All the Hearts You Eat E-Book

Hailey Piper

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Abenteuer, Thriller, Horror
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 584

Beschreibung

A visceral and heartbreaking work of gothic horror about small town mysteries, local folklore and the things we leave behind when we're gone, from the Bram Stoker Award winning author of Queen of Teeth. What really happened to Cabrina Brite? Ivory's life changes irrevocably when she discovers the body of Cabrina Brite on the sands of Cape Morning, along with a mysterious poem. How did she die, and why does it seem she was trying to swim to Ghost Cat Island, the center of so many local mysteries? Desperate to uncover the answers surrounding Cabrina's death, and haunted by her discovery, Ivory begins to see the pale ghost of Cabrina, only to shake it off as a mere hallucination. But Ivory is not alone. Cabrina's closest friends have also seen a similar apparition, and as they toy with occult possibilities, they begin to unravel the truth behind Cabrina's death. Because Cape Morning isn't a ghost town, but a town filled with ghosts, and Ivory is about to discover just what happens when you let one in.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Part One: The Ghost

1.The Body

2.The Fool

3.The Heart

4.The Invitation

5.The Visitor

6.Haunted

7.The Angel

8.The Cemetery

9.Secrets

Part Two: The Night of Fools

10.The Séance

11.An Ocean of Ghosts

12.The Answering Cry

13.Star Ocean

14.Cape Morning

15.Creatures of The Night

16.Prey

Part Three: Patient is the Night

17.All Manner of Beasts

18.The Hunger

19.Lie Still in the Dark

20.The Shaping Place

21.Twilight

22.Real and Dangerous

23.Heightened Senses

Part Four: The Drowning Place

24.Symptoms

25.The Plan

26.Purpose

27.In The Belly of the Brite

28.The Hunters

29.The Clean Room

30.Out

31.The Hunted

32.A Dance With Devils

33.The Key

34.The Night Wind

Part Five: The Night of Beasts

35.Those Who Remain

36.The Sea Takes Blood

37.The Dead

38.Sister Night

39.The Laughing Beast

40.The Man With The Machete

41.Cape Shadow

42.Her Smile

43.The Broken

44.A Creature of Death

45.Revenge

46.Another Bite

47.The Brite Girl

48.In The Earth

49.A Shard of Ivory

Acknowledgements

About the Author

A PASTE MAGAZINE MOSTANTICIPATED HORROR NOVEL OF 2024

“You think you know how this haunting will go, but you don’t. All the Hearts You Eat has a dark and powerful undertow, and it’ll pull you far, far out to sea.”

Chuck Wendig, New York Times bestselling author of Wanderers and Black River Orchard

“All the Hearts You Eat is a secret spell, a starless sky, the chambers of a heart and the depths of sorrow. Hailey Piper grips us in this gorgeous yet tragic death poem and life poem, in which we’re struck with the utter heartbreak of how when we are starved of friendship, love, and care we are turned into a monster. As beautiful as the sea and as unsettling as its destructive waves.”

Cynthia Pelayo, Bram Stoker Award®-winning author of Crime Scene

“Sharp but tender, delicate but bloody, tragic but triumphant, All the Hearts You Eat will curl cat claws into your chest and take hold of your heart. This is Stephen King’s IT for a new generation.”

Delilah S. Dawson, New York Times bestseller and auhor of Bloom

“Piper delivers not only a fresh twist on the vampire mythos, but a juicy reimagining of horror’s archetypal Dead Girl Story. This book contains an ocean of feminist rage, queer love, and trans resistance—and like an ocean, it’s as violent as it is beautiful. All the Hearts You Eat is here to rip a hole in your world.”

Lindsay King-Miller, author of The Z Word

“Piper writes about the big, overarching things here—love, loss, desire, belonging—with the same nuance and precision she brings to this novel’s haunting, braided narratives. All the Hearts You Eat has the insistent pull of a fever dream.”

Keith Rosson, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author of Fever Dream

“All the Hearts You Eat paints monsters from the whispers of the waves, scrying secrets from bittersweet death poetry. Piper examines with uncompromising force the ghosts we leave behind when sorrow is unclaimed by the sea but still eroded by its waves. Utterly haunting.”

Sofia Ajram, author of Coup de Grâce

“Sad, furious, hopeful and absolutely lovely.”

Hildur Knútsdóttir, author of The Night Guest

“Weaving classic horror elements into a powerful tale of trans solidarity and the life-sucking toll of being forced back into the closet, Piper cements her place in the queer horror canon.”

Publishers Weekly, starred review

“All the Hearts You Eat is filled with mesmerizing and breathless words that explore violent pleasures, painful desires, insatiable thirst, sacrifices in hopes of acceptance and belonging, scraping both across and under the skin with effortless lyricism—a novel with an alluring pull, like following a hypnotic trail, and by the time you notice how deep you’ve tread, it’s already far too late.”

Ai Jiang, Bram Stoker® and Nebula Award-winning author of Linghun

Also available from Hailey Piper and Titan Books

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All the Hearts You Eat

Print edition ISBN: 9781803367644

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803367651

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: October 2024

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© Hailey Piper 2024

Hailey Piper asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

“We are the saddest of all the animals.”

—Lindsay Lerman

“Most people have a ghost story of some kind, even if they don’t believe in ghosts.”

—Alison Rumfitt, Tell Me I’m Worthless

Once there was a ghost who fell in love with a lady by the sea. It happened here on the sand and rock, against the brine and rhythm and salt.

The ghost first fell in love with her forlorn beauty. And then her smile. And as the ghost haunted her, it fell in love with her spirit. It loved her so hard that it clawed a hole from the world of the dead into the world of the living and tried to take her home to that dead place.

But the ghost was part of the sea, and the sea wants blood. Everyone who lives on the coast and alongside its waves should know that.

The cold of the sea sank its fingers into the lady’s once-warm flesh, into her slowing heart. For a moment, the ghost and the sea were one, and she became one with them, and in another kind of story, this might have been an ecstasy.

