“Not likely, is it?” Malcolm asked.
Violet finally turned, looking at Jennie. “You don’t have to answer. We all know the answer.”
“So what’s your version?” Jennie asked.
“If I had to guess? The witchcraft is real, obviously. The Morák, the vampires, they’re trying to murder us, so yeah… pretty real. It’s easier to believe in them than it is to believe Maggie put her life on the line for people she didn’t even know. I’d guess they were hunting her the way her family had hunted them. Or maybe it was sheer coincidence. She was living her life, and they found out whose daughter she was. Either way, my bet isthat she was attacked, infected or bled or whatever it is they do to make you into one of them. She tried to use witchcraft to drive out the stain of evil they’d planted in her, to stop herself from dying and being resurrected like that. But it went wrong somehow, had a power and reach she never imagined. She was afraid and rushed and maybe dying, and she lashed out with the so-called old fire. I think it’s all about survival for her. Selfishness.”
“Until now,” Violet said softly. “Her last wish… if it works, this is a pretty noble act, isn’t it?”
“I guess so, but what does it matter to her now? She’s dead.”
Malcolm bent to look into the eyes of his mother’s talking corpse. “How did I do, Maggie? Close to the truth?”
Loving her and hating her had always been like breathing in and out. Inhale, exhale. Despite the surrealness and terror and grief that had transformed this journey and given it the frisson of lucid madness reserved for nightmares, she felt very real there in the footwell, slumped in on herself. A monster. A dead thing. Still Maggie at the core of it all, still fighting the thing that must have been inside her, corrupting her, all this time. But Maggie would have looked at him with scorn for daring to question her version of her history, her image of herself.
Instead, she looked at him with a vulnerability and sadness he’d never seen in her when she’d been alive. “Malcolm… sing.”
He blinked. Later, he’d think how stupid he’d been not to understand immediately, but he’d been lulled into thinking the need had passed.
“Sing,” she rasped, the way a child might say, “Don’t leave me.”
“Malcolm!” Jennie snapped. “Sing the goddamn song!”
Maggie flinched. Nostrils flared. Her eyes widened, red lacing the whites, pupils shrinking. Her upper lip peeled back from her teeth, not a sneer but a quiver of hunger.
He couldn’t sing like Billie Holiday. His voice cracked, but he sang. Just two notes before she twisted in the seat and grabbed his throat, silencing him. Tears slid from her eyes, tinged withred, and he could see the pain that racked her body. Pain she’d inflicted upon herself hundreds of years ago.
She screamed.
Violet slid an arm around Maggie’s throat, yanked her backward, knocked into Jennie, who jerked the steering wheel. The car skidded, sliding, thudded through the deeper snow at the road’s edge. Violet shouted at her that they were going to crash, but Jennie threw her weight onto the wheel, kept it straight, got the Frazer back on the road.
Malcolm hammered at his mother’s wrist. Violet grabbed at Maggie’s eyes from behind, and when Maggie tried to claw at her, she lost her grip on Malcolm’s throat. Twisting, thrashing, she tried to get at Violet while Jennie hit the brakes and they glided to a shuddering halt that sent Benjy slamming into the back of her seat.
Maggie the dead lashed out again. The fingers of her right hand hooked into claws, punched through the Frazer convertible’s roof, tearing rents in the vinyl. The icy wind whipped into the car, but without her hand choking him, Malcolm could raise his voice again. It felt ridiculous, this beautiful song, but he’d barely finished the first line when dead Maggie faltered, and halfway through the second line, she collapsed onto the seat.
Blinking. Staring. Expressionless. Yet still his mother’s spirit managed a few more words through dead lips.
“Jennie,” she rasped. “Can you go any faster?”
Malcolm slumped back into his seat. Snowflakes gusted through the rips in the vinyl roof.
“Not a chance,” Jennie replied, but she put the Frazer in drive and hit the gas.
They passed theWELCOME TO MAINEsign less than an hour later.
43
By the time they crossed the state line, Violet was shivering so much her teeth hurt. She’d been cold before Maggie ripped up the roof. Now she sat huddled in the passenger seat with her legs drawn up beneath her. She knew they couldn’t go any faster, figured it was half a miracle that Jennie had gotten them this far without putting them over a bridge or into a ditch. But they had a few hours to go, and she had to deal with the frigid air until they arrived in Shediak. At least she could pull her hands up inside her coat—Jennie’s were pale and thin as icicles on the wheel.
Malcolm had fallen mostly silent since Maggie had risen for the second time. Now he stared out the window, reaching over occasionally to wipe snowflakes off his mother’s face. They were all quiet now, and still, but none so still as Benjy. The monsters couldn’t track him—Jennie had seen to that—but she wondered if Root could see through him, could hear their voices. Did the monster know what they’d been through, what had happened to Maggie?
Another thought had been haunting her every time she looked at the boy. The grin was a mask of evil, but it was puppetry, and Root the puppeteer. If even Maggie—dead, transforming—could hold on to the core of herself, what did that mean for Benjy? Was he trapped inside himself, aware of all that transpired? The idea broke her heart. The child would never be the same.
She slid her hand out from inside her sleeve and reached into the back seat, brushing snowflakes from his hair and face.
“Careful,” Malcolm said. His expression suggested she’d gone a bit crazy. “Want him to bite your fingers off?”
“He’s not one of them,” she argued.
