“Can we do it later, Granmos?” Kestrel asked. She’d been dangling from a tree all morning, and her head was pounding. She wanted to sink into the corner and go to sleep.
“Do you think the forest will wait? Do you think the wolves and the god-knows-what-else will let you pause and take a nap before they catch you?” She put the knife down and swiveled to face Kestrel properly. “Do as I say. Tell me what scares you.”
Kestrel’s mouth was dry. She stared at her grandma’s feet.
“I’m scared of wolves,” she said, somewhat truthfully.
“You can knock a wolf out with your eyes closed. Don’t avoid the question.”
“Ghosts,” Kestrel said, scrunching her fists. “Those birds with teeth.”
“Nobody likes them,” her grandma snapped. “What scares you? What keeps you awake at night and gives you nightmares? What makes your guts shrivel?”
For a moment, Kestrel knew what she was going to tell her grandma. Then she pressed her lips shut.
“You’ll use it against me,” Kestrel said bitterly.
Her grandma stood up so fast the chair fell over. In one second she’d crossed the room and grabbed Kestrel’s shoulders. Then Kestrel was pressed against the wall, and her grandma’s face filled her vision. She was so close that Kestrel could see the veins in her pale blue eyes, and smell her dry, sour breath. The locket her grandma always wore pressed against Kestrel’s ribs, so hard she knew it would leave a bruise.
“Say it,” her grandma snapped.
“Get off me,” Kestrel said, wriggling desperately. Her brain was shrieking at her to run. She felt the same as when she was cornered by a slavering monster, a bundle of jangling nerves and horror.
“Tell me!” her grandma shouted, her fingers digging into her shoulders. Her mouth was open in a snarl, her yellow-stained teeth as long as wolves’. “Say it!”
Kestrel felt a short, sharp pain, and woke suddenly, drenched in cold sweat. Pippit was on her face, scratching her with his claws. She gasped and fell out of the gutter, landing in a pile of dead leaves by her mother’s doorstep. Her spoon landed point-down in the ground next to her.
Pippit launched himself after her and landed on her chest, and started licking her cheeks.
The smell of Pippit’s breath was a horrible way to start the day, but at least it was real. Kestrel hugged him so tightly she could have crushed him.
“Nasty?” he said, wriggling to get out.
“It was just a dream,” she said, although she could still see her grandma’s veiny eyes, and her heart was thumping so fast she felt dizzy. “It happened a long time ago. It’s over.”
Pippit tilted his head, as though he could tell exactly how awful she felt. Kestrel had never answered her grandma’s question; it was the first time Kestrel had really disobeyed her. And only three days later, she let the grabber in.
She was a murderer.
The scene was printed behind Kestrel’s eyelids forever. On that night, she saw the grabber approach the house. It was very tall, and very old, with a thin neck that didn’t look like it should support its large skull. Its clothes barely hid the jumble of bones that poked out from its shirt. It wore some of Granmos’s stolen jewelry around its neck. One of its ears was hanging by a thread, and there was a large brass key dangling from its belt.
Kestrel’s grandma had always been afraid of her father. When she was young he used to lock her in the cellar. The day she became lost in the forest was the day she’d finally escaped the cellar, stealing his key as a terrible souvenir which she’d kept over the fireplace, until one day it had gone missing.
Even though Kestrel’s grandma was old and her father probably long dead, the old woman had always been worried, deep in her heart, that he would come looking for her and drag her back to the cellar.
Her grabber had brought a vision of the old man back to life.
Kestrel remembered glimpsing it through the shutters. The grabber pressed his pale, wormy lips to the other side, as gently as a moth bouncing against a lantern.
That night, Kestrel slipped away from the shutters and walked toward the door.
She reached out and started to twist the handle, feeling nothing except this slow, horrible anger that pushed everything else away. All she could think of was making the constant torture stop.
She heard her grandma turn around and drop the knife she was sharpening.
“Don’t!” Granmos shouted, in a voice filled with sharp, sheer panic, but it was too late. The next thing stamped guilt into Kestrel’s heart every time she remembered it.
The grabber was inside, striding toward her grandma, who was frozen, and it was reaching out for her with his long, cold fingers—and then it was dragging her outside.
Suddenly Kestrel realized what she had done, and she raced after them. She could see her grandmother’s face, furious with betrayal and something she’d never seen before: fear.
Then Granmos was gone, dragged into the belly of the forest.
Kestrel knew she was a terrible person. She was so ashamed of herself that she’d dreamed of her grandma almost every night since. But something deep in the pit of her stomach was also shamefully, horribly relieved.
She tried to tell herself that the grabber would have caught her grandma anyway, even if Kestrel hadn’t let it in. But it didn’t change what she had done.
“Kes?” Pippit said worriedly, licking her nose. Kestrel blinked the image away.
“Let’s find some monsters,” she said weakly. “We’ll grab Finn and go to the Salt Bog. Can you imagine if we found the path? Or my grandma’s grabber? I could kill it, and my mother would let me go. This could be the day.”
Pippit looked at her skeptically. He wrinkled his nose as though he wanted to say something else, but then he thought better of it and started to wash himself.
Kestrel slipped by the houses. It was a cold morning, and most of the doors were still shut tight. As she walked she flipped through her grandma’s notebook until she got to the entry about the Salt Bog, which contained lots of warnings about not going near it, absolutely not, no matter what, understande? There was also a description of something called the Briny Witch that had been almost completely obscured by mud.
“Yum?” said Pippit, spying a poisonous-looking mushroom on the ground.
“No,” said Kestrel quickly, and slammed the book shut so she could keep an eye on him.
It didn’t take her long to find Finn, who was hanging upside down from a tree and whistling. Pippit snickered as Kestrel crept up behind him.
“BOO!” she shouted. Finn yelped and fell out of the tree.
Kestrel laughed so hard she had to sit down, but Finn didn’t join her. He made a face that meant shut up and act normal, and flicked his eyes at the tree. Kestrel stopped and looked up. Perched in the branches, her skirt drooping like the tail feathers of an exotic bird, was Hannah.
“What’s she doing up there?” Kestrel said, astonished. She’d never seen anyone else in the trees before.
“I went to see her, like you asked,” Finn muttered. “She just sort of . . . followed me back. She said she wanted to learn how to climb trees. It’s weird. She’s being nice.”
“Where are you off to?” Hannah asked. She slid down from the tree with surprising grace, landing next to them with a tiny thump that barely even ruffled her skirt.
“Nowhere,” Kestrel said quickly, at the same time as Finn said, “Just for a walk.”
“Can I come?” Hannah asked, and without warning slid her arm through Kestrel’s. Kestrel froze, her whole arm on fire. She had no idea what to do. Nobody except Finn or her mother ever touched her. She was so close she could smell Hannah’s soap.