The house smelled of milk gone bad. The sink was heaped with paper plates and takeout containers, the trash having long since overflowed. Giuliana Larkin, still in the bathrobe she’d worn for three days straight, sat cross-legged in her son’s bedroom, tearing up his comics collection one book at a time.
Riiiiiip went Batman.
Riiiiip went Superman.
Riiiiip went green guy with laser gun and robot with six arms.
Perhaps he was old enough to put away childish things, and this would help him become a man. But if so, she didn’t much care.
She was due to pick him up at the church in a few minutes, and she didn’t much care about that, either.
She’d wanted to be a good mother. Not at first, maybe. Not enough to stick around after the kid was born, but she’d come back for him. Was it her fault that it was too late, that he was already ruined? Maybe if she’d raised him, rather than leaving the job to trash, she could have found it in herself to love him. But she doubted it. She wasn’t, as it turned out, the mothering kind. After she left her father’s house, she’d vowed never to let anyone beat her again; after she had Milo, she’d vowed never to let anyone beat him, either. And the night before, when he’d knocked over his milk and she’d gone after him with the iron, its metal face still red-hot, she had stopped herself in time, before searing the flesh off his cheeks. But only just.
She’d promised herself the comics instead, and as soon as she’d gotten him out of the house, she’d taken a scissors to them. She soon discovered it was even more satisfying to tear them up with her own hands.
By the time he made it back, she would be gone.
“Whatever,” Scott had said when she asked if she could stay with him for a while, nestled under his covers, her head against his scarred chest, her hand playing along the pipes and needles on the nightstand, already eager for night to come again, for their highs to mingle along with their bodies, for their skulls to open and joy to rush in.
It wasn’t much of an invitation, but it was enough. When she finished with the comics, she walked out of the house, not bothering to pack a bag or lock the door behind her. That life had nothing she needed.
Jason didn’t know how to punch or shoot. But he knew how to watch and wait and bide his time. He knew that he was smarter than Baz Demming, and he knew that he would not let Baz, or anyone else, hurt him again.
He knew that Baz was only human, and if Jason slammed into him with his mother’s Jeep, Baz would bleed and break and die.
But that was how Nick had died, and so Jason could not do that.
It left plenty of options.
Poisoning. Drowning. Stabbing. Garroting. Strangling. Suffocating. Throat slitting. Jason’s mother was a doctor, which meant Jason had access to any number of pills and potions that could drop a quarterback. It would be easy enough to get hold of a syringe. Or a scalpel.
Jason’s mother liked to garden, and he was pretty sure even a confirmed weakling like him could swing a shovel hard enough to knock someone out – and an unconscious quarterback couldn’t protect himself, no matter how many muscles he might have.
The world was full of weapons, when you cared to look.
Sometimes he thought it didn’t even have to be Baz – it could be any of the football players, or anyone at all. As long as he finally got to hit back; as long as he got to be the one standing and laughing and deciding while someone else lay curled up on the ground, trying not to scream.
But it was Baz he wanted, and it was Baz that he followed, waiting for his opportunity. He stalked the quarterback from the shadows, and dreamed of poisons and knives and guns, and was too honest with himself to pretend this was still about justice or self-defense or even revenge. This was about two things: power and death. For the first time in his life, Jason would get one.
Baz would get the other.
There could be no more to clean; there was always more to clean. Twenty-four hours of scrubbing, vacuuming, dusting, laundering, Windexing, and washing had barely made a dent in the filth. After another twenty-four hours, high on cleaning fluid, hunger, and lack of sleep, Charlotte King had surveyed her work and deemed it inadequate. The house defied her. It was like living in a landfill, only a matter of time before the rats and maggots emerged from the walls to consume her.
Having turned her back on all the foul human needs like food and sleep, she was well into her sixty-second hour – her daughter mercifully consumed by her mission to save the world – when the answer came to her. How could the surfaces be clean before the surfaces were bare?
The guiding truth of Charlotte King’s life: cleanliness was next to godliness. And on this day, she ascended.
The clothes, the books, the flotsam and jetsam of two generations – photo albums and trophies and cookbooks and dishes – that was easy. Into the trash, first, until she got tired of tying the bags and discovered heaving them out the window was simpler. Her own clothes went as well, and it was better this way, with nothing to separate her from the deed. Clean mind, clean body, clean soul. The heap of discards grew, until, as the wedding china crashed to the driveway, she felt she would nearly explode with the radiance spilling out of her. The dog, which Ellie had dragged home one day and which her husband had insisted they keep, obviously had to go as well.
The furniture went next: Television. Computer. Chairs. Table.
Clutter.
Trash.
Filth.
