CHAPTER 6
Kessian insisted that he could guarantee nothing, that he understood my refusal completely, and that his methods were far from standard, but that he’d also had a great deal of success with other clients.
This reassured me far more than if he’d made grandiose claims about the spring’s preternatural abilities to fix me. I’d met many a dodgy salesman of essential oils and healing crystals on my travels, but Kessian was obnoxiously forthright.
Which was how I found myself standing on the bank of the spring, toes curled around the flagstone, every instinct within me rearing back from what I was about to do.
Kessian waited patiently and didn’t rush me. I still had my robe on and closed it tightly around me to combat the shivers. It was summer, but the sun had yet to burn the dewy night from the air, and I knew the water would be cold, though it wasn’t the cold I feared.
“Would it help if I stepped in with you?” Kessian asked.
“You’re fully dressed.”
“Are you trying to persuade me to get my kit off?”
“No! No, I wasn’t implying that.”
“Relax.” He was already kicking off his shoes and rolling up the legs of his trousers. “I’ll keep the rest on and change later.”
Technically, we weren’t supposed to go in with clothes on.
I’d grown up here. I knew the rules. But I appreciated him breaking them for me, and equally appreciated the sly grin he flashed me when he said, “Though for the record, it wouldn’t take much persuasion from you. I do remember offering round two.”
I really, really could not entertain that thought. His flirting might put me more at ease, but I couldn’t afford to get close to anyone. Especially not in Shearwater.
Flagstones had been built into the banks to form a staircase. Kessian descended the first step, submerged to his ankles, and waited for me. The water glowed where it touched him, and I didn’t imagine it this time: the starry freckles on his cheeks glowed, too.
“I thought you were wearing makeup,” I said.
He glanced away. He didn’t strike me as the bashful type last night, but he looked it now. “They first appeared when the spring blessed me with these abilities.”
I wasn’t sure whether to feel safer or not, knowing the wild magic had shown him such favor, but I’d come this far.
With a deep breath, I took my first step into the water.
The cold effused through me, my skin erupting in goose bumps, but nothing else happened. None of the shadows deepened or moved, a secret tide didn’t pull me under, even the voice of the trickling falls sounded less malicious.
Kessian beamed. “All right?”
“Yeah. All right.”
He descended the next few steps. He wore a loose-fitting pair of gray trousers and a thin white poet’s shirt, which became transparent as gossamer when wet. His long plait floated on the surface, snaking after him.
He closed his eyes and turned his back to me. “You can take off your robe now, if you want.”
I considered keeping it to maintain a layer of propriety between us, but the cloying sensation of the thick, towel-like fabric, soaked and clinging to my skin would be sickening.
I untied the robe, wadded it, and threw it onto the bank, grateful for the privacy of the gardens and trees as I waded in up to my chest.
“You can open your eyes.”
Kessian turned. “Great. I’m going to sit on this shallow rock. If you could just position yourself between my knees. Back to me. Yes, that’s good.”
I shivered, though not from cold. The glowing water rippling around him felt warmer than the rest. “What do I do?”
“Sink deeper. Float back just enough so your head’s in the water.”
Normally this would afford me an unflattering look up Kessian’s nostrils, but even from this vantage he was unfairly beautiful. His eyes glimmered with cool reflections of the water’s vibrant blue.
He hovered his hands over my shoulders. “Physical contact helps the magic flow between us. May I?”
I nodded and drew a sharp breath when his fingers lightly caressed lines up my neck and into my hair.
At once, my mind flooded with images. Racing to eat my ice cream before it melted while sitting on this very bank with Laurelie beside me. Jumping in off the highest rock to see who could make the largest splash. Lunaris, still a scruffy calico, hissing when she got sprayed.
More images followed. Roast dinners at Grandpa’s—he always gave me the oyster from the chicken.
Dad teaching me the technique for coning clay on the wheel.
A sea of black mourners around coffins with no bodies inside.
My sweet calico transforming, magic stretching and twisting her into a caravan. Goodbyes. So many goodbyes.
Then just a blankness. A dark, cold expanse of time that lurched nine years forward. The images became more sensory, more illicit. A kiss tasting like citrus, bumping along in an old Volvo, fingers tangled in bedsheets and blue hair, breathing hard into the side of his love-bitten neck.
Kessian pulled back, fingers clenching. “Sorry.”
“What was that? Could you see all that?”
“Yes. That wasn’t me controlling it, though. It’s the spring. It’s almost like it wanted to reacquaint itself and got a little … greedy.” He let out a forced laugh. “I guess it missed you. It’s never been that thorough.”
I flushed with embarrassment, which was ridiculous. The last few visions weren’t anything Kessian hadn’t seen before. He’d been there. The earlier images, my life in Shearwater before I left, was nothing he hadn’t found out after my fight with Fae. Still, I asked, “What’s supposed to happen?”
“For locals, it might dive into their history a little before showing us something from the future. Something that will help them navigate their problems, or steer them toward the right path. For visitors and tourists, it can’t seem to access their past. I think it can only “see” as far as the boundaries of Shearwater. ”
It made a strange sort of sense, but I found its attention frightening. Why such particular interest in me? Why had it saved me from drowning and not the countless others?
“Should I keep going?” Kessian asked.
“Yes.” We’d already begun. Might as well finish.
“This next part will be strange. Like a dream. Try to relax.”
Uncomfortable with the spring as I was, Kessian’s fingers in my hair grounded me. As if reading my mind, he kneaded behind my ears and tugged gently on a few strands, sending pleasant shivers through me.
“Seems I’m not the only one who likes having his hair pulled,” he murmured.
He was incorrigible. I sank low enough my ears were below the water, muffling all noise, until even the soft ripples fell away. Kessian kneaded soothing circles into my temples, and I drifted into a trance like a paper boat rocking in the surf of dreams.
