tackle chest, the voice in the waves.
“You can’t leave now,” Elias said. But it wasn’t really Elias; it was something else, bleeding through the costume it had made of the man she’d been going to marry.
Hard suction on her side, something slimy attaching to her skin and pulling, tiny mouths lined in teeth.
She refused to look at him, still, only seeing him from the corner of her eye as the ache in her side grew to a sting, a rip.
“It’s too late, Claire,” Elias said. “You’re it for me. You always were.”
The pain in her side was excruciating now, sawing at her skin, tearing it slowly.
Claire tried to pull away, but whatever Elias’s body had become held her easily, and her movements were useless as a beached eel’s thrashing.
The sting of tearing flesh was bad enough to make her scream, but all that came out was a low, mournful whine.
Ash finally turned to look at her.
Her other hand made a claw, raked in Elias’s direction, but all it met was something cool and viscous, gathering beneath her fingernails, smelling like salt and rot.
Scuffling, shouting. Ash, trying to call her name. The sideways wrench, another skid of tires, the feeling of floating.
“Pretty, hollow Claire Sutherland.” Elias’s voice at her ear, but it was not his familiar lips against her temple. These were cold, and wet, and hid sharp, needle-fine teeth. “You’re the end of the line.”
The BMW hit the water with a sound like an explosion. The airbags deployed.
Claire didn’t mean to look at Elias, her ears ringing, eyes beginning to sting as water leaked into the car. But something about him glowed, even more than she’d noticed before, an unnatural phosphorescence. It drew her gaze, even though she didn’t want to see.
His eye lay on his cheek, a running yolk of blood and pus.
A tentacle burst through the orbital socket the eyeball had left empty, curling around her temple, the suckers adhering to her skin with the pinch of razors.
Long, thin teeth, too many for his mouth, making it split too wide, making blood pearl up at the straining corners.
But his remaining eye still blazed that familiar blue.
Terror tipped, finally, alchemized into horror. Claire shrieked and shrieked and shrieked until her throat filled with ocean.