We only know the one kind of story: the life in her seeped away, and she died, like all tragic lovers torn between worlds.

The romantics would say they are now ghosts together in the world of the living. But those who walk the coast and brush against its enigmatic nature know the story better. We say that when the ghost broke through the worlds, something shattered in the way people die here, and no one can mend the wound. The romantics might also say that lovers who’ve been torn apart between worlds can at least reunite in the world of the dead.

But those aren’t the kinds of stories we tell in the uncertain places by the sea.

PART ONE: THE GHOST

1. THE BODY

The sea wanted blood. Ivory Sloan had known that all her life, traveling from one coastal town or another along the eastern United States. She had spent most of her twenty-nine years with a passable understanding for the Atlantic Ocean and its hazards—jellyfish, undertow, strangers.

She should have expected to find death at the shores of Cape Morning.

A gray overcast painted the sky as she approached the water; New England coastal summer made for uncertain vacations against its sudden storm fronts, and there was no better deterrent for tourists than a chilly early twilight mixed with chances of unpleasant weather. Unlikely for other locals to wander the shore yet, either.

For a few minutes each morning, this stretch of beach belonged to Ivory. One of the rare perks of renting her stuffy attic room—ready access to the water. Before true daylight lured overheated tourists to the beach and cooped her up in the café until evening, she wanted her morning swim.

Down wooden steps and a grassy slope, white sand led the way to chopping waves. Ivory passed an enormous driftwood tree that had been lying on the shore the past few months. It had supposedly floated down from Canada, but no one could be sure. Scars marked its trunk where barnacles once clung to the bark.

Ivory crossed her arms and slid her pastel pink hoodie up her midriff, past her chest, and over her head. She folded it with care and laid it in the sand beside the driftwood tree, and then she set her boots and socks on top. Her jeans joined the pile last, revealing in full her black one-piece swimsuit and her inner thigh tattoo.

I am a creature of life, it read in curving letters and black ink.

Her swimsuit’s dark hue made each part of her torso look smaller, shrinking her chest, belly chub, and the swell between her legs. She didn’t want anyone to see that part of her, especially after she emerged from the water, swimsuit clinging to her skin. Neither locals nor tourists would understand. Or worse, they might understand, and she had no control over what they might decide to do with that understanding.

One quick swim, that was all she wanted. In and out from here to Ghost Cat Island, the tiny sea-slick patch of rock standing not far from shore, and no stranger would stroll close enough when she fetched her clothes off the beach to eyeball the outline of her tits or her dick.

The sand was cold against her feet as she padded toward the Atlantic. Wet impressions dotted the shore’s edge behind her before the next wave splashed her knees and flattened the sand. A chill hit her skin, but it would fade once her muscles went to work.

She had reached waist-deep water, the waves frothing at her arms and chest, when she noticed the man standing on the beach.

Her knees buckled, tugging her down so that the surf pushed at her chin. She hardly ever saw anyone out this early, at least not in June. Maybe in July or August when the daytime sun boiled the air, but not in the beginning stretch of summer.

Had the man seen her swimsuit, its details? He might spot her now if she slid away. She didn’t know him, his intentions, anything. Why the hell was he here?

Maybe because the sea wanted blood.

She couldn’t hold here in the shallows to wait for him to leave, no telling how long that might be. Better she risk going back for her clothes and heading home now.

She kept one dark blue eye on the beach as she retreated from the water. The man stood stiff in his khakis and coat, a white ballcap hugging his gray locks. He didn’t seem to notice her, all his attention zeroed in on the tide three feet past his boots. A pale tangle of driftwood lay ahead of him. Was he local? One of the summer people? A drifter? Ivory had never seen him before, but that hardly mattered with eight thousand people living here, not to mention the legion of tourists. The man held a phone to his ear, scowling as he spoke.

Ivory only realized who he’d been talking to when the sirens sounded from afar. Within moments, flashes of red and blue flickered over the grassy slope between the summerhouses and the beach. She froze halfway between the water and the driftwood tree and looked—reallylooked—at where the man was staring. And exactly what he’d called in.

The white shape lying in the tide was a dead body.

Ivory stumbled toward the driftwood tree, eyes locked on the frothing water, splashing at pale skin.

Over the past few days, families and college kids had swarmed Cape Morning’s tree-choked roads, cramped town, and windy beach to swim and tan and drink themselves brainless. A different scene from Florida, but a clean beach on a warm day drew tourists nonetheless. Did this body belong to one of them?

Ivory kept backing up until her hip banged against the driftwood tree. Her clothing pile collapsed in her shaking hands. She pushed her head into the hoodie and yanked her damp hair through in clingy dark red locks. Never mind the wet swimsuit getting her clothes and boots soaked as she hurried into them. There would be time to dry and change into something else when she reached home before her barista shift.

But she couldn’t leave yet. A sudden heaviness tugged her toward the prone trunk of the driftwood tree.

She sat and watched as the man with the phone turned toward the distant uniformed strangers, descending the wooden steps to the beach. No rush—dead was dead. Nothing they could do but investigate and then carry the dead away.

Ivory sucked at the wind, trying to catch her breath. Lightheadedness sent her doubling over, and it became easier to breathe with her eyes focused on the sand.

Where she spotted a piece of pink-tinted paper at her feet, partway pinned beneath the driftwood trunk.

She pinched its corner and worked it free. The wind tried to snatch it, but she held on firm. It looked torn from a journal or diary. A transparent flower pattern wreathed its edges, and curls of black ink scrawled over its front.

Don’t call me a suicide. I want to live.

I’ve simply chosen one death over another

After I’ve been robbed of life.

—Cabrina Aphrodite Brite

Ivory glanced at the dead body, and then back to the words. The authorities had neared the man who’d called them to the beach. If they spotted Ivory, they might want to question her, and she didn’t care to talk.

What about her secret find? A suicide note might determine the future of Cabrina’s body, how her family saw her life. But it wasn’t really a suicide note, the first line said as much. It was more a death poem, and a poem couldn’t count as evidence, could it?

