“I can’t explain it,” Theon breathes. “It isn’t even just the land anymore.” And for a startled moment, his face changes, all at once in dreadful harmony. Lil holds her breath and forces herself to look, breathe in the sight that makes her want to rip out her own ribs. Counts. One. Two. Three.

  “God, Lilith,” Jason whispers, clutching the fence with one hand, reaching for her with the other. “I don’t know how to make you understand the way I feel about you.” The poker slips from her hands.

  And from behind Lil, Wyn screams. Nothing but that could have jerked her away. He’s followed her, his toothy mask bravely balanced on his head, but he’s pale now, shaking all over. Lil whirls to him.

  “Hey,” she breathes. “Hey, it’s okay.” She catches him in her arms.

  “It’s”—his breath is hummingbird fast—“him. It’s. Him. The hungry man.”

  Their boogeyman. The thing that stalks children in the night. Lil whips back to the specter at her gate, putting Wyn behind her. He holds tight onto her hand. The intruder is Theon again, the moment over, and he glares at the boy in her arms.

  “Don’t listen to that mutt,” he snaps, petulant. “Send him away.”

  “Tell me one thing,” she demands. The face looks wrong on him now. Elongated, ill fitting. Like there’s something under the skin he wears. “Was Jason ever here? Or was he always you?”

  Theon blanches, utterly caught out. “I—” He can’t deny it. “Look,” he says, almost desperate. “The two of you kept cycling through the same old story. The same empty year. The same harvest. The same people leaving. You don’t even know you’re the only ones left here. Everyone else is gone, Lil, there’s no one left but us. Let me in.”

  Shock electrifies her. Everyone? It can’t be…

  But how many times had she stopped in town to find no one there? How many times has she felt like she and Sasha were all that existed?

  “Can you even remember this town’s name? The state you’re in? What’s the name of the river? You don’t even know, do you? It’s all eroding. You’re ghosts living in a ghost town, living the same year over and over again for thirty years,” Theon says.

  Lil picks Wyn up and holds him as fragments of Theon’s whole insidious speech find her. They burrow under her skin like poisoned needles, a stain she may never be free of.

  “And Jason? Coming for the funeral? Staying in town for you? Bringing up the Pecan Festival? That isn’t what happened. Is it?”

  Suddenly, blood pulses in her ears. She sees Jason, standing on the tired porch of Honeysuckle House. “I’m sorry, Lil. The Pecan Festival is a great idea. You have so many great ideas.”

  Of course. The banners in his attic. She’d shown him, the first time. It was her idea, her appeal to Jason. To get him to stay. And he’d said—he’d said—

  “But I can’t stay. This isn’t my home anymore.”

  “Jason hasn’t been here for thirty years. He’s been a ghost,” Theon snaps. “Until…this time, he became me.”

  Jason hugging her one last time. Her steely anger. “Don’t come back this time, if you don’t intend to stay,” she’d said, only she hadn’t meant it, and by his sad smile, even Jason knew it. His car, vanishing down the horizon. She’s been trying to bring him back and find a way to make him want to stay ever since.

  It was the last nail in the coffin. The morning after their thirtieth birthday, she’d seen it, hadn’t she? The sign on the Finch orchard, red letters on the white and blue Realtor’s sign. SOLD.

  One of the last great houses, gone. To Theon.

  “I’ll never leave,” she’d promised the trees, the water, the earth, the house that night. “Even if everyone else leaves, I’ll stay.”

  “We’ve been caught in this cycle so long, I thought I’d change it up. Try getting you to let me in as him, rather than me,” Theon murmurs. “This time, when I met his echo at the funeral, I had the idea. To become him. I slipped into his skin, bit by bit. I showed you the fires from the hill. And it was different. You and I felt something. It was us. Let me in—”

  She wants to vomit. It wasn’t Jason with her that night at Honeysuckle House. It had been a lie, Theon wearing his skin and she’d—believed. Heart, body, and soul, she’d believed. He made her trust him. “You sicken me,” she breathes.

