The Graces (22 page)

Yes. We were. Never to be again.

I felt only shame when I remembered how she’d made me feel. Because with the Graces I’d felt special,
but with Summer I’d felt human. All the endless roaring questions I had that no one else seemed to, the relentless scratching in the core of me that made me wonder why, why, why, what is the point of us, why do we yearn when we’re nothing but animals, why do I love and hate the dark things, why must I push against the life I’ve been handed, why can’t I be normal like everyone else? Well, Summer could answer all that with just a narrowing of her eyes that meant ‘why would you
want
to be?’

But now it was them versus me. I’d come second best to her family. I would always come second best. Summer looked at me, and all she saw was the one thing I’d worked so hard not to be for her: a freak. A lonely, lying freak. I’d never wanted to see that look on her face, and I’d never let myself think it could come to this. But it finally had, and now that we were here, all I felt was numb.

‘Summer,’ I said, ‘whatever you think I’ve done, whatever you think I am … I can’t bring Wolf back. He’s dead, okay? He drowned, and I saw it. And that’s it. The dead stay dead.’

She stared at me for a moment more.

‘You’re lying,’ she said abruptly. ‘God! I didn’t want them to be right.’

‘Summer—’

She pushed herself off the bed, her bare feet landing noiselessly on the rag rug. ‘It’s like you hate us. Like you want to punish us. You’re not this person, River. You’re not. But you’re trying so hard to be.’ Her hands came up, hesitant, helpless. ‘And I don’t see any other options left.’

I watched her go with bright, wet eyes.

A couple of hours until dawn.

All I did was sit, staring at the wall.

I just wanted it to be over.

In the morning, I had a shower. They’d left towels, and Esther’s soaps, in the en suite bathroom. I let the water run over me and tried to think. When I was dressed, I examined the bathroom window half-heartedly, but it was tiny. I might have been able to get my head and one arm out, and I’d read in a book once that if you could do that, you could get out of even the smallest-seeming of spaces. But I was too tired to try. I just wanted to lie down and disappear into nothing.

Fenrin brought in breakfast without a word. Just unlocked the door, came in, deposited the plate of little pastries and a cup of coffee on the floor, and left. Like I was their prisoner. Like I was their pet dog.

I ate it. At first I had thought about refusing dramatically. Grinding pastry flakes into their stupid rag rug or pouring the coffee onto the bedclothes. But it would just bother me more than them – I was the one
stuck in the airless room with it. It was childish, anyway. Better to keep my strength up so I could be ready.

Ready for what?
I mocked myself.
This is not a fairy tale. This is not a hero’s journey
.

You are no hero. And no one is coming to rescue you.

I couldn’t quite believe it had only been a day since eggs in the café, and a day and a night since they had come back into my life. I felt like I had been in this room forever. I paced the length of it, over and over. I wanted, I desired, I yearned for everything to be right, and not this crazy, sickly wrong. I was half expecting a visit from Thalia, but she stayed away. When I wasn’t pacing, I was sitting, listening. The house was too quiet. I couldn’t tell if someone was outside my door or not.

When the light began to fall away, Fenrin came back. He brought me meatballs this time. He put the plate on the floor and spun on his heel, leaving within seconds. He didn’t even look at me. For the last hour I’d been dreaming up a plan to attack him as soon as he opened the door. It would be something, at least, some kind of defiance, however aimless. But he came in and left so quickly I hadn’t even told my muscles to move me off the bed before he was turning the key in the lock on the outside.

I stared at the plate for a while, smelling faint wafts of garlic, until my stomach rumbled. The meatballs
were cold from the fridge, but still amazing. There was a chalky, bitter aftertaste to them I couldn’t place, and it wasn’t until maybe twenty minutes later that I got a suspicion of what it might be. Because it wasn’t even full dark outside, but I was suddenly so, so bone tired.

I crawled back onto the bed. I had time to think that they must have got the dose right this time because it didn’t take so long.

Faces. Murmurings. I was trying to roll over, but everything was so heavy, heavy. Things were long like strings.

We were in a car, I decided. It was dark and I was on my side. I could feel someone’s arms around me. How nice it was, that simple feeling.

I didn’t know how long it took me to surface and understand. It was slow and fast, all at once. When I did, I knew several things.

We were at the cove.

The sound of the sea was in my ears.

The breeze was cold enough to set me shivering.

My wrists were aching. This was because they were tied behind me.

My back was against something hard. I was tied to one of the boardwalk posts.

It was a black night, and the stars were out full. The moon was a glowing chopped penny in the sky. They’d lit a fire. I was too far away from it to feel comforted. A vague sense of warmth reached my shins, but that was it.

