Maggie clawed his chest with both hands, digging through his shirt and sodden sweater.
He coughed out salt water, cleared his throat, and started to sing.
Sadness joined the pain etched on her face. “Malcolm, no—”
Jennie shoved Maggie’s head under the waves. Malcolm grabbed Maggie by the handcuffs, and together, they hauled her ashore as he continued to sing. She hung limply in their grasp, feet dragging through the sand where the surf kept washing away the snow to keep it from accumulating. Farther up the beach, rarely touched by the tide, the snow coated the sand and ice rimed a lifeguard chair. They paused at the chair just to catch their breaths. Malcolm kept singing Billie Holiday, but took deeper breaths and longer gaps between each line.
“God, look at her,” Jennie said.
Malcolm didn’t want to. Whatever part of Maggie still lingered in the dead thing had been extinguished now.
Except that it hadn’t, not completely. Perhaps thanks to the curse that had begun all of this, a vestige remained, and she opened her eyes.
“You were always… a good boy… Malcolm.”
Jennie barked laughter. Malcolm heard the anguish in her. Even mostly dead, their mother overlooked all Jennie had done to be loved. Maggie had dismissed her because she hadn’t inherited the old fire of witchcraft, and Jennie had dedicated her life to overcoming that disappointment. Maggie had given Malcolm this task, but without Jennie and Violet, he would never have made it.
Maggie faded, head lolling, a corpse again. Brother and sister knew she wouldn’t stay that way for long, and they hurried over the rocks beyond the sand, up a path through browned beach grass and dying goldenrod.
“Even dead, she can still always make things worse,” Malcolm said.
Jennie’s smile carried a dreadful sadness, but it didn’t slow them down. She gripped the tire iron in one hand and dragged Maggie with the other, bent to their shared labor. They crested a rise and found themselves on the edge of a narrow road across from a stand of pine trees. Fifty yards to the north lay a small parking lot with a closed-up wooden hut that might have been asnack bar or public bathroom. Down the little road to the south were a few old saltbox homes that had probably been in the same families for generations. These were quiet places, isolated by design, and time meant very little here.
“I don’t think it matters where, as long as it’s on the island,” Jennie said.
They carried Maggie across the road. He kicked up some snow to unearth a bed of pine needles. The soil at the tree line was solid ground, not sand. He nodded to Jennie, and they set their mother down gently, both watching to see if she opened her eyes again.
He sang quietly, just to make sure, and jammed the blade of the shovel into the earth. It surprised him to find the soil cooperative. He’d half expected it to be frozen solid, but then it onlyfeltlike January. It was November, and this snowstorm had surprised everyone. A day or two earlier, the weather would have been autumnal, and in another twenty-four hours, it would probably return to more modest temperatures. The ground wasn’t frozen yet.
Malcolm tossed the first shovelful of dirt and pine needles. Jennie sat on her haunches, tire iron in hand, watching Maggie’s corpse. For the first time, softly, she began to sing along with her brother as he dug. Malcolm carved out the shape of their mother’s grave, a bit more than five feet long and three wide. He was methodical, removing the first layer of dirt, and had managed to get the whole thing about eighteen inches deep when he realized how clearly he could see his fingers wrapped around the shovel.
He looked up. The sky at the edge of the horizon had lightened to a pale blue, just a stripe, but it heralded the sun.
“You’d better hurry,” Jennie said.
Malcolm shot her a look of brotherly irritation. He hadn’t come all this way just to let the sun rise without him fulfilling his promise. He thought about Violet, wishing suddenly that he had not left her behind. The idea of Shediak had been fraught with danger in the moments before they’d stolen the boat, but now he wanted her there with him. Violet had loved Maggie, too, maybemore purely and clearly than her own children had loved her. She should have been there.
He dug faster. Time to finish the job.
Jennie shot to her feet. She stared southward along the shore, saying nothing but communicating everything. Malcolm spun to see two dark figures coming along the beach, bent in pain but nevertheless careening toward them, staggering as if flung by the wind and unable to halt without collapsing. They seemed almost like ghosts, but of course, they weren’t ghosts at all.
One of them was Elias.
The other meant to kill them.
Neither would allow Malcolm to finish digging his mother’s grave.
Malcolm’s grip tightened on the shovel.
52
Violet turned the key. The Frazer’s engine choked a few times, and the creature by the shed bent even lower and began to run toward the car, some kind of gangly bird about to take flight. Only it wasn’t a bird. Tall, thin, hungry, it only seemed to fly through the last vestiges of the snowstorm.
They were going to die.
The cough of the engine woke Benjy, who blinked sleepily, saw her terror, looked past her out the window, and began to scream. He wanted his mother, but Violet was all he had.
The Frazer roared to life. She slammed it into Drive and floored the gas pedal. The tires spun in the snow, and she had a moment to think that she’d let fear steal their one chance of survival, then the rubber hit pavement. The car shot forward, and the Morák flung itself into the place it had been parked. The monster careened onto the snowy roadway, sprawled and tumbled and slid across the street.
