I move on. “And what have you been doing since I left, hmm? Pining? Standing over that empty grave in the forest with your cock in hand, wondering who will satisfy you now that I’m gone? Who will play your willing victim?” I grin at him. “It’s going to take a lot more than a windup toy to frighten me now. I’m not your Lady Mother, Henry. I don’t give a fuck about being respectable in public anymore.”
“Who are you?” he hisses as he moves opposite me, the couch now between us, my back to the windows where he once stood.
“Don’t you recognize me?” I ask, inching toward the table. I don’t want him to see what I’m after. The second he knows, he will do everything in his power to stop me. Regardless of my earlier concerns, if I want to be sure I can kill Henry, I need to feed more. “I’m your darling wife. The woman you raped and beat and tortured for two years. I am what you made me, Henry. What’s the matter? Don’t you like what I’ve become?”
For a second, I think I see a flicker of remorse in those fathomless blue eyes, pale as glaciers and even colder. But no sooner do I recognize it than it’s gone, replaced by a seething fury he will never be free of. Not until I free him.
“No more talking,” he says slowly. “I’m going to kill you now, Piers. I’m going to squeeze you until the life flows out like juice across my fingers. And then I am going to fuck your corpse like you always deserved. Do you understand? You will die here in a puddle of your own piss as I watch, and it will be the best sex of my life.”
“You can try,” I tell him acidly. “But I’m betting it goes the other way, minus all the corpse fucking becauseew.You see, I made a mistake in Charleston, one fatal miscalculation when I plotted my escape.”
“What’s that?” he asks between gritted teeth.
“I should have killed you instead of killing myself.”
He lunges at that, grabbing the sofa and leaping over it evenas he pushes it aside. I spin and reach into the bag, gripping a handful of berries in my fist, but before I can get them into my mouth, he’s knocked me to the ground with the flat of his hand. Sparkling red spheres spill across the carpet like rubies. I scramble toward them, gathering them up, but he clutches my ankle and yanks me back, flipping me over as he pins me down, a hand on each wrist, his knee digging into my solar plexus.
His eyes burn down at me. If he could, he would make me combust right here, a bomb of a woman, a torch to his perversion.
Despite myself, the vulnerability of my predicament, I start laughing. A thick, heady, rhythmic sound flowing out of me, wetting the corners of my eyes, causing my chest to heave.
“Shut up!” he screams. “Shut the fuck up!”
“Or what, Henry?” I ask. He doesn’t have me where he wants me yet. And he knows that I know it. He will have to let one of my wrists go to choke me. And it won’t matter which. I have berries clutched in each hand. Either way, I will feed and he will die.
It infuriates him that he isn’t sure of what’s happening, that I know something he doesn’t. The insecurity eats at his insides. It has been eating at him since the day they first put him in his monster mother’s arms. He lifts my wrists and slams them against the floor, causing my bones to shudder in agony as several of the berries fly from my grip and the rest crush against my skin, their juice running into the creases of my palms. I howl with the ache and the loss.
He rises, grinning, releasing my wrists, and slaps me hard, my cheek cracking with the force, my ear ringing. Great tears betray me, rolling from the corners of my eyes at the pain. The feeling of triumph causes him to let up the pressure on my chest just enough for me to squirm and jerk my leg up hard into the soft meat of his groin.
He unleashes a furious howl, sliding off me as he grips his crotch, and I roll over licking skin and seeds and juice from my hand, scrabbling to my feet and making for the kitchen door. Itumble down the porch steps, and a moment’s hesitation—should I bolt for the café full of law enforcement officers or make a run for the underground shelter full of dried, toxic stores?—means I hear the scrape of a table leg, the crash of a lamp as he finds his footing and comes after me.
Without another thought, I head straight into the woods, hoping I can lose him in a thicket of conifers or across a stream, hide beneath the swell of a mossy boulder. The meager drops of bryony juice I licked from my hands aren’t enough, even with my gift for concentration, to kill an evil like Henry. Without feeding, I have no hope of winning this fight. Hiding from it is all that’s left. But I haven’t traveled more than thirty feet when he tackles me, bringing me down hard against the knot of an exposed tree root, filling my mouth with loam and blood.
I spit dirt, my vision swimming as a white, waxy knob focuses it—the immature cap of a destroying angel mushroom emerging from the earth right in front of me. Myrtle’s voice rings through my heart—a very little poison can do a world of good—and I know this button has risen for me, my magic calling it forth when I needed it most, just like the pokeweed in Charleston.
Henry is already twisting my arm behind me, but with my other hand, I snatch at the mushroom, letting it fill my mouth, every bite a mix of relief and excruciating pain.
He grabs me by the neck and pulls me up, spinning me to face him. His hands rest there, tight but not constricting, not yet, as he glares at me in the early rays of morning.
“Come on, Henry,” I tell him while I still have my voice. “Don’t you want to kiss me goodbye?”
His fingers dig into my skin. For the second time tonight, I can’t breathe and begin to lose consciousness, blackness creeping in from my periphery like ink spilling in water. Everything in me fights to stay awake, alive, long enough to finish him. As he watches my eyes flutter, my face purple, he can’t resist. This was when I was always the most beautiful to him, the most irresistible.He leans in, refusing to let up on my windpipe, and presses his papery thin lips to mine. With the last ounce of strength I have, I push my tongue, coated in blood and saliva and tiny fragments of mushroom, into his mouth.
The gesture startles him so much he releases me. I cough and wheeze, hacking to the side and stumbling, barely holding myself up on my feet. When I glare back at him, he is wiping his mouth, spitting out bits of white flesh.
“What the fuck is this?” he whines. He always hated a mess.
“Don’t be such a crybaby,” I grate out. “I saved it just for you.”
That creaseless brow buckles as something rumbles inside him. He places a hand on his chest, long fingers splayed, every nail manicured to perfection. “What have you done to me?” he asks, belching noisily.
As the air pours into my lungs, I can feel the tissues of my throat knitting themselves back together, the magic inside me undoing years of damage even as it undoes Henry in front of me. I suck in oxygen like water in a heat wave, coughing out all the fear and self-loathing he planted, years of shame that was never mine to carry. When I am able to rise to my full height, he is on his hands and knees, back arching like a cat, as vomit streams out of him, panic warping his face. He finally collapses on his back, his hands crumpled against his chest as stomach cramps seize him again and again.
I move to stand over him, looking down at the face of my nightmares. For the first time, I see a man before me and not a demon. Such a shame he could only show me that at the very end. “Goodbye, Henry,” I tell him, his eyes blinking with understanding come too late. “I can’t say that I’ll miss you, but you taught me an awful lot. Thank you for that. It’ll sure come in handy from now on.”
One gnarled hand raises toward me, as if to plead for help, but I knock it aside.
“Now, now,” I chasten him. “We mustn’t resist our destiny.” When his eyebrows crumple with confusion, the painful surprise of where he finds himself, I realize I feel nothing for him anymore—not fear, not empathy, not even pity. He’s just anothermark, one of many. I watch with detached interest as the life vacates his eyes like an incandescent bulb dying, the bane witch inside me finally taking her full form, blossoming like a flower toward the sun.
