“You’ll never be forgiven, no matter how much you hurt yourself.”
“Who would look at you now?”
“You should have saved her.”
Elly gasps at the realisation that this last cruelty has come from her own mouth. She doesn’t know how she knows the cruellest thing it would be possible to shout, but she does; she feels like she can inhabit every inch of Grace’s story. Somehow, she knows what will hurt the most.
The ugly words keep flying through the night air, and it doesn’t take Grace’s body long to respond. Elly had seen Grace’s hex at her First Fly, but it shocks her anew now: the lush eider that rashes over every visible inch of Grace’s skin, the iridescent specks of gold in her spread wings, the way her fair hair disappears from her head, leaving behind a pate of slicked feathers. The skin around her breasts and stomach remains almost bare, as though it’s been pecked. It looks fleshy and pink, raw to the elements.
When Grace’s transformation is complete, Elly feels a consuming sense of calm to look at her. She looks almostmorelike herself in this form, truer to the essence and core of what Elly considers to be Grace: the kind, impatient, sturdy heart of her.
Grace’s wings begin to beat. Elly feels it on her face: the mighty gust of air, bringing with it the smell ofearth, the smell of nests filled with newborn chicks. All at once, the guests grow silent. Her muscular legs take a few, powerful strides forward, as if she’s going to run straight into the crowd. All the women fall back together, but there’s no need, because Grace never reaches them. Instead, she is suddenly airborne, she is above their heads, she is beyond them and away. The guests begin to cheer as Grace’s silhouette grows higher and smaller. From this distance, Elly thinks, she could be an eagle. Anyone looking into the sky now would see nothing more than the large shadow of a night predator. Maybe they would think,What an impressive-looking thing, but they probably wouldn’t look up long enough to notice.
When all grows silent again, some of the women settle themselves down in the grass. It’s a cold night and the lawn crunches with the first suggestions of frost, but they don’t seem to mind. They stretch out their limbs, scars shining in the moonlight, backs to the earth and faces to the sky.
“What’s happening?” Elly asks Margot. “What are we waiting for?”
Margot had been bobbing up and down on her heels, but now she plops down so that she’s cross-legged, as flexible and nimble as a child. “You’ll see,” she says.
Elly joins her on the grass, tilting onto her side to avoid the uncomfortable pressure on her swollen belly. It’s been painful all day, her ribs aching, a low pulsing in her lower abdomen. She wonders why they’re out here on the grass rather than on the roof, although part of her is relieved to not be up there again. She can’t stand there without thinking of Lakshmi, how she’d given Elly her lipstickon her first day in the house, the way she’d squeezed Elly’s hand the night she died. Siobhan and Theo are the last to sit. Only Haina remains standing. She keeps her unreadable face turned to the stars.
How long does it take for them to hear that swooping sound again? One hour, maybe two? Elly is shivering, the wetness from the earth seeping upwards into her clothes and the gaps between muscles, but she forgets all about the discomfort when she looks up at the sky. There is a shape looming, approaching them at speed – lower and faster, lower and faster. It doesn’t look like Grace; it’s too large, too misshapen, seeming to be composed of two entirely different parts. The guests scramble to their feet. Many are already cheering, stretching their arms high above their heads, as if they might touch the creature carving its way through the night air towards them. Elly can’t make sense of the picture until Grace has landed back on the grass. Her feathers are rain-soaked. They bring with them the scent of elsewhere. Her black eyes are wild and roving. She uncurls and reveals what she has brought with her in her enormous claws, her carrion: the limp body of a woman.
Elly staggers backwards, the blood draining from her face. The woman is middle-aged, hair streaked with grey, her body thin and wiry. There are oozing lacerations in her stomach from where Grace’s claws have gripped her. She has been carried here from who knows where. Her wounds leak darkly onto the grass at their feet.
Haina’s eyes are electric, her skin glowing and vital. She seems to have grown taller and broader in a matter of minutes. “My angel,” she says, and her voice is unstable,a train teetering on a track, about to plunge down the mountain side and into rapture, “who have you brought us?”
Grace shakes out her ruffled feathers, throws her head back. The noise she lets out is so loud, so high and deafening, that Elly’s legs give out beneath her and she drops to the ground. The noise seemed to gut her from the inside out – she feels void, as though she’s been vomiting. She’s shaking. But there’s another feeling, too: the satisfying cleave of comprehension.
She’d understood Grace’s cry.
It wasn’t a linear thing like a sentence, or even complete, like an image. Instead, it was a jangling bag of shards, of broken words and meanings.
child killer under the bridge cruel cruel hands and horrible knowledge
only did it because she could
they begged and begged but
she’d do it again
no one will miss the child killer
Haina takes a step towards Grace and holds out a hand so that it brushes the matted softness at her cheek. “You’ve done well, my angel,” she says in a voice so tender it makes something in Elly’s stomach loosen. “You deserve your prize.”
Grace lets out another sound – shorter and sharper this time. On the ground, the unknown woman twitches and her eyelids flicker. Bile rises in the back of Elly’s throat. Because she knows, doesn’t she? She knows what is about to happen. A variation of this moment has happened in her dreams every night since her last session with Haina. She recognises the desperation in Grace’s face now, the wayher claws outstretch in anticipation, her pupils widening with thefinallyof it all.
So when Grace descends on the unconscious woman, when she uses those talons to rip open what’s left of her stomach and pull out the intestine like a long, bloodied rope, when she pokes the claws into the eyes to spear them out and pulls the flesh away from the thighs, discarding it on the grass, Elly doesn’t take a step back. Instead, she steps forward. There’s something dragging her towards the body, meaning she’s ripping at it, too, now – she and the rest of the guests. A noise in the back of her throat: she’s screaming. A guttural, seething howl. She’s screaming, not in fear, but in something closer to ecstasy. Grace grins up at her, and she has never looked so alive.
They dissemble and destroy, they disconnect and dislocate. Elly doesn’t know how long it takes, but when the night is at its thickest, there is nothing left of the woman but a single word spelled out on the stained grass, a word made up of skin and muscles and bone.
Hex.
The women all stagger backwards to admire their creation, exhausted and dazed. Grace is still in her hex form, clumsy but somehow luminous, an orb of light in the centre of the garden. The bloody word seems to pulse, to beat. Elly feels as though she has been waiting to look at that word, to understand what it means, all her life.
As the commotion dies down, Grace begins to transform again. Her feathers shrink back into the landscape of her skin, long hair grows from her scalp. She is getting smaller. She becomes the original Grace, the Grace who now seems so defenceless compared to the might of her hex.There is blood on her face, down her chest and collarbone, covering her bare breasts down to her navel, but she has never looked so clean, so new. She looks to Haina with heavy-lidded eyes.
“Well done, Grace,” Haina whispers.
