In retrospect, it probably hadn’t been wise to kiss Val.
But sweet heavens, the kissing had felt good.
It shouldn’t have felt good; it was supposed to have been a maneuver, a farce. She hadn’t planned on kissing Val, but when the moment had arrived, she had thought, all right, this whole getting-close-to-Val thing couldn’t have been developing more beautifully, could it?
Then Val had melted under her touch, and let out a tiny ragged sigh of relief against Marion’s mouth, and Marion’s whole body had morphed at once into something beastly and divine—nerves pulled tight and legs wobbly as sticks, her brain slip-sliding into a slick, shifting heat she’d only ever before experienced in her most private fantasies.
For a while, Marion had forgotten about her unsettling phone call with Zoey and the fact that Chief Harlow had a secret room of his own. She had forgotten that Charlotte had vanished, that her father was dead, that her mother existed in a half-lit haze of grief. She had forgotten that she was only supposed to be getting close to Val in order to extract information from her.
While kissing Val, Marion had felt, simply and deliciously, like a girl.
Night had fallen on day one of Jane’s disappearance. Marion was alone, freshly kissed, a smile haunting her lips and Val’s touch lingering against the curve of her back.
She wandered across the Kingshead grounds, hoping the moonlight and sea air would cool her skin and shrink her back into a manageable shape. Otherwise she wasn’t sure she would fit back inside the cottage; the stale air in that house wasn’t fit to be breathed by a sprite such as herself. She sparkled with a vitality she hadn’t known she possessed.
She had kicked off her shoes by the back steps and now wandered barefoot through the wet grass—black and clinging, rimmed silver by the moon. The cool earth seeped up through her soles; she swallowed and tasted the dark loamy tang of the forest.
Then she heard a soft snuffling sound, like that of an animal foraging for worms in the damp. She’d reached one of the grazing pastures—vast and rolling, a glossy shivering imitation of the ocean.
Marion froze.
A beast was watching her.
A horse, soot-dark and tremendous. Marion recognized him as one of the prized Mortimer stallions, a world-class stud. He stood on the other side of the pasture fence, his ears pricked, alert. With his front right hoof, he pawed the wet ground, scraping up strips of mud.
“Hello,” she made herself whisper. Calm the beast. Let him know you’re a friend. This horse wasn’t Nightingale, but he reminded Marion of that horrible day nevertheless.
As if in response to her memories, the bone cry roared to life. She sank to the ground in silent despair, hands rising automatically to cover her ears. The high whine rang on, so piercing it carved grooves into her teeth. In the distance came the sharp flutter of beetles’ wings, the cicadas’ droning call. The earth seemed to tremble beneath her bare feet.
The cry was building up from inside the ground, Marion thought. It reached up from the mud and grabbed her bones and shook them until they shrieked.
“What are you trying to tell me?” she muttered. “What do you want?”
A sudden silence fell across the pasture—no birds, no bugs. Just the bone cry, droning on, and a brimming, soundless weight, like the world holding its breath.
From behind Marion, in the trees, a branch snapped. A weight hit the ground. Something heavy dropping from the trees?
Run.
The horse kicked the pasture fence.
Marion’s head snapped up.
He kicked the fence again.
A hot knife plunged into one of Marion’s ears and out the other. She staggered away from the fence, back toward the woods. Maybe if she ran, her feet would pound out the pain. And if she ran fast enough, maybe the bone cry wouldn’t be able to catch her.
The horse reared up, his eyes wild. With his hind legs first, and then with his front, he kicked at the fence like a prisoner bent on escaping his cell, even if he had to smash all his bones to do it.
“Stop,” Marion gasped, blinking hard to rid the fireworks of pain from her eyes. She reached toward the horse, her arm shaking. “Stop, it’s okay! It’s okay!”
But the horse wouldn’t stop, and the fence was splintering. When he let out a shrill cry of fear, Marion saw a light switch on inside Kingshead.
The fence shattered, black wood flying. The horse ran. A jagged piece of destroyed fence scraped up his side as he fled.
