In that moment while they were both frozen, Dayna looked down at Fiona’s hands on her arm. She’d been clawing at her, trying to get her to release her grip, and had pushed up one of the woman’s sleeves. “What is that?” At first glance she saw only a series of scratches, red and inflamed, but the pattern of scratches drew her gaze back.
There was something familiar about it, the shaky lines on the outside forming a circle, and the crisscrossed lines within. A wave of sick horror rolled over her.
It was familiar because she’d seen that mark over and over. At the stone circle at the first murder scene, carved into the trees behind Sage Widow, on the news constantly.
“That mark—”
Fiona released her abruptly and slammed Dayna back into the bookshelf, where she struck her shoulder just above the bite on her arm. She hissed at the pain and clutched the wound, blinking around at the bookshelves through tear-blurred eyes.
Fiona’s eyes were impossibly wide and black. Almost all pupil. She launched herself forward, knocking Meiner out of the way, grabbing at Dayna’s shirt, growling inches away from her face.
“I know it’s you.”
Dayna jerked back, and the book under Fiona’s arm crashed to the ground at their feet. Papers scattered across the carpet. As Fiona bent to snatch at them frantically, Dayna reached out and grabbed the nearest one, shock rooting her to the spot. Red ink spiraled down into the middle of the page, the same word repeated over and over until it was sucked into the center.
Dayna, Dayna, Dayna…Her name. Just her name, a thousand times over.
Fiona made a strangled sound of protest, darting forward to grab it out of her hands. A second later she froze as a deep voice from the end of the bookshelves cried out, “Fiona, don’t!”
The reverend was suddenly there, in his thick black jacket and white collar. He stood between two bookshelves at the end of the aisle, and Dayna wondered exactly how long he’d been there. How much he’d seen.
He looked furious. “Fiona! Don’t touch her. Go sit in the car immediately.” His gaze flicked from her to Dayna, and the anger drained out of his face. For a second he just looked exhausted, and then his expression hardened again, became stern. “Stay there while I get Fiona to the car. I need to speak with you privately.”
Dayna only nodded, too shocked to protest. She folded her arms over her chest to stop her hands from shaking, watching as the reverend escorted Fiona outside.
CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
DAYNA
They waited for a few minutes, Meiner staying close to her. Dayna kept glancing at the door, stomach twisting into knots.
Meiner kept her voice low. “Are you okay? Do you want me to stay?” Dayna swallowed and shook her head, watching as the reverend reentered through the glass doors and headed toward them.
“I’ll meet you outside, okay?”
Meiner only nodded silently and turned for the door, giving the reverend a cool look as she passed him.
In the beat or two of silence that followed, her father slipped his hands into his pockets and Dayna took several deep, shaky breaths, trying to slow her racing heart. She kept trying to make sense of what she’d seen just now: the symbol carved into her mother’s arm, the red spiral of her name snaking into the center of the page….
What the hell was going on?
The reverend’s face was grim and white. “You should have told me you found that woman’s body. I…I would have been there for you. I had to hear it from Samuel’s father.”
“I don’t want to talk about that.” Dayna’s frustration surged. “I want to talk about Fiona. She just attacked me. You saw it.”
For a long moment the reverend just stared at her, and then he sighed heavily. “I was hoping to avoid all of this, but…I think I have to tell you something about your mother, and I want you to listen without interrupting.”
Startled, she nodded, unease stirring her stomach.
“After you were born, your mother was never the same.” The reverend paused, brows furrowed. Then he squared his shoulders, as if he were steeling himself. “They called it postpartum psychosis, but…it never seemed to go away. For years, I tried everything, pills, doctors, psychologists. The mental health ward in the best hospitals. Sometimes she seemed to do better, but she’d always relapse, usually worse than before. The doctors…they seemed to think she wasn’t a normal case.” He frowned down at the bookshelves. “And at some point, when you were about four or five, her psychosis switched to a narrower focus…” He hesitated, eyes flicking up to Dayna’s face. “You.”
Dayna blinked at him. “What…what does that mean?”
“She became obsessed with you. Watching everything you did, talking about you constantly…Sometimes I’d catch her coming into your room in the middle of the night to just stand there and stare at you, for hours. She’d hurt herself sometimes, too, when the delusions got especially bad, run into door frames and things like that. She said it would make everything quiet again, at least for a while.”
Her throat was too tight to swallow properly, and her voice was hoarse when she spoke. “Quiet?”
“The delusion, I suppose. It all seemed to be centered on her belief that you were…I don’t know, not who you were supposed to be.”
Dayna’s mouth fell open. Suddenly the blacked-out pictures in the guest room made a terrible kind of sense. And what Fiona had said about Dayna not being real, and the symbol on her arm…
A strange, creeping horror was spreading over her skin.
“What else did she say about me?”
“Does it matter? She was delusional. It’s one of the reasons I waited so long to bring her back here. I was afraid seeing you again would make her slip back into it.”
She shook her head, not wanting to believe what he was saying. “You mean…it’s me. I’m her trigger.”
Her father nodded slowly, and the guilt on his face made her feel sick. “There’s more.”
“Tell me.”
“The reason I sent her away…” He hesitated. “She— I came into your room and she was…um, she was standing over you with a pillow.”
It felt like frost was creeping through her, freezing her core. “She was trying to smother me?”
“I don’t know for sure, but I suspected it. That was when I sent her away.”
She leaned back against the shelf, hand over her mouth. The room was spinning, and she dragged in a sharp breath, feeling suddenly light-headed.
Fiona had tried to kill her. The woman the reverend had brought back into her home had tried to murder her. And worse, the creeping suspicions were only getting stronger the more she thought about it.
The lines carved into Fiona’s arm, the symbol of the Butcher…it reminded her of the way the root ink on her cheek had looked the night of her ascension, her pledge to the goddess.
Did that mean Fiona was on his side? That she was helping him in some way? Helping him hide, maybe, or…finding him victims?
It had come back to her suddenly, the strange way Fiona had looked at her, the way she’d grasped her arm and hissed, Where are the rest of them?
Dayna had thought she meant her friends, but…what if she’d meant the other gods?