In The Pines g5412

Contents

1. My girl, my girl

2. Don’t lie to me

3. Tell me, where did you sleep last night?

4. In the pines, in the pines

5. Where the sun don’t ever shine

6. I’ll shiver the whole night through

Acknowledgments

About the Author

This is a work of fiction. With the exception of incidental references to public figures, the names, characters, places, and events in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

In the Pines

Copyright © 2021 by Pippa Glencoe

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

This work contains lyrics from “Bury Me Beneath the (Weeping) Willow” and “In the Pines,” both of which are traditional folk songs in the public domain.

Cover Design © R Design

Editing by Jackie Gilliam

In memory of Lisa. My fucking tempo. Always.

“There is a lake of fire on top of the mountain. In the lake lives a mighty demon. If you should reach the top, the demon will seize you and throw you into the fire.”

-Sluiskin

1

My girl, my girl

The wet pavement glowed red in the night, reflecting the glare of the flashing stoplight as it swayed overhead in the wind. The light creaked on its line, its monotonous, repetitive sound the only one that broke the silence looming over the desolate town. It was the only stoplight for sixty miles in either direction, a sad vestige of humanity’s attempt to tame the wilderness that surrounded the town of Tillicum—if you could call this glorified rest stop, bumfuck sort-ofplace a town. Maybe it once was, back when the loggers and the mills sawed and ground and hacked the pines into submission. But the wilderness couldn’t be tamed. Not here, where it lived and breathed, where the ocean thundered to the west, the winter gales shearing the trees and people alike into bent, craggy shapes huddled against the wind. Where, to the east, the mountains hulked, hurtling avalanches so violently down to the earth from their glaciated peaks that the ground trembled and quaked. Where it rained almost every day of the year and a wall of stinking fog blinded and choked anyone unlucky enough to through. She felt as abandoned as the town, although she was the one walking away. It wasn’t too late to turn around, to go back to him. But what self-respect would she have left if she did? If she closed her eyes she could still see the lines of his bare ass, the way it undulated, the muscles flexing, as he fucked another woman in their bed. It wasn’t something that could be unseen or unknown. She could still hear his protestations as he chased after her, the way he screamed her name. It was more real to her now than the wind howling in her ears. Her heels clacked noisily on the asphalt, and she cursed as she rolled her ankle on its uneven surface. She knew she looked like a goddamn prostitute, shambling drunkenly along the side of the road in the dark, her tights torn at the knees from where he’d dragged her, her knuckles bloodied and raw from punching him. She clawed at her skirt, willing it to cover more of her legs, and

she shivered in the rainy night, feeling naked and exposed. She had no plan, no strategy. In her drunken stupor, she’d vowed to walk the hundred miles to Aberdeen if she had to. Once she got there, who could say what she’d do or how she’d live? Maybe she’d wait tables and give guys ten dollar blowjobs on the side. Anything would be better than here. Anything would be better than this. Nothing can hurt you when you’ve lost everything you love. The rain plastered the dark tendrils of her hair to her face, making them appear as black as an oil slick. Rivulets of water cascaded down the sides of her face, dripping off the tip of her nose and from her eyelashes into her eyes, blinding her. She didn’t care. She could drown out here, washed away in a landslide, and she wouldn’t fucking care. As she staggered along the shoulder of the empty highway, the dense wall of fog in front of her lit up from the headlights of an approaching car. She glanced over her shoulder to see who it was, to make sure he hadn’t followed her. An old rusted pickup truck, too shabby and weather-beaten to be called anything so charming as vintage, crawled along the road. Its plates were in-state, but the unfamiliar car was decidedly out-of-town. She allowed herself to exhale in relief. It wasn’t him. Before she could think better of it, she extended her left arm, hitching up her thumb to bum a ride. It went against every last thing she’d ever been taught about survival, but without money or decent walking shoes, her options were limited. The truck pulled to a stop alongside her, the clutch groaning in protest as the driver shifted the car into neutral. She leaned forward to squint through the enger window, trying to get a look through the rain-soaked glass at who was driving, but all she could make out was the shape of a man—someone with broad, muscular shoulders. The man leaned forward across the bench seat and pushed open the enger door with one solid swing. The door squealed on its hinges as if it hadn’t been opened in years, like the truck was jealously protecting its sole claim on the driver’s company.

Her pulse raced violently in her ears, thundering like the overhead sky. Every muscle in her body tightened in anxiety, her tendons and ligaments threatening to snap from the strain, her body an over-tuned instrument striking an unnaturally shrill chord. Through the gaping maw of the open door, she could finally see the driver, her tension subsiding the instant she saw him. Maybe it was his boyish good looks, his open, unassuming smile, the slight cleft of his chin, his wavy, unkempt blond hair, or some combination thereof, but at the sight of him a warmth rushed through her, unexpected but not unwelcome. In his black Sub Pop t-shirt and ratty flannel he looked like every guy she’d ever known, a real hometown boy, but then she’d never quite seen anyone so attractive as him before, either. He was a blend of the familiar and the strange, inspiring a feeling in her that could only be described as uncanny. She walked up to the open door, leaning her palms onto the grubby, worn upholstery. “Do I know you from somewhere?” she asked, biting her lip and trying to puzzle it out. Maybe she’d seen him years ago at a football game, a player from a visiting high school, maybe. With a build like that, he could’ve played ball once. Or maybe he was one of the folks who ed through town on their way to the coast, or into the rainforest. It was possible she’d seen him around town before. He frowned at the question, his warm blue eyes scanning her face as if to ask the same thing, but he didn’t answer. “Hey yourself. You're soaked. Why don’t you hop on in?” His tone was solicitous, gentle. She complied, sliding in ass first so that he wouldn’t notice the raw flesh on her knees. He waited for her to slam the door shut and strap in before shifting gears and resuming his path down the empty road. “Thanks for picking me up,” she told him. “I could’ve been there a while.” He nodded once, acknowledging and dismissing the gratitude in a single gesture. “How far do you need to go?” There was no point, she knew, for him to ask which way she was going, or for her to ask him. Out here, on the farthest reaches of the Olympic Peninsula, the road went but one of two directions: back, toward Port Angeles, or onward, toward Aberdeen.

“All the way to Aberdeen,” she replied. “But I’ll go as far as you’re willing to take me.” Her fingers toyed with the frayed hem of her skirt, worrying and distressing the fabric until she had enough thread to wrap a puller around her finger. “Works for me. I’m headed on down to Oregon anyway. I can just drop you off on the way.” She liked the sound of his voice—it was soft-spoken and low, reassuring. With a voice like that, you could say anything and get away with it. A voice like that made you feel like you were old friends. “I’m Gid, by the way. What's your name?” He pried his eyes off the road to look at her, his gaze falling to her bloodied knuckles. He had the sense not to ask her what had happened, his eyes flitting away to resume his careful watch of the road. He waited in silence for her to reply. When she finally spoke, it was a lie. Running away like she just had—there could be a missing persons report. Or one for assault. So she gave him the name of her dead sister, Mara. It was better if no one knew her real name, couldn’t phone the police with a well-intentioned tip that would disastrously rope her back into the shitty life she wanted to forget. No, she wanted to vanish forever and completely, to let the girl she’d once been die and to begin a new life as someone else. “Mara, you said it was? I can’t tell you how happy I am to see you. It seems like I’ve been driving forever on this damn road. The loneliness of it was beginning to grind on me.” “I bet,” she replied absentmindedly, chancing a look his way, taking in the strong cut of his jaw, sharp as a logger’s blade, and the way his soft hair blew in the breeze of the window he'd left cracked open. In the dim light his eyes looked so clear they matched the milky pallor of the fog outside the car. He didn’t seem to notice her furtive appraisal of him as he reached his hand down, grabbing the coffee cup from between his knees, and took a healthy swig of whatever was in it. She couldn’t help but make a scoffing sound. She’d lived here long enough to know that sometimes the only way to warm your bones was to pound whatever cheap liquor you could get your hands on. Didn’t matter when you drank. Or

where. You did it just to get by. But it didn't make it right. He held the cup up, swishing it around, as if he’d read her thoughts. “Don’t worry,” he chuckled. “It’s not alcohol or anything—although God knows that would help the time.” When she didn’t laugh, he added, “Just tea. Honest. Got this back in PA.” There was something so familiar about him she was certain she could trace the outline of his face, even in her dreams. Maybe that’s how she knew him—from Port Angeles. “Is that where you’re from?” she asked, trying to sound casual, running a thumb tenderly over the jagged flesh of her knuckles. He shook his head. “No. Uh-uh.” He took another swig, this time finishing off the tea, and dropped it onto the truck’s floor without caring where it fell. “I’m from Gold Bar,” he said. “Ever hear of it?” He flashed her a grin, the sight of it so much brighter than anything she had ever seen here at the end of the world. She gnawed her lip, chewing so furiously she could taste the sharp metallic blood seeping from her splitting skin. “Yeah,” she said, surprising even herself. “Guess I have. It’s out toward Stevens , right on the highway. One of those old mining towns.” “Yeah.” His eyebrows darted up, and when he spoke he sounded pleased. “Well,” he amended, “it used to be, anyway. It's not much of anything anymore.” “Same as here,” she muttered, scowling in the rearview mirror toward the shadows that had swallowed Tillicum. Gid pressed on, even though she hadn’t asked. He was obviously hoping to talk to her, whereas she would have preferred to sit in silence. “Everyone just lives in Monroe now,” he explained, “because of the prison. They’ve got all the jobs. Lots of prisoners, so business is good, I guess.” He glanced at her, and when he did she noticed the dark shadows ringing his eyes, so deep they looked like bruises. She didn’t know how long he’d been driving, but he looked like he could use a break. “Is that where you work—the prison?” He laughed and scratched at the back of his head, his nails dragging noisily on

his scalp. “Hell no… I couldn’t see myself in a place like that.” He shuddered. “Too depressing, don’t you think?” Fixing her eyes in the rearview mirror again to avoid staring at him—he really was startlingly attractive—she muttered, “I wouldn’t know.” Or maybe she’d know better than anyone else, since her life had been nothing to her but a neverending prison sentence, solitary confinement since her family had died. Silence stretched on between them for several minutes, neither one of them attempting to break it. He seemed to be waiting for her to say something. And, while there were a hundred different things she could say, she had the feeling he wouldn’t particularly like to hear any of them. But he had rescued her in the dead of the night, and he seemed pleasant enough, so she supposed she should at least try to be polite. “So what do you do, then?” she asked, not quite interested enough to be called curious, but not disinterested either. His thumbs tapped restlessly on the steering wheel, his hands positioned at 10 and 2 o’clock like a good boy or some fucking well-trained dog. The sleeves of his flannel had been hastily rolled, and she couldn’t help but appreciate his muscled forearms, the fine blond hair that covered their expanse. “Well,” he said, “um, you know… I used to work at my dad’s bakery.” She cocked an eyebrow at his use of past tense. “Used to?” “Yeah. The bakery… it’s gone now,” he explained. His voice was forlorn, his expression impossibly sad. Something in the words aged him, making him seem like some ancient, forgotten relic of a lost race. “What happened to it?” she pressed, her voice a mere whisper, like a finger probing an open wound. Intrusive, but gentle—needing to know, but with as little pain as possible. “Did it go out of business or something?” “There was a fire.” He paused as if searching for the right words and swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing furiously in his throat. “They say the ovens had been left on… We lived above the bakery, and my parents... they were in bed. They didn’t make it out.”

Her heart constricted painfully in her chest at his words, bleeding and writhing for him. She knew a thing or two about dead parents. “I’m sorry,” she said, two of the most worthless words in the English language. Gid shot her a rueful smile. “Don’t be. It’s not like it was your fault, right?” “It wasn’t anyone’s,” she reminded him, resisting the urge to place her hand comfortingly over one of his. When he didn’t reply, they fell back into silence. There was only the splattering of rain on the windshield, the rhythmic squeaking of the rubber wiper blades on the glass, the whistling of wind as it rushed in through the cracked window, the pelting of the tires against the concrete. The silence between them was pregnant with something, but she couldn’t be sure what. Maybe he was too shy to ask her questions about her life. Which was entirely for the best. It saved her from having to lie. He cleared his throat and pointed toward the radio. “Mind if I turn something on?” “Not at all,” she said, thankful for any excuse not to have to talk. Gid flipped on the truck’s radio and pressed a button on the antique tape deck. The speakers crackled to life, filling the cab with the strains of an acoustic guitar. The music’s dark and haunting melody struck her heart like a punch to the chest... she knew this song, every word of it, every note. It was a cover of an old folk song Nirvana had recorded right before Kurt Cobain killed himself. It had been one of her father’s favorite songs. Her father, who’d owned a shotgun too —although he hadn’t only used it on himself. The song was elegiac and mournful, and when Kurt begged his girl—again and again—not to lie to him, howling in a shattered voice that he would shiver the whole night through, lost somewhere in the misery of the pines, she knew it was the sound of a man giving his own wake. Betrayed and alone. Hateful and dying. She knew a thing or two about that. “It hurts, doesn’t it?” Gid asked, watching her from the corner of his eye. “Hearing it—yeah,” she replied, mostly to herself.

He shook his head, his voice calling her back to him. “No. I mean betrayal.” She ran a finger along her lower lip, ing the way it had felt to be kissed by a faithless lover, to feel his warm lips pressed against hers in an empty and broken promise. Closing her eyes, she couldn’t help but see the other woman’s face contorted in pleasure, head thrown back, eyes squeezed shut, or the blue neon light of the adjacent bar that filtered in through the slit of the curtains, coloring her hair a grotesque shade of purple. The woman’s tits swayed, her fists clutching at the tangled bed sheets, desperate to hold onto anything. And him… His skin was pale, his hair bronze, the muscles of his ass taut. He was a golden god, plundering and taking what he wanted, as the gods always did. And what he had wanted all along was Krista Buchanan. He’d never wanted her. She knew that now. In the silence of the car she could still hear the sound of his pelvis smacking against Krista’s ass as he forcefully drove into her from behind, the way he growled and Krista moaned. She could hear herself cry out in the doorway, a strangled, aborted sound. She looked over at Gid, searching his profile to understand what it was he knew of betrayal. “It hurts,” she itted, but if he had asked more, she couldn’t possibly begin to explain where the pain was rooted. Love was a weird thing, a senseless act of violence against ourselves. It was nothing but madness and self-destruction. “You think you know someone,” she itted. “You think they love you. You think they care about you. But do you know what I think?” His blue eyes locked on her for a moment. She could read desperation in them, his burning need to know what she thought. She continued. “I think love is a lie. Like heaven—or God—it’s a lie we tell ourselves to make us feel less alone, less scared to live in this piece-of-shit world. When in reality we’re all speeding along at 70 mph through a wall of fog, barrelling toward a lonely death, an unvisited grave. And that’s all there is. Love isn’t real.” He hung his head noticeably at her words, and when he spoke he sounded like a young child, dejected and beaten. “It’s not?”

“No,” she told him, feeling more certain of it. “It’s not. And anyone who says it is is lying through their teeth.” The entire world around her was black and dank, covered in a shroud of fog, an unwelcoming and hostile place. There was no love in it. No kindness. Those were merely fairy tales and lullabies we told ourselves to sleepwalk through life’s horrors. Gid’s jaw clenched and rolled as her words sank in, his hands tightening on the steering wheel, knuckles whitening. His entire demeanor changed in a moment, his boyishness and sweetness dispelling into the darkness. The tension in his body radiated off him into hers, seeping in through her pores and lodging in her bones. For the first time she could feel how close his body was to hers. She could feel how physical a presence he was. “I really don’t know what to believe anymore,” Gid told her. “It seems like everyone’s a liar. Everyone in this fucking place. Everyone has their own agenda. I’d hoped that you would be...” He trailed off, then cleared his throat. “Anyway, never mind.” “Well, I’ve got no reason to lie to you,” she said. “My sole agenda right now is you getting me a couple hours down the road from here.” She looked around, then, to take in the surroundings of the cab more fully. You could tell a lot about a person from their car, and she wanted to know more about the person who’d taken pity on the roadkill that had been still dragging itself along the side of the road. The interior of the truck was as beaten as the exterior, the fabric upholstery of the seat ripped in several places from years of wear and tear. But the truck was otherwise tidy and uncluttered. If Gid was traveling with baggage it must have been in the truck bed, hidden beneath the plastic tarp he’d draped across it. A rabbit’s foot, dyed a faded blue, dangled from the rearview mirror by a grubby, double-knotted shoelace. She reached out and gently stroked the rabbit’s foot. “I haven’t seen one of these in ages,” she mused nostalgically, thinking of summers spent traveling with her family in their station wagon, stopping off at western-themed gift shops to buy whatever knicknacks a couple dollars panhandled off her parents could buy. “I didn’t know they still made these. Where’d you get it?”

He pinched the bridge of his nose, and when he spoke he sounded as irritated as he looked. “Please don’t touch that.” She retracted her hand, feeling stung. Apparently, she’d said something to upset him or touched upon some sore subject. She didn’t know where the conversation had taken a turn, but because she didn’t feel like walking the next eighty-some odd miles to Aberdeen, she thought it would be best if she said nothing more at all unless he initiated it first. He seemed to feel the same way, that not talking was probably best. He ejected the cassette, flipping it over and rewinding it to start the album from the beginning. “About a Girl” came on, but he made no attempt to speak to her over the music. Instead he gripped the steering wheel and stared straight ahead, a stony expression masking his face. So she rolled onto her right hip, curling up a little to rest her head against the window. Exhaustion and fatigue overwhelmed her. There’s no way to say how long she slept or what woke her up first: her forehead knocking against the glass of the window from the bumpy road or Gid arguing with himself. “What—where are we?” she asked groggily, wiping the sleep from her eyes. Through the window all she could see was darkness and fog weakly punctuated by the two narrow beams of light from the truck. From what she could tell, they were driving down an unpaved forest road, and perhaps had been for some time. The hulking trunks of Sitka spruce and hemlocks stood sentinel on each side of the road, long strands of moss dangling from their limbs as if to bar access to the dense forest beyond them. Gid had been muttering unintelligibly under his breath, something that sounded like “you’re a monster, you’re a monster,” but as he realized she had awoken, he directed his invective toward her. He headed her off. “There’s no point talking to me. I know you’re a fucking liar.” Panic struck deep in her stomach. She had no idea who Gid was or how he could possibly know she had lied about her identity—much less why a fib about her name would anger him so much. Anxiously, she felt the sides of her hips, searching for a pocket where she might have stashed her ID.

“Don’t move,” he warned her. “I know what you are. You’re a monster.” He paused and inhaled deeply, a shaky breath that made him sound as scared as she was. “You’re a bitch.” “What’s happening?” she croaked, searching for her voice but not being able to find where it had gone. “I don’t understand.” He shot her a withering look, no longer caring about the road before them. Her eyes, pitch black as the night, met his, her lower lip trembling from the waves of terror that were beginning to wash over her. “That’s priceless,” he snapped, ripping the rabbit’s foot from the rearview mirror and blindly throwing it at her. “Acting like you don’t even know where I got this. Like you didn’t fucking give it to me.” She gasped wordlessly, uncomprehending. His voice was like an ice bath, a raging river so forceful it could sweep land, houses, trees, the world itself, out to sea. “Did you ever love me, Cassie? Or was it always going to be that Radford prick?” With eyes wide she asked him, “Who’s Cassie?” As she spoke the name, she at last understood how she knew Gid, where she had seen his face before. He was on television everywhere. The infamous fugitive, Gideon Burke. She felt so stupidly ashamed of herself for allowing her life to come to this. Without thinking, she brought her hands to her neck and touched the same spot he’d touched on her. They’d found her body in the Skykomish, in a gravel bed where the river met the Snohomish. No one had found the mechanic’s body, but by now it would have probably made its way into the Sound, a human reduced to chum. “Listen,” she said, trying to sound reasonable and calm. “I did lie earlier about my name. I—I gave you the name of my sister. Mara.” She shivered as his eyes locked on hers. She’d thought they were warm and radiant, but now she saw they were as harsh and unforgiving as the tide that battered the beach. She went on, trying to explain before he did something rash, something that couldn’t be undone, “My name is Jamie Woodruff. I’m not from

Gold Bar, Gideon. I’m from Tillicum.” Thinking quickly, she made herself as small and vulnerable as she could. She began to cry, hot tears scalding her face that she wiped away with shaking fingers. “Y-you don’t h-have to d-do this,” she beseeched him. “It was j-just an honest mistake.” She thought about Cassandra Lee’s face and how, other than perhaps the color of her skin, she didn’t look a thing like the dead girl. She begged him because she had no other weapon at her disposal, “I want to go home, Gideon. You can still take me home.” She realized, possibly too late, that she didn’t want to die. Not here, not like this. Maybe not ever. She didn’t care that she didn’t have a home. Or a family anymore. She just knew she didn’t want it to end here. If she died now there would be no one to mourn her. Her knees began quaking as he braked and cut the engine. He slumped over the steering wheel, his shoulders shaking as he sobbed Cassie’s name over and over, a well-worn prayer that brought him no comfort or absolution. “I’m so sorry, Cassie,” he moaned, openly weeping. “I would have always stayed with you. Always.” She had one chance. Without looking she reached for the handle of the car door, unbuckling herself and forcing the door open in one swift movement. She landed hard in the dirt, her knees giving out beneath her, before he realized she was gone. Gideon howled, an inhuman, deranged sound, as he realized she had escaped. She began running blindly into the forest, the mud sucking the heels off her feet, the moss lashing across her face, tangling itself around her and holding on like the drowned hands of a dead girl. In the silence of the night, deep in the pines, there were only her screams and his. She couldn’t tell where hers ended and his began. They mingled as one, a chorus of desperation and pain. Somewhere nearby a coyote ed them, a lonely, plaintive sound that beckoned them onward. It called to them: me. Stay with me. She ran as fast as she could, pumping her arms furiously, dodging the massive

trees, stumbling over fallen branches and sword ferns, clumsily advancing over the uneven terrain. The rain fell heavily upon her, sheets as thick and dark as blood. She gasped for air, choking on a fog that felt as poisonous as whatever had infected Gideon’s brain. He trampled noisily through the undergrowth, and she could tell by the sound and by his heavy breathing that he was advancing on her quickly, steadily. One of his hands clamped onto her wrist, arresting her motion. She tried to wrest it from his grasp, but he was too strong. “Let go of me!” she snarled as he pulled her to the ground, falling on top of her. “I can’t!” he moaned, sounding as tortured and lost as she was. In the darkness, all she could see was his hand. She lunged forward with her mouth, biting him, tearing at his flesh. He howled pitifully and withdrew it, cradling it to his chest. Taking advantage of his weakness, she kicked him, rolling him off her. She stumbled to her feet, but Gideon reached out with his uninjured hand, clasping her around the ankle, dragging her back down to the earth. In the distance, a bolt of lightning struck a tree, illuminating for one second the forest around them. Everything glowed a sinister blue—the pallid color of Gideon’s eyes, the color of the water that had swallowed the bodies he’d dropped into its depths. The water, the torturous water. The last thing she would ever see or know. “You’re a monster, Cassie!” Gideon cried, knocking his injured hand furiously against his head, blindly battering himself. She tried crawling away, her hands seeking purchase on the forest floor. Her fingers sifted through the loose dirt, frantic and searching, until they brushed upon something cool and metal—

2

Don’t lie to me

“These are the tenderest parts. You see?” Her blood-covered index finger dragged a line across the soft pink flesh, still moist and peppered with traces of pale fur, to show him. “This is called the saddle. It’s the loins.” Beneath the rabbit’s translucent skin he could see its veins, silvery blue tracks that traveled through its scrawny body like the glacial-fed rivers that coursed through Sky Valley. An angry purple bruise ringed the rabbit’s throat where the snare had strangled it. Blood. Flesh. Veins. Bruises. These were the palette of a body’s possibilities, one that had more to do with death than it ever had with life. He chanced a glance up at the girl kneeling in front of him, his stomach tightening at what he saw. In the sun-dappled light beneath the pines the skin of her bare shoulders glowed warm, like a jar of honey left on a windowsill to catch summer flies. As she bit her plump, cherry-red bottom lip in concentration, popping the ts on the rabbit’s hind legs, he felt himself trapped in the sight of her. The intensity of his longing had grown throughout the years, until it had become a gnawing sickness he got in the pit of his stomach every time he looked at her. He’d loved her since the day Cassie Lee had taken her first tentative steps into Miss Taylor’s kindergarten classroom and slid into the empty seat next to his, but that love had been sweet and innocent. This love—it was bitter and cloying, and it twisted his guts to the point of pain. Her gray eyes, the same color as the battered rocks lining the banks of the Skykomish, briefly met his, and a rare smile made its way onto her face. “Are you paying attention to a single thing I say, Gideon Burke?” “I’m hanging onto your every last word,” he said, swallowing thickly as he tried not to gag on the bile making its way from his stomach into his mouth. He

wanted to bite her chapped red lips, to ghost kisses along the delicate column of her throat. He wanted to lick her bloody finger clean until the pressure of his tongue rubbing against her skin made her gasp. Cassie didn’t know any of these things—and especially not that last thing. That the sight of her cleaning the rabbit, sawing and severing the tendons still connecting its head to its body, made his dick twitch in his pants. Watching her clean the rabbit carcass made him believe she was like him in some fundamental way he’d only recently begun to understand—that maybe she didn’t only tolerate the mess, but that she kind of liked it too. Disionately, she used her pocket knife to make an incision in the abdomen, reaching her fingers in to fish out the rabbit’s heart and entrails. Her brow furrowed as she held the liver up to her face, inspecting it. It took everything Gideon had in him not to kiss the frown off her forehead. “What’s wrong?” he asked. “Nothing,” she murmured, turning the liver over in her palm and running one of her thumbs over its surface. “I’m just checking it for spots to make sure it wasn’t diseased.” “And?” He took a long, slow breath, inhaling the heady scent of blood mingled with whatever deodorant she’d put on that morning. Later, when he painted this, he’d make her eyes the color of shale, the liver a deep, rich aubergine, and he’d stroke himself to the image, imagining her brows were knitted from the force of his cock thrusting inside her. “...It’ll make a good pate.” She opened the plastic lunch box resting on the ground next to her, depositing the liver into a small sandwich bag filled with ice. She shut the box, leaving her smeared fingerprints on it, to resume her work cleaning the rabbit. Pointing with the blade of her knife to the intestines, she added, “We’ll need to bury those.” “Concealing the evidence?” he teased, his dick throbbing uncomfortably against the waistband of his pants as she smiled back at him. She rolled her eyes. “Something like that.”

