The girl in red, p.1
The Girl in Red, page 1
Praise for
The Mermaid
“Beautifully eloquent language . . . and the credible historical setting will draw readers into this lovely reimagined fairy tale.”
—Booklist (starred review)
“Beautifully written and daringly conceived, The Mermaid is a fabulous story. . . . Henry’s spare, muscular prose is a delight.”
—Louisa Morgan, author of A Secret History of Witches
“There is a current of longing that runs through The Mermaid: longing for the sea, for truth, for love. It is irresistible and will sweep you away.”
—Ellen Herrick, author of The Sparrow Sisters
“A captivating tale of an intriguing young woman who finds herself in the world of the greatest showman, P. T. Barnum. Original and magical, this is a novel to dive into and savor.”
—Hazel Gaynor, New York Times bestselling author of The Cottingley Secret
Praise for
Lost Boy
“Christina Henry shakes the fairy dust off a legend; this Peter Pan will give you chills.”
—Genevieve Valentine, author of Persona
“Multiple twists keep the reader guessing, and the fluid writing is enthralling. . . . This is a fine addition to the shelves of any fan of children’s classics and their modern subversions.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“This wild, unrelenting tale, full to the brim with the freedom and violence of young boys who never want to grow up, will appeal to fans of dark fantasy.”
—Booklist
“Turns Neverland into a claustrophobic world where time is disturbingly nebulous and identity is chillingly manipulated. . . . A deeply impactful, imaginative, and haunting story of loyalty, disillusionment, and self-discovery.”
—RT Book Reviews (top pick)
“Henry keeps the story fresh and energetic with diabolical twists and turns to keep us guessing. Dynamic characterization and narration bring the story to life. . . . Once again, Henry takes readers on an adventure of epic and horrific proportions as she reinvents a childhood classic using our own fears and desires. Her smooth prose and firm writing hooked me up instantly and held me hostage to the very end.”
—Smexy Books
“We all have a soft spot for the classics that we read when we were growing up. But . . . this retelling will poke and jab at that soft spot until you can never look at it the same way again.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“An absolutely addicting read. . . . Psychological, gripping, and entertaining, painting a picture of Peter Pan before we came to know him in the film: the darker side of his history. The writing is fabulous, the plot incredibly compelling, and the characters entirely enthralling.”
—Utopia State of Mind
Praise for
Alice
“I loved falling down the rabbit hole with this dark, gritty tale. A unique spin on a classic and one wild ride!”
—Gena Showalter, New York Times bestselling author of The Darkest Promise
“Alice takes the darker elements of Lewis Carroll’s original, amplifies Tim Burton’s cinematic reimagining of the story, and adds a layer of grotesquery from [Henry’s] own alarmingly fecund imagination to produce a novel that reads like a Jacobean revenge drama crossed with a slasher movie.”
—The Guardian (UK)
“A psychotic journey through the bowels of magic and madness. I, for one, thoroughly enjoyed the ride.”
—Brom, author of The Child Thief
“A horrifying fantasy that will have you reexamining your love for this childhood favorite.”
—RT Book Reviews (top pick)
Praise for
Red Queen
“Henry takes the best elements from Carroll’s iconic world and mixes them with dark fantasy elements. . . . [Her] writing is so seamless you won’t be able to stop reading.”
—Pop Culture Uncovered
“Alice’s ongoing struggle is to distinguish reality from illusion, and Henry excels in mingling the two for the reader as well as her characters. The darkness in this book is that of fairy tales, owing more to Grimm’s matter-of-fact violence than to the underworld of the first book.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
TITLES BY CHRISTINA HENRY
The Girl in Red
The Mermaid
Lost Boy
The Chronicles of Alice
Alice
Red Queen
The Black Wings Novels
Black Wings
Black Night
Black Howl
Black Lament
Black City
Black Heart
Black Spring
BERKLEY
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
1745 Broadway, New York, NY 10019
Copyright © 2019 by Tina Raffaele
Penguin Random House supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader.
BERKLEY and the BERKLEY & B colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Henry, Christina, 1974– author.
Title: The girl in red / Christina Henry.
Description: First Edition. | New York: Berkley, 2019.
Identifiers: LCCN 2018043169 | ISBN 9780451492289 (pbk.) | ISBN 9780451492296 (ebook)
Subjects: | GSAFD: Fantasy fiction.
