Val ignored Nightingale and the girl clinging to his back.
Instead, she watched the girl running after them.
This second girl wore a red parka, and though she ran alongside the crowd of gaping, shouting shoppers, she somehow existed apart from them. There was a sharp shine to her pink cheeks. The fragility of her fearsome, fearful girl-body made Val’s chest ache, and electrified the fine hairs on the back of Val’s neck, and awoke Val’s deep-gut appetite that belonged to herself, a little, but mostly belonged to him.
A force pulled at Val’s flat belly. She took a step against her will.
He had noticed. He’d sensed the girl, and Val didn’t want to follow her, but he wanted her to, and that was that.
Or was it?
Was it really?
Val, feeling bold, decided to test him. Her grandmother had warned her against defying him too often, but she had also warned Val against never defying him.
Don’t lose yourself to him, my darling one, Sylvia Mortimer had said. Not all of you.
Keep a morsel for yourself.
Val closed her eyes, remembering her grandmother’s words: That’s what the first of us said—your great-great-great-grandmother Deirdre. She told her daughter, and so on, until my mother told me, and I told Lucy, and now I’m telling you, because your mother . . . Well. She’s harder than the rest of us. She’s had to become that way, because it’s hurt her more than anyone else. He’s hurt her more than anyone else, and now there’s nothing left of my daughter but a brittle shell.
So just listen to me, Valerie: keep a morsel for yourself. Whatever happens, hold that scrap tight.
A bramble took root in Val’s stubborn feet. Maybe if she stood there long enough, briar tangles would wrap her up within an enchanted wall, and the wall would stand guard around the sleeping girl until the prince came and burned everything down.
That’s how the story went, right?
Go.
Val’s spine snapped to attention, all hungry teeth and whetted knives and manacled rows of bones. Her mouth dropped open and tears sprang to her eyes. He hardly ever spoke to her directly. Not in parking lots. Not under the open sky.
She’d pay for her hesitation, later, in the stones.
Val ran, sprinting ahead of the crowd, and she looked good doing it, in her second-skin yoga pants, her blond hair piled on top of her head. Of course she looked good, everyone knew it—her most of all. She’d spent a lifetime maneuvering all manner of things to make it so.
Plus, good genes. She’d been blessed with stellar DNA.
“Make it stop!”
The girl on the ground—Marion was her name—screamed the words over and over, thrashing against the rocks. She gripped her hair, her head, she wept and wailed.
Zoey Harlow swore, jumped to her feet, and backed away.
For once in her life, Val agreed with the little shit.
“Marion?” Parka Girl, the girl he wanted, rushed to Marion, her pale face gone ghostly. Her name was Charlotte Althouse, and she was the daughter of the new housekeeper, and Val wanted to throw back her head and laugh because this situation was unfolding so perfectly it almost couldn’t be believed.
“What’s happening?” Charlotte cried. She reached for Marion, but Marion slapped her hand away.
A siren’s wail. Chief Harlow to the rescue, straddling Marion and pinning her arms to the dirt in a way that made Val’s mouth fill with bile and her limbs go hot-cold. She didn’t like seeing people trapped. Not strangers, not friends, not even the hateful boys she slept with.
Valerie Mortimer’s nightmares were of being pressed into a shrinking space that compressed all her disjointed parts into an invisible cage. She endured them every night.
“Marion?” said Chief Harlow, in that booming voice like a deep canyon. “You’re all right. You’re all right, help is coming. Okay?” His eyes flicked up to Zoey. “Did you see what happened?”
“No.” Zoey crossed her arms over her chest and chewed on her thumbnail. Her Afro of soft black curls, recently peppered with bright orange streaks, bobbed slightly in the sea wind. “Came over the hill, Nightingale was gone. She was just lying here.”
People were crowding around, finally having caught up with them. Their sweat sickened Val. All these dirty flesh-bags, acting like they were something, with their horse farms and their tricked-out sedans, their portfolios and their trust funds, when it was her, it was her who had the power here, who knew more than they could ever fathom. How dare they inch up close like they were all in this together?
She whirled around. “Back up,” she ordered, in the voice her mother had taught her—one part sweet, two parts you’d-better-damn-well-listen-to-me. “Give them some air. And put away your phones. Have you all forgotten how to be human beings?”
Her latest conquest, Collin Hawthorne, hovered nearby. He watched her in a sort of stupid half-smiling daze.
Val recognized that awestruck look and imagined how it would transform, were he to stumble upon her in the stones one night. She almost wished he would, even though it would get messy. Just to see him, for that final flash of a second, understand exactly what he’d been sleeping with.
“People!” he called out, mimicking her, which Val found hysterical. “Back up, all right? Let the paramedics work.”
Two paramedics hustled past and gave the weeping, stricken-faced Marion some kind of shot. She relaxed immediately, popped-out veins smoothing themselves back into her neck.
Val saw a shell-shocked woman struggling to get through the onlookers. Recognizing that pale skin and dark hair, Val thought, Ah, and strode forward.
“Move aside,” she commanded. Gently, she took the woman’s arm. “Are you Marion’s mother?”
“Yes,” whispered the woman. No color in her cheeks or lips. Wide eyes trained on her sedated daughter. “I’m . . . I’m Pam.”
“She’ll be all right,” said Val. “We’ve got wonderful doctors on Sawkill, the very best. They’ll help her.” Val squeezed the woman’s hand. Softly now, Val. Kindly. “Please don’t be afraid.”
And as Val passed Mrs. Althouse over to Charlotte, Charlotte’s eyes met Val’s.
Thank you, said Charlotte’s grateful smile.
Val returned the smile—gentle, endlessly compassionate—and even with her sister unconscious on the ground and her mother stunned and frightened, Charlotte seemed to relax a little.
Val’s black heart rolled over on its back and wriggled, because everything was happening as it should.
Goddamn. She was good at this.
She was good at being queen.