Jess was startled by the speed of her reaction. Apparently, all she’d really done these past five years was wait. Everything else—opening her shop in the mornings and lingering at the window to wait for the sun, creating the Stockade, weaving cocoons of near-normalcy around Eddie, Rebecca, Kaylene, Trudi, and even Joel, settling into a sort of playacting marriage with Benny so threaded with actual feeling that even she sometimes mistook it for real—felt dreamed, now. All this time she’d believed she was moving on, grieving, recovering. But in reality, she’d just laid herself flat in the blue rye grass like a rusted trap. She’d thought she was still Jess, but was really only springs and teeth.
Even as she swept knives into her hands and leapt at the thing swarming over Rebecca at the base of the steps, Jess marveled at her own readiness, which in truth was closer to outright enthusiasm.
In truth, she couldn’t wait to fight.
And die.
Yes. That, too.
Midair, knives plunging down, she realized that she’d been leaning over this particular abyss since the moment she’d stared, for the last time, into her daughter’s living eyes. The moment Natalie murmured “Mom” through her tears, by which she’d meant yes, and given Jess permission to pull the trigger.
Commanded her to, really.
The monster’s arms swallowed her. They were horribly cold, slick, so much stronger than seemed possible, the constriction instantaneous even as Jess stabbed, the crack of bones audible even over the screaming around her. Somehow, with her vertebrae bulging and her shoulders popping free of their joints, Jess got at least one knife raised again, not enough to plunge, just enough to shove it deeper into one of the holes she’d made in the monster’s ribs.
That was the moment Jess understood how useless this fight was.
The creature who’d come for them in Virginia and killed Sophie’s Roo … the Whistler in the woods … those had been monsters, sure enough. But this thing was a rogue wave. A gale tearing back and forth across the Earth forever, sweeping away everything it touched.
As consciousness flickered, as Benny flailed uselessly into the fray to try to free Rebecca and Joel lunged in with his rake, Jess experienced one last surprising surge of feeling. Not fury, not hope—obviously—not even sadness.
No. More than anything else, she was disappointed. In herself. As it turned out, she’d made the coward’s choice after all: she’d chosen fighting and dying. And she’d done that precisely because fighting and dying were so much easier than staying. Grieving. Loving. Functioning.
Parenting.
* * *
It took the sting of yet another knife in her back to awaken Aunt Sally to revelation. As it seized her, she almost burst out laughing, half considered holding up a hand and telling the Little Fighter on the floor and the dervish with the knives to hold up just a second, just so Sally could properly appreciate the experience. Feel the wonder.
She’d never actually been in a fight!
Was that true? How could that be true?
But it was, and she knew it. Burning the rest of her monsters alive … that had been a cleansing, an act of volition and participation in her own fate.
Hardly a fight, though.
If she were honest, she’d hadn’t even done much killing, all things considered. Given her hungers and the length of her life and all. She’d had Caribou and her monsters to bring her edibles. Platters of flesh and beautiful bones. In the wandering days before Caribou or Mother, before her monsters … she’d killed then, of course, and often. But nothing she’d killed had so much as raised its voice, let alone a fist. They’d simply bowed and snapped before her like grass.
She’d been so, so many things: life-ender and then both life-giver and life-ender to her monsters; sister to Mother, who’d abandoned her in the end and died alone; lover, sometimes, though without any particular partner or any actual love; creator of a whole riverside world in the Delta where her creations hunted and danced; inventor of Policy; judge of all who came before her; avenger; God.
Victim. Yes. Hard as it was to remember, now, she had most certainly been that.
Devourer of everything.
Destroyer.
And now … bereft of monsters, and having murdered Caribou for the second—no, third—time, if one counted the night she’d created him … and with these gnat-people flying everywhere around her and wielding knives, so consumed by whatever drove them that they didn’t have the sense to curl up and yield to the inevitable … with all the Earth and whatever meager bounties it offered spread before her … Aunt Sally discovered, to her amazement, that she still had sensations to discover.
The complete absence of Hunger, for one thing. In all the years she’d lived—in either of her lives—she couldn’t remember ever feeling less hungry than she did right now.
