“Laurelie?” I said.
The smoke rippled, a low growl making the timber of the shed shake.
I held up the coin. It felt a bit like waving a red flag in front of a bull. The wraith swayed, watching the coin owlishly, the smoke around it roiling with more fervor.
“Laurelie, if you’re in there, please hear me. It’s Tal.”
The shadows blazed against the sigil, the wraith’s figure contorting, and in the flicker of darkness around its face, I thought I saw that hazel eye again. The same color as mine.
A frisson of static and magic issued from Kessian. “Keep talking. I’m going to try something.”
He took a step toward it. Fear crept into my voice, but I did as he said and kept talking. I called Laurelie’s name, asked if she could hear me, squeezed the coin in my hand.
The shadows boiled like water. Kessian reached into them and tried to part them like a curtain. He’d breached the perimeter of the sigil. I stumbled over my words, torn between demanding to know what the hell he thought he was doing and keeping the wraith’s attention on me.
“Try to remember me, Laurelie. I’m your brother.”
Kessian’s presence seemed to soothe the darkness, not agitate it. The fumes of the wraith’s body moved more languidly as Kessian’s fingersdragged through the shadows, carving through them, until a face emerged and cried out over the rattling breaths of the wraith.
“Help me!”
A hand burst from the wraith’s chest, fingers grasping and webbed in dark ooze. With the coin between our palms, I clasped that hand and pulled.
An elbow jutted out. Then a shoulder. A second hand pried its way out of the wraith’s rib cage until finally Laurelie’s face emerged, retching up black water.
I braced a foot against the doorframe like I had with Amelia, pulled as hard as I could, but the wraith let out a low wail of warning, and Laurelie was nearly swallowed again. Her throat was a lattice of dark veins.
The wraith wasn’t going to let her go.It’s a part of you.
Between choking gasps, she said, “Lunaris. Lunaris can—”
Shadows throttled her into silence, but I grasped her intent as several things I hadn’t understood slotted together like shards of a broken pot.
“Kessian. Get back to Lunaris.”
“What?”
“Go to Lunaris, open the door, and get inside. I have an idea.”
“Are you sure you want me to leave you with her?”
Reluctantly, I let go of my sister and took two steps back. “Please trust me on this.”
Kessian swore as he dropped his hands, releasing the wraith from the magic that bonded Keeper and strid. The shadows grew, brewing like storm clouds, swallowing Laurelie once more.
“Go,” I said.
Kessian gave me one worried look, then made his way back to Lunaris as swiftly as his legs and cane could carry him. Lunaris held her door wide for him. He climbed up and turned around, watching me anxiously.
I’d thought whoever had freed the wraith during the wedding had done it to sabotage us, but I’d been wrong.
With the toe of my shoe, I smeared through the lines of the sigil on the floor. The light of the prison died.
I had to turn my back on it to sprint for Lunaris. I could hear the grass and sod tearing up under its feet as the wraith pursued. The musicfrom the wedding played the slow song Kessian and I had danced to while I fled for my life.
Kessian waited in Lunaris’s doorway. He held out a hand to pull me through faster. I grasped it, plunging past the threshold and whirling to see if it had worked.
The wraith was right there, reared up in the doorway. It seemed frozen on the other side, but if I watched closely, I could see the very slow, soft ripples of movement in its shadows, the infinitesimal descent of its claws.
