Within Lunaris, time moved slowly. If I stepped back out, the wraith could dismember me in a second.
Careful to keep my body within Lunaris’s threshold, I reached into the wraith’s chest cavity. I still held the coin and felt something stir within. Laurelie’s spirit answering the call of a familiar relic.
“Come on, Laurelie,” I whispered.
Using my fingers like spades, I dug into the shadows and peeled them back. Where before, they moved and undulated like oil, too slippery to grasp and constantly re-forming, now they felt more like mud and soil. I dragged the shadows clear from one section of Laurelie’s face, revealing a cheek smudged with dirt, a closed eye, her mouth. Kessian exerted his own influence, calming the wraith, making it complacent.
I unearthed Laurelie to the shoulders, her arms, her hands—the fingernails black underneath.
Her eyes fluttered open as I pulled her through Lunaris’s doorway. “Tal?”
As I clawed away the shadows trapping her elbow, she writhed and managed to pull that hand free. “That’s it,” she gasped.
With a heave, the rest of her pulled free, and we collapsed backward into the kitchen. The shadows fell away from her.
Most of them.
Everywhere her skin showed, dark veins wormed through her. Her hands and feet looked charred, her hair stained and still dripping. She appeared the same age she’d been on the day she died, still wearing her pajamas, but nine years as the wraith had taken its toll.
“I don’t have much time,” she said.
Chapter 38
The wraith still moved a tiny fraction at a time. Laurelie shut the door on it and turned to face us.
I pulled her farther into the sanctuary Lunaris had made for us, grasping her by the shoulders. It was so strange to see her this way, an aged weariness in her eyes, but she still looked sixteen.
“Are you all right? I mean— Of course you’re not. I can’t believe I just asked that.”
“I’m better than I’ve been in nine years,” she said. “You’ve given me my mind back, at least temporarily.”
“Is there any way to get you away from it permanently?”
“Probably not.”
My heart staggered.
“I don’t want to give you false hope. I am neither alive nor dead. I am neither myself nor the strid, but something in between.” Her voice and the way she spoke changed subtly. Like the Keepers, she spoke with the threads of more than one voice. Her own, and something reedy, watery. “Both of us have changed in this unhappy union.”
I felt lost, a mix of disbelief and soul-sucking sadness that she was here, but not herself, and probably not for long.
“I have so many questions.”
“Ask and I will answer as much as I know, but be quick.”
I scrambled, caught between reuniting with her, hardly recognizing her, and needing answers to cure the strid and escape.
“How did this happen? When you made a wish on this coin, how did you become … what you are now?”
“Marlowe gave me the coin. He told me it was a true wishing coin, that the spring’s magic had returned, and it might grant my wish if I asked with all my heart.” The sweetness of her voice rasped with barely restrained anger. “He lied. The coin had no magic. He’d lured me there so he could use the bone flute. He had not meant to kill the first time. But he did with me.”
“Why? What could he possibly gain from killing a teenager?” Kessian asked.
“At the time of my drowning, I did not know, but since merging with the strid, the history of Shearwater is a pool of memories I can drink from. I could tell you how Edwi—Grandad smashed a favorite toy Marlowe played with often because he saw it as a waste of time and a sign his son was too lazy to amount to anything, and perhaps you would sympathize with the boy Marlowe was, but over time he grew spiteful. And greedy. He wanted to be rich. He wanted to be the heir to Shearwater Spa who returned magic to the spring. He wanted to prove his fatherwrong.”
“And he was willing to kill his own family for that?” Kessian said, disgusted.
The dark veins spidered up Laurelie’s throat, creeping over her jaw. “He was willing to make a bargain with Warwick. The coin he gave me had no more power to grant wishes than a pebble picked off the road, but the bone flute … It grants wishes at a terrible cost. Warwick knew what Marlowe wanted, and that he could be used to serve Warwick’s interests.”
