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herself to give Madrigal a single nod.
    The girl leapt at Jasper, taking him so swiftly that all he had time to do was drop the shovel but not raise his hands to protect himself. He seemed utterly surprised by the child’s speed and strength, possibly because, having once carried her off all unresisting to Deadman’s Mount, he simply didn’t believe her a serious threat. But Maddie bore him to the ground in a matter of seconds and began her work.
    Anne did not look away. She found neither regret nor sorrow, neither satisfaction nor disgust inside; she thought she might be empty now. She wondered if sensations, emotions, would return, but it didn’t bother her, the idea of permanent lack.
    With a bite, Jasper’s muscular neck was torn open, exposing for a few seconds sinews and oesophagus, before the dark red welled and the creature took more mouthfuls, barely chewing before she swallowed. The shifting of her throat as the morsels moved down, down, down to her gullet for a long digestion was hypnotic. Soon, Jasper’s head hung loosely by a few bloody threads and the child’s tongue wound itself through the white vertebrae peeking above his shoulders, picking them clean of meat. Anne watched as her daughter subjected Jasper to the same kind of scavenging she had the drifter. Soon, there was nothing left of Anne’s former lover, nothing left of Finnegan’s Field’s Mr Underhill.
    â€œWhat now?” she dully asked the gore-covered child, who shrugged as she cleaned her face much as a cat would, with a licking of hands and a rubbing of cheeks and forehead.
    â€œI go back beneath. Your child will let me be at last.”
    â€œRelease her,” said Anne quietly. Then louder, but more pleadingly. “Please give her to me.”
    The creature shook its head. “There is not enough of her left. She would not fill this body, this brain. There has only been the desire for revenge and that is fulfilled … She will fade quickly. Nothing remains for a mother to hang her heart upon.”
    In the years that Madrigal was gone, Anne had kept her daughter’s voice in her mind, kept it clear and crystal as a bell, but now … now she didn’t think she could recall it. The sound of the many voices had replaced it; the old creaking tones, the echo of creeping roots and soughing boughs, of myriad timbres braided into one, had overwhelmed the last thing she’d retained of her child. Tears welled and broke.
    The creature seemed nonplussed, then for a moment, just the tiniest moment, Anne’s true daughter appeared; the vagueness the thing had worn was sharpened into something she recognised, and the girl-suit fit properly for the first time in months. Madrigal lifted her arms. Anne’s knees gave way, and she collapsed into the hug; thin limbs wrapped around her neck and held her tight. She ignored the smell of blood and meat on Maddie’s breath, of the mess that Jasper had left in his death throes, the lasting stink of shit and piss hanging in the air where he’d died, where he’d been disappeared.
    When at last the little girl pulled away Anne saw that her daughter was gone, all trace of Madrigal eased, shrugged off as easily as an unwanted coat. The sense of a second being under the skin was stronger, the way the body’s outline vibrated in time with a different rhythm. The not-daughter stepped back, nodded, and turned.
    Anne saw the shovel Jasper had dropped. Its great pan of a head beckoned. The handle was smooth, mostly, but in some places, there were splinters; fragments pricked at her palms as she grasped the shaft, then dug in deep as she swung the tool, even deeper when it connected with the back of Madrigal’s head.
    The impact sounded like a melon on cement.
    The hole Jasper had made in the Mount was the perfect size and shape, and Anne began to slide Maddie into it. When she was done, she thought, she would replace the piece of turf