He took a look around, surveying the hard-packed dirt beneath their knees. It was the middle of a drought in the height of dry season, and it hadn’t rained in weeks. Without tools, digging a hole would be messy, dusty, hard work. “It seems like it would be a whole lot easier if we dumped them into the Sky.” She shrugged. “We could.” Her cool gray eyes landed on him again, sending a shudder along his spine from the weight of their touch on his skin. “You wanna take care of it while I finish this up?” His hands were clean so far, with not a speck of dirt on them. Working at the bakery wasn’t exactly conducive to living comfortably with filth crusted beneath his fingernails. He considered her question briefly before the thought of Dylan Radford came to mind. A guy like him wouldn’t hesitate to scoop up the guts— no wonder she was fucking him. It was exactly like his mother always said: Gideon was a pussy and a worthless piece of shit, a girly boy who’d rather paint all day than get his hands dirty doing whatever needed to get done. For fuck’s sake, he couldn’t even pick up a dead rabbit’s intestines to chuck them in a damn river. He couldn’t do anything right. “Sure,” he said, not really having any other choice. The last thing he wanted was for Cassie Lee to see the depths of his worthlessness. He grabbed the empty white bucket next to him—the one Cassie said she’d brought with her this morning in the hopes of catching a steelhead—and threw the guts into it, wiping his bloody hands onto the rough fabric of his cargo pants and standing up. He shifted anxiously from one foot to the other, looking down at her, unsure what to say next. If he had known he’d find her here this afternoon, checking her snares, he would have rehearsed things to talk about. Anything would have been better than gawking at her like an idiot. “I’ll—ah—meet you back here in a few?” he finally asked. “Naw,” she said, slicing the rib meat off the remains of the flayed animal. His heart instantly plummeted into the bucket of entrails he was holding— worthless, dead guts that belonged to a worthless, dead animal. She looked up at him, her face at the level of his crotch, and he hoped she

couldn’t tell he was still hard for her. “I’ll meet you down there,” she added, wriggling her bloody fingers at him. Of course. Even if she decided to walk the couple miles back home, she’d need to clean herself up somehow. For a second he allowed the image of her peeling her blood-smattered tank top off over her head and wading into the icy waters of the river, her skin pebbling from the contrast between the iciness at her feet and the sun-baked air, to invade his mind. He allowed himself to imagine he’d her instead of doing what he always did, which was to watch wistfully from the riverbank, hoping to catch a glimpse of her nipples through her soaked cotton bra. “Be sure to take the tackle box with you,” she said. A shadow of a smile toyed at the corner of her mouth. “But don’t worry about the pole. I can grab that.” He nodded and took half a step back, his eyes flitting to the low neckline of her tank top and down to the shadowed valley between her breasts. Right at the spot where her top obscured the view of her skin, he could see a mole—a beauty mark—on the swell of her left breast, an imperfection so perfect he wondered about the madness of the one who’d deigned to put it there. “I’ll see you in a bit, then.” She went back to work, sawing into the rabbit’s saddle. “Yep. See you in a bit.” He made his way over to the Sky, following the narrow footpath through the ferns until he reached its rocky bank, and then he carefully descended over the boulders and water-worn logs until the current licked at the toes of his boots. Squatting, he set the bucket and tackle box down on the boulder next to him and plunged his hands into the river, watching the blood rinse away. He closed his eyes and stayed there, fingers growing numb, until he heard her voice at his shoulder. “It’s a beautiful day.” She stooped next to him and submerged her hands, her right one still clasping the pocket knife she carried everywhere with her, the one she’d said her daddy had given her before his accident. Their shoulders were so close they were almost touching.

“I wouldn’t mind walking back into town,” she said as she carefully rinsed off the blade, “Lord knows I’m used to it. But I was wondering if I could bum a ride with you. I mean… if you’re headed that way. It’d be easier than carrying all my gear.” “Of course.” He rubbed his hands together beneath the water, scrubbing away the traces of blood that clung to his cuticles. He wanted to ask her about Dylan, what Dylan would think of people seeing them together, her sitting next to him in the cab of his truck. Whether Radford would care if anyone would talk, or of what they might say. But he knew he didn’t have the courage to ask her about him outright, so instead he prevaricated and settled on asking about her car. “Is the Buick still in the shop?” “Yeah. Dylan said he’d need to order a new hose for the radiator. Even without charging me for the labor, that’s about two hundred bucks I ain’t got.” She stood up and shook off her knife, folding it and then slipping it into the back pocket of her cutoff shorts. From where she stood, mere inches from him, the smooth skin of her legs was close enough to lick, to bite, to brand. Gideon wanted to grab her, pull her toward him by the back of her thighs, and bury his face between her legs so that anyone walking by—the old, middle-aged, beerbellied men from the suburbs fishing thirty yards down the bank—could see that she didn’t belong with Dylan Radford, no matter what she had to do to get that radiator hose. But he did none of those things. Instead, like the pussy he was, he offered, “If you need to borrow any money from me, I’d be happy to spot you.” “No. But thank you,” she said, a little put off. So prideful. She never had taken charity well. The one time he’d made the mistake of offering his lunch to her she hadn’t talked to him again for the rest of the school year. As if she were aware she’d come off too harshly, she nudged his shoulder with her knee. “It’s not like you got heaps of money sitting around, Gid, and even if you did, you’d be better off investing in something else. The Titanic would be a

better investment, for fuck’s sake. My ol’ shit box always has something wrong with it. You fix a leak in the gas tank, and it springs one in the radiator. So who’s to say I’d ever be able to pay you back? It’s really not worth it.” “But you need a car to get around,” he pointed out. “Yeah. I need a car,” she sighed. “But for now, how’s about I bum that ride with you?” Very much liking the sound of that, he stood up and faced her. Over the thundering of the river, he thought he heard her breath hitch. Or maybe he only imagined it—sometimes he did that, losing himself in whatever fantasy happened to come to mind. Right now it was the idea that the electricity that pulsed through his body had made its way into hers too and that, when they were close like this, it made the soft, downy hairs on her arms stand up, as though they were stretching out to touch him. They were so close he could feel the heat of her body radiating off her, and he looked down at her, iring the way she looked with the river behind her. He knew he would paint this too, how the tumult of the rapids was reflected in her cool gray eyes and the trunks of the trees that lined the riverbanks had seeped into her skin, suffusing it with a hundred different shades of their russet warmth. He wanted to submerge himself in her depths and bury himself in her shade. He wanted to hide in her, to die in her. The urge was overwhelming. He stooped to grab the bucket of entrails, and for a split second he thought he felt her fingers whispering through the ends of his hair. But it was only his imagination. He was sure of it. In one unceremonious dunk, he dropped the rabbit’s guts into the river, and they floated away, bait for the predators that lurked, ravenous, along the banks of the Sky.

The ride back into town was agonizingly short. Gideon could have driven all day and into the night with Cassie by his side. As the music from his radio filled the cab of his truck, the wind from the open windows whipped around them, sending loose strands of her hair flying around her face, and he allowed himself to imagine he was on the open road with her, bound for places neither of them had ever seen. They’d wind along unknown country roads, down the Oregon coast and into California, straight on to the desert, and then to Mexico. They’d drive until the faces of the snowy, pine-covered mountains they’d seen their whole lives were nothing more than distant memories in the rearview mirror, until the ones before them were bare, their naked expanses awash in coral and rust and ruby. He imagined that they could leave all of this behind, even the broken, corrupted parts of themselves—the vile things they’d done and thought—if only they drove far enough. Cassie had propped her elbow up on the open window and was looking out at the world around them, at the decrepit houses and derelict buildings, the shithole convenience store that had once been a two-pump gas station, the rusting husks of its pumps covered now in plastic tarps, and the bar that had been a whorehouse for the prospectors and loggers who’d stolen the land and then raped it. The air outside the truck reeked of poverty and desperation, mingled with the faint tinges of smoke that had made its way over the mountains from the wildfires burning in the east. But none of that affected him right now, because Cassie was singing. She didn’t seem to realize it, at least not at first. Her voice was soft and low, husky and almost reverent, as she sang along to the song on the radio. “Oh, bury me beneath the willow, ‘neath the weeping willow tree, and when he knows where I am sleeping, then perhaps he’ll weep for me.” She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, like something inside of her had been shaken loose. “This song always makes me feel so…” She trailed off as she gazed out the window again.

“Sad?” Gideon offered. He couldn’t take his eyes off her, couldn’t be bothered to care if they drove right off the road or headlong into oncoming traffic. “I guess I was gonna say free.” “Me too,” he said, even though he’d never felt free a day in his life. The closest he’d come to it was right now, with her. The lie was worth it; she flashed him another one of her rare smiles. Each one of her smiles was like a shiv, stabbing the intrusive thoughts that plagued him, slashing away at you’re a monster, a bastard, you should just be done with it— done with them, burn it down, burn the whole fucking place down, burnitburnitburnit. When Cassie smiled, she was the one on the offense—not the voices—invading him, making him feel a kernel of something that felt like wholeness. He gripped the steering wheel tighter, his hands clenched firmly at 10 and 2 o’clock, and let the tightness travel through his entire body, pulling him as taut as a clothesline snapping in a squall. “Do you think…” he began, his coward of a voice failing him at first. “Do you think you’d want to do this again sometime? That is, if you can?” “Rabbit hunting?” She arched an eyebrow in surprise. “We certainly could. But we could also just, you know, hang out. If that’s what you meant.” He didn’t know how to tell her what he meant, that he wanted it all—the snaring, the slicing, the tearing of flesh from bone, his body drifting closer to hers until somehow they were kissing and his tongue was stroking her mouth, her bloodied hand gripping his cock and pumping until he came in violent spurts all over it— all over her. At the thought of release, he forced his shoulders to relax. He took a deep breath before trying to talk again. On second thought, they’d have to do something… else… next time if he had any hope of keeping himself together. “How about we go hiking?” Cassie shrugged, looking a little disappointed by the offer, and looked away. “Sure. Which trail were you thinking of?”

“Oh, none of the ones around here.” “Oh?” Cassie looked over at him, her interest piqued. He flicked on his turn signal and pulled into her driveway, which was right off the highway. Her house was an old, ramshackle two-bedroom homestead that her family had lived in since the other Indians were pushed off to the reservation at Tulalip and the town of Gold Bar had been established. Many years ago, the family had done well enough for itself that they’d been able to afford putting up siding on the place, but it had since fallen into bad disrepair, with several rotting strips dangling off like seaweed haphazardly clinging to a pier. A bright blue tarp covered half the sagging roof; the other half was covered in a thick layer of moss that had frizzled up in the sun. The Lees’ goat, Nanny, was tethered to a post that allowed her to range around most of the yard, but she was doing a half-hearted job of attacking the weeds that towered above her head in thick clumps—it was as if the goat, too, had long ago given up on trying to make the place look respectable. “Well,” he said, “I was thinking that maybe, if you wanted a change of scenery, we could head over to the Peninsula. We could do some backcountry hiking, stay a few nights along the trail—I mean, you know, in separate tents. I’m not coming onto you or anything.” There was no way she was going to go for it. The mere suggestion was suicide. But something inside of him told him to lob it out there anyway, that his life, such as it was, wasn’t exactly worth living without the risk. “No. Of course you aren’t.” She frowned and unbuckled herself as he shifted the truck into park. “Were you thinking a group thing, then?” The very point of hiking on the Peninsula instead of around here was to avoid a “group thing.” Nothing sounded worse to him than that. It was hard enough having to act normal around one person, but around a whole group of people? There was no way he could pull that off for any length of time. Not Cassie’s best friend, Kelly, with her curious eyes and prying questions. Or that douchebag Jackson, who was always trying to get him out to the bar for a couple of beers, to buddy up to him by talking about the Hawks or Mariners—as if he gave a fuck. Or Radford. Christ. No doubt she’d invite Radford, and then he’d have to spend the whole time acting like he didn’t want to drive a baseball bat right into the

fucker’s skull. He shook his head. “No. I was thinking just us two. But, you know, just as friends.” “Okay, okay, I get it,” she huffed, grabbing her plastic lunchbox and the tackle box and hopping out of the truck. She slammed the door shut, and for a moment Gideon thought she was going to walk away without giving him an answer. Instead she leaned in through the open window, resting an elbow on the frame, and frowned at him. The way she stood there, framed by the window of his car, made her look like a painting of a vengeful angel on Judgment Day. Her delicate beauty—her slender shoulders, her bony, fragile collarbones, the gentle contours of her neck—all of it was enhanced by the squalor of the yard behind her. Her sun-kissed skin was the same color as the wood piled against the front of her house, rotting its way back down to the dirt, and her eyes were stormy like the plume of smoke that billowed in the distance, hovering above the Cascades. He could fill up a museum with paintings just of her, just like this. She was sublimity itself, as awe-inspiring as she was terrifying. “You’re beautiful,” he found himself whispering in a mixture of reverence and dread, even though he certainly had not meant to and did not know what inside of him compelled him to speak at all. They were just two words. Two sad little words. They didn’t begin to describe the way he saw her—or what he felt at night, when he closed his eyes and allowed the thought of her to wash over him like a healing balm. They in no way encomed his feelings for her or the hopes and dreams he allowed himself to harbor for her. But those two words were enough to burn down this town. And, having spoken them, he felt like he was on fire. Panic crackled through his veins, searing his organs and limbs—every soft part of him—reducing him to ash and bone. Cassie bit her lower lip, frowning harder than she had been a moment before. “You know I like you, Gid, right?” He made himself shrug so she wouldn’t know that he was sick with regret and fear and desire and, now, hope. “Sure. We’ve been friends for ages.”

“Have we?” She laughed, sounding a little exasperated. “I don’t know… I guess you could call us friends. But… I really like you. So yes. I’ll go camping with you.” She pulled back, tapping the window frame with one hand before she turned amd started to walk away. “We can use the same tent, by the way,” she called out over her shoulder as she made her way up the gravel pathway to her house. “There’s no sense in bringing two.” He beamed, wishing he could live in this moment—this one small victory— forever. But of course he couldn’t.

“I heard you was hangin’ around with that Lee slut today.” Those were the first words out of his mother’s mouth as he walked through the door of the apartment he shared with his parents above their bakery. Not hello, how was your day? Or even Gideon, can you grab me my lighter? His mother never missed the opportunity to be combative and hostile. Long after she’d lost the ability to box him in the ears or wallop his ass with one of his dad’s belts, she’d used her words as weapons to hurt him. Gideon sighed as he sat down on one of the kitchen chairs to unlace his boots. There was no point in correcting her about Cassie. As a child he’d gotten whooped more times than he could count trying to defend her to his mother. She never backed down—not one ounce—on her belief that Cassie’s mother was a whore and that so, too, must be the daughter. Which was rich, coming from her. “Word gets around quick,” he said, heading over to the sink to wash his hands properly. “Sure does.” His mother groaned as she hoisted herself up, slowly making her way from the family room to where he was in the kitchen. She used the wall to steady herself, her right leg dragging along on the floor behind her. “Need me to grab your gabapentin?” he asked. “I’ll be fine. I don’t need you wipin’ my ass for me,” she snapped, which was not technically true. When she was in the middle of an exacerbation, like she was now, sometimes that’s exactly what she needed. “So,” she went on, “what are you doin’ around that slut? Don’t you know she’s whoring around with the mechanic too? Has been for years, since they was kids. Although I’m sure you heard all about that.” Gideon shook his head. “She told me today she likes me, Ma.” “She likes your money, more like,” his mother scoffed. “That’s not it. She won’t take my money, even when I offer it.”

“Why in the Lord’s name would you offer it to her? Just how stupid are you?” She reached for her pack of cigarettes and sank heavily into a chair at the table, slipping one out and putting it between her thin, wormy lips. With fingers made slow and clumsy from her disease she tried several times to strike a light, finally succeeding on the fifth or sixth attempt. She took a long drag, closing her eyes as she exhaled, her hand tremoring as it held the cigarette aloft. Gideon stood there, saying nothing, because he knew that first drag was the one second of joy she had on any given day, the one moment when the fleeting bliss outweighed the pain. Even the worst of us deserved a tiny morsel of happiness, he reasoned. “You’re soft and stupid,” his mother said, her voice scraping over the silence like acid eating away at metal, her sibilants hissing as they devoured whatever they touched. “Just like your father.” Gideon turned away and leaned over the sink, hanging his head in exhaustion. She hated his father—almost as much as she hated the child she’d been burdened with. It was always this with her. Always. And he was so tired. “I don’t want to fight, Ma.” “Then you need to stop doin’ stupid shit, bringing shame down on your family. You think I wanna hear from Edith Block—” She pointed her shaking hand at the old corded telephone that sat on the folding TV tray by her recliner, as if Edith Block herself was crawling her way out of the receiver. “You think I wanna hear from Edith Block, of all people, with that embarrassment of a son she has, that you’ve been caught whoring around with the little Lee skank? I’ve known that girl for years—I knew her whore of a mama, too, since the time she hooked her claws into Otis Lee—and the neither of them has ever been anything but trouble. I raised you better than that, Gideon Burke. So help me, Lord, I raised you better than that.” Gideon peeled off his sweat-soaked shirt, the scars that peppered his back and arms itching at the memory of how exactly she’d raised him. He shot a nervous look over at the closet—at the crucifix nailed above it—even though it had been years since she’d been able to push him in there. Quickly, as if she still had the ability to leap up, clutching a fistful of his hair in her claws, and throw him down to grind her heel on his throat, he walked toward his bedroom.

“I’m going to change and head downstairs to help Dad close up shop.” “Go ahead,” she laughed mirthlessly. “Run off like you always do. But : she’s gonna use you for whatever you’re worth—and it ain’t much— and then she’s gonna spit you out. She’s always been for that Radford boy. An’ I get it… don’t you? He’s a man, like you’ll never be. You’re good for nothing but frosting cakes, and what’s that gonna get her? Don’t you see?” The trouble was, he did see. He saw everything.

He wasn’t sure if he was supposed to knock at the door or stay in his truck and wait for Cassie to come out. He’d sat outside for a solid ten minutes, his idling truck’s engine rumbling and his guts twisting tighter and tighter as he’d agonized over what to do, before he decided that maybe she’d need help loading up whatever gear or bags she planned to take with them camping. So, reluctantly, he took the keys out of the ignition, slid out of the car, and made his way up the pathway to her house. From over in the yard Nanny looked at him, bleating in displeasure. Whether it was from the intrusion or because he didn’t come bearing food for her, he really couldn’t say. He’d never cared much for goats, except for the taste of them in a stew. They were always screaming and carrying on, staring at you with their judgmental eyes narrowed to slits like they knew something about you that you didn’t know yourself. As a child he’d gotten caught once beating one with a shovel. The animal had been tied up to an oak tree in Arlo Royal’s yard. Old man Kilmory—dead now— had stormed out of his house, reeking of whatever liquor he’d gotten his hands on the night before, and asked him what the hell he thought he was doing to that poor, goddamned animal. Gideon hadn’t told the old drunk he was pretending to be his mother, punishing him at the whipping post she kept in the backyard for him. Instead he’d said he was pretending to be a cop, and that there goat had been stealing, sir. Carefully, Gideon went up the rickety, rusted metal ramp that led from the gravel pathway to the wooden porch. A large mud-caked rock propped the storm door wide open, so he knocked directly on the front door instead. It was a battered slab of wood so rough-hewn and pocked it looked like Vikings had eaten off it for a couple millenia before the Lee family had scavenged it for their homestead. He rapped with his knuckle three times—small, unassuming knocks, because he knew that she must have heard him out in the driveway. “Come on in!” he heard Cassie yell from inside. “I’m just finishing up a few things!” Tentatively, he pushed the door open and stepped inside the foyer, if it could even be called that. Gideon didn’t know a word that was shrunken and pathetic

enough to encom what it was he was standing on. A landing, maybe, since that’s about all anyone could do on it. From where he stood, he could see the whole of the living room, half of the kitchen, and down the short hallway that led to the bedrooms and bathroom. As he’d expected, the interior of the house was as battered and worn as the outside, but unlike the yard, it was surprisingly tidy. It smelled of mothballs and disinfectant and the attempt to keep detritus and disease—and the vermin that thrived upon both—at bay. The walls were covered in fake wood ing, something that had no doubt been a luxury for whatever Lee had put it up half a century ago. And the furniture looked about as old. A tattered olive green sofa lined one wall, its velvet fabric worn down to nothing on the arms—a wedding gift, maybe, from Grandpa Lee to his bride on their wedding day, back when there was such a thing as romance and courtship. Two mismatched armchairs lined the opposite wall, and Gideon considered for a brief moment actually sitting on the one whose springs hadn’t burst through the seat cushion. That was something a person who wasn’t dangerously close to crawling out of their skin would do, right? They’d make themselves at home? “Hey,” Cassie said breathlessly, appearing at the end of the hallway from one of the bedrooms. She looked like she’d gotten caught in some sort of errant windstorm. A tendril of hair had fallen out of her braid and now hung alongside her face, framing it. Her cheeks were flushed, and one of her bra straps—cotton candy-colored pink today—had slipped down her shoulder. She must have noticed his eyes lingering on it, because she quickly tucked it back beneath the strap of her tank top. Come to think of it, she looked exactly the way he’d imagined her after being freshly fucked, and he glanced over his shoulder and out at the driveway, a part of him wondering if he’d see Dylan Radford’s F-150 go peeling off with a screech onto the highway. “I’m sorry I’m running a bit behind,” she said. “A couple things came up this morning that I had to take care of.” I bet you did, he found himself thinking against his will. “It’s okay,” he lied, forcing himself to smile, but jealousy raged and blazed

inside of him like a brushfire sweeping across the plains. She gestured over her shoulder to her bedroom. “I’m almost done packing. I just got a few more things to toss in my bag. I’m assuming you brought the tent… ‘cause I can grab mine if—” “Yeah, we’re all good there,” he said, cutting her off in his eagerness. Not wanting to trust anyone else’s gear to keep the bugs out, he’d driven that morning into Monroe to get one. As it was, he had no idea how he was going to manage sleeping outdoors on the dirt, among all the filthy things that lurked, living and decaying, beneath it. She nodded, her cheeks flushing a deep, mulberry shade of red. “Okay. That’s good, then.” They stood in awkward silence for a couple of moments, just looking at each other. She was wearing her cutoff shorts again and a white tank top that was so short it exposed half her stomach. The skin of her belly looked soft and warm and paler than the places the sun was used to caressing. It made him want to peel her clothes off, right there in the hallway, to see if her breasts were pale too. Or her ass. Or her cunt. He wanted to see that, too, so badly he ached for it. “Well,” she said, tapping her palms against the bare skin of her thighs—skin that ought to have been, but thankfully was not, covered by fabric. “While I’m finishing packing you can head on into the kitchen if you’d like. There’s some marionberry pie on the table that my mom made last night, and you can help yourself to some if you’re looking for something sweet.” “I’d absolutely love something sweet right now,” he confessed, talking about her lips, her tits, the warm, wet folds of her pussy that she was barely keeping tucked away under those dinky cutoffs—anything but the pie. “Okay,” she laughed, “then go on and help yourself.” She turned and headed back into her bedroom, leaving him standing in the hallway. She called out, as if it were an afterthought, “And Daddy’s in there too. You can go say hi to him. I’m sure he’d like to see you again.” Her words were like a cannon unexpectedly firing into the air, the force of the boom making him startle and then recoil.

He hadn’t seen Otis Lee since the night of the accident, when the man had wrapped the hood of his truck around a Douglas fir tree off the side of Highway 2. Otis had been trying to dodge an animal crossing the road, or so most people thought, since the man was notoriously as sober as a Mormon funeral and no other cars appeared to have been involved in the crash. But Gideon knew better. There’d been no animal, at least not the sort of animal that lived and breathed and ate and shit—and then eventually died—in the woods. “Um... all right,” Gideon said, clearing his throat to try to shake off the feeling that someone was choking him. “I’ll… ah... head on in and say hello.” As it turned out, there were thirteen steps to the kitchen. He counted them, his pulse hammering in his temple faster and faster with each one he took. It was agony, like how he imagined it would be walking to his own execution. His vision began to narrow to pinpricks, the darkness closing in on it from all sides, and the world began to bob and sway, the floor beneath his feet creaking and groaning like an old ship on a storm-tossed sea. But he made himself go on. A man would do that, he told himself. A man would face what he’d done, would face his monsters. Only a pussy would piss himself in fear. And today wouldn’t be the day he proved his mother right. When he rounded the corner and entered through the doorway of the kitchen, he was relieved to see that Mr. Lee had been positioned with his back to the door. Otis was watching—or had at least been placed in front of—an old television set that sat on top of the counter. Some Western was on, but the TV set was humming so loudly and the image was so garbled from poor reception that Gideon had no idea what show it was. He suspected—or maybe he just hoped— that it didn’t much matter. He took a second to collect what he could of himself, standing motionless on the cracked linoleum floor, before he made himself walk toward the kitchen table. He’d have to go in front of Otis’s wheelchair in order to take a seat at the table. There was no way around it. The headrest of the wheelchair was high to Mr. Lee’s neck, which was,

like the rest of his body, completely unable to move. A vegetable, his mother had called him, her lips pursed together in a pencil-thin line, betraying nothing of what she must have felt. No better than a squash left to rot in the field, picked at by the crows. He’d never walk again. Never speak again. His hands were useless, and so, presumably, was his mind. That’s how Gideon found the courage to walk in front of the man, by telling himself he was nothing but a rotting vegetable, decaying a little more with each ing day. After all these years, what could really be left of him? They said his heart had stopped beating for seven minutes before they were able to revive him. Seven minutes of his brain uselessly gasping for oxygen. Seven minutes of starvation. It was a funny thing, how people could starve for years… starve for food, starve for love, starve for safety, starve for shelter… and all it took the feeble human brain was a matter of minutes of starving for oxygen to die. What a weak, pathetic, fragile thing the human brain was. Gideon pulled out one of the heavy wooden chairs from the kitchen table and sank down onto it, loosely threading his fingers together and resting his elbows on his widespread knees to make himself appear comfortable before daring to look at Otis Lee. Sometimes, in his dreams, he still saw the man lying on the ground, twisted and crumpled, among the glass of his truck’s windshield. His blood was so shiny and dark it reminded him of pyrite, or of paint splattered onto the canvas of the pavement—like an exquisite Pollock, priceless and perfect in its chaos. The blinking hazard lights of Gideon’s truck on the opposite side of the road made the fragments of glass sparkle and shimmer like rubies in the night, and the light of the full moon illuminated the pale, gray eyes of the dying man who was crying out for his mother—Gideon’s mother—on the cold concrete, even though she was home in her bed, sleeping on rumpled, sweaty sheets. It was his eyes Gideon noticed first, not the face marred with scars that would never fade. As soon as Otis’s eyes drifted upward to meet his, he knew the man was not a vegetable. Not a rotting squash, corrupted in its own flesh. His body might be irrevocably broken, but his spirit was not. There was fury in his eyes, but also fear.

