“What did Marlowe wish for?”
“For magic to return to the spring, so he could prove once and for all that he was worthy. And so the wish was granted, but magic was returned by—”
“Tithing the lives of two dozen people,” I finished hollowly.
“Once Marlowe realized the bone flute had twisted his wish, he could do nothing about it. The contract he’d signed magically ensured his silence insofar as Warwick’s part in the tragedy. He could never speakof the bone flute to anyone. He had gotten his wish but could claim no credit for the magic’s return without admitting responsibility for the deaths. Rather than guilt, he felt only bitterness and self-pity.
“So to ensure he would still inherit the spring, he hatched another plan. He would make a second wish, and a third, but these would be straightforward, without room for ambiguity.
“While I wished for my dad back, Marlowe wished for my death by drowning.”
Laurelie’s voice was barely recognizable. I put a tentative hand on her arm and she blinked, looking down at it as if observing a strange, out-of-body experience. Some of her own voice overpowered the wraith’s. “I’m … sorry. To speak of it now, I would not think nine years had passed.”
In the timestream, past, present, and future overlapped each other. Time healed all wounds, they said, but only if time marched in sequence.
“I don’t understand,” Kessian said. “You weren’t the first in line to inherit. Why kill you?”
“Grandad would never pass the torch to him. He preferred Tal and me, Fae and Amelia. Like so many parents, he did his best to raise his children, love them, but he made mistakes. Played favorites. Lost his patience, lost his temper. His grandchildren were easier to love; he didn’t have to fear letting them down because they were not his sole responsibility.”
“So Marlowe would have come after the rest of us? Even Amelia?”
Laurelie’s mouth twisted. “He might have spared her under the assumption he’d have more control over her, but in that he does not know her well. He would have been the ruin of us all, except the bone flute still twisted his wish, twisted me. I became the wraith to haunt him. I would have dredged him from his bed and drowned him in whatever body of water was deep enough. But he fished that coin out of the spring, hooked it in your ear, and bound me to you instead.”
I went cold. “But the coin was meant to banish you. I thought he was protecting me.”
“The power you had to banish me was not in any talisman; it was in our bond.” Her expression crumpled, some of her leashed fury turned inward. “I never wanted to harm you, but over the years, it becameharder and harder to tell where I ended and the strid began, and it wasso angry. Both of us so angry. It fumed that its magic had been corrupted through those sacrifices, and I—I raged over my stolen life.”
I tried to absorb it all, but like an over-sodden sponge, I couldn’t hold everything. It leaked out of me. “He murdered you just so he could inherit the spring when it had already been sold to Warwick. He made Warwick richer, and us—”
Poorer wasn’t the right word.Broken, more like. Words for once failed Kessian, too, who could only squeeze my shoulder.
Laurelie bowed her head. “Now you know the whole story of how he poisoned Shearwater.”
I scrubbed the dampness from my eyes, set aside my feelings and all the things I could not change in favor of the one thing I could.
“How is a poison like this cured? What’s the antidote?”
Slowly, Laurelie’s expression wilted, melancholy dampening her anger. She cast a furtive glance to the door, where the tap of the wraith’s claws finally making contact set the hairs on my arms on end.
“Laurelie? What’s the antidote?” I said again.
“I poisoned the wild magic with my hatred for my uncle, my desire to go home when I could not, with how much I missed you and Fae and the Shearwater of my childhood. That home, the family I once knew, is gone. Changed. Or perhaps it was always this way, and now I can’t unknow the things I was blind to as a child. Either way, I can never go back.”
The dark veins crawling up her face spidered into the whites of her eyes as she looked into the ceiling lights. She did not want to answer.
“Unless …?” I prompted.
“Unless you bring my home to me.”
“What does that mean?” I said.
“No,” Kessian said.
“It does not have to be him,” Laurelie said to Kessian. “It could be you.”
“What are you talking about?” I looked between them, my intuition quaking at the implication while my mind blocked it out.
The scrape of the wraith’s claws, slow and quiet, made Laurelie speak faster.
