Emilienne could still see the damage William Peyton had done to René’s face so many years ago. One eye stared blindly over her shoulder, the color muted by a white film; the other eye hung from its socket and rested on the sharp edge of his exposed cheekbone. Of his nose there was only a sliver of cartilage left. There was no mouth, no chin; his jaw hung at a crude and broken angle, which explained why his voice sounded so thick-tongued. As far as Emilienne could tell, he hadn’t a tongue at all. Or any teeth.
“Oh, René.” Emilienne sank down beside him.
Later, when remembering this moment, Emilienne would recall how morbidly suitable she found his deformed face, how apt it seemed to hear such horror related by such a gruesome source. Because it was horrific, what he was telling her. Indescribably, unimaginably horrific. She thought it strange that she felt nothing at all when he tried to hold her hand; his transparent fingers slipped through hers. When he finished telling her the terrible truth, she rose from the bench, smoothed the wrinkles from her skirt. She walked out of the room and through the water in the hallway to the phone, dialed the number to the police station, and in a clear voice gave the operator the address on Pinnacle Lane where Marigold Pie lived with her nephew.
Before she left the house herself, she turned back to René. “Don’t you dare take her with you,” she pleaded.
“I don’t want to,” he croaked.
WHEN MY GRANDMOTHER reached Marigold Pie’s front yard, a crisp lightning bolt cracked overhead, quickly followed by a thunderous boom! In the moment when the lightning lit up the sky, Emilienne noted that the letter P in Marigold Pie’s name was missing from the mailbox. It lay under the giant rhododendron bush that blocked the house from the road. The letter must have fallen off, landing upside down and backward so that it resembled not a P but a lowercase b. With ironic despair, Emilienne thought, Henry, I’ve finally found your b in the bush.
The front door was open, the house dark and quiet. Emilienne shivered, partly from the cold, partly from fear. But then she entered and resignation settled over her. She found a light switch and flicked it on. The floor and walls of the hallway were splattered with what looked like paint, so bright was the red. The air was thick with brown-and-white-speckled feathers. She choked as if they were going into her mouth, up her nose, into her lungs. Frantically, Emilienne brushed them away from her face.
There’s blood on the floor and feathers everywhere.
When Emilienne first entered the back room, her heart galloped with some relief: her granddaughter didn’t have blond hair. But then she saw the bloody stumps on my back. And saw my wings — a bloody mess of torn sinews and feathers and broken bones cast aside on the carpet. The bile rose in her throat, and her heart sank. It was me after all.
Emilienne knelt down and pressed her face close to mine, refusing to breathe until she felt my breath on her cheek. There it was. Quickly she pulled off her wet coat and pushed it against the wounds. There was so much blood. The carpet was sticky with it. Red rings leaked through both sides of the coat, and Emilienne’s hands were soon covered with blood too. And though she didn’t need to see it to know it was there, she looked up anyway. There it was, hanging over the mantel.
The cat on the wall.
“Heart in my mouth” was a phrase my mother had never understood. As she sped toward Pinnacle Lane, Henry and Trouver trying to stay upright in the seat beside her, Viviane’s heart was not in her mouth. What good could it do in her mouth? Her heart had leaped out of her chest and was racing two feet in front of the truck. She could see it in the headlights, its arteries pumping like arms at its side. Viviane wished she could send it farther ahead. She wished that it had already rounded the curve onto Pinnacle Lane. She wished that it was sitting beside me, wherever I was.
Henry whimpered with worry.
“We’ll be there soon,” Viviane crooned, creating a little song with the words, something she used to do to soothe him when he was little. Even now, as Henry began to hum the song to himself, she could see the tension wash away from his face.
The truck sped past the elementary school, the church, and the post office in a wet blur. The rain surged; the wipers barely kept pace. Viviane leaned forward, knuckles white on the steering wheel, and peered into the dark.
When she saw him — the man running straight toward her — she slammed on the brakes. The tires ripped hard through the clattering rain with a squeal, and she threw her arm out to stop Trouver and Henry from crashing into the windshield. The man stopped in front of the truck and stared at Viviane with wild black eyes, his face streaked with red. Blood, she realized with horror.
Before Viviane had time to react, two figures appeared behind him. Translucent and pale, they shimmered in the truck’s headlights. Their eyes were opaque and blind; water poured over their monstrous gray skin. One figure cradled a baby over the place where her heart should have been. The other flashed from canary to girl, reaching out an arm in rage to grab at the man.
And then they were upon him.
Viviane watched in terror as the translucent figures engulfed him. His screams, hoarse and inhuman, filled the night.
With a sudden flash, the street burst into flames. The heat scorched the glass of the windshield. The man tried to flee — wildly thrashing his arms — but his movements only seemed to feed the fire.
And then, just as suddenly, the fire and its victim were gone, leaving only the heavy stench of singed skin.
Trouver turned a nervous half-circle on the truck seat, whining and stepping on Henry.
“You stay here. Don’t move,” Viviane told Henry. She threw the truck into park and flung open the door. The dog leaped out after her and circled the truck in hurried steps, his body tucked low to the ground. In front of the truck, a black mark scarred the pavement where the wretched man had stood. She recalled the man’s eyes — black, feral, and unblinking. Viviane dropped to her knees, sinking into the puddle of water around the truck, and ran her fingers over the mark. It was still hot to the touch.
She looked up in time to see the specters fade into the darkness.
The ambulance arrived at Marigold Pie’s house, soon followed by the local police. The flashing lights had drawn all of Pinnacle Lane to the scene. There were the old Moss sisters in their matching house shoes and coats and a single umbrella protecting their curlers from the rain. There was a sleepy and bed-clothed Mart Flannery and his son, Jeremiah. Zeb Cooper had jumped out of bed at the sound of the ambulance’s wail. Wearing nothing but red long johns and a pair of galoshes, he was trying to persuade his curious neighbors to move to the sidewalk. His son, Rowe, was there and his crying daughter, Cardigan — both of their faces white with shock. Next to them was his wife, Penelope, who’d wept upon learning that her own family was all right, and then again when she learned Emilienne’s family was not. There was Wilhelmina Dovewolf, guiding my mother inside Marigold’s house, both quiet in stoic despair.
There was Constance Quakenbush and Delilah Zimmer, best friends and first-grade teachers at the elementary school. There was Ignatius Lux, the high-school principal, and his wife, Estelle Margolis, and, next to them, Amos Fields, who’d never been much good to anyone since his son died in the Second Great War but always seemed to have money for a morning croissant at Emilienne’s bakery. There was Pastor Trace Graves and some of the high-school kids who’d wandered down from the reservoir. One of the boys thought to grab the big white dog standing in the street and loop his belt around the dog’s neck to keep him out of trouble. A girl wiped the dog’s muddy paws with her jacket. Eventually there were several teams of ambulance attendants and more police officers in stiff blue uniforms, their vehicles crowding the street in a chaotic jumble of flashing lights. When they carried me out — my wingless body prone on a stretcher, my mother and grandmother walking beside me in blood-covered clothes — it was said that the entire block fell silent in reverence.