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her leg free, it just went deeper and held fast. She struggled against the suck of the quicksand, but within seconds she was knee-deep. She had a horrible feeling exactly as if hands had grabbed her ankles and were pulling her down. She knew this was just fear and too much imagination, so she reached for the end of the wall to try and haul herself out, but it was just too far away. Her hand caught a trailing tendril of bladder wrack, but when she tugged at it, it just came loose and tumbled into the sea beside her.
    She bent over one knee and pushed on it with both hands, trying to lift the other foot even an inch. Nothing happened, but the sea seemed to rise a little. She stared at it in horror.
    “Help!” she shouted, and looked up.
    And there he was, in the water.
    Striding toward her.
    Smiling and reaching out a helping hand.
    “Edie. It’s okay. I’ve got you.”
    George.
    George stood there, with a sudden wind blowing his hair back off his face, smiling into the light.
    Smiling into her face.
    She felt suddenly giddy with relief and happiness.
    “Grab my hand. If I come farther it’ll get me too.”
    Their fingers reached for each other. She missed on the first attempt and nearly fell.
    “Come on, it’ll be fine. I’m not going to hurt you,” he said.
    And as she looked up from the water, she caught the glint of the little blade held in his other hand. And then her gaze continued up his arm and took in his face and the appalling thing that was happening to it.
    It was melting and shifting so that it was George and then it wasn’t George, not completely, not very, not really, not hardly, and then . . . not at all.
    It was her mother’s partner. Her stepfather. The smiler with the knife, right down to the streak of blood across his face where she had scratched him with her nails as she’d made her escape from the beach hut and the horrors she had glinted within.
    It was death on the beach, a death delayed, a death from what seemed a lifetime ago.
    “Don’t be silly. I’m not going to hurt you,” he wheedled, a smile curdling across his red face, and she caught the rank bar-and-tobacco smell on his breath. “Why would I hurt you?”
    “I killed you!” she yelled.
    He laughed. “Didn’t kill me, love. Sticks and stones may break my bones, but girly can’t never hurt me, eh?”
    When he laughed, his eyes fluttered, and she remembered how creepy she’d always known he was, creepy from the first moment her mother had brought him home to the last time she’d seen him, after he’d told her about her mother dying. After they’d gone for the walk on the beach and he’d tried to be nice to her.
    Before he’d tried to make her go into the old beach hut, where she’d seen the full horror of it all.
    He lurched deeper into the water and grabbed at her. She couldn’t dodge much because her feet were caught fast, and he quickly got her.
    As his hand grasped her upper arm and pulled her, something else happened. A blast of wind from the sea hit them, followed by another and another, building in strength. And then she saw that it was not wind but the downdraft from the wing beats of the huge bird that she’d seen keeping level with her as she’d run. Close to, she saw it was an owl. And for a reason that she neither understood nor questioned, she knew it meant her no harm.
    The man saw it at the same time.
    His mouth crumpled into a loose O of shock, then widened into a scream as the bird screeched at him. The power of the noise blew the tops of the wavelets around them flat. Maybe because the screech wasn’t aimed at her, Edie’s ears only rang with the force of it, but the man seemed suddenly maddened by the sound. His hands bunched over his ears as the great gray bird hung in the air between him and Edie, staying in place with thunderous wing beats.
    The man slashed desperately at the owl with his knife.
    Blood ribboned between them, and spattered into the water.
    “No!” she gasped in horror for