2.
It took all three of the Ashbury brothers to force Ash up the aisle, Patrick coming down from his place at the lectern.
Theo was with them, too, but he didn’t seem to be helping much, just walking along behind and looking upset, his dress shoes limping through clumps of flesh the skins had left along the carpet runner.
Now that Claire was no longer being kissed by skinbags of tentacles or bleeding out from a side wound, she could crane her head and watch, too wrung out from screaming and thrashing and nearly dying to do much of anything else.
Theo glanced at her once but wouldn’t meet her eyes.
His hands trembled by his side. He still looked sick, as if he’d been puking ever since she last saw him, on the yacht.
Ash fought like a cornered animal. His eye was already blackening, a purple bruise mottling his cheekbone and blood at the corner of his mouth, crusted beneath his nose.
His father had a hand in his hair, wrenching back his head, while Patrick and Greg hauled on his arms. His feet dragged along the carpet, at least until the brothers forced him close enough to see the blood, the bile, the leftover stains of the meal the skins had made of her.
Then he lurched up, incredulous eyes going from the gore to Claire on the altar. “What did they do?”
“Tried to eat me.” Her voice seemed floaty and far away, like someone talking in their sleep. “Part of me, at least. Elias fixed it.”
Not-Elias. But she had no name for whatever wore his skin now. It hadn’t given her one other than god, and she refused to use that.
“Fuck.” Ash’s blazing blue eyes swung from her to his stepmother, who’d stood up and was lighting yet another cigarette with shaky hands. “She’s your damn sacrifice, and you couldn’t even keep them from hurting her first?”
“This is good,” Audrey said, completely sidestepping the question.
The front of her pretty dress was caked in gore now.
A streak of yellowish bile marred her face, stretched from temple to cheekbone, like some macabre contour she’d forgotten to blend.
“You do care. She’ll be an acceptable sacrifice, even after everything went so sideways. ”
“It knew he would.” Wellsley, taking advantage of his son’s current calmness, came up behind Ash and grabbed both his arms, bracketing them across his back. Ash gave one half-hearted heave, but he was too preoccupied with looking at the mess Claire had become to really try to break free.
Just guilt, the feeling on his face, and he’d get over it soon enough. Once the god was walking in Claire’s skin, once the Ashburys received their reward, their gilded world righted. Just guilt, and she didn’t know Ash well, but she knew he was practiced at ignoring that particular emotion.
Still midway up the aisle, Theo turned away.
Greg watched his husband, lips pressed together, but didn’t go to comfort him.
Beyond the tentacle-patterned glass, the ocean was still black.
That same immense thing, watching. Seeing the drama they played out for their own peace of mind, when all it wanted was the meat on the table.
Patrick sighed, polishing his glasses on his shirt.
He grimaced as he stepped around the altar, careful not to soil his shoes in the pooled acid of Claire’s insides as he looped around to the stairs and mounted the platform once again.
He cleared his throat and rested his hands on the lectern.
“OK, we’re going to keep this short and sweet.
What happens after is the important part, anyway. ”
She recognized his audiobook voice now. The pilot over the intercom, on the plane. Must have been another skin, one too far gone to speak, so Patrick recorded in his stead.
Ash tried to buck off his father again, snarling. Patrick rolled his eyes and gestured to their youngest brother. “Greg, a little help?”
Greg stood in the aisle, equidistant from both the crowd at the altar and his husband, who’d retreated almost to the doors. Theo’s lip trembled, his eyes shining in the ghostly light of the candles. “Greg.” His voice was hoarse. “There’s still time.”
Greg pulled in a breath. “Don’t be weak, Theodore. You had a chance to make her go, if you really wanted. Too late now.”
Theo glanced at Claire. Closed his eyes.
Firming his mouth, Greg turned and stalked up the aisle, where Ash still struggled against his father’s hold. Greg took something out of the pocket of his suit jacket. A syringe.
“Ash,” Claire whispered, “don’t—”
But Greg sank the needle into his nephew’s neck before Claire could warn him, depressing the plunger and sending the clear liquid inside coursing into his system. Ash slumped sideways, blue eyes cloudy, and it took both Greg and Wellington to hold him up.
“That was only half a dose, I trust?” Patrick narrowed his eyes behind his glasses. “We still need him to perform, later. Make it official.”
Claire had thought she was beyond the point where she could get more afraid, but new dread began a slow spiral, a snake eating its tail, growing stronger on its own flesh.