It was not the first time she’d dragged her family out of the mud; it was not the first time she’d nearly acted too late. Surely the Lord could forgive her for not suspecting sooner that a fourteen-year-old could harbor so stained a soul. If she hadn’t been vigilant, if she hadn’t, in one of her periodic sweeps, found the diary, she might never have known, and Ellie might have followed her dark path to its inevitable end. Instead, Charlotte had caught the animals in the act. A bucket of cold water hadn’t been enough to wash away their sin, but it had been a start.
Of course, Ellie had never thanked her mother for the work done that day, for the gift Charlotte had bestowed on her, delivering her, still dripping with her shame, to the deacon’s doorstep. But Charlotte had mothered three teenage girls. She knew better than to expect gratitude.
All these years later, Charlotte had allowed her vigilance to wane, and she saw now her mistake. She hadn’t addressed the root of the problem. The taint remained. The dirt. The source of original sin. The seeds had been planted here, in this house, and as long as it remained, so would the danger.
The bare rooms were glorious, but the surfaces still screamed for purification. There was, in case of emergency, a stock of white paint in the garage, and Charlotte saw, as if by divine vision, that this would be next, and right. A home of lines and corners and nothing but unbroken stretches of white.
In an ecstasy of certitude, she began to paint.
Baz slammed his bruised shoulder into the tackling dummy, hard.
Again.
Again.
It wasn’t working. The red was still there.
That’s how he thought of it: the red.
It was both like and unlike living in a fog. Sometimes it was a mist so real he could touch it – was surprised that his hands weren’t slick and wet with condensation. Sometimes he could even see it, his world tinged with red. Other times it was less tangible: the feeling of red. Neither fury nor lust nor fear, not exactly, but somehow all of them together, paired with something else: a need. The red wasn’t content to just sit within him. He was its vessel, and when it woke, the only way to exorcise it was to let it feed.
The red had been with him since he was a child and, except for that time with the family cat, he’d managed to keep it under control. Football helped. So did tormenting the occasional loser at school. Always before, when it came over him, there was a simple supply-and-demand formula to banish it. The red demanded targets; Baz supplied them. Normally, a few runs at the tackling dummy or a misshapen face was enough to clear the mist for
another few days or, if he was lucky, weeks.
Not anymore.
Not since the storm.
The red was with him all the time now. He would never be rid of it. He had never been in control. It had been toying with him all these years, and now it was tired of the game, and it was tired of waiting.
It was impatient, and it was hungry, and all the dummies in the world wouldn’t shut it up.
He knew what would.
He ditched the field, changed out of his sweat-soaked jersey, and gave in to the magnetic pull of the Porter house (now the Prevette house) and her. The hedges around the perimeter were tall enough to hide him, so long as he was careful.
He was careful. From the edge of the backyard, he could see into her window. At night, when she stood before it with the blinds open, he could see her strip, a private show just for him. Almost as if she knew he was watching. Sometimes he sat there for hours, thinking about what he would do to her. Thinking didn’t make the red go away. It only intensified it, to an almost painful degree, but there was pleasure in the pain. He could wait. At least until he was safe, from the Prevettes and anyone else who might want to nose into his business. Until they were alone.
The red was a gift, he understood that now. A reward for good behavior, and he intended to live up to it.
He was going to make it hurt.
Deacon Barnes thought he had prepared himself for the pain, but he never knew there could be pain like this. He screamed. And then, because his faith was stronger than his flesh, and his love for the Lord stronger than all, he brought the hammer down again. This time, the nail went all the way through his palm.
“Praise be,” he managed to choke out, spots of black swimming across his vision and bile coating his tongue.
Praise be.
The Lord demanded sacrifice. A demonstration of fealty. Purification: all weakness, all temptation, all sin burned away. He would doubt himself no more, and no more would he doubt the Lord. Questions were for the weak. Envy, uncertainty, confusion, regret – these were the small concerns of small minds, impulses that stank of frail humanity. He had ascended beyond that. The pain would carry him to certainty.
This was the valley of darkness, but he would show no fear. He would be a beacon, and lead them to the light. Those who deserved to be led.
And so the nail, and so the palms, and so the pain.
It filled him up, and that was right. Satan would be left with nowhere to hide.
He smeared a finger through the blood and brought it to his tongue. This was the taste of salvation.
“Whatcha doing?” Milo asked.
Grace dropped another piece of paper into the burning waste bin. “Playing with matches,” she said. It probably wasn’t the best example to set for a bunch of small children, but the handful of kids who’d passed up the sudden field trip weren’t paying attention to her. Even if they were, the high school cheerleader hadn’t bothered to stick around after Ms. Tanner wandered off with the bulk of their charges, so who was left to complain?
