CHAPTER 32
Kessian and I fell into step behind them, and he let his fingers brush mine in case I wanted comfort. I knew if I accepted it the grief would pour out of me, so I didn’t.
“Were you awake for this?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“You must have been terrified.”
“I had cuts on my feet from the pine needles. The forest was so cold, but Dad’s hand was hot and clammy.
It all seemed … far away. Like it was happening to someone else.
And after, it was all hard to remember, but now …
” I clenched my hand, wishing I’d taken Kessian’s comfort after all. “I don’t know if I can watch this.”
“Maybe we can stop it?”
I blanched. “What?”
“I’ve been thinking what the Keepers said to us. They said in dreams, we could only be spectators to the past and future, but here we could be their architect.”
Remembering what Emery had told us, I said, “Like time travel?”
“Marlowe bumped into me. I can affect the world. Maybe I can stop all this from ever happening. Stop the strid from being poisoned in the first place.”
I didn’t want to succumb to the hope that he was right. It raised so many questions, like what would become of us after, when history had been rewritten?
As we delved deeper into the forest, the shadows thickened, then seemed to move. They did move. Out of the dark, more people appeared. An elderly woman in a nightgown, a man in a security guard uniform come straight from the night shift, a teen girl with her hair wrapped in silk curlers.
The strid hadn’t discriminated. Old, young, men, women. It took them all.
All the while, the song grew stronger, louder, and something else occurred to me.
“What if we aren’t meant to stop this happening? What if we’re supposed to find the identity of the flute player instead?”
Kessian looked contemplative. “Could be … but he was on the other side of the river. If we want to stop your dad from drowning, we won’t have time to get to the flutist before he flees.”
As the crowd around us thickened, the trees grew more sparse. We didn’t have long to deliberate. Crossing the river alone was a danger.
We reached the bank of the strid. My heart kicked wildly as the reality set in.
I was about to watch my dad and I walk into the river and get swept away.
Knowing I survived did nothing to calm me.
The urge to grab them by the arms and drag them to safety was overwhelming, but I could not affect this world. Only Kessian could.
We drew closer. Ahead, someone I didn’t know reached the edge.
They kept walking as if there was no drop, as if they meant to walk across the surface to the other side.
Instead, they vanished, sucked under the moment their foot submerged, as if the strid had grasping hands poised to yank the unsuspecting down, down, down.
The flutist’s music shrilled in celebration of the first death.
“I don’t know if I can watch this, either,” Kessian murmured. “Not without trying to stop it.”
I said, “I don’t think it will help. The Keepers told us history is already written.”
But as a second person plunged in, and a third, terror seized me. What if it did go wrong? What if I died this time, and our entire world rewrote itself so I’d never lived past sixteen?
I couldn’t control that, but catching a glimpse of the flutist, that I could do.
We were ten steps from the shore. Nine. Eight.
Kessian said, “I have to try.”
I’d come to the opposite conclusion. I didn’t want to relive my worst moments, but finding the one responsible? “I’m going to try and jump the gap. You try and save me and my Dad.”
Kessian looked alarmed as I broke away, running for the river’s narrowest point.
My young self and my dad were three steps from the edge. Two.
The darkness, the cold. Perhaps the memory made me more aware of the real world, where time suspended Kessian and me in icy repose. Drowning, but slowly. Maybe it was the weight of grief. Or maybe it was just that the rocks were slippery.
I leapt but only got minimal traction. It felt as though the strid had its own gravity, sucking me down. My foot slipped on the rock of the opposite side. Kessian screamed as I slammed down on my chest, pain punching all the air from my lungs. Gasping, I grasped for a handhold to pull myself up.
Memories came back to me. Walking inexorably toward the edge.
The damp cold of the roaring strid, the sound of a splash—though no one had been ahead of me to make it—and a warm hand on my wrist pulling me to safety before going suddenly slack.
Then Dad had pulled me forward, heavier than me and the invisible force trying to draw us back from the banks.
It had all been a panicked blur. How could I have known the ghostly touch had been real?
All those years ago, Kessian had tried, but the shock of seeing me fail to make this jump had loosened his grip. The three of them—my younger self, my father, and Kessian—all went sprawling into the river right as I pulled myself out.
I screamed. The speed at which the strid swallowed them all made the ache in my ribs sharpen to a knife’s point. I scrambled up onto the bank and nearly dove in after them, but a stab of clarity stopped me.
Kessian had tried to change the events of history. Instead they’d played out exactly as they had in reality.
I’d always wondered how I’d survived …
In that split second, I made a decision and begged the Keepers, fate, the strid, whatever governed the world as I knew it, for it to be the right one.
Rather than dive into the strid after them, I sprinted into the woods. If I was quick, there could still be time to catch sight of the flute player. In my dream, he’d been within sight of the tree line.
I crashed through in that direction, forgetting I was a ghost, invisible and voiceless, unable to connect with people. I couldn’t grab the flutist and make him pay, but if I knew who it was, perhaps I could fix all this.