It was the latter that gave Gideon the courage to speak. “Hello, Mr. Lee. It’s nice to see you looking like this... that is, I mean, that you’re doing so much better than the last time I saw you. Do you me? I’m the Burkes’ boy, Gideon.” For one long, pregnant moment Mr. Lee fixed his eyes on Gideon, his gaze boring into him. Studying him to assess not who he was, but what. Finally he blinked. Yes. Of course I you. “That’s good,” Gideon said with a smile. “I’m really glad you do. I’d be disappointed if you’d forgotten.” Mr. Lee said nothing. Of course he couldn’t, and so Gideon pressed on, “Cassie said there was some pie in here I should try out, so I thought I would. Would you like some too?” The man closed his eyes in rebellion. Not with you. “All right, then,” Gideon said. “Don’t mind if I do.” He reached over and grabbed the pie tin, sliding it toward himself. Without looking for utensils or a plate, he gouged his index finger into its guts, scooping out a chunk and stuffing it into his mouth. He sucked the pie filling off his finger. The fruity tang of the pie mingled with the salt on his skin, and he wondered if Cassie would taste like that too. He looked in satisfaction at his berry-stained finger. “Decent, but my dad’s pie is much better. But then,” he added conciliatorily, “we do run a bakery.” He took another scoop, lapping at the juices on his finger while the man across from him breathed heavily in inept fury. Gideon took a glance around the kitchen, wondering what it would be like to live here with Cassie, to call this a home. Wondering what it would be like to have a home at all. Could he belong here, in this place? Could he belong anywhere? “Here’s the thing,” he said after a while. He spoke softly, quietly, certainly. “I’ve liked Cassie for a long time... ever since we were kids.” His gaze drifted toward the other man again. “So you and my mother doing... what it was you were doing… it would have ruined everything. Brothers can’t marry their sisters, legally speaking. Or morally. Which I think is every bit as important, don’t you?

What are we without our morals? Animals, that’s what.” Otis’s eyes hardened, their gray depths brooding menacingly like the waters of the Skykomish on a stormy winter’s day. You’re the animal. Gideon looked at the door to make sure they were still alone before continuing. “This is your fault, not mine. You were the one behind the wheel of your truck. You were the one who should’ve been home with your wife instead of fucking— pardon my language, I mean lying—with someone else’s. This is your fault. The Bible says, ‘If a man is found lying with a married woman, then both of them shall die, the man who lay with the woman, and the woman; thus you shall purge the evil from Israel.’ And who are we to argue with the Good Book?” Otis’s breathing was so heavy now that Gideon knew he wanted to hit him. But he couldn’t. He could do nothing but sit there and listen and take it, so Gideon smiled, feeling more at ease than ever. “I’ve forgiven you a long time ago for what you did, Mr. Lee. I’m hoping you can forgive me too. And don’t you worry—your secret's safe with me, just like mine is safe with you. Because you can’t say anything about it, can you?” he taunted. Mr. Lee refused to blink. He held his eyes open until a tear slid out of his right eye. “That’s okay. I trust you. I was a little worried at first, but now I can see that everything is going to be okay. Especially now that there’s the baby to consider.” In another room he heard the squeal of door hinges in dire need of greasing. The bathroom, maybe. Or a closet. Just one more thing in this house that needed a man’s touch—and not Dylan Radford’s either. His. Gideon stood up and rubbed his hands together to brush off the remaining pie crumbs onto the floor. He smiled down at Mr. Lee, who stared up at him, his copper-colored skin grown pale, his face sagging in devastation. “I’m so sorry, Mr. Lee—or should I say Dad? Can I call you ‘Dad’? You don’t mean to tell me that Cassie hasn’t told you about the baby?” The silence in the room was deafening, like the thundering of a waterfall

battering the rocks at its base. Otis’s breaths grew labored, the man heaving the way he had the night of his crash, when his collapsed lungs had clawed for any bit of oxygen they could get. His jaw hung open in shock, his tongue uselessly working to speak. No, no, he pleaded, that can’t be true. “It’s early days yet. She probably just wasn’t comfortable saying anything until we knew it was going to keep. But don’t worry… unlike most other men, I’m capable of doing the right thing. We’ll get married, and all of us will be one happy family, won’t we?” The door down the hall squealed again, and then Cassie’s footsteps began making their way toward them. She came into the kitchen, her hair freshly braided and a large camouflage-colored pack slung over her shoulder. “Alright,” she announced. “I think I’m finally ready. Have you boys been behaving in here?” “Oh, I think so,” Gideon said. “I was just telling your dad that we’re going hiking by Lake Quinault.” “Are we?” She looked surprised. “That’s exciting. I haven’t made it all the way out there in years. Actually not since the time Daddy took me trout fishing that one sum—” At the sound of Otis’s heavy breathing, she paused, frowning. “What’s the matter, Daddy?” She walked around his chair to face him, stooping low in front of him to scan his face. Her bag dropped heavily to the floor beside her, forgotten. “Are you feeling okay?” she asked, her brows knitted in concern. Mr. Lee blinked. But his face was so very pale, like he’d felt someone walking— like someone crawling—over his grave. “Look, we can stay with you until Shirley gets here if you’d like. I just called her, and she said she’s only a few miles up the road. It really wouldn’t be any bother. Would it, Gideon?” He shrugged as Cassie looked up at him and made himself look as innocuous as possible. “No, not at all.”

In fact he’d love nothing more than for that greasy old hag Shirley to come strolling through the door and see him standing here in the Lee kitchen like he belonged here, with Cassie slinging an overnight bag she was taking out on the open road with him. Let that get back to Dylan Fucking Radford. “Has he been breathing like this the entire time you been in here with him?” “He seemed fine to me, but then…” He gestured dismissively to Mr. Lee, sitting there inertly in his chair. “I don’t know him quite like you do.” Cassie bit her lip, trying to puzzle out what was going on in her father’s mind. As if she could ever fathom what her father had done, or what had been done to him. As if she had any idea that there was a war taking place between these two men in her life, a war her father had started and that Gideon was intent on winning. As she stared into her father’s eyes, gradually his breathing began to slow. That was the sort of effect Cassie had on people—it was a magical, terrible thing. She made your body do things your spirit did not want. She looked over her shoulder at the humming TV and stood up to tinker with its antennas. After a few seconds of fiddling, the image cleared up fractionally. “There. That’s better.” She smirked at her dad. “If Shirley tries to put on one of those judge shows, give her the what for, all right?” She went back up to her father and leaned over to plant a kiss on his cheek. Putting a palm gently on his face, she looked into his eyes. Gideon’s guts roiled in jealousy. That hand belonged on him. Those eyes belonged on him. That tenderness was stolen from him. These were thoughts he did not want, but he thought them anyway. “Everything is going to be all right, Daddy. You’ll see. I’ll be back in a few days.” She shot a look at Gideon for confirmation. “Right?” Gideon smiled. “Unless we decide to run away.” “Haha, very funny.” She scanned her father’s face to confirm that whatever

storm had been brewing inside of him had ed before she grabbed her bag and headed toward the door. “Have Shirley or Mom call me if you guys need anything. I’ll see you later, Daddy,” she called out. Gideon gave Otis a meaningful look before following her. “Don’t worry, Mr. Lee. I’ll take care of her.”

3

Tell me, where did you sleep last night?

It was already early evening by the time they reached the old logging road leading deep into the heart of the Quinault rainforest. The sun hung low and large in the western sky like a heavily pregnant belly, its long rays of light splicing through the dense canopy of trees. The tangerine-tinted light made the moss clinging in thick sheets and clumps to the branches and trunks of the forest glow a neon green, more brilliant and alive than any shade of green Gideon had ever seen before. “That’s wolf lichen,” Cassie had said when he asked her if she knew what the moss was called. “Back in the day they used it to poison the wolves. That’s why there’s none of ‘em left. They’d dry it out, mix it with ground glass, and stuff it into the belly of deer carcasses to bait them.” At her words he’d felt that gnawing hunger again, the kind he tried not to think about. It made him ache in the very center of his soul, in the place where he felt most hollow. They’d disembarked the ferry at Kingston earlier that afternoon and had driven south along the Peninsula, taking the route along the Hood Canal and just north of Aberdeen instead of the northern route through Port Angeles and the town of Tillicum. The journey had taken several hours, and they’d never stopped—not once—but instead had talked and laughed and listened to music the entire way. Sometimes Cassie would stop talking to sing along to the tape she’d popped into the truck’s cassette player. It was an old Nirvana album she’d pilfered from her parents’ stash of sentimental keepsakes that her mom kept in the attic, and they’d kept listening to it over and over again, letting the music bleed into them. Every time Kurt wailed about the lake of fire, Gideon would gaze out the window at the mountains leering down on them and wonder, as Cassie’s silvery cool voice filled the cab, where bad people went when they died.

It had made him think about the sleepy, forgotten hot springs scattered throughout the Olympics and whether, if he lured her into one of them, he could beat the devil himself in making a lake of fire a place of pleasure and not pain. He’d imagined himself caressing the bare skin of her back as she straddled him, his cock buried somewhere even warmer than the water around them. The sulphurous smell of hell would envelop them, but instead of the screams of pain among the tortured souls of the dead there would only be her gasps and moans, his grunts and groans. Her knees would grind onto the gritty bottom of the shallow pool, chafing and rubbing against the rocks until they bled, and then he’d drive into her harder, gripping her ass, biting her shoulder, pushing so far inside her that she’d throw her head back in blissful agony and cry to the God who had forsaken them that it felt so good, that, oh God, it felt so good. Such was the tenor of his thoughts as they coiled their way up the mountain roads and into the pines. Now, as the truck made its way down the pitted dirt road into the forest, the trees and blackberry brambles grew closer and closer until the dangling wolf lichen reached down to stroke the windshield and the thorny shoots of the blackberries scraped and slashed at the car’s flanks. Their progress was slow and plodding, Gideon bringing the truck to a near stop at each pothole so that they wouldn’t blow out a tire. After a particularly nasty pothole, Cassie tugged at her seat belt, pulling it away from her lap. “I kinda hate to ask,” she said, “but do you know how much farther up the road we gotta go?” “A little ways yet, I think. Maybe another five or six miles... it’s hard to say for sure.” “Alright.” She chewed the inside of her cheek for a moment, considering something. “What’s the name of the campsite we’re staying at? Or the trail we’re taking?” She pulled her cell phone out of her pack and swiped at its cracked screen, apparently wanting to look up directions there. But it was futile, and of course she must have known that. They’d long since lost cell reception. Gideon doubted they’d had any even back on the highway.

Out here in God’s country it was just you, your thoughts, and the road you were on. Sometimes, if you drove far enough, you could even escape your thoughts. “To be honest,” he confessed, “I don’t exactly know that either.” She looked at him in surprise. “You don’t know? But you did reserve a campsite for us, right? And you got the backcountry permit? This time of year campsites fill up fast.” “Sure,” he lied, trying to stave off the sound of his mother’s voice rasping at him from the back of his mind. Failure. Fuck up. Worthless. “I just can’t the exact name… they’re sort of all the same, aren’t they?” He laughed uneasily. “It was Quinault River-something-or-other. The North Fork or the North Bend. Something like that.” She nodded, seemingly placated, and looked out the window at the cathedral of trees surrounding them. A million pines and spruces, hemlocks and cedars stood sentry around them, stretching out as far as the eye could see. Some stood proud and straight, while others lay dead and mouldering on the forest floor. The two of them may as well have been nowhere at all—it was a faceless, nondescript place, just one spot in any number of the millions of beautiful places that existed out here on the Peninsula. “I guess this is as good a place as any, then,” she sighed, unbuckling her seat belt. “Would you mind stopping for a quick second? I need to hit the lady’s room. It shouldn’t take me more than a minute.” “Not at all!” he said, immediately pulling the truck to a stop. “I’m so sorry, I didn’t even think about—” She laughed off his apology with a wave of her hand. “I hope you don’t spend too much time thinking about that, Gideon Burke. Anyways, it’s not going to be the last time nature calls while we’re out here, right? So we might as well get used to it.” She reached down and grabbed a bandana that she’d tied to the outside of her pack, then she opened the car door with a decisive swing, pushing against the blackberry brambles and jurassic-sized ferns that were hemming them in on the road, and slipped out of the truck.

He tried not to, but he watched as she disappeared into the woods. She moved with the grace and agility of someone accustomed to hiking in the backcountry, stepping with ease over fallen logs and ducking under mossy limbs that were burdened under the weight of the lichen slowly choking them to death. If briars snagged at her skin or starving insects swarmed at her to feast, she gave no indication of it. She seemed one with the earth, relaxed in it in a way he’d never be. At the sight of her small, fragile body surrounded by the towering trees and the lush, wild foliage of the forest running rampant all around her, he felt something itching inside of him. He knew what it was, that thing that lived inside of him and scratched with its nails at his skin, clawing to come out. The monster. It was urging him to follow her. Valiantly, he fought it, even though it told him to run after her, to stay with her, to pin her down to the ground, to do things to her —with her—that he knew he shouldn’t do. She was out there right now, peeling those tiny shorts of hers down, exposing herself to the forest for anyone and no one to see, and the thing inside him made him ache and throb for her. It made him so hard for her he fought the urge to palm himself over his pants for just a second of relief. Gideon sat, riveted and sweating and uncomfortable in his own skin, and he waited, wishing that someone had handcuffed him to the steering wheel. After what felt like an eternity, Cassie reappeared, winding her way through the undergrowth like some woodland nymph out of a myth. His breath caught at the sublime beauty of her, and he looked away quickly so that she wouldn’t notice he’d been watching. “I’m not gonna lie,” she said as she pulled herself back up into the truck. “But I’m kinda relieved you’re still here.” “What do you mean?” he asked, trying not to panic. Maybe she could see it on his face somehow, the thoughts that must have betrayed him. Maybe she sensed that it had taken every shred of self-restraint he never knew he’d had to stay planted where he was and not to follow her. He swallowed with effort and swiped at his forehead, feeling hot and uneasy. “Where else would I be?” “Um… just up the road?” She looked at him with concern. “Are you alright,

Gid? I didn’t mean anything by that… just that it would have been one hell of a prank to drive off a ways and make me think I’d been ditched, is all.” He forced himself to laugh and relax his grip on the steering wheel, even though he didn’t find anything particularly funny about what she’d said. “Is that something people actually do?” She shrugged. “Some people.” He didn’t need to ask her who she meant by “some people.” The minute she so much as thought of Dylan Radford, the poison crept in between them like a toxic fog. It made him want to gag and choke, to writhe in agony, to lash out at whatever crossed his path. The mere thought of him was a venom. “Call me a radical,” he said a little stiffly, unable to hide his resentment, “but that doesn’t seem like something you’d do to a friend. It isn’t very nice.” “Yeah, well, you’re a whole lot nicer than most people.” She looked away from him and out the enger window, worrying her lip as the forest slowly began to slip by them again. They fell into an uneasy silence for the first time that day, the light around them waning lower and lower as the truck crawled deeper and deeper into the woods. After a while Cassie sighed, the silence between them having become unbearable, like a thousand little needles pricking at the skin. “Look, Gideon, I know I mentioned the other day that, you know, I... like you, but there’s something I’ve been wanting to clear up with you for a while now.” His jaw clenched tighter at her words, bracing for the rejection. Bracing for the explanation that, while she liked him—whatever good that was for—it was always going to be Radford. That it always had been, and so it always would be. “Go on,” he said through gritted teeth after she failed to fucking say anything at all. “Okay.” She rubbed her hands briskly down the tops of her thighs, back and forth and back and forth, like she was warming her legs up for a sprint. “I think you should know that with me and Dylan… it... it isn’t like that anymore with us. Hasn’t been anything like that in a long time. When we… I mean, after the...”

Her voice broke off, and she made a small, choked sound. “Ah, forget it.” “I can’t.” He knew she was looking at him now—he could see it out of the corner of his eye—but he kept his eyes fixed on the crooked, gnarled road ahead of them. “I can’t forget it,” he repeated, giving a short, caustic laugh that sounded as bitter as it tasted. “I wish I could.” “I do too,” she said, her voice so small it was barely perceptible over the fern fronds whispering against the side of the truck. “Everybody talks, but you know… we were just kids when we first got together… We were still kids when it… when it happened. We barely knew what sex was, much less how to do it or how to use condoms—forget about how we were even supposed to get our hands on any—and, now that I’m older, I realized that I thought it would be safe with him. Safe with him like it wouldn’t be with you.” He wanted to cry. He wanted to rage. He wanted to stop the fucking truck, rip open the goddamn door, and go running, feral, into the forest, never to be seen or heard from again. He wanted his mother’s voice to shut up, to be gone, to be silent. He wanted all the doubts, all the recriminations, all the worries, all the anxiety to stop. He wanted it to stop. To just stop. To stop. To stop. He rubbed the heel of his palm against his forehead, trying to massage out the ache. She didn’t feel safe with him. Because he was dangerous, deranged, broken. And it had driven her directly into the arms of his own worst nightmare. It was his fault, ultimately. All of it. Because she wasn’t safe with him. “I’m a monster,” he confessed in a fractured voice that mirrored all the places he was broken inside.

“What are you talking about?” She laughed, sounding genuinely amused. “You really have no idea, do you? You’re the least monstrous person I’ve ever met, Gideon Burke. You’re kind. Do you know how hard that is to find, a kind person? Someone that the world hasn’t squeezed that out of? And what’s more, you’re—” She broke off, clamping her lips shut as if to physically hold back the words. “I’m what?” “I don’t know if I can say it… I don’t think I can. It’ll change everything, and I don’t want—” “I’m what?” he pressed, needing to know. Needing to hear it. More than anything, he needed to hear whatever it was she was struggling to tell him. Finally, after several seconds, Cassie caved and spluttered out, “You’re beautiful. You called me beautiful the other day, and… I think you’re beautiful too. So much that it hurts to even look at you sometimes.” His stomach clenched, his pulse raced, the world spun. Even the road came to a sudden halt, the truck’s headlights illuminating a blockade of trees, impenetrable and dense, before them. Cassie went on, seeming not to notice or care that the world had ended right in front of their faces. “And I just thought you ought to know that the reason Dylan and me… the reason we have the past we do is that things have always been easy with him. Comfortable… or… or...” “Natural,” Gideon supplied, thinking that what she was trying to describe was how it must have felt for water to find its own level. It was something that, no matter how low he happened to sink, he’d never experienced. “No. That’s not it.” She put her hand on his where it had fallen to rest on the bench seat. Her palm was hot and sweaty, like she’d spent all afternoon lying out in the sun. “Sort of the opposite, actually. It was like being with a cousin, or someone you shared blood with.” She wrinkled her nose and shook her head as if she were trying to choke down a bitter pill. “It was safe in all the wrong ways. Everything about it felt wrong.” And he believed her. For a moment, he actually believed her.

He flipped his hand around to clasp hers, their fingers twining together. He squeezed her hand, hard but not too hard, just enough to make sure she was real. If nothing else, at least he could make sure of that. The skin of her hand was rough, her fingernails dirty, and in his fantasies neither of those things were true, so this must be really happening, he rationalized. “I didn’t think I deserved you, you see,” she said. “Not after the… the abortion. Not before it, but definitely not after it. And I guess I still don’t.” She lifted her chin a fraction—a little gesture of defiance, but the only one she was defying right now was herself, or the people like his mother and the pernicious things they said. “I was a kid then, Gideon. Fifteen years old. And I’m a completely different person now.” She looked over at him, her gray eyes scanning his face as she looked at him through the gloom. “We’re different people now, aren’t we? Do you think it’s fair, to beat yourself up your whole life for the things you did as a kid?” Her words gave him something that felt like hope. It stabbed him in the chest, directly in the heart, spreading its heat through his entire body. It coursed through his veins, down to the tips of his fingers that were clutching hers. It traveled to his cock, which ached to bury itself inside her, to fill her with children—his children. It made its way to his mind, shushing the doubts that squalled there like an infant crying out for comfort. Hope. He didn’t know what to do with the feeling, whether he should dissect it to see how it worked—how it was made—so that he could reconstruct it later. Whether he should smother it now so it couldn’t hurt him when it fled. Or whether he should lose himself inside of it in case it was a blanket and not a shroud. Cassie leaned toward him, her slender body crooking itself the way a Madrona tree did as it clung to a cliffside in search of the sun. So Gideon leaned closer too, until their lips were so close their breath mingled, dancing and entwining invisibly as it escaped their panicked lungs. “The thing is that... I love you, Gideon Burke,” she whispered, her breath hot and short and desperate as it fanned across his face. “And there’s nothing safe about you.”

“No,” he rasped, his hands making their way to her neck, his thumbs caressing the exquisitely delicate skin of her cheeks. “There isn’t.” He kissed her, then, crushing his lips against hers. Those soft, sweet, cherry red lips... It was exactly as he’d imagined it would be. She tasted like a lake of fire crackling and hissing in the sun. Her tongue stroked his, hot and wet and needy, and he moaned into her mouth, wanting her. His body wanted her. All of her, every part of her: the purity of her heart, the tang of her blood, the musk of her cunt, the salt of her skin. It was perfect agony. In the wall of trees ahead of them, just outside the twin globes of light cast by the truck’s headlights, there was a break in the pines. A trailhead, or what had once been a trail. Down it lay a shaded path, one that seldom saw the sun. It was only after Cassie pulled away from Gideon, breathless and panting, that she noticed it. “Is that the way to the campground?” she asked, her voice hoarse like Gideon had already fucked her. He slipped the key out of the ignition and smiled at her, eager for the next part of their journey. “Why don’t we go find out.”

They loaded themselves up with what felt like gear for an entire army and made their way into the gloom. At the trailhead there was an old, rotting stand that looked like a primitive version of a church lectern. A trail , perhaps, except it looked as though it had been many years since this had seen a slip of paper. Its base was ensnared with young blackberry shoots, while its wooden top had been overtaken by fungus and moss. Cassie smirked and gestured to it. “Should we sign in?” He knew it was a joke, but he hated the idea—hated the thought that even out here, miles away from anyone and anything else in the world, they still couldn’t truly be free. That there was always someone watching, waiting, judging, tracking. But he chuckled anyway, playing along with it. “Sure. Let me just grab my pen.” He reached into the small pocket on the front of his flannel shirt, pretending to grab a pen that wasn’t there. “Psssht. Pens are for pussies,” she scoffed, reaching into her back pocket. “What we need is my…” She frowned, then checked her other back pocket, then her two front pockets, her movements becoming frantic. She scanned the ground at her feet, then looked back at the truck, which sat, lonely and abandoned, in the small clearing behind them. “Cassie, what’s going on?” She didn’t reply. Instead she sprinted back toward the truck. Had he done something wrong? Had she seen it in his eyes somehow, in the light of the rising moon—that a wolf lived inside him? He lumbered after her in a half-jog, the contents of his pack noisily rattling with each step he took. “Talk to me,” he pleaded. “What’s going on?”

When he reached her, she had fallen to her knees and was shuffling her hands around in the dirt behind the truck. She stood up quickly, like she wasn’t carrying the equivalent of a small child on her back, and opened the back hatch, scanning the bed. Her breathing was ragged and short—she was anxious and panicked, like she’d just been told that someone she loved had been terribly hurt and was on their way to the hospital, clinging to life. “Open the cab,” she demanded. “Okay. Gimme a sec. But do you mind telling me what’s going on?” he asked as he unbuckled the straps of his pack and slipped it off his back and onto the bed of the truck to fetch the keys from where he’d stowed them. Clearly, she was looking for something—which thankfully ruled out the idea that she’d been running from him—but beyond that, he had no idea. Unless… She said it at the same time he thought it: “My pocket knife. I can’t find it.” He tossed the keys to her over the bed of the truck. “Are you sure you didn’t put it in your pack?” “Never. It’s always in my back pocket. Always.” With one impatient yank she opened the enger door. The squeal of its rusty hinges scared off some nearby bird, its wings frantically flapping as it took off into the night. Gideon came around the truck to stand behind her, watching her as she futilely searched the cab of the truck for her knife. But it wasn’t there. Not on the floor. Not on the upholstery, or tucked into the crevice between the seat and the back. Not on the dashboard, or in the glove compartment either. Gone. It was gone. “It’s okay,” he tried to reassure her. “I brought one of my own.” “You don’t get it!” she cried as she slammed the door shut and leaned against the truck, pressing the heels of her palms to her eyes. “Fuck, Fuck, FUUUUUUCK!”

she screamed into the night, sinking down to the ground and—mortifyingly— breaking down into tears. Her shoulders quaked from the force of her sobs, which were loud and raw. On the ground, at his feet, she looked like a child who’d just lost their favorite toy, something—or someone—they truly loved. “Hey,” he said, kneeling in front of her and tentatively reaching his hands out to rest them on the bare skin of her shoulders. She felt frail and pitiful, so easily broken. “It’s going to be okay.” At his touch, her sobs turned to whimpers, and she wiped at the snot on her face with the back of her hand. “I m-must have lost it when I went into the w-woods. Do you think if we went back I could...” She looked back at the darkened forest road, enveloped now in the shades of night. No. There was no going back, and she knew it. Even if they could recall where they’d stopped along the road, which was in itself an improbability, there was no way she’d be able to find her way in what would be pitch darkness to where she’d dropped it. It was gone. “Maybe we could go looking for it tomorrow,” Gideon offered. After all, the point of this whole endeavor wasn’t to finish any sort of trail in the backcountry. It was just to be out here, alone with her, for as long as he could and to see where that took them. Cassie didn’t look at him. Her eyes were fixed on the logging road as if she expected some person to come stumbling down it, clutching the knife in their bare hands, to give it back to her. “My daddy gave me that knife,” she whispered to the ghost on the road, or to no one at all. Certainly not to Gideon, who already knew all about it. “It was the last thing he gave me before his accident. It was like he knew somehow that after… that after he wouldn’t be able to protect me the same way. He told me I was

grown enough to have it and that, as long as I had it, I’d be safe. Those were… those were one of the last things he ever said to me. That same night he had his accident.” She fell silent, staring mournfully down the road, all the light stolen from her. “I’m so sorry, Cassie,” Gideon whispered, realizing that he’d been the one to steal it. Her gray eyes, bloodshot from tears and swollen from crying, looked at him, reading his face to judge his sincerity. “We’ll see if we can find it,” he said. “We’ll camp here tonight, then tomorrow go back and look for it. And even if we can’t find it—” As fast as a cat striking out with its paws, she leaned forward, capturing his lips in a kiss. The kiss was salty, seasoned with her tears, and it made him think of hell—made him think of the lakes of fire in the mountains, and of living there forever with her in them. He tongued her mouth, not caring if he was too rough, too messy, too invasive. Not caring if he was too desperate or needful, if he gagged her or choked her. He held nothing back in his kiss, and she moaned, the force of the sound reverberating through him. “I want you,” she panted, already pulling at his flannel shirt, blindly ripping it off his shoulders. Maybe she felt like she’d already lost everything, like there was nothing left to lose. Or maybe crying had blown apart whatever self-defenses she had left around her. Either way the dam, being broken, was open, and he knew he would take full advantage of it. ...Of course he would. Because he wanted her too. There was almost nothing else he’d ever wanted. He unbuckled the straps of her pack, first the strap on top—the one spanning her collarbone—and then the one around her waist.

