It was the magic hour, everything soft and purple-limned, which was not a time during which Val preferred to venture into the woods. Something about the quiet clarity of twilight, how it transformed the colors around her into otherworldly shades—green to silver sage, blue to fairy moss, brown to underbelly black—twisted together her gut and heart, left her toes and fingers cold.
But she was running late, so she reminded herself how unfairly gorgeous she looked in this lighting and plunged into the trees.
Better to be uncomfortable than to keep him waiting any longer than she already had.
They had made a deal, long ago: Val would meet him at the appointed time, three times a week, with no delays. And in return, he would not interfere with her daily schedule too terribly much.
Her sandaled toes wedged under a tree root, and she stumbled. Bark scraped a slender stripe of skin off the top of her foot.
“Shit,” she whispered, bending down to inspect it.
“There you are!” A towheaded boy, his bright pink cheeks smudged with dirt, his khaki knees grass-stained, bounded out from between two bowed sycamores. He extended one pudgy hand. “I missed you!”
Oh, God, she hated when he took this form.
And he knew it. That cherubic smile beaming up at her, those twinkling eyes. Oh yes, he knew, and delighted in it, and he was better at assuming shapes now than he had ever been. He was more solid, more believable. Once, details had been off, details that would have given him away—unblinking eyes, malformed words, arms held straight at his sides when he walked. In those days, years and years ago, he had hardly ventured out of the woods, much less the stones. So Val’s grandmother had told her.
But he was growing more powerful. He was learning.
The world had the Mortimer women to thank for that, for allowing him to exist outside the realm that had birthed him and to live in theirs instead.
You’re welcome, world.
Val hesitated, then took his hand. The boy wrapped his sticky fingers around hers, bone rubbing hard against bone, and led her deeper into the trees. Val bore the pain in silence. Her mother had done worse, many times.
You must be strong, Valerie, her mother had said, her hands around Val’s young throat, her perfectly shadowed eyes daring Val to scream. He doesn’t take kindly to weaklings.
“Sing to me?” the boy asked, plaintive.
Val swallowed. “I don’t know if—”
“Sing.” The boy turned hard blue eyes upon her. “I like it when you sing.”
A sharp pain tugged Val’s stomach into a knot, and she complied at once, singing a song her grandmother had composed as a girl. Val had made the mistake of sharing it with him one day, when she was young and still thought this whole thing a fine game, a delightful secret between her and her mother: A beast from a hidden land who favored their family above all others. A beast who feared nothing except a Far Place where all life went to die, and of which they must never speak, if they wanted to keep him happy and calm.
Ever since that day, when he’d first heard the song, he often requested it of her.
It curdled Val’s insides to perform it for him.
She knew her grandmother had kept it private all those years—private from him. Sylvia Mortimer’s own private morsel of self. So here she was, Val the traitor, singing her grandmother’s secret song. But there was no going back now.
“I love this song,” he sighed, swinging their joined hands between them. “Your voice is lovely, Val.”
There was a game Val and Natalie Breckenridge had played when they were young. One girl closed her eyes, and the other pretended to crack an egg over her head—a soft thump of the fist against the skull. Then, the yolk sliding down, down—fingers spider-trailing down the neck and arms and back. It had been a shivery thrill, raising all the blond hair on Val’s legs. Once, she had kissed Natalie after, and then it had become a different game—let the other girl crack an egg somewhere on your body, and if you didn’t shiver, didn’t flinch, didn’t make a single sound, you’d get a kiss anywhere of your choosing.
But now Natalie was gone, and Val dated fine, handsome young Sawkill men. The Breckenridge estate had been sold. The grieving Breckenridges themselves had moved back to the mainland, fleeing ghosts, and Val was, as ever, alone.
Val felt the same shivery sensation now, trailing down her body like invisible fingers, as his tiny child’s hand crept up to circle her wrist. He sang along with her, her grandmother’s words:
Little fairy girl, skipping down the sea
Little fairy girl, pretty as can be
Who is the fellow with the bright clean grin?
Do you want, fairy girl, to weave a spell for him?
As they sang, trekking through the woods like sister and brother, cousin and cousin, Val’s mind wandered back to the clean white room in which Marion now lived.
Marion, Marion. It was a pretty name, really. Marian the Librarian. Maid Marian the noblewoman.
Marion Althouse, with slick black hair, soft pale skin, a low voice like the slide of honey.
Val stumbled again—these awful trees, their roots were everywhere, she wanted to mow them all down—and the boy shoved her. She fell, knocked her knees against the cool ground, packed hard with mud. They had reached the circle of stones. Val would recognize that mud anywhere. She’d grown up with it wedged under her fingernails.
Once, he wouldn’t have dared push her quite so hard.
Once, he’d needed her more than he did now.
