The voices in the kitchen stop.
“Don’t move,” Owen says.
Siobhan stalks back out into the hallway and into the kitchen. Owen sees her first; he’d been on his way into the hall, to apprehend her.Big, brave man. That thought makes her laugh, a wet, hacking sound that causes both Owen’s and Sylvie’s eyes to widen. With what? What do they see when they look at her? Siobhan imagines herself – mouth dripping with thick saliva, feathers obsidian and outspread. She must look like a nightmare. Like a reckoning. Owen’s mouth falls open. Sylvie starts to scream.
Siobhan opens her mouth to say something – she isn’t sure what – but all that comes out is a splintering kind of cry. Owen and Sylvie cover their ears, as if the sound causes them physical pain. Owen sags against the countertop, immobilised, but Sylvie is running.Good for you, Siobhan thinks.You’re so much stronger than him. Sylvie wrenches open the door to the main flat and then is gone. Siobhan canstill smell the sweetness of her perfume on the air, can hear her making her way down the stairs and out into the night.
Good girl, Siobhan thinks.Run, and keep on running.
Siobhan stops wailing. Owen takes his hands from his ears. It is quiet in the flat now. There’s nothing but their breathing. His, short and fast. Hers, measured and slow. What should she do to him? Scalpel-sharp images in her head: Owen’s body, rearranged into a new shape, the shape of a single word, sprays of blood on the pretty kitchen tile. But no, she can’t pull him apart like the women did with their sacrifices, because what would that mean? What would that make her?
But, still. He needs to be punished.
Does he know that it’s her, when he looks up into her face? Can he still find her in the features of this thing she has become? From the way his eyes glimmer, from the way they flicker to the open bathroom door and back again, Siobhan thinks that yes, he does. Maybe he knows that it’s her who scoops him in her powerful arms and takes him across the kitchen to the window, the window that shows them the whole of the city sprawled out at their feet.
Maybe he knew it would end this way all along, that somehow, she would bring everything crashing down, because he doesn’t resist. He doesn’t resist even when she holds his body close to hers, so close and tight that she hears a bone crack; even when she opens that old window and lets him fall seven storeys from it. The sound of him hitting the pavement is a short, sharp shock, and then the night is quiet.
***
When Siobhan wakes up in the morning, naked in bed, soles of her feet dirty and a hoarseness in her throat like she’s been screaming for hours, it’s impossible to tell what’s real. Her fever’s broken – she’s no longer clammy and hot, and her head feels clearer than it has in days. Her scar still looks awful, but the inflammation has calmed down. It’s red, rather than green and weeping. Beside her bed is an empty packet of ibuprofen and a bottle of tequila, only an inch of liquid left at the bottom.
She sits up in bed. Cool light streams in from the open window. She hadn’t shut the curtains last night. Where had she been? The evening appears to her all out of order: outstretched wings, cold bathtub, the sharpness of claws, the Showroom, smashed picture frames. Sylvie running from the flat. Owen’s peaceful face before she let him fall, fall, fall.
Siobhan lurches to one side and vomits over the side of the bed, straight onto the carpet. What comes out is black, like old blood, like tar. It can’t be real. None of it can be real. She’s not well, she had a fever – she’d dreamed the whole thing, here in bed. She grabs her phone from the bedside table. It has 2% battery left.
Can I see you today, she writes to Owen.Please.
The pressure in her head is building. It’s almost unbearable. She grips her phone in her fist and smashes it into her forehead, as if that’ll create a hole and let it all come leaking out. She puts her fingers to the skin there and they come away bloodied.What are you?she thinks to herself, swallowing down more vomit.What have you done?
But of course, it isn’t true. It can’t be – because she isn’t like the women at Hex House, no matter what shesaw or learned there. No matter what Haina told her. She’s put so much distance between that person and this one, spent so much time trying to forget. It was just her infection, she tells herself over and over, willing it to be the truth. Last night, she watched Hex House clips and drank until she passed out. That’s what feels real, that’s what feels right, despite how vivid her dreams were. Exhaling shakily, she puts her hands to her face to find that her cheeks are wet. She feels like she’s scrambled from a train track in the nick of time.
I’m sorry for everything, she writes to Owen.I’ll leave you alone now.
Her phone dies before he can reply, but it doesn’t matter, because she’s sure of it now, that she imagined it all: her transformation, her violence, Owen falling like a bird shot from the sky. It had felt so real, all of it – she had wanted it so badly that she can still feel that want shaking in her bones. That want had almost undone her.
She sits in bed, the world spinning around her, filled with impossibility. She doesn’t know how she fits into it anymore. The only thing she can do is get up. She’ll shower, and then she’ll see if she can piece herself back together, see if there’s anything left to fix.
Siobhan only sees them when she throws back the duvet to get out of bed. All around her on the mattress are feathers: thick, wet, and dark.
THEN
Haina isn’t at breakfast for two days in a row. The door to her study stays locked, only Siobhan permitted to go in and out. Elly asks Theo what’s wrong, but he just shrugs.Shiv won’t tell me. There’s a bite to the way he says it, a bitterness.
The guests whisper amongst themselves, exchanging worried glances across the table. Barely anyone eats. Margot chews one of her curls in her mouth, replacing it with another when it becomes sopping wet.
“This isn’t good,” she whispers. “Something bad is going to happen, Little Mouse. I know it.”
No one has ever seen Haina like this before. Elly can feel the sickness in every fibre of the house, the carpets, the threadbare cushions, the rattling table legs. The sky is gloomy and overcast. The smell, the smell of rot that no one can pinpoint or eradicate, is everywhere. It feels as though it’s closing in on them. Elly wonders if it’s coming from her own skin.
One morning, Siobhan appears at Elly’s shoulder.
“She wants to speak to you,” she says.
Elly follows Siobhan down the hallway and into the study, feeling eyeballs on her back. The curtains have been drawn and it’s sour in here, like bad breath, like unwashed bodies. It takes Elly’s eyes a long time to get used to the gloom, but when they do, she can see that Haina is slumped in her armchair. She is so thin, her clavicles jutting like a pair of bike handles from her chest. Her cheekbones look like they could cut clean through the skin.
“Come and sit down, my angel,” she says, her voice a rattle.
Elly does. She remembers all the other times she’s sat in this very chair, when she was the one who’d felt frail and fragile, sitting across from a Haina who was vital and urgent and powerful. She has the sense of something ending, or of something huge approaching, but she can’t stand back far enough to recognise its shape.
