2. #3
As she watched one of the skins close a gaping mouth over Patrick’s ear, teeth ripping through his glasses and cartilage at once, Claire wondered if Ash had something to do with this.
If he’d reached into the skins’ minds, or what was left of them, and directed them to eat his family.
She guessed that’s what he’d meant when he said he wanted it to end—the god, what it had done, but also what it had made of them.
He wanted all of it to end, and for the Ashburys to end, too.
The skin moved on to the rest of Patrick’s face, his body flopping mindlessly. Claire turned away.
Behind her, Wellington Ashbury V watched the carnage through wide, unblinking eyes. He took one step back, then another, glass from the shattered vases crunching beneath his classy dress shoes.
When he finally plummeted over the cliff, Claire wasn’t sure if it was on purpose, or just because he wasn’t paying attention.
She was almost sad about it as she watched him fall, the sand below clouding when he hit. The skins were so hungry.
At the edge of the bloodbath, curiously untouched, stood Theo and Dierdre.
Both of them looked like crash victims, pale and still, shock making them into wax figures of themselves.
But Claire could track Dierdre’s eyes to where the skins were eating what was left of Patrick—a faceless mass of quivering muscle now, occasionally jerking from his brain’s last electrical firing, but dead for all intents and purposes. And Dierdre’s lip was curling up.
Theo’s wasn’t. He looked like he was ready to cry.
Claire looked to Ash, towering and tentacle wreathed, a stone-faced god bringing his judgment.
Part of her wanted to try to save him, still. He’d conquered the god and become this. It didn’t feel like a victory.
But he’d done it for her. Partly. The least she could do was escape, after all that.
“Come on!” Her knees were wobbly when she pushed up from the ground; Claire lurched away from the cliff, toward where Dierdre and Theo stood. “We have to go!”
It took them a moment to rouse, both frozen as they watched the skins rip through the two Ashbury brothers left, like people watching feeding time at the zoo.
But when Claire’s hand closed over Theo’s arm, he broke into a run and headed for the garage, making a low keening noise in his throat that never quite resolved into a scream.
Dierdre took longer. Her body swayed back and forth, eyes fixed on the skins.
Patrick was a bloody lump of tissue; they’d moved on to Greg now and were realizing that the two brothers wouldn’t be enough for all of them.
Still, none of the skins looked to Dierdre or Theo or Claire, instead fighting each other over scraps of the true Ashburys.
With a wrench, a skin ripped Greg’s arm from its socket.
A gout of blood splashed over Dierdre’s open-toed heels, matching the color of her pedicure. She didn’t even flinch.
“Dierdre.” Claire spoke to her like she’d address a frightened child, though most of her attention stayed on Ash, still towering at the edge of the cliff on his throne of tentacles. Still watching her with those lighthouse eyes. “Dierdre, we need to leave now, OK?”
“Why?” Dierdre laughed, a choked chuckle that gurgled in her throat and died before it really made it out of her mouth. “What’s left?”
This would be the end of Ashbury Marinography.
At least the end of the Ashburys reaping any benefits from it.
The employees had left, fleeing when the ceremony took its turn; surely the executives were already figuring out how to spin this, how to fix it, whom to pay to make sure that nothing happening here was ever truly investigated.
“The company will take care of you.” Claire had no idea if that was true; Theo and Dierdre would be loose ends that needed tying up. Or trimming.
“They will one way or another,” Dierdre murmured, as if reading Claire’s mind.
The color of her eyes slowly changed, the unnatural blue fading away to a perfectly normal hazel as Dierdre looked toward Ash on the cliffside.
The Ashburys’ bargain was moot now, and the signs of it had no need to linger.
“They’ll have a harder time taking care of that. ”
Ash wasn’t watching them. The skins, full of flesh and warm blood, left the remains of Greg and Patrick on the rock and slowly approached their god.
Ash didn’t speak, but he met the eyes of every skin that came up to him—those that still had eyes—and placed a hand on each one’s gore-caked forehead.
It reminded Claire of the few church services she’d seen on early-morning TV, priests blessing their penitents.
The purr of a motor, the scrape of rubber on asphalt.
A sleek black Aston Martin careened around the half-circle drive, coming to a screeching halt in front of the skins’ defunct prison.
“Get in!” Theo yelled as the window rolled down.
“The causeway isn’t there, but if they left any of the yachts, we can take one to the mainland! ”
His eyes were brown, and though he looked pale and nauseous, there was a vitality about him Claire hadn’t seen before.
As she opened the back door, Claire wondered briefly if it would be safe to cross the sea, but the thing to be afraid of was in Ash, now. And she was nearly certain that he wouldn’t let the ocean hurt her again.
Nearly.
Dierdre slipped off her stilettos and picked her way over the leftovers of her husband and brother-in-law to the car on bloodstained feet. She ducked into the back seat as smoothly as a celebrity into a waiting limo, stepping past Claire without any acknowledgment.
Claire paused a moment, door held open. She looked over her shoulder, to what Ash had become.
The lighthouse eyes were on her, bathing her in their eerie blue glow. She didn’t raise her voice as she spoke, but she knew he could hear her, the impression of her words traveling through the air like echolocation. “What happens to you now?”
“Not sure.” He didn’t raise his voice, either, but she heard it. “Something new.”
The tentacles behind him were shrinking, slowly, the places where his skin had split knitting back together.
Up above, the sky bled from indigo back to cornflower, beginning to look more like the afternoon it should be instead of the dead of night.
The sun speared through the clouds, a ray of light burnishing his golden hair.
Claire raised her hand.
Ash did, too. The places between his fingers were webbed.