Ivory understood, but others might not. The family would ache to think their dear girl, Cabrina Brite, had taken her own life. Broken hearts. Only pain.

But Ivory could help. She folded the poem in half and tucked it inside her hoodie pocket.

Her legs shuddered as she stood from the driftwood seat. Not ready to go, but she couldn’t stay here. She didn’t want to watch the authorities, closer now, take photographs of Cabrina Brite, or inspect her every inch, or draw her from the water like scavenging gulls picking at beach debris.

As she walked back the way she’d come, Ivory turned to watch the sea. She scarcely made out Ghost Cat Island beneath the overcast. It was so tiny that she never tried to stand on it when she swam out, only touching it and then returning to shore.

But that was the nearest land to where Cabrina might have died in the night. Had she, too, meant to swim out to the small scrap of rock?

Ivory had heard stories of locals glimpsing feline shapes upon the island. There were tales old and new of their lithe paws walking on ocean waves as if the bobbing water were gray-blue hills, fur glimmering with sunshine. No one ever found them—there was nothing on that lifeless rock to find—but that didn’t stop anyone from looking. Or from telling the stories.

Cabrina might have been the same, looking for ghost cats, no more solid than flying saucers or that monster at Lake Champlain. Mirages at best, lies at worst, but sometimes people liked the lies.

Ivory knew she shouldn’t entertain fantasies of ghosts. They might show up and then stick around.

Gray clouds parted, and the sun cast a sharp glare off the water. Shapes flashed across the glittering waves. Ivory shaded her eyes under one hand and squinted for a better look at Ghost Cat Island.

A figure slid over the island’s rocky nub, its shape bowing under the sun like a distorted shadow play on a bedroom wall. One sleek leg stretched in a molten glow, almost human. The figure’s next step dragged it down, close to the rock, and sprouted new limbs, melting its shape into that of a pacing four-legged beast.

It briefly sloshed and crawled above the watery sunshine. Then the figure’s next step sent it climbing a slope of light until it stood tall on two legs, with two arms at its sides, its glowing silhouette thin and pale. Like someone Ivory might have seen lying in the surf. Someone who’d left a death poem wedged beneath a driftwood tree.

Cabrina? she wondered.

The sunlight glinted off a fresh wave and stabbed Ivory’s eyes shut. She threw both hands over them, croaking with pain, and then she blinked into the shadows of her palms until the dancing white dots settled behind her eyelids.

When she looked again, grayness had retaken the shore, and only rolling waves broke across Ghost Cat Island. No light, no animal, no human. Nothing at all.

Someone laughed in the wind, and Ivory turned from the water. Beachgoers were strolling far down the sands. They were only vague puddles of likely tourists in hoodies snatched from different state colleges, but soon they would pincer her against the authorities. Someone might say they’d spotted her, a woman in a pink hoodie, acting suspicious even though she’d done nothing wrong.

Others would soon join them. They would be waking up across the summerhouses to wailing sirens and flashing lights, and they would come to see the sights of Cape Morning. Even a dead girl could become entertainment for bored tourists.

Ivory headed for the nearest wooden steps and climbed past the grass back to town proper. A soft breeze chased her, and she couldn’t shake the sense of footsteps behind her, first sandy and soft, and then padding on pavement at her heels. She expected to glance out the corner of one eye and spot a pale shadow, but nothing followed that she could see. Only scattered pedestrians dotted the sidewalk.

The feeling of being alone, and yet not alone, refused to leave. A presence weighed on Ivory’s back, like someone jamming a cold fingertip to one side of her spine. She couldn’t blame herself for feeling unnerved after seeing the man, and then Cabrina’s body, and that sunlit mirage over Ghost Cat Island, but she needed the feeling to die now, let her get on with the day.

It faded with each step, and the walk home was only a block from the beach. Ivory met no one she knew on the way, and she was grateful for it.

She didn’t need anyone to tell her she looked like she’d seen a ghost.

From the Diary of Cabrina Brite,April 8, 2018

I tried to stop writing my thoughts, but then it was like I swallowed a scream, and it kept getting bigger inside me, and either it would kill me or it would turn me out like Dad, and that would be how she ruined me.

She and Dad won’t see this time. I hate that I lost the online entries after my birthday video, but we lose everything eventually, the kind of thing you learn when you turn nineteen, and anyway, I couldn’t let her keep seeing my thoughts.

This one will be secret. Paper and pen and a hidden place. I can scream inside here. All the thoughts and truths she can’t handle or doesn’t want me to know.

If I could run on water, she would never see me again.

Goodbye, Cape Morning!

Goodbye, Massachusetts!

Hello, Atlantic Ocean, then Europe, Africa! And keep running.

The closest I can get is crashing into the water, soaking my body like it soaks the sand. Sometimes I daydream about swimming into it and never coming out. But I always do. The ocean never keeps me. I keep it instead, dripping in saltwater drops, lingering in my throat. I’m still shivering with it. If the ink runs, that’s why.

She tries to keep me here, but she can’t stop me at night when there’s the beach and spring break. Don’t I deserve a moment’s peace too?

Rex wanted us out at the water, and this far into April, the spring-breakers are headed home. He said his Ma told him Cape Morning has a magnetism which attracts too many people, but I guess the magic comes and goes with the sun. Maybe the magic is broken. Lots of things are.

Xi came with us. She wanted to enjoy the last of spring break before school hit. Summer will be full of summer people, and then she starts college in August.

I snuck out. Xi knew, Rex knew, maybe everyone knew. I told them I didn’t bother asking permission, so no one had to worry about my dad rolling up with cop sirens chirping, looking for me under a certain town councilmember’s command.

Xi pulled me aside once and asked How bad is it? but I faked a laugh. I wouldn’t have wanted to talk about what happens in the house anyway. Rex took us out to forget everything else.

It got weirdly cold, and we were bundled up in winter coats like it was January instead of April, all of us around the fire Rex likes to build on the south tip of the beach. It doesn’t really help, but sometimes we pretend it does.

