2. #2
Off to the side, Theo and Dierdre stood, pale and silent amid the wreckage of the floral arbor.
“It will be all right, Wellsley.” Audrey had stopped her screaming, though her throat still sounded raw. Her hair was damp and straggling, coming out of its updo. “Better than all right. It wanted an Ashbury, originally. Now It has one. Now It—”
She cut herself off, staring into the unnaturally dark sky and the god towering over them. The god who was changing.
When Claire had briefly worked at a bookstore that was more interested in selling kitschy toys than in books, there’d been a fad for stuffed animals that could be turned inside out to become something different.
That’s what the god looked like—as if it was turning itself inside out, tucking the tentacles away to reveal naked human flesh.
First a leg, then an arm, muscular and yet so, so tiny when compared to the god’s mass.
It shrank as it performed this uncanny inversion, though the tentacles didn’t go away, not fully.
They just became somewhat smaller, a fan of serpentine limbs behind and below the now-revealed torso, slimy with whitish mucus.
The tentacles supported the human pieces, raising them to hover in the sky.
The head was birthed last from the mass, and it shouldn’t have been a surprise, but Claire still felt the air leave her when it was Ash’s.
His eyes had always been a brilliant blue, but now they were electric, like a lighthouse on a stormy shore. Like headlights. They seemed to carve a path through the dark as Ash—what had been Ash—swept his head to one side, then another, rolling out his—its—neck.
“It’s fine.” Audrey chanted it to herself, crouched near Claire, her nails spiked into Claire’s shoulders as if she wanted both to hide behind her and to hurl her off the cliff. “It got a new body, that’s what It wants, It wants an Ashbury, it’s fine, it will be fine…”
Wide gaps opened in Ash’s skin, bloodless, leaking the same clear fluid that had tried to melt Claire down.
His naked body had a green cast, like something lit from within by a sickly underwater glow, the same phosphorescence as the illusion of Elias in the god’s throat.
It made the open places shine, incongruously gentle light.
The tentacles sprouting from his back still waved in the air, not shrinking, not dissipating.
The tentacles below him held him up, as if he was ascending into the darkened sky.
Ash and the god, melded together. Not one disappearing inside of the other, not Ash worn as a skin, but both of them making something entirely new. He’d done what Claire had, refused to be completely dissolved, refused to be a willing sacrifice.
He hadn’t let himself be digested, but he’d let something happen. Claire’s arm tingled.
Slowly, shaking off Audrey’s clawlike nails, Claire stood.
The tentacles pushed Ash up into the air, hovering; he towered above her now, looking down through those lighthouse-bright eyes.
Absurdly, she thought of Spider-Man comics, of Doc Ock, or Ursula in the old Disney cartoon, singing about poor unfortunate souls.
Above his head, the sky had settled to velvet black.
A snarl behind her, like Audrey would claw at her again; something stopped her, a harsh whisper from Mr. Ashbury. “It worked,” he breathed, the words serrated and forceful, as if he couldn’t decide if he should laugh or sob. “It worked, didn’t it?”
Claire didn’t think it had. Not like it was supposed to, anyway. Her hand rose, the one streaked in red from being nearly consumed, coming closer to the salt-slicked skin of the monster before her.
Ash bent toward her, tentacles writhing to bring him nearer to her warmth. When she touched him, brushing the backs of her fingers over his arm, a shock spangled through her, electricity in water.
“This can work,” Mr. Ashbury said, sounding more pulled together.
Coming around to this, a half god and half man who looked like his oldest son.
“It doesn’t look like a person, not really, but It can stay here, and we can hide It.
Treat It like family. Surely that’s close enough, right?
It wanted to be a person, to feel what a person feels. This is the best way—”
The god’s hand cut him off, massive and flecked with iridescent scales, settling gently over Wellington Ashbury V’s mouth and nose.
The Ashbury patriarch struggled beneath his palm, fingers scrabbling at slick flesh, unable to pull it away.
Ash didn’t look at his father, even as he slowly stopped his breathing. Those lighthouse eyes stayed on Claire.
She reached out and touched Ash’s cheek. It was cold beneath her palm, slimy and unpleasant, but she didn’t flinch away. There was an understanding here, a familiarity.
