CHAPTER 22
We found my family gathered in the reception of the spa.
All of them except Amelia. Marlowe sat behind the desk with his head in his hands, face obscured, while Lettie wept and Mum tried to comfort her.
Fae sat on the bottom step with Camilla holding them, a picture of a family in grief from which three faces were missing.
And mine, but it always was.
The door chime drew all their attention as I walked in. My mum rounded on me at once, eyes red and a tissue scrunched in her fist.
“You. You’ve been back a few short days, and now look what’s happened.”
“Mum, please,” Fae pleaded. With their knees tucked and their tear-streaked face, they looked as young as the day I left.
“How did it happen?” I asked through the lump in my throat.
“The same way it’s always happened.”
“Amelia and I shared a shift today,” Fae said.
“I was closing up for the day when I heard screaming from the direction of the spring. By the time I got out there, it already had her.” Fae shivered, voice breaking.
“It dragged her under the water. I tried to go in after her, but it was just like with Laurelie. No body, nothing. Like the spring just … absorbed her.”
She broke down completely then. Lettie did, too. She wouldn’t even look at me. Marlowe barely held it together himself, and I wondered if he hated me, too, now.
“None of it would have happened if you’d left like you were supposed to,” Mum said.
“This isn’t Tal’s fault,” Fae argued.
“Then whose is it? Nine years, and nobody else has drowned, but now—” My mother covered her mouth with the back of her hand and looked away, chin wobbling.
Perhaps it was a case of classic dissociation, but rather than rail against the accusation or sink under the weight of my guilt, I found myself envying everyone’s ability to express their feelings, raw and out loud, while I probably looked as though I didn’t care.
A weight crushed the air out of my lungs, my chest was sore with the abusive slam of my heart, but none of it really showed because I wasn’t predisposed to tears or raising my voice.
I wanted to. I wanted to scream that Amelia was important to me, too, and why didn’t I get to grieve her with everyone?
“Do you have anything to say for yourself?” Mum fumed.
“I was trying to fix it,” I said quietly.
“Right before Fae’s wedding? Did you stop to think how terrible it would be to lose someone so close to the big day?”
“Mum, that isn’t fair,” Fae protested. “We can put off the wedding.”
“We certainly will not. We cannot afford to postpone. This close to the date, we lose our deposit for everything.”
“Can we not talk about money right now!” Fae cried.
Mum was looking at me like I should have an answer. All I could think to say was, “I’m sorry.”
“Amelia is gone! Don’t you get that? Amelia is gone, and Laurelie, and Nathaniel, and none of us will be left if you don’t leave,” she screamed, taking a step toward me, but she found her path blocked.
Kessian put himself between us. I hadn’t noticed him move.
His voice had more gravel in it than when he’d spoken to Warwick.
“You’re blaming him? You gave up on him when he was sixteen, and you’ve had nine years to sort all this trouble out in the meantime rather than leave the burden to your kids once they’d grown.
If you want a scapegoat, look in the mirror. ”
Stricken silent, my mother did naught but gape at him. When she recovered, she said, “This is a family matter. You don’t know the first thing about it.”
“I know Tal’s sacrificed nine years of his life protecting all the people in this room.
I know he’s only stuck around this time because the wraith had a lock on me, and if he left I’d probably have been taken next.
While you gave up on him, he’s been scouring Shearwater for a solution. He may even have found one!”
“Really?” Fae raised their head from their hands. “Are you serious? You found a way to stop it? Can we get Amelia back?”
“Oh, please say you can,” Lettie whispered.
“No.” I didn’t want to get their hopes up. “I mean, I don’t know. It’s— I haven’t had time to read through Grandpa’s research yet.”
“Research? What research?” Marlowe asked.
I held up the folder. It had a crease in it from where my thumb had gripped too hard.
Mum looked stung. “He never told us about any research. Where did you find that?”
“It’s a long story.” One I didn’t know how to start because it meant revealing Grandpa had been murdered, that I’d spoken to his ghost and raided Warwick’s house, bargained with him in hopes of exorcising Shearwater of the wraith before anyone else had to die, and we’d lost Amelia anyway.
Kessian stepped in. “Unfortunately the story comes with more bad news.” He gave me a solemn nod of support, and it struck me I’d never had an advocate like this. Someone who helped me find the words and fought in my corner.
It had been a trying day, and it wasn’t likely to get easier. I didn’t anticipate my family receiving what I had to say well, but I found a silver lining in the unexpected solidarity of Kessian telling the story with me.
We covered everything from the point of my escape to Coill Darragh.
They took the news of Grandpa’s murder as well as Amelia’s “abduction.” I wasn’t ready to think of her as dead yet.
They reacted to Warwick’s bargain with equal parts anger and a lack of surprise.
Nobody liked him, and after Kessian’s chastisement earlier, Mum was only too pleased to latch on to another scapegoat.
It took two rounds of tea and the better part of an hour to cover everything. Marlowe, who’d looked more morose than I’d ever seen him, seemed to take solace in the discovery of Grandpa’s research. I laid it out on the desk, and he flipped through it delicately while I read over it with him.
“Warwick told us he’d devised a trap for the wraith. Something to summon and confine it.”
“I wonder why he never shared any of this with us,” Marlowe said.
“Because he never shared anything with us. We had to find out from Warwick that he’d bought the spa, remember?” my mum said.
“He didn’t?” I asked.
Marlowe nodded sadly. “I’m sure you’ve reached the age now where you realize your parents are not nearly as wise and perfect as you think they are as children.”
“Speak for yourself,” said Mum.
“Your grandpa was a good grandpa, but … he wasn’t always the best father,” Marlowe finished.
In that moment, time felt folded in two, the past overlaid with the present, drawn in parallel. Yes, I could relate to that, though I wouldn’t say so in front of my mother.
