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“You need to speak a three-fold refusal,” he said over the noise, incredibly calm despite the cold, as if he’d lived through so much more than this. “Dip the pendant into the water and say: What was taken is returned.”

I did exactly that, like I was reciting lines from a play.

“Now scrape the nail over the back of the pendant and say: The earth is my witness, and the earth does not forget.”

I struggled through it, my hands shaking. I couldn’t feel my fingertips.

“Say: What was forced upon me, the mark and the bind, I reject and return.”

I pushed through the line.

“Okay, one more line to close it: What I now choose is mine alone.”

I repeated the line.

A wave struck me with a roar like the earth cracking open, the water a cold muscle trying to drag me with it. I staggered, my feet losing their grip on the shifting grit, until Damian caught me. He was a warm wall against the brine, and I leaned into him as if he were the only thing in the world that was solid. I felt his body go rigid, his restraint holding firm for one heartbeat, and then I felt it break. His arms crushed the air from my lungs, pulling me in until there was nothing but a thin film of salt and four days of secrets between us.

We waded out like we’d washed out of a shipwreck, surf-battered and dazed from skin pressed against skin.

On sand, the shivering was louder than anything else in my head.

He handed me my towel and stood there with the control of a sentry, toweling off like it was eighty degrees. His tattoos were dark islands across his skin.

We dressed quickly, raking our legs through denim. The rough sand scraped the soles of our feet.

“Let’s get to the jeep. I’ll crank the heat up,” he said. He took my hand, and we headed back barefoot without the light of our phones, bone-cold, our eyes now adjusted to the dark. I held the necklace tight in my hand.

Damian pulled blankets from the trunk.

The jeep warmed quickly, the roaring heater blasting hot and dry on my damp skin. The windows fogged. We sat wrapped in blankets, thawing. Damian looked distractingly good with salt spray in his hair.

“I want you to know something,” I said.

“Tell me.”

“I’ve been on bad dates before. Like the time a guy talked about his ex for an hour, or the time I had to drive a guy home because he ordered seven old fashioneds and forgot his own name.”

“And?”

“And despite the fact that this date involved supernatural blackmail, a literal coven, the discovery that my jewelry has been blessed by goat sacrifice, and a folk-magic ritual in freezing saltwater in my underwear, this is somehow not the worst first date I’ve been on.”

He was laughing now. Actually laughing. It warmed me more than the heater could. I even forgot my underwear was still clammy under my clothes.

“What’s it ranked?” he said.

“I don’t know yet. I’m calculating.”

“Tell me when you’ve decided.”

“It might depend on what happens in the next five minutes.”

He stopped laughing and looked at me as if he were recalculating. The fog on the windshield had reached the side windows now and we were sealed inside our own weather.

“You said you fully planned on being rebellious about a lot of things,” I murmured.

“I did say that.”

“Was that a line?”