Fiendish

  The bottle left Cody’s hand as he fell, arcing high. Then it exploded in a burst of liquid fire down the side of Fisher’s face and neck and shoulder.

  At once, the whole Willows seemed to come wildly alive. The creek churned violently, full of monstrous fish snapping and thrashing, chewing at everything they could reach. The hell dogs were on us now, pouring out of the shadows and launching themselves into the yard.

  Fisher ducked himself under the muddy water and straightened.

  The fire all down his right side had gone out, but chips of glass shone bright as prayers, buried in his cheek. His skin was healing around them and they sparkled in the light from the burning truck, flashing crazily as he turned on the coalition.

  Luke yelled something I couldn’t understand as he dragged Cody back up into the truck. I turned where he was pointing, just in time to see something big and bristling that looked like the beast that had savaged Shiny’s chickens come barreling out of the trees.

  It thundered through the flooded yard, scattering the hell dogs and careening every which way. It slammed into trucks, bouncing off wheels and bumpers, and toward Mike, who still stood pinning Fisher with the gun. His finger was hard on the trigger as the water churned and the dogs surged around them, and when the chicken-killing hog lowered its head into his side, the gun went off in a huge, unholy burst of buckshot and powder.

  For a moment, everything seemed to shatter around me. The sound was so loud I screamed, but I couldn’t hear myself. Fisher stood, the front of his shirt torn open, blood spattering out in perfect rays like someone had drawn the sun on his chest. The whole yard stopped moving. The hog ricocheted off the fender of someone’s truck, dashing away again, like it only ever moved at that one breakneck speed.

  I stood with my arms held out, like I could somehow stop a thing that had already happened, and even Mike looked shocked, sick at the blood that spread under Fisher’s hands. Then he let the gun drop into the water and backed away. He coughed as he did it, not a hawking or a throat-clearing, but strange and thick and wet.

  Two of the hell dogs had caught the scatter of the blast and were torn apart everywhere, sinking messily below the surface.

  Fisher touched the front of his bloody shirt. The hollow was running in every inch of his veins, all fury and buckshot and pure, unguarded rage, but the blood was leaking out of him, leaving in bright gushes, making him stumble.

  I tried to say his name, but the word was stuck. I cleared my throat, tasting murky water, tasting scum and dead leaves. I gasped, but couldn’t seem to get my breath as Fisher fell back, blood billowing up in huge, dark blossoms, swirling in the muddy water as it closed over him.

  I stumbled to him, half-falling, trying to drag him away from the mangled bodies of the dogs, hardly caring that I was crying a little, choking hard on a taste like creek in my mouth.

  Davenport stood in the yard with the water rising around her. Everything seemed to be coming apart at the seams, but even now, she only looked small and sad and milk-white in the face of the storm. It moved across the sky in a black plume, set to wash away the whole rickety little town. Nothing to hold it back.

  “Stop,” I said, but it was barely a whisper. The water kept filling up my mouth. It was running from my nose now. “Davenport, you’re going to kill us.”

  She looked at me and her eyes had gone pale, unearthly blue all the way to the edges.

  “Then put me in the ground,” she said.

  And the way she said it, I knew the ground was not a place. Not the tiny room I’d been buried in. What Davenport was asking was still and deep and forever.

  Her voice was vicious. “I’ve got no love for any of you, but God help me, Clementine. You are the worst, always messing around in everyone’s business. Well, you know my business now, and I hope you understand that knowing it is not going to do a thing to help you.”

  Water was rushing into my mouth, and every breath was less like a breath and more like drowning. Fisher lay heavy in my arms, his blood swirling up in clouds, mixing with the blood of the mangled hell dogs, and even after I got his head up, the water didn’t stop running from his nose and mouth.

  Davenport was wading toward us. “You know what I’ve got in me—what I can do. You know just as well as I do that I can end every last one of you right now!”

  Her eyes were blurry, full of rage, and I knew that she was right. If someone didn’t do something, she’d drown us all, old blood or not.

  Over by the burning truck, Luke Maddox was leaning on the tailgate, hacking like he’d just been pulled from a raging sea. The whole coalition had stopped packing their bottles. The oily rags lay forgotten. Shiny and Rae were huddled on the porch, choking into their hands.

  Davenport only watched it all with a strange, eager look, and I understood that none of us could even begin to fix this. Maybe we couldn’t fix anything. We were all built for destruction.

  There was a part of me, though, that railed against the thought. A part not content to let my world end again.

  Not for a bunch of loud, frightened boys playing men, and not for Davenport, whose eyes had gone so flat and empty she didn’t look like a person anymore, just a living reflection of wrath and despair and water.

  I saw the black heart of what we were born into, how Fisher and I had each lived alone in our small, secret rooms, and still been able to find each other. Shiny, eight years old and praying for rescue that didn’t come.

  The help was with us, though.

  They were here, living in the shadow of our own everyday, watching over Shiny while she slept, telling Myloria the stories that she put in her tattoos. Now, with the reckoning upon us, there was no line between us and them, no magic that could keep the fiends in the hollow.

