How did that happen? Sophie wondered even as it did.
Partly, she supposed, she’d been distracted by the pain in her leg, which she’d remembered from the last go-round as searing almost beyond imagining, and which turned out to be worse. Knowing from experience that both she and the leg would survive did nothing to lessen the anguish.
Partly because of her wounded state and the distance from cliff top to cave mouth, she’d had to concentrate harder than usual to assert influence over Princess Sock Puppet down there, who’d proven a challenge to control even when they’d been face-to-face. How that girl would squirm.
Partly the Little Orphan That Could had gotten a little too good at going silent, making no sound and leaving no trace as she ghosted through everyone else’s world.
Mostly, though, Sophie had let herself get mesmerized just sitting here atop this cliff, watching Ju snare Eddie. The second that girl had looked up and spotted Sophie, she’d swayed to her feet and danced away from Sock Puppet’s side, gliding across those rocks bathed in moonlight, wreathed in sea spray. It was the joy in her movements—the dancing and swaying as much as the way Eddie fell into her gaze and went quiet—that drove home the revelation at last:
That girl is like me.
Ju is like me.
Rather than providing clarity, the discovery confused Sophie more. Ju was like her when? Before the Whistler? Or now?
Or both?
Whatever the cause, Sophie somehow neither saw nor heard Rebecca coming until the handle of the ax slammed straight into the small of her back, driving her half off her wounded leg and very nearly over the cliff before her face smashed into earth.
* * *
For Trudi, the moment was weirdly familiar, almost nostalgic. It reminded her of leaping up from behind banisters at Halfmoon House, right into the teeth of Amanda’s scowl or Danni’s taunts, and scurrying for her room.
One second, she’d been crouched on the rocks, unable to move or even think about moving, really. She’d been holding her breath, trying to render herself so small that both the green-eyed girl by her side and the Sophie thing up on the cliff might forget she was there. Relax their hold, or whatever the hell it was they were doing.
And the next—as Rebecca bludgeoned Sophie into the ground and Ju whirled to look—Trudi seemed to pop up behind her own eyes, lock back into place inside her skull and skin. Five feet away, twitching like a butterfly pinned to the air, Ju stared up at Rebecca, then over her shoulder toward Eddie, then back again. Eddie, too, had surfaced—Trudi had literally seen that happen—and now looked frantically toward Trudi.
Then Ju had him again, or else he saw her coming and ducked for cover. Certainly, he went still once more. Vanished into himself.
As Ju swept past, Trudi felt that gaze brush over her like the skirt of a fire. Sparking and dangerous, yes, but too cursory to catch her, this time. Instinctively, Trudi tensed to hurl herself at the girl, knock her over, rip out that red hair in clumps. Do something.
Do it now! she was screaming inside her own head. Drive her over the edge into the sea. Even if you have to go with her.
But she didn’t move. Somehow, faster than her consciousness could track, her brain was making calculations, chattering to itself. The math didn’t add up. Not yet. Sophie on her own was still way too much for Rebecca and Eddie. And even if Trudi survived the fall, somehow drowned Ju in the Strait and got free and crawled back onto land—assuming there was land to crawl onto down there—she’d never make it back up here in time.
What she did instead, as she watched Ju’s arms slide under Eddie’s shoulders, was the hardest, most desperate thing she’d ever done or even considered doing.
But she did it.
* * *
Swinging the ax had almost knocked Rebecca over, which would have been disastrous even if she’d somehow managed not to land on the blade, which she’d used as a handle, striking Sophie with the wooden part instead.
Why had she done that?
Somehow, scrambling, she stayed on her feet, got centered, leapt sideways to stand straddle-legged next to but not quite over Sophie with the ax flipped right side up, blade end this time.
Swing! she thought as her muscles tensed all on their own. Now, while she’s down. Last chance.
Sophie rolled over, stared up. There were tears in those wild-animal eyes. Pain tears, Rebecca understood even as she eluded Sophie’s gaze. The only kind the thing beneath her could or would ever cry, now.
Swing!
“So this is you, then?” Sophie said, her meaning clear, her tone so closely approximating a human one. Half knowing, half taunting.
And maybe sad? Wild-animal sad?
Oh God, swing.
“Rebecca the ax murderer,” Sophie continued. “Sophie-smasher, for the second time. Killer of the defenseless.”
Don’t answer, don’t look, don’t engage, Rebecca thought, even as she heard herself snort. “Defenseless.”
“Too much?” Sophie grinned. “Overplaying it, am I?”
Grinning. The thing was actually grinning.
That helped, watching it grin while thinking about Kaylene’s hair on the stair. Kaylene’s striped foot with her shoe dangling off it. A snap sounded in Rebecca’s ears. At first she didn’t recognize it, didn’t even realize it was a memory.
