Zoey sat on the floor in Grayson’s living room, her father’s book lying on the carpet in front of her. It wasn’t cold enough for a fire, but Grayson had built one for her anyway, in an attempt to stop her shivering. As she watched the flames, her eyes unfocused, she glimpsed in their shifting shapes the illustrated figures in her father’s book, now given new meaning.
It was a ritual.
According to Grayson’s translation, that was the “method of extermination” the Hand of Light had devised.
A ritual soaked in blood. A ritual centered around sacrifice.
Grayson was bustling about in the kitchen, wiping down the counters and dusting out the cabinets. The compulsion to clean was a trait he’d inherited from his father, and something Zoey had always appreciated because she could not have cared less about whether any kitchen cabinets, anywhere, were clean. But, she had to admit, it was nice when they were.
Zoey had just pulled her legs to her chest and rested her chin on her knees when a quiet knock sounded at the front door.
She shot to her feet and hurried to the foyer, Grayson right on her heels with a dishrag flung over his shoulder. A quick glance out the peephole revealed a Marion-shaped person, but night had fallen, and Zoey had to make sure.
“Marion?” she called out. “Prove it’s really you. What’s Grayson’s professor name?”
“Professor Asshole,” Marion said at once, her voice hollow.
Zoey opened the door to reveal Marion standing on the other side, looking dazed and sickly pale, dark hair plastered to her head. It had started, softly, to rain.
“Marion?” Zoey was afraid to touch her.
At the sound of Zoey’s voice, Marion’s empty expression collapsed, and she staggered forward into Zoey’s arms.
And just like that, Zoey knew.
Grayson quietly closed and locked the door, and Marion’s sagging weight forced Zoey to lower them both to the floor as gracefully as she could manage. Leaning back against the door, Zoey held Marion close as she wept on her shirt. She stroked Marion’s hair, tenderly combing out the wet snarls.
Standing a few feet away, Grayson shot Zoey a sad look and then moved to the kitchen to put a kettle on for tea.
When Marion at last whispered against Zoey’s neck, “I thought I might have started to love her,” Zoey felt such a rage building inside her that she could have sworn she felt fire spark from the ends of her hair.
The next time Zoey saw Valerie Mortimer, she would show her not a scrap, not a crumb, of mercy.
After Zoey helped Marion back to the armchair, Marion stared at the fire for a while, drifting in and out of sleep. She lay wrapped up in Zoey’s favorite of the Tighe family’s afghans—an ugly, fluffy thing, orange and white and asparagus green.
The first time Grayson had kissed her, they’d both been tucked under that blanket, watching but not really watching Alien. Normally Zoey would have been pissed at anyone coming between her and Ellen Ripley, but this was Grayson, and his kisses, although they hadn’t exactly set her on fire, had left her so soft and relaxed that she’d hardly noticed when Kane’s chest burst open.
The first time she and Grayson had had sex, they’d lain on top of that same blanket, in the bed of his truck, serenaded by crickets and hugged by dusk—soft violet sky above, soft black grass below.
And it hadn’t been bad. It hadn’t been great, either—at least not for Zoey—and as Grayson held her afterward, catching his breath and drawing circles on her shoulders with his thumb, Zoey had realized she could happily exist for the rest of her life without doing that ever again.
Does that mean I’m broken? she’d wondered, tears pricking her eyes as she stared at the stars coming out to play, winking down at her like they knew things she didn’t.
On the day she split with Grayson, she’d asked him that same question: “Does this mean I’m broken?”
He’d answered immediately: “No. It doesn’t. And I don’t care about the sex, Zo. I want to be with you.”
Zoey, though, had recoiled at the idea. He would grow to resent her. He would break her heart, and she would break his.
She’d backed away from him, shaking her head. “I’m not going to change my mind, Grayson.”
“Zo, please, I’m not asking you to—”
Zoey had left him then, unable to bear the gentle sound of his voice or the sight of his tears.
And that was that. The end of Zoey and Grayson. Grayzo, she’d told him once, would be their ship name.
RIP Grayzo.
So as Zoey sat across the room from Marion, listening to the sounds of Grayson baking cookies in the kitchen (really, was the boy an actual saint?), she couldn’t help staring at that damned ugly blanket and stewing in a state somewhere between regret and not-regret.
“Thanks for letting me cry on you,” came Marion’s soft voice. Curled up under the afghan, propped up by Mrs. Tighe’s ridiculous collection of throw pillows, Marion peeked out from under a wave of black hair and offered Zoey a tired smile.
“Don’t thank me,” Zoey said darkly, which was probably not the best way to begin the conversation. But if Marion wanted a friend who made a point of saying the right things at the right moments, well, she’d have to look elsewhere.
Zoey stood, the quiet panic she’d tamped down for a half hour now finally emerging. “Grayson?”
He poked his head out of the kitchen, saw that Marion was sitting up, fully awake, and deflated. “Right.” He took a breath. “Right.” Then he disappeared, replaced by sounds of running water and dishes being stacked.
Marion clutched the afghan at her throat. “What is it?”
“What’s what?”
“You’re panicking.”
Zoey waved her off. “Only slightly.”
“Zoey.”
Stalking circles around the room, Zoey waited for Grayson to join them. Then she retrieved her father’s book from the end table and squeezed herself into the armchair beside Marion, and opened it to the pages Zoey wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to stop thinking about, not for the rest of her life.