And something else. Something even more primal and harder to name. She hadn’t come to this house planning to do damage, certainly not to kill.
She’d come to find Ju. A totally different sort of hunting.
Was Ju the reason for the absence of Hunger, too?
For one moment, realizing that, Aunt Sally went still while the dervish-woman poked her in the back with her knife a few more times.
Ju. The one creature alive that Sally would never devour or allow to be devoured. The one creature she’d ever met who was actually worth savoring instead. Pale Ju of the witchy eyes. A person to savor and save. No one and nothing to devour or allow to be devoured.
Which made Aunt Sally … a mom?
With a single convulsion of her arms, Aunt Sally dislocated both of the dervish’s shoulders and flung her aside, flashed out a hand and caught the neck of the man with the rake and ripped a hole in his throat.
Her first fight!
As she dropped down on the Little Fighter, simultaneously catching the flailing little hairy man in both hands and snapping one of his arms as though harvesting corn, she wondered if she’d be any good.
* * *
Yet again, Rebecca thought as that horrible weight drove her seemingly straight through the floor and the hatred radiating off this new and even more terrible monster flooded her nostrils and mouth. I am reduced to watching. Story of my life.
Mercifully, she supposed, her head still hadn’t cleared from the plummet down the stairs. Stars whirled in her eyes, so that the flying faces of people she lived with and loved seemed to wink in her own firmament. Comets arcing past and away. Joel hanging frozen with his rake in his hands like a constellation in the instant before the monster hurled him across the room. Benny’s white whiskers seeming to fly off him as he tumbled backward and collapsed into himself. Benny-supernova.
From somewhere far away—on the other side of the sky, of the cavernous thing engulfing her—Rebecca heard a pop, then a scream. She couldn’t make sense of either until Jess staggered back into the periphery of her vision, one arm dead at her side. The other, which she must have yanked back into its socket somehow, raised the butcher knife. One last time, Rebecca watched Jess’s face appear over the monster’s back like a moon. Bright and savage moon. Jess-rise.
The knife slashed down. Rebecca forced herself into motion, did some flailing for form’s sake. For Jess’s sake, really, because Jess had to see the knife was doing no good, that nothing anymore could do any good, and yet she kept driving the blade up and in, up and in, her mouth twisted and eyes screwed to slits. Remote as she could be, Jess was no moon, never had been. She was a pumping piston of fury and grief, desperation and love.
My favorite person, Rebecca thought as the monster gashed her sides, as blood bubbled out of her ribs. Person I most wished I could have been and least wanted to be.
We are such ridiculous, tangled, strangling things.
She watched Jess’s knife pump, pass uselessly through, as though Jess were stabbing water. One last time—for Jess, and also Trudi, wherever she was, and for Eddie, Amanda and Danni, Marlene and Jack, Kaylene and yes, fucking goddamnit, for herself—Rebecca fought free of her thoughts. She actually felt herself rise from her own roiling insides. I am the Lady in the Lake, she thought, fists rising to do who even knew what, eyes closing because what use was seeing, now? Also Excalibur. Lady of Halfmoon Lake, with the world cascading through her.
She opened her eyes just in time to see it happen.
Directly overhead, above Jess’s stabbing arm, the newcomer appeared. Emilia. Rebecca had forgotten she was even in the house. And she couldn’t even begin to imagine where Emilia had found the ax.
A song popped into Rebecca’s head. More accurately, a song title, stuttered out in that crazy Internet-ghost voice, the one from Joel’s favorite-ever show. The voice that had turned out to be ghost, the stitched-together ramblings of Jess’s dead daughter. “Be Care-Care-Careful … with THAT Ax … Eugene.”
In a concussed daze, but with her senses returning and her vision clearing, Rebecca watched Emilia’s dark hair flying as she swung the ax high. She moved like she didn’t need to be careful, had used an ax before. Right at the apex of the swing, Rebecca caught a glimpse of her wide-open eyes, which looked drained of color, a fainter black than they should have been, than they always must have been. Drained of Emilia, maybe. Filled, instead, with the murmurings of the monster that had come for her. Her Invisible Man.
Only then did Rebecca wonder whom, exactly, Emilia planned to kill.