“You’re distracted,” came the little boy’s voice. His smile was small and cold. He stood over her as she twisted around to sit properly, inspecting her scraped palms.
She didn’t look up, but felt his eyes on her all the same. He examined her, head to toe, like her mother looking after one of the horses. And he would like what he saw—her long, lean lines; her shining golden hair; her trim waist. She made sure he would like what he saw, and so did her mother, and so had her grandmother, before cancer got her.
Or so Val had been told.
She couldn’t imagine her mother thought she actually believed that bullshit. But Val was good at pretending. Her mother had made sure of it.
“I’m sorry,” said Val, looking up, but the boy was no longer there. Instead, shadows writhed around the edge of the stones. They were only stones from the beach—small, pale, innocuous—but even so, Val saw them whenever she shut her eyes at night. They encircled her every shrinking dream. He didn’t want her ever to forget who she was and what she had been born to do.
“What are you thinking about tonight?” came his voice from the shadows. The shadows shifted and curdled, sometimes tree-shaped, sometimes wing-shaped, sometimes arm-and-leg-and-shoulder-shaped.
“I was . . . I don’t know,” Val said, shaking out her stinging palms. “Do you have instructions for me?”
“Are you thinking about the Althouse girl? Is that what’s distracted you?”
Marion.
God, surely he wasn’t interested in Marion? She had a plain face, a soft body. Thick thighs and a round face and wide, limpid eyes like a trapped puppy. She was dull where other girls shone; you’d walk by her at a party and mistake her for the pattern on the wall. Marion didn’t make Val hungry like Natalie had, like Thora had. Marion didn’t stir his appetite, which lived like an alien egg inside Val’s womb, waiting to be passed on.
“Charlotte is lovely,” he said, a dark triangular shape, now perched beside her. She blinked, and he jolted across the edge of her vision. She could feel him curled around the back of her neck. “She’s hungry. She’s lonely. She aches, and she fears.” He licked his little-boy lips. “What’s the word? She is pliable. Don’t you think?”
The relief that rushed through Val was like diving into the surf in high summer. She nearly choked on her own breath.
Charlotte. Of course. Not Marion. Charlotte.
She pressed her bleeding palms flat against the mud. Her grandmother had taught her that it never hurt to offer some of herself to the stones, so Val did whenever she could. It kept the trees serene. It reminded Val that, no matter how tightly he wound her chains around his wrists, she was still a girl, still a human, still an independent being who decided when she breathed and when she ran and when she stood her ground.
Well. Mostly.
“She’s exquisite,” Val agreed. Her voice rang out strong and clear in the glen. “You’ve chosen wisely, as you always do.”
He squirmed in delight against her back before leaving her alone in the dirt. His nails crab-claw clattered across the stones. Then he was up in the trees, jerking from branch to branch like the stabs of an angry painter’s brush.
“Bring her to me,” his voice crackled back to her across the woods. “Tonight.”
Val blinked. “I need more time than that.”
A thick silence made Val’s stomach tighten and sink.
“More time?” He was horribly calm about it.
“I’ve already befriended her, but it takes time to really gain trust,” Val explained, battling the instinct to cover her chest with her palm and hide her beating heart. “If she suspects anything, if the hunt doesn’t go smoothly, that could ruin everything. You taught me as much yourself.”
Another fraught silence. Then the clearing seemed to exhale.
So did Val, faintly dizzy.
“I have taught you well,” he agreed.
“I wouldn’t be the girl I am without you.”
“You won’t be a girl for much longer,” came his low voice.
No, and he would soon no longer need any of them, Val knew—not her, not her mother, not Val’s someday-daughters. Soon, he would be grown and free, able to kill whomever and whenever he pleased. Her mother’s estimate: weeks, maybe, until that day. Two months. Three, at the most, depending on how quickly Val helped him feed.
And then what would she and her mother do? What would they be? Would he turn on them?
Would he set them free, too?
Unlikely, thought Val.
That was an absolution her kind did not deserve.
She gathered herself and stood tall. She had long ago taught herself to look only peripherally at the truth of what she was, what she did. Any closer, and she would lose her mind. “I will not fail you.”
“You never have, child.”
There—a note of affection in his voice. Val swayed where she stood, her eyes falling shut. A fierce warmth expanded in her chest and slid down her belly, her thighs, her legs. Her traitorous body—groomed to serve him, birthed to anchor him—responded gleefully to his approval.
When she opened her eyes once more, a supple smile curled across her face. She had one goal, one purpose. It was the thing for which she had been conceived: she would make him proud.
But first, back to Kingshead. Her party was in a week, and there were arrangements to be made. Booze to select. Most important, an outfit to be crafted.
Val Mortimer never showed up to a party looking anything short of to die for.