  Theon hunches like a kicked dog. But he isn’t. He isn’t. He is a monster. She sees it now, the strangeness of him, the feeling of him, like he is rage and hunger barely contained in a paper shell.

  “I loved Jason,” she spits, with all the hatred burning her up inside. “I will never love you.”

  Raw hurt shines in his eyes. Almost like tears. He looks lost with it.

  Lil takes a breath and locks her knees, because if she doesn’t, she might crumple. “No matter how many times you come back or how you trick us, what form you take, Sasha and I will drive you out. Every time.” She tucks Wyn’s face into her shoulder and stares their monster down. “I don’t want you, you—you thing.”

  Theon’s struck dumb one moment. And the next, fury morphs over his face. Without a sound, he disappears.

  In the silence, Lil could weep. She can’t. There’s someone who needs her more, shuddering against her collar. Wyn is too young for this.

  She shifts him in her arms enough to check on him and wipe a few tears from his eyes. “It’s okay,” she says, over and over again. “It’s okay. It’s okay…”

  But it isn’t. She’s never seen Theon angry like that. He’s always played human before, but never made such a vulnerable play. Now she’s coldly aware that all bets are off.

  And she doesn’t even know what he is.

  Sasha has the truck. But the Smiths next door have a tractor. And they never lock their barn.

  “We need to go get Autumn and Sasha,” she says, putting Wyn down. “Can you be brave with me? A little longer?”

  After a moment, he lowers the mask over his face. It glowers up at her. She takes his hand and they start running.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  When the world is young, he crawls out of the hot mud on his belly. He has been spit from the slavering, volcanic maw of the earth, and the starshine above him aches. And he is hungry, so hungry his insides eat themselves.

  He limps his way in darkness to the gleam-flicker of fire—warmth that burns against whisker and fang. It is not fire which draws him, but the other warmth. The warm red river-pulse inside the figures who have built the flame. Whining, he comes on his belly for help. But they kick, bellow loud from their chests and he flees—quick to hide, or they club at his tender places. He is young too, like the world. Easy to hurt.

  But he cannot stay away. He licks his own blood, chews his own limb and tail and bone, and it does not sate him; he is so hungry he is so hungry he is so hungry—

  So he learns. When they sleep, he sneaks back. He wears a new form, a facsimile of what the fire-builders are. It is all shadow, too long of back, too sharp of fang, legs that do not bend as they should. But it is strong. He is strong. Hunger snarls in his belly as he steals one away, gathers one of them up in his new arms and tosses it over unwieldy shoulders—and he runs on false legs.

  In the darkness, he and his first prey discover that the throb of fresh heart in his throat soothes him. As does the scream. As does the fear. Because as he learns under his first moon, the hunger of his body is small compared to the empty need of his being, the hunger of himself. He eats and eats and is empty, so empty, like the mouth of the earth he crawled from.

  ***

  He lingers, follows the people as they squirm across the dirt of the young world. He steals from their beds and their tables, eats in the darkness, revels in his growing strength. Until one day they rise as one and attack. They corner him in the dark cave where he has made his first home and strike his tender places. It is a shock, pain and blood and fear—his attackers leave him for dead and flee. He lingers. But then he heals. And eventually, he follows, weak as he is, pitiful creature he has been reduced to. He has nowhere else to go, no company in this world but the people. He will have to be more careful. He fears their clubs and kicks.

  And so he learns new forms. He can be a rustle of wind in trees, he can be deer with antlers built high, he can be ravenous gleam-flicker-flame. But the nuances of their own shape still elude him; he struggles to speak their throat-sounds. So he does not fit in. If he comes near as one of them, he is caught out and chased.

  They know he haunts them. They give him a name. Though they spit it like a curse, it is nice to be known. They try to ward him off with blood on their doors. He does not realize it is meant to deter when he first laps it up with hungry tongue. Initially, he takes it for an invitation.

  When they move on, frightened by the babies torn from their beds, by the graves dug up, by the abandoned camps consumed by fire, he follows. He is growing strong again. And he has come to like the taste of their scraps.