Marlowe traced a drawing of a sigil in the notes. There were several versions, altered each time, with a list of tithes that received modifications along the way. “It’s incomplete,” he said.
“Even this last one?” Kessian asked.
“It’s missing a—” I didn’t quite know the word for it, the rune and tithe that defined the nature of the creature to be bound.
“A focus,” Marlowe said. “It wasn’t possible to specify a tithe for the subject to be summoned because we don’t really know what the wraith is, nor is it substantial enough to take teeth or hair from. Without a focus, the sigil’s just a fancy drawing. It won’t work.”
“How do you find out what the wraith is without trapping and studying it, though?” Fae asked.
I didn’t answer because the thought that came to mind would not win me any more favor amongst my family.
It can break through the wards because it’s a part of you.
I thought of falling into the strid with two dozen other people and emerging as the sole survivor. I thought, too, of Kessian’s connection to the spring, the way his freckles lit up the moment Amelia was taken by the wraith.
Marlowe caught the look in my eye. “You know how to finish it, don’t you?”
“Maybe.”
Understanding dawned on Kessian, too. He worried his lip between his teeth, puzzling it out.
Mum grasped Lettie’s hand and bounced impatiently. “Well? There’s no time to waste. How?”
Marlowe said, “Before we figure out the ‘how’ we should figure out ‘where.’ So no one gets hurt this time.”
We discussed options and eventually settled on one.
The grounds around the spa and spring hid a number of utility sheds, but one in particular was on the perimeter of the woods, too far to be of use, so it had been abandoned.
The padlock, rusted shut, we broke open with steel cutters. An old spade leaned against the wall, but otherwise the shed’s only occupants were spiders, wood lice, and mouse droppings.
I’d driven Lunaris onto the grass as close as I could get her. A rocky ledge was too steep for her to cross, but she’d be near enough in case anything went wrong and we needed to make a quick escape. I hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
By the glow of a witch light, I transcribed the runes from my grandfather’s notes onto the concrete floor. When I got to the focus, I wrote out two names in runes. Mine and Kessian’s.
It made the most sense to me. The wraith was somehow a part of me—that was how it breached Coill Darragh’s wards and my own. Kessian was a part of the strid. Its magic flowed through him. If the wraith was a part of me, and a part of the strid, perhaps this would be enough for the trap to work.
What terrified me was we wouldn’t know until we tried. If it successfully summoned the wraith but failed to trap it, we’d be in danger with no talisman or recourse except to run.
We pooled our resources for the tithes. The last, the one to represent the wraith, had to come from both of us. I pulled out a strand of my hair. Kessian did the same, taking it from his fringe and handing it to me. We tied them in a knot and soaked them in the spring’s waters.
With everything prepared, I turned to face my family. They all looked to one another uncomfortably. Nobody wanted to be this close to the wraith when it appeared.
“It already took Amelia tonight,” Marlowe said. “Perhaps we should wait until after the wedding?”
“I’m afraid of it crashing the wedding,” I countered. “I’d rather get this over with. None of you have to stay.” I cast Kessian a sidelong look. “You as well.”
“I don’t want to leave you to fight it alone,” Fae said.
Kessian said, “He won’t be. I’m not leaving.”
I was for once glad the depths of my feelings didn’t often show on my face, with the way that opened my heart right up.
“We’ll stake out a spot nearby. Come to the rescue if anything goes amiss.” Marlowe took my hand and shook it. “You’re a brave lad, you know that?”
“I don’t feel it.”
“Well, you are.” He pulled me into a hug, which prompted everyone else to join him. Even Mum, though she looked the least comfortable, still sore from Kessian’s rebuke earlier.
They left, Fae waving to us nervously as they backed into the night.
“Thank you for staying,” I said to Kessian without looking at him. “I’m used to dealing with things alone.”
“Me too.”
A few hours ago, I’d been kissing him, and now I could hardly look at him.
I feared all of this going wrong and what might happen to him.
All this time I’d held back from touching him because I didn’t want to nurture the feelings that had no chance of taking root in my nomadic life, but those feelings had grown anyway.
I hadn’t gotten to grips with what had happened to Amelia, either. Everything had felt very real in Kessian’s garden, but not here.
“Might as well rip off the plaster,” Kessian said. “I’ll be right here.”
“It might be easier if you weren’t.” He looked stung, so I raced to add, “I’m afraid you’ll get hurt.”
“I survived Bowen’s Wane. What’s a wraith got on that? And if it drags me off, I don’t have to worry about finding a home anymore.”
“That’s not funny.”
“Sorry.”
I wasn’t good at reading people. That was academic at this point. It wasn’t that I didn’t notice a change in someone’s mood and demeanor, it was that I so rarely could figure out where that change had come from.
I caught a chilliness in Kessian’s tone that hadn’t been there before, but I must have imagined it, because a moment later he said with his usual confidence, “Let’s catch a wraith.”
The only thing left to do was cast the spell. As I called upon my magic, drawing deep, Kessian laced his fingers with mine and squeezed.
One rune around the sigil’s perimeter lit up, blue as bioluminescent algae.
Slowly, one by one, each rune blazed alive.
Beside me, Kessian’s magic flared, too. A surge of power went through us both, and the slow illumination of the sigil sped up, each rune lighting the others in a domino chain, until the inside of the shed was so bright I had to close my eyes.
I opened them again once the glow died down. The sigil frosted into the ground stayed crisp and poised. All it needed was a prisoner.
But one didn’t appear.
“The sigil’s alive. The trap worked, didn’t it?” Kessian said.
“The trap did. The summoning didn’t.”
“Maybe it takes a minute?”
We waited with measured breaths, but the shadows didn’t stir, the air didn’t saturate with cold and damp.
The wraith wasn’t coming.