  I opened my mouth to scream for them, but it was all grit and water. I was afraid that soon, there wouldn’t be enough breath left to keep me upright.

  They were my birthright though, my legacy. I carried them with me in the same way that Shiny carried heat or Rae the peculiar and careful magic of her own mind, and they were always with me. The chimes, which had jangled so fiercely in the wind, had all stopped ringing. They hung perfectly still as the trees thrashed and beat at the sky.

  The boys in the yard were slumped and choking, blue lipped. Their faces had all gone slack, more awestruck and more afraid than I’d ever seen them. I turned, holding on to Fisher with both arms, clinging more fiercely every time I felt another warm surge of his blood jet out into the water.

  The fiends had all materialized inside the house. They stood looking out the glassless windows, more glorious and more terrible than anything I could have hoped to see.

  The first to come through the door was the burning woman, wrapped in her white sheet. She stepped onto the porch, shining like a desert sun under the wind chimes. As she passed it, the fire licking up the side of the house went out.

  Behind her, a gnarled man and woman came, holding hands. Their skin was gray and twisted like the willow roots that grew along the banks of the creek. Then the hungry man from the hollow, bony and blindfolded, in his black preacher’s pants and his white shirt, his teeth filed to points.

  The fiends of the Blackwood house stood side by side on the porch.

  The coalition had an age of hate and judgment on their side, but my past—my history—was stronger. These were the people who had made me what I was, blood of my family, and every one of them a vision of power. Once, the town had been theirs just as much as anyone’s, and now, in the hour of our destruction, the only thing was to give it back to them.

  The last of them was the woman I’d seen reflected in the bedroom mirror, her face an empty moon, her eyes like two burning holes cut into a perfect sky. They glowed like comets, and I understood that her blood was the old, savage blood that gave me mine. She was the source of my light.

  “Please,” I said, water runnin
g out of my mouth. My chest kept jerking, trying to draw breath. My arms were shaking as I tried to keep Fisher’s ruined chest above the swirls of black poison spreading like fingers through the water. “Please, help us.”

  The air seemed too high-voltage to breathe. When the first bolt of lightning hit, it lit up the Willows like a crack in the sky.

  The fiend of light turned to me with eyes so bright they left a blinding glow inside my eyelids when I blinked. “Will you release her?” she said. “Will you break your star and offer her to us?”

  Davenport stood in the middle of it with her arms out from her sides, her fingers spread as the creek churned around her. She was crying now, long sobs that made her whole body shake.

  I had always thought the world was good, that everyone could find the beauty in themselves. Everyone could honor, and forgive, and live a full and gorgeous life, even when the hands they’d been dealt weren’t easy.

  But what Davenport had been born into had taken so much from her, leaving her with just the wickedest and the worst. Her father had given her life, and then taken every scrap of joy or freedom, and even now that he was dead, all he had left her with was a deep, abiding hatred for what she was.

  Her power was tremendous, working through her, but it had gone to rot, and without someone to help her and to love her, she did not know how to take it back.

  “Yes,” I said to the fiend, water spilling out of my mouth. “Yes—whatever she needs. Give her whatever she needs.”

  The fiend crossed the porch, and when she stepped into the water, the whole creek glowed around her. In the glow, I could see the dark shapes of the fishes, following her as she waded across the yard to Davenport.

  The other Blackwood fiends followed her through the flood. They moved slowly, drawing the snakes and hell dogs and all the wild, spectral creatures with them.

  When they reached for Davenport, her face crumpled and she gave a small, desolate cry. It was hard to tell if it was terror or relief.

  The coalition had all hunkered down in their trucks, coughing and choking, looking for all the world like what they were—cocky boys with their fathers’ guns, staring out at the terrible, wonderful history of my family.

  The fiends paid not a bit of mind to any of them. They gathered around Davenport, reaching for her, closing her gently in their arms, whispering all the ways they’d come to take her home. She fell against them and they turned in one motion, bearing her away toward the hollow.

  DUSK

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The yard was deathly still. No one dared to move or speak.

  With Davenport gone, the creek had begun to recede.Now everyone lay wet and shivering, breathing in long, choking gasps.

  In my arms, Fisher lay motionless.

  I shook him, trying to raise his head, to make him look at me. I wanted to stand, to drag him up, but he was heavy in my arms and the poison had seeped inside him. His blood had all run out into the water.

  Under my hands, I could feel the shape of his ribs, the dense, fluttering knot of his heart, not much bigger than my fist. He was still alive, but with every beat, his pulse was growing fainter, thinner.

  He was slipping away from me, even as I tried to call up the bright, flickering power that could save him. But my body was heavy. My hands were cold and numb. Without Davenport to complete the star, the light that had been so strong inside me a moment ago suddenly felt just as wrung out and exhausted as the rest of me.

  I pressed harder and closed my eyes, working desperately to pull the poison out of him, to keep a hold on his heart—reaching for it, finding it. I held it in my mind, pouring all I had left of my exhausted craft into the very center of it.

  It seemed so hopeless, so impossible that a life could rest on such a small thing.

  Everything was very still.

