2.
Her ears rang, tinnitus as loud as a marching band. Claire’s vision was blurry, and for a moment she couldn’t figure out where she’d landed when the god unceremoniously ejected her from its throat.
Rock under her hands, her knees. She reached a few inches sideways, and her fist closed on empty air. The cliff, still.
Claire tried to stand, but her body wouldn’t let her yet. Her legs felt tingly, but her left arm stung like a bitch, and she collapsed over onto it with a soft curse, muffled in her ringing ears.
Slowly the ringing faded. A scream, behind her, then many screams. The sound of scuffling, shining shoes on rough rock, an avalanche of people trying to get away.
She turned her head to face the god.
The same strobe light glitch she’d seen on the tentacled thing in the god’s throat was happening to all of it now, as if it were an old VHS movie monster superimposed on the world.
The god shivered back and forth, limbs lashing, tearing down all the trappings of ceremony the Ashburys had installed.
One of the vases filled with salt water crashed to the ground, shattered.
The suction cups of another tentacle caught on the white flowers in the canopy and ripped half of them away.
They scattered into the air, petals falling like snowflakes.
Her eyes couldn’t focus on the god’s shape, not fully, her brain unable to take in its sheer size all at once.
Before, the god hadn’t looked quite so large, hiding parts of itself away in dimensions she couldn’t fathom.
Now it didn’t try, taking up nearly all of the cliff, tall as Harrow Point, huge and world-ending and too much to comprehend as a whole.
The Marinography employees on the lawn ran, eyes rolling in terror, trampling each other in their haste to get to the garage and the phalanx of luxury vehicles there, leather-upholstered escape that would do them no good without the causeway.
A tentacle from the god had slithered into the skin enclosure, somehow managing to avoid smashing the fence, and the skins clung to it adoringly, like puppies on an owner’s leg.
Some were weeping, viscous tears that looked like the fluid that had nearly dissolved Claire, leaving livid runnels in distended flesh.
Smaller tentacles reached out of the skins’ orifices to caress their maker.
Claire looked down at herself. Her gown was mostly intact; her body, too.
Both unexpected. Whatever had happened in the god’s throat didn’t appear to have consequences out here, on the plane of existence she was used to.
At least not easily observable ones. Her left arm was still stinging, though, the one that had been longest enclosed in that digesting fluid, the one she’d ripped the flesh from and fed to the god.
Small red lines scored the skin from shoulder to fingertip.
She stood, woozy, backing away from the cliff edge and staring down at her arm, twitching her fingers to make sure they still worked.
“Claire!”
Her name, bellowed. Ash.
He was still down by the skin enclosure, held by Patrick and Greg—his former guards had fled, apparently.
Both Ashbury brothers looked terrified, and Patrick had a gun in his hand, waving it wildly at the skins, at the retreating Marinography employees.
He fired a round into the tentacle closest to him, but the god didn’t react at all, even when a chunk of blue-green flesh blew off into the air, spinning blood and globules of blubber.
Ash tugged forward, fighting closer to Claire, and Patrick’s gun came perilously close to his head. Claire screamed, the sound melding with a shot. At the same time, another tentacle slithered over the cliff, blocking her view.
Claire made a high-pitched keening noise that didn’t sound like it should come from a human mouth. But her cry was lost in the chaos on the cliff.
“What did you do?” Wellington Ashbury, crunching broken glass under his shoes as he ran toward the cliff, his eyes wild. “What the ever-loving fuck did you do?”
“Put her back!” Audrey clambered over broken rocks to stand next to her husband, her lipstick smeared, her white dress stuck to her legs with spilled salt water.
All traces of genteel sadness and delicate regret and motherly scrim were gone now, only panic in their place. “Put her back in Its fucking mouth!”
The god was still thrashing, glitching, like it didn’t know what to do. The tentacle in the skin enclosure lashed up into the sky, sending bloated bodies sailing over the cliff and into the tide below.
A few more steps backward, salt water from the vases wetting Claire’s hem. But there was nowhere to run, not really, open sky before her and carnage behind. Wellington’s hand closed over her red-scarred arm; something like lightning spangled through her, painful and exhilarating at once.
“This is not happening,” Wellington said, in the tones of an order. Like he could erase the past ten minutes through sheer force of will. “We are not leaving this damn cliff without a sacrifice, Claire. I am very disappointed in you.”
