Mercy Killings

The Voss house squatted at the end of Marshgate Road like a toad waiting for a fly. It was three stories of crooked chimneys and mismatched windows, each pane hung with something that caught the grey light—crystals, dried herbs, bundles of feathers tied with red string. The garden had gone to seed years ago, but deliberately so, every overgrown path and tangled rosebush placed with the precision of a surgeon. A boundary, Wren realized. The whole property was warded.

She stood at the gate with her hands in the pockets of her thrift-store coat and tried to remember the last time she'd come here. Eight years ago. Maybe nine. She'd been sixteen, maybe fifteen, and Lolly had given her tea that tasted like pond water and told her things she hadn't wanted to hear. She hadn't listened. She'd left Mire's End instead, which was its own kind of not listening, just with more dramatic flair.

The gate opened before she touched it.

"Get in here, girl." Lolly Voss's voice carried from somewhere inside the house, sharp and impatient. "I'm not spending the afternoon shouting at the fog."

Wren walked the broken-flagstone path to the door. It swung inward as she reached it, revealing a hallway cluttered with the detritus of seventy years of accumulated witchcraft. Bundles of dried sage hung from the ceiling beside Catholic medals and dreamcatchers and what looked like a child's mobile made of bone. The smell hit her next—incense, mildew, and underneath it all, something electric and alive, like the air before a storm.

Lolly waited in the kitchen, seated at a table buried under books and candles and jars containing things Wren chose not to examine closely. She looked exactly as Wren remembered: white hair piled in a messy bun, wrists clattering with mismatched bracelets, red lipstick applied with a precision that belied her otherwise chaotic appearance. Her cane—a carved thing of dark wood and questionable provenance—leaned against the wall beside her. She didn't need it. She never had.

"Sit," Lolly said, gesturing to the only clear chair. "Tea's already made. Don't complain about the taste."

"I remember the taste."

"Then you remember it's not optional."

Wren sat. The chair creaked beneath her like it was complaining. Lolly pushed a chipped mug across the table, and Wren wrapped her hands around it without drinking. The warmth was good. The warmth was necessary. She'd been cold since stepping off the bus, a chill that had nothing to do with autumn in the Pacific Northwest and everything to do with the way the fog had pressed against her skin like it was tasting her.

"You look like hell," Lolly observed.

"Thanks."

"Circles under your eyes deep enough to drown in. When did you last sleep? Properly sleep, not that half-dead thing you do where you lie there glaring at the ceiling."

"You sent Tommy Vetch to bring me back."

Lolly's eyes—sharp and dark in their nest of wrinkles—narrowed. "I sent a letter. What that boy did with it is his own business. He's got his own reasons for wanting you here, and not all of them are mine to share."

"He said Nana Maren died."

"She did."

"He said it was wrong."

Lolly picked up her own mug. Her hands were steady, but Wren noticed the way her jaw tightened, the tendons in her neck drawing taut. "Tommy says a lot of things. Half of them are prayers he doesn't know he's saying. But on this—" She paused, drank, set the mug down with a click that sounded like a bone breaking. "On this, the boy isn't wrong."

The kitchen felt smaller suddenly. The walls closer. Wren's fingers tightened on her mug. "Tell me."

"Not yet." Lolly raised a hand, forestalling the argument Wren could feel building in her own throat. "You come in here asking questions you're not ready to hear answered. You've been running from this for eight years, girl. Eight years of sticking your fingers in your ears and pretending the dead don't speak to you. I won't pour the ocean into a teacup. We do this right, or we don't do it at all."

"Lolly—"

"Drink your tea."

Wren drank. It tasted like pond water, exactly as remembered. She swallowed, grimaced, and felt something loosen in her chest. A tightness she hadn't known was there. The electric quality in the air intensified, and the kitchen seemed to sharpen around her, edges becoming more defined, colors deepening. The grey light from the windows took on substance.

"What's in this?"

"Nothing that will hurt you. Everything that will help you see." Lolly leaned forward, bracelets sliding down her wrists. "You perceive souls, Wren. You always have. But you perceive them the way a nearsighted child perceives words on a page—shapes without meaning, shadows without detail. You learned to ignore them. Your grandmother taught you that, and she was right to, at the time. But the time for ignorance is done."

"I know what I see."

"You know what you've allowed yourself to see. There's a difference." Lolly's voice softened, and the change was more frightening than her sharpness. "The dead are everywhere in Mire's End. They linger because they can't leave—something holds them here, something feeds on them. You've seen the edges of them, haven't you? In your peripheral vision. Movement where there shouldn't be. Cold spots that have nothing to do with the weather."

Wren said nothing. She thought of the funeral home, the way the air had thickened in certain rooms, the sense of presence she'd spent years learning to dismiss.

"Finish the tea."

She finished the tea. It went down easier this time, the bitterness giving way to something almost sweet. Her vision blurred, sharpened, blurred again. When it settled, the kitchen was different.

The dead were everywhere.

They clung to the walls like shadows cast by nothing. They drifted through the air in slow, aimless spirals, translucent figures that flickered between forms—a woman's face, a child's hand, the suggestion of shoulders hunched in eternal grief. They weren't solid. They weren't even fully there. But they were real, more real than anything Wren had ever allowed herself to acknowledge. Each one carried a faint luminescence, pale blue-grey, like bioluminescence in deep water. And each one was in pain.

