Chapter 75 - Echoes in the Marrow
It was not Eleanor. Not yet.
The thing that stood in the rain was what remained of my sister, Chloe.
Her silhouette was warped, elongated, her spine bent at an unnatural angle that suggested multiple compound fractures that had healed incorrectly in a matter of hours. The designer dress she had worn to her baby shower hung in tatters around her emaciated frame, encrusted with dried sea salt and black grease. But her face—illuminated by the twin amber glows floating in the trees above her—was slack, her jaw hanging open as if unhinged, thick black tendrils spilling from her mouth and coiling down her neck like a living beard.
"Chloe..." I breathed, terror freezing the air in my lungs.
"She's gone, Clara," Miller said quietly, his hand moving down to unholster his service revolver. "That isn't your sister. Look at her chest."
Beneath the sodden fabric of her dress, her abdomen wasn't rounded with pregnancy anymore. It was hollowed out, collapsed inward like an empty husk, the ribs protruding sharply through the pale skin. Whatever she had carried—the child she had toasted to, the bloodline she had bragged about before her mother pushed me—had already been harvested.
*“Clara...”* The sound didn't come from her lips. It came from the car's dead dashboard radio, crackling through the blown speakers in a raspy, dual-toned imitation of my sister’s voice. *“Why... didn't you... share? Mother gave... you... the gold. She gave me... the rot.”*
Chloe took a step forward. Her left leg bent backward at the knee with an audible snap, but she didn't flinch. She simply dragged it forward, her fingernails clicking against the wet asphalt like crab legs.
"Stay in the car," Miller ordered, kicking his door open into the storm. "Clara, lock the doors. If I go down, you run into the woods toward the old fire tower. Do not look back."
"Miller, don't! The bullets won't stop her!"
Miller stepped out, raising his revolver with both hands. "Chloe Vance! Step back! Drop to the ground!"
The creature that had been my sister tilted its head sixty degrees to the side. A wet, bubbling hiss escaped her throat, and then she moved.
She didn't run; she launched herself across the forty feet of tarmac on all fours, her limbs moving with a disjointed, insectoid velocity that defied human anatomy. Miller fired three shots in rapid succession. The muzzle flashes lit up the dark, the heavy lead rounds tearing fist-sized holes through her chest and shoulder, blowing out sprays of black, oil-like fluid instead of blood.
She didn't even slow down.
The impact drove Miller backward against the hood of the cruiser. Chloe’s hands, elongated and tipped with jagged shards of blackened bone, wrapped around his throat, lifting his two-hundred-pound frame off the ground with terrifying ease.
Inside the car, Leo began to shriek. It was the first time I had heard him cry—a high-pitched, piercing wail that tore through the vehicle.
The moment the baby cried, Chloe stopped.
Her head jerked toward the rear window, her jaw working furiously as the black tendrils in her mouth writhed. Her milky, pupil-less eyes locked onto the bundle in my arms.
*“The... seed...”* the radio hissed.
I didn't think. The gun Vance-Cross had dropped was sitting on the floorboard between my feet. I grabbed the cold steel grip, kicked the rear passenger door open, and stepped out into the freezing mud.
"Chloe!" I screamed over the roar of the gale.
She dropped Miller, who slumped into the ditch gasping for air, and turned her contorted torso completely around without moving her hips.
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"You wanted my baby?" I raised the tactical sidearm, leveling it directly between her amber-glowing eyes. "You should have stayed on the balcony."
I emptied the magazine.
