The blackness gathered under Kessian. He mouthed an apology. Then the wraith pulled him under. He slipped out of sight with barely a ripple.
I dove under after him.
Nothing should have been loud underwater, but the strid was. It raged, the howling gale of something lost that couldn’t find its way back to solid ground. I’d heard some variation of its song many times now, but it was nothing compared to this. The water crashed like cymbals, momentous and angry.
I could hardly see through the blackness. The spring seemed expansive, but I didn’t think the space we occupied was physical anymore. This was the cut in the world between the Bloodstream and the strid, thespring, the water that made up the blood of Shearwater. I swam into the dark.
At first there was nothing. Then came the winking glimmer of Kessian’s stars, distant as real ones, glowing enough to see his wide, terrified eyes and the shape of what held him. The same crimson, corrupted magic that had once swirled around Laurelie twisted around him. Circling him was the wraith, its movements graceful as a shark, more at home in water than on land.
I swam toward them, but a current fought me, held me back. I moved as if through molasses while the wraith consumed Kessian. It wrapped one hand around his throat, sickle-shaped claws far too near his jugular. He instinctively pried at its fingers, then froze. Through the gurgle of water in my ears, I could have sworn something spoke.
Kessian listened, wide-eyed and attentive.
No, I thought.Whatever it’s saying, don’t listen.
I tried to swim harder, but there was no fighting the current. Every muscle in me screamed with exertion while I made no progress forward, forced to watch as Kessian bowed his head, absorbing whatever he’d heard. Briefly, he turned in my direction. His eyes met mine.
No, please don’t, I thought desperately.
I could read his lips as he said, “Trust me.” Then something else I couldn’t decipher.
“No!”
The wraith ducked its head, and the antlers seemed to split apart. The entire wraith did, like it had been unzipped, shadows discarded like old clothes, revealing the shape of Laurelie one layer at a time. She looked pristine, untouched, the same as she did the day she died. Laurelie was set free, but the empty cage now reached for Kessian. The ribs opened like spider legs, holding him like a fly, and its skeletal face bent too close. It didn’t have teeth, but its proximity made it look like it would bite.
I fought the current, but I could not move. The water was cold, but everything in me burned.
The wraith said something, and Kessian tipped closer as if enthralled. He nodded, and the wraith leaned forward like it really would bite him. Instead, the shadows crawled up Kessian’s face, pried his jaw open, and poured down his throat like the wraith was forcing him to drink poison.
Bubbles foamed from my mouth as I screamed.
The strid threw me out onto the shores of the spring, as if depositing me out of a bad dream into the waking world. Or the opposite.
Because Laurelie was coughing up water on the grass beside me, and Kessian was gone.
Chapter 41
Irounded on the spring, wading in. “Give him back.” The words clawed their way up my throat. “Give him back!”
But the water didn’t stir. No one else crawled out of it. Despair threatened to drown me more readily than the strid ever had. I couldn’t lose Kessian. Memories of him blazed through me in a grieving wildfire. How he’d made me laugh when we first met, the steady way he’d listened to me ramble, that quiet night spent at my pottery wheel.
I couldn’t accept that we’d never spend another night like that. I’d only barely accepted my own death by sacrifice, I couldn’t accept Kessian’s.
Laurelie coughed up a lungful of strid water. My heart warred between disbelief that she was here, doubting my reality, hoping she was, and grief that Kessian had been traded for her.
She could have answers. The strid had spoken to him, said something. Maybe she knew.
“Laurelie? Are you … Is this real? What happened?”
She clutched her head, pulling aqueous weeds from her hair and blinking around in confusion.
“Did he trade places with you? Is he still— Can we go back?”
She didn’t respond, staring past me at the house. I turned to see torchlight flushing through the gardens like hounds. Voices filtered closer, some I recognized. Fae’s was among them.
Oh God. What could I say to them?
I lost him. I tried to hold on, but the strid stole him away. I traded my lover for my sister.
