And though fear skitters through me with those spiders, I manage a step. Then another. My limbs feel leaden, as if the river wants to swallow them whole. Behind me, I hear the others follow. I hear the confusion in their voices, the alarm, even if I can’t hear their specific words any longer. “This way,” I tell them, and my own voice sounds strange now too. Unnatural. Arion’s hand tightens on my arm. He can’t hear the whispers urging us onward. None of them can. I understand that. But they trust me enough to allow me to lead. So I will.
Another step.
Another.
I’m going to save Arion—save everyone—if it’s the last thing I do.
I couldn’t help him before. I couldn’t help anyone. For as long as I can remember, I have only ever made everything worse. I have been a coward. A liar.
A murderer.
But not anymore.
In the distance, I hear thedrip, drip, dripof an ominous leak, and the macabre stench of decay sweeps across the river. Something touches my hair again, combing icy fingers through my locks, and when I glance to my left, I spot it. A translucent phantom in the shape of a young woman. I turn, and hundreds more unfold from the ethereal blue light. Ash gray, silken, but entirely transparent.
“Please,” the woman brushing my hair murmurs. Her hollow eyes seek mine. “Return them. Return them to us.”
The others clutch my dress. Tear at the hem. Panic creeps up my throat again, constricting it, but Arion is there. In a second, he pulls me tight to him with a snarl. My ears ring, and too late, I realize I must be screaming, because he gazes down at me—atme, not at the ghosts—in horror. “What in Mortem’s name—”
The secondMortemleaves his lips, the phantoms wail. A terrible shrieking that sends a trickle of blood down my nose, onto my lips. Onto my tongue. The wail is unbearable. It ruptures something deep inside me—my bones, my organs, mymemories. They all fracture at once. As if I’m being shattered from the inside out. The blue light behind my eyelids explodes into darkness. Or perhaps the darkness explodes through this entire place, througheveryone.
All at once, there is no more river. No more riverbank. No snowflakes or phantoms or anything except a single doorway in front of me, rising alone in that absolute darkness. No walls. No ceiling. Not even a floor. Just darkness and a door andme.
I move forward.
Alone.
Arion has vanished with the river, and though a small, quiet part of me wonders at his absence—at Vesper’s and Amaya’s and everyone else’s too—it’s as if someone else has taken hold of my body. Fissures splinter the frozen stone of the door, so cold, it could be glass. So smooth, it could be water. The fractured surface pulses slowly with the reverberatingthud thud thudof a heart.
Aheart.
My own pulse answers in response, beating harder now. In anticipation. In hunger.This is it.This has to be it. The light in the cracks glows brighter. Veins of iridescence climb the stone door. Resisting the urge to shield my eyes, I reach out with shaking fingers. I touch the icy handle. Before I can turn it, however—before I can even gasp—the wall explodes with shrapnel of stone.
And darkness bursts into brilliant blue light.
The force of it throws me backward, and I land hard on my elbows as the world rushes back into focus, as the riverbank returns. Arion, Vesper, Gavriall, Amaya, her crew—they stand around me, gaping down at me—without noticing the river behind them. Watersurges up, up, on a violent stream that rises like a tidal wave. I open my mouth to warn them, to cry out, but it’s too late.I’mtoo late.
The wave smashes over us in a second, flooding the room, sweeping us into a lethal current. It whips us around, and my fingers slip from Arion’s, over and up andout. Reaching for him desperately, I wait to transform. To breathe and use my tail to swim, to save the others, but the water on my tongue is not salty. It is not theocean.
I do not transform. I do not grow gills.
I do not knowhowto swim with legs.
The five of us are forced to succumb to the brutality of the waves as they spiral up, up,up, forcing us through the trapdoor, down the halls of the castle, and past its great front doors. Spitting us back out into the trench.
PART
5
ABYSSES
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
ARION
Frigid water sears my nostrils, scorches through my bones, as a wave wrenches me under. As itmanglesmy wings, twisting them with relentless, bruising force. I ignore it. The pain. The panic.
I ignore it all to findher.