Her bare, glorious waist. He grabbed her there with both hands, bracketing it, his thumbs rubbing circles over the soft flesh of her belly. Her skin was so soft it reminded him of rabbit fur, or of a piece of fruit, bruised and overripe, ready to explode from its own sweetness. It reminded him of the warmth of the sun on his face, or of the susurration of the Skykomish as its waters splashed and spluttered their way downstream. Her skin was so soft he wanted to ruin it, rip into it, bite it, spoil it, desecrate it. Nothing that soft had a right to exist. He bent his head down, still gripping her waist tightly, and bit down on her neck —hard, but not hard enough to break skin—and then pulled away to gauge her reaction, to see if she would still want him if having him meant this. Her lips were swollen from kissing, her eyes swollen from crying, and her pupils were so wide and deep the galaxy itself could have been swallowed up inside of them. She looked wrecked and like she wanted to be ruined, her face flushed, her chest heaving breathlessly, as she stared up at him, a wild girl in a wild place. In his dreams sometimes his touch was reverent and adoring. Sometimes it was tender and loving. A part of him thought that, if Cassandra Lee ever allowed him to touch her, he would be all of those things to her. But here, in the woods, kneeling in the dirt, the leaves rustling in the trees, the insects hissing and buzzing around them, he wanted none of those things. He wanted to fuck her the way animals did, coarsely, savagely, out of base instinct and necessity. He wanted to drive himself inside of her, the weight of his body pressing her facedown into the ground, pummeling her as she gasped, her fingers scrabbling and clawing at the dirt. He wanted—he needed—for it to hurt. He thought she might need that too. His hands skimmed upward beneath Cassie’s shirt to fondle her tits, his touch careless and confident, like the conquistadores who had found a land that belonged to someone else but arrogantly claimed it for themselves anyway, simply because they could. Her eyes drifted closed as he thumbed her nipples over her bra, her head falling back and chest jutting out toward him, eager to be

conquered. A small, contented sigh escaped her parted lips, and she moved slowly—so excruciatingly slow, as if she were forcing herself to trudge through tar—as she slipped the pack off her shoulders one at a time. She moved as if she were drawing out the pleasure of it, as if she knew that the minute the pack was off the tempo would change between them. And it did. As soon as both her arms were free, his mouth found hers again, their tongues stroking, thrusting, fucking each other’s desperately. The soft, wet, sucking sounds of their kisses mingled with the sound of their short, heated breaths, drowning out the noise of the forest around them. As they kissed, Cassie pawed at his t-shirt, peeling it—ripping it—off over his head, and then her lips were on him again… on his neck, his chest, her tongue darting out to flick at a nipple, and he watched in awe as she kissed her way downward, her fingers nimbly working at his zipper until she could reach into his pants and free his cock. He was kneeling in the dirt, and she was crouched, cross-legged in front of him —two filthy, lowly, abject things—when her lips wrapped around him. Her mouth was hot like the fires of hell, was wet like a lake of fire, and Gideon’s hands gripped the back of her head, his fingers winding themselves into her hair. He couldn’t help it—didn’t want to—and without warning her, he thrust himself deep, pushing her head down to take all of him. To take him, to take him. He was so deep inside her he could feel the head of his cock fucking her throat, but instead of gagging or pulling away in disgust or anger, Cassie gripped his thighs and moaned around him. He almost came at the sound, the vibrations of it coursing through his shaft and right to the root of him. “Jesus, fuck, Cassie,” he rasped. He wondered where she’d learned to do this. It was that unwanted, stowaway thought that brought out the monster. “Stop,” he croaked, his throat raw like hers must have been too.

Cassie released him and pulled away, her face stained with tears, her eyes wide, something like mortification creeping into her expression. “Oh God. Did I do something wrong?” she asked. “Not at all,” he lied, hating that even out here, even now, Radford was here with them, that piece of shit fucker. Impatiently—a little angrily—he grabbed the hem of her tank top and yanked it over her head, her arms lifting compliantly as she let him. Sitting back on his heels, he looked at her, perched in front of him in her garish, cheap-looking bra, and he took himself in his fist. Once, twice, he pumped his cock, and she watched him, riveted, biting her lower lip, thinking they were playing some sort of game, like this wasn’t a matter of life or death. “I want to hurt you,” he said with difficulty as he stroked himself, hating himself for the desire but no longer willing to fight it. “Right now... I want… I want it to hurt. Is that… is that okay?” With visible effort Cassie swallowed—perhaps her throat was sore from being fucked, or perhaps it was tight from fear, or maybe it was a little of both. In the moonlight filtering through the pines he noticed how pale her face looked, how she shifted, almost infinitesimally, away from him, like a rabbit readying itself to bolt. “Why do you want that?” she whispered, gnawing her cherry red bottom lip of hers so hard he half expected it to bleed, her eyes gleaming like she was goading him on. “Because…” he panted, still stroking himself, but slowly now. He made his strokes long and leisurely, the skin of his shaft reveling in his own touch as much as in the cathartic joy that came from uttering the words. “...It’s better that way.” And because you deserve it. Wordlessly, Cassie stood up and took a step back—slowly, deliberately, the way a cornered animal would while trying to escape a wolf. But she didn’t run like he thought she might. (And what would he do then? Follow her gleefully. He knew he would. Running as fast as his legs would take him, he’d run after her, howling to the moon, hot in the pursuit of her.) Instead she unzipped her cutoff shorts and

peeled them down over her ass, dropping them to the ground. With one foot she kicked them aside. She stood there in her bra and panties and boots, shivering, her discarded scraps of clothes forgotten in the dirt, and Gideon drank in the sight of her. Her exquisite brown skin—he’d never been able to paint it just right, was never able to capture the essence of it, no matter how many times he tried—gleamed blue in the moonlight. And she looked like she’d been carved in marble… with her slender limbs, her delicate bones, her pert little tits heaving beneath that hideous bra, she reminded him of some ancient figurehead found, sunken for centuries, at the bottom of the sea. He drank it all in, consuming her until he felt like he was the one being consumed. Her panties… God, her panties. He groaned and stroked himself harder. Her panties were a joke. She might as well have been wearing nothing at all under her shorts. They were thongs—black, or otherwise appearing that way in the darkness—and sheer. Right through them he could see she was shaved bare. Right through them he could see she was wet, the juices seeping from her pussy and dampening the tops of her thighs. Right through them he could see when one of her hands drifted inside the waistband and then down… down... until she was cupping herself and rubbing circles over her clit with her middle finger. He had no idea if any of this was really happening, and he didn’t care. Didn’t care. Didn’t care… He stopped stroking himself and stood up, his cock twitching from the lack of touch, twitching for her touch, as he stalked toward her. She backed away from him—she had nowhere really to go, maybe a step, maybe even less—until her back and bare asscheeks hit the enger door of his truck. She hissed from the touch of the cold metal on her skin. Her head fell back against the window, her eyes drifting closed, and she fingered herself, her thoughts lost in some faraway place, or maybe in some dream of him—or someone other than him. She looked like a ghost, a vision he’d conjured, getting herself off in the moonlit

night, buried in the woods. Maybe she was a ghost. Or maybe this was perdition, a private hell crafted just for him, and she was his demon. Gideon had never been all that interested in heaven. What his mother—she, right now he’d call her she—what she had always taught him about heaven made him realize, from a very young age, that he had no interest in the place. It wasn’t for him… the campfires with Jesus, sitting around on rocks in the desert singing “Kumbaya” with the saints… how could anyone ever endure that tedium of eternal virtue, of sitting around making lists of all the good things you’d seen and done? No. This place was for him. This place, with only Cassie, being tortured by her, longing to torture her, in the dark. Here. Like this. He reached out, cradling the side of her face, and kissed her gently, his lips barely brushing against hers. Gently, just once. Once so she would know he loved her too. “Are you scared?” he asked, his voice low and rumbling, like thunderheads moving over the ocean. She nodded fervently, her lips brushing against his, but he could feel her hand working desperately—moving faster—to get herself off. “Y-yes,” she gasped. He chuckled and rested a hand against the truck, leaning in to trap her in place with his body. “Good.” Stooping his head, he bit her neck again—harder this time, much harder than the first time—so hard that she yelped, bucking her hips against him, searching for him, searching for the relief of being invaded by him. He captured her lips while they were still open, kissing her roughly, stealing her cry, and with his right hand he pushed her thighs apart, ripping at the crotch of her feeble panties until he heard the cheap fabric rip. When he cupped his hand over hers, he could feel the wetness of her fingers.

Two of her fingers were inside her pussy, sliding in and out, coating her entire palm in her juices. She was saturated and dripping and ready. He didn’t wait for her to beg him, even though he could have made her, just to be cruel. Her hips had begun that telltale rocking, the slow, sliding undulation that portends a building orgasm, and he thrust two of his fingers inside her, ing hers. She gasped from the intrusion. “Oh, God, yes. Gideon,” she moaned out, her head resting against the back of the truck, her eyes lolling shut in bliss. She was so warm, so wet, so deliciously fucking wet, that after a few pumps of their fingers, he couldn’t help himself. Lunging forward, he trapped her bottom lip between his teeth, biting her, as he jammed his fist inside her. Cassie wailed out into the night, the walls of her pussy fluttering and squeezing around his hand as she came. The sound of her voice—the whine of her cry, the way it died out into a husky moan—almost made him come with her. It was the most beautiful, exquisite, agonized sound he had ever heard. It was the sound of pleasure meeting pain, tumbling headlong into it, not caring where it led. She was as warm and pink and tender as a rabbit being gutted, and Gideon grunted filthy things—he didn’t even know what, he was so lost, so far gone—as Cassie rode out her orgasm, wave after crashing wave, her knees tremoring from the effort it took to stand, tremoring from the promises—the threats—he was making to her. He pumped his fist, pushing against the tightness, pushing against the contracting muscles, then pulled out his hand and took a step away from her to assess his work. She was leaning limply against the back of the truck, struggling to catch her breath, a tendril of hair fallen from her braid, her cheeks flushed. Not abject enough. Not nearly. He ripped one of the cups of her bra down, exposing a dark, dusky nipple, and then wiped his hand off on her abdomen, painting her with her own musk. There. Perfect.

“Turn around,” he commanded—or was it the monster? He couldn’t be sure anymore. He didn’t think the boy—the weak one, the useless one, the insipid one —would ever have the courage to speak to Cassie this way. But she loved it. She must have. Because she turned around and planted her hands on the truck, presenting her dirt-smudged ass to him. She was filthy. Just like a slut, a voice rasped in his ear, a voice stained with tobacco and laden with pain, choked by resentment and hostility. Stop it, he told it. You’re not real. Out loud he asked Cassie, “Do you think I’m done with you?” “No,” she said, looking at him over one of her shoulders as Gideon shucked off his shoes and pants. Her hips visibly swayed, her ass wiggling in anticipation. “I don’t think you are.” He walked up to her, the dirt beneath his feet still battered smooth from the winter’s rains, and took her braid in hand. The strands of her hair were silky and smooth, fine like spun sugar, and he leaned in to sniff her hair, to inhale the scent of her, to see if she smelled like candy too. Her breath hitched from the closeness of his body and the uncertainty of what he’d do next. He considered his options. He could nudge her legs apart and take her like this, standing up, from behind, using his truck to carry their weight. Or he could finger her tight little asshole and take her there. He could make her crawl onto the bed of his truck, lapping at her pussy as she tried to crawl away from him, yelping at the rough metal tearing at her soft skin. Or he could fuck her, slow and sweet, face-to-face like a good boy would do, on the bench of the truck, their breath fogging up the windshield, diffusing the light of the moon as it peered down on them. Instead he wrapped her braid around his arm and yanked hard, forcing her to look up at the sky, wincing from the pain of it.

“Grab a stick,” he muttered, pushing her away from him and toward the edge of the woods. She didn’t ask him what kind, how long it should be, how thick. Didn’t ask him what for. Instead she walked into the woods, squatting down from time to time as she rummaged for the perfect one. She took her time, picking one up to consider it, then discarding it for failing to meet whatever metrics she’d decided that the stick he was going to use to whip her should have. Finally, she settled on one. It was a long, thin branch, perhaps from a cedar, that had been stripped bare of its fronds. She handed it to him with a smirk. Like this was a game. “Take off your fucking bra,” he said. “And drop it onto the ground. Same for what’s left of your panties.” As she reached behind her to unclasp her bra, he stooped and took her exposed nipple into his mouth, worrying it with his teeth hard enough to make her hiss. In one hand he clutched the switch, eager to whip her with it, and with the other he gripped her ass—gripped it so tightly it was like his fingers were trying to peel her apart. She fumbled at the task, unsteadily taking half a step back, and reached out to grab onto him for . Her fingertips landed on one of the smooth, ribboned scars on his shoulders, and he couldn’t have that—didn’t want her to know what had been done to him—so he gritted out “Forget it, I’ll do it,” and turned her around brusquely. The bones of her spine begged to be caressed as they jutted out at him from inside her tiny, birdlike body. But instead of caressing them he reared back, and with one lightning fast stroke he brought his arm holding the switch down on her, cracking the whip against her flesh. An angry red welt bloomed on her skin, but she didn’t cry out. Didn’t move. Just stood there.

So he whipped her again, this time across the ass. She squeezed her asscheeks tighter from the brutality of it, but she didn’t cry out. Didn’t move. He loved her. Never more than now, he loved her. “Is this—is this okay?” the boy inside him asked in a moment of weakness. Always weak. The boy was always weak. Cassie turned her head, but she didn't look at him. The profile of her face was so painstakingly gorgeous he wanted to hit her again. With his hand this time. Bare skin on bare skin, the crack of it hurting him almost as much as it would hurt her. She nodded. “Whatever you need.” Her voice so low he wasn’t sure if he’d imagined it. God. What he needed… what he needed… No one had ever cared what it was he needed. He threw the switch down and stalked up to her, peeling her thong down her hips, down her legs, sinking onto the ground behind her as he licked and laved at her flesh, tasting her, wanting her, needing her. She kicked her underwear aside with one booted foot, and as soon as her ankles were free of it he tugged down on her hips, tugged her until she was kneeling in the dirt in front of him, and then—roughly, quickly—he pushed down on her back until she was facedown in the dirt, arms spread over her head, palms down in the dust, like a penitent praying to God. He spread her welted asscheeks apart to bare all of her, exposing her, assessing her, seeing how wet her pussy was for him—how pink and tender and already raw—and with one smooth shove, his cock was inside her, enveloped in her warmth. He’d fucked other girls before, but never like this. No one had ever let them fuck them like this. Roughly, brutally, like they were nothing more than two biological imperatives meeting in the middle, ing and twisting and writhing together because they needed to. Never like two wild animals rutting in the night.

He forced her down into the dirt with the entire weight of his body, grunting with each thrust as her elbows and hands and knees scraped against the cold ground. It smelled like dirt down here, like the salt of her skin, like the sulfur of hell, like the tang of blood, and he thrust so deep inside her he could feel the head of his cock pushing against her womb. At the thought of her womb he fucked her harder, faster, more forcefully, lost in the urge to fill her with his babies, one after another. He wanted to see her belly heavy with his child. To hear her screams as she bore down, knees spread open, heaving and sweaty as she pushed her insides out, his child cleaving away at her guts. He wanted to see his child suckling from her lucious nipples, her breasts swollen and engorged as her body fed some tiny part of him. ...But then he thought of Radford. He loved her. But he also hated her. So he fucked her harder, and maybe she was crying, or maybe it was him. Maybe they were weeping together for everything they could have had if they’d only been born someone else, somewhere else. If the voices didn’t hound them. If they were free. With each frantic, furious thrust the wetness from her cunt squelched, and his slick torso slid gracelessly across her back. They were too wet, too hot, too sweaty, and it was too much—so much he couldn’t breathe—so he hoisted himself up onto his knees, keeping his cock rooted inside of her as he crooked her pelvis upward to accommodate the new position. The night air was chilly and damp, the dew settling on his heated flesh, cooling him, and from above her he finally felt like he could breathe. Mindlessly, like the beast he was, he gripped her hips, yanking her toward him with each thrust to push himself as deep inside her as he could go, and Cassie moaned a low, guttural sound, and came again. This time he came with her, filling her up with his seed, spilling inside her spurt after glorious spurt, marking her as his, his, his, his soul howling to the moon. Sated, she groveled, tits down in the dirt. “I love you,” the boy told her.

You bitch, the monster added, nowhere near done with her.

It was still dark when he awoke, a hunger rumbling deep inside of him. For a few moments he had no recollection of where he was—all he could discern was the soft glow of the moonlight filtering through the fabric of something above him. A tent. Yes, that was it. And someone’s limbs were on him, entangled in his, pinning him to the ground. Then he ed. I am nowhere. With Cassie. The tent smelled heavily of sex, the air thick with it, and the smell made him want to take her again, but instead he disentangled himself from her and quietly rolled over, unzipping the tent’s door, and headed out into the night. Even though it was the peak of summer, it had grown cold in the early hours of the morning, a heavy mist settling low to the ground, blanketing it in a dank dew. Gideon shivered, his naked flesh instantly peppered in goosebumps, and he walked back toward the car in search of his clothes. He found them strewn everywhere—Cassie’s poor, sad undergarments little more than trash now—and he dressed himself, slipping his pants on without boxers, since his were nowhere to be seen, and then his socks and boots. He’d just slipped his t-shirt back on over his head when he noticed it. Through the mist there was a light emanating from the trailhead into the woods. It had a watery aspect to it, blue and shifting and ephemeral. It beckoned to him, cool and inviting, promising to cleanse him, to slake his thirst. So he followed it, penetrating the dense wall of foliage, and made his way into the woods. The trail was awash in the dim blue light, allowing him to meander through and around the plants that had begun their reclamation of the land. Carefully, slowly, he stepped around the thorny arms of the blackberry bushes, wading through the knee-high ferns and over the rotting corpses of spruce and hemlocks, toward its source. In the distance there was a low rumbling of a river—some fork of the Quinault, depending on where they were—thundering its way to the ocean. But other than that, the air was preternaturally still. Even the creatures of the night

had fallen silent—listening, waiting to see what would happen next. The path was fairly level but treacherously gnarled with roots and gravel, so he kept his gaze fixed down toward the ground, step after step, for what felt like many miles. Onward he went, ducking to avoid the low-hangling tendrils of moss that begged to hold onto him, and toward the light. Onward he went, into the belly of the forest. Finally he came to a clearing. In the center of it there was a pond—a small lake of icy cool water, untroubled by man, undisturbed by the breeze. It looked like a sheet of glass, its waters glowing a deep cerulean blue in the moonlight. In the middle of the pond a heron hunted, its silhouette visible through the fog. It stood motionless on one leg as it waited for some invisible prey to by. “I wish I could paint this,” Gideon whispered reverently, feeling dumbstruck by the beauty of the scene. He sank to the ground at the edge of the shore, not caring if his pants got muddy or if the pond itself reached out to engulf him, sucking him to the bottom of its depths. He could die out here and finally be happy. Suddenly there was a noise behind him, a snapping of a twig, or a rustling in the brush, and he turned, startled, to see who—or what—had followed him. Cassie emerged from the darkness and walked toward him, a small smile on her lips. She looked like a water nymph, her hair hanging loose in waves so long they skimmed her waist. She was wearing a sheer white slip, the shadows of her nipples visible through the thin silken fabric. Her feet were bare. “Hey there,” she said, kneeling next to him. She seemed to carry no shame or awkwardness about what they’d done only hours earlier—no remorse about the lines they’d crossed, or the reckless abandon in what could only be called their mating. She looked at him like she loved him even though he was a monster. “What is this place?” he asked, hoping she’d have some kind of answer for him. She always seemed to know things like that. She shrugged and laughed, her voice husky from sleep, husky from screaming.

“Heaven, maybe?” Out in the lake the heron swooped, its long beak breaking the plane of the water in one piercing blow and then emerging triumphant, holding a wriggling fish tight in its clutches. The fish flapped, uselessly struggling for its life, before the heron flew off, its wings whooshing loudly in the air as it took the fish to its inevitable death. “No,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t think I’ll get to go there.” Cassie looked at him. “Why not?” It was his turn now to shrug. “Because I’m a monster.” She frowned. “Who told you that?” He didn’t answer. It wasn’t important. He knew it to be true, anyway. She reached out, lightly gripping his forearm. “Why do you think you’re a monster? It’s… it’s not because of what we did back there, right? Because… I wanted that too. All of it. More of it.” She took her hand back, resting it on her lap and looked down at her entwined fingers. “I want so much more of it.” And that was the problem. The problem was how much more he wanted to give her, and what that would mean. “You have no idea, do you?” he asked, his voice edged in bitterness. The things he wanted to do to her were unthinkable things. Unspeakable things. Things you couldn’t come back from. “So… why don’t you clue me in? Why don’t you make me understand?” He took his t-shirt off so she could see the patchwork of scars littering his back. Each one told a story, each band of mutilated flesh told a tale of the monster and his mother—of Grendel and the hideous beast that had born and raised him. “It would feel good to do this to you,” he confessed. “To watch you split apart and bleed, and then to split you apart again. To paint you as something new and beautiful. To know it was me who made you.”

“Gideon,” she whispered, not seeming to hear what he’d just said. Her eyes were wide and fixed on his back, taking in the horror of it. Her fingertips traced a scar, the featherlight touch of it unbearable on his tender skin. “Who did this to you?” But she knew the answer. Of course she did. All of Gold Bar knew. They’d seen his shirts, stained with blood. Had heard his howls in the yard. Had seen him limping, dejected and broken like a bait dog, on the playground. For years they’d known. They’d known and done nothing because... “I deserved all of it. I’m evil. And she always knew it. Always tried to beat it out of me. But I’m evil to the core, so there was nothing she could do.” “I’d like to kill her with my bare hands right now,” Cassie said. “Or…” she looked up, searching for the right words. Her eyes fixed on a moss-choked tree, and she stood up, pulling a clump of wolf lichen off a limb. She handed it to Gideon. “Put this in your pocket,” she told him. “For what?” “When the time is right, you’ll see.” Once he’d tucked the lichen into his pocket, Cassie walked over to the edge of the water, apparently satisfied. She pulled her slip over her head, tossing it back to him before she stepped forward, her toes touching the water. On her ass and across her back he could still see the welts he’d left on her. They were countless in their chaos. He moaned at the sight of them—moaned at the same time she did. “God, it feels good,” she said. He leaned forward to touch the water. It was like ice on his fingertips, like watery death. How could it possibly feel good? He reached out and touched her calf to stop her from going in—to hold her back—but quickly withdrew it, wincing in pain. He shook his hand, wanting to cry, and submerged it in the pond, desperate for relief. Cassie was on fire. Her skin was scalding hot. She took a step into the pond, then another, its water hissing and sizzling and

turning to steam all around her. When she was waist-deep, she turned around to face him, beckoning him to her. “Why don’t you come in with me? It feels like fire… it feels…” Her hand dipped below the water, and he knew what she was doing, could tell because he’d just seen that ravenous look in her eyes back at the truck. “It feels like heaven.” She slipped lower and lower as she ventured out farther into the lake, eventually disappearing into the mist. The gentle sounds she made as she treaded water faded out until Gideon was alone again, sitting at the shore, shrouded in silence. “Cassie?” he asked, alarm rising in him. “Cassie, are you okay?” He stood up and walked as close to the water as he dared, scanning the surface for any sign of her. But the water was still, a smooth sheet of glass once more, one that had never been broken or smudged or marred by human hands. Panic took over, and he made his way into the lake even though he’d always been a poor swimmer. He had to find her. He had to follow her. And if he didn’t make it? Well, it didn’t matter. If something happened to her… if it was his fault, having brought her to this place… he wouldn’t be able to live with himself, anyway. He went as far as his calves, then up to his waist, and before he knew it the ground had fallen away beneath his feet, and he thrashed in the water, desperately trying to keep his head above the surface. He slipped below, and that’s when he saw her, illuminated by the light of the moon as it sliced through the crystal clear water of the pond. She was floating, motionless and still, her arms swaying above her head, her long hair dancing around her in the current like the tentacles of a sea anemone. Her eyes were open and unseeing, her skin unnaturally pallid. He went to her. In the lake of fire they would always be together.

He woke up to Cassie’s lips wrapped around his cock, one of her hands cupping and tugging at his balls. Aside from his pants, which she’d rucked down his hips while he slept, he was fully clothed. Even his boots were on. They bore no trace of the pond—no wetness, no mud—and he knew, then, it had been nothing more than a dream. Cassie hovered above him, still nude, her skin marked with bruises and welts and bites from where he couldn’t help but taste her a little too much, a little too hard. Poor, beautiful thing, made even more perfect by his brutality. He reached out and threaded his fingers through her hair so she’d know he was awake, and she looked up at him with greedy gray eyes, her pink tongue wickedly running the length of his shaft before she engulfed it, deepthroating him like she had the night before. He didn’t stop her this time. Instead he closed his eyes and revelled in the fit of his shaft to her mouth, the way her throat squeezed the crown of his cock so perfectly, like they’d been made just for this. He felt one of her fingers stroking his perineum, boldly inching its way toward his asshole, but before she could breach him there, he came directly down her throat. He’d never known such bliss—never dreamed of it—and as he rode out his orgasm, he imagined all the things he had yet to do to her. Today, maybe. Or tomorrow. Fuck it if they ever left this place. They’d stay here forever, covered in their own stink, hedonistically devouring each other. She pulled away far too soon, leaving him cold and bereft, his dick still wet with her saliva. Reluctantly, he reopened his eyes. She sat across from him, crosslegged on the sleeping pad they’d shared, her pretty little pussy smiling right at him. “Good morning to you too,” he said. She wiped at the corner of her mouth with the back of her hand and smiled.

