Wilder Girls(50)

“Reese,” I call. “Get it!”

But I can’t find her, can’t see anything but the looming dark as Mr. Harker bears down and his bruised hands, spongy with rot, close around my throat. I thrash, try to throw him off me, and his grip only tightens. Branches snake around my waist, holding me down. And one slithers up my neck, wrenches a scream from me as it hooks around my jaw and pries my mouth open.

   It’s bitter on my tongue, and I’m choking, scrabbling at Mr. Harker’s bloated face. His skin peels off like strips of paper, gathering under my nails, soft and pulpy.

“Hey!” I hear Reese yell. For an instant the pressure lessens, before Reese’s silver hand flashes above, the knife deep in his shoulder, and she slams into her dad, sends him reeling back onto the ground.

“Quick,” I say. “Pin him.” But Reese is just looking at him, her mouth open. She’s no use, not anymore.

I throw myself down, trap Mr. Harker’s ribs between my knees and pin him to the ground. He roars, muscles straining, and he’s looking at me, I know he is. Me and Reese’s dad, face-to-face.

I cry out as his body surges up. The bristle and spray of branches, thorns scoring a gash down my arm. I get a good grip on my knife. Pull it out of his shoulder and plunge it into his chest, flesh splitting and rising like foam. Bile bubbles up between my lips, trickles down my chin as I work the blade, widen the rip in his skin.

“Don’t,” Reese cries from behind me.

But I can’t listen. It’s not him anymore. I lean hard, brace my hand on his elbow as I wedge the knife deeper and deeper and start to lever it up. There’s a heart to all this. There has to be.

Blackened blood weeping down over my fingers, knife blade duller than I thought, but I’ve got a seam opening in him, and he’s getting weaker. Smaller roots are snapping, breaking away. At last I rip the knife out, toss it aside and dig through his shredded skin.

   He’s rotting from the inside out. Tissue mottled with mold, the smell so sour and stinging that my eye is watering. Something scuttles up my jacket sleeve, first one and then another, and another, and in the red light of the flare I make out the gleam of a hundred wingback beetles crawling out of the wound.

I choke back a yell, and before I can move, a vine slinks up my back and knots around my neck. Squeezing tighter and tighter, splinters jabbing sharp, pain spilling across me in waves. But he’s weak now, blood pouring out of him. I grip the vine and break it in two. Fling myself back at him, his face pulling apart as his mouth opens wider and wider.

I shove my hand deep into his chest again, bear down with my whole body until I hit what I think is bone. But a glimmer of the flare light, and they’re not bones. They’re branches, spindled ribs curving and cresting. I hook my fingers underneath them. Wedge my knee under his chin and pull, inch by inch.

Until finally. A snap. And inside his rib cage, I see it. A beating heart, glossed in blood. Built from the earth, from the bristle of pine, and inside, there is something else, something more, something living. I don’t think twice. Just claw at it with both hands, and it comes screaming out with a wet tear.

   Mr. Harker’s eyes close. Everything goes limp. I let the heart fall from my shaking hands and bend to one side to throw up.

When I’m finished I sit back, spit slick down my chin. I wait for the guilt, wait for the gnawing in my stomach. After all, I know that feeling. Since Boat Shift, since Byatt, I’m starting to think I’m built for it.

But Mr. Harker is dead, and I’m not, and the guilt doesn’t come. I did what I had to. I kept us alive.

I get to my feet, my legs unsteady, hands numb as I find my knife and slip it back into my belt loop. We made it. If this was the worst the wildwood could throw at us, it might be okay in the end.

When I turn, Reese is there, her right shoulder hanging at an angle that makes me dizzy. “You okay?” I say. “We should fix that.”

She’s looking past me to the wreck of her father. “You killed him,” she says. Her eyes hollowed out, her face drawn and pale. “You really did.”

She’s in shock. That’s all. She’ll come back, realize there was no other way. “I had to save us,” I say as gently as I can. “I’m sorry, but—”

“He’s dead.” Voice flat, everything that’s her stripped out of it.

“It was us or him.” She doesn’t answer, so I step in close, push her braid off her injured shoulder. It doesn’t look all the way dislocated, but when she tries to move it out from under my hand, the color drains from her face and she gasps. “We should take a look at this, yeah?” I say softly.

   “I’m fine,” she says, even as she sags against me, and I watch her close her eyes, feel her shaking. “I had him back,” she whispers. “I thought he was gone, and then I had him back.”

“It wasn’t him.”

“He knew me.” She opens her eyes, and when they meet mine the accusation in them is clear and sharp. “You took him away.”

“He was going to kill us,” I say, frustration building. I had to save us. Why doesn’t that matter to her?

“Better me than him,” she flings back at me. “Better us than my father.”

I don’t know this version of her. Even at her angriest, Reese is always contained, always whole. But this girl, this Reese in front of me, is in pieces. Edges torn, heart scattered.