CHAPTER 5
Shit? Why shit?” Then Fae zeroed back in on the bite mark I’d left on Kessian’s neck. “Oh, shit. Please tell me you didn’t fuck my brother.”
Kessian replied, “Does it make it any better if I say he’s the one who fucked me?”
“Ugh! No! And you!” Fae turned on me, jabbing me in the chest with a finger. “At Grandad’s wake?”
An incriminating silence was all I could muster.
“I can’t believe you. Well, actually, I can believe it of you, Kessian. But Tal?”
I could only repeat what Kessian had said. “We all grieve in our own ways.”
Kessian suppressed a snicker. He wasn’t helping us.
I might have found it funny, too, if this didn’t involve my family and some last-ditch effort to save me.
Seeing a random healer with unique magic was one thing.
Spending more time with a man I’d slept with and fantasized about seemed distinctly riskier.
“It’s fine,” Kessian soothed. “I’m a professional. We can still move forward with the treatment plan, can’t we?”
Fae scowled at me. “Can’t you?”
My mortification snuffed out any temptation to argue. I would simply refrain from any kind of intimacy with Kessian. The wraith following me only preyed on people I cared about.
So no more sex. No more fantasies. Definitely not romantic ones.
“It’ll be fine,” I told Fae. “I’ll be good.”
“Right. Good. I’m going to pretend I don’t know anything about this.” Fae held up their hands in surrender. “No need for introductions. Bye, bye, have a good time, but not too good a time, bye!”
They stomped down the stairs. I could hear them puttering around the reception desk. Probably organizing papers and cleaning. Fae cleaned when they were stressed.
“Well, this is a surprise. Not an unpleasant one, though,” Kessian said. “Come in.”
I shuffled in after him and temporarily forgot the awkwardness of our introduction.
Kessian’s treatment room, from the baseboards to the crown moldings of the ceiling, had been painted a deep, dark turquoise. Soft, colorful textiles like the ones he favored in his own home made a cozy sitting area near a pair of sliding doors at the back, leading out to—
I drew up short. Through the glass, the spring’s waters trickled over limestone rocks, a vibrant blue against the creamy stone. A few orange leaves spiraled in the current from its miniature falls.
I studied the deeper shadows around the rocks, the trees, but none of them moved unnaturally.
Kessian handed me one of the spa’s white robes. I clutched it to my chest. “Do I get my kit off?”
“I usually leave the room to let my clients change, but I’ll let you decide whether that’s necessary when I saw it all last night in detail.”
I clutched the bathrobe a little tighter, my face hot.
“Aw, suddenly shy? I’ll step out and give you some privacy. But for the record”—Kessian paused in the doorway, giving me a cheeky wink—“you’re even sweeter on the eyes in the daylight.”
He left, shutting the door behind him.
Still with no idea what my treatment entailed, I shuffled out of my clothes and donned the robe.
I always had the ridiculous notion that I needed to fold my clothes on the available chair, which I did.
The absurdity of my situation sank in while I was tucking my briefs into my jeans so they wouldn’t be visible.
I slept with him yesterday to solve my loneliness problem, and now he’s supposed to solve a nine-year haunting that kept me from coming home.
Nothing in my life had ever been that simple.
Uncle Marlowe had hired exorcists, curse breakers, spoken to scholars in wild magic, and none had answers.
The wraith was not something common or well-documented like a poltergeist. It was unique, a strange blend of wild and witch magic born from the strid.
What it wanted, how it had come to be, they didn’t know.
Without a means to communicate with it, they couldn’t find out.
Without understanding its nature, they couldn’t hope to kill it, either.
Most spirits were exorcised by burning the remains of the dead, but the bodies of those taken by the strid never surfaced.
The only things keeping me from fleeing were my promise to Fae and the fact I was no longer dressed for running.
Kessian knocked and, at my assent, came inside.
“So how does this work?” I asked.
“I’ll explain it all, but I warn you, my magic is a bit unusual.”
“Magic? You’re a witch?” He had no familiar. At least, not one I could see. I’d met a witch once whose familiar was a ladybird, but tiny familiars were uncommon. But then, mine was a caravan.
“Ah, not quite. My magic doesn’t come from within me. It comes from the spring.”
All the hair stood up on the back of my neck. “The spring?”
Kessian’s smile brightened, and I could have sworn the glittery freckles on his cheeks winked like real stars. “Let me show you.”
He opened the glass doors to the spring outside. Numbly, I followed him barefoot across the stone path. The water chanted, shallow falls rippling the uncanny blue. They had not been so bright on the day Laurelie died.
“Since you grew up here, I probably don’t have to explain how the magic of the strid works,” Kessian said.
“It shows us visions of the future. Possibilities that may come to pass, if we play our cards right. But for me, it works a little differently. I can focus those visions. It shows me—us—paths we can take to solve a particular problem, heal from an old trauma, or to achieve a greater sense of contentment in our lives.”