“What can I say? I woke up hungry.” “Lucky for me.” He reached over lazily and ran a finger down her slit, pushing it inside of her to feel her wetness. She hissed and winced. “Sorry…. I’m… I’m a little sore today.” “Just a little?” he said, adding a second finger and curling it upward as he pumped, beckoning her to him. Her head fell back, her eyes drifting shut, as she listened to his call. “I’ll have to fix that.”

It was easy to lose track of time out here. If it weren’t for the path of the sun across the sky, time would have no meaning at all. It would be measured in the cracks of his hand across her skin, the penitent kisses on tired, aching flesh. It would be measured in their sighs and grunts, their groans and her screams. It would be measured in the emptying jugs of water as she washed herself clean before he filthied her again. They barely ate and rarely slept, and they went nowhere at all. On the fourth day, Gideon woke up to the smell of smoke. Sitting up with a bolt, he unzipped the tent door, pulling his pants up as he moved, to investigate the source. A wildfire out here could be deadly—could trap them in the heart of the forest, and they’d have no way to reach help. They’d burn alive, reduced to ash, before anyone could find them. But it was only Cassie, tending to a fire she’d made in the clearing, as she fried up a can of baked beans for breakfast. She took a swig of water and, opening a small case, took something out and palmed it. “Taking a painkiller?” he asked, strutting his way over to where she was gingerly sitting on the ground. She’d never had anal sex before, or so she’d said, but he didn’t exactly go easier on her for that. She shook her head and opened her palm, showing him. “No. It’s just the pill.” “Birth control?” he’d asked, surprised. She looked up at him, a droll look on her face. “No. A boner pill. Of course it’s birth control. What did you think we were doing out here? Making a baby?” “Of course not,” he lied, keeping his tone light and airy. He sat next to her, resting his elbows on his knees. “If we were, I probably wouldn’t have bothered doing the last thing we did.” She swatted at him playfully with the back of her fist, but before she could take back her hand he’d gripped onto it and was biting on the knuckle of her index finger.

“But what if we were?” he asked, sucking on her finger. It tasted like pussy and semen and sweat. “Would you hate that?” She grew still, her back going rigid, and she stared down at the flames licking at the kindling in the fire. “No,” she whispered a little breathlessly as his tongue insistently stroked her flesh. “I guess I wouldn’t.” He opened her fist and tossed the pill into the fire. “What are you—” she cried, but he was already crawling on top of her, kissing her madly, kissing her like there was nothing else in this world but to love her. “I wouldn’t hate it either,” he said, tugging at her ragged cutoffs, rolling the denim down her legs. He slithered his way down her body and spread her legs wide, envisioning what the head of his child would look like crowning from her pussy. “Okay,” she gasped at the touch of his tongue on her clit. “Okay,” she cried as he dragged it, again and again and again like some feral, rabid animal, down the length of her, spreading the juices that seeped from her all over her, all over his face, all over her thighs. “Okay,” she wept, her knees tremoring, as he made love to her with his tongue. “I’ll do it. I’ll do it. I’ll do it.” Tears stained her face. His beautiful hostage, prisoner to his every whim and need now. He worshipped his prisoner with his tongue. Thanking her. Praying to her. As trapped by her as she was trapped by him. His exquisite, fertile goddess. The future mother of all his children. The beans burned in the frying pan, the acrid smell filling their heaving lungs, and the fire turned to embers, then to ash. But neither of them noticed, or cared.

“We have to go, you know,” Cassie said, twirling a lock of his hair in her fingers, her figure lazy and languid as they laid together in the dirt. Her skin was sweet honey in the late afternoon sun, her black hair as shiny as coal. “I told them I’d be back yesterday.” “I know,” he sighed, dragging one of her thighs across his lap to open her to him, his fingers drifting down, down, to where he’d made her flesh red and raw. Maybe she could be distracted… maybe they could just… “Gideon Burke, I know exactly what you’re doing.” She smacked his chest and pushed herself upright. “And I won’t have it. You’d fuck me to death if you had it your way.” He let the words hang there in the air between them, not bothering to refute the basic truth of them. He sat up and watched her get to work, dissembling their tent and gathering all their things. He wouldn’t stop her, but he’d be goddamned if he lifted a finger to get them back to Gold Bar. “Where do you suppose we’ll be able to do this” —he gestured with a finger to their surroundings— “again? When you live with your parents, and I live with mine?” “You got a tent and a truck. Same as now. I’d say that leaves things pretty open, wouldn’t you?” She picked up her tank top from where he’d thrown it and slipped it back on over head. Her neck and collarbone were covered in bruises and hickeys, her shoulders and exposed belly stained by the kiss of his switch. She looked like she’d been buried in an avalanche somewhere for a week. An absolute fucking manmade disaster. He smirked at the sight, loving how it enumerated their sins, but he went over to his bag and fetched one of his flannels for her. Let everyone in Gold Bar see her wearing his clothes—it said much of the same thing: she belonged to him. “Fair point,” he conceded. “But I wish I could stay here forever with you.”

She came up to him and rested both her hands on his shoulders. Her gray eyes scanned his face like she was cataloguing every feature of it, and after a couple moments of silence, she pecked the tip of his nose with her lips. “You’re sweet,” she told him, then walked away. He had no idea how she could believe that after the things he’d said and done to her, but she seemed to be sincere. She always seemed to be sincere with him— not a liar like everyone else. Not a liar or a manipulator, like his mother accused her of being. Not a monster like his mother was. After Cassie had gathered all their things and retrieved the food container from the woods, she stowed her pack inside the cab and Gideon’s in the bed. “C’mon, Gid. Time to get a move on. It’s gonna take us a good four hours to get back to the ferry. And who knows how long of a wait we’re going to have there. I don’t want to get stuck in Kingston overnight. As it is, we’re not getting back home ‘til nightfall.” When he didn’t budge, she shot him a pointed look and called out to him as she carefully slid her sore ass onto the bench of the truck. “If you get in the car, I’ll blow you on the way back to the highway.” She didn’t have to make that offer twice. He got into the truck, and they left their safe haven in the woods—the only trace they’d ever been there was her father’s pocket knife, which lay forgotten somewhere in the undergrowth.

4

In the pines, in the pines

When they pulled up to the Lee house it was already close to midnight. The lights inside the house were on, burning as the people inside waited anxiously to see if their missing daughter would come back home. “Shit, my parents are still up,” Cassie grumbled, leaning over the bench to give Gideon a quick kiss. “My mom’s gonna murder me for not calling.” She’d mentioned it several times on the way back home—how she ought to call —but every time she said something, Gideon had pulled her toward him on the seat and pushed his hand down her shorts to finger her. Like a Pavlovian dog, Cassie had learned that if she so much mentioned Gold Bar to him, he’d get her off. So the last time she tried, back on the ferry crossing, her eyes glittering wickedly at him, he’d pulled her onto his lap and made her ride him. The first thing he wanted her to know was that when she was with him, there was no one else. Hopefully she could learn that lesson through pleasure. But if she didn’t, there was always pain. “I’m sure they’ll just be happy to see you in one piece, more or less,” Gideon said, smirking at his beautiful girl. Cassie laughed. “You’re terrible.” “Well, send my regards to them. Be sure to thank them for allowing you to come with me.” Her mouth dropped open, her eyes sparkling with glee at his entendre. “I take it back. You are evil.” She grew serious, then, as if she had just ed what he’d told her on their way into the woods: I’m a monster.

“I had the best time the past few days with you,” she said, reaching out to take his hand. “I don’t know if I’ve ever felt so…” She trailed off, at a loss for the right word. He smiled and squeezed her hand. “Sore?” “Alive.” She took a deep, shuddering breath. “You make me feel alive. And… I’d do it all again, okay?” He gave her a crooked smile, ing the phantom who’d visited him in his dreams, luring him into the lake of fire. “I think you might be a bit of a monster too.” They gazed at each other in the darkness of the cab, all traces of bashfulness between them gone, the children they’d once been, harboring their own sweet, innocent crushes, obliterated by the violence of their fucking. It took a monster to love one. “Oh! I just ed!” she cried out, taking back her hand so that she could rifle through her pack at her feet. “I wanted to give you this.” She offered him what she had pulled from it—a small rabbit’s foot, dyed blue. “It’s from the rabbit we cleaned together. I dyed it your favorite color.” His favorite color was red, but he didn’t correct her. Instead he took the proffered rabbit’s foot, stroking it with his thumb. Blood rushed to his groin, making him grow hard, his cock straining uncomfortably against the confines of his pants. “I love it,” he told her. He looked up at her. She was so small, so fragile, but he hadn’t broken her. “I love you,” he said. Just then the front door of the house opened, Cassie’s mother framed by the golden light all around her as she stood there, glowering at them. “Shit. I really gotta go,” Cassie said. She gave his hand a quick squeeze and got out of the truck, slinging her pack over her shoulders. She looked at him one last time before she slammed the door shut and walked away.

She hadn’t told him she loved him back. ...Maybe he’d only imagined she’d told him that in the first place.

The wheedling voice and bloated face of Tucker Carlson greeted him as he came through the door of the apartment. His mother, never a fan of the hours her baker husband kept, had fallen asleep in her recliner. Her neck was crooked at an uncomfortable angle, the vitriol blaring on the TV providing a soundtrack to her dreams. Gideon kicked off his boots and crept across the room toward his bedroom, not wanting to wake her. The last thing he wanted to hear right now was how he reeked of a slut, or any of the usual invective his mother was capable of conjuring up from the depths of her rotten soul. As soon as he reached his room, he closed the door quietly behind him and slid the brass door chain in place. He didn’t want either of his parents to disturb him, to steal the sweet taste of the past few days any sooner than they inevitably would. His bedroom was spartan in furnishings and decoration. Aside from the twinsized bed he’d had since he was a child, there was only one dresser and the easel he kept folded in the corner. The rest of the walls were lined with his canvases, each stacked seven or eight deep, that he kept for lack of anywhere else to put them. They were paintings, mostly of Cassie, in a variety of mediums: linseed oil, acrylic, egg tempera, watercolor, and even blood and human hair. When his mother was well enough to get around on her own, she’d sometimes come in here, grab one or two of the most graphic paintings, and destroy them. He’d caught her a few years back, knife in hand, slashing the canvas off the frames. What would decent folk say if they knew you was such a filthy piece of shit, she’d said. Lustin’ over a little whore. Makin’ this disgusting pornography. And maybe that’s all it was—pornography. But to him it was the expression of his soul, the encapsulation of all that was beautiful and good in the world. It was the spark that ignited him, that kindled his ion and burned away the corruption, purifying him. His mother could never destroy them all. Faster than she could destroy them, he could create them. Painting after painting of Cassie. Swimming naked in the

Skykomish, breasts poking out of the water, her dark nipples puckered from the cold. Cassie with blood seeping from her pussy, her thighs stained with her menstruation. Cassie hiking in the woods, her slender but muscular legs straining to climb over a boulder that had tumbled onto the path. Cassie, kneeling on all fours on his tiny little bed, her soft pink cunt opened to him, begging him for the relief that fucking her could only bring. He found this last painting and brought it to the front of a stack, then sat on his bed, staring at it. That cunt was his now. Would always be his. No matter what. He slid his flannel off his shoulders, then took off his t-shirt, baring his chest to her. He let her see him in his true form, scales and claws and all. He would show her now. Gideon stood up and unbuttoned his pants, dropping them to the floor, meaning to stroke himself to this painting and then come all over it, but something caught his eye. A tuft of something green had fallen out of his pocket. He reached down and picked it up. Wolf lichen. It was the moss Cassie had given him in his dream. When the time is right, you’ll see, she’d said. He still didn’t see, but he stashed it in the top drawer of his dresser anyway. Then he faced his painting, palming himself until he grew hard, and ed everything Cassie had let him do to her.

It didn’t take long to knock her up. Not at the rate they went at it. Whenever they had the chance, his hands were on her. Behind the diner, where she worked with her mother. In his truck, in whatever parking lot they could find. In the dead of the night, in the woods, with the smoke from the wildfires out east filling their breathless lungs. They’d only had the first, real drenching rain of the fall when she told him she was six days late. She told him not to get his hopes up, in case the baby didn’t keep. But it kept.

There was no reason to believe that telling his parents about the baby would go well, but he couldn’t help but hope anyway. He and Cassie were grown adults and had made the choice together to get pregnant and then, unlike the time she’d gotten pregnant with Radford, to stay that way. The news should be something to celebrate, regardless of what his mother thought about Cassie. A sweet, innocent baby cradled in his arms would make a better man of him, a whole man. Holding its fragile little body in his hands would prove to the monster inside him that it wasn’t in charge. He was. The boy was. And the boy was a man, capable of making babies and then providing for them. So, riding high on the news, he decided to hold a dinner for his parents, where he’d finally tell them. A honey-roasted root vegetable salad, followed by goat stew with rustic peasant bread, and finished off with a homemade pumpkin pie topped with fresh whipped cream. His mother’s taste buds had long ago been incinerated by her smoking habit, but his dad would enjoy the meal—and perhaps his mother would be softened enough by the effort to stomach the reality of their expanding family. He would have preferred to tell them on his own, but Cassie had asked if she could be there too, and it only seemed right, now that she was his family, to invite her to the Burkes’ table. He just wasn’t sure he would be able to protect her from everything his mother might say or do. “The Lee slut is here,” his mother said as she held the nicotine-stained curtains back from the window to peer outside. Cassie had parked her Buick on the street out back and was making her way through their backyard, toward the tall flight of steps that led up to the apartment. She was clutching a box of chocolates in her hands that she probably thought—foolishly—would serve as some sort of peace offering to his implacable mother. “ what we agreed to, Ma, about your language,” Gideon reminded her as he cleaved a head of cabbage in half. “Agreed to? I didn’t agree to nothin’.” She sank back into her recliner, making it

clear she had no intention of getting up to greet Cassie as she came in the door. “Yes. You did. I promised you I’d destroy all my paintings if you don’t say anything unkind to—or about—Cassie during dinner. You said it was a deal. Now don’t be a liar.” “Lyin’ is the problem. Just looking at her, I’m finding it a bit hard not to think the truth. Don’t know how I’ll hold back tellin’ it. The girl’s a cheap slut. The whole town knows it. And now they’re gonna see her comin’ into our house, like we condone her lifestyle. Well, I don’t, anyway. I can’t say much for you or your father.” Gideon sighed, swiping his forearm across his brow as he clutched onto the knife. When she tried him like this he wanted nothing more than to run one clear through her. If she knew that, she might not be so willing to needle him while he was chopping vegetables. He threw the knife down onto the counter and went to the door to open it for Cassie. She was standing on the landing at the top of the steps, her face flushed, body jittering with nervous energy. He hadn’t seen her this nervous since the first time she’d let him choke her out. “Relax,” he murmured as he kissed her temple. “If she tries to sink her fangs in you, I’ve got your back.” He ushered her into the living room, taking her coat and hanging it up in the coat closet. He gestured to where his mother sat on the recliner. “Ma, this is Cassie, my girlfriend. Cassie, this is my mother.” They knew each other already, of course. In a town of a couple thousand people, you didn’t have the privilege of anonymity. But Cassie nodded at his mother as if this were the first time she’d ever laid eyes on her, granting her the courtesy of a fresh start. “It’s nice to meet you, Mrs. Burke.” His mother snorted. “I bet it is.” Cassie looked down at the chocolates in her hands, perhaps to hide the sting of

the first lash. “I… ah… brought you these,” she offered, holding them out. “You’re gonna make a cripple stand up for a box of chocolates? Am I some kind of pet monkey to you?” “No! I… ah… I’d never. I would never treat you like that.” Cassie walked over to his mother, looking flustered, and deposited the box on the coffee table in front of her. “I don’t know if you know this, but my dad’s disabled.” Her words hung in the air like the plume of an atom bomb. After a few awkward beats, Gideon found the composure to speak. “I believe she’s aware of that. Aren’t you, Ma?” His mother’s eyes darted toward his and narrowed. Questioning what it was he knew about her past, no doubt. He’d never had the courage to confront her directly about her betrayal, although they’d danced around it for years. “Yes,” she said. “I’m aware of the fact. Cassie, tell me: exactly how ‘disabled’ is your father? Is he like me—is it just a little hard for him to get around? Or is he a vegetable, rotting away in your home?” “Mother.” “What?” His mother held her hands up, feigning innocence. “I’m simply askin’.” “Well,” Cassie said, a hint of steel edging into her voice. “I’d say he ain’t like you at all. But to answer your question more directly… no. He ain’t a ‘vegetable.’ His body’s given up on him, but his mind is sharp as a tack. He re absolutely everything.” His mother’s sneer fell off her face at Cassie’s words, and she reached for her cigarettes on her TV tray, her hand shaking more than normal. “Everything, does he?” she asked. “Yeah. Our birthdays, his and my mom’s wedding anniversary, all the stories from when I was a kid…” Cassie shrugged, unaware that she had tread into dangerous waters. “Everything. He’s still my dad. Not the same as he always was, maybe, but he deserves respect. Mine. And yours too.”

She’d lost her advantage by not hinting at the affair, but, then, she didn’t know about it. His mom went to strike a light, but before the flame could meet its mark Gideon stopped her, grabbing onto her hand that held the lighter. “Don’t smoke around Cassie, all right?” he said, prising the lighter from her talons and chucking it onto the tray. “Whyever not?” his mom asked, eyes wide in incredulity. “You mean to tell me the air of my home ain’t fit for that one to breathe?” “Yeah, Ma, that’s what I’m saying.” “Pshhht,” his mom scoffed again, but she had the good sense to obey him. With effort she jammed her cigarette back into its pack, then crossed her arms belligerently, apparently done with the both of them. “You wanna keep me company in the kitchen?” Gideon asked Cassie, quirking his head in that direction. “It’s going to be a few before Dad’s done clo shop.” Cassie looked over at the array of food on the counter and table—at the beets and goat cheese, the onions, the jar of apple cider vinegar, the fresh pumpkin waiting to be gored—and wrinkled her nose. At sixteen weeks along, the morning sickness still hadn’t abated. It meant the baby was strong, she’d told him by way of consolation. With her ever-present nausea, they hadn’t been able to have sex for weeks. She’d told him the smell of their bodies sickened her. A part of him wondered if he sickened her now, if it was her body rebelling against his compulsions and desires. “I guess I’ll hang out over here on the couch, if that’s all right with you,” Cassie said. She was picking the shittier of two options, and the far more dangerous one, but Gideon smiled to hide the jolt of rejection that sizzled through his guts. “All right. Make yourself at home. I’ll bring you a glass of water in just a few, okay?” “Don’t hurry on my .” She squeezed his hand, then headed over to the couch. Like always, his mom had Fox News on. Right now Dana Perino was going on

about the latest Black man—Gideon had long ago lost track of their names— who’d gotten shot down by the police and how the police were simply doing their best under very difficult circumstances to enforce the crumbling order of our society. “The problem is they’re animals,” his mom commented to no one in particular, nudging her chin toward the TV. “The whole bunch of ‘em.” “I agree,” Cassie said. “I kinda find it hard to believe a person would want to become a cop now unless brutality somehow appealed to them.” “You dumb girl,” his mom sneered. “I was talkin’ about the Blacks.” She looked pointedly at Cassie. “And the browns and reds too. I don’t know what anyone could expect from ‘em. A dog bred for fightin’ is only good for that.” “We are not dogs. Or any other kind of animal,” Cassie snapped. “We are people, just the same as you.” “‘Just the same as you,’” his mom scoffed. “Hardly. At best you people are house pets.” “The same was once said for your kind too.” “My kind?” his mom asked, taken aback by that. “What in the hell are you talkin’ about?” Cassie shrugged, as if the answer was obvious. “Women. White women. Pretty little pets, fine as long as you knew your place. And even if you ain’t told that anymore, you’re still animals. Not for fighting, but breeding.” Gideon opened the fridge to fill a tumbler with water for Cassie, considering whether he ought to intervene. But before he could say anything, his mother barked out his name. “Don’t you have any snacks for me, boy? I’m starvin’ over here. I thought you was supposed to be makin’ me a dinner. Some dinner this is turnin’ out to be.” He grabbed a package of cheddar cheese slices from the fridge and a box of crackers from the pantry and brought them into the living room, along with the glass of water for Cassie. “Here you go,” he said, leaning down and kissing the top of Cassie’s head and then placing the drink and snacks on the coffee table.

His mother’s beady eyes assessed his girlfriend. “What do you know about breeding, girl?” she suddenly asked. Cassie flushed, the arrow flying dangerously close to its mark, and reached for a cracker. She took a small nibble off the corner. “I know that white people like to stay with their own kind. Have families of their own kind.” “Is that what my son is doin’ with you?” Gideon’s throat constricted. Had she, in the span of a few minutes, already discovered the truth? “Excuse me?” Cassie asked. “Staying with his own kind? Is that what my son is doin’ with you?” “Ma, I love her,” Gideon said, pleading for reason, pleading for comion he’d never find from her, making himself be brave even though the boy inside of him was quaking as he ed the sting of her hand on his face, his ass, his thighs, his back. ing the sharp ache of her foot landing between his ribs, bruising them, sometimes breaking them. ing how it felt when a bone snapped—the sudden, shocking pain of it—how it brought him to the ground, sobbing, every time. His mother snickered. “If that’s what you say it is.” The apartment door opened, and his father walked in, bringing a gust of damp, cold winter air with him. The man’s face was flushed pink, as it perpetually was, both from the heat of the bakery ovens and the excess weight he carried on his frame. “Well, helloooo!” he bellowed out cheerfully, unaware of the war that was already raging in the apartment. When his greeting was met with silence and steely stares, his smile fell off his face. Of course there was a war raging. There always was. “I closed up a little early today,” he explained feebly, although no one cared what he had to say, and he knew it.

“Your son was just professin’ his love for the Lee slut,” his mother told him. “Mother,” Gideon whispered, not shocked. Horrified. “I’m no liar, boy. And I won’t be held back from tellin’ the truth. That one” — she pointed to his girlfriend, to the mother of his unborn child— “is a slut. I heard from Edith Block she’s been sleepin’ around behind your back with that mechanic again. Everyone knows it. You’re just too stupid to see it. Pussy blind, that’s what they say about you.” His father stood there stupidly like always, his mouth opening and closing like a fish out of water, gasping to breathe. Saying nothing. Doing nothing. Inept to stop the abuse. Not that he’d ever tried. Gideon looked at Cassie, whose face had drained of blood. “Is it true?” he asked her, his voice no more than a pitiful, broken whisper. “No! Of course not!” She stood up, clearly angry, subconsciously bringing her hand to her still-flat belly as if their unborn child could hear and understand all of this. “You’d be crazy to believe anything she says. She’s horrible, Gideon. Why would you believe anything she has to say about me?” His mother’s eyes fell to where Cassie’s hand rested on her stomach. She began to laugh. It was a cruel, vindictive sound. Mirthless. Hateful. Filled with derision. “I knew it,” she said, standing to meet her foe. She reached for her cane that she kept propped against her TV tray, leaning heavily on it for . “I knew she was after our money. I knew she’d get her hands on it.” “Your money? You think I’m after your money?” Cassie was the one to laugh now. “You and all your many millions?” “We still got more than your family, missy,” his mother snapped, her pride stung. “You’re livin’ in a hovel. It’s filthy. Not even fit for the animals you are.” “Mother,” Gideon said. “You’re talking to the woman I love. She’s going to be the mother of my child. Enough.”

His mother walked toward him, her hand unsteady as it clutched her cane. “You dumb boy. I bet that little bastard ain’t even yours. But it won’t stop you from payin’ for it the next eighteen years, from the little bastard gettin’ our bakery someday. You’ll have nothin’. You’ll be nothin’. Just like you always were. Just like you deserve.” “Stop it!” Cassie yelled, raging her way toward them. Her cheeks were stained a deep red. “It’s one thing, you abusing me like this. But him?” She rested a hand on his chest, right over his hammering heart. “Hasn’t he suffered enough by you? You think I don’t know? You think I haven’t figured it all out? His body is covered in scars from you.” She pointed her finger now at his mother, right in her face. Right in her fucking face, not more than an inch from it. “You’re a fucking evil monster. And you don’t deserve my kindness, or my pity neither.” “Get out,” his mother spat, with a look in her eyes he knew far too well. He’d seen that look every single time she’d tied him to the whipping post, every single time she’d dragged him to the closet to confess his sins to God, every single time she’d forced him, naked, into the bathtub, the scalding hot water searing his open, weeping wounds, to purify him. A baptism in fire, she’d called it, that look gleaming in her eyes. His mother went on, the venom spilling from her wormy lips, her body shaking from fury and disease. “Get the fuck out of my house, you whore, and take that bastard of yours with you too. Take it to its real daddy, if you can even figure out who that is. Don’t you never come back here again. Don’t you never come near my boy, actin’ like you know him. Actin’ like you know what’s best for him. You don’t know nothin’ about him, you hear. And you better hope you never do. You whore—” He should have seen it coming. With all the years he’d lived with her, known her, endured her, he should have seen it coming. But he didn’t. His mother took her cane in both hands and lunged forward with it, shoving it across Cassie’s chest. Cassie, taken off guard, fell onto the hard floor, sprawled out on her back. She landed with a sharp cry, gripping her stomach as she winced in pain. “I’ll kill you,” Gideon whispered to his mother.

He looked over his shoulder to tell his father—that useless piece of shit—that he would kill him too, but the man was gone. He’d left the apartment door ajar when he’d fled, too scared to even close it behind him, lest the ire of his wife fall upon him too. “Come here,” Gideon said, kneeling down and scooping his fragile little bird into his arms. Cassie threw her arms around his neck, openly weeping. He carried her toward the door, grabbing her coat from the closet next to it, and walked, shoeless, into the night, holding her tight in his arms.

