My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(119)

“I’m really going to,” she makes herself say, like hearing it out loud might make it true.

But… she can’t?

She looks down to her hand like to clock where the betrayal is, but it’s not there. It’s in her head. Her head is what’s betraying her. Her heart.

She can’t do it. She’s not a killer.

“Jennifer?” her dad says, a sort of confident chuckle to his voice that makes her want to hurl.

“No,” a voice says from just past him, “it’s Jade,” and then Tab Daniels’s head conks over to the side fast and hard. He falls away, slumps ahead into the water, out of Jade’s arm, blood from his face coating the water.

Letha. It’s Letha.

She’s holding a board with a nail in it, but to her it’s a bat.

The nail, and the force behind it, tore Jade’s dad’s temple away from his skull. Some of him—cheek muscle, nose tissue, a whole eyebrow maybe—is still on the sharp end of that nail, even.

“He’s never going to hurt you again,” Letha says, breathing hard, which is when the world turns white and fast and stinging. Letha disappears into it and Jade falls onto her knees, shielding her face, her newly exposed scalp.

There’s a sound too, an everywhere sound, a deep dangerous whirring, like a weed whacker the size of a car, which means— Hardy’s airboat.

He’s got it revved high, all his lights shining through the mist and droplets his great blades are spitting across the water.

Until that fan cycles down, anyway.

Monstrous shadows surge through the light, and all Jade can see is Hardy teetering there now from whatever just happened, one hand still to his high captain’s chair, his stomach open to the night air, his hand already clamped to that line of pain. But his hand’s not big enough for this. At first a little blood seeps through his fingers, and then the rest, slick and bulging, glistening gray.

Jade’s breathing hard now.

She looks back around to Letha, still standing exactly where she was, the nail-board down by her leg, and… she didn’t do this to Hardy, she was right here, doing what Jade couldn’t.

And—and Theo Mondragon, Jade can see his hulking shape on the pier, one hand trying to keep his seeping nail-tears shut, the other shielding his eyes from the projector light, Brody huge on-screen behind him, lining up on that oxygen tank one last time.

“I don’t—this doesn’t—” Jade says to Letha, reaching forward not so much to pull Letha in as to just hold on to her, but… a small hand is reaching up from behind Letha, is taking her chin, and is wrenching it to the side, Letha’s own hands coming up fast to try to hold her face together but even her final girl strength isn’t enough.

Her jaw is tearing away, her head trying to go with it, her eyes blown wide because this can’t really be happening, and finally her reflexes and muscles are able to clamp her hands onto whoever’s doing this terrible thing to her, so her whole body can ride this tearing-away motion.

Still, her jaw is definitely creaking away from her face, opening her screaming mouth unnaturally wide, and crooked —a dark chasm Jade’s seen a hundred times through the tracking lines of a VHS tape, but up close and personal like this, it’s so much more intense. The top and bottom rows of teeth, they’re—they’re supposed to be parallel to each other, pretty much, but Letha’s lower teeth are angling fast away, and there’s the distinct sound of the hinge of her jaw cracking, the skin there tearing. There’s not any blood yet, this moment is being sliced too thin for the blood to be coming yet, but if the skin is parting like this, if the bones are shattering into the muscle, if the ligaments and tendons are popping like rubber bands— And then this instant catches up with itself and Letha is being flung away, her body ragdolling across the remains of Lonnie’s living room, thunking into the side of the jauntily floating but thoroughly abandoned bass boat, and… then sinking, with no ceremony.

The final girl is dead.

Jade looks into the space Letha just was, to whoever just did this impossible thing.

It’s a little girl with long black hair, a little girl with pale dead skin, a little girl with a dress both rotting away and rolled in stabby elk hair, a little girl with forever-cracked lips and shattered fingernails, thin black veins spidering away from her black-black eyes.

Stacey Graves, the Lake Witch.

She opens her mouth to hiss but her own jaw dislocates on one side, falls out of joint, stretching the dry skin on that side of her mouth down. She screeches, draws one hand up to stop this pain, and cocks her head over to some angle she must know, jams her jaw back up into place.

“You,” Jade says, falling back, catching herself on a gunwale, and it all comes home for her in that instant: a little girl, afraid of what she is, gallops across Indian Lake on all fours, away from the boys who played this trick on her, away from the town that never fed her, away from the father who never wanted her. All she’s looking for here is her mother, stashed in a crevice over there, one deeper than the buzzards can find, because Letch Graves doesn’t need any more attention from the sheriff.

But Stacey Graves is no buzzard, and she has weeks to find her mother, and finally does, right at the water’s rising edge.

Stacey Graves wriggles into the shallow cave with her, drapes her mother’s arms around herself, and goes to sleep until the hated water seeps in with them, bringing its faint music with it. Because it’s the water coming up over her, not her trying to get under it, and because she’s wedged so tightly in her mother’s embrace, Stacey Graves is able to go under at last and be with her mother, which is all she’s ever wanted.