Root hissed and lunged for her. Jennie dropped lower, plowed into it shoulder-first, twisted, and slammed it to the sand. She’d learned many things in her travels, and this was one of them. Root tried to scramble to rise, and she put all of her strength into a kick to the side of its head. Its skull caved in and it dropped, but she knew that wouldn’t kill it.
Jennie lifted the tire iron, knowing she had to obliterate its brain or its heart, separate them from each other. She hoped Malcolm could finish digging.
She brought the tire iron down with both hands, stabbing toward Root’s left eye.
Elias snagged her wrist, shook the tire iron loose, and it flew into the sand. Jennie saw the same struggle in his eyes, but it didn’t stop him. He backhanded her across the face. Blood sprayed from her nose, and she sprawled to the beach beside Root.
The waves crashed nearby, crawling up the sand toward them. One of Root’s eyes shifted to glare at her. A piece of bark jutted from its cheek, worked loose when she’d smashed in the side of its skull. As she watched, the bark fell out, and the flesh began to knit itself together.
Jennie’s ears rang. Blood flowed freely from her nose. A concussion would be the best she could hope for. How badly had that one blow injured her brain? Her vision blurred, but she tried to force herself up to her knees, on the way to rising, hoping she could find the tire iron.
Elias stood over her. “Sister,” he whispered. “I didn’t want this.”
But through his pain and this strange regret—feigned or not—he certainly sounded as if he was going to enjoy what happened next.
54
Elias could hear a voice screaming inside his skull. It belonged to the man he used to be, the boy he’d been, growing up with an older sister who sometimes tormented him but always loved him. On a thousand unloved mornings, Jennie had made him breakfast when Maggie couldn’t be rushed, and he would have been late for school without his sister. She’d been the one to defend him when his fourth-grade teacher had rightly accused him of cheating. When Sarah Beth Kelley had agreed to go to the ninth-grade dance with him and abandoned him five minutes after arrival, snickering in the corner with her friends, it had been Jennie he’d sought for comfort. Jennie who let him cry on her pillow and never said a word. Jennie who told him to be careful who he trusted enough to love them.
He dragged her into deeper water, clutching her hair, and shoved her head under the waves. She tried to scream, but drowning silenced her.
The voice inside his skull could not be so easily silenced. The old Elias fought so hard that his body shook. He wanted to tear out his own throat, his own heart. Jennie needed to die, and he ached to drink her blood, rip her open, but also he wept black blood tears as salt spray soaked him.
“No,” he moaned.
Elias threw himself backward, landed in the shallows. A wave washed over him, shoulder-height, and he watched his sister erupt from the ocean, coughing salt water. Her eyes were bloodshot, herskin pale as she gasped for breath, staring sidelong at him, terror writ upon her face but confusion there, too.
The voice inside him wanted to shout at her to run, but he couldn’t even manage that. Need gnawed at him again. Disgust roiled in his gut, fury at his weakness. Jennie saw his internal struggle, glanced at Root, and started to wade to shore to help Malcolm.
Elias didn’t get up. He might not be able to warn her, but he could fight the urge to murder for a few seconds longer, stay on his knees, let the next wave rock him, and the wave after that. But then he saw Root lying in the water, skull deformed, one eye missing. The other eye stared at Elias, and he felt serpents of hate slither inside him. Poison that rushed through dead blood vessels. Root pulling dark strings inside him.
Elias turned, lunged, and caught Jennie’s ankle before she reached the sand. Dragged her down, scuttled along her body, and bit the back of her neck. Flesh came away. Blood spurted onto his lips and face and spattered his eyes. He shook with the pleasure of it.
Jennie screamed, reaching around, trying to bat him off her.
He ran his tongue over his lips. Salt water, salt blood. The voice of the old Elias whispered a plea inside him that he make it quick, that she not suffer. Elias might have been able to give her that, but he wasn’t the only one inside his skull. Root was in there, too, and it wanted to make Jennie suffer.
“Sister,” Elias managed.
She screamed as he bent to taste the wound again.
55
The shovel blade whickered through the air. Malcolm swung like he was at bat. A heartbeat before it connected, he turned his grip so instead of slicing into his brother’s neck, he smashed the flat face of the shovel into the back of Elias’s head. He collapsed into the shallows, water flowing over his head.
Jennie knelt in the surf. She turned to look at Malcolm, pale and slack with shock. On her knees and propped with one arm, she reached her free hand to touch the back of her neck, where Elias had ripped off a two-inch wide strip of meat with his teeth. In the shimmering blue-black before sunrise, she brought that trembling hand back around to stare at the fresh blood dripping from her fingers.
“Get up, Jen. Behind me, now!” Malcolm shouted.
Elias levered himself out of the rippling shallows and turned on them. One of Elias’s eyes bulged obscenely from its socket. In the other, no trace of their brother remained. The thing that had been Elias roared with such manic ferocity that Malcolm could hear the damage it did to his vocal cords. Shrieking, shredding.
Malcolm barely got the shovel between them in time. Elias charged, Malcolm knocked him in the teeth with the shovel handle, twisted around as they fought over it, and they crab-walked together out of the water and tumbled to the sand.
Elias clamped a hand on Malcolm’s throat and slammed him to the sand. Malcolm kept the shovel between them, lengthwise, and Elias might have killed him if he’d held on to it. As it was,Malcolm expected him to be stronger, faster, but he saw the pain in the monster’s eyes, the madness and disorientation it caused, and knew he had a chance.
He used the shovel handle to lift Elias, just enough to get his knee up into his brother’s chest. Malcolm threw Elias off. As he rose, he saw how light the horizon had become. Sunrise might be any moment. Soft colors lay along the edge of the ocean in the distance.
The grave for Maggie would have to be deep enough.
