“Where do we get the fairy dust from?” I ask.
“What?” Widow kicks at a rotten coconut, sending the husk flying.
“We’re fae, right?” I wiggle my wings, which takes a great effort on my part. “Tinker Bell always had fairy dust. Where did it come from?”
“The Silver Mountains, I think?”
We bypass a large pile of seaweed, and I’m glad when we get upwind of it.
“Do they make it?”
“That’s one of those fae secrets I’ve never been privy to. Maybe if they were still around, I could ask. But I don’t intend to venture into the Silver Mountains anytime soon.”
I wish I still had some. I’d use it to fly out over the ocean and pluck Hook from the waves. But I don’t say that wish out loud. I’m already in enough danger as it is.
We walk for a long way until the crystalline structures bar our path and soar high overhead. I lean against the nearest cubic shoot of rock, then yank my hands back when I feel something like a hum.
“What?” Widow peers at the stone.
“I felt something when I touched it. It was almost like a …” I close my eyes. “Like a song.”
She presses her palm to the crystal. “I hear it, too. It’s the island singing.”
“Is it safe?”
She nods and takes my hand, pressing it to the stone beside hers.
The hum fills me again, like a thousand voices all singing in harmony. The tune is slow, almost mournful. It sends goosebumps shooting across my skin, and it seems to pull my own sorrow around me like a cape.
“It’s … heartbreaking.” I gasp and pull my hand back. “It hurts.” The island’s song seemed to be pulling from my own aching heart, resonating at the same level of pain. I feel it in my marrow, in the deepest parts of my grief. “It’s an open wound.”
Widow slowly backs away from the stone. “We should return to the camp. We can comb the beach at moonrise before we enter the ca—” She whirls and draws her cutlass.
“What is it?” Then I hear it, too. Hesitant footsteps. Someone is picking their way through the crystal maze and is headed right for us.
Somehow, I sense her before I can see her.
“It’s okay.” I put my hand on Widow’s sword arm.
“What is it?”
A weathered old woman appears between two of the stone outcrops and hobbles toward us, her gaze fixed on me.
“Ari. Queen of the Mermaids.”
ChapterEighteen
“Clytemnestra told me I’d find you here.” Ari stops right in front of me, her wizened body bent and her eyes whitened with cataracts.
“The witch?” Widow looks around at the stone walls, as if expecting Nessie to pop out.
“Witch?” Ari cackles, raising the hair on the back of my neck. “She’s a god to the likes of you.” She tries to draw herself up to her full height, though she only seems to get slightly less bent. “The same as I am.”
Widow crosses her arms over her chest and leans back, looking her up and down. “You don’t look like a god to me, and if my memory serves, you tried to poison Moira.”
“That wasn’t poison in the deadly sense.” She waves a hand. “Besides, Tinker Bell tricked me.” She squints up at me. “Though I see she’s met her fate for ill or for good.”
“In the end, it was for good.”
