Chapter 17
Inside the house, Thalia was hunched over a bowl of oatmeal. Her eyes peeked out from under her brow for a split second before she refocused on her food.
“Lia,” Ember said quietly, fetching a bowl for herself from the cabinet and filling it at the stove.
Thalia didn’t look up. She didn’t move. She just sat there, clutching her spoon and staring into the specter of her breakfast like it held her escape. Ember took a quick look out the kitchen window to be sure that Gina was still outside. She was still kicking and beating at the thing that had squirmed from the skull.
Ember turned back to her sister. “Who was that out there? Who did she kill?”
Thalia’s eyes darted up once again, but disappeared again just as quickly.
“Lia,” Ember tried again, this time lowering her voice. “Where’s Nan? Did mom kill her? They keep calling her a hunter. What is that?”
Without a word, Thalia got up from the table, scooping her uneaten oatmeal into the garbage and putting her dish in the sink. She ran the water enough to fill it and keep the food bits from sticking, and then made a beeline for the pile of shoes by the front door. She pulled on a pair, and turned for the door leading to the garden.
Ember gingerly stepped in to block the door, and Thalia was forced to face her. Her hair hung in pigtail braids today, much as it had when they were little. As their eyes met, Thalia only gave a little nod of surrender.
“You should shower,” she whispered, pushing past Ember to join her mother in the garden. “We don’t talk about the rest of it. Ever.”
Watching her go, Ember sighed, nodding, and looked down at the bowl of oatmeal in her hands. Thalia wasn’t going to talk to her anymore, and Ember couldn’t blame her. Gina was…well, she was in the back yard, crushing something unnatural beneath her foot while burning it alive.
She wasn’t someone that anyone would want to cross.
Ember went up to her bedroom, pausing in the doorway as she looked around the empty shell. She had almost forgotten. She turned and went down the hall, opening the door to her grandmother’s room. Without touching anything else, she set the bowl of oatmeal on the nightstand, her bag by the bed, and returned to the hall. As she fetched a towel from the linen closet and went into the bathroom to shower, she felt dead on her feet.
Balling up the clothes Thalia had given her and putting them in the sink, she hoped they didn’t stink too badly. Zinny had washed them, but Acton had carried her most of the way home. She washed, paying close attention to her hair, and then wrapped herself in a towel and went back to her grandmother’s room.
She looked around at the many artifacts of a life well-lived, and her eyes fell on a set of Russian nesting dolls sitting on the dresser by the window. Ember wasn’t sure if her grandmother had ever been to Russia, and for a moment, she felt a pang of regret.
The black slug in the backyard hadn’t been her grandmother. Ember wasn’t sure why she was so sure, but she was. The thing had been one of them—one of the demons. But if that was true, then where was her grandmother? The woman was old, and Ember wasn’t sure that she could take care of herself. Gina had probably sent her away to an elder care facility. That was what she tended to do with family members who crossed her.
When the demons had called her a hunter, Ember had somehow assumed they meant that she carried a gun, or a knife, in Gina’s case. But she was a hunter—she hunted them, and killed them, and burned them. They didn’t look on her as a normal human, and they were afraid.
And now, Ember understood why.
She opened the drawers, feeling like she was invading Ethel’s privacy. For years, she had wondered what would have happened if her grandmother had stood up to Gina and forced her to keep the daughter she hadn’t wanted. Now, she realized that Ethel had been little more than a child herself in the situation.
Gina ruled the household. Gina ruled the entire island.
Ember changed into a simple, old woman’s nightgown. It was floor-length and had frills around the neck and cuffs that itched, but it was a pretty thing. As she grabbed her cold oatmeal and went to sit on the bed and eat it, she noticed that like the nightgown, the bedspread also had a floral pattern. The pattern was hand-stitched, and raised off the fabric in a way that made it nice to touch.
The entire room was so different from the Spartan simplicity of the rest of the house, Ember wondered if she and Ethel would have gotten along. The room was even set up much the way that Ember’s room had been, with the nightstand under the window and the bed pushed into a corner. Cursing Gina once again for robbing her of everything she could have had, her thoughts returned to the thing in the back yard, and she paused.
Gina destroyed or got rid of everything that caused frustration in her life. She killed people for it, and yet, as far as Ember had pushed her, and as difficult as she had made her life, she hadn’t forced her back out.
It was possible that their blood relation was the reason, even though it seemed of very little value to Gina. What was astounding, then, was that nothing had happened to Acton yet.
Ember furrowed her brow. Why hadn’t Gina gone after Acton? Even if they were friends, which Ember strongly doubted, part of Acton’s motivations had to be to use her to get at Gina. Even though Ember didn’t know Gina very well, she was certain that Acton would be a slug under her foot if it ever came down to a direct fight.
It was possible that Acton’s mind control, or whatever power he possessed, worked on Gina too; in which case, Acton was responsible for everything. He may have been the one who sent her away to begin with, the one who brought her back, and the one who had destroyed her life.
Ember set aside her oatmeal. The thought turned her stomach, but not nearly as much as the next to come into her head.
Acton had been taking her out for weeks, and if Gina’s bonfire was any indication, he had been doing it to goad her into a fight. But Gina had refused to fight him, and instead, she had blamed Ember, and begged her to stop going out. It was the same way she acted toward Thalia.
It was the way that mothers acted toward their children, and the way that Gina had never acted toward Ember.
With a sour taste in her mouth, Ember felt her lips contort into an expression of disgust. She turned to close the drapes over the window, but stopped when she saw something sitting outside on the window sill. It was a small overturned glass jar, with a piece of paper tucked underneath it.
Sliding the window open enough to investigate, and saw a hairy spider, about the size of a quarter, hunched and terrified against one wall of the jar. Grabbing the small jar, and the paper beneath it, she pulled the tiny creature inside and gently shut the window again. Setting the jar on the nightstand with the little spider still inside, she pulled the piece of paper out from under to read it.
So you won’t get lonely. Remember to free him tonight.
Ember’s heart gave a little leap of gratitude as she stared back down at the tiny spider, slowly circling the rim of the glass, searching with his front two legs for a way out.
Even as she quietly wondered who Acton was, and what he was to Gina to be immune to her wrath, she hugged a pillow to her chest and smiled at the small creature he had sent to keep her company.