It wasn’t supposed to work this way, damn it! he thought again. She was supposed to cry! Both of them were supposed to be afraid!
He snapped his fingers in front of Katie’s face, but she ignored him. Instead, she turned to Jonathan, extending her hand, and Jonathan took it. Jealousy, kitten-clawed, scratched its way down Row’s spine. He didn’t like the way Katie and Jonathan were looking at each other, communicating without talking. Once, that had been the two of them, Row and Katie. In a town that had forgotten him, only Katie had seen him clearly. The longer she and Jonathan kept looking at each other that way, the more uneasy he became, until he finally told Lear, “Break them apart.”
Lear grabbed Katie and tugged her away. Katie looked up, and Row took a step backward. Her face was a wild bloom of color, and her eyes had narrowed to bright green slits. In the next moment she leapt across the room and attacked Jonathan.
Row stared at this development, too shocked to respond; he had ordered Gavin to keep an extra close watch on her, assuming that if she went for anyone, it would be himself. But now she was grappling with Tear, climbing his back. Lear and Gavin and the others stood frozen, their mouths gaping, as Katie gritted her teeth and wrapped her arms around Tear’s neck. Tear didn’t even fight her off, only stood there, gasping for breath, and at the last minute Row realized what was happening and jumped forward, but it was too late. The snap of Tear’s neck was almost deafening in the high, hollow emptiness of the church. Katie dropped him, and the body slumped to the ground, eyes wide open and staring.
“God help us!” Gavin shouted, and Row wanted to tell him to shut up—only a fool like Gavin would still believe in God, at this of all moments—but he bit his tongue. He might need Gavin now. Katie stared down at Tear’s body, her shoulders heaving, and Row watched her, feeling as though he had never seen her before.
“Katie?” he asked.
She looked up, and Alain began to shriek.
Katie’s mouth was open wide, so wide that she appeared to be screaming herself. As Row watched, the hole opened wider and wider, growing in circumference until it seemed that her mouth must swallow her head. Her eyes and nose tipped backward until they seemed to be first on top of her head, then behind it. The open mouth grew into a black hole, and Row watched, frozen in horror, as first a hand emerged, then an arm.
Alain bolted from the room, still screaming, Howell and Morgan right behind him. Gavin and Lear stayed put, but Gavin had drawn into the corner of the pulpit, wrapping his arms around himself, his eyes wide and bruised as he watched Katie transform. Now a shoulder had emerged, and while Row watched, the edges of the hole rippled and a head pushed its way through, and as he glimpsed the face, Row screamed himself. The dead didn’t frighten him. He had been dealing with corpses for years. The dead didn’t frighten him, but this was no corpse.
This was a ghost.
Lily Freeman had emerged from Katie’s form, shedding it as easily as a snake sheds its skin, leaving Katie’s behind, a small heap discarded on the floor. Lily was naked, her body streaked with black, like smears of earth, her long dark hair unbound, not the woman Row had known but someone much younger. He had seen this Lily before, in the portrait that hung in the Tears’ front room. Several times, Row had snuck in to explore the Tear house when no one was home, and the portrait of Lily had always struck him, though he couldn’t say why. However little use Row had for his mother, he had always been able to feel her anger when he looked at that picture, at the wildly happy Lily who had ruined everything, taken everything that the Finns should have had.
Lily was wearing his crown. Row stared at its glinting blue and silver, horrified; he had been ready to commit murder to get it back, even to torture Katie, if it came to that, but he could no more snatch the thing off a ghost’s head than he could have taken the jewel from around Jonathan Tear’s neck. It might as well have been on the moon.
She turned to look at him, and Row screamed again. The face was Lily’s, but the eyes were gaping ebon pupils. Her mouth was hard, a black-edged grimace, as though the lips were lined with soot.
“You were right, Row,” she whispered, and that was the worst of all, for the words were Katie’s, Katie’s voice echoing from the mouth of this filthy apparition. “We don’t have room for special people here.”
She lurched forward, and Row scrambled away, stumbling behind one of the ten pews that lined the right side of the church.
“No saved people,” Lily rasped. “No chosen people. Only everyone, all together.”