She could feel it. Not hear it, not see it, but feel it—a low, constant ache that radiated from every figure in the room. They were trapped. The sensation was unmistakable. Like pressing your hand against ice and feeling the warmth being pulled out of you. They wanted to leave. They couldn't.

"Oh god," Wren whispered.

"Now you see." Lolly's voice was grim. "Now you see what your grandmother spent her life trying to manage. What I've spent my life trying to contain. What your father—" She stopped, and for the first time, something like grief crossed her face. "What Elias has spent his life exploiting."

Wren's head snapped toward her. "What do you mean, exploiting?"

"I mean that man has been trapping souls for longer than you've been alive. Binding them before they can dissipate naturally. Hoarding them like coins in a vault." Lolly's hands curled into fists on the table. "Every soul he binds feeds the thing beneath the marsh. Every feeding makes it stronger. It stirs in its sleep, Wren. It's almost awake."

"What thing? What are you talking about?"

"Something old. Older than Mire's End, older than the Calloway name, older than the festival your grandmother led with such devotion." Lolly stood abruptly and crossed to a window, her limp more pronounced than Wren remembered—or perhaps just less carefully hidden. She stared out at the fog. "The marsh has always been here. The town was built beside it because the first settlers found rich soil and good fishing. But the marsh was already occupied. Your ancestors knew it. They made bargains with it. Salt lines, songs, offerings—the Feast of the Drowned wasn't always a celebration. It started as a payment."

"A payment of what?"

"Souls." The word dropped like a stone into still water. "One every seven years. Given freely, or at least given with enough ceremony that the marsh accepted it. It kept the thing sleeping. Kept the town safe. Your grandmother maintained the old ways even as the town forgot what they meant. She thought she was managing it. She thought the old bargain still held." Lolly turned from the window, and her face in the grey light looked carved from driftwood. "Elias broke the bargain. He found a way to feed it more. And more. And more."

Wren's mind raced. The funeral home. The preparation room she'd found that morning, too clean, too organized. The way certain drawers had been labeled with names she didn't recognize. "He's using the funeral home."

"Bodies come in. Souls linger—that's natural, that's what your bloodline perceives. Seven days of slow fading, seven days for the dead to make peace. But Elias doesn't let them fade. He binds them. True name, cherished object—the old methods, the ones your grandmother taught him when he was a boy and she still believed he might be different." Bitterness cracked through Lolly's voice like ice. "He takes them before they're ready to go and he feeds them to the marsh, and every soul makes the thing stronger."

"How many?"

"Dozens. Over the years. Maybe more. I stopped counting. I stopped—" Lolly pressed a hand to her mouth. When she lowered it, her lipstick was smeared, and she looked every one of her seventy years. "I helped him start."

The kitchen was very quiet. Even the dead seemed to still, their drifting paused as if they too were listening.

"What?"

"Thirty-two years ago. There was a man—Henry Garrick. Bone cancer. In agony. Begging for it to end." Lolly's voice had gone flat, recitative, the tone of someone who had rehearsed this confession a thousand times in the dark. "I had the herbs. I had the knowledge. And Elias had just come back from wherever he'd been, full of ideas about what the Calloway bloodline could do, what we'd been wasting for generations. He told me Henry's soul could be put to good use. That it would be honored, not wasted. That the marsh needed it more than the void did."

"You killed him."

"I mercy-killed him." The distinction mattered to Lolly; Wren could hear it in the way she clung to the word. "And I've been paying for it ever since. Because that first soul was the crack in the door, and Elias kicked it wide open. One mercy killing became two. Then it wasn't just the dying. Then it was anyone whose soul he deemed 'useful.' Then it wasn't mercy at all."

Wren stood up so fast her chair scraped against the floor. The dead scattered from her movement like startled birds. "You helped him. You helped my father start this, and you—what? Watched? For thirty years?"

"I tried to stop him." Lolly didn't flinch. "I failed. I've been failing ever since. Your grandmother was stronger than me, smarter than me, and she couldn't stop him either. So yes, girl. I watched. I watched and I waited and I kept the wards up and the salt lines drawn and I did what I could to keep the thing in the marsh from waking entirely while your grandmother gathered evidence and built her case."

"Evidence."

"Names. Dates. The objects he used. She was going to expose him. She'd found a way—she said she'd found a way to unbind the souls, to starve the thing back into dormancy. She was going to present it all at the Feast of the Drowned, in front of the whole town. She said the old rituals would hold him, would hold it, long enough for the truth to come out."

The dread hit Wren like a physical blow. She knew what was coming. She could feel it forming in the air between them, inevitable and terrible.

"Lolly."

"Your grandmother didn't die in her sleep, Wren." Lolly's voice broke on the name. Her composure finally fractured, and behind it was a grief so vast and so old that Wren staggered under the weight of it. "She was murdered. Two weeks before the festival. Before she could tell anyone what she'd found." The old woman's hands trembled. Her bracelets chimed against each other. "And her soul—Wren, her soul is the most recent one he harvested."

The dead in the kitchen pressed closer. Wren could feel them against her skin, their cold and their grief and their desperate, aching need. And somewhere beneath the floor, beneath the foundation, beneath the marsh and the fog and the rotting bones of Mire's End, something vast and patient shifted in its sleep.

It was hungry.

And her grandmother's soul was inside it.