The three of them were there, standing a little way off. Thalia had stepped forward, away from the other two, and she faced the sea, her long hair shivering in the air, the ends dancing, gently lifted and dropped, lifted and dropped.

‘She’s awake,’ Fenrin called, watching me.

‘Good,’ Thalia replied. ‘We’ve only got an hour until midnight.’

She turned towards me.

Her left hand held something loosely by her side. She was wearing a long bronze-coloured skirt that stirred something vague in me, but it wasn’t until I looked at Summer that I got it. They were all wearing the outfits they wore that night. The night Wolf died. They had scarves and layers and boots on, but otherwise it was the same. They’d put my coat back on me, but the air rolling off the sea cut at my cheeks. I didn’t feel cold yet. Maybe I would soon, once the drugs had worn off.

‘What are you doing?’ I said, my words slow and thick. ‘You think you can bring him back with the right clothes?’

‘Not us. You.’

I shifted on the sand, trying to break up the gloopy feeling that had me in its grip. ‘Yeah, well, sorry to disappoint you, but I burned that outfit.’

I’d actually given it away to charity, but if I’d had a fire handy, maybe I would have burned it. If I lived in a mansion with a real, open fireplace that we lit in winter, lounging on rugs and cushions in front of it, clutching mugs of hot chocolate. If I had that life, I could burn things in a comforting symbolic fashion, instead of walking to the charity shop on a grey Sunday morning and handing them a plastic bin bag of clothes it cost me less to buy than they’d sell it for.

‘Now,’ said Thalia. ‘You bring him back.’

Adrenalin swooped and dived inside me.

Thalia brought up her left arm. The firelight caught the blade of her athame quite nicely. It was as sharp as I remembered – its edge a sliced silver grey.

Fenrin moved towards me. Before I could even think what to do, he crouched on my outstretched legs, pinning them to the sand. The weight made them buzz. Thalia crouched to my left side on her haunches, her right hand dangling between her thighs. With her left hand she held the dagger out, its point near my heart.

‘Bring him back,’ Thalia repeated. ‘Or we sacrifice you for him.’

I tried to pull my wrists apart, but I might as well have tried to uproot a tree with bare hands. My fingers were going numb.

‘You’re insane!’ I shouted into her face. ‘I can’t!’

Sucking silence. The wind lifted Thalia’s hair and billowed it around her face.

‘You’re lying,’ she said calmly. And she raised the athame, pushing the tip against my chest.

‘Jesus, Thalia,’ I managed.

‘Are we really doing this?’ Summer’s voice, wavering with panic. ‘This can’t be right! We can’t be right about this, Thalia! There’s no going back after this!’

‘I know,’ said Thalia, and she tightened her grip.

I tried to laugh. ‘You’re not going to do this.’

‘No? Why not?’

‘Because it’s murder, Thalia! You can’t just murder someone!’

‘In the laws of nature,’ she said, ‘you make your own justice. Nature doesn’t care about murder if it’s justified. One life for another. That’s how it works.’

‘Yeah, sure, but back in the real world, we have these little things called the police and prison!’

Her little rosebud mouth twisted as if she was mildly concerned. ‘You think we’ll go to prison? I’m not sure anyone will even miss you, you know. No one ever misses the villain.’

I gaped at her. ‘The villain? I’m not the one about to stab someone through the heart!’

‘Don’t you get it?’ said Thalia, astonished. ‘River … you’re the bad guy. You’re the one the good guys always try to stop. It’s tragic when you die at the end, but you know, everyone agrees that it’s for the best. You know that story, of course you do. You have to be stopped, for your own good. Can’t you see that? Wouldn’t it be better for everyone if you just went away?’

‘Get off me!’ I screamed, twisting and bucking. But Fenrin’s weight had made my legs go numb, and all that happened was that Thalia raised the athame and waited until I stopped. The sand was freezing, numbing me. I felt the gritty pressure of it under my fingernails.

‘Why are you doing this?’ I said, and my voice cracked. I didn’t want to be weak, snivelling and wailing, but my mind was going round in a terrified circle, an endless loop of oh god oh god oh god, shutting everything rational out.

Thalia held the athame steady and looked into my eyes, her voice absolutely sure.

‘Because it’s the right thing to do.’

She was terrifying. I wasn’t going to change her mind, whatever I said. What were you supposed to do in the face of that?

Thalia finally frayed as I did nothing but stare at her, trying with every ounce of energy I had left not to cry. ‘Just give him back!’ she shouted, furious. ‘Give him back, you murderer! GIVE HIM BACK.’