Well, the fire might help the others. I’m the one who has to pretend. I would have been warmer that night if I had put on jeans, but I never get to wear a dress anymore. Xi asked what happened to my makeup, dresses, blouses, and I said, She threw most of it out, and Xi knew who I meant. The jewelry went in the garbage too, even my seashell necklace. All I’ve got left is the Bride of Frankenstein costume dress I hid under the mattress and the nude lipstick I hid in the vent. She never looks there.

I wore them both tonight, and I felt something close to right again.

There were other kids from school, just chattering and milling around, a phone blasting Blood Red Shoes so loud it fuzzed the audio. I think someone brought drinks. If Rex and Xi ask what happened, I can say I drank too much. Shouldn’t underage drink, yadda, yadda, guess our parents are right about one thing, good talk.

They might not believe me, but like the fire, we’ll pretend it helps.

It was my fault. I had that heavy feeling in my knees like I might go through one more late growth spurt. With Germaine in prison and still waiting for trial, I’m out of options to get the pills I need. There’s no hope of him getting out. He was dealing coke to others. Never me, but I get cut off from my meds the same.

She had something to do with it. Either she found him out and told the rest of town council and Dad and his cop buddies, or she threatened to bash Germaine’s brains in and toss him out to sea unless he turned himself in. Cape Morning takes care of secrets, even hers.

The ocean sends a whisper,

That the outsider feeling isn’t just me,

That our bodies and souls are borrowed,

And one day we give everything back.

I longed to look at the ocean,

And I was afraid to look, too,

Like when you have a crush in middle school,

And to have class with them both lights and destroys you.

The ocean longs to crush my heart,

And part of me wants to let her.

The poetry needs work, but that’s how it felt. I could barely look at the water, like it was the sun at night. Still, I told everyone to come closer and get their boots in the tide. I had a spring break game for them. They had to have been drinking. No one would have done what I said without at least being tipsy.

The rule of the game was: see who could keep their faces under for the longest without coming up for air. Nobody really wanted to get their faces wet when it was so cold out, but I got Xi to play, and then Rex and a couple other guys joined in, and Brian said he wasn’t going to be shown up by two girls. It was brutish, but it made me feel more like I belong, even though I don’t.

That’s not their fault. I am an outsider, stuck inside. At the house, she wants me to pretend her and me and Dad have a perfect little home, like we’re in a stage play called Election Campaign, and we put it on 24/7, like I pretend the fire keeps me warm, like I’ll pretend the game was a drunken mistake and not an honest one.

We all got on our hands and knees a little into the water, and then we put our faces in. I forget if I took a good breath. Rex did, I heard him. I thought he would win, but I also thought it was just a silly game.

A little drowning goes a long way.

The cold makes it easy to keep holding your breath. Not right away. First it stabs your skin everywhere and makes you want to scream, but after that? It’s peaceful. Slows you down.

Cabrina, how long were you down?

We were too busy drowning to time ourselves, but I kept my face in the water long enough to see things.

Down in the dark, someone reached out for me. It might have been a person. I thought it looked a little like a cat. But then I had another thought: I was seeing into the afterlife. Is there such a thing as a death psychic? I could be one.

One of the bio teachers from back in high school, before I got pulled out, said we all come from the sea, and maybe we go back there when we die, no matter where we die. Like an ocean of ghosts.

The something inside the water reached for my lips and let a piece of ocean drip into me. It was thick, like sticking my mouth around raw meat, and there was a darkness, and I wondered if I would be part of the Atlantic soon.

And I swallowed it. A little bit of ocean to play with my inside screams.

Rex tackled me. I fell sideways into the tide and took a breath. He was shaking his fists and shouting at me. He thought I was dying. Xi shouted too and kept aiming a finger at me, like every word was supposed to be a bullet gunning me down. I pointed back at her, tried to play it off like a joke, but no one believed me. Most of the guys who played the game with us had punked back to the fire, even Brian. Poor nervous boys.

Xi and Rex stayed angry, but they stayed with me too. It wasn’t right to scare them. I told them I was sorry and that I loved them. I wanted to cry, but sometimes a fist holds every feeling back, and it’ll crush my bones if I dare give the world one teardrop.

So I showed everyone a new game. I wiped the ocean off my face, turned to it, and screamed as loud as I could out over the water.

Xi screamed with me, and then Rex screamed too. Some of the others whooped or made little fakey shouts to join in, but they didn’t get it. Ours were real screams, the kind that break your throat and steamroll your lungs. Mine were high-pitched cracked little shrieks.

I had to get them out of me right then. If I didn’t, each one would’ve got stuck inside me. There’s something wrong in the world when you can’t scream right.

The ocean understood,

And it offered to swallow the screams for me.

I thought, how Atlantic of you.

But what could the Pacific do?

I could let my screams loose,

On a different ocean.

Would I be a California girl?

Or would I just be this same girl,

Decaying on a west coast shore?

That might be something later if I can make it make sense. Water is just molecules and atoms and all the stuff in it. There’s no kindness to water, and it didn’t have any reason to take my screams. So maybe it wasn’t the water itself doing me that kindness.

Maybe it was the ghosts.

2. THE FOOL

Ivory finished her question and then took a drink, like that meant she wouldn’t have to repeat herself no matter what she heard. It wasn’t the sort of question she would ordinarily ask while nursing a sweaty beer bottle at the end of a man’s bed, but she’d started the day on strange tides and saw no reason to end it any different.

Wolf wore a confused expression, one eyebrow raised. He looked like he didn’t think he’d heard the question right.

“I asked if you believe in ghosts,” Ivory said.

“Maybe.” Wolf lifted the glass neck of another beer to his lips. “Why?”

“Do you think there would be a ghost for no reason?” Ivory turned to the floor as if it could answer her instead. “Like, one would come around for the fun of it?”

“What are you on now?” Wolf had asked Ivory more questions tonight than he usually asked her in a week. She should fall into a weird mood more often.

“I’m not on anything,” Ivory said. “If a ghost came around, she—there would have to be a reason, right? Unfinished business? A ghost wouldn’t show up for nothing.”