“Can I?” Milo said.
“Why not?” She handed him a few of the crude wanted posters, each bearing a color photo of Cassandra Porter’s smiling face. It looked like a prom picture. She wore a pastel green dress. “Just one at a time, though. That’s important.”
“Why?”
She could have made up some kind of fire safety reason. Or told him the truth, that it was more satisfying that way, that she liked to watch the flames eat away at Cass’s face, singeing it into ash one perfect feature at a time, chin then lips then nose then eyes, curling in the heat and finally disappearing. She liked to imagine that she heard a tiny, paper-thin scream echoing up from the trash can. Cass was the one who’d told her about voodoo dolls one night, when they’d both gotten bored with whatever Disney trash her parents had planned they watch. Grace liked to imagine that each time she set the match to the photo, Cass, wherever she was, felt at least a tingle of heat across her scalp, along with a shiver of certainty that someone was out there, hunting. She could have told Milo that for some reason it seemed that if she set the whole stack on fire at once, it wouldn’t have the same effect. But Milo was eight, and so it was easy enough to just say “Because.”
He went with it.
“What do you think will happen if they find her?” he said, dropping a page into the fire. It wasn’t as satisfying as when she did it herself, but it was good enough.
“I think she’ll get what she deserves,” Grace said.
Lately, it was all she could think about.
When her parents had been around, there’d been plenty of other things to distract her. The strain of smiling just the right amount, as if everything were normal. The tense pause, after every line, waiting to see if it would set off another unpredictable bout of paternal tears; the struggle of attending school every day and, when that became too tedious, the additional struggle of keeping her parents from finding out how many days she’d skipped. The puzzle of how to fill that time, hours that shuffled past with all the ardor of a retirement-home escapee.
Now, alone in the house since the storm, she had no one to pretend for and no one to catch her in her lies. She had nothing to do but sleep and read and come to the church basement faithfully every day and play with the children, Milo especially. The torture of being around him – of pretending to laugh at his dumb little-kid jokes and tolerating his dumb little-kid questions and suffering through the farce of a worshipful little brother – seemed like a reasonable penance. She hadn’t managed to protect her own little brother – let her put up with someone else’s.
It wasn’t a terribly demanding schedule, and it offered plenty of time to focus on the only thing left that seemed to matter: Cassandra Porter. Where she would find Cassandra Porter. What she would do when she found her.
It had been her birthday, the night her parents announced that Owen was on the way. They’d served up the news along with the cake, like it was supposed to be the best present of all. And because parents, even the good ones, never really get it, they’d been surprised when she burst into tears and fled to her room. She’d stayed awake all that night, imagining what it would be like to have a baby in the house, sucking up all her parents’ attention, all their love. A baby would be needy and cute and it would never talk back. It would lay claim to her parents, who were supposed to belong to her. Only to her.
Then the baby had come, and it had all come true… and she’d learned to deal. She’d even decided that the baby was cuter than expected, if not as cute as everyone else seemed to think. That, at least when her mother was tired and her father was busy and she had to hold Owen against her shoulder and rock him to sleep, she didn’t actually mind having him around. But she never quite got used to the fact that her parents belonged to him, too. And now he was gone, and he’d taken them away with him. They weren’t real anymore: they talked, they ate, they occasionally even smiled, but they were empty. It was all Cass’s fault. Cass had stolen her family, and left Grace all alone.
She was alone.
Grace had promised herself, when Owen was still lying blue on the floor, that Cass would die. That Grace would do it herself. But she was a kid, and kids made idle promises all the time. I promise not to lie. I promise to do my homework. I promise to be good forever if you let me have one last cookie. A kid’s promise didn’t have to mean anything.
She didn’t feel like a kid anymore. Lately, she’d felt like making another promise. A real one. She was old enough to know that real life wasn’t anything like TV. Killing someone was probably harder than it looked. She had no idea whether she could actually pull a trigger or stab a knife or set a fire or do any of the hundred things that rushed into her mind whenever there was a vacant moment.
But she was starting to think maybe she could.
“What if she’s not so bad?” Milo said.
“She is.”
“Yeah, but what if she’s not?”
“But she is.” Be nice, she remind
ed herself. Nice like she’d never been to Owen.
“You don’t know.” Now he was whining.
“And you do?” She took the flyers back from him, dropped another one in the fire. Smoke was starting to billow. Soon some kind of fire alarm would probably go off and all hell would break loose. Let it. There was no one to punish her, and nothing to punish her with.
“So maybe I do,” he said.
“Do you know what that girl did?”
“She says she didn’t mean to,” he said.
She stopped, forcing her gaze away from the flame. “What?”