  ***

  As eons pass, he becomes new forms. The human form, once such a mystery, with practice, becomes a convenience. He is man, he is woman, he is running water eating shoreline, he is howling wolf pack, he is screaming train, eating and eating of the land. He is a thousand hungers. He is consumption itself. He remains fond of his first ones: the begging coyote, the shadow with antlers, the ever-starving flame.

  He gives himself a name, to talk to them. He makes it up himself. Theon. If he asks nicely, humans give him his meals now. He finds the lonely and lost places, comes to them at their death, and eats what’s left. Theon loves what humans do to the earth. He loves the way their hunger leaves the earth scorched and ravaged until it cannot sustain them and they have to leave. And it is all his.

  Until one day, he comes to this town. And at its heart, a pond. A tree. Theon has never smelled anything like it. He doesn’t know what it is. But he knows it’s old. It’s eternal and bottomless like him. Finally, a meal that matches his hunger. And he is ravenous for it. He knows that the pond and its tree are meant for him. It’s the first time he’s ever been close to something that will fill him. He wants, so much, to be sated.

  But he has barely approached the woman who guards it, barely asked to buy—there are more elegant ways to eat now than scrounging at a firepit—before she chases him away. Here is a place he cannot gnaw to the bone because of two sisters sustaining it. There is the old magic, the pond and tree that grow strong at the heart. He cannot get it. It has been long since he has been denied like this, but it will only make the eating sweeter.

  Fine. A long game. He has the language now to play games as men do. And while he waits for the pond, the land feeds him. It gives orchards, fallow lands. And children. Tenderest of all, this land is peopled with plenty of abandoned, forgotten children. They remind him of his first taste of blood. They grow of the trees, so humans don’t care for them either. There are so few creatures like him anymore who grow in strange ways. The kinship he feels with them is more proof that this place was made for him. They are fun to hunt. He wastes happy years tracking them down, one by one, easy pickings as he waits for his feast. He is content to stay. He is so hungry.

  He is train, he is fire, he is eminent domain. He is suffocating miles of kudzu growing over trees and grass, greedy for sunlight. And so he eats everything the town has to offer.

  Until one day, he is locked out of the orchard entirely and cannot step foot on the land.

  It must be the fault of the sisters. Theon stands at the edges of the fence, screams, salivates, and burns—but he has been pushed out. It is unthinkable.

  For ages, he runs the edges of the barrier on coyote feet, he claws at the firm husk that keeps him out when he wants in. Full of rage, he burns houses and buildings, and blankets himself over them as living green. He eats at the town because they won’t let him in the orchard. For years and years, they hold fast.

  Until he feels a new pull. Eager, ravenous, he follows it. It’s a pull from inside the husk. A longing from the very woman who has denied him, time and time again. For she, herself, craves. He feels it under her skin, awash in her pulse, in the shine of her eyes. She is tired of grief and loneliness. Theon is not welcome. But Jason is longed for.

  But he missteps.

  He only means to taste Jason’s form. Jason is a creature who burns too. Theon pulls him over himself like a mantle, little by little. He learns his ways. Jason is welcome in the orchard, he sees. He wants that.

  But when he wears this skin, Theon forgets himself. He is ancient, and she is just a woman—but no one has wanted him in any form before.

  And he answers her desire.

  He answers again, yes and yes, and yes.

  He carries Jason’s memories, has picked over them like carrion, has sucked in his love and lust until Theon knows Lil as Jason did. And he forgets that he is not Jason. At their first touch, Honeysuckle House burns around them. It’s the first fire he didn’t intend to set since the form of flames was new to him. Around them it burns with abandon and he is helpless. He too is burning inside.

  Waking before her, there is nothing he can do but run. Theon only wanted to drink from the unending well of the pond. And yet, Jason didn’t look to the pond, the land, the scraps for his satiation; he found it in Lil.

  Could Theon?

  Is this love?

  But Lil will not let him in again, nor will she accept him now that she knows the game. She will not let him have the pond, the tree, herself. Humans always bellow and club his tender places. He was a fool to expect different of her.

