He turned toward the pine trees and that shallow grave, and Elias piled into him, arms wrapped around his legs, dragging Malcolm down. They had fought so often as brothers. Elias had teased and bullied, and sometimes they’d shared the camaraderie for which Malcolm always longed. As the older brother, Elias had always held back, knowing how angry their mother would be if he really hurt Malcolm. When the day arrived when Malcolm fought back hard enough to hurt him in return, they’d seen the shock in each other’s eyes. They’d recognized how easily a fight between them could have ended in blood. There hadn’t been any more fighting after that.
Not until now.
It’s not Elias, Malcolm reminded himself. This monster with his ruined face, a torn-up mouth, and red froth sliding over wicked teeth… this thing was not really Elias. It wasn’t his big brother, who’d explored the woods with him and held his hand every time they crossed Cabot Creek, who’d never let him win at marbles but gave Malcolm his favorite tiger’s eye as a reward for being a good sport.
It wasn’t Elias. But it had been, and that made Malcolm break a little inside.
The Morák raked nails like claws across his clavicle, dragged down the collar of his shirt, tore skin and fabric. Malcolm twisted the shovel, jabbed the blade into Elias’s side, drawing blood and cracking bone. They struck with fists and knees and shouted hate and desperation at each other, and out of the corner of his eye,Malcolm saw Maggie’s corpse stand up from where he’d left her lying next to her grave.
Maggie but not Maggie.
Hunched over, clutching her gut, head twisted trying to endure the pain of her own curse. Coming down the beach. Undead again, because her boys were trying to kill each other.
Malcolm knew he had to sing. Ridiculous, but she lurched toward them, hungry and hate-filled, and he knew he would never survive fighting them both. The sun would edge above the horizon in minutes, but he didn’t have minutes. He had to sing.
Elias clawed at his eyes. Malcolm jerked away, and Elias got the better of him, rolled on top of him the way he always had when they were children and he was the bigger one. Bloody spittle drizzled into Malcolm’s eyes as his brother began to strangle him, crushing his throat. Malcolm couldn’t sing. He couldn’t breathe. Could barely think.
His strength flagged. His vision darkened, as if the dawn had decided not to come after all.
56
Jennie wanted to help Malcolm, but she could barely stay on her feet. Waves crashed around her legs as she staggered from the surf and reclaimed her tire iron from the sand. Her fingers were numb from the frigid water. She’d barely felt it when she’d been fighting, but now the ache in her bones made her hunch like the Morák in their agony. Blood trickled down her back from the wound Elias had given her.
Something splashed behind her. Ten feet ahead, her brothers fought on the sand, but she turned, her stomach tight with dread. When she saw Root staggering from the waves, its misshapen skull still knitting itself back together, she nearly collapsed in surrender.
Jennie shook her head, as much to clear it as to refuse fate. She lumbered toward Root. The monster opened its mouth, and the shriek that came out sounded like nothing she’d ever heard. Something from a prehistoric beast, a thing not meant to be there on the sand in Maine in the twentieth century.
“We will not be made to hide in the ground again,” Root snarled. “Never.”
“Well,youwon’t.”
Jennie threw herself at Root. Exhaustion, blood loss, shock, and numbness left her with no better control of her body. No agility, no coordination. But Root had little enough of its own. She drove it into the shallows, and it managed to claw the left sideof her face as she brought the tire iron down again, only wanting it to die.
At last, to die.
She smashed its already ruined skull, but that hadn’t killed it before, so she used the flat end of the tire iron to stab its throat. Jennie dug in, stabbed again and again, ripped its neck open until sand and sea started filling the gap. She dropped the tire iron, no longer caring when it was swallowed by the water, and sat astride Root’s chest. Hands on either side of its soft, shattered skull, she bent to the task, pulling and twisting until, with a final crack, she separated Root’s head from its body.
The vampire stopped moving then, finally.
She heard a scream and turned to see her mother splashing toward her in the shallows. Root’s head dropped from Jennie’s hands into the water. Without her, Malcolm would have been dead half a dozen times. Even with Violet at his side, he’d never have gotten this far.
“You needed me,” Jennie told her mother.
Maggie drove her down into the waves. Jennie had no fight left in her. When her mother’s teeth tore into her throat, she heard the sound of Maggie drinking her blood and found she hadn’t the will even to be surprised.
As she slid into darkness, she knew she had proven something, but only to herself.
It wasn’t enough.
57
Malcolm saw it happen. Couldn’t stop it. Swung the shovel hard enough to shatter Elias’s arm, which would mend itself if he let up. So he swung again, cracked his brother in the skull, spun, and really wound up this time, smashed Elias’s knee. When Elias fell, he seemed almost grateful to be lying down. Malcolm no longer felt any hesitation about killing this thing. If any of Elias Wise remained inside him, he was still a monster. Malcolm wanted to finish the job, rip his heart out, but he didn’t have time… not with Maggie coming up the sand toward them.
Not Maggie, he thought.She’s dead. Elias is dead. And Jennie…
Grief erupted from him in a scream of such anguish, such bitter resentment, that he wanted God himself to respond. To come down onto this fucking island and explain himself.
Maggie laughed at his pain, even as her own pain slowed her to a limping, predatory shuffle.