But it was. That was the sound of Danni’s back breaking over the Whistler’s knee in the Halfmoon Lake woods. Jack and Marlene already dead by then. Amanda about to be.
And still, Sophie kept talking. “Fine. How about this? Leaving aside the issue of whether I actually am defenseless—instead of just, let’s see, one-legged, effectively one-eyed for the moment, beat to hell by every implement in Jess’s fucking house, and seriously pissed—I’m just lying here. I’m not attacking you. I was actually running away from you. And yet you’re about to kill me. Again. So. I say again: Rebecca, meet yourself. Ax murderer. Killer.”
“I have no choice,” Rebecca snapped. Tears boiled from her own eyes. For Kaylene, Amanda, Jack, Marlene. For Jess’s daughter, Natalie, whom Rebecca had never met, and Jess, who wasn’t even dead but would rather have been. For Danni, who had barely even gotten to live. For her parents, who’d had nothing to do with this, and who’d been gone twenty years now. Did she really still have tears left for them?
Propping up on her elbows, Sophie dropped the grin. “Here’s the one thing today’s events make definitively clear: that’s you. But it isn’t me.”
A whirl of thoughts almost swept Rebecca off her feet and over the cliff. This one had more memories in it, thousands of them, plus lightning flashes of feeling, bursts of confusion. The ax handle seemed to thicken in her fists, gain mass, and she nearly dropped it. But she didn’t. She held still until her head cleared to the extent that it ever did or would.
“Maybe so,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
Sophie stayed on her elbows, trying to catch Rebecca’s gaze. Or maybe just looking. “Not as sorry as I’m about to be, apparently.”
She really did seem sorry, or sound that way. Possibly, she had just understood what Rebecca had already realized. Had known all along: Rebecca really was going to do it.
“I’m sorry. Sophie.”
Flinging the ax overhead, closing her eyes but then forcing them open, Rebecca coiled her whole body into the swing. The ax had just reached its apex when a new voice trilled up from below and stopped her.
“Hello?” it said. “Yoo-hoo.”
Ax still raised and trembling, Rebecca edged one step closer to the cliff and looked.
On the ledge near the cave mouth down there, arms locked as rigidly to her sides as if she’d been chained, Trudi knelt, staring straight out over the water at nothing. Five steps to her right, a wispy, red-haired, green-eyed girl Rebecca had never seen stood right at the edge of the rocks, dangling a motionless Eddie by his elbows over empty air, the black and roiling sea below.
“Hi,” the girl said. “I’m Ju.”
* * *
Not for one second, as Rebecca rolled into her swing, did Sophie consider closing her eyes. The last time her own death had come flying at her face, she’d been too distracted to process or enjoy it. She’d had the Whistler’s brains in her teeth and his crazy keening in her ears.
This time, she wanted to see what it looked and sounded like.
Which turned out to be the starry night sky, wind in grass, and a song surfacing pointlessly in her ears. Some old Natalie fave, nothing Sophie had really loved except when Natalie sang it. “Take Me to the River.” How like herself, really, not even to hear her own music at the end.
She was mouthing words, gulping wind, swallowing the sky for a good few seconds before she realized she was scared. For real. And that the blow hadn’t fallen.
A voice—not Rebecca’s, not Natalie’s, not her own—repeated itself on the breeze.
“Hello?”
Slowly—painfully—Sophie pushed to a sitting position. Rebecca was looking over the cliff. Her killing mask had slipped. The Little Orphan That Could and Did suddenly looked dangerously orphanish again.
Dangerous for the Little Orphan, that is.
Swiveling carefully so as not to remind Rebecca that Sophie was there, she took in the tableau: Princess Sock Puppet on her knees, looking either dazed or hypnotized; Ju with her red hair dark and rippling as a bloodstream; and Natalie’s boy—Eddie—in Ju’s arms, dangling motionless over the ocean.
“Hi, Ju,” she called, before she was sure she had anything to say. “Maybe you should—”
“Hi, Sophie!” the girl chirped, bobbing up and down once, starting to wave before remembering she was holding something. “Come down!” More than anything, she sounded like a middle-school girl welcoming guests to her first slumber party. As though Sophie were something brand-new in her life. As new as Ju was in Sophie’s.
“Hmm,” Sophie said, checking Rebecca, who had recovered a little. Not enough to try murdering again yet, but Sophie could definitely see thinking happening. She also took note of her own leg, which was yawning open, dangling from itself on wispy red threads. It throbbed plenty, but not in a productive, sew-stuff-together sort of way. Not yet.
“Might be better if you came up, kiddo,” she called.
Rebecca stirred, looking again as though she might say or do something. But all she actually accomplished was lowering the ax. An expression composed of half a dozen expressions misted over her face: total exhaustion, bewilderment, horror, grief. Murderous rage.
