Welcome back to Eldritch Girl…
Fairwood extracts Katy’s memory of her 11th birthday, in which Katy’s destiny becomes clearer to her; in the present, Katy learns who killed her beloved grandmother and Wes and Ricky face a reckoning.
CWs: child neglect and manipulation, disruptive/drunk/violent family member in family gathering situation, gift-giving (can be read as manipulative but without CSA connotations); gore, violence with blunt instrument, head injury/impalement, maggots, parasitic-infestation-adjacent body horror, strong language, dealing with grief and trauma in destructive ways.
Chapter 8
“I hate you,” Katy spat, and it felt good to get that out, like spraying out poison. “I hate you. You think you’re so fucking clever, don’t you, but you ruin everything. Everything!” She couldn’t stop now, even if she wanted to. It all flooded out, word vomit on a tide of fury. “…All my birthdays when I was a kid, pretty much every Yule you ever bothered to show up to, you’re a fucking embarrassment, and you took Gran away from me! You… you took her away!” She couldn’t see. Angry tears blurred the garden and smudged him out of existence, the way she wanted to erase him from her life. “I hate you.”
Wes sniggered, but Katy was over him, too.
“Shut up, Wes.”
“See, this is why I had to abduct you.” Ricky was infuriatingly calm. “Knew you’d never come if I just asked.” She charged him, poker raised, point first. She expected him to dodge. He didn’t. The point went straight into his head, her whole weight behind it, and right through into his skull.
~ C. M. Rosens, Thirteenth, pp. 234-5
I didn’t want this to be the note we ended on before Christmas so I skipped a week, but this is the anger and rage chapter where Katy gets to see if she can really kill someone as herself, and not as the Beast.
A lot is going on for a 17-year-old to cope with and Katy isn’t making rational choices, but then she’s only got Wes and Ricky to support her, and both of them have betrayed her in some way, and neither are particularly reliable or can provide the support she actually needs.
Ricky is pretty sure of himself and confident that he’ll come back if she kills him, like he usually does (see: The Crows). Katy is, on the other hand, born to be a family killing machine. So let’s see if he’s right about this next week…
C. M. Rosens 