“How?” Though based on my current attire, I could hazard a guess. The notion filled me with cold dread.
“First, you take a dip in the spring. Don’t worry, I’ll turn my back while you’re disrobing. All it takes from there is physical contact. The magic channels through us both.”
I stopped, rooted to the spot. Perhaps to anyone else, the spring looked serene, beautiful.
To me the sound of its chanting waters and the opaque blue disguising any view of the bottom were sinister.
I remembered the way they tasted in my lungs, how the icy cold made it hard to move, how the deadly current meant any movement was wasted energy anyway.
Intellectually, I understood the spring was separate from the strid. The strid’s waters fed into underground aquifers, which in turn bled into this spring. There was no deadly current, and so long as the wraith wasn’t near, nothing to drown me like Laurelie.
But the magic of the spring came from the strid. They were connected. I’d washed up here, though that should have been impossible. Wild magic often was.
I didn’t trust it. Not at all.
Kessian realized I’d stopped halfway up the path. He turned to me. “Everything all right?”
“I’m not getting in there,” I said. “I can’t.”
“What’s wrong?”
I’d already turned on my heel. “Nothing. I just have to go yell at Fae.” With a muttered apology, I stomped back into the house and to reception, where Fae was on the phone.
When they saw my approach, they murmured a swift, “Can I call you back in a few minutes?” before hanging up.
They drew me through the door into the reception office, away from any early patrons so we wouldn’t disturb their holidays.
“Why didn’t you tell me I had to get in the water?”
“If I had, would you have come?”
“No.”
“Then there’s your answer.”
Kessian had caught up with me. “I’m sorry, what happened? Did my flirting make it too awkward, or—?”
“It wasn’t you. Fae neglected to tell me I had to bathe in the spring.”
Fae threw up their hands. “Because I knew you’d react like this, and the spring isn’t dangerous!”
“Laurelie drowned in that spring!” I shouted.
They both went quiet.
On a chilly night a couple months after my father drowned and I survived, my sister Laurelie silently left our bedroom, went to the spring, and never came out again.
I’d woken to the sounds of her screams, but when I looked out the window, I couldn’t see her, only splashes, and something darker than pitch standing waist-deep in the water.
Its body was composed of shadows. They had density, like the swirling mists of a gas giant with its cataclysmic gravity. The shadows obscured the thing’s face except for the blank voids of its eyes. Its darkness bled into the roiling water. It attacked my uncle next, then ran off when I chased it.
All we found of Laurelie were her shoes by the shore, taken off and lined up like she’d gone in voluntarily. Perhaps she’d heard the song. It didn’t matter. She was gone.
I left Shearwater soon after.
Kessian’s jaw dropped, and to my relief, he rounded on Fae, too. “You didn’t tell me that!”
“She didn’t drown, she was drowned. By the wraith, and I’m hoping Kessian can help free you from it,” Fae said.
“You still should have said something,” I insisted.
Kessian agreed with me. “I’m trying to heal people, not traumatize them by bathing them in their worst memories. If I’d known that, I wouldn’t have gone skipping outside like I was leading him into a world of magic and fairy tales.”
“All right, I get it!” Fae crossed their arms, but it looked more defensive than defiant.
“Maybe I should have said something. I’m sorry.
I didn’t think you’d bother trying if I told you.
Seems I was right. I didn’t mean to be insensitive, I was just—” They chewed their lip, glancing between me and Kessian.
I waited, heart hammering in my throat. I’d come in spoiling for a fight, but now they’d apologized, I didn’t know what I wanted.
Fae said, “Kessian, can I talk to Tal alone for a minute?”
Kessian nodded, but he paused to pat my arm and apologize once more before he left.
Neither Fae nor I spoke for an awkward length of time. The tension felt the same as it had standing over my grandfather’s grave, wondering what I could say, and there was so much, none of which would make the situation better.
Fae broke the silence. “Do you even want to come back?”
It wasn’t the question I expected. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Means what it says on the tin. Do you even miss us? Miss Shearwater?”
All my anger deflated. “Of course I do … I’m just used to it.”
There was a hard, flat lump on my ribs where a piece of debris in the strid had lodged when I’d fallen in.
The magic of the water had healed the skin over it, and it caused me no pain, so it stayed there.
Missing them was like that bit of shrapnel stuck between my ribs.
It had been there so long, I forgot the pain of what it had been like when the wound was made.
Fae’s expression softened, tinged with sadness. “I don’t want you to get used to it. I want things to go back to the way they were.”
That was it. The thing I’d been grasping at while wondering why I’d really had a go at Fae. I wanted things to go back to normal, too, but they couldn’t, because Dad and Laurelie were gone.
But if there was a chance at something close, shouldn’t I take it? I hadn’t seen any sign of the wraith this morning. All my encounters had taken place at night. Maybe, if I timed my visits to Shearwater right, I could avoid any more.
“You really think Kessian’s magic will work?” I asked.
Fae’s posture finally relaxed. They said, “Why don’t you ask him?”