Wolf leaned into the flat wooden headboard and drank deeply of his beer. He was a big man, built of firm bone and stony muscle, and took up much of the bed, its sheets and blankets forming hills around him.

Ivory never asked if Wolf was his first name, or his surname, or a nickname. She’d long ago decided his business was none of hers. Almost easier to think him like his namesake, a wolf accidentally born as man. She once believed wolves could live anywhere, even the coastal towns where she grew up and then hopped between as an adult. Even the cities. Werewolves, too. Both existed in her childhood stories, and when she was little, that had meant both were real somewhere. They sometimes wandered, maybe vacationed, and even decided to linger.

She realized Wolf was looking at her again. A stoic expression had formed between his cropped hair and gray-black beard.

“I think the world is complicated,” Wolf said, and he set his beer bottle onto the glass-topped nightstand with a firm clack. “Everything we know of the world is a mess. Maybe everything we don’t know is a mess, too.”

His answer pasted a smile into the corner of Ivory’s lips. She might have been too hard on him. He hadn’t invited her over for ghost talk, but willingness to play at spectral epiphanies went a long way.

“Why ask about ghosts?” Wolf raised a dark eyebrow. “Seen one?”

“No big reason.” Ivory swirled her bottle’s last puddle of beer. “But yes, maybe I saw one.”

Wolf coughed out a laugh. “You’re not on anything now, but what about earlier?”

“It isn’t like that,” Ivory said, exhaustion creeping into her voice. “It’s been going round and round in my head all day, and I can’t talk to Joan about it without getting a lecture.”

“Joan might have it right,” Wolf said, his tone dismissive.

Ivory wanted to mention that Joan wasn’t exactly Wolf’s biggest fan. And she wanted to mention the body of Cabrina Brite, the death poem she’d pinched from the beach, and what she’d seen—might have seen—in the sun’s glare across Ghost Cat Island.

But she might have misworded her questions. She’d been holding her morning encounter behind pursed lips the whole workday, and by nightfall it might have overcooked on her tongue.

Wolf sat forward, and the headboard groaned like an abandoned lover. His feet slid past Ivory’s legs, and his thighs tucked around hers as the bulk of him pressed across her back. One arm encircled her chest, and his beard and lips brushed her neck.

“Why don’t we quit the dead talk for tonight, yeah?” Wolf asked.

But his question was a statement. Ivory’s ghosts had pricked his blood in the wrong way. Only she could set it right.

“Let me freshen up,” Ivory said, sliding his arm away and easing off the bed.

She kicked past abandoned cardboard fragments and loose laundry, detritus of a single man’s bedroom, and slipped into the bathroom. If she waited for his assent, she wouldn’t make it this far. She needed a moment to herself behind a locked door.

A crucifix hung from the wall opposite the mirror—Wolf kept one in every room but the bedroom—and Ivory shifted her head to blot it out. She studied her reflection across the toothpaste-speckled glass. The day had clouded her makeup, hung blue-gray bags beneath her eyes, and glued a stony frown over her lips.

She shouldn’t have been pushed to worry tonight. Asking these questions, dissecting her face—it was wrong and unfair at the end of a rough day. She should have called off visiting Wolf’s place tonight. Serving food and drink left a special kind of exhaustion in anyone’s skin and bones, the body absorbing furious cravings and bottomless demands.

Ivory studied that special exhaustion in the mirror. Nudged it. Tried to smush it around with her fingertips and find the woman she’d been before today’s shift.

The woman who might’ve seen a ghost.

But her fingers carried neither the time nor parasitic quality of hours on her feet asking, Can I get you anything else? with the answer almost always, Yeah.

Hers was a conditional humanity. Not the sort where she demanded better of herself, but where the world demanded she prove her worth. She could be human if every stranger found she measured up to the right expectations.

Am I nice enough that they’ll let me live?

Am I pretty enough that they won’t burn me?

She thought she’d figured out the answers. Wolf seemed to want her, sometimes more than she felt wanted. Weren’t these human measurements? She couldn’t say for sure when someone as young as Cabrina could—what? Die by accident? By choice? Ivory hadn’t even named this uncertainty, almost refused it.

Thinking about death wasn’t right tonight. Wasn’t she a creature of life?

She backstepped from the mirror, and her reflection did the same. Her hands pawed down her front, testing every curve and corner. Were the meat shapes at her chest the right roundness for Wolf? The right position? Ivory pressed both hands against her thighs, kneading her fingers against either leg, and then she slipped between them where everything hung small and soft. What about these meat shapes? She never tucked into a gaff at Wolf’s house, by his preference, but uncertainty haunted her insides anyway.

Why the hell was she like this?

And worse, what if someday she wasn’t like this? Her rocky non-relationship with Wolf might die when she was no longer a combination of cock below, tits above, softly this and firmly that, a puzzle piece of unique sides that fit his attraction just right. No more pretending she was more than a maid and a fetish, that he wasn’t validation in this blood-sucking town.

She couldn’t believe in love, and she couldn’t ask him to love her.

“Ivory?” he called.

“On my way,” she said. Fuck the mirror.

The bathroom door opened on dim lighting, the center of Wolf’s bedroom blanketed in fuzzy darkness. He waited on the bed, heavy and warm in the gloom. Music breathed gently from the window-side wall, the easy kind of wordless tune you might expect beachside, but he’d brought it here.

Ivory couldn’t help but smile. All her fretting about her looks, only to do this in the dark.

She let the instrumental music lead her onto his bed again, one foot gliding past the cold glass curve of a beer bottle. His firm hands found her waist, her thigh and its tattoo, and drew her weightless off the floor, into his arms, onto his lap. He had a rough touch tonight, the true wolf coming out. Eager to unzip and roll down her jeans, slide off her tank, almost tearing her bra. She kissed his neck, ran fingers through his short hair, and then squeaked as teeth scraped her shoulder.

“It’s only me,” Wolf said, and his smirk crossed the darkness. “Didn’t mean to bite you.” But he wasn’t apologizing for it, either.

