We descended the stairs after her, following her out into the night. She had slipped on sandals and marched halfway across the lawn already. At the water’s edge, she waited.
I wondered if I was meant to do something, like in the other memories. Short of tying her down, I couldn’t stop her. I could feel the inflexibility of history. Whatever she was doing, she did it willingly, and if I were to stop her tonight, she would come back to do it the next night, or the next. There was a special type of cruelty in making me watch. The war between doing anything to stop it and the knowledge that I couldn’t tore at me.
I was here to cleanse Shearwater of the poison, but I couldn’t be cured. The things which had soured me couldn’t be undone.
From the pocket of her pajamas, Laurelie retrieved a shining coin, and my whole world twisted. It was old, copper, and bore the face ofa centuries-old monarch. The same coin Marlowe had fashioned into a talisman for me.
She clenched it tightly in her fist, held it to her chest, closed her eyes and murmured, “I wish Dad would come back to life.”
With determination, she threw the coin into the spring. It broke the mirrored surface with a soft splash, the glowing red light coalescing around the place where it sank like a school of fish to bait.
She waited, and in the silence, it seemed nothing else would happen.
Then the woody song of a flute drifted through the reeds, and Laurelie’s hands, clutched to her chest in hope and anticipation, fell languidly to her sides.
Eyes glazed, she sat down in the grass and took off her sandals one by one, placing them neatly aside. Mari yowled fearfully before the music ensnared her, too, and she went placidly quiet.
Laurelie didn’t notice. She stood and extended one foot, tapping her toes to the water’s surface. The glowing red lights flocked to her, condensing around the place where she took one step, and then another, like a sinister swarm of fireflies.
Both feet planted, she waited, hands hovering like a gymnast on a balance beam. Then she walked forward, each step resulting in an exultation of light from the spring, until she stood in the very center of the pool. Her familiar watched from the shore, tail swishing.
The glowing lights in the pool moved less like fireflies now, more like an angry hive of bees coursing at her feet. The water bubbled. I reflexively grabbed Kessian’s sleeve, knowing what happened next.
The spring sucked Laurelie under. Her descent caused barely a ripple, only a singular drop rising into the air after her, scarlet with unnamed magic.
All the lights in the spring went out. Not in flickers or dwindling numbers like matches reaching their ends at different times, but like a flipped switch. It was impossible to see what happened below the black surface.
On the shore, a shadowy magic twisted through Laurelie’s familiar, strangling a terrified yowl from her before dragging her into the spring with a splash.
The music stopped. The spring was quiet. Then came the crunch of grass, and Marlowe hesitantly emerged from the trees. In one hand, heheld the bone flute, its strange shape and pointed tines making it hard to distinguish as an instrument.
He cast a spell, drawing something from the bottom of the spring. The water rippled and broke as the shiny coin Laurelie had wished upon floated into his hand.
Kessian had a hand over his mouth, watching with horror, but my own feelings had become too big to swallow, the helplessness of watching too much to bear.
I had never been terribly violent in life, though there’d been times when frustration built up so strongly I thought my chest would burst like a rotted pumpkin. It all came out of me, all that pent-up rage, as I stomped across the grass and seized Marlowe by the throat.
Or tried to. I could not. I was no more material here than a mote on the breeze, and my fingers passed through his neck like a specter’s.
But he felt something. Goose bumps erupted on his skin, and he shivered violently, stumbling away and rubbing his throat where my hands had passed through. I hadn’t withdrawn them, still squeezing like I could tear apart the tragedy of our lives if I torehimapart first.
He staggered, and I went with him. Something slithered within me, making me corporeal. Marlowe’s eyes bulged. We both felt solid as he clawed at my invisible grip, tried to kick me.
I could hardly hear the water burbling behind me for the blood rushing in my ears, or Kessian’s cries to stop, his warnings. No, the thing that stopped me killing my uncle was the darkness crawling up my arms like smoke.
I recoiled, flailing my arms, trying to flick the ichor from them when I saw where it had come from.
In the same spot Laurelie had disappeared, the wraith rose up, wreathed in wet shadows and the aura of death. Tendrils of it curled through the ground and into me like tributaries, like veins. Kessian put an arm around me, trying to lead me away. On the ground, Marlowe choked. He’d dropped the bone flute in the bush during our struggle. It looked like driftwood, a crooked branch.
For just a moment, the shadows condensed transparently around the wraith, and I saw it—her—for who she really was.
Green eyes. A gangly, teenage frame.
Laurelie.
Things that had once been a mystery to me resolved, a picture made clear under the right lens. She could get through my wards because she was my twin. Coill Darragh couldn’t keep her out because it had accepted me, and she was family, a part of me.
Lights flickered on in the upper floor of the spa house.
