On the bench behind Kingshead, overlooking a sea full of abandoned bones, Val sat barefoot in a soft gray nightgown, staring at her hands.
Inside her, the waxy blackness of his presence was squeezing each of her organs, sucking hard on the underside of her skin, anchoring him to this world. He shivered and gnawed at her veins, impatient to be free of her. It wouldn’t be long now. The weight of him inside her cells gave her a new sensitivity, like she’d sprouted tiny antennae of her own, coating her body like a velvet sleeve. She could read the state of him so much more clearly than she ever had before.
And it was true: he needed only one more kill, one more meal, before he would be able to stand on his own.
A tingle distracted Val—twin itches, burrowing into the hollows of her palms. She glanced down.
Her hands . . . they glowed.
Val closed her eyes and turned her thoughts outward—to the black windblown trees surrounding her family’s home, to the horse farms and their glossy dark hills, to the pebbled paths weaving through the five woods like veins.
To the Rock itself.
Why are you doing this? she thought, just as she’d done in the red room, when she’d asked the Rock to hide her light. She’d asked it, and it had listened.
It had obeyed her.
And now . . . would it answer?
Out here, on her bench, hidden from the trees and facing the endless expanse of the sea, Val felt . . . well, not safe, she never felt that, but at least, for the moment, she felt unseen.
What are you? she asked. She planted her bare feet on the sand-strewn black rock. She imagined that the blood coursing through her body would extend like a raging river, down into the island. It would gather information there and come back as a gentle rain, cooling her forehead.
What are you?
A pause. A beat of waiting silence. Val held her breath.
Then she felt a blazing heat gather itself, as it had done in the library—right before she’d burned her mother—and in the red room, when he’d marked her as his queen.
She smiled, faintly.
That day, she had pleaded with this energy to hide.
Now, she welcomed its return. It punched up through the rock beneath her like an electric fist.
Hello, Rock, she thought.
Then Val rose, only slightly unsteady, and the brilliant fist thrust up through the soles of her feet and into her torso, collecting around her chest and in the center of her clenched palms like white-hot stars pulled down from the heavens.
Distantly, she recognized that she hadn’t thought this through very well. Experimentation was . . . not a good idea. He would sense the intrusion, the crackle of the white foreign heat against the blackness with which he’d slickly coated her insides.
He would not be pleased. He would want to find the root of this foreign power and tear it out.
But she heard nothing. She felt nothing. No displeasure, no punishment. He could, very easily, if he wanted to. He could cause her pain even from the other side of the island. She’d seen it happen to her mother a thousand times, seen her collapse and clutch her belly, soundless agony carving terrible shapes across her face.
Val waited. She cupped his mark with glowing hands.
Nothing. Only the waves; only the wind.
She opened her fingers and then clenched them again, the sensation like submerging herself into a fizzing hot bath.
Then, a flash of white, fluttering down from the gray sky: A moth, hovering a few inches in front of her face—tiny and pale, black spots like eyes on its wings. It whispered gibberish as it flew, its tiny moth voice childlike and clear. With a contented sigh, the moth alighted on Val’s wrist, just beyond the reach of the brilliant light resting in her palm.
So said the moth: This power is the Rock’s, and it is yours, too.
Use it.
They are coming.
Val stared at the moth. “Who’s coming?”
The moth fluttered up the trail back to Kingshead. Val raced past it, heart suddenly pounding. The back of her neck tingled, like ghost fingers were tapping out a sonata on her skin.
She burst into Kingshead—such a tomb it was, with her mother gone, and she wouldn’t be able to deflect the questions for much longer: Where’s your mother, Val? Is she sick? Tell her we hope she feels better soon!
Val hurried to the front parlor, used her buzzing fingers to part the gauzy curtains. Four cars, headlights off, moved slow and silent up the drive to the Althouse cottage. They parked, surrounding the house like points of a compass. People climbed out—men, Val thought, in dark coats and hats. They held guns. Some entered the cottage. Others stayed at the cars. A few of them moved down toward the trees, the edge of Kingshead Woods. Twenty men, maybe. They were moving too swiftly, too darkly, to count.
Marion?
Val didn’t grab her boots. She wanted to feel the Rock between her toes.
She slipped out the front doors, and ran.