I inched my hand closer, trying to reach out to Mother, but she backed away in her chair.
My arm slipped from the table, and I was falling. Every muscle inside me contracted as though my spine was being squeezed by an iron fist.
Then I collapsed to the floor with a loudthump.
My back arched and thrashed at unnatural angles while ice climbed inside me, attacking my legs and arms. It was so cold it felt like fire.
I tried to call out for relief as my body stiffened from spasms, but no noise came from me. No tears sprang from my eyes. My screams echoed in my head and bounced off my skull.
I had experienced hypothermia before, but it came to me in stages, taking me slowly. There was no warning, no name for what was happening to me.
Celia pulled Mother into her arms as she wept.
One moment, I was drinking from the cup, and the next, I was sure I was dying. And Mother was turning away from me as everyone else had always done.
All I could do was gaze up at the web and surrender to the soul-slicing freeze. But before my eyes closed, I realized it was a perfect circle inside the mesmerizing web.
A sign that I had reached the edge of death.
PARTII
THE SHALLOW
CHAPTER 10
ADORA
November 17, 2020
72 days until the Crimson Eclipse
There weredays when the wind was so cold.
Days like these always follow the cruelest nights. The kind of cruel nights that shook me, and for a split second, I felt like a little girl again needing the comfort of my mother. It didn’t take long for this ache to shrink and for my strength to return, but this ache didn’t leave me. Not entirely. It moped inside me like a sad, dark cloud.
I killed a woman. Soon, Augustine would return to the cell and find Lena in a bed of her blood with her wrists slashed in a peaceful sleep at last.
The only way to keep my promise to her and save Mom was to kill Kane, and Cyrus had become a thing standing in my way. If Cyrus or anyone else caught me during my efforts, they’d take me to the Wicker Man. But it was a risk I was willing to take. So much was riding on Kane’s death. If I didn’t move forward with the plan because of this sudden arranged marriage, then I would have wasted the majority of my life.
I descended the attic stairs to the second floor and dipped into my bedroom. Outside my window, daylight crowned the ocean.
To fight the chilling temperatures, I dressed in layers. My vintage coat, a cotton pullover, and a tank. My steps were quiet as I left the cottage’s premises through the gate and down the stone stairway.
Gray was the sky, black was the sea, and white was the beach. The only sound during this time was the crashing waves, the whistling wind through the cliff’s edge, and the faraway cry of a gull. In the distance, the lighthouse beam on Bone Island cut through a blanket of fog, the horizon blurring like a somber oil painting.
I walked along the snow-capped beach stretching across the east end of Weeping Hollow when about thirty feet down the shoreline, a strange object partly wedged between rocks bobbed in the shallow waters.
The closer I got, the larger it was—a coffin-shaped box about seven feet long, three to four feet wide, covered in muck and barnacles, debris floating with the tide surrounding it.
I chanced a look around, and no one else was nearby.
I took cautious steps closer, broken glass crunching beneath each step and water splashing up my legs, spilling into my boots and soaking my ankles.
It wasn’t black muck but spiders blanketing the box.
Hundreds of black spiders.
My insides curled, my shoulders tensed. I kept my gaze on the box, afraid of it leaving my sight, as I leaned to my right to pick up driftwood.
