“He said it wasn’t the first time he shoved someone over the cliff. I remember it clearly. He sneered when he said it, and then I—I mean my great-aunt Beth—wrenched her arm away from him and went into a free fall.”
I blink away a bite of pain as I think about her great-aunt’s last moments in that life.
“She didn’t feel anything, Alder. She—” she looks up to the sky “—she felt in control for the first time in her life.” I squeeze her palm in mine as we stand at the edge of the platform, damp with tide pools and seaweed. “She was only fourteen.” Fable hums, almost numb with the truth of her great-aunt’s tragic ending.
“But she brought me one step closer to you.”
“So she did.”
“So, what was my last ending, then?” She’s moving away from me, closer to the edge where the waves lick the edge of the giant basalt platform. It’s slick; I can see it shining with moonlight from this angle, but can she? Does she care? Timing is everything. If I don’t reveal that soon, we’ll lose our chance at forever.
I furrow my eyebrows. “The last life you remember is the only one that matters.”
Alder
“What about the legacy of Leith? Murder and abuse and cruelty? That’s why it’s cracked and crumbling at the foundations.”
I shake my head. “I think that’shislesson to learn, not mine.”
“I wish he were dead.”
I feel the pain radiating off her; she’s vibrating now.
“I have to save them.”
“Fable, no. Not yet.” I step closer. “Do you have the gem?”
“Of course. I always have it.” She pulls it from the pocket of her jeans. “I broke it.”
My eyes widen. “I didn’t think it was possible.”
She frowns, then tucks it back into her pocket.
“Listen, I don’t know what we’ll find in that cave, but I’m going with you. I just need you to know one thing. If this goes wrong…well, there’s a way to make this last.”
“Make this last?”
She doesn’t understand. The sound of the waves coming in pounds at my skull.She needs to understand.
“Us. To make us last, we have to hold the halves of the gem together and split our souls. I believe that’s what happened to the plague doctor and Annie—their souls split together at the time of their passing. I can’t figure out why, when Annie passed in Edinburgh before even making the journey to Skye, but now that I know a soul can linger in purgatory forever if the lessons aren’t learned, they must have split simultaneously on the day the plague doctor died at Leith.”
“W-why? What do you mean? You want us to split? And then, what? I die?” Fable’s voice cracks on her last word. “No, not yet. I-I still don’t even know if any of this is real. I just need to know if there are skeletons of innocent women in that cave—”
“Fable, there are. Of course there are. That’s why the Salt Witch chanted the curse there. She lit the souls of the underworld on fire as she melted candle wax and sang that chant over their bones for hours and hours each night. Amethyst and aragonite with sea salt create a force out of the environment like an aura that responds to the human central nervous system. There’s still so much before time runs out. You have to get this.”
“Why is time running out? What are you not telling me, Alder?”
I shake my head, waves pounding like a headache. “Your great-aunt, your great-aunt. Ugh, I can’t force you. Okay, what do you remember?”
“That there are more women at the base of that cave, and that would solve the mystery of the vanishing women of Skye.”
“You’ll not find what you’re after, I can promise you that.”
She frowns, as if my overenunciation triggers something in the recesses of her memory. “That’s why the gem called me to it. Because it is mine.”
I clutch her hands together. “It is.”
“But I’m not the Salt Witch?”