  Yet he knows her tender places now too. He knows what will make her relent. The other sister is on open water, out of their sanctuary. And Lil won’t hold so firm a line alone. Eventually, even she will be lonely.

  He is so hungry.

  But not for much longer.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Sasha never got around to preparing the steamboat for the Pecan Ball, but it sits on the river like a paper lantern. A warm golden glow emanates from the deck lights, framing the guests with soft auras. She parks in the grassy field that acts as an overflow lot. They can hear a jazz band tuning up on deck as they wait to board.

  Autumn is close beside her, and there’s another thrill low in her stomach that she’s actually managed to speak finally. Standing there in line, she wishes fervently that they could just be alone, actually, with none of their neighbors around to fog the clear window of this joy. She glances over at Autumn.

  By and large, she’s unchanged: her swept-up hair is a little messy, she has that same impish grin, the same unladylike mannerisms. She’s still Sasha’s Pip, who wakes her up by pouncing on her bed and tickling her, and borrows Sasha’s hands for thumbprint cookies. Only now, Sasha knows what Autumn feels like, skin to bare skin. What she looks like with nothing between them but moonlight. She knows what it’s like to kiss her, slow, lazy, and sated while water hushes by underneath their tree house.

  “Guess I’m not on duty tonight,” Sasha notices, nodding at Tim, one of the jolly shipmates who runs the ferry when she isn’t there, behind the wheel. He looks excited, and she doesn’t blame him; they don’t get this boat out of its covered storage space often. It gleams with an improbable luster tonight.

  She people watches. It’s fun to see the town, usually behind counters or sweeping up shops, bedecked in their (somewhat humble) finery. There’s Su and her string bean of a husband, talking to the high school vice principal, little glasses of cordial in their hands. Freddie, their town librarian, adjusts his bow tie in the reflection of a brass pole. It looks like Pop has brought his daughter for a date, and she wears a corsage of burnt-orange mums.

  There are some faces missing, of course. Somehow, death and loss can still reach them here in the snow globe. Russ. Jason. These are jarring absences, but no one else seems at all aware of anything off. She casts an eye for Lou, but Autumn slips her arm into Sasha’s elbow, and she is distracted.

  “Ooh, puff pastries,” she says. “You tackle the caterer, I grab the whole tray?”

  Sasha laughs. “I think—” But the steamboat’s whistle interrupts her. Beneath them, the boat rumbles. They’re some of the last aboard. The steamboat is getting underway. They chug out onto the dark water, the same misty currents Sasha has traversed so many times before. Quietly, she urges the shorelines to hold them snugly, and allow nothing, no bad winds, no thunder, to puncture the evening for her.

  First, they do a tour of all the hors d’oeuvres floating around the deck, and each receives a full critical review. Almost always, Autumn has made a more delicious version of each delicacy, or has ideas about how she might. Sasha snickers, jabbing several smoked oyster canapes into Pip’s mouth.

  They drift over to the bar for glasses of spiced cider. Sasha leans against the rails, gazing out at the rush of the river. The band is in full ecstasies on the upper deck. Back toward the town, and up on the ridge, twinkle bright, flickering stars. More phantom fires. “No one knows,” Sasha murmurs. “No one knows but us.”

  “Yeah.” Autumn leans the other way, facing the people making a go of dancing under the string lights. Autumn tilts enough that her hand finds Sasha’s shoulder. “Is it bad that I’m happy?” she hedges. The turn of her neck makes it hard to meet her eyes, hard to see anything but the shine of her hair, and the butterfly clip keeping strands out of her face. “I’m kind of used to being—left behind,” she grits out. “I’m okay. Mostly. I’ve had a really good life. Mostly. But it’s hard to see people change. So finding you of all people again…even as messed up as all this is…” She swallows. “I’m just glad you’re here.”

  They’re brave words, a confession that seizes Sasha by the heart. She dips her head, lips brushing Autumn’s, pulling her in to crowd Sasha into the banister. Pip smells of fall. “I guess I know what I’ve been waiting all this time for,” she says against Pip’s mouth.

  Autumn’s breath catches lightly, and Sasha’s hand tightens against her hip in response.