Classification: LCC PS3608.E568 G57 2019 | DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018043169
First Edition: June 2019
Cover art by Pep Montserrat
Cover design by Judith Murello
Title page crossed axe art © IvanDbajo/Shutterstock.com
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Version_1
For Rebecca Brewer, because some heroines have a cupcake stash instead of wearing a cape
CONTENTS
Praise for Christina Henry
Titles by Christina Henry
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter 1: The Taste of Fears
Chapter 2: All Our Yesterdays
Chapter 3: Toil and Trouble
Chapter 4: Hide Your Fires
Chapter 5: Daggers in Men’s Smiles
Chapter 6: What’s Done Is Done
Chapter 7: The Grief That Does Not Speak
Chapter 8: The Serpent under It
Chapter 9: The Dearest Thing
Chapter 10: Sound and Fury
Chapter 11: The Hurlyburly
Chapter 12: A Walking Shadow
Chapter 13: Brief Candle
Chapter 14: Something Wicked
Chapter 15: Supped Full with Horrors
Chapter 16: Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
About the Author
CHAPTER 1
The Taste of Fears
Somewhere in an American forest
The fellow across the fire gave Red the once-over, from the wild corkscrews of her hair peeking out from under her red hood to the small hand axe that rested on the ground beside her. His eyes darted from the dried blood on the blade—just a shadow in the firelight—to the backpack of supplies next to it and back to her face, which she made as bland as rice pudding.
Red knew very well what he was thinking, what he thought he would be able to do to her. Men like him were everywhere, before and after the world fell apart, and it didn’t take any great perception to see what was in their eyes. No doubt he’d raped and murdered and thieved plenty since the Crisis (she always thought of it that way, with a capital letter) began. He’d hurt those he thought were weak or that he took by surprise, and he’d survived because of it.
Lots of people thought that because she was a woman with a prosthetic leg it would be easy to take advantage of her—that she would be slow, or incapable. Lots of people found out they were wrong. Someone had found out just a short while before—hence the still-bloody axe that kept drawing the attention of the stranger who’d come to her fire without invitation.
She should have cleaned the blade, though not because she was worried about scaring him. She should have done it because it was her only defense besides her brain, and she ought to take better care of it.
He’d swaggered out of the trees and into the clearing, all “hey-little-lady-don’t-you-want-some-company.” He had remarked on the cold night and how nice her fire looked. His hair was bristle-brush stiff and close to the scalp, like he’d shaved it to the skin once, but it was growing out now. Had
He didn’t look sick; that was the main thing. Of course nobody looked sick when they first caught it, but pretty soon after they would be coughing and their eyes would be red from all the burst blood vessels and a few days after the Cough started, well . . . it was deceptively mild at first, that cough, just a dry throat that didn’t seem to go away and then it suddenly was much more, a mild skirmish that turned into a world war without your noticing.
It didn’t escape Red’s notice that underneath his raggedy field coat there was a bulge at his hip. She wondered, in a vaguely interested sort of way, if he actually knew how to use the gun or if he just enjoyed pretending he was a man while flashing it around.
She waited. She wasn’t under any obligation to be polite to someone who thought she was his next victim. He hadn’t introduced himself, although he had put his hands near the fire she’d so painstakingly built.
“Are you . . . ?” he began, his eyes darting over her again. His gaze paused for a moment when he saw the gleam of metal at her left ankle, visible just beneath the roll of her pants.
“Am I what?” she asked. Her tone did not encourage further conversation.
He hesitated, seemingly thinking better of it, then gestured at his face. “Your eyes are light, but your skin is brown. You look like you’re half-and-half.”
She gave him her blandest glance yet, her face no more expressive than a slice of Wonder Bread.
“Half-and-half?” she said, pretending not to understand.
Red had that indeterminate mixed-race look that made white people nervous, because they didn’t know what box to put her in. She might be half African or Middle Eastern. She might be a Latina or maybe she was just a really dark Italian. Her eyes were an inheritance from her father, a kind of greenish blue, and that always caused further confusion.
Their eyes always flicked up to her hair, looking for clues, but she had big fat curls that could have come from anybody. She was used to speculative glances and stupid questions, having dealt with a lifetime of them, but it always surprised her (it shouldn’t have, but it did) how many people still cared about that dumb shit when the world was coming to an end.
“I was just wondering what—” he said.
“Where I come from it’s not polite to start asking people about their folk before you’re even introduced.”
“Right,” he said. The intruder had lost some of the swagger he’d had coming into the clearing in the first place.
“What are you doing out here on your own? I thought everyone was supposed to go to the nearest quarantine camp,” he finally said, choosing not to introduce himself despite her admonishment.
They were not going to be friends, then. Red did not feel sad about this.