His eyes were bright enough to make her squint, an anglerfish lure, blue instead of yellow. Claire had thought maybe she’d be able to tell if Ash was still in there, just by looking, but the blue light told her nothing. She didn’t know him well enough for that.
And that was why she asked the question anyway, though she wasn’t sure if the creature before her was even capable of answering. “Why?”
A shudder under her hand. The skin next to Ash’s eye split, gill-like, revealing more underwater glow, as if it ran through every part of him. It might’ve been beautiful, in any other context.
“I…” It came out labored, the edges blurred, spoken through lungfuls of sea. “I want it to be over. So I’m finishing it.”
Ash—whatever he was now—straightened to his full skyscraper height, new limbs writhing beneath him, his arm stretching unnaturally long so his palm could stay over his father’s nose and mouth.
The spotlights of his eyes settled on the cowering figure of Wellington Ashbury, still struggling beneath his hand.
Almost like an afterthought, Ash lifted his hand away, and Wellington pulled in a gasp, choking.
Audrey snarled, pushing aside her husband to plant her feet and raise her finger, like someone admonishing a cashier over an expired coupon.
“We gave you a body. Not the one who made you a promise, but it is an Ashbury, and that’s what you wanted in the first place.
If you can’t control it, then you know that isn’t our fault.
” She shook her head. “What would your mother think, Wellington?”
Claire, for one, didn’t think. She just moved, scarred arm tingling, and shoved Audrey Ashbury over the cliff.
She didn’t scream. She was too shocked, Claire guessed.
Her finger was still pointing accusingly as she was swept into the air, the white of her dress dimming in the open black sky.
Her pearls clacked together, one stiletto fell off, but those were the only sounds as Audrey Ashbury fell through the dark and met the rocks on the shore.
Honey, she’d called her, over and over. Like a pet being euthanized for convenience. An inverse of a mother, taking her out of the world rather than bringing her in, swallowed instead of birthed. And who Claire had been had accepted that, wanted it.
She wasn’t that thing anymore. Didn’t know what she was, not yet.
Claire smiled, and her teeth felt sharp.
Mr. Ashbury stared after his wife only a moment, his hands opening and closing, like he’d reach out for her even though the moment was long gone.
He cleared his throat as he turned to the god, wiping all traces of grief from his face.
And there was grief, Claire saw, even if Audrey had been the sister he didn’t really love.
She half expected him to dive for her, send her over the cliff to follow Audrey, but he turned instead to the monstrous form of his son.
“Listen,” Mr. Ashbury said. “Audrey did make an excellent point…”
Ash wasn’t listening. Slowly, with the ponderous movement of a continent beneath the surface, he turned away from the cliff’s edge to face the sprawling expanse of Harrow Point.
Greg and Patrick were still standing by the fence that held the skins, too preoccupied to pay attention to the fact that the Ashbury matriarch was dead.
Greg clutched one of the dropped Tasers, and Patrick had found his gun, though he held it loosely, like he wasn’t planning to shoot it again.
The skins clambered at the entrance of their enclosure, arms and legs gone to tentacle, shoving at the gate. They heaved against it, teeth chattering, and every time they did, the fence scooted a little farther over the dry stone.
Ash raised his hand. One of the ocean-colored tentacles still writhing behind him darted forward, nimble as a finger.
It flicked the lock.
The gate opened; the skins spilled out. Greg and Patrick tried to blast them with the Tasers, the white light of the weapons buzzing against the unnatural dark, but it did nothing.
The skins fell on them, hands clawing, teeth tearing.
Patrick lifted the gun, but a skin ripped off his hand before he could, shoving it in their mouth and crunching down.
Patrick screamed, staring at the spurting stump, clattering in a broken-doll heap to his knees.
Blood spattered the ground as the skins went for the two closest Ashbury brothers, apparently more preoccupied with getting mouthfuls of flesh than with rushing toward their god.
The Ashburys were divinely blessed; to the skins, eating them must be like getting as close to the god as they could, so much better than what they’d been given before the Ascension.
Claire’s side still ached where Lucille had plunged in her hand.
Her stomach still churned when she thought of Mike, such a basic horror compared with what she’d seen since.