The hospital reeked of bleach. The smell had made Cassie vomit profusely, but now she was finally resting comfortably, asleep in her hospital bed, her dark hair fanned out on the pillow like a halo. After several anxious hours in the ER they’d transferred her to a room and told them that she would need to stay overnight for monitoring because they’d detected something while doing an ultrasound—a hema-something or other, where the placenta had partially pulled away from the uterus. The doctor had said it was small, that it could have possibly been there all along, but he knew better. His mother had done this. The awareness of that ate at him, piece by piece, gnawing at him with its sharp, jagged teeth, until he felt like a bloody husk, no more than chum for sharks. She had done this. Gideon waited until the hospital grew quiet in the late hours of the evening, when the night nurses hovered down behind their desks, their tired eyes fixed to the computer screens in front of them as their patients slept, sedated by narcotics or lulled by the symphony of blips and beeps surrounding them. Then he stood up quietly, not wanting to disturb Cassie, and grabbed her car keys from the plastic bag they’d given her to hold her personal possessions. Slipping out the door and down the hall, he made his way toward her car, unseen in the shadows of the night. He drove home to Gold Bar. There was something he had to take care of.

When he came through the apartment door, the news was blaring on the television. Sean Hannity was pontificating about the communists that had taken over the Democratic party, something about how they were a threat to democracy itself in their disdain for the virtues of capitalism and individualism. His mother was in her recliner, still awake. She had been waiting for him. “I’m surprised you had the guts to show your face back here again,” she said, not taking her eyes off Hannity. Not granting him the dignity of looking at the wreck of a man she’d made. “She’s in the hospital because of you,” Gideon told her. His mother shrugged, unmoved. “We could lose the baby because of you.” She finally looked at him, a small smile making its way onto her face. “Then I’d’ve done you a favor.” “It’s funny,” he said, approaching her. The blue disposable slippers the hospital had given him allowed him to move silently across the floor, a gentle whoosh whoosh that belied the fury inside of him. He sat down on the coffee table in front of her. “You’ve always spoken of living a virtuous life, of being a good person, of being a champion for,”—he gestured to the TV—“family values. And yet, here you are, celebrating what could be the death of my unborn child.” His mother screwed her mouth up and scoffed. “‘Unborn child.’ That thing’s no better than a parasite, created to bleed you dry.” “I thought that was your job,” he replied, his voice low and soft and sad, “to bleed me dry.” She looked at him with the eyes of a reptile, her pupils no more than slits. “Everything I ever did to you was deserved. Even as a boy, you was twisted. I tried to make you right.” Her gaze slid back to the TV, apparently done with him. “Ain’t my fault I never could. Can’t make a tree that’s already crooked grow

straight from the roots… Edith Block knows all about that, what with her own miserable excuse of a son. Hell, I’d rather you was a homosexual like the Block boy than what you are: a fornicator. A fornicator and pervert who lies with beasts. An abomination. I tried to make you right.” “Right.” Gideon smiled and then nodded, resolved on what to do next. “You only ever had the best intentions for your family. Everything you did, you did for your family.” “You’re good and goddamned right,” she said, crossing her arms. Still looking at that godforsaken fucking TV instead of him. “Now go on and get out of my way. Leave for all I care. Don’t ever come back. Do what you gotta do. But you ain’t ever got a right to make threats to me in my own home.” He stood up and made his way down the hall, toward his bedroom. He glanced over his shoulder, but his mother’s eyes were still rooted to the TV, as if she were a snake charmed by the tune of it. Instead of walking into his bedroom, he entered his parents’ room, where he could make out the bulky shape of his father sleeping peacefully beneath the comforter. His father. Who’d never done anything but turn a blind eye to the violence in his own home. Gideon crept silently across the floor and stood, gazing down at the man. He’d never given much consideration to him—at least not as an adult. As a boy, in the dark of the closet, his wounds raw and bleeding, he’d cried out for him sometimes, even prayed to him for mercy and intercession. But he’d never shown mercy, had never interceded on his behalf. And so Gideon’s prayers had been no better than those he offered up to the Holy Ghost, a father said to exist but who was never seen. ...Useless. An absent father. A dead God. Gideon grabbed his mother’s pillow and thrust it over his father’s face, pushing down as hard as he could. His father awoke, panicked, his hands reaching out to try to pry the pillow off his face. He yelled out for help, but his voice was muffled—and the voices on TV were so much stronger, their tones strident and bellicose, amplified by the certainty that came with hatred. His father kicked and thrashed—a strong man

frantically fighting for his survival—but his son was stronger. The man’s screams didn’t last long. Quickly depleted of oxygen, his movements grew lethargic and weak, then ceased altogether. Gideon kept the pillow over his father’s face for a moment longer, panting and jubilant and flustered from what he’d just done. There was no turning back now. Tonight was the first day of the rest of his life—a life he’d share with Cassie, free of all this. Finally free of the niggling doubts, the recriminations. Free of the perversion that was his family. Free of their influence. “You got better than you deserved,” he whispered to his father’s corpse, placing the pillow back on his mother’s side of the bed. Like a mountain lion stalking through the shadows in search of its next prey, he strode across the room, shutting the door behind him with a confident thump. “James, is that you?” his mother asked when she heard the noise in the hall. She looked up, surprised to see Gideon standing outside her bedroom door, his chest still heaving as adrenaline and triumph coursed their way through his body. “What in the Lord’s name are you doing botherin’ your father this time of night?” “Just… saying goodbye,” he replied as nonchalantly as he could manage, trying to keep himself from panting in anticipation and giving himself away. “But don’t worry. I won’t be much longer now.” He went into his room and surveyed it a final time—the paintings, all lined up as witnesses to what was going to happen, painting after painting of Cassie’s wide, unseeing eyes fixed on him, her mouth open in agony and ecstasy, screaming out for him to doitdoitdoit. He opened the top drawer of his dresser and pulled out the tuft of wolf lichen Cassie had given him. In death it had dried and shriveled, its electric green color faded to a drab shade of olive, and its texture was no longer silky and smooth, but rough like a scouring pad. Perfect. It would scour her clean. It would scour away all her sin. It would rip and tear and abrade, and she would bleed from it, would suffer from it, and then she would die.

He took it and strode into the living room, moving with speed and determination because the wolf was going to choke on her own poison. Finally. The wolf was going to die. She looked up at him, her eyes wide in shock because the boy was gone, and all that was left now was the monster. He was massive—nearly as tall as the ceiling, covered in scales, wreathed in fire, a hideous, sublime demon born from the pits of hell. The monster tore off a chunk of lichen and, grabbing his mother’s face in one of its claws, jammed it brutally into her mouth, forcing her mouth shut again. “Eat it, you bitch,” the monster snarled. “Eat it and die. You lying, adulterous whore.” His mother feebly shook her head, her eyes bulging in terror, her body trembling in fright and anger, spittle seeping and sputtering out from between her lips. She gagged on the moss, retching, her tongue trying to thrust it out, but the monster refused to allow it. Instead he made her swallow it. And then he tore off another piece. He jammed that one into her mouth too. Again. And again. Over and over, the monster made the wolf choke down the poison. He did it for the child in Cassie’s belly. He did it for the child he’d once been, alone and undefended. He did it because it felt good watching something die. His mother’s eyes were leaking tears, and in between bites she moaned and wailed and coughed and sputtered, pleading for mercy, but the monster didn’t speak the language of mercy. “What are you doin’ to me?” she wept. “What is that?” “It’s wolf lichen,” the monster told her, gloating and lordly above her. “It’s going

to kill you.” She began to laugh then, taking the monster off guard. Foam leaked out of her mouth—some mixture of snot and bile and spit. “Wolf lichen ain’t gonna kill no people,” she cackled. “You dumb boy. Worse ‘ll happen is that it makes me sick.” As if on cue, she began to heave, leaning forward in the recliner to empty the contents of her stomach onto the floor. The monster was furious. So he grabbed her by the hair, dragging her from her recliner, dragging her, kicking and screaming, across the floor. He dragged her to the tomb where his father was buried and hoisted her by her bleeding scalp onto the pyre, next to the king’s corpse. In the moonlight filtering through the chintzy white curtains she saw her husband’s blank, dead stare. She heaved again, vomiting onto the bed, vomiting all over herself, and the monster forced her mouth closed, forced her to swallow her own bile, forced her to take her own poison and venom back in. Forced her to take it the way she’d forced him all those years. She choked on it, all traces of mockery gone. There was only terror now, and the certainty she was about to die. The monster left her there, then, gagging and choking next to the body of the man she’d never loved. The monster sloughed a tendril of fire from his body and used it to set the pyre alight.

In the morning the fire captain would sift through the ashes, discovering the bodies of the two Burkes together in what was left of their bedroom, the ruins of it collapsed into what had been the bakery. Their flesh and guts were burned away, their bodies purified in death. “And their boy?” he asked the young lieutenant by his side—Christ, come to think of it the lieutenant’d be about the same age as the Burke boy, he realized. “Gideon,” Lieutenant Jackson supplied, his face still sweaty and soot-stained from the effort of extinguishing the fire. It had taken them hours, the fire had been burning so unnaturally hot. It had been like no house fire he had ever seen —it had possessed the searing heat and seething rage of a wildfire’s heart, propelled by the elements to burn and scorch and devour until there was nothing left. “No sign of him. Although his truck is parked on the street out back.” “Well, that seems a shade suspicious, don’t you think?” Jackson shrugged. “Maybe so, Cap. Or maybe old man Burke left on one of his ovens and went to bed while Gideon was out with friends. The guy’s always seemed alright to me. I got faith that Officer Bertrand will get to the bottom of it.” The captain looked up at the charred skeleton of the building, at the tell-tale “V” on the cinderblock wall where the bedroom had once been. Men often lied, but fire never did. The fire started there. Upstairs. In the bedroom. Not in the bakery. “I hope you’re right,” he said, watching Officer Bertrand as the man squatted down gingerly to inspect something in the ashes, shifting them around with the end of a ballpoint pen. “I hope we get to the bottom of this.” But something told him that perhaps they never would. That fire had been like the pits of hell itself.

“Now that’s a good man,” the nurse said as she entered the room, carrying a tray of food that had an extra breakfast sandwich and cup of fruit on it for Gideon. She was kindly-looking, all edges worn soft and round by middle age. Her skin was so dark it looked as though it were gathering and swallowing all the light around her. She was a comforting presence—the sort of person that ought to be a mother, the kind of person made for enveloping others in her arms. “You’d be surprised,” she went on, “how many fathers skip out for a shower or a comfortable bed, even when their babies are already here. They leave the mothers to do the work. Or they assume we will. As if we’re the parents, and not them.” Gideon lifted his head from the bed. He’d fallen asleep facedown while sitting beside it, his hand still clutching his girlfriend’s. “Hmm… I’m sorry. What was that now?” he asked in confusion, swiping at his eyes to clear the grit from the inside corners. His head throbbed and guts ached like someone had been trying to cleave him from head-to-toe in his sleep. “Poor thing,” the nurse tutted. “Maybe you should go home. Get yourself cleaned up. Grab a pair of shoes,” she said pointedly, gesturing to the disposable slippers still on his feet. They were filthy now from Lord knows whatever they’d picked up from the hospital floor, their bottoms stained black as soot. “What time is it?” Gideon asked, frowning at the nurse. Hell, what day? The nurse nodded toward the clock ticking cheerfully at them from the opposite wall and placed the tray on the table at the foot of Cassie’s bed. 8:23. Light was leaking in through the slats of the vertical blinds, the bleak winter sunshine from outside jittering on the wall as the heat from the radiator made them dance and sway. Morning. It was morning already. He’d been there all night, but it didn’t feel as though he’d slept more than five minutes. He was exhausted and sore and famished, like he’d spent the entire night running a marathon. Cassie’s eyes fluttered open, a small smile making its way onto her face as she

saw Gideon sitting there faithfully by her side. “You stayed,” she croaked, her voice hoarse from sleep. “Of course I did,” he told her, some nagging thought tugging at the back of his mind. Her eyes drifted back shut, the smile still on her lips. “Must be why I slept so sound.” “How are you feeling this morning, Miss Lee?” the nurse asked, coming up beside the bed to check Cassie’s vitals and to tinker with her IV bag. “Tired. Achy. But otherwise... okay, I guess. How is the baby?” Her hand drifted to her stomach, gently stroking it. The nurse smiled reassuringly. “Oh, she’s doing just fine. She’s a strong one.” Gideon’s heart stuttered in his chest. Cassie’s eyes flew open. “She?” they asked in unison. “Oh.” The nurse flapped a hand, laughing it off. “I call all of ‘em ‘she.’ Pay no mind to me.” “You’re lying, ain’t you?” Cassie asked, her hand clutching onto her tummy as if the baby inside her had decided to do backflips. “I can always tell when someone’s lying.” “So can I,” Gideon said, reading the nurse’s face, the way she tried to hide her discomfiture through movements that weren’t even necessary. An extra fiddle of a dial on the monitor next to Cassie. The smoothing of the bed sheets. The rustling of cracker wrappers as she gathered them to throw away. “Well,” the nurse said after a long, pregnant pause. “It looks like you’ll just have to wait to find out, now won’t you?” She breezed out of the room, leaving Cassie and Gideon to bask in the news. A girl.

A strong one. “Let’s call her Willow,” Cassie said in a hushed voice, her face flushed with joy. She would be strong enough to bend without breaking. She would grow and thrive and flourish anywhere… on land, beneath water, on the barest, thinnest of soils… it didn’t matter. Like her mother, she would be the picture of grace and beauty. She’d also be tough as a whip. It was perfect. “Willow it is,” Gideon agreed, leaning forward to kiss the mother of his child. The kiss was long and lazy, their tongues lapping and tangling and tussling as they ed how their daughter had been made, neither of them caring that their breath was stale because they were lost in the memory of their entwined bodies—the salty taste of their sweaty skin, the soft gasps Cassie made as he’d emptied himself inside of her, their racing hearts pumping blood to their cheeks, their fingers, their toes. When he got up to use the bathroom, he expected to see the face of a man who had everything beaming back at him in the mirror. The woman he’d always loved. A baby—a daughter—on her way. A whole future, unfolding right in front of him. His heart felt light in a way it never had before, as if someone had cut the chains off it in the night. But instead he saw a monster staring back at him, hulking and huge, with eyes burning red and flames crackling and hissing as they unfurled from his flesh. The monster looked triumphant, like it had news to tell him. “It’s you,” Gideon said numbly, reaching up to touch his face but only finding the scales of the monster beneath his fingertips. “It’s you.” “Yes,” the monster said, wrapping a length of chain around his fist, then pulling it. The chain tugged from where it was looped around Gideon’s heart, constricting it. Its beating slowed. And slowed. Until his blood felt like sludge in his veins. The monster grinned at him, his teeth sharpened to points and stained with gristle and gore. “And it always will be.”

Between the job he picked up at the lumber mill and the insurance payout he received for the bakery, Gideon was able to buy them a small house on the outskirts of town. The house wasn’t much, just a rambler with a few bedrooms smacked onto a box-shaped yard, but it had a roof and four walls, and it was theirs. This was the house he’d keep Cassie in, especially now that she’d quit her job at the restaurant and her Buick had finally given up the ghost. He’d keep her in it and fill it up with their babies until the yard was overrun with dirty, barefoot children. The big ones would play chase on the lawn while the little ones— chubby, still fat from breast milk—would toddle and crawl after them. People talked the same as they ever did, and maybe even more—about poor, sad Gideon, whose loving parents had perished so tragically in the fire while sleeping in their own bed. About how, if Gideon had been there and not watching over Cassie in the hospital, he might have saved them, or prevented the whole thing. About how that Lee girl sure had sunken her claws into a good one, especially coming in hot off that Dylan Radford. About how she’d been sleeping with the mechanic, right up until the time she’d said she’d gotten pregnant by Gideon. About how she’d really brought that Burke boy down to her level. All they was missing now was the goat in the yard, the voices said. Instead of one voice—his mother’s voice—sharp and focused like a needle piercing his flesh, leaving a tattoo with no ink, almost imperceptible in its violence, he heard a chorus of them. It was like his mother’s spirit had fanned out into the town, diffused, dispersed, but undiminished. It reached him now from all angles, cowing him into a corner until he was left whimpering and overwhelmed. They’re all liars, he told himself, even if he no longer believed it, as the monster laughed from where it lurked in the shadows, a low, rumbling sound that shook Gideon’s guts. Willow was born early—at thirty-five weeks, or so they’d thought. But the baby was strong, her arms and legs already fleshy with fat, and so she came home the day after her mother bore her into the world, screaming and crying, Cassie’s brow covered in sweat and face streaked with tears, her body threatening to crack apart.

The baby was the spitting image of her mother, with the same shade of skin and slate gray eyes. Most babies have gray eyes, Cassie had remarked to him. But maybe they’ll end up blue like yours. A goddess and a queen, Willow wore her lush dark hair like a crown upon her head. Everyone who saw her remarked that she was her mother’s twin. But Gideon thought she also favored Dylan Radford.

5

Where the sun don’t ever shine

The baby was screaming down the hall, her tiny voice shrill and panicked, because her mother wasn’t coming for her. Her mother was coming for him. The monster. He’d gagged Cassie with a cord he’d found in the garage, tired of hearing her plead for just a couple minutes with the baby, and was fucking her on the couch. The leather still smelled like Dylan Radford—he could smell the man’s aftershave on it, or his cologne (he didn’t care which)—and it had incensed him so much that, even though the baby was only a month old and they’d been told to wait six weeks to have sex, he was punishing her by plowing into her, making sure his angle hit her right at her perineal tear. With each thrust she trembled and shook, her voice wailing around the gag like her infant’s, but her hips thrust upward toward him, goading him on through her pain. The monster liked it rough, but then so did she, because she was a monster too. He’d driven by the house during his lunch break, planning to check in on Cassie and the baby. But as his truck crawled down the street, he saw that Radford had beaten him to it, his F-150 parked right out front, brazenly advertising to the neighbors that the man had no shame in being seen with another man’s woman. So, after kissing his sweet baby’s head, he’d laid her down in her crib and begun torturing her mother. Cassie’s breasts were swollen with milk that leaked through her bra and shirt, staining his shirt and then, when he flipped her onto her belly, staining the leather on the couch, and her pussy was dry and tight from being stitched up. Between the smell of the strange man, Cassie’s new, filled-out shape, and the tighter fit of him inside of her, it was like fucking a stranger. It made him wonder if Cassie was imagining that too, that she was with someone

else. A stranger. Another lover. A former lover. Radford. He fucked her harder, rotating his hips with each and every brutal thrust, and groaned as she came on his cock. It coaxed him into coming too, and he spilled his seed into her, trying already—again—to get her pregnant. She tried to scramble away, but he kept himself buried inside of her, imagining they were knotted together like wolves, trapped like this for hours, her desperate and panicked and regretting what they’d just done, but bonded together, unable to be parted. “I know,” he whispered onto her neck, and even though he couldn’t see her face, he could feel her body stiffen beneath him. “I know about Dylan Radford.” She tried to move her wrist to pull at her gag, but he grabbed it roughly, pinning it onto the couch. “Don’t lie to me. I can fucking smell him.” She shook her head no no no, but he didn’t want to hear it. “Every time you so much as look at him, I’m going to make it hurt,” he threatened. The baby screamed down the hall. She was out of her mind now, each of her screams like a saw, serrating and slicing and hacking its way through his skull. Gideon pulled out, slipping on the pair of pants he’d thrown onto the living room floor, and stalked down the hall toward the baby. “Gideon,” he heard Cassie pleading once she’d ripped the gag out of her mouth. “Please.” She came after him—he could hear her steps thundering after him, even over the baby’s screams—but he ignored her. He swung open the nursery door and swooped the baby up, her little munched up face nearly purple from crying. “It’s not like that,” Cassie said, trying to grab onto Gideon’s arm. But he moved away from her, walking the baby over to the rocking chair in the

corner, giving the baby his knuckle to suck instead of her mother’s breast. “She’s hungry,” Cassie mumbled. “Give her to me.” But the baby suckled, if not happily, then contented enough, relieved just to be held and warm. Cassie and Gideon sat in silence for several moments, the sound of the rocking chair thumping against the floor filling the room with a sense of dread. “You should clean yourself up,” Gideon said coldly, looking at Cassie’ milkstained shirt and the semen clinging to her thighs. “You’re a mess.” “Maybe I am,” she said, looking defeated. “But I’m a mess who loves you.” He couldn’t look directly at her, so instead he gazed down at his daughter. Her little mouth was warm and wet on his knuckle, the pull of her tongue on his flesh begging him over and over for love—the one thing she’d inherited from him, an insatiable need to be loved. “You don’t really mean that,” he said after a while. “What are you talking about?” Cassie walked over to where he was sitting on the rocking chair and sank on her knees before him. The baby wriggled in his arms, frowning and suckling harder because she could smell her mother nearby. Gideon sighed and handed the baby off to the one she wanted. “It’s always going to be him.” Cassie rucked up the right side of her shirt, holding the baby to her breast so that the infant could latch on. Willow made satisfied little piglet sounds as she suckled at her mother’s nipple, the milk already beginning to cascade into her mouth, filling her with the feeling Gideon had never known. Gideon looked down at them, his body roiling and raging with jealousy and hatred. “I thought I told you,” Cassie sighed, “that it never was like that with me and

Dylan. We’re old friends, Gideon. And we’re allowed to be. He came by to see the baby, is all that happened. And he picked a time you wouldn’t be here because he knows there’s no love lost between you two.” “And what reason does he have to dislike me?” Gideon asked in a low voice. She shrugged, petulant now. “That’s for you two to work out, not me.” “Maybe I will. Work it out, I mean.” He drummed his fingers on the armrest of the chair, imagining bludgeoning Dylan Radford to death, imagining the immense satisfaction he would feel at the sound of the man’s skull crumbling inward on itself. “Or you could just leave it. And be the bigger man.” “Well, don’t you have a mouth on you.” “It never seemed to bother you before.” He leaned forward, grabbing her chin with one hand to make her look at him. “You make me want to hurt you,” he told her, imagining wrapping his hands around her throat, pulling her apart limb by limb, burying his hand inside her body to fish out all her tender parts. “So hurt me, then,” she whispered. Pleaded, he thought. “But don’t make it about him.” “Oh, I’m going to,” he said. “But if I find out that he’s been in my house while I’m away—if I find out you’ve been talking to him behind my back—there’s no telling what I’ll do to you. I’ll rip out your heart and feast on it. I’ll start with that.” She pulled away and stood up, their daughter already dozing on her breast, drunk from milk, drunk with love and power. “You shouldn’t say things like that, Gideon. It’s not like you. It’s not right. I know you’ve been going through a hard time since the fire, but—” He rose and strode toward her. “You don’t know anything. Dylan Radford wants to fuck you. It’s as simple as that. And there’s no saying how many times you let him in the past, no saying what his expectations for the present or the future

might be. You’re either naive or you’re lying, but either way, you need to show me the goddamn respect of not lying to me—not patronizing me—do you understand? Don’t make me burn down this house too.” Her eyes widened, her irises pale and watery in the moonlight. “Who are you?” she whispered, her back hitting the wall. For the first time, she looked truly afraid of him, disgusted by him. For the first time she truly understood what he was capable of, what he had done. Good. She needed to be afraid. “I’m the monster that loves you,” he told her, lifting the left side of her shirt and lowering his head to suckle at her exposed breast. It wasn’t love that he stole, but it tasted like it. He heard her whimper above him, her body shaking as she leaned against the wall, but she held still and let him nurse from her. He suckled and stole, drunk on the power. But she let him, and that felt like a victory.

She’d found him painting in the spare room, naked and stroking himself to a painting he had just made of her dismembered body. She gasped when she saw him, his cock, angry and covered in paint, in his fist, his brow knitted as he imagined the paint was her blood. “My God,” she gasped, backing away from him as if to unsee everything, but it was too late. The room was lined with paintings. Most were of her in various states of undress. There was the one that had wolves feasting on her limbs. Another depicted her, legs splayed apart, with Gideon’s face buried between them, ripping her apart with his teeth. Another one—one of his favorites—showed her nursing their daughter on one breast and him on the other. He’d made her do that often… it was one of the true joys of his life now and one of the reasons he would make her a mother again and again, for as long as her body could stand it, and maybe even longer. There were other paintings too. Those were of his mother. Of the things she used to do to him. Sometimes she was naked in those, and if he painted himself as a young boy, so was he. “This is pornography,” Cassie cried, her voice choked and afraid, her face repelled. Just like his mother had been. It was worse than pornography, the monster wanted to tell her. It was the truth. “Is that… is that your mother?” she asked. Her trembling hands covered her mouth. “Is that what she used to do to you? I know she used to hit you… I know those scars on you are from her, but… but...” “What don’t you understand,” the monster said, still stroking himself. Cassie’s face crumpled as she took in the sight of him, huge and angry and burning right before her. He came on a grunt, no longer ashamed of what he was, no longer interested in hiding why. “You are kind and good,” she wept, begging for her words still to be true. Her shoulders shook and knees visibly quaked as she backed away from him and

toward the door. “You’re the daddy to my daughter. And I love you.” She smacked her palm to her chest, right over her heart, smacked it again and again like she was trying to keep it beating. “But you need help, Gideon.” She gestured to the paintings, her face ghastly and pale, tears streaming down it. “We can’t have this in the house. Can’t have you doing this. You… you killed your parents, and now…” Her voice trailed off, and she stood there, watching Gideon as he wiped himself clean with a rag. “And now what?” he asked. She ran her finger across a bruise he’d left on her neck. “I’m… I’m worried you’re gonna kill me.” He laughed bitterly, stung by the truth of it. “I’ve never killed a person who didn’t deserve it.” His words hung in the air between them like the noxious smoke of a coalburning fire, carcinogenic and foul. After a couple moments of gaping at him, her mouth slack and eyes wide, Cassie fled the room, running down the hall, running toward the family room, where she’d left their daughter. She didn’t ask him how many. She didn’t ask him why, what they’d done to deserve it. She ran. And the monster, springing to life in glee, pursued. She was standing in the garage, fumbling with the keys to his truck, barely able to hold onto their daughter, when he found her. “Sweetheart, what are you doing?” he asked her in a calm voice, his heart racing and galavanting on the wind as he took in the sight of his quarry. “I’m… I gotta… please,” she heaved, backing up against the truck, clutching their infant in her arms. “I think… I think I should leave. P-please l-let me lleave.”