Marion looked at the pages, aghast. “What is all this?”
Zoey glanced up at Grayson.
Grayson took a deep breath and sat on the edge of the coffee table. “It’s a ritual the Hand of Light has devised. When completed, they’ve found it banishes the Collector back to one of the obscurae. Not forever. Their notes say that the monsters end up returning, maybe not always to the same place, but the banishment doesn’t kill them or anything. They always return. They go into hiding, regenerate, and return. Sometimes it takes years, though. Even decades.”
Zoey watched Marion’s gaze drop to the illustration lying open in her lap—three girls. One stabbing. One slicing. One being consumed by a black cloud with white eyes.
“All right, so . . .” Marion shook her head a little. “What is the ritual, exactly?”
“Semper tres.” Grayson flipped back to the page with one of the sketched superhuman girls—the girl brandishing a sword. He pointed to the words scrawled beneath the girls’ feet. “It means ‘Always three.’ That’s the key, it seems. They need three girls for the ritual. And not just any three girls.”
Grayson glanced at Marion, and then at Zoey, his gaze worried.
“Three extraordinary girls,” Zoey said for him, remembering her father’s words. She drew her limbs into a knot at Marion’s side. Even with the fire, even with Marion’s body squished against hers, Zoey couldn’t stay warm. “We’re supposed to fight each other, using our power. We beat the shit out of each other, and the Collector can’t resist the call of our blood. The call of our fury.”
She rolled her eyes, scrambling desperately for levity. “It’s so dramatic.”
“He follows the call to the site the Hand of Light has chosen for the ritual,” Grayson continued. “A controlled location. The Hand of Light has weapons. Guns, swords, knives. They make sure the girls can’t escape. They turn them against one another. The girls fight, the Collector comes, and he begins to . . .”
Grayson’s voice dropped off.
“He eats them,” Marion whispered, her eyes glittering. “Doesn’t he? Just like Charlotte.”
Zoey swallowed hard. Just like Thora.
Grayson nodded miserably. “The consumption of each girl weakens the monster, but he’ll be unable to resist. He gorges himself, and the Hand of Light ensures that until that’s done, neither he nor the girls can run away. Once all the girls are consumed—”
“Blam-o.” Zoey slapped her hands together. Grayson and Marion both jumped. “The girls’ power zaps the monster back to the hellhole from whence he came. And what’s worse? Apparently once girls start dying really quickly like they’ve been doing around here? It means the monster’s close to breaking free.”
Marion looked up at her, eyes wide. “Breaking free of what?”
Zoey drew in a deep breath, let it out slowly. Steadily she met Marion’s gaze. “The queen. And once he’s free, he’ll kill anyone. Not just girls. Anyone. And he won’t need help to do it.”
“And once he’s free,” Grayson added, hands clenched in his lap, “it’s much more difficult for the Hand of Light to track him down. He can still be tempted by the ritual, by the combination of the three girls, but once he’s no longer contained to a specific area, it’s like the hunting equivalent of searching for a needle in a haystack.” He exhaled, rubbed his hands over his face. “At least, so the book says.”
“Which makes me wonder if the Hand of Light would even care about hunting down these monsters,” Zoey muttered, “if no one else but girls were ever in danger. How much do you want to bet the Hand of Light formed because some old rich men figured out these monsters could develop a taste for man-flesh and wanted to protect their own asses?”
“Can I once again apologize on behalf of men everywhere?” Grayson offered. “Because we can really fucking suck sometimes.”
Zoey arched an eyebrow. “Sometimes?”
“Most of the time.”
“There it is.”
Marion had sat quietly during their exchange, and continued to for two straight minutes. Zoey counted the seconds to keep from screaming.
Finally, Marion looked up at her, clear-eyed and calm. “If we do what Grayson described, if we go through the ritual, then the Collector will go away, before he manages to break free of . . . of the queen? No one else will die?”
This was so far removed from the words Zoey had expected to hear that she actually squawked.
“What?” She scrambled away from Marion as if she had been burned. “If we do this? No. Hell. No.” She stood, fuming. “We are not letting some dickhead man-cult use us like this. There has to be another way.”
“Okay,” said Marion. “And what would that be? This way has worked. The book says so.”
Zoey spluttered, words failing her. “It doesn’t matter anyway,” she blurted at last. “Three extraordinary girls.” She pointed at herself, then at Marion. “One, two. We don’t have a third.”
“So we find her. And then we begin the ritual, like the book says.”
Zoey laughed, just shy of hysterical. “Nope. Nuh-uh. Not gonna happen.”
Marion watched her patiently. “Then what do you suggest? We try to banish him all by ourselves? Unguided? Uncontrolled? I don’t know about you, but I don’t exactly feel like a pro with my power or anything. What if I can’t make it work? What if you can’t? What if we die trying, and then he’s still here, and he breaks free and starts killing everyone we’ve left behind?”
Silence stretched between them, tacky and dense. The grandfather clock burst in with twelve brassy chimes, and Zoey growled through the din, “Grayson, permission to smash your clock with my baseball bat so it never bothers me again.”
Grayson, head in his hands, said flatly, “Permission denied.”
“So?” Marion watched Zoey, her eyes still swollen from crying, her lips pale and chapped. “What’s your other way, Zoey?”
Standing in the middle of the room with her fists clenched, Zoey had not even a whisper of an answer.