  And then it beat, pushing back against my hand. Blood ran through him, through every artery and vein. I could only pray silently, steeling myself for what would happen when I lost my last particle of strength and the power of the hollow was gone completely. I pressed my forehead against his and waited.

  His heart gave another violent jerk and I knew I wasn’t the one doing it anymore. It was beating, he was healing, and I started to cry.

  I sat in the ruined yard of my ruined house, holding on to Fisher as under my hands, the buckshot began to push its way back out of his skin. Mike Faraday’s truck still burned like a signal fire, towering over the Willows.

  After a while, the water washed back.

  * * *

  Fisher and I lay in the middle of the yard. The blood and the water and the awful chaos of the reckoning had all washed away.

  Shiny and Rae were huddled together on the porch. The place under the window where the bottles had exploded was still smoking a little, but surprisingly, the house did not look considerably worse than it already had. Shiny’s skin was still a red mess of cracks, though, and she was shivering like her whole body would fly apart.

  In the yard, the air was hushed, like the stillness after a clap of thunder. There was nothing but the stillness of it. Nothing and nothing. Seconds stretched out.

  I lay in the dirt with my head on Fisher’s chest, looking up. The sky was cloudless now, clearing to a pale, watery blue as the sun went down. The ground was freezing, but under me, Fisher was warm. The air was clear, singing with crickets.

  “It’s over,” I said into his shirt. My voice sounded flat, so rough and strange that I wasn’t sure it was mine.

  The boys from the coalition lay sprawled around us on the muddy ground. They were coughing and spitting, but Davenport’s craft had been undone the moment the fiends had taken her, and we were all breathing clear and easy now, in no danger of drowning.

  There were a few changed fish flopping in the mud like slimy, spiny monsters, but they were going still. The brambles and the vines were all turning black, sinking into the ground as the light from the hollow faded.

  Mike Faraday slumped against the fender of someone’s off-roader, staring around at the dying catfish like someone seeing his own nightmares. At Fisher, red and tattered from the shotgun, and at Shiny’s raw, cracked skin.

  His eyes were dazed and he kept opening his mouth and shutting it again.

  Shiny sat on the edge of the porch, letting her legs hang down. “Mike,” she said, and her voice sounded tired. “If you say one word . . . I don’t even know. Just take your merry band of assholes and get out of my yard. You’re lucky right now that it’s only your truck I burned down. Next time, I promise it’ll be you.”

  Her shoulders were sagging, though, and for once in her life, she didn’t really seem to want to burn down anyone.

  Mike stumbled away from the truck and stepped down hard on the thrashing fish. It made an awful crunching sound under his foot, twisting and snapping at his boot, but it was already getting weaker, going still.

  “The reckoning,” he said finally. His voice sounded dazed, like he had lost himself and was only now realizing it. “It was happening, and y’all just stopped it.”

  But I’d only done the thing that I could, called on the power that we had. The fiends might be strange and full of mysteries, but they were the beating heart of everything we were.

  Shiny leaned against the porch railing, wincing. Her voice was husky, and she’d taken back her buck knife from Rae, but she was smiling a little. “I don’t know if you know this, but Blackwoods are very good at surviving.”

  The boys and men from the coalition were all struggling up, getting into their trucks, backing down the driveway and out onto the road.

  It confounded me that they could leave us just like that, like they had never felt a fear so great they were willing to burn us. But it was the way of things, the way of people.

  The town could be nearly destroyed, then pick itself up and straggle on—maybe the same wa
y I could lose years of my life to the cellar and then, when all was said and done, still come home to the Blackwoods.

  The same way Davenport had left this place and gone to another.

  When Fisher shifted under me, I pushed myself up on my elbows and leaned over him. The spray of glass sparkled down the side of his face and little streams of blood still ran down his cheek, making crooked pathways in the dirt. His shirt was in a state, torn mostly to rags by the force of the gun. The skin around the buckshot wound seeped and bruised but had already knitted itself back together.

  “We are not good for the environment, Clementine,” he muttered, looking up at me.

  I could still feel the light deep in my bones, humming more faintly since the star had broken, as low and tired as the rest of me. “But we’re very good at saving the world.”

  He lifted an arm and set his hand between my shoulders, holding on to the back of my dress. “No, we’re not. Look around you—we are terrible.”

  But he was smiling, and then he kissed me. His mouth was hungry, and he lay on his back with his arms around my waist. The way his lips moved against mine made it hard to care that the yard was muddy or my dress was wet or there were twigs and leaves stuck to my legs, only that he was warm and alive, that kissing me like this was what he was born to do, like we were all there was.

  THE TOWER

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  It was a hot, sticky day, and Fisher and I were in the front hall of the Blackwood house, prying boards off the blackened doorways and throwing them into a pile. It was hard, messy work, but there was no way around it. Without opening up the doors, it was impossible to say for sure that the house was beyond saving.

  At first, Myloria had been deeply distrustful of this scheme, but now she drifted around after us, peering into rooms she hadn’t looked inside in a decade. The upstairs was flatly unusable, and most of the rooms would need a lot of work just so no one would fall through the floors, but some were only singed and neglected, and it would be nice to be able to spread out.