“You don’t need to go. I’ll get help,” he lied. “I’m sure there’s someone who can help me.” He stood there, naked and smeared in paint, before her. He showed her his palms, as if to say See? I’m harmless. “I’m not going to kill you,” he added. “I love you. I love Willow. We’re a family.” Cassie wept, her shoulders shuddering uncontrollably, and the baby began to fuss in her arms, her fat little limbs flailing against her mother’s chest. “Here, let me hold the baby,” Gideon offered. “No! I mean…. N-no.” Cassie shook her head. “I think I should t-take her to my parents. Then you and I can… we can…” “Don’t be ridiculous.” He came forward and took the baby, his hands gently cradling the back of her head as he planted a soft kiss on her forehead. “I think you’re misunderstanding things,” he said. “Ma deserved to die for what she did to me. She deserved to die for what she did to you…. What she almost did to our baby. And my father…” He shrugged and looked down at Cassie, whose gray eyes looked dead and washed out. “He let it happen for years. My whole life, he let it happen. He had it coming too. They deserved it.” He said nothing about the goat tied up to the oak tree in Arlo Chance’s yard. Nothing about old man Kilmory or her father, although each of them had what he’d given them coming in their own ways. “That’s the thing about you, Cassie,” Gideon said gently, tenderly. “You kill for less. The rabbits you strangle to death…” He made himself break off, licking his lips at the memory of Cassie cleaning the animal carcass. “They’re food,” she whispered, her cherry red lip trembling. “Nah.” He shook his head. “That’s not why you do it. You like it. The death. The blood. The violence. If I’m a monster, then you are one too. That’s why you love me—or you say you do, anyway. We’re the same.” She closed her eyes. “We should talk more,” she said, “but let me take Willow to

my parents’ place.” “Why?” he asked. “Are you afraid we’ll rub off on her? Are you worried that she’ll end up like us? You want some place that’s wholesome for her? Some place that’s better?” “I guess.” She nodded, then finally looked up at him. “I guess I am worried. This place ain’t fit for her. Not like it is now.” “It’s no better over there. People are people, no matter where you are. Your old man… your sweet daddy… you see, Cassie… he was fucking my mother. For months they carried on behind everyone’s backs. He’s an adulterer. A liar. He lied to your mom, lied to you. He pretended to be a good man, a loving husband, faithful to his family. See? That’s where we’re better. At least we’re faithful to each other, right?” “You’re lying,” Cassie whispered. “If you don’t believe me, then go ask him. See for yourself.” He began to walk away with the baby. “Go on. Take your time. We’ll be here waiting.” She didn’t follow him into the house. As the door shut behind him, he heard the clattering of the garage door opening, the grinding of his truck’s engine coming to life, the popping of the gravel beneath the truck’s wheels as it made its way down the driveway and out onto the street. Willow sucked on her chubby fist, contented in her father’s arms, against his naked chest. “C’mon,” he murmured into her hair. “Let’s go wait for Mommy on the couch.”

It was evening by the time Cassie returned. The baby, her tummy overfull from a bottle, was sleeping in her nursery, her thick hair matted to her skull from sweat. In the distance an owl was screeching into the night, its shrill call piercing the air as it issued its demands to anyone who would listen. The air was crisp, the fragile early summer heat already broken by dusk, and a dew was settling onto everything that was green. The Cascades were ablaze in the alpenglow— peaceful monsters that huddled together, looking sated and fed, their snowy beards stained carmine and vermilion and blush. The mountains snoozed, and the monster inside of him snoozed too. Gideon was waiting for her on the porch, his ass numb from sitting so long on the wooden step, a bottle of beer clutched in his hand for company. From down the street he spotted his truck, turning off the highway and plodding its way toward home. “You were right,” Cassie said as she slid out of the truck, her face haggard and shoulders slumped. She sat down next to him on the porch—close, but not too close. “He started crying soon as I asked him.” She took the beer from him and took a swig, wincing at the taste. “I’m sorry you had to find out like that.” “How did you find out?” she asked, peeling at the label. “And when?” “A long time ago,” he replied, not answering her first question. She could imagine it for herself if she must: the semen-stained bedsheets, his mother’s tousled hair, the smell of sex hanging heavy in the apartment. All while his father had been working downstairs, obliviously slaving over the ovens. “I just couldn’t bear the thought of ruining the image you had of your father.” “How kind of you,” she murmured, not sounding at all grateful. “Would you have rather I told you sooner?” “Yeah.” She nodded and took another swig of beer. “I think I would have. I think I’d rather have all your ugly truths, rather than the kind lies you been giving me.”

“You say that, but then the minute you get the truth, you run. So which is it?” Impatient with her, he grabbed the bottle and took a long pull to mask the bitter taste in his mouth. Out of the corner of his eye he could see her watching him, scanning his face as she assessed the difference between the man she’d seen earlier—the menacing giant who had been lurking, reveling in his depravity— and the one sitting next to her now. “I want the truth,” she said, her voice so low he almost couldn’t hear it above the traffic rumbling down on the highway. “So you prefer him, then. The monster. Not me.” “What are you talking about?” she asked, her eyebrows knitted in a frown. He sighed. “I thought you wanted to cut the bullshit, Cassie. Don’t pretend like you don’t know. There’s me. And then there’s him. But he’s the truth. He’s the real one, the one underneath my skin. The one I really am.” “I don’t believe that,” she said, shaking her head. “You’re kind and good… kind and good down to your bones. You’re just… sick, is all, I guess. Your mother made you sick. Hurt you. Made you believe you were bad. But that’s not the truth. None of what she said is true.” “Isn’t it though?” “No.” She reached over, resting one of her hands on his, giving it a gentle squeeze. “It’s not. Now come on inside. We can talk more in the morning about the rest of it… the paintings…” She stood up, tugging on his hand to coax him into standing too. He faced her, gazing down at her from where they stood on the porch, a perfect portrait of a man and woman in love to anyone who might be watching or ing by. “I need you to be gentle,” she said. “Until I can trust you.” Kind lies. She was asking for kind lies. And, because the monster was sleeping, he smiled sadly down at her, planting a malty kiss on her lips, and told her, “I can be gentle.”

She guided him by the hand into the house, into the warm yellow glow of their living room, down the darkened hallway, and into the soft black womb of their bedroom. The air in the room was already muggy, still warm from the heat of the afternoon, the closed window and drawn curtains trapping the summer air inside. With his elbow he snicked the door shut behind him, shrouding them in absolute darkness. Cassie’s hand fell from his, and he heard her step lightly toward the bed. He put the beer on the dresser and moved toward her, planning to lavish her with gentleness. She’d find it torture… Cassie, who loved him for all the ways he was dark and scary and not safe. Cassie, who loved the monster who pummeled her, facedown, into the dirt, where she felt she belonged. But he’d be so gentle. So kind. So nice. He found her standing at the side of the bed, her arms crossed, body shivering. “Please be gentle,” she begged as he ghosted his lips across hers. He spent hours showing her the meaning of gentle… of near kisses, near climaxes, his shaft running along the length of her wet slit without ever penetrating her. His tongue lightly skated across her flesh, his mouth almost suckled from her breasts, his fingertip just dared to breach her tight asshole… until she cried out in frustration, “Please fuck me.” Ah. The ugly truth. There it was. But he denied her the satisfaction of the truth, instead lavishing her with more kind lies, sliding gently inside of her, slowly making love to her the way good people did, the way honest, God-fearing people did. He could do this, he told himself. He could be this. “C’mon,” she groaned. She clawed his back in frustration, searching for relief, struggling to breathe in the dank humidity of the room. She thrust her hips upward to push him deeper and harder inside of her. “I want…” she panted. Grabbing his hand, she put it to her throat. “Fucking choke me, Dylan.”

“Thanks for doing this,” a voice murmured. “Anytime,” another voice said, the tone low and deep. A man’s voice. “Is that her bag?” “Yeah. It’s got everything she needs in there. My folks should have some extra diapers and formula already.” “And what about you?” the man asked quietly. “Can’t I talk you into coming with us? Stay with your parents for a while—or me? You know you could stay as long as you like.” “No… I… I can’t leave him, Dylan. I gotta stay and help him.” Gideon’s eyes drifted open. The room was so dark he could hardly make out the shapes of the furniture around him. The air in the room was stale and close, and his ass and thighs were sticking to the couch, which was damp from his sweat. The living room. He was in the living room, not the bedroom like he ed. He must have fallen asleep with Willow while they waited for Cassie to return. His hand reached out to where the baby had been napping, curled up in a nursing pillow beside him, but she was gone. And Cassie— She’d come back, just as he ed. But she was out on the street now, talking to—no—conspiring with Dylan Radford. Dylan. She’d called him Dylan. While he was making love to her, she’d called him Dylan. He would have thought it was a dream, but it had felt nothing like it. The taste of beer, mingled with the musk of her cunt and the salt of her skin, was still on his lips. He slid his hand down to his groin and palmed his cock, then brought his

hand up to smell it. It smelled like her. He knew it did. He would have sworn to it in a court of law. That fucking bitch. What was left of the boy he’d once been—the one that ed her sitting next to him in school, her long, dark hair in pigtails, her gray, guileless eyes looking shyly at him from beneath her eyelashes—sank to the floor, then lower. He sank beneath the floorboards, down beneath the dank, bug-infested crawlspace, and then farther, down into the dirt. He curled up in a hole, huddled in a ball, crying, waiting to die. She’d been an angel, a goddess, a beacon of light, a star in an otherwise empty sky, for so long that the boy didn’t know if he could live in this godless, dark place without her. He didn’t even want to try. He was losing her. Had already lost her. Had maybe never even had her. She was outside with Dylan Radford, whispering, and doing what? Taking his daughter away from him. Taking Willow somewhere safe. Somewhere he wasn’t. The man he was burned in shame and humiliation and despair. He was worthless, not to be trusted even with his own child. He was sick, deranged, depraved. Why would Cassie ever want him when she could have anyone else? When she had Dylan Radford at her beck and call, waiting for her? He was destroyed. She had ruined him. She had done this to him. She’d damaged him worse than his mother ever could. She had sliced open his chest and fished out his heart. She’d taken it and held it in those savage little hands of hers, just to crush it, just to laugh as the pulp seeped and oozed between her fingers. She was a heartless bitch. They’d all been right. Each and every knowing voice, the smirks audible in their consonants, the laughter bubbling out, frothing and foaming in their every vowel, had been right. She’d made a fool of him. Used him for his money. Lied to him as he cared for

another man’s child. She’d brought him down low, lower than she was, low enough to press her heel to his throat and grind until he couldn’t breathe. And he’d let her. He’d let her. The monster, infuriated, stood up and strode, naked, over to the picture window to look out into the moonless night. Radford’s truck was idling in the street with the headlights off, and the mechanic—who had the face and body of an underfed wolf, lean and sharp and mean—was standing in front of Cassie, his hands resting on her shoulders, as they spoke in hushed voices to each other. The monster could not hear what they were saying over the pulse hammering in his ears, but he could see the concern in the mechanic’s eyes, the love, the worry, the desire. He could see everything. Cassie wrapped her arms around Radford’s waist and buried her face in his chest, hugging him, then letting him go. The man nodded at whatever she said to him, then stepped back. He glanced toward the house, his eyes fixing on the monster, his face paling at the sight of the devil himself staring him down, threatening pain and damnation. The mechanic’s lips moved, and Cassie looked over her shoulder, finding him where he stood in the darkness. She said something. Gideon, the monster thought it might have been, but Gideon was gone. Radford loped to the driver’s side of his truck, opened the door, and climbed in, the car pulling away with a whiny little screech of the tires before he’d even turned the headlights back on. Fleeing. Making a quick getaway with the baby. Fine. The monster knew where to find him. Down the street, he spotted his orange pickup truck. For some reason, Cassie had brought it back to him. The sight of it was enough to surprise him—why hadn’t she just ridden here along with Radford?—but then she wasn’t just a cruel bitch, she was a dumb one too. Cassie took a deep breath—her shoulders rising and body puffing up from it—

and then turned and walked slowly, with her arms crossed, back toward the house. “Gideon,” she said as she stepped through the door. “You should get some clothes on.” “Will that be enough, do you think?” She frowned at him, not understanding. Never fucking understanding. “Enough?” she asked. He gestured to his body. To the scales, the scars, the smoke that smoldered off him. “To hide who I am. What I am.” “I never said anything about hiding.” He laughed bitterly. “Finally. Some goddamn truth out of you.” She sighed in frustration but reined in her brittle temper. She was afraid of him. Good. “I have no idea what you’re talking about. I just want you to put some clothes on. The neighbors can’t see you standing in the window like that.” “Let’s talk about what it is the neighbors see.” “I am. Right now it’s your dick.” He made his way over to her, towering above her, taller than the Cascades themselves as they leered down at them from the eastern horizon. “Are you mocking me? Do you think this is funny?” “Who even are you?” she asked, her bloodshot eyes scanning his face as if he were a total stranger to her, searching for some feature—any feature—that she could recognize. “I’m who I’ve always been,” the monster told her. “I guess I’m starting to see that,” she conceded. Tears welled in her eyes like the Skykomish swelling after a spring melt, threatening to overrun its banks. “We’ve each had our own revelations, then, haven’t we?”

“What’s yours?” she asked him. Playing dumb even now, at the end of everything. He smiled to show her his teeth, so furious he wanted to rip her apart one bite at a time. “Dylan Radford,” he told her. She looked confused by that answer, like she’d expected to hear something else. “What about him?” “You love him.” She rolled her eyes and turned away, beginning to walk down the hall to their bedroom. “Enough,” she said, shaking her head and holding up a hand in exasperation. “I can’t hear this another time. I already told you—” “He’s Willow’s father,” the monster said to her back. Cassie froze in her tracks, then spun back around. Her cheeks were red, her face filled with thunder and lightning, and she stormed toward him, forgetting to be afraid, until she was in his face, jabbing her finger in his bare chest. “Don’t you ever accuse me of—” “Regardless,” he said, not caring who the child’s father really was, not when… “You said his name.” She took a step back from him, her hand limply falling to her side. “What? When? Just now… outside?” “That’s another thing we should talk about,” the monster said. “How you called him to steal my daughter away in the dead of the night. How you were caught sneaking around, right in front of my face. But no. I don’t mean ‘just now... outside.’” She took another step back from him. “Then what do you mean, Gideon?” “Tonight. When we were making love. You said his name.” “We didn’t…” She shook her head resolutely and swallowed. The monster could hear the muscles of her throat working to push her saliva down. They were trying so very hard, those poor, weak little things. “Gideon, we didn’t have sex

today. Not tonight, not this afternoon. Not any time today.” She took another step away from him, toward the bedroom. “Don’t do that,” he threatened. “Do what?” she whispered, moving away from him again. “Don’t lie to me. Don’t tell me I’m imagining things. Don’t do what she did.” “Who? Your mother? Are you talking about your mother?” She put her hand on the frame of the bedroom door, gripping it, her body taut, eyes wide. He went on, oblivious to her question. “Don’t act like I’m the twisted one, the one who doesn’t see the truth—who doesn’t speak the truth.” He took a step toward her, and she backed into the bedroom, swiftly slamming the door shut between them. He stormed toward it and twisted the handle to open the door, but it was locked. No matter. He’d shoulder it open easily enough. On the other side of the door, he could hear Cassie making panicked sounds, like an animal cornered by a predator—frantic, repetitive sounds halfway between a wheeze and a cry. Hyperventilating. She was hyperventilating. He’d heard a rat make sounds like that once as a falcon shredded into its torso with its beak, eating it alive. Terrified and agonized, beyond fighting. Just breathing because that was all there was left to do, because if it kept breathing—if she kept breathing—then maybe she might conquer the inevitability of death. Then, something heavy began to move—the dresser. She was pulling or dragging the dresser to barricade herself inside. “Cassie,” the monster said. “You know that won’t do much good. If I can’t get through the door, I’ll use the window. And if I can’t use the window, I’ll burn this place to the fucking ground with the both of us in it.” “I’ve been so stupid,” she cried. “Oh God, help me.” “God has nothing to do with this,” the monster said. “I don’t even think he can hear you all the way down here.”

“Why are you doing this?” Cassie wept from inside the bedroom. “I only ever loved you.” “Then why’d you steal our daughter?” he asked, his forehead pressed to the door, heat radiating off him and seeping into the walls. He’d smoke her out if he had to. “I didn’t steal her. She’s just at my parents’ for a couple of days… I thought it would give us a chance to talk, a chance to get you help. That’s all. I swear. I swear.” He clacked his claws against the wall on each side of the door. “So you took her out of my arms while I slept. You didn’t bother to wake me. To tell me. To ask me. And you had Dylan Radford guard you while you did it. It all sounds so innocent—so very loving—to me. By the way, speaking of love, what did dear Otis have to tell you?” On the other side of the door he could hear the sound of metal hangers knocking against a wall—she was frantically pulling her clothing out of the closet. Leaving him. She was going to leave him. Or at least try. “Did he tell you everything, Cassie? Did he tell you about his accident too?” “What would he have to tell me about his accident?” she asked, her voice filled with dread. The clattering of the hangers grew quieter and quieter as the seconds slipped by, until it was no more than the whisper of metal brushing against metal. “It was me, Cassie,” the monster told her. “I drove him right off the fucking road. That’s how much I loved you. I would have burned the world down for you. I killed my own mother for you… just like you said I should. I used the wolf lichen you gave me. Every last thing I’ve done is to be with you. To give pleasure to you. To be the best man I can be for you.” She was silent. Frozen in place, no doubt. Stunned—petrified like a pine forest swallowed by water, then scorched with lava and turned into stone. Finally, after ages of not speaking, he heard her voice on the other side of the door. “I never told you to kill your mother,” she said. “And I have no idea what you’re talking about with the wolf lichen. But if what you say is true… if you …

if you drove my daddy off the road… I hate you. I hate you so much that I’ll be the one to burn the fucking world down.” The monster’s rage flared, and he shouldered his way through the door as easily as if he were coasting through water, splicing it apart effortlessly with his body. The door was nothing to him, the dresser even less. He felt no pain. He was beyond pain. He staggered into the room, panting, delirious for her. Wanting to rip her apart. Wanting to fuck her pieces. Wanting. The monster wanted to destroy her. Cassie cowered, her back pressed against the wall opposite the door, a gun in her shaking hands. She tried to keep it pointed at him, but her body was quaking so hard the muzzle pointed at the floor, the ceiling, almost everywhere but at him. “Don’t move,” she threatened. “I’ll shoot.” He laughed. “Cassie, where did you get the gun?” “I’m a hunter, and you didn’t think I owned a fucking gun?” A short, hysterical laugh escaped her in between sobs. Her entire body was shaking, filled with nerves and adrenaline and terror, but she still had the gall to laugh at him. He stalked toward her, unafraid of the gun. Unafraid of her. Unafraid of anything anymore. Nothing could hurt him now. He had nothing left that could hurt him. He’d lost everything he loved. “You’re not going to shoot me,” he said, easily wresting the gun out of her hand and tossing it behind him on the ground, where it fell with a clatter near the foot of the bed. Her lips trembled, tears pouring from her eyes, and she sobbed, sliding down the wall and onto her ass. The monster sank to his knees before her and pressed his lips to hers, his tongue darting into her mouth to taste her one last time. She bit it—hard—the metallic tang of blood flooding his mouth from where her teeth had pierced it. “Don’t touch me,” she snarled, and the monster snarled back at her, wrapping its claws around her tender, bruised throat and pushing her down to the ground,

squeezing. Squeezing the fucking life out of her, the flesh soft and malleable beneath his hands. Blood dripped out of his mouth from between his clenched teeth and onto her face, and she thrashed, pulling uselessly at his hands, her eyes going wide. Her legs kicked beneath him, her cherry red lips gaping, working to say something. Stop, he thought she was going to say. Or help me. Or I love you. Or Gideon, please. Her eyes flitted for a brief instant to the door. Her mouth moved, and finally she gasped out a word. “Dylan.” The fire swelled inside of him, crescendoing like a tsunami, and he squeezed harder, his talons gouging into her neck. He’d rip her fucking head off. It was nothing to him. She was nothing to him. She was clay. Dirt. Meat. Pulp. Her body went limp beneath him, her eyes rolling back in her skull as she ed out. Behind him there was a sound, and he turned his head and saw Radford standing there in the doorway, his chest heaving from running, his face blanched in horror. “You fucker,” the mechanic growled, baring his teeth as he lunged for the gun on the floor. But the monster was faster. He scrambled on his knees for it and picked it up, pointing it at the man falling toward him, and pulled the trigger. The mechanic landed facedown on top of the monster. Blood ran freely from the wound on his skull—beautiful cranberry-red blood, as smooth and elegant as a ganache. The bone of his skull was a brilliant white, hard and unyielding like alabaster. Next to him, the monster heard the sounds of Cassie’s ragged breathing, the swollen cartilage of her neck compressing her windpipe, constricting the flow of air to her lungs. The unbearable weight of a dead man on his chest. The slick blood, warm and wet, all over his naked flesh.

The wheezing breath of his love, the liar, whistling like a tea kettle. These were the last things the monster ed.

Gideon awoke with the corpse of Dylan Radford draped over his body, his flesh painted in the man’s blood. He turned his head, and there, stretched out across the floor just a few feet from him, lay Cassie. She was still unconscious, her chest shuddering as it struggled to take whatever meager air it could get, her breath rasping in and out. The skin of her face was flushed from being choked, the skin of her cheeks so dark they resembled bruised plums. He’d done this. The monster had done this. “No,” Gideon gasped, pushing the mechanic off him and crawling toward her. “I’m so sorry,” he begged her, scooping her up into his arms, cradling her, stroking her hair, caressing her face. If she heard him, she gave no indication of it. She lay limp in his arms, her body consumed by the effort of trying to stay alive, trying to drag each and every precious molecule of oxygen it could from the air around them. “What can I do?” he begged her. “Just tell me what I can do.” He didn’t care anymore if she’d never loved him. He didn’t care if his child was another man’s. He could love her—always—just the same. He would always love her. There’d never been another choice. With reverence he kissed her forehead, whispering against her clammy skin, “If you make it, I’ll take you back there. To the woods. To the lake. To our place. Please. We can stay there forever, just me and you. Just me and you.” Her chest heaved and stuttered as she fought to draw another breath. An ambulance. He needed to call for an ambulance. He looked around, his eyes desperately scanning the mess around them, searching for her phone, but he didn’t see it anywhere. He reached down, his hands sliding into the pockets of her shorts, but they were too small to hold much of anything in them other than a keyring with his truck key on it. So he gently laid her back down on the ground and went over to the bed, rifling through the suitcase she’d begun to pack of her things. He found it at the bottom, in a purse he hadn’t noticed her wearing when she’d

come back to the house. The phone’s battery was low, its cracked screen locked, but after a few guesses at its code he was able to unlock it. There was a new text message waiting for her, sent twenty minutes ago. From Radford. On my way back, it said. Gideon scrolled back through the thread of messages, starting with Cassie’s most recent message to Dylan. Help me pls. He is going to kill me. There were so many messages. Countless messages. The two of them had been in every day, multiple times a day, for weeks—and probably months and years. They’d talked about everything and nothing. Some were about Gideon. Some were about the baby. Other texts were about dates the mechanic had gone on, or asking Cassie for advice on what to say or do regarding another woman. Mostly their messages were about the things each of them had done that day— rude customers at the garage, bullshit they’d watched on TV, inside jokes Gideon didn’t have any context for, or the crap going on in the news. None of them were sexual in nature. None of them were about running off together. None of them indicated that they were between two people in love. And yet— And yet, didn’t only people who loved each other talk with such ease and intimacy and frequency? Gideon supposed he’d have time to think about that later, to mull it over and consider it from every angle once it had saturated into his soul and festered there. But for now the most worrying text was the last one Cassie had sent: He is going to kill me. He didn’t want to kill Cassie. He wanted to live with her forever, somewhere where they could be alone and unmolested by the world. He wanted to eat her in such tiny, insignificant, delicious morsels that she wouldn’t even notice she was disappearing piece by piece. Which, he conceded, meant she was right to worry. He might kill her—not out of hatred or malice, but out of love, because he

wanted to consume her, chew her up, ingest all her sweetness, and keep her, stowed away in his body, at the cellular level. He was going to kill her—eventually, inevitably, horribly—and here was the proof of it: a text and a corpse at his feet, while Cassie lay sprawled out, halfdead, on the floor, her neck ringed in a dark purple bruise in the shape of his hands. There could be no ambulance. An ambulance would bring the authorities to his door, and he’d have no chance of ever being with Cassie again. As it was, the authorities would find their way to him through Radford’s texts. There was no escaping that. They’d come for him, and he’d spend the rest of his life locked away in maximum security at the prison in Monroe. No, he’d have to leave Gold Bar, and quickly. He’d have to take Cassie down the coast with him, making their way to Mexico as fast as they could, keeping as far off the grid as possible. And Willow— They’d have to leave her behind. The realization made him think about what it must feel like to have to saw off a limb trapped beneath a rockslide, to feel each and every serration of the blade as it bit into the skin, as it made its way through ligaments and muscle and then through bone. But there was no way around it. There was no telling what the Lees knew about tonight. Had Radford told them that Cassie was in trouble when he’d handed the baby off to them? Had they… had they perhaps already called the cops? Otis knew for certain who he was… what he was capable of… if there was any possibility that Cassie was in imminent danger, they’d call the cops on him with glee. Time might be perilously short. Even now, he imagined he heard the high whine of a siren, threading its way around traffic on the highway, racing toward him. Gideon sprang to action, grabbing the patchwork quilt they used as a comforter from the bed and laying it out on the floor, then rolling Radford’s corpse onto it. The limbs of the dead man flopped uselessly, one arm tangling at a sharp angle beneath his body, his head listing to the side, dead eyes fixed accusingly on his murderer. Gideon took one end of the quilt and threw it over the man, tucking it