And relief? Maybe? Just a little? That the decision had been taken out of her hands, at least temporarily …
Yep, Sophie thought, without time or desire to analyze the thought. We could have been friends, you and me.
Ju was coming. She had the boy in front, her hands on his shoulders so she could steer him. Princess Sock Puppet trailed listlessly behind. Again, it occurred to Sophie to wonder who was causing that, but she had too many other, more pressing concerns to pay that much mind. The procession clambered up the rocks all in a line as though doing a bunny hop. Badly, in slow motion.
Rebecca spoke, sounding submerged. “What are you thinking to do, here, Sophie?”
Sophie’s smile was instantaneous, instinctive. But her shrug was for fun. “This was your plan. And apparently hers.” She nodded toward Ju. “You guys tell me.”
“Don’t hurt him.”
“Me? Once again, you seem unclear about who’s hurt—”
“Don’t let her hurt him. Or Trudi. Please, Sophie.” As though hearing herself beg was too much, Rebecca raised the ax again. Not to strike, just to hold in front of her chest.
Sophie watched her do that. Watched those thousand feelings tumble across and then off her face, leaving her as blank as Sophie suspected she always looked, now, and almost always felt.
She didn’t feel blank right this second, though. That was something.
Ju was barely twenty feet below, now, still leading Princess Sock Puppet and steering Eddie by the shoulders. Natalie’s Eddie, whom Sophie had held in her arms almost as often as she’d held her own son.
Had held more than her own son, if the past few weeks counted.
“What does that girl want?” Rebecca murmured.
“Hmm,” Sophie said, wincing at another whiplash of pain from her leg. “I think maybe she wants to trade.”
“What? For you?”
“Amazing, some people’s tastes, huh?”
“I think you’re wrong. I think she wants to kill us all. With your help.”
Sophie considered that, held her leg. Eventually, she nodded. “One of the two.”
Ju climbed nearer, and Rebecca stepped back. The step brought her closer. One good lunge, now …
Just in time—or not really in time, but Sophie hadn’t seized the opportunity—Rebecca seemed to realize where she was. Hopping sideways, she swung the ax out wide without quite raising it. Then she stood still, gnashing her jaws together. “Jesus Christ. It’s like the fucking Pig War.”
This time, laughter positively exploded from Sophie’s mouth. It wasn’t planned or weighted with meaning. She just laughed.
“Excuse me?”
“The … Trudi learned about it in school. There were English soldiers and American farmers here. Someone on one side killed one of the other side’s pigs. Then they had a war about it. Or no, they didn’t. I don’t…” She trailed off, fixated on the little group approaching.
First the boy, then Ju’s grinning face appeared over the lip of the rocks. Sophie smiled once at Ju, then turned her smile on Rebecca. This time, her laugh was her new, post-Whistler one. Real enough, and with her old laugh in it, and yet …
“In that case,” she said, “who’s the pig?”
* * *
The whole time, watching the redhead and Eddie and Trudi climb, Rebecca cast around inside her own head for an idea. One more trick or ploy, a last something to keep at least some of them alive. Eddie and Trudi, especially. She’d have been happy enough to sacrifice herself, if she had to. She had almost come around to the idea that she might, and that doing so might indeed do some good.
But not enough good.
She could drive her ax through Sophie’s skull right now. Possibly. Or if she timed the move just right, she could fling herself at this Ju right as the girl reached the top of the cliff, driving her backward. If she were unspeakably lucky, Ju’s hands would come off Eddie’s shoulders before she fell.
Rebecca half believed she could accomplish one of those things, but not both. That left her with one last impossible decision to make: attack the monster she knew? Or go for the girl she didn’t know at all, who might not even be a monster but was clearly coming into her formidable own, step by inexorable step.
Eddie had clambered up onto the grass now on his hands and knees. He clearly saw Rebecca, but nothing in his sweet, silvery eyes stirred. He might as well have been sleepwalking. The girl’s hands had slipped from his shoulders to his waist as she tried to step up from the path using only her legs. Her eyes kept dancing back and forth between the boy, Sophie, and Rebecca, though Rebecca glanced away whenever that gaze flicked toward her, just in case.
Behind the girl, Trudi’s face appeared. Unlike Eddie’s, her eyes went straight to Rebecca’s. The instant that happened, Rebecca understood: not only was Trudi still present in her own head, but she was much closer to control of herself than either Sophie or the new girl imagined.
That was enough. It had to be.