“I might like to be bitten,” Ivory said. She wanted to sound cocky, but it came out in a shaking breath. More than anything, she wanted him to like how she felt about everything he did.

He kissed her hard again, first across the lips, and then down her jaw and neck. His fingertips dragged at her waist, crumpling her panties. He might rip them if she let him. Her breath rocked her body in a gentle in and out. One of his hands sank against her breast; the other crossed between her legs, gentler now, stroking her soft cock.

She almost wished the lights shined bright enough to see his face better, get a solid sense of how he looked at her, if she’d see anything in his eyes beyond attraction to her surface self. What had his past intimate partners looked like? He kissed her pretty belly, ample hips, and sometimes her shy member and the tops of her feet with their blue lagoon toenails.

This wasn’t love. It was worship. She wasn’t human right now but a divine figure carved from flesh. Some kind of complex goddess he couldn’t have named, only given himself over to, and then given back to himself as a gift.

Some nights, she enjoyed it. Tonight, she wanted to be more than an effigy of a woman, subject to careless fingers and ravenous appetites.

If you don’t want it, you can end it, she reminded herself. But she didn’t want to stop either, even when he was rough and thoughtless.

A man pure of heart did not need a wild animal bite or a lycanthropic curse to become a wolf under the full moon. He only needed life to whisper in his ear, You’re the best, the absolute best, the most specialest boy, and then you’ll be the most powerfulest man, and everything you choose to take belongs to you.

Even Ivory’s humanity.

Wolf’s hands loosened, and his face climbed from her body. “Distracted tonight, huh?”

He had noticed she wasn’t touching back. This might be a rare moment when he understood Ivory had oceans beneath the parts he liked to play with, full of questions and strangeness, fears both real and superstitious.

But she couldn’t tell him that. “Oh,” she said, brushing a red lock behind one ear. “Guess I was someplace else.”

Wolf smirked again, and his teeth gleamed in the window light. Ivory melted into that look without meaning to, and she could believe her head was full of paranoid soup instead of brains. That his heart might be bigger than she gave credit for, and he might even have it set on her.

She would never know for sure.

“Come on, cute thing, get out of your head and be with me,” Wolf said, and he kissed her again.

Ivory pressed him toward the headboard again. A fresh eagerness rained down her muscles. Her sensitive lips and tongue lit when she leaned between his legs. She could get out of her head and into the moment, as if pushing his hard cock inside her mouth left no room in there for thoughts.

Simplicity overtook the evening as she drank of him. She almost believed they could work like this, and maybe she could tell him how she wanted things to be. He might even care. She could be safe laying out her true desires, and then her thoughts, and then the grounds of a real relationship.

But if she was wrong, her desires would mean the end of it all. She would know for certain she was an idol, and a toy, and when he finished playing with her, he’d go looking for another woman who might fit his criteria.

Down she’d go, to sand and surf, another forgotten goddess, like those buried in dead empires across the world.

These were the messy thoughts of post-intimacy euphoria. The moment was done, and she sobered her mind as she rinsed with mouthwash.

Wolf’s firm hands found her again as she left the bathroom, and she giggled in surprise when he grabbed her up in his arms. She had thought they were done, time to turn her out the door, but he was kissing her again. Hard, again. The bathroom light cast a wolfish hunger in his eyes before she hit the switch and flew from the doorway. A bottle of slick fluid passed from hand to hand to skin, and the rest happened in a humid maelstrom.

Back to bed, he pressed her face down, his weight on top of her, inside her, his every muscle crushing and fusing her to the mattress. She could scarcely breath beneath his sweat and skin, her nose and lips plunged against fabric, and she reveled in the thrill quaking through every nerve, her skin alight with burning sunshine. Her world climbed, crested, filled with his breathy moan and then her high-pitched rattling squeal. She hadn’t meant to burst against his bedsheets, but sweetness was hard to find, and this night was much-needed honey, in both body and soul.

For a brief ecstatic moment, yes—she could believe in love.

3. THE HEART

A tidal rhythm beat in Ivory’s ears. She sloshed atop fitful waves, and sometimes beneath them, at once wanted and unwanted. Had she been drowning for a long time? She should finish already, get this death business wrapped up.

Countless stars lit the sky and sea as the waves splashed her onto a black-sanded beach. White bones rattled against the incoming tide in a broken skeletal jig. They were tiny chipped fragments at the ocean’s lip, but they grew larger inland, and footsteps approached, kicking and crunching them.

“Who’s there?” Ivory asked.

She hoped to see a pale thin girl walk the beach. Cabrina Brite of all people would understand the feeling of washing ashore.

Except Cabrina had washed onto the sands of Cape Morning. Ivory had washed onto its sister of night, a Cape Shadow with its own sky and ocean, hidden from the red sunrise.

She rolled over and sat up, eyeballing a great white skull the width of her chest that lay not far away. It was catlike, only far too large, the remains of some prehistoric sabercat with two curved teeth boring into the sand.

Something laughed from inside the skull’s sockets, shrill and mean.

“Cabrina?” Ivory said, her voice nearly a croak.

She doubted Cabrina laughed like that. But then, how could Ivory know? They had never met while Cabrina was alive.

The skull twitched, and Ivory made to turn, stand, get away, but her head felt full of seawater, leaving her a waterlogged doll. The skull watched her squirm in place. She could only stare back unblinking as a hairy yellow-black teardrop slithered down the skull’s alabaster cheekbone and onto the sand.

It was a cat. Short tawny fur covered most of her lithe body except where a black stripe split her down the face, spine, and tail, like a chasm gaping open through the cat’s body.

The chasm cat arched her spine in a taut stretch and then padded toward the water on cautious steps. Red drops trailed her hindlegs, and Ivory had the ludicrous thought that the cat had gotten her period. She was pretty sure cats went into heat instead.

The same red fluid dripped from Chasm Cat’s mouth. An object trembled between her teeth. She might have caught a small bird, or a fish, but the wet form wriggled without any clear shape.