as well as he could beneath the mechanic’s dead weight, and then began to roll him up in it. With some effort he managed to drag the corpse by its feet across the house and into the garage, resting it on the ground out there until he could back his truck in. A long line of blood—so much more than he ever realized a person could have inside their body, a veritable ocean’s worth—stretched across the house, staining the carpet and soaking into the cheap linoleum of the kitchen and the garage’s concrete floor. There was no point trying to clean it, so he left it there for the cops to find—one final painting as evidence of his depravity (perhaps not his best work, but certainly his most satisfying). From under the kitchen sink he grabbed a roll of paper towel and wiped himself off the best he could, wad after wad of it smeared with the dead man’s blood. He jammed the soiled towels into the trash until the basket was overflowing with them. He felt filthy from it. The blood stained his trunk and legs and crotch a dark, foul brown, but there was no time to shower. That would have to be later... sometime... whenever. But not now. He washed his upper body and arms off in the sink, unable to do anything about his blood-crusted hair, and then made his way down the hall and back to the bedroom, where Cassie had not yet come to. (Would she? Gideon didn’t know. He could only hope she would fight and claw her way back to consciousness.) She looked so tiny and insignificant on the floor, so fragile and delicate, that it reminded him of the rabbit they’d trapped and cleaned together. She was a pathetic creature, little more than bait for wolves, barely worth the trouble of catching. And she was covered in blood too—some of it his, but most of it Radford’s. She’d have to be cleaned as well, but that would have to be once they’d gotten on the road. He threw things at random into the suitcase she’d been packing—underwear, some pajama pants, a couple sweaters that were folded in a drawer, a pair of boots he found on the floor of the closet—and threw a couple weeks’ worth of clothes in a backpack for himself. They’d have to get more things once they got to Mexico. The thought reminded him of the cash he had stashed between the mattress and box spring. It wasn’t much, but if they were careful it would last them a few weeks, maybe even a month or two if they could get south of the border quickly. He put the cash in his backpack, along with the gun, and grabbed a framed picture of Willow from the front room to take along with them as a

memento of their firstborn child. Quickly, before the sirens he could hear ringing in his ears got any louder, he stowed their bags in the garage next to the corpse of the mechanic. He packed a cooler of food—whatever food he could swipe from the fridge, along with some of the cans of nonperishables Cassie kept stacked sky-high in the pantry—and dumped the supplies next to the pile of their things. He took a final look around the garage, searching it for whatever else they might need, desperate as the time grew shorter and shorter, and spotted the rolled-up tent beneath the tool bench. Perfect. They’d camp outside, in whatever woods they could find, hidden away from prying eyes and inquiring minds, just like they used to do. Now that he’d gotten used to the squalor of sleeping on the dirt —of fucking in the dirt, rolling in it, making love in it, tasting the residue of it on Cassie’s skin—maybe they’d even live in their tent once they made it to Mexico. They could stay like that forever, two nomads running from civilization and all the horrible things they’d done. With the tent added to the pile, he went back into the house to throw on some clothes, eager to get on the road and to feel the fresh air of a new town on his face. He threw his cell phone onto the bed, leaving it next to where he’d dropped Cassie’s, and grabbed his truck keys from her pocket. Out on the street, under the cover of dusk, he rifled through Radford’s truck, not caring about leaving fingerprints behind. There’d be no question he murdered the man, although he hoped that whatever dumpster he’d drop the corpse in would be emptied into a landfill before anyone bothered to check inside of it. Although the car keys were nowhere to be found—they were probably somewhere on Radford’s corpse—his phone was sitting in plain sight in one of the cup holders on the console. That was a piece of good luck. At least the authorities wouldn’t be able to track down Radford’s body using his cell. Gideon switched the phone to silent, then locked the doors and continued on down the street to fetch his own truck. A hush had fallen over the neighborhood, the kind of quiet that comes with the evening, when people have settled down, overfed and complacent, onto their couches to numb their minds until they fell asleep. The living room window of the blue rambler across the street was open, the curtains lightly stirring in the breeze, the sound of a cheering crowd on TV wafting out into the night. A couple

doors down a dog was in a fenced-off front yard, some wiry-haired mongrel that grumbled as he walked by it but couldn’t be bothered to bark. But otherwise the neighborhood was quiet. Even the old woman who lived next door to them, a compulsive gardener who fussed over her yard every day, whether it was pouring rain or sweltering, was nowhere to be seen. It was as if God himself had cleared the road for him. That thought calmed his nerves, allowing him to move swiftly and to back his truck into the garage, hoisting the mechanic’s corpse in head-first. He laid a tarp over the body—the quilt was soaked with blood and would stain anything it touched—and then piled their possessions on top of the body to keep it in place and hidden from sight. Finally, with the corpse loaded and their things packed, he went back into the house for Cassie. Gingerly, he scooped her unconscious body into his arms and carried her, like some perverse version of a man carrying his bride across the threshold, out of the house and into the garage, sitting her on the bench seat of his truck. Strapping her in, he kissed her forehead. “We’ll be so happy together,” he promised her, even though he knew it was a lie. Deep in his belly, the monster rumbled, reminding him that Cassie was a liar, a whore, a monster, a bitch. That she would never consent to leaving their daughter or to loving him again. That they were doomed. He shut the enger door, Cassie’s head lolling to the side to rest against the glass. Anyone looking in would think she’d simply fallen asleep on a long road trip. Tendrils of her dark black hair hung loose across her face, obscuring the marks he’d left on her and the blood smeared on her skin. Gideon got behind the wheel and exhaled slowly, preparing himself for everything that lay ahead of them. He slipped the key into the ignition and turned it, cranking the weary engine to life. The truck, rumbling awake, made its way down the road as if it had a will of its own, trudging its way toward the highway that would take them forever from the town of Gold Bar. He forced himself not to look at the Lee place as they drove by it, at the ambercolored light that streamed from the windows as the occupants inside held onto his daughter, loving and fawning over her in a way he would never be able to again. But under his breath, he bid her a goodbye.

It was his whispered goodbye that finally awoke Cassie. She stirred, her hand coming up to press a palm against her forehead, her eyes squeezing shut in pain. “What…” she rasped, her voice shredded and torn. She swallowed with effort and tried to speak again. “What happened?” The air wheezed as it came out of her throat, hoarse and feeble like a death rattle. “Shh,” he said, reaching a hand out and placing it lovingly over hers. “Try not to talk. Give yourself some time to rest.” The hand that had been pressed against her forehead drifted down to her throat, and she winced as she touched the bruise. Then, finally ing what had happened to her—what he had done to her—she ripped her hand away from him and pressed her body against the door, as far from him as she could get. “You,” she said, her eyes wide in terror, mouth turned down in disgust. “...And Dylan…” She swallowed, wincing from it, but forced herself to go on. “What did you do to Dylan?” The monster sent flames of hatred from his belly, licking their way up toward his throat and down to his cock, which swelled at the thought of the hole he’d blown in the mechanic’s skull. “Dylan won’t be a problem anymore for us,” he said, hating her for asking. “Or at least he shouldn’t be.” Tears welled in her bloodshot eyes. “Is he… is he dead?” Gideon nodded. “And rotting in hell, I hope.” Cassie whimpered, her lower lip trembling. “Are you... are you going to kill me next?” He laughed sadly, wanting to tell her no. But he couldn’t. The monster was going to do whatever it pleased—whatever she deserved—and if she kept asking about Dylan Fucking Radford, then he might kill her sooner rather than later. “We’re going somewhere else,” he told her. “Somewhere far from Gold Bar.” “What about…” She swallowed, then forced herself to keep talking, even though it took more energy than she appeared to have left in her. “...Willow? I can’t leave her. Why don’t you… why don’t you leave me with her? And just go?”

Devastation overwhelmed him like a lahar sweeping through a valley, goring everything in its wake. She’d rather be left without him in Gold Bar than go with him anywhere else. That’s how it was going to be, then: Cassie always wondering about Dylan, always pining for Willow, always dreaming of the day that she might be free of him. He would never be enough for her. He’d never been enough for anyone. Hatred and self-loathing roiled inside of him, mingling with betrayal and heartache and loneliness. “Did you ever love me, Cassie?” he asked after several minutes of silence. “More than anything,” she told him, her voice so quiet and raw he could barely hear it over the sound of the tires crunching the gravel on the road the truck had turned down. “You’re a liar,” he said. He kept his gaze fixed ahead, fixed on the dark outline of the pines that loomed ahead of them, flanking the banks of the Skykomish River, because he couldn’t bear to look at her. He pulled the truck off into a small clearing alongside the road—a spot fisherman and day hikers used to gain access to the river—and slumped his arms over the steering wheel, resting his head on them for a moment of peace. “Almost more than anything,” Cassie amended. He heard the sound of her seat belt unbuckling, the precise metallic clang of it, and he thought she might be sliding her way across the bench toward him to comfort him. A foolish thought. Instead, the enger door squealed open, and before he knew what was happening, she was gone. She was already bolting in front of the headlights of the truck by the time he lifted his head, vanishing down the path to the river as he got out of the truck to follow her. He pursued her, the monster whipping and lashing at his heels, goading him on, spitting and snarling at him to run fasterfasterfaster. He was fast, but his quarry was faster, a lithe, sure-footed creature at home in the woods, her nimble feet flying over the roots and rocks that snagged and tripped him up.

Moonlight filtered down through the needles of the pines, casting a faint glow on the trail before him and leaching away all the colors of the forest. The world was reduced to black and white and a thousand silvery whisps of gray. Ahead of him, wheezing and rasping, was one of those whisps—Cassie, pumping her arms furiously, her coal-black hair flying behind her, as she ran from him. She halted as she reached the cutbank leading down to the river and shot a look over her shoulder at him before she began her descent and disappeared from sight. “Cassie!” he howled, frantic to get to her, to grab her, to keep her, to… save her, maybe. The monster was telling him what to do, but he didn’t want to listen to the monster anymore. He only wanted her. He’d only ever wanted her. The cutbank was steep, with rocks and roots of various sizes jutting out from the sandy soil that the river was, in times of high water, greedily devouring. When he reached the top of it he could see Cassie down below, crawling on her hands and knees, making her way toward the waters of the Sky. The river churned and seethed before them, a cauldron of downed trees and debris, its frothy, foamy waters glittering like a million shards of broken glass in the moonlight. A cold mist wafted across his face from the river’s rapids, and a wave of terror overcame him. He was a poor swimmer, and Cassie knew it—at night, without seeing the debris around him or the rapids below him, he didn’t stand a chance. He had to reach her before she made it to the water. Heedlessly, not caring if he broke his neck trying to get to her, he slid down the bank, the sand beneath his feet crumbling away. His teeth rattled in his skull as he hit the ground, landing roughly on his knees. By now Cassie had made her way over the boulders flanking the river and onto the small pebbles of its shore. She was wading into the river, up to her shins in it already, and moving with purpose deeper into its waters. “What are you doing?” he cried, following her. Always following her. But if she heard him, she gave no sign of it. “You’ll die in there!” he screamed. And maybe that was the point, he realized, to let the river take her—to take the both of them—rather than go on living with him.

He’d hate her for that if he wasn’t sick with the need to save her. He scrambled over the boulders, the craggy rocks abrading the skin of his palms and tearing at the knees of his pants. In the darkness he misstepped once, his foot lodging itself painfully between two boulders. He winced and yanked his foot out of the crevice, his boot saving him from the worst of the rocks’ jagged edges, but as he continued his pursuit of her, he hissed in pain. He wouldn’t be able to carry her if he reached her—he could barely his own weight. With effort he made it over the boulders, limping onto the narrow slip of stones that served as the riverbank of the Sky. Out in the river, Cassie was neck-deep, her arms treading water, splicing over its choppy surface as the Sky began to push her downriver. There was no time now. She’d be gone in a moment, either pushed outside of his reach by the river or killed by whatever was churning alongside of her in it. Gideon glanced upstream and saw a shape rapidly advancing toward them in the current. There was no question of what it was. In the moonlight it gleamed white like the beacon of a lighthouse flashing its presence. It was the husk of a massive pine tree—at least thirty feet long—its bark sheared away and limbs picked clean by the monstrous river. He didn’t think twice. He plunged into the river for her, the frigid water like needles of fire on his flesh. From downstream Cassie turned to look at him, a smile coming across her lips, her teeth glinting white in the moonlight. A demon. She was a demon. “This is the only way, Gid,” she called out to him (or at least he thought she did. He heard a voice—a woman’s voice—scraping over his scars and making them burn). The sound of the water slapping violently against the boulders in the middle of the river matched the frenetic beating of his heart. The water was cold—so cold he gasped out in shock, so cold it felt like hellfire. Torture. This was torture, as bad as anything his mother used to do to him, as bad as anything he could imagine. It felt like he was being flayed apart, his skin being peeled off his body by the river’s malevolent fingers. The rocks beneath his feet gave way, and then there was nothing but the water. Water below him, around him, above him.

His head slipped beneath the surface. He looked up at the strangely silent world, the moonlight smiling down at him as the water gushed and gurgled and glugged by. Above him, the phantom husk floated past, a battering ram cutting its path down the river. Unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God, he thought before the world went dark. When he opened his eyes, he was laid out on the pebble shore of the Skykomish, soaked and shivering. He didn’t know if he had been saved by the river or rejected by it, but he forced himself to stand, coughing and spluttering, his ribs aching and bruised, his legs weak and heart broken. From where he stood, his eyes scanned the surface of the river, searching for her. But Cassie was gone. He hoped her baptism in the Sky was enough to save her soul. But if not, he knew where to find her.

6

I’ll shiver the whole night through

She tried crawling away, her hands seeking purchase on the forest floor. Her fingers sifted through the loose dirt, frantic and searching, until they brushed upon something cool and metal— She didn’t know what she had expected to find. A stick, maybe, or a rock. Something to blind or batter him with if she got lucky. But instead she’d found… A knife. A pocket knife. Already open, its blade badly rusted from exposure to the elements. She didn’t have time to question it, to consider how it had gotten there in the first place or what had happened to its owner. There was no time for that. Gideon’s fingers were gripped around her ankle, his sobbing imprecations to a dead girl filling the air, so loud and keening and raw that she could barely hear the steady pattering of the rain as it fell around them. Instinctively, like she had done it a thousand times before, she wrapped her fingers around the knife’s handle and pushed herself up onto her knees. Gideon’s grip tightened, his face contorting in fury. “You’re not leaving me this time!” he snarled. “I won’t let you.” He yanked her roughly by the ankle, dragging her painfully backward across the dirt and toward him. He scrambled up and over her body, his weight pressing down on her to keep her in place, as he fumbled to unzip his pants. “It’ll be me and you, Cassie,” he panted into her ear. “Here, like this. Forever. We don’t ever have to leave.”

He’d just finished speaking, his hot, stale breath still fanning across her face in a plume of mist, when she swiped the blade over her shoulder and plunged it into the soft skin of his throat. The knife cut upward, piercing into his mouth, and his eyes went wide with shock and fear, blood instantly pooling out from his lips. As he pulled away, she withdrew the blade and stabbed again—this time through one of his awful blue eyes. The blade went in easily (too easily), like cutting through warm butter, until the tip of it struck something that felt like bone. She yanked the knife out of him, ready to stab him again, but he scrambled off her. Falling to his knees, he moaned and gurgled in pain, lurching forward to press his face to the ground, but the position caused him to splutter and choke on his own blood. So he rolled over onto his back, crying and writhing, clawing at his face and neck, trying to staunch the flow of it. Defeated and undone. But she wasn’t done with him. She stalked over to him on raw and aching feet, shuddering uncontrollably from the cold and the adrenaline and the shock and the fury. “You think you can just do anything,” she gritted out between her clenched teeth, no longer scared or lost like she had been only moments before. She was transformed now, reborn, remade. A phoenix soaring above the scorched earth. The goddess Kali, dancing on the battlefield. Pele, emerging from the pit of a volcano. Duskeah, armed with her bone needle, standing in front of the fire. Unafraid of evil—of man—and wielding his fire against him as a weapon. “You think you can take whatever you want,” she went on. She might as well have been talking to her father, who’d taken her family from her and had tried to take her along with them, all in the name of “love.” She might as well have been talking to him (no, she would not even think his name, not after he’d fucked Krista Buchanan, not after he’d dragged her on her hands and knees across the concrete like some runaway bitch of a dog). She no longer saw Gideon, only his pale, blood-stained flesh and the body of a man lying prostrate on the ground. “But what you don’t realize is that for everything you take, there is someone who will give it right” —she plunged the knife into his belly, dragging it with all her might upward, as if to gut him— “back to you.” She shivved him again and again, blindly, uncaring whether she struck flesh or bone, barely noticing the sickly warm substance coating her skin

and clothes. Gideon thrashed beneath her, throwing her off him, and tried to roll on top of her, but his open wounds vomited blood and viscera onto her, onto the ground, onto them both. He sank to his knees, the blood trickling and then cascading from him like some grotesque pantomime of a waterfall. “Cassandra,” he choked out, his hands pressed to his stomach as if to hold in his own guts. “Help me. Please. Please. It burns.” His words were a sloppy, wet burble, like a brook sloshing at its own banks. “I told you,” she said, not recognizing the sound of her own voice. Who was that speaking? That woman with a husky voice, low and somber and vengeful? “I’m not Cassandra. She’s dead. You killed her. Murdered her. Then threw her away like trash.” She let the rain fall down on her, cleansing her as it washed away their mingled blood, baptizing her and making her pure again. She let the hideous water drown her fire, snuffing it out with a thousand tiny hisses as the raindrops pelted down on them. Gideon slouched to the ground on his side, blood seeping from one eye as tears seeped from the other. He was as good as dead, and that was good enough for her. Cassie, his lips said silently, over and over again, no longer seeing the woman in front of him or the forest he was doomed to rot in. She turned and ran on shaking legs back through the trees, toward the narrow pinpricks of the truck’s headlights that she could barely discern through the thick curtain of foliage and moss. Behind her Gideon coughed and moaned and wept, the coyote still howling somewhere in the distance: Stay with me. His taste was in her mouth—his flesh wedged between her teeth, his blood still coating them, slathered over her lips and chin—and she gagged and retched as she ran to her salvation, but she did not—would not—stop to vomit. She ran, her shoes long forgotten, the precious, sacred knife clutched in her hand, as his cries grew fainter and fainter behind her. Wolf lichen, drenched from the rain, pulled and clawed at her as she made her way blindly, frantically, elatedly through the forest.

When she reached the truck, panting and out of breath, her muscles burning from a lack of oxygen, she hoisted herself in through the open driver’s side door and tossed the blood-stained knife onto the seat beside her. Gideon had left the keys in the ignition, the music still playing softly on the tape deck, and she sent a quick prayer of gratitude up to the sky before turning the keys and cranking the engine to life. With a thunk, she slammed the door shut behind her and locked it, then released the parking brake and shifted the truck into gear, moving forward along the narrow forest road. The road was too narrow to turn around, and she didn’t dare try to reverse her way out for the however many miles he had taken her down it, so she had no choice but to go forward, the ferns and briars of the forest scratching and pawing at the truck as if trying to work their way in. The road—if it could even be called that anymore—was rough and pocked, and with each mud-filled pothole she winced and prayed to a God she’d stopped believing in years ago that she wouldn’t blow a tire, wouldn’t get stranded out here with him—like him—to die. After what felt like a lifetime, the years accumulating on her body like a thick layer of dust, coating her with grime, weighing her down and wearying her, the road opened into a small clearing and abruptly ended. In the thick wall of forest that stared her down, she noticed an almost imperceptible trailhead, its entrance marked only by a moldering wooden standing near its mouth. The clearing was empty, but she considered the possibility that if there was a trail here, then there might be someone camping nearby who could help her. Maybe they’d know what to do or where to go. So she looked in the rearview mirror, scanning for Gideon’s frame lumbering after her, even though she knew that, in all probability, he was either already dead or would be soon—that there was no way, in his condition, he could have followed her however many miles she’d driven down the road. Once she made sure she hadn’t been pursued, she put the truck into park and opened the door with still-shaking hands, slipping out and making her way toward the trail to see if anyone had recently signed in. It was a foolish thought, she realized, as soon as she approached it. If the trail had once existed, it had been abandoned long ago. The was overrun with weeds and sodden with rot, with no sheet—not even one disintegrated into pulp by the rain—in sight. But there, plain as day, even though they were

only illuminated by the truck’s headlights, were the words, carved onto the top of the : Gid + Cassie Always Her jaw fell open, horror roiling through her, and she finally allowed herself to bend over and vomit. She heaved again and again, ing the sight of blood oozing and sputtering from him, the black, tar-like fluid weeping from his ruined eye. She retched at the memory of his face, contorted in agony and hatred and betrayal, retched at the sensation of his fingers wrapped around her ankle, at the heat and weight of his body on hers. She vomited until there was nothing left inside of her, until her shoulders and neck and back ached from the force of heaving. She vomited until she’d purged everything she could of him and her life and of loss. She wouldn’t allow herself to cry for the dead girl, though—or for Mara or her mother or even herself. Instead she picked herself up, her bare feet squelching in the mud, and climbed back into the truck. She turned the truck around and headed back down the abandoned road, back toward the highway, then on to Tillicum. She’d be goddamned if she let a man drive her from her own town.

Acknowledgments

I feel incredibly lucky to say that it would be impossible to thank every single person who played a part in bringing this book to fruition. So, while I acknowledge the futility of the endeavor and the inevitably pisspoor job I’ll do of it, I would like to take a moment to thank the following folks: My parents: From day one, you have ed me in my love of reading and writing. You were always more than happy to take me to the library or to a bookstore, to put money in my hand for Scholastic book fairs, to take me to go see a play, to encourage me to write my own crap… basically to be my crazy, nerdy, creative self. And you’ve always been so proud of me for it. Not every kid can say that of their parents—that they are unfailingly ive of their ions and pursuits—and that privilege is not lost on me. I love you both so much. Manc: thank you for being my best friend, soulmate, and staunchest er. Thank you for believing me when I don’t believe in myself and sacrificing literally every single day to me in the effort of writing. Every word that exists I owe to your love. Little E: You are the light of my world, and I hope that even when I write ugly tales like this one, I can do my small part to make your world brighter. Thank you for keeping me on my toes and sharing your love of life with me, for honoring me by being my daughter. Big M: You are absolutely not allowed to ever read this book (and please make sure your sister doesn’t either), but I hope you know how much I love you and how proud I am of you. Seeing you grow into the man you’ve become today has been one of the greatest joys and privileges of my life. Jackie: Thank you for your years of friendship and guidance, for your infallible good sense and eagle eye as my editor. There is no one I trust more than you to hold my work in their hands. I don’t know what I did in a past life to be gifted now with your kind heart, loyalty, and beautiful brain, but I am so thankful for

you. Bri: There is nothing you aren’t exceptional at doing. Thank you for sharing your creative mind with me, your energy, enthusiasm, and ion. Thank you for always being ive of me—on this project and all others. You make me feel brave and confident and audacious just by being in proximity to you. Maree: You talk me down off the ledge on a daily basis and patiently guide me through the ins and outs of what it means to be a working writer and functioning human being. Your sense of calm, your insightful mind, and your courage inspire me to be a better, braver person. When it comes to this story, thank you in particular for your encyclopedic knowledge of the Bible, which came in very handy. (Mara FTW!) Fran: You are my fiercest friend with the purest heart. Thank you for always keeping shit real, for talking straight with me, defending me against myself and any others, for pushing me to keep writing, and for teaching me the meaning of gems like saco de wea. Your generosity, your protectiveness, and your love are so expansive that they reach me from halfway around the world. Chilean sleeves forever, chica. I can’t wait to visit you someday in your dream house in Valdivia. Kelly: Thank you for a hundred different things, but especially for pushing me to keep writing my “serial killer” story (or whatever this turned out to be). Your enthusiasm for the project kept me pushing through whatever doubts cropped up along the way. Now it’s your turn to write something inspired by your love of true crime. (Ready, set, go…) I believe in you so much. More than you know. Thank you for your friendship and love. I love you! Angie: I keep a friendship keychain you gave to me years ago on my writing desk, and it sits right beneath my monitor as I type. “Distance means so little,” it says, with a dandelion scattering its seeds in the wind. It so perfectly captures the strength of our friendship. Distance doesn’t matter. You’re with me every day, and I’m with you. Thank you for your love and in everything. You’re not just one of my very best friends, but I also consider you my family (and not just because everyone mistakes us for being sisters ;p). Thank you for being the sister I always wanted. Tisha: I knew the minute I met you that you were one of my people. I insta-loved you. You have brought so much joy and laughter and light and kindness to my

life… you are one of the most genuine and wonderful people I have ever met. If I had it my way, I’d buy a place in Bungalow Heaven and inflict myself on you daily like a street dog following you home (so it’s probably a good thing I live a thousand miles away). Tina, Clare, Carolyn, Hinke, Heather, Julie, Jessa, Javis: You’ve each played your own part on the gnarled road here, either as collaborators, fellow writing sprinters/joggers/limpers, ers, prompters, etc. I could write a book about each of you and the stories you weave... their darkness, their heat, their beauty, their soul, their wisdom, their wit, their creativity, their intellect... you’ve inspired me and so many others with your talent. Thank you for being there on this journey. It couldn’t have happened without you. Until recently I was a hobbyist writer (let’s just call it that instead of using the “f” word), and because of that there are dozens of readers and other writers I’d like to thank for their over the past several years. Most of the people I know, though, are simply by their avatars or screen names, but a couple of them I have been fortunate enough to get to know better and call my friends. This leads me directly to Kat and Alice. Kat, thank you for loving this baby since it was only a twisted little fetus. Thank you for championing it—and me— and for your kindness and heart. You are a gift in this world and in my life. And Alice, my dear, you always astonish me with your brilliance and thoughtfulness. I don’t know what quirk of the cosmos brought you into my life, but I am so thankful for it. To be honest, I don’t really feel fit to touch the hem of either of your garments, but you’ve never made me feel that way. It’s just that you are so phenomenally you. Your words have inspired me and kept me going more times than I can count. I owe you such a debt of gratitude. Please accept these paltry words instead, and my love. I am sending thanks out into the cosmos to the souls who first wrote “In the Pines” and “Beneath the (Weeping) Willow Tree.” Thank you to Nirvana and Lead Belly in particular for their haunting versions, which wormed their way into my soul through my ear and have stayed there for many years. I suspect it will be that way until I make my way into the pines too. And last, but certainly not least, to Lisa: You aren’t here to read this, but I wouldn’t be writing fiction if it weren’t for you. So much of what I have and who I am now is because you had the heart to befriend me. I began this story for

you, and now I finish it.

About the Author

Pippa Glencoe is a writer, editor, and recovering wedding photographer. Born and raised in Detroit, Michigan, she now lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband, daughter, and ferocious pit bull, who tries every single day to murder her with kisses. When she isn’t writing, she’s dreaming about it. And when she isn’t dreaming, she’s scheming. In the Pines is her first novel. For more information visit www.pippaglencoe.com.