Shadowkissed (A Hemlock Grove fan fiction)

never trust a stranger in a jaguar

                                                       September

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"Beep, beep!" Macy's older sister, Anna, calls out from behind her bedroom door. Macy's alarm clock broke last month, just days before her schedule for her senior year at Hemlock Grove High School came in the mail, so this is Anna's brilliant solution.

She's already up and dressed anyway, brushing a hand through her blond hair as she reads over this morning's news on the computer. It's all stocks, big international conflict in the Middle East, and lots of speculations over some sort of new technological advancement being made at the Godfrey Institute. Macy feels almost happy to see such boring headlines: last September, there had been the grisly attacks, girls who'd had their insides strewn all over the place by some wacky killer animal—and even more shocking was the news that it had actually been the quiet Godfrey daughter at the root of all of them. The Godfreys are a fucked-up family, that much is undeniable, but Macy never suspected any of them of murder. It's just so savage.

She's seen a lot of death in her life, from real-life corpses at funerals she wished she never had to attend to extremely-realistic crime television shows, but what happened to Brooke Bluebell, a cheerleader at Penrose High who gave Macy a ride home from a party once, is more than enough death for anyone. Reporters were barred from putting any pictures of the actual crime scene in the papers, but with all the excitement surrounding her murder, it wasn't hard to imagine it yourself. Sometimes if she thinks hard and long enough about it, she can paint a perfect picture in her head of what it had looked like for that jogger who happened upon the grisly scene one morning in early fall, when the horrors were just beginning.

Lisa Willoughby's murder headline had been much of the same: teenage girl found mutilated by some horrible unknown beast that not a single incompetent cop could make heads or tails of. What's worse, though, had been the news that someone dug her up and stole some of her . . . inner body parts from her grave. People are pretty fucked up here in the Grove, Macy concludes, pulling a sweater over her head. She feels absolutely horrible for the parents of both girls; she knows what it's like to lose someone—multiple someones—and to have their deaths plastered all over every headline makes it even harder to move on. She thinks about Tom Sworn, police chief of Hemlock Grove and father to twins Alyssa and Alexa Sworn, the third and fourth victims. Macy, who had only spoken with the Sworn twins once or twice in between classes, didn't have much to say to Officer Sworn when she'd seen him the other day at the general store. He'd been the one to shoot Shelley Godfrey with a double-barrel shotgun and has since been considered a hero by all of the town. But Macy always sympathized with Shelley, instead seeing her as more of a gentle giant than the murderous, bloodthirsty beast that everyone is making her out to be. Macy doesn't know what to think. It seems to her like, after all this death, everyone needs someone to blame. And what better scapegoat than someone who can't verbally defend themselves?

And then there's Jenny. It still makes Macy a little sick to think about what had happened to one of her best friends at Hemlock Grove High School. Jenny had been literally ripped to pieces and left strewn across the rocks of Hemlock River. Macy keeps thinking and thinking about how they never found some parts of her—the killer had only left her torso and pieces of her limbs like some sort of twisted scavenger hunt for the police. As of late, a headless Jenny in last year's silver homecoming dress, her body all bloodied and stitched together like Frankenstein, has been added to Macy's recurring rotation of nightmares. Sometimes it's hard to remember what Jenny even looked like before the murder.

Her mother went to the grocery store early this morning, and her father took an early shift at the station, so it's just Macy and her sister at home. The quiet used to make Macy feel peaceful. Now her entire life is like this quiet, extended silence, reminding her of everything she's lost, and she kind of hates it.