Even when the cat hopped onto Ivory’s chest and slinked up her body, Ivory couldn’t make out the nature of the cat’s crimson prize. No fur, feathers, or skin. Only a raw gleaming muscle, its edges swimming in thin tendrils like tiny hairs underwater.

The dark lump swelled with heat where it touched Ivory. Its drops dotted her chest and flared past her collarbone and up her neck, where the lump’s odor invaded her nose. Either Chasm Cat herself had no scent, or this sour animal stink overpowered all others.

She slid the wet lump against Ivory’s lips. Mixed sensations made her think of newborns, and red-tinged milk, and dark blood dripping down a needful throat. They were alien thoughts, as intrusive as the lump itself.

The cat pressed harder against Ivory’s face, greasing her lips and chin with warm fluid. Knifelike slits in the cat’s eyes cut an insistent wedge into Ivory’s mouth. Her entire body would cover Ivory’s face if she kept sliding upward, and Ivory remembered old folklore about cats smothering infants in their cribs.

She could almost believe it as the lump sprouted tiny limbs and crawled inside her mouth. Each touch was a spider leg across her gums, between her teeth, exploring the insides of her cheeks. Once squeezed all the way inside, the lump sank onto her tongue, and its hair-like tendrils flicked at the edges of her throat.

If she resisted, those tips would keep prodding inside her mouth. It was simpler to bite down. Soft flesh coated the lump’s outside, but inside, her teeth crunched messily on thin fishlike bones. The sound clicked in her ears and made her jerk and twitch and want to vomit.

Chasm Cat pressed her face to Ivory’s lips to keep the meal from coming up, and then she nuzzled Ivory’s neck as if showing her how to swallow.

Harsh wind rolled off the still-coming tide and whistled through the sockets of the beach skull. Swallow, its notes sang. And don’t forget.

Ivory hurried through crunching and then forced the stinking lump down her throat. Its fleshy hairs squirmed all the way to her stomach.

Chasm Cat sank from Ivory’s face. Small paws padded down Ivory’s limbs, past her tattoo, smudgy and unreadable here at Cape Shadow, and then Chasm Cat slinked past the grand skull, where the darkness cleaved her into two tawny half-cats with a black line between them. The tide sent bones clacking across the sand.

Beyond the shore, a black silhouette cut a starless patch from the night-blue sky where a mountain climbed from the ocean.

Ivory had to be imagining this distant shape. There was no island off the coast of Cape Morning besides the tiny remaining nub of Ghost Cat Island. Nothing like the looming presence in the distance.

But then, she had to be dreaming, right? The rock Ivory knew might only be the pathetic reality to a cat’s infinite dream. Ghost Cat Island might be grander than Ivory had ever known.

The blue-black sky rippled, and the stars shot apart, a clump of luminous sand dispersing through a cosmic ocean.

Ivory began to crumble too. Her vision washed from the world under a black tide, and she became sand in an hourglass, bleeding at hour’s end to the far side of time. Away from Cape Shadow.

Back to Cape Morning.

4. THE INVITATION

Something moved in the dark.

A noise hit Ivory as she surfaced from the dream. She wanted to cry out for the cat, and then for someone to come to her attic bedroom, before she remembered she wasn’t home. This was Wolf’s house. She rarely stayed over at Wolf’s, but a new exhaustion had slipped into bed, and they had both crashed together in worn-out sleep.

Sweat dotted her skin as she curled against the bed. A scent she’d once savored had gone bad somewhere nearby, and now a miasma coated the cool sheets and warm air. Wolf’s heavy breath teased toward snoring beside her.

Which meant the noise couldn’t be either her or Wolf.

He would be pissed if she woke him up over nothing, and did she really want to spoil a good night? Better to see if there was anything worth bothering him about. She climbed out of bed on careful tiptoe, slid on her underwear, tank top, and jeans.

The zipper chewed its teeth shut as the noise came again. Hard surfaces, scraping together, like the soles of rough feet brushing against floorboards.

It could be a window rocking loose in its frame. Wolf’s house was old, wasn’t it? These wooden floors and narrow halls had watched generations come and go.

Ivory listened at Wolf’s bedroom doorway. A cry stirred in her chest like a war horn calling across an ancient battlefield.

Except to cry out might draw an intrusive presence.

She crept into the hallway, paused outside Wolf’s office to listen again, but there was nothing on the other side of the locked door. If she called it quits now, she could strip naked again, slide into bed, and soak in Wolf’s warmth until morning. She should take what she could get. That was how life worked.

The next scrape dragged a soft shriek up Ivory’s throat. She swallowed it hard. She had to be hearing branches against glass, her own heartbeat, not footsteps elsewhere in the house.

At the hallway’s end, she glanced into the kitchen and turned on the light. No sign that anyone or anything had entered since her arrival tonight, but the kitchen’s luminance only reached so far into the nearby living room. One more wall switch, anchored between the living room’s crucifix and the sofa, and Ivory could put this trouble and herself to bed.

Scraping came again, closer and louder, a sharp nail against glass. Outside.

Ivory padded over the living room carpet and parted the weighty curtain from the picture window, where Wolf’s house looked out on his neighborhood.

A white figure rushed away from the glass.

Another shriek tore up Ivory’s throat. Her hands flew to cover her mouth and pawed uselessly at her neck, but they couldn’t choke away her cry.

The figure swept toward the end of Wolf’s driveway like a leaf snatched by the wind. It twisted there, lost in a stormy spiral, and then turned around as if hearing Ivory’s shriek.

Looking back at the house.

Waiting.

A stillness settled between them, caught in the picture window glass. Was this a thin human far away, or a hunched animal close by? Ivory couldn’t tell for certain in the dark. She leaned forward to get a better look and then sank against the window. Exhaustion tugged her eyelids down.

When she opened them again, there was nothing but the white reflection of her face against the black night.

Like bone upon sand. Her dream of catlike phantoms returned, carrying a force-fed heart. Swallow a small heart, offer blood, and off to a world of shadows, if she would only follow that uncertain figure into the night.