The music abruptly stopped. Ahead, a figure in the trees whipped around.
The darkness was complete. I could not make him out until he cast a spell, and the bright glow of a portal illuminated his face.
It was Marlowe.
I stopped dead, breathing hard.
Not Warwick. Marlowe. My uncle Marlowe.
In the light, his face was waxy with fear, eyes wide, searching the forest for the source of the sound and, seeing nothing, fleeing through the portal. It vanished behind him.
My pulse hammered. Marlowe had given me the talisman to protect me from the wraith.
Marlowe had helped us trap it. His own daughter had been taken by it.
How could he have been the one to play that song, lure all those people?
Why? And how had he come by this flute, which Warwick had on display in Foxbury Manor?
I had to bury the feelings festering within me. There was no use contemplating them here on my own.
I started running again, back the way I’d come, toward the spa and the spring where I’d washed up nine years ago, the mysterious sole survivor. If my theories were right, it wouldn’t be a mystery anymore.
As the night air chilled my burning lungs and the forest floor drummed underfoot, a needle of doubt punctured my certainty.
Memories from that night flooded back. My father, struggling to surface.
Those struggles ceasing abruptly when a rip current drove his head into the rocks, a ribbon of scarlet streaming into the water like a loose scarf.
The scream I’d let out, and all that precious air with it.
The current had played with my father’s limp body like a cat with a toy before it sucked him out of sight, into one of the tunnels pocking the stone walls of the strid’s banks.
I didn’t know if we could die in these memories, but if that was what became of Kessian, I’d never forgive myself.
I burst out of the woods, Shearwater Spa across the green, lights on as people searched for the two family members missing from their beds. The spring’s waters trickled placidly with the bright coin of the full moon reflected on its surface. I pulled up at the shore, watching and waiting.
People had asked how I’d fallen in the strid and washed up in the spring.
I had never known, and my memories around that were foggy.
There’d been magic like a song sung in a million different voices.
A hive of music that, at its crescendo, cracked apart and let me pass through something like a portal.
But mostly I remembered being cradled. In my dazed state, I thought it had been Dad, but he was dead already.
In that moment when I’d chased the flutist rather than dive in after Kessian, it had been because I was sure whose arms had held me. Not what, but who had saved my life all those years ago.
The longer the spring remained a smooth mirror of the sky, undisturbed, the more I doubted it.
He can’t be dead. Please don’t be dead. I couldn’t bear it. Not you. Not after tonight.
A soft glow appeared in the water. It turned bright blue, swirling out from the center in ripples. A figure broke the surface, hair painted over their face in inky stripes, mouth open to suck in greedy lungfuls of air, dragging something—someone—up with him.
Relief couldn’t break through the adrenaline. I surged forward, wading up to my waist to help them to shore. The figure flipped their soaking hair out of their face. I nearly collapsed seeing Kessian, scratched but otherwise unharmed.
The body in his arms was mine, nine years younger.
I helped drag him out and lay him on his back.
Kessian performed compressions on his chest. Plugged his nose and breathed into his mouth.
Compressions again. He—I—looked so painfully frail.
Limp, rocking with the motion of each compression, lips blue and hanging open.
Despair might have choked me if not for my certainty that this worked. In a sense, it already had.
On the fourth set of compressions, water spouted like a geyser from his open mouth. He rolled, vomiting up the strid’s briny water. It tasted like salt and iron and blood, I remembered.
Kessian sat back on his heels, letting out a sob of relief.
“It was you,” I said. “I felt like we’d met before, and we had. You saved my life.”
He smiled weakly. “I guess I did.”
“How did you survive the strid?”
“I could navigate it, somehow. The Keeper’s magic, it was like a purer version of the song sung by the flute. I … can’t really explain it, but I followed it here.”
Footsteps resounded in the night. A light bobbed through the darkness, and as it got closer, I recognized my mother’s face in the glow of her lantern. She wore a puffy jacket over her pajamas, eyes red with tears. She must have run here after finding her husband gone and her son’s bed empty.
She ran to me—her young son—and threw her arms around him. It only took him a few shaky moments to do the same, sobbing uncontrollably. I’d backed away several pacesinto the tree line, but I still heard my cracking, teenaged voice say, “Dad’s gone. Dad’s dead.”
My strength to hold the grief at bay failed me. I remembered that hug, the power of my mum’s arms to make me feel safe again. I remembered how this was the last time she ever hugged me like that, because soon Laurelie would be taken, too, and I would be blamed.
Kessian said, “Are you …?”
My breath snagged in my throat, the world gone blurry. And like my mum had done years ago, Kessian wound both arms around my ribs so tight they creaked when I breathed.
I didn’t reject the comfort this time. I gathered him close and wept into his shoulder, grieving the death of my dad, Laurelie, the love of my mother, the home I’d had to leave behind, and—
Kessian drew back and wiped my tears with his sleeve. “I’m sorry, but I have to ask. Did you find the flute player?”
“Yes,” I said. “It was Marlowe.”