Greg nodded curtly, answering his brother’s question, and Patrick moved on.
“We come to join this man and this woman in the sight of the Lord of the Sea, God of the Under, It That Presides in the Unseen World. We bring you, Claire Sutherland, into the fold of the current and the protection of the wave, to join with our family, chosen as scions to usher in a new era, where the gods of old rise once more and humankind is subservient. We give It Who Has Been for Millennia a body in exchange for protection from the sea, and all that protection brings us.” All of this in a rush, almost bored.
Patrick looked down at Claire, still tied to the altar. “Do you accept?”
It didn’t matter if she did or didn’t, the stony look in Patrick’s eyes and the firm set of Wellington’s mouth said so. This was just a formality, part of the ceremony, and she’d be bound one way or another.
“Fuck you,” she said, and spit a wad of bloody phlegm at the lectern. It slid down slowly, painting a shiny trail over the wood.
“Lovely,” Patrick said, rolling his eyes. “Ash? Can you top your blushing bride’s delightful sentiment?”
“Double fuck you,” Ash said, his words like syrup from the sedative. But he aimed his own spit perfectly, and it spattered over the right side of Patrick’s glasses.
“He sounds like my dad did at our wedding, honey,” Dierdre said. Her eyes were daggers as she stared up at her husband. “He never did like you, don’t you remember? You got him kicked out of the country club for that.”
“And I’ll kick you out if you aren’t quiet, Dierdre,” Patrick said mildly, frowning down at his glasses, futilely polishing. She followed the order, though her eyes still glittered.
“Let’s move.” Mr. Ashbury hauled his son back down the aisle toward the doors. Ash’s eyes were fluttering now, his knees gone jellied. “Greg, the second syringe, please. I don’t want to waste any more time than we have to, It’s close already.”
A sting in Claire’s neck, the burn of a needle chased by the cold of something slipping into her bloodstream. The last thing she saw was Theo’s face by the door, watching her like he was watching his own funeral.
○ ○ 2. ○ ○
Of course it was the damn submarine.
Claire woke at the hum of the engines, the floor beneath her vibrating.
Her mind connected what she felt to what Patrick had said at her mockery of a wedding to what she’d been told when the Ashburys made her come down to the underwater dock and see the vessel they’d all spent their wedding nights on.
“No.” She sat up, her side and head in a duet of agony. Her vision was still swimmy, but she saw the floor closing above them, shining panels shifting back into place, the tiny figures of the Ashburys watching them go. “No no no no.”
Trying to stand didn’t go well, even after the Elias-god’s healing; her legs weren’t up to the task of holding the rest of her.
So Claire crawled as fast as she could to the edge of the craft, where the clear panels of the wall began right as the gleaming floor ended, lurching to her knees and banging her fist against the glass until it ached.
“You can’t! I can’t be in here! I can’t! ”
They couldn’t hear her, she knew that, but still she screamed and begged as the submarine slipped soundlessly into the deep, darkness closing all around it, too dense to see anything through.
Claire’s throat felt like it was closing, too, narrowing to a thin straw, she couldn’t be this deep, she couldn’t, she’d die or not die and which was worse—
“Claire.”
A hand on her shoulder, clammy and trembling. Ash had crawled over to her, his blue eyes still hazy but lucid, and Claire didn’t think before turning and burrowing into him, wrapping her arms around him like he was a life raft as her breath sawed in and out.
Ash shushed her, passing that trembling hand over her hair. Someone had combed the blood out, and his fingers didn’t snag on any tangles, though it felt thick and sticky on Claire’s neck, dried in ropes. “You’re OK,” he murmured, low and scratchy. “You’re OK.”
It was a lie, but she let him tell it. She took his comfort, since it was all she had.
They stayed like that. She didn’t know how long. Time was an impossibility here, deep under the ocean’s surface where no light penetrated.
But when Claire’s eyes lit on the huge bed that dominated the sub’s floor, she pushed hurriedly away from Ash, huddling into herself. He didn’t act surprised. He eyed the bed warily, as if it were an animal he didn’t want to let out of his sight, and settled his back against the wall.
“So can you tell me everything now?” Claire asked. “How this all started? It’s not like I can go anywhere. It’s too late.”
He winced at that but didn’t argue. One scratched-up hand went to his throat, as if feeling for that seaweed and bile he’d vomited out when he tried to speak plainly with her before. “I think so. You’re caught.”