“It takes time to process it,” she says in a soothing whisper. “You’re discombobulated, is all, your senses in upheaval. I told you this would happen. You’ve had your whole world turned upside down. Fear is normal at first.”
But it’s not the fear that feels out of place to me, it’s the lack of it. That Arla seems perfectly at ease living over the mythical equivalent of an active volcano is delusional. “How deep does that well go?”
“Wells are anywhere from ten to hundreds of feet deep,” she answers. “Butthat one…We’re not even twenty feet above sea level in Pioneer Square. He dug deep enough to hit the saltwater-freshwater interface—the journal indicates that much. And it’sgrated at the bottom. But how far beyond that, I haven’t been able to deduce. The deepest well in the world goes more than twelve hundred feet down,” she says. “And it’s not holding an ancient elemental entity.”
I shiver imagining the potential scope.
“But it’s not like I’m going to call groundwater services to have it surveyed,” she tells me. “Even with a complete translation of the journal, I’m not sure I’ll ever truly understand how he did it.”
Back in her loft, she deposits me on a barstool and starts making a tall glass of ice water. “You need to hydrate,” she says, passing it to me. My head is beginning to throb with the impending drum of a killer headache. “And you need rest. The first time is difficult.”
“Why?” Though I don’t know if I can trust her answer.
“Because everything inside you is revolting against what you’ve learned. All those carefully ordered neural pathways are rerouting themselves, gouging new trenches into your brain. Even your organs can feel the change. They’ll resist at first, but with time it gets easier.”
Anneli’s blindness from her encounter comes back to me. Is that what happened? Did her eyes revolt against the vision in Svalbard?
But Icansee, if painfully. And Arla seems to think my reaction will be short-lived. “How many times have you been down there?”
“As many as it takes.” Her eyes are flat, a wall I cannot scale. “It’s different for me.”
“Why?”
“We belong to each other,” she says simply. “The Fathom and me.”
It’s clear that she believes it, but I don’t. That creature I witnessed—she doesn’t belong to anyone. I’ve known creatures like that before. My grandfather. My grandmother.Some things simply don’t fit in cages.It’s a drug to Arla, the power she’s sitting over. I can understand the pull. I’ve felt it myself, that insatiable craving for limitlessness. But I can’t understand the ignorance. It’s willful and reckless.
“You said that she called you.” I watch her for any reactionthat will explain. Does Arla hear a voice like I do? “What did you mean?”
She nods. “It was nearly three years ago. I was looking for a new place to land. My relationship with my father was strained beyond repair.”
I keep quiet, the headline Brennan showed me glaring behind my eyes.Drowning will do that,I think.
“I started to feel a tug westward, away from Colorado and everything I’d known, a pull to the coast and the water.” Her eyes meet mine and cut away, as if she doesn’t want me to read too much in them. “I’ve always loved the water. I was barely walking when my mother found me in the neighbor’s pond, swimming as if I were born to it. It made sense, at that point in my life, that I would find my way to the water again. But in the end, it wasn’t the ocean I found. It washer.
“I wanted to invest in real estate, build something for myself for a change. I was drawn to this listing, to its dilapidated basement. The second I saw the door, I knew. I made an offer on the spot. It took time to figure out how to get inside. The key—”
“It appears and disappears,” I note.
“Yes, it’s part of the spell. In the beginning, I slept down there on a mattress on the floor. My dreams were a vivid, repetitive, thrashing sequence of events—the stacking of bricks, the painting of words, the call to the deep and her arrival, the man before her, short but proud, the magic barely holding, the fire eating a path through the city. Until I saw him stand before the door one night and hold out his palm. He spoke a word—Aramaic forgift—and a key appeared. The next morning, I tried it, and that was the first time I stepped inside. Now, I have only to think it and the key appears.”
“And after? When it goes away?”
She shrugs one shoulder. “I simply think it gone again once the door is locked, andpoof.”
The story Brennan told me about Arla’s water-dowsing days makes more sense. If the Fathom called her, it must have sensedher affinity for water, a magic that would enable her to find it when no one else could. But why does the Fathom need Arla? There can only be one reason—it’s looking for someone to free it.
“What about the rest of us?” I press. “Why drag us into this?”
Arla schools her gaze just left of mine. “I told you. We need a full circle to complete the spell.”
“Yes, but what can we do? I don’t read Aramaic. None of us is schooled in demonology. Well… maybe the twins,” I say facetiously.
Her smile is careful, practiced. “Your magic will feed the spell, kitten.”
“How?” I question.
“Let me figure that out,” she insists, but her avoidance of specifics breeds unease in me.
