He reached over, trying to tug my ring loose from my finger. I snatched my hand back before it could completely come off.
“Didn’t you just yell at me for taking this thing off before?” I yelped.
He pulled my hand back into his, his fingers gently taking the ring off, but the metal still touching my skin.
“I said never take it off without me present,” he corrected. “One day this ring will be just a decoration, and you will have to be able to keep control over your own mind and body. I’m right here and I will not let anything bad happen to you. I swear.”
I nodded, allowing him to take the ring and slip it into his pocket.
“Now close your eyes, and when the whispers come, visualize them as individual threads of light, something that you can easily manipulate in your hands, pushing them to the side.”
I did what he said, tight and anxious as the first few whispers brushed against my skin, a slow pressure building in the back of my head just as it had earlier in the church. But Alaric was right. There were not nearly as many voices, and the pressure was only mildly unpleasant, not a sharp, intense pain. I felt Alaric’s firm grip on my hand, an incandescent warmth flooding through me where our hands were intertwined. I recognized this as his own magic, pushing through into me, filling me up with a kind of warmth not unlike the kind I felt when he kissed me in the library.
The voices and whispers became slightly clearer, and I concentrated on singling one voice out of the dissonance of the others, manifesting them as threads of light. I opened my eyes, and suddenly I not only could hear the different voices but could see them as these ethereal threads of light, floating around us. If I didn’t know how dangerous these death echoes were, I would almost think they were beautiful.
“Put your hand in the water and choose a whisper, a thread, to focus on,” Alaric encouraged. “Push the others to the side and focus on the one.”
I nodded, moving to dip my fingers into the water as one child-like voice began to break through the others, sounding angry and desperate.
He did it on purpose.
He knew it wasn’t a good idea.
He can’t be trusted.
I continued to push through, reaching for the voice, willing it to explain more. To tell me who this person was who couldn’t be trusted. As I continued to reach forward, a hand from beneath the water grabbed me, pulling me under in an instant.
I was in two places at once. In reality, I had been pulled under the water of the newly renovated pool, drifting towards the bottom at the deep end as my lungs burned for air. But I was also in between, within a vision the death echo had taken me into.
In the vision, I stood on the edge of the pool, light streaming in through the windows that wrapped around at the top of the ceiling. The sounds of splashing and chatter filled the air. I looked around, finding young kids taking swimming lessons in the shallow end while what looked like teenagers were practicing their dives with a coach nearby. There were parents in the stands, chatting amongst themselves as they waved at their kids who were swimming in different parts of the pool.
Two little boys on the far side of the pool, where no adults were currently watching or nearby, caught my eye. I walked towards them, feeling more like I was gliding rather than walking; the vision taking on a dreamlike haze. As I got closer, I could make out the older boy, maybe 10 years old, softly encouraging his younger brother, most likely 7, to jump into the deep end.
“It’s okay, John,” the older brother continued. “It’s just like the shallow end. You’ll be fine.”
“I’m scared,” John mumbled, moving further away from the edge, looking around for someone to help. “I don’t wanna.”
“Are you a baby or what?” His older brother turned mean. “Just jump and swim to the other side with the ladder. It’s not hard.”
“I’m not a baby,” John quipped, his little face turning red with anger. “I just don’t want to.”
John turned to walk away, most likely to head back towards the shallow section where the other small kids were swimming. But then suddenly, John’s brother grabbed his arm, and it felt like he was grabbing my arm. Suddenly, I was no longer watching the scene unfold, but was in John’s perspective, his little arm burning as his older brother dragged him to the edge.
“No!” we both screamed, fighting with all our strength to get away. Ice-cold fear washed through me as I realized how helpless we were to fight off this older, bigger kid. Without another word, John’s older brother pushed him into the water, his dark green eyes wide with curiosity and fear. We thrashed as we started to sink, screaming out our last breath of air as the panic set in. Lungs filled with chlorine water, burningas we thrashed, trying to break the surface.
I felt another set of familiar arms pulling me up out of the water and as I broke the surface, once again back in my own body in the present with Alaric, I started to cry and shake, coughing up the water that I had inadvertently swallowed. I had not only tapped into a death echo completely, but I watched as a child had been killed. By his own brother. And re-lived the experience with him as if it had happened to me.
Alaric laid me down beside the pool, leaning over me as he brushed my hair from my face, his calloused hands firm yet gentle.
“Mari, look at me. Focus on me.”
I was hyperventilating, trying to get as much air into my lungs as possible. They had just been filled with water. Ifeltit.
“You’re okay,” he continued to whisper gently, taking my ring out of his pocket and slipping it back onto my finger. My eyes finally locked on his dark green orbs, and a shiver rippled through me as an echo of what I had just experienced rushed through me. John’s older brother’s eyes, the eyes of the one who had pushed him in the water, of the ones who had watched him die, were the exact same shade of dark green as Alaric’s.
Chapter Nine
Alaric sat me up as I began to shake, my drenched clothes causing chills to course through me. We were both soaked and breathing heavily as the familiar warming feeling of my ring thrumming against my finger slowly made me feel safe again. The voices had stopped, and I couldn’t see any more of those thread-like lights that were the death echoes still lingering in this place.