I woke outside a house.
It had once been a handsome house. A rotted porch wrapped all the way around its first floor, with a swing by the door screeching on rusted chains.
The garden had overgrown and crawled in through the broken windows.
It had the air of an aged starlet, still breathtaking and stage-worthy, if the world hadn’t decided to neglect her for the new and youthful.
I recognized it. This was Grandad’s house.
“Shall we go inside?”
Kessian appeared at my shoulder like a ghost. I hadn’t heard him approach. He was there as if he’d always been.
“This is my grandad’s house.”
“I know. I used to visit and help him with the gardening.”
A stab of envy went through me. Kessian probably knew present-day Edwin Ashborne better than his own grandson did.
“How is coming back here meant to help me?”
“The more you see, the more it might make sense. Come on.”
We walked up the steps of the porch, through the door with its two stained-glass panels, into—
It should have been the foyer, and it was, but it was also a forest. The stairway banisters had grown into trees that twisted through the ceiling, branches sprouted from the walls, and the rug runner had a peculiar, cloying feel underfoot.
Worst of all was the sound.
There’d been a grandfather clock in the hallway, which tick-tick-ticked and chimed on the hour.
I remembered, in early childhood, finding the noise so intolerable that I’d screamed and screamed whenever we visited.
My parents thought I didn’t like Grandad, but it had just been the clock.
We stopped coming around so often, until one Christmas, when I’d gotten old enough to understand how clocks like that worked, I jammed the pendulum with an old shoehorn to stop it from ticking.
The clock was there now, overgrown with foliage, its pendulum still swinging to and fro, but instead of ticking, the song of the strid issued from it, its tune like wind, percussion like rain.
“Do you hear that?” I murmured.
Kessian nodded. “What is it?”
The words caught in my throat. “That’s the song I heard. The one that lured me into the strid.”
“Oh.” Kessian’s expression changed, assessing the song differently. “It takes on a different sort of beauty when you put it like that.”
The grandfather clock lurched. We both jumped at the sound of something spraying inside. I expected blood, but the geyser of it began to leak. Black water hemorrhaged from the cracks around the glass-paneled door, gurgling into the hallway.
The clock didn’t tick, but my heart did. A heavy, rapidly accelerating drum. I took a step back from the clock, feet squelching in the sodden rug runner.
“I think we need to leave,” I said.
“Nothing here can hurt you.”
This failed to reassure me when a hand composed of shadows slammed against the inside of the glass.
It arrested the swing of the pendulums, splashing through the water rising in the interior.
The fingers squeaked against the pane as they slowly closed to make a fist. Then the hand drew back and punched through, glass shattering and frigid water bursting from within.
I backed away. I grabbed Kessian’s wrist and tried to pull him back, too, but he said, “It can’t hurt you. This is the safest place to confront your fear.”
The thing was emerging from the clock. It moved sinuously and with an irregular pace, like a dancer adapting to an off-beat tempo.
Its arm came through first, prowling with its claws grasping the muddy floorboards.
Then a shoulder jerked out, popping at an odd angle.
The antlers rattled the pendulums and phased through like smoke.
I’d backed up to the front door, still grasping Kessian’s wrist. It can’t hurt you, he’d said, but it seemed plenty capable, and I didn’t understand how this vision could help me.
The wraith tilted its head, antlers scraping the ceiling, and pointed at the clock, whose hands abruptly spun backward, rewinding through time.
The forest shrank away. The wraith vanished.
The variety of clocks cluttering the hallway shrank and vanished, the yellowing wallpaper restored to white, until everything appeared just as it had when I was young.
It all melted away, and for a moment I thought I was back in the waking world because I was standing on the banks of the spring, but Kessian wasn’t there, and it was night. I watched the water, which bubbled and glowed. Something was emerging from it. I expected the wraith and took a step back.
But it wasn’t the wraith. A dark head of hair emerged, a face coughing up water. A young girl.
I leapt in, wading up to my waist to help her, and it was only when she swept her hair from her eyes and lifted her face that I recognized her.
Laurelie.
That … that wasn’t possible. If the strid meant to show me both the past and possible futures, then this wasn’t one. She’d died.
I heard noise behind me and turned to see lights on in the spa house. Voices carried through the garden, torch beams hunting through the reeds and tracking toward us. In their glare, I couldn’t see who held them until we were out of the water.
The torch light lowered. It took a moment for my eyes to adjust, but standing before me was Fae. Not Fae of nine years ago, who’d had longer hair and only wore hoodies with band logos. This Fae’s hair had been pinned up and studded with pearls. A wedding style.
They said, “Laurelie? Is that Laurelie?”
Before either of us could answer, the vision changed again.
Now I was racing through the woods, heart pounding as powerfully as the strid waters I could hear just ahead. Through gaps in the trees, I could make out a figure striding toward the bank, his plait swaying behind him in the breeze.
Kessian. He was dressed for a wedding, a gold chain woven through his plait and a colorful shirt beneath his waist coat. He walked with a cane painted like it had been touched by frost.
He moved in steady, trancelike steps toward the strid where a tall, dark creature with an antlered head awaited him, holding out its claws.
I knew it was a vision. (A very realistic one.) I knew it wasn’t real. (But if it was a vision of the future, could it come true?)
I also knew that I would not make it to the shore in time, and it felt too real in the moment not to terrify me when Kessian walked across the surface of the river like a water strider, turned to face me, and reached out as if I could pull him to safety.
I tried. I sprinted with shin splints and burning lungs. I held out my hand. Our fingers clasped.
The wraith had no mouth, but I felt it smile as it dragged Kessian down, and me with him.
I shot awake.