My Heart Is a Chainsaw (The Lake Witch Trilogy #1)(120)

But then a sharp black hook finds her, ends her sleep.

She comes up, frees herself, and, looking for her mother again, kills anyone she finds hunting on that side of the lake, making those woods so sacred they become national forest almost on their own. But she does manage to find her mother again, dragged out along with Stacey, just floating at the surface of the lake now.

Stacey leads her to a better cave, a higher-up cave, one the singing water will never find, and then blocks the entrance up behind them, and this works for decades, until the forest becomes a furnace, dripping enough sparks and hissing pitch down that her mother’s dry skin sizzles, flickers, catches flame.

Stacey Graves pats those little fires out, waits for the larger one to die back, and then she climbs up, goes for the first culprits she can find. They’re at the edge of the lake, are in a series of little houses that aren’t the town she hates, but will do.

Afterwards she retires to her cave, sleeps the sleep of the dead with her mother again, hopefully this time forever, but then someone drops in with her. She hisses at him, scratches at him, and then thick grey water starts to spurt down into her cave. But it’s not water at all. It’s melted rock.

Stacey Graves fights through before it can dry, rises that night, and takes the first lives she chances upon: elk, foraging close to shore under cover of darkness. But she’s not done yet.

There are voices out on the water. Laughing, happiness.

Not on her watch.

She rushes out there to that green canoe, silences them both, and, looking for another cave to ride out eternity in, she hides from the sun—it makes her skin hiss, her eyes smolder, her lips and nailbeds steam—in the only cave she can find: the elk she slaughtered, which embed their stabby hair into her rotting nightgown. But it’s nice in there, it’s dark and pressing like a hug, like her mother’s there with her, and for weeks and months, it’s enough, until a saw made of screaming metal tears into her rotting cave, splashing light in.

Stacey Graves retracts from it, squirming deeper into the decay, and then she pushes hard enough that she falls out into the open air again, after which she races to the loudest, most obnoxious sound she can, the one that must be responsible for disturbing her: the yacht. After tearing up and down those tight halls, slashing across those slick decks, crashing through door after door, she hides from the sun again for the day, and then— then this, the party on the water, disturbing her sleep, invading her lake. Her lake.

How Jade knows she’s right about all this, it’s not that the dates or the logic line up, it’s that this little dead girl is standing behind where Letha was— on the water.

It hasn’t been Theo Mondragon impossibly being here and then there at the same time. It’s been a little dead girl flitting across the surface from person to person, a little girl not slowed down by having to wade or swim—she couldn’t if she wanted to, because this Christian burial ground won’t take her Indian self, won’t let her step through.

Right when Stacey Graves starts to surge forward, for Jade, a bellow stops them both.

It’s Theo Mondragon.

He’s standing in Hardy’s airboat, is looking at the bass boat Letha just died against. He’s looking at the water his only daughter just sank down into.

And then he’s looking at Stacey Graves.

He’s got the machete back, now, must have had it slid into his belt at the small of his back.

“You! ” he says to Stacey Graves, and she angles her head over, maybe surprised to be called out instead of retreated from.

But, does she even understand words anymore, or does she only understand death?

She seems to get it when Theo Mondragon points his machete at her, anyway.

Stacey Graves darts forward and Theo Mondragon cocks the machete back to cut her in half, but at the last moment she swerves, slides under his swing, stands up behind him.

Before he can orient, set his feet in the rocking airboat, she’s reached around, has him by the jaw the same as she had Letha.

She flings him hard to the side, not even bothering to tear his face in half, just cracking him into the side of the pier, probably fifteen feet away.

Theo Mondragon’s legs and shoulders try to keep going, and do, folding around the unmoving side of the pier, and something cracks inside him. His back, surely, because people don’t fold sideways, do they?

He sloughs off, down, and it seems for a moment that the empty green canoe is going to catch him, but it only catches his machete.

Stacey Graves, after watching that slow drip into the waiting water, maybe even appreciating it, turns, inspects the red surface of these waters, her eyes settling again on Jade.

“No,” Jade whispers to her, like that can work. But it’s not a completely voluntary thing, either. Is just a prayer, really.

It’s answered by the night splitting in two from… gunfire?

Four fast shots, grouped tight in Stacey Graves’s back, flinging her small body ahead, sending her skidding across the surface of Indian Lake, which looks so wrong.

It’s Hardy, Jade sees. He’s dying, is still trying to save her, because he’s not going to let Jade die in these waters like his daughter did.

It’s what dads do. It’s what they’re supposed to do.

After those four shots, though, Hardy slumps forward into the water, and Stacey Graves is already there on top of the water he just disappeared under. Just like when Hardy was eleven at Camp Blood, she’s tearing at the surface, trying to get to him, but again she can’t. Jade uses this distraction to push back, to hide, to live, and once under she kicks back and back, so that when she rises amid all the floating dead, she’s just one head of many. Right beside her, faceup, is Mr.