He’s frozen in place, face beyond pale, paper white, eyes wide in fear. Dread fills me, and I know I’ve lost him.
But I refuse to lose my little sister.
“Knife, Caleb, now!”
He turns and runs.
It hurts even more than I knew it would.
Fine. I’ll do it myself.
I turn my attention to the lantern we’ve created, and I summon every single trickle of magic I can feel inside of me. It’s usually thick, maple syrup, molasses-like, and when I use it to bake it comes naturally.
Now it’s nothing like that, as if the dam has burst and the magic’s right underneath my skin.
I squeeze my sisters’ hands. “We need a blood offering.”
“It’s too late for that,” Hazel says, an eerie laugh sending a shiver up my spine.
“The lantern,” I say. “We offer the circle our blood. We offer the guardians a bit of our life.”
And I stare at the lantern, and it happens exactly as it did in my vision.
The glass bursts, shards of shrapnel that fling immediately into the air, bouncing off the circle itself, the bubble around us. It happens so quickly, and yet it’s almost as if I see every shard in slow motion.
I wonder if it’s because I’ve already seen this happen once.
I close my eyes against the onslaught, and I hope that none of us are hurt too badly.
I barely feel it as the glass sinks into my skin, and it’s over as quickly as it started.
Fire rips from Hazel’s mouth, a soundless scream.
Watchmere Light blinks back to life, a steady beam on the ocean.
“You’ve done well, child,” a voice says in my head, and I look down to see the kraken’s tentacles slither away from my ankle.
The magic collapses, the bubble bursting, and I fall to my knees, completely exhausted, every inch bleeding — but there’s no sign of the glass.
I look, searching each small paper cut across my arms and hands, even on my face, trying to find the shards, not wanting them inside of me.
“I’m sorry,” Hazel says. She’s crumpled on her side in a fetal position. “I’m sorry. I forgot to write down that part. I messed everything up.”
Posey’s at her side in an instant, shaking her shoulder.
“No,” my sister tells her. “Look. We finished it. We figured it out.”
“Also, what the hell was that?” Rose says.
The albatross and the snake are nowhere to be seen, and the thick, oily, slimy feeling of magic gone to rot, a feeling I didn’t even recognize until now, disappears. It had been slowly choking Silverlight Shore, but in its wake?
Everything feels right again.
Rain pitter-patters against our skin, washing away the blood, and Watchmere Light shines bright across the harbor, a beam settling just shy of the huge glowing eye.
It blinks once and disappears, and maybe it’s my imagination, but it’s almost as if I hear a thank you from deep in the sea itself.
I take a deep breath, reveling in the fact that we solved this problem.