Spoken just like a father, just like she was part of the family, and Claire couldn’t stop one bark of unhinged laughter.
Tentacles parted, as if the god sensed that it was getting another chance, another try at devouring her whole. That world-ending mouth opened in the center of its writhing mass, big enough to eat the whole sky, absent stars and all.
A sound close by. Scuffing rock, hard breathing.
A body, slamming into hers, knocking her from Wellington’s grip.
Claire sprawled to the ground, landing on her hurt arm, cursing again.
She stumbled away from Wellington, fell on her stomach, and caught herself right at the edge of the cliff, staring over into open space.
Vertigo spun through her middle, the tide gyroscoping in and out.
Swallowing nausea, Claire rolled over.
Ash stood in front of her. Bleeding, again, this time from a wound on his shoulder, a tiny hole spurting carmine and soaking his already-filthy white shirt. Patrick’s shot must have gone wild, hit him there instead of his head.
“This,” he said, chest heaving, “is not happening.”
An echo of his father, the same words meaning an entirely different thing.
“Son.” Wellington’s hands were in fists, trembling, but his voice was smooth as he walked toward his son, toward the god behind him. “It has to. There has to be a sacrifice. And she made a promise. It’s her own fault, really.”
She had. It was. But Claire was starting to wonder if maybe there was more than one way to keep a promise to a god. Her scarred arm itched and itched and itched, the nerves within reforming, becoming something new.
“It rejected her. You saw.” Ash gestured behind him, to where that mouth was still open, those limbs still thrashing. “It threw her back up. You’re just going to keep tossing her in there until she sticks?”
“If that’s what we have to do.” Audrey seemed caught between lunging at Claire and trying her best to keep far away, clutching Wellington’s arm as if it were both weapon and armor.
“We know the requirements and aren’t afraid of them, Ash.
That was always the difference between you and Elias.
He knew what he had to do, and he did it willingly—”
“Quiet, Audrey,” Wellington said. “Be fucking quiet.”
She was. Audrey Ashbury was practiced in ordered silence.
Ash looked at them. Then he looked at Claire. “Good job, C,” he said. “You made it spit you back out. Knew you could.” He glanced behind them at the god, a sharp smile arrowing the edge of his split lip. “It must be hungry, then.”
The sky churned behind him, strobing light and dark, the sun not knowing what to make of this. Tentacles lashed the air over his head like a living crown.
Ash turned around and rushed headlong into the god’s mouth.
Too late, Claire’s hand shot out, like she could stop him. Behind her, the commotion of Wellington and Audrey, both moving but going nowhere, both making noise but saying nothing.
Ash ran into the god’s mouth, and it snapped closed behind him.
It didn’t choke, didn’t heave. Claire didn’t even see it swallow.
All the tentacles that had been snaking over the cliff face shuddered, once, then rose in the air, reaching for the blackness above the ocean like a worshipper seeing an idol.
○ ○ 2. ○ ○
Claire didn’t know what Ash was doing in there. Destroying the god? It didn’t look like it. Something else? Surely he wasn’t just going along with this, becoming the sacrifice in her place like he’d initially wanted, surely he had some plan…
Audrey was screaming. Her hands were pressed to either side of her face in a gruesome imitation of the Home Alone poster, her impeccably lined eyes staring at the god.
Claire thought for a moment that maybe Audrey was showing some latent grief for her nephew, her stepson.
But no, her scream was all terror, with a razor lace of rage.
Wellington Ashbury grabbed Claire by the shoulders and spun her around to face him.
“It was supposed to be you.” Here was the grief missing in Audrey’s scream, leaking out of the man’s eyes.
He looked so old, suddenly, so tired. “I did everything I could so it wouldn’t be him, it was supposed to be you. ”
The other congregants were long gone, leaving crushed wineglasses and white coats scattered on the green of the manicured grass.
Blood made muddy puddles where some of the skins had been battered open by thrashing tentacles.
The god on the cliff grew ever larger, limbs still stretched into the air.
The remaining skins howled, reaching, grasping, trying to touch it.
The guards who’d stood next to the pen with Tasers had dropped them and fled; Patrick and Greg had taken their place, trying to keep the sagging masses of madness and flesh in check.
Patrick’s gun lay forgotten on the ground.