“If you know what’s good for you, Nadine,” he said, “you’ll never ask that again.”
(lest I strike thy beak or slit thy throat)
“You’re hurting me,” she whispered.
Cal released her, taking a large step back like he no longer trusted himself to be near her.
“I do like you, Nadine,” he said. “And that is not my nature. Remember that, later: I tried to spare you this.”
Shaken, Nadine watched him gather the candles from the car with a stony expression, his face already smoothing over from the wild-eyed urgency that had, for one moment, broken through his genteel mask.Fear, she thought, watching him.That was fear.
And then the power went out with a hum, plunging the room into darkness.
C H A P T E R
T H I R T E E N
? run to me ?
The lights were off in the main house, too, and Nadine found out just how unsettling a house filled with dead things could be when the moving flame of a candle gifted them with the temporary illusion of life. She could not get to her room fast enough, shaken by Cal’s strange words.
(this is why I don’t sleep with sparrows)
After an afternoon laden with heavy rains and even heavier warnings, she had no interest in sitting down to another playacted version of a civilized family dinner. Luckily, the Cullravens had elected to eat in the confines of their rooms, rather than sit in the shadowy dining room.
(I tried to spare you this)
Nadine ate alone in her room, picking at the potatoes and venison, thinking about Cal telling her about how they caught and preserved their own meat in the cellar.
Whatever they told you to do, don’t do it.
She wondered what a sparrow was.
She wondered what would happen to her if she ever found out.
Maybe Noelle found out.Maybe that’s why she disappeared.
She lit a candle to see herself to the bathroom, keeping her eyes lowered as she brushed her teeth in the mirror, not liking how the dancing flame made her face look sinister and unfamiliar in the glass. Once in her room, she set the dining service outside her door on the floor, and then covered the painting with her discarded flannel shirt, before falling into a fitful sleep.
In her dream, Cal was chasing her through the woods and she was afraid. He had a bow and arrow, and she had just seen him kill a deer, and for some reason, she thought that he was about to use it on her. When he caught her, she had screamed, but all he did was push her down on the freshly killed deer. Both of them were nude and blood from the deer kept getting on her skin, running in crimson rivulets over her face and body, which Cal kept licking off.
And then—he spread her legs wide, and he fucked her on the corpse.
Nadine shot up with a gasp.
The power was still out and the roar of distant thunder was echoing over the steep valleys.
What a disgusting dream, she thought. Except in the dream itself, she hadlikedwhat Cal had been doing her. Liked that the coppery scent of blood had hung in the air like heavy exotic spice. Even his cock had felt good as it stretched her to a fullness that had verged on pain.
“I want to make you soar,” he whispered.
But then she had looked around and noticed people watching them from the trees. Except they weren’t people, because they had no eyes—just skull-like hollows from which scorpion tails protruded like coat hooks. And when she had looked up at Cal, she realized at the exact moment he made her come that his eyes were gone, too.
He smiled at her, then, with that terrible, eyeless face, reaching up to pluck one of the dangling scorpion tails from its empty socket before plunging the twitching, envenomed point of it right into her pounding heart.
“I’m sorry, Nadine; it’s my nature.”
Even in dreams, Cal made her hurt.
