She didn’tfeelgreat. She heaved violently and attempted to breathe in through her nose. She managed it twice more before she was sick all over the grass. She felt curiously hollow. In the cavern of her chest, her heart swung emptily, like the clapper in a bell.
Tommy, she thought, panic surging in a white-out heat. The last she’d seen of him, he’d been on his knees, slowly bleeding out from a graze in his side. She’d told him she loved him, and then she’d gone. She had to do it—she’d had no other choice. It was the only way to save him.
“Graze wounds are rarely the cause of death,” said Colton, standing over her. “It’s highly improbable that bleeding out from a shallow laceration is the thing that kills him.”
“Colton,”said Lane, horrified.
“What? I’m being comforting.”
It wasn’t until Vivienne peered between them, her throat aching, that she realized she’d said it all aloud. It had spilled out of her in a mad, mortifying babble, but in a voice that was all her own.
“Where is he?” asked Lane. “Do you know?”
“The Hamptons,” Vivienne said softly. “He’s in the Hamptons.”
Thomas sat in the back of the ambulance and stared dead ahead. Directly in front of him was a lake, wide and dark, its water cut with diamond crests beneath the midday sun. To his left—beyond the road and the houses and the dunes stuffed with beach grass—was the sea, flat and blue. The Atlantic, and not the cramped and sunless Sound.
Endless, crystalline ocean. Cold, bottomless depths.
He’d failed.
His side gave a screaming ache and he shifted slightly, a wide sterile pad tugging at his torso. The paramedics had arrived on scene not long after he and Reed stumbled out of the collapsing house, smoke in their lungs and Adrian Faber hobbling between them. The EMTs had insisted Thomas be seen, in spite of his repeated assertions that he was fine.
It was just a graze.
It felt like the end of the fucking world.
That night at the Turners’ party, he’d seen Vivienne sitting in the moonlight and thought she looked just like a siren. It was nothing compared to the way she’d looked as she waded out into the the black waters, sinking beneath the glassy surface without a ripple.
I love you, she’d told him. And then she’d gone.
He’d fought after that. Hard and furious. By the time he’d splashed into the waters after her, she’d been nowhere to be found. He’d stood in a puddle up to his shins. The endless sea of black was gone. Where the night had once appeared to stretch on for miles, there was only a wall. Only a single earthworm, wriggling in the dirt.
All around him, the house gave a horrible shudder. Dirt fell around him in clods.
Walsh, he’d heard Reed shout.We have to go!
He’d spent enough time working on houses with his uncle to know when the foundation was compromised. A basement flood like this—in a house by the sea, where the earth was being slowly eroded—it wouldn’t take much to bring it down.
He’d slammed bodily into the wall. More dirt came around him. Fetid water kicked up around his feet.
He’d done it again. Again, ignoring Reed’s continued entreaties for him to leave.
He’d never been able to tear open the skies. That was Colton Price’s forte. He could only step through an existing opening—feel that stale, suffocating pop of nothingness, and then emerge onto the other side. But things were magnified here—amplified by the pulsing of a ley line, deep beneath the ground. Faber had said as much, as he’d coughed up spiders in the living room.
If Vivienne could pluck something clean out of her head, who was to say he couldn’t force himself through the sky? He’d barreled into the wall again. The water was ice around his ankles. It lapped furiously at his feet. He slammed his shoulder into the dirt as skulls went toppling from their necropolis, plunking into the shallow water like pale white boulders.
Again. Again. His body screamed for him to stop.
There’d been a great, buckling crack—the sound of the house falling down around his ears.
He didn’t know when he quit. When Christian Price began howling, maybe. Or when Reed descended on him like a madman, cursing so violently in his ear that it rattled him back to awareness.
Now he watched the assembled firefighters stand by and monitor the building’s collapse. It sat in a heap of wood and glass, the shingled roof gone concave. Torn to the studs, just like he’d promised. Nearby, Philip Farrow was being loaded into the back of a police car.
It didn’t bring him any satisfaction.
In the front yard, being gingerly prodded at by paramedics, knelt Christian Price. Thomas had watched him desiccate, down in the root cellar. It all happened so quick. Vivienne went under, and the elder Price began to laugh—a deep, triumphant sound—holding his hands out before his face like he expected a parcel full of secrets to drop into his arms.
