Walt and Ike had been prodding the face painter’s body with a long stick, but now they looked up as though they had only just remembered Kestrel was there.
“How long has it been living here?” Ike asked sharply.
“She was probably working with it,” Hannah said behind her.
A wave of fury crashed over Kestrel’s head. Fury at what had happened to her mother and her grandma. Fury at the face painter, for tricking them. Fury at the villagers, for being complicit in it all.
“Shut up,” she said quietly.
“What?” Hannah said. Kestrel turned to face her and the villagers, her fists clenched.
“You heard me,” she said. “All you’ve ever done is hide and whisper, telling one another how terrible I am, and you’re still doing it now!” She stepped forward, and several of them automatically backed away. “At least I tried to stand up to my moth- the face painter,” she snapped. “You just kept feeding it, and making it stronger, and doing everything it said, and helping it by torturing me. Because you’re all weak.”
Kestrel stopped to take a breath. She could feel their disbelief rising off them. None of them seemed to know what to do.
In the end, she didn’t have to say anything.
“You were its servant,” said Hannah softly. “You were the one who made it strong.”
Kestrel lashed out without thinking. She caught Hannah in the face, leaving a long scratch down her cheek. Hannah screamed. Kestrel grabbed Pippit and scrambled away as the villagers fell on her. She swam through her mother’s fallen hair and crooked arms as everyone roared and tried to grab her.
“Go!” shouted Pippit.
Kestrel didn’t have a plan.
She stood up, ran, and threw herself to the hungry forest.
18
THE GRABBER
The villagers came after her, hurling abuse, many of them braving the clutches of the forest for the first time in their lives. Kestrel ran until she was sure that she’d lost them, but she could still hear their voices curling through the trees.
So she stumbled on. Deep in her heart she knew that she wouldn’t find an end to the forest. It was too cruel and clever to let her out.
She crashed through the undergrowth and fell over, gasping for breath. The forest was plunged into silence. Kestrel got up, feeling ill. Something wasn’t right.
She’d only heard silence like this when a grabber was on the loose.
She heard a long, ragged breath in the trees.
“Hello?” she whimpered.
No answer. She looked around, a silent scream building inside her.
Her grabber was standing behind her. It was waiting for Kestrel to notice it. Beetles crawled over its shock of gray hair and squirmed under its coat, which was made of different colored rags. The grabber breathed in deeply, its whole body swelling until it seemed that it would burst at the seams.
Bile rose in Kestrel’s throat. She meant to back away, but the grabber had her caught in a strange kind of gravity, and she found herself rooted to the spot. She was drowning in panic. It was stuck in her throat and swamping her lungs. The air was too thick to breathe.
She was going to die.
The grabber reached toward her, its fingers wriggling in anticipation.
Its hands didn’t match. One was small and elegant, thick with tarnished silver rings—the rings she’d found in the Salt Bog, the ones that had belonged to her grandma. The other was the bluish, waterlogged hand of the Briny Witch. The holey stone Kestrel had given him was jammed on its middle finger. Kestrel’s heart did backflips when she imagined what it would have taken to kill the half-drowned man.
Its back was slightly hunched, but it was larger, much larger than Granmos had been, as though the old woman had been stretched in all directions. It had dipped its hands in blood to mimic her grandma’s permanently stained nails.
The grabber shivered in recognition when Kestrel met its eyes.
You always know what your grabber’s going to be, deep down.
Kestrel couldn’t speak. She could barely move. The grabber took one step forward, and its tongue darted out to lick its lips. Kestrel finally regained control of her legs, and she took one step back, then another. The grabber waited a moment.
Then it lunged.
Kestrel turned and fled, plunging back into the trees with no idea of her direction, or where she was going, only that she had to get away from her grabber. The forest came back to life, trying to catch her with its teeth and nails. Wild dogs danced behind Kestrel, snapping their jaws, and shining blackbirds crashed around her head as she ran through the grasping trees. She ran into a tangle of thorns which dug into her clothes and her hair. She ripped them away in a blind panic, hardly noticing them tear her hands, and looked for a way around them.
The grabber wasn’t behind her anymore; it was coming from her right, as though it was herding her somewhere. She could hear it coming toward her, crushing branches under its feet. Kestrel’s legs were shaking so hard she could barely run anymore, but she finally got free of the thorns and stumbled on.
A tiny, desperate part of Kestrel wished the grabber would just get it over with. Why couldn’t it just attack her? She knew it was chasing her like this for a reason, but her thoughts were shouting over the top of one another, and she couldn’t make sense of them. All she knew was that she had to get away.
Suddenly, without any noise at all, the grabber was in front of her with its arms outstretched. Kestrel screamed and swerved to the side. She fell over a branch and hit the ground with a bone-crunching oomph, and the grabber stepped toward her. It wasn’t even out of breath.
Kestrel was ready to roll over and plead with it, but a creaky, familiar voice rang through her head.
Get up, you stupid girl. Run.
Granmos’s voice was as clear as ice. Kestrel obeyed numbly. She dragged herself to her feet again and sprinted, just as its claws closed over where her head had been. The grabber was only surprised for a second; then it was a moment behind, running swiftly through the trees, immune to the screaming animals and the shadows. Kestrel would never outrun it. It would never tire.
Just when it seemed that there was nowhere left to go, nothing left to try, Kestrel heard her grandma’s voice again.
Think! Granmos snapped, just like she had when Kestrel was training, a hundred times over. How did I stop my grabber?
Kestrel tried to squash the dozen clamoring voices in her head, the ones screeching at her to give up. She forced them into the dark space at the back of her mind where she’d hidden everything else, her huge fears and her sorrow, and made herself concentrate.
But she didn’t know how Granmos had kept her grabber from eating her for so long. She’d died anyway, alone and frightened, sucked into the belly of her monster. Her grandma, who had never been scared of anything in her life.
Fear had gotten the better of her. Kestrel stumbled over a stone in surprise. The thought was so huge it was almost blinding. She leaned over and gasped for air, then staggered on, desperately turning it over and over in her head.
That’s it! her grandma urged.
The grabber had eaten Granmos when she was scared. That’s what changed—she was scared that Kestrel was going to be killed.