“What are you doing out here on your own?” she answered.
“Right,” he said, shuffling his feet. His eyes darted in all directions, a sure sign that a lie was on offer. “I lost my friends in the dark. There were soldiers and we got separated.”
“Soldiers?” she asked, sharper than she intended. “A foot patrol?”
“Yes.”
“How many soldiers?”
He shrugged. “I dunno. A bunch. It was dark, and we didn’t want to go to the camp. Same as you.”
Don’t try to act like we have something in common. “Did you come from the highway? Do you know which way they were headed? Did they follow you?”
“No, I got away clean. Didn’t hear any of them behind me.”
This sounded like something he’d made up to explain the fact that he was alone in the woods with no supplies and no companions and sniffing around her fire looking for something he didn’t have.
Red sincerely hoped he was as full of shit as he seemed, because she was not interested in encountering any soldiers. The government wanted everyone rounded up and quarantined (“to safely prevent the further spread of the disease”—Red had snorted when she heard that announcement because the fastest way to spread disease is to put a whole bunch of people in tight quarters and those government doctors ought to know better) and she didn’t have time for their quarantine. She had to get to her grandmother, and she still had a very long way to go.
Red had passed near a highway earlier in the day. The experience filled her with anxiety since soldiers (and people generally) were more likely to be near highways and roadways and towns. She hadn’t encountered a patrol there, but she’d had a small . . . conflict . . . with a group of three ordinary people about two or three miles into the woods past the road. Since then she’d tried to make tracks as fast as possible away from anywhere that might be populated. Red wasn’t interested in joining up with a group.
She hadn’t asked the coyote to sit down and join her, and it was clear he didn’t know what to do with himself. Red could see the shape of what he figured would happen on his face.
He’d thought she would be polite, that she would offer to share her space with him. He’d thought she would trust him, because she was alone and he was alone and of course people were pack animals and would naturally want to herd together. Then when her guard was down or maybe when she’d fallen asleep, he’d take what he wanted from her and leave. She was not following his script, and he didn’t know how to improvise.
Well, Red’s mother hadn’t raised a fool, and she wasn’t about to invite a coyote to sit down to dinner with her. She stirred the stew over the fire and determined that it was finished heating.
“That smells good,” he said hopefully.
“Sure does,” Red replied. She pulled the pot off the fire and poured some of the stew into her camp bowl.
“I haven’t eaten a darn thing since yesterday,” he said.
Red moved the bowl into her lap and spooned a tiny bit of stew, just a mouse bite, into her mouth. It was too soon to eat it and hot, far too hot, and it scorched her tongue. She wasn’t going to be able to taste anything for a couple of hours after that, but she didn’t show it. She only looked at him, and waited for whatever it was that he was going to do.
He narrowed his eyes then, and she glimpsed the predator he’d tried to disguise under a charm mask.
“Where I come from it’s polite to share if you’ve got food and someone else doesn’t,” he said.
“You don’t say.”
She spooned up some more stew, never taking her eyes from him. She was going to lose what was in the pot in a minute when he charged at her, and she was sorry for it, for she was hungry and it wasn’t easy to carry those cans of stew around.
He pulled out the gun then, the one he’d been pretending not to finger the whole time.
“Give me what’s in your bag, bitch,” he snarled, his lips pulling back from his teeth.
Red calmly put the bowl in her lap to one side. “No.”
“Give it to me or I’ll shoot you,” he said, waving the gun in her general direction.
He thought he was being menacing, and it made her snort. He looked like a cartoon villain in a movie, a mangy excuse for a badass—the kind that threaten the hero when he walks through an alley and get thrashed for their trouble. She wasn’t dumb enough to think that he couldn’t hurt her, though. Even an idiot with a gun was dangerous.
“Are you laughing at me?” His face twisted in fury as he stepped closer.
He was coming around the side where she’d rested the pot, as she’d expected. He was afraid of the axe, though he didn’t want to acknowledge it, so he was giving the bloodied blade a wide berth. That was fine by Red.
“What’s the matter, bitch? Scared?” he cooed. He mistook her silence for fear, apparently.
She waited, patient as a fisherman on a summer’s day, until he was within arm’s length. Then she grabbed the pot handle and stood as fast as she could, using her real leg and her free arm for force to push upward and tapping her other leg down only for balance once she was on her feet.
The trouble with the prosthetic was that it didn’t spring—Red didn’t have a fancy blade that could perform feats of athleticism—but she’d figured out how to compensate using her other leg. She needed to prevent the coyote from killing her for her food.