“Whaaat—”

The noise shot another shriek through Ivory, and she’d already spun from the window and raised her hands before she realized it was only Wolf, speaking through a yawn. Her second scream blocked out the rest of whatever he said. He was a silhouette against the kitchen light, rubbing the heel of his hand at his forehead.

“Ivory,” he said, fighting another yawn. “It’s just me.”

He should try telling her heart that, maybe then it would quit slamming one-two fists against her ribcage.

She forced in a deep breath. “I heard something,” she coughed out.

Wolf tilted his head to show he was listening. “Wind. Nothing else.”

She looked out the window again and listened to him pace the room, grumbling to himself. He turned on the lights, and she came eye to eye again with her own transparent reflection and the sliding shapes of the living room against the darkness.

Maybe she’d heard the wind. Or a cat, not in her dreams but something solid and mischievous running around in the night. People weren’t supposed to believe in ghosts, and a visit by some large feral cat made a hell of a lot more sense than a visit from the dead. And Ivory had never given a ghost reason to haunt her anyway.

Besides grabbing the death poem.

She chewed her lip, and her vague reflection did the same. Wind, cat, ghost, her own imagination? The only dead people she’d seen before were in funeral homes. She’d never witnessed one out in the world until this morning, let alone stolen the deceased’s writing. What had she seen on Ghost Cat Island? It could’ve been a cat. Or a ghost. And if it were a ghost, couldn’t it be Cabrina? Curious and perhaps not too happy at having her poem taken from the beach.

Why did that matter if her death wasn’t a suicide, as the poem claimed? What really happened to Cabrina Brite?

The death poem gave no answers.

“What are you looking for out there, another ghoul?” Wolf asked.

“Ghouls aren’t ghosts,” Ivory muttered, but she couldn’t remember the distinction.

“Pretty sure they’re the same.” Wolf slid close, warming Ivory’s back. “And this is why we don’t tell ghost stories before bed.”

He was making fun of her. Thought she’d had a nightmare, and maybe that was so, but he should take her seriously. He instead tried to pick her up and carry her back to bed, as if nothing had happened since.

Ivory pressed him back and curled into herself. “I was scared,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what it really was.”

“Come on.” Wolf offered a smirk instead of comfort. “Can’t you take a joke?” He laughed as if he could infect her with the noise.

The best she could muster was an olive branch of a smile, and even that made her tongue taste rotten behind her teeth. She looked down at her clothes, and then to the front door. To walk away in the middle of the night would be dangerous, ghosts or not. Ivory would need Wolf to drive her.

His hands encircled her wrists in rough but familiar fingers. “Come on,” he said again. “Back to bed where you belong. With me.”

Pleading haunted his eyes. Be the good one, pretty Ivory, they said. Or pretend. Can’t you at least pretend? Be convenient for me. Please.

The window beckoned, the night waiting with its ghosts and ghouls.

Ivory relented, kissing Wolf’s hands. Tonight had been good. Wasn’t that worth being convenient for his sake? She could shrug off his disregard, especially when she would rather hold his body than a grudge.

He drew her in, and she let him, and the bed took them again. Even if she couldn’t get back to sleep, his wanting her might be enough.

From the Diary of Cabrina Brite,April 17, 2018

You can treat anything like flower petals

Plucking away the pieces

She loves me

She loves me not

She loves me

She loves me not

She f

I shouldn’t have done that with Xi. I knew better, I’m smarter than this, but she’s smarter than me, and we both knew what we wanted, and my heart was so full when I looked at her that night, and we kissed, and everything went from there.

It was a good kiss. A good everything.

[a section is missing, cut away by fabric shears]

wrote it then I wouldn’t stop thinking about it, but I already can’t stop.

I kissed Xi. In different places. Ordinary kisses, sweet kisses. A special kiss.

She was soft, and I’ve been second-guessing myself since. Did I do this because I have feelings for her? Or because we’re friends and I don’t know how to show affection right? Or because I want what she has? She can’t slice open a vein and share meds with me, doesn’t matter which parts of her I taste or take inside me.

I’m so fucked. Xi’s been looking at me weird since. I don’t think she told anyone. But she knows one thing, and Rex knows another, and they talk, but none of us would kiss and tell.

Which means nothing about this can get to the house. To her.

It stays between Xi and me, and I guess Rex in whatever he figures out or hears. I can’t even keep my lies straight anymore. But Xi and Rex and me are forever, if forever can be a for now kind of thing. I hope it can.

Xiomara

Alyssa

I’m going to die in this house.

5. THE VISITOR

Five days after an elderly Cape Morning resident found the body at the beach, and one day after the wake, Alyssa Xiomara Munoz attended the funeral service for one of her best friends in the world.

She hated every moment of it. All the wrong things came out of people’s mouths in the church, at the cemetery. Especially from Viola Brite, acting the perfect grieving mother as if the funeral were a scheduled event in her reelection campaign to town council, while her husband Gary stood by in approving silence.

Xi spent the evening cleansing her brain with a long scroll through photos of herself, Rex, and Cabrina. Cabrina never took selfies, had no social media presence anymore, and she wasn’t fond of letting others take her picture, but Xi had managed to guilt her into group shots. Sometimes she had taken candid photos of Cabrina while pretending to text or browse videos. And she sometimes felt guilty for taking them.

But not tonight. Right now, she needed every true photo of Cabrina she could get. Her head turned away while sitting at a high school cafeteria table. A distant figure on the beach at night. A forced smile seated between Xi’s big grin and Rex’s smirk on Cabrina’s birthday back in April.

If Xi sat on her bed in her pajamas and kerchief, scrolling through photos until she passed out, maybe she could push this terrible day out of her head.

Rex hadn’t shown up at the funeral. Less likely chickening out, more likely because one or both of his mothers refused to let him go unless he promised to hold his tongue, a promise Rex could never keep. Cabrina used to blame it on Rex being a Virgo, but really, he was the youngest of the trio. Xi had turned nineteen in February, and Cabrina in April, while Rex remained eighteen until September, and that appeared to make a big difference in restraint.