Faster than she’d imagined possible—faster than the conscious command to do it—Rebecca whirled on Sophie and flung up the ax. Even as she swung, she saw (or felt) Trudi lunge, driving the red-haired girl face-first into the rocks at the edge of the path, knocking Eddie free. He tumbled away into the grass as Rebecca’s blade whistled down and caught grass, earth, the back of Sophie’s left hand. The blade stuck, the force of the swing almost pitching Rebecca onto it again. She staggered toward Sophie, who’d squirmed sideways with her mouth open and snarling and her free hand snaking out, snatching Rebecca’s ankle and yanking. Rebecca felt her feet go, the ground flying from her. She landed on her butt and kicked with all her might, catching Sophie flush in her wide-open mouth. Teeth exploded, and spit and blood flew. Sophie snarl-shrieked, and Rebecca threw herself sidelong, yanking the ax with her. It came out of Sophie’s skin with a sucking smack as Rebecca rolled away into the grass and pushed upright.
What she saw made her shout, sob-laugh, and burst into tears.
Trudi and Eddie were sprinting free over the grass into the woods, with the wind at their backs and the night closing around them.
Gone. Free.
Shoving to her feet, bracing for the attack she knew was coming, Rebecca turned.
The girl lay where Trudi had slammed her, facedown with her hair fanning across the rocks. Like Kaylene’s across the stair, Rebecca thought, and swung the ax uselessly at nothing before getting herself still again.
The girl was breathing but otherwise motionless.
The girl was breathing.
Rebecca had time to process that because, incredibly, Sophie wasn’t coming for her. She wasn’t even looking at Rebecca, or at Ju either. Instead, she’d curled around her wounded hand. As Rebecca watched, Sophie whimpered, drew the hand to her face. Red frothed at the edges of her lips, poured down the sides of the hand while Sophie pressed it to her lips. It was as though she were drinking herself. Occasional shards of white—which could have been splintered teeth or bits of shattered knuckle—rode the red rivulets, glinting as they disappeared into the grass.
Don’t wait! Rebecca heard herself scream once more inside her head. But she didn’t lift the ax again until Sophie finally looked up. The hatred in those eyes positively glinted in the mistless moonlight. Blood foamed along the ridge of her mouth. That should have made killing her easier, was like a giant blinking neon sign in the middle of Sophie’s face screaming, Monster. Monster.
Except it made her look more like a clown.
“You know I can’t leave you be,” Rebecca said. She hadn’t meant to speak at all, was already edging forward.
Sophie watched her come. For a moment, Rebecca thought that really was all the monster was going to do: burn her eyes and those red clown lips into Rebecca’s memory and brand her with them. So be it.
Then Sophie shrugged. “You’re going to kill her, too, then? That girl?”
Rebecca made herself keep moving. If she turned, looked at Ju, even let herself think … and yet here was her own mouth betraying her again. “Who is she?”
“Search me. She just showed up. I figured she was one of yours, at first.”
“Yeah, well, she isn’t.”
“No,” Sophie said, through bubbles of her own blood. “She isn’t. But I’ll tell you this. She’s going to need—”
“She’s not going to need anything,” Rebecca whispered. Made herself say it aloud. And stopped moving. One half-step and a quick, hard swing from ending this once and for all, she stopped for the last time.
“Hey. Rebecca. Isn’t there some kind of three-strikes rule? Even with the death penalty? You’ve tried to kill me three fucking times. Don’t I get to go free now?”
“Twice,” said Rebecca.
“Three times. With the shovel in New Hampshire, at Jess’s house a little while ago, and just now with the ax.”
“I didn’t mean to kill you in New Hampshire. And I wasn’t the one killing you at Jess’s house, either. Not … on purpose. So, actually, one time. This time.”
“Objection, Your Honor. Technicalities.”
Rebecca was no longer listening. She couldn’t allow herself one instant more. Any second, that girl would stir and open those green eyes, or Sophie would strike, and then it would be too late and not just for Rebecca. There really wasn’t any choice. She raised the ax.
As if sensing the moment, Sophie opened her mouth. Then she closed it again, glancing over the cliff at the light on the Strait. When she did speak, her voice had a new note in it. To Rebecca’s horror, it sounded awfully close to respect. “You really are going to kill the girl, too.”
“Jess would.”
“Oh, yeah. Jess would.”
Right as Rebecca swung, Sophie smiled. It was a smile Rebecca had seen only on this woman’s face. Neither Kaylene nor Joel, certainly not Trudi or Amanda or Jess had ever unleashed a smile that bright. It was the grin of the girl in that picture Jess still kept in her bedside drawer, the one of Sophie and Natalie high-stepping out of waves off the South Carolina coast, fully dressed, with the world streaming off them.
So alive.
“Stop it,” Rebecca hissed, as the last five years seemed to burst in her mouth and fill it with ashes. She could taste every unimaginable thing she’d done. Everyone she’d lost.
“Stop what?” Sophie said, all innocence and flashing teeth and wattage.
She knows, Rebecca thought. She’s doing it on purpose.
“Living,” Rebecca said.
She wouldn’t have dreamed it possible that that smile could go wider, flash brighter. But it did.
“Make me,” Sophie said.