I don’t think she meant to, when I look back on it now. She was climbing fast to hysteria, and when you’re like that you don’t have the best control of your body movements. But at the time, all I knew was that this cold, awful girl who had severe problems of her own and
would not listen
was screaming inches from my face, relentless, the sound pounding against my eardrums, and then I felt a red-hot wire scorch my skin and something warm pooling in the crease of my belly. Confused, I looked down and saw a spreading dark stain against the cream of my sweater.

It was blood. Blood soaking through my sweater.

The crazy bitch had actually
slashed
me.

My

Fucking

God

Rage like trying to stare at the sun, white-hot, blinding. No thought. My whole self was crumbling to dust, flash-fried by fury.

‘No!’ Summer screeched. She sounded very, very far away.

The weight left my legs. When I knew anything
again, I knew to look for the source of the choking noise in front of me.

It was Thalia. Her long hair was wrapped round her neck. The wind streamed past her face in a tight, awful circle. Her hair was a rope being pulled by the air, by invisible hands. It tightened into her flesh.

She was making a horrible wheezing sound.

‘No, no!’ Summer was frantic. She almost fell on top of Thalia in her haste to help, hands scrabbling at the hair rope crushing her sister’s throat. ‘Stop! STOP IT. SHE’S DYING.’

Fenrin had left my legs and he was behind Thalia, trying to get his fingers in between hair and flesh. They wrestled. All I could do was stare. I couldn’t move. There was nothing I could do to help. My hands were still tied, though I was guessing at that because I couldn’t even feel them any more.

I saw a hand flash out – Summer’s – and grab the athame on the sand next to Thalia’s thigh.

A few more awful seconds. Or maybe it wasn’t even one but it felt like forever, while Thalia groaned and panted.

Then she fell forward onto her palms. There was something dark creeping down her neck like a long, thin caterpillar. Blood from where Summer scraped Thalia’s skin cutting her hair off at the base of her skull.
The rope of hair slithered down the curve of her back and coiled onto the sand.

For a moment everything hung between us, suspended.

But there was no time because I heard a kind of sucking roar, and I looked towards the sea, and it was happening again, just like with Wolf, oh god, but I had time to scream out:

‘HOLD ON TO SOMETHING—’

The wave reached us. Everything was gone. Bubbling in my ears. I was slammed to the side as the water came crashing down. My arms, still tied, wrenched against the post, shoulders roaring with pain. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t hear.

We were drowning. We were dead.

I was almost relieved. No responsibility in death. No more consequences.

But then something pulled on me, and I slammed back against the post as the wave rolled away from us, leaving its waste behind, the toxins it no longer wanted. I huddled against the post, coughing, waiting. But it didn’t come again.

Just a single, monstrous wave. As unnatural as the sky turning neon green.

I managed to raise my head, my hair hanging over my eyes like seaweed hanks. The shoreline was calm
again, calm as anything. Just its little joke.

Coughing next to me. I shifted on the sopping sand, muscles seizing and freezing, and I saw three bodies.

They were all moving.

Fenrin was the first to raise himself. His face was pressed into the sand. He spat, spat again. Flopped onto his back. His skin looked grey in the dark, under the starlight. Thalia was curled into a ball. Her face was thinner without all her hair, or maybe it was the cold and the wet. Summer was on all fours, black fringe hanging down in strings over her eyes. I watched her as she looked up at me. My belly pulsed steadily. I felt no more liquid warmth on my skin, but I didn’t know if it was because I’d stopped bleeding or I was just too cold to feel.

Silence. The calm sound of the sea filling the gap.

I just wanted it all to stop. I wanted to lie down and feel Summer pressed up against my back, but I’d never have that now. I couldn’t bear their emotions any more, all pouring out onto me, weighing me down, burying me. I forced myself to talk, no matter what it would cost me. It needed to come out, or maybe I’d try to kill us all again.

‘I didn’t mean to.’

Silence.

I felt the post dig into my back, comforting.
Something solid to prop up my broken self. My knees were drawn up to my face and I talked into them rather than out. But at least I was talking. I was shivering from the cold.

‘I never mean to,’ I said. ‘Not really. Just for that one second. Just a split second. But it’s enough. It’s always been like that. Just one second.’

I was leaning my head back against the post, eyes closed.

‘You know how kids will scream “drop dead” or something when they’re angry? They don’t really mean it, though, not afterwards. Well, for years when I was young, I thought when you wished for something bad, it happened for real, because it did. For me.

‘Just before we moved here, I made my dad go away. He disappeared in the middle of the night. Didn’t even pack any clothes. Left everything behind. I was mad at him – we’d had a fight about … this. Whatever this is that happens around me. He wanted to get me sectioned. To get help, he called it, but really he was too scared to deal with me any more. That night I wished and wished he would just go away for ever. And then he did. No one knows where he is. He just … vanished.’