And Marion followed.
The bone cry told her to. A physical force accompanied it that night—a searing hand, unseen but unmistakable. It whipped up from the ground like an electrical charge and slapped down between her shoulder blades. It pushed her on, hooked into her bones and tugged, and said, with a slight shake, Go.
She couldn’t possibly keep up with a horse; she was a mere human, and the farthest thing from a runner. But she pumped her legs hard, ignoring the shocks of pain that jolted her knees as her bare feet slammed against the rocky ground. Wet black branches struck her across the face, dragged red lines across her arms.
The horse was tearing through the Kingshead Woods like it was the end-times. Marion kept running after him, though the horse was by now far away, vanished into the trees. Her side cramped, her lungs were twin hives of fire. Whenever her feet hit the ground, energy snapped up to smack her knees. Her legs couldn’t keep up with themselves. Her vision blacked out, tilting. She stumbled over a tree root, out of the woods, and into an out-of-body experience:
She’d reached the northern edge of the island—past Kings-head, past the old Breckenridge farm. She emerged from the trees by Aurora Park, a tiny playground with red swing sets that offered the best view of the northern sea.
It wasn’t possible. She had been running for . . . five minutes, maybe?
And these cliffs, they were miles away from the Kingshead pastures.
Ahead, the Mortimer stallion jumped over a hedge, landed wrong. Marion heard a sickening snap, and yet the horse pushed himself on, gait uneven, favoring one of his legs.
“Wait!” Marion’s voice cracked. She ran across the playground, shoved past the swings and sent them flying. “Stop, please!”
But the horse, if he heard her, had no intention of stopping. Without another sound, without pause, he jumped over the little fence that kept kids from plunging to their deaths and flung himself over the cliffs, into the ocean.
Marion fell to her hands and knees, wrapped her arms around her head. She was a shaking ball on the ground. The bottoms of her feet were burning, and her body was marked by the fingernails of the woods.
“Help me,” she whispered. The bone cry grew louder, rattling her from skull to toes. She tried to shove her thoughts against it, like shutting a door against a battering wind. She shuddered on the cold wet ground as daylight split open the east. The bone cry was thunderous in her ears, and as she braced herself against the ground, she felt a force rise up beneath her like the earth was going to crack in two.
A sharp static force grabbed hold of her. The bone cry’s shrill whine exploded into a ringing, white-hot silence.
Marion opened her eyes.
She was no longer in the mud by the cliffs where the horse had jumped.
She was on a beach, but not a Sawkill beach.
This beach was soft and white. The water lapping at its shore was a rippling amber like pools of heated gold. Overhead, feather-thin clouds streaked a lavender sky. On the distant horizon, chunks of land white and craggy as glaciers hung in the air, capped with glittering structures.
Marion shivered. It was cold in this place. She shifted in the sand, dislodging a fine coating of snow, and looked around.
Detritus littered the beach—wreckage, maybe of boats? Planes? A propeller. Garbage, washed up from the water—a Frisbee, a toy truck, a steering wheel, a helmet.
Piles of clothes.
Piles of bones, charred and heaped.
A whisper came from her left. Marion whipped her head around.
Fat white trees dotted a field of shimmering blue grass. The trees were rural neighbors with long, quiet space between them, their leafless, bony arms reaching crookedly for the sky.
From her right: a low, soft clicking like the tap of tongue against teeth.
Marion cried out, whirled right. Her limbs gave out. Her cheek slammed into the snow-covered sand. Home, screamed her brain, desperate for it. Safe.
The world changed. It darkened and stilled. No more beach, no more whispering grass, no more sky-ice.
She was in her bedroom, in the housekeeper’s cottage, at Kingshead.
Her clothes were drenched with dew and sweat, and her feet throbbed red-hot. She’d scraped them raw, running after the doomed horse.
A moth perched on the carpet in front of her face, watching her shiver. Its feelers inspected the tip of her nose. Sssss, sssss, whispered the quiet flap of its black-eyed wings.
So said the moth: This is only the beginning.