CHAPTER 36
Istill had a hold of Kessian, but the wraith had a hold of us.
In the depths, it was hard to see the creature, but I felt it. The ice of its touch was a needle under the skin, bringing back sharply the first time I’d fallen into the strid’s cold waters.
I fought its grip, but it was iron. I tried to kick up for the surface, but the water weighed me down like a lead curtain. I clawed at the wraith, hoping to harm it, hoping to free Kessian.
Instead, my hand grazed the muddy bottom of the spring, or the strid, or wherever we were.
Something cold and metal grazed my fingers.
Rough, engraved. Thoughtlessly, I grasped onto it.
It seemed to be embedded in the ground, and I tried to use it as leverage to pull myself out of the wraith’s clutches.
Whatever I held, it budged. In the dark, I saw a glimmer of silver and rust, attached to a chain. With another tug, it came free.
It was my pocket watch. It had been here since the day I’d nearly drowned, but the panic of drowning now blocked out any speculation as to the grander reason for finding it.
Gripping it in my fist, I lashed out with a punch at the wraith.
My arm went through the thick molasses of water and shadow.
With a swooping sensation and the rush of water in my ears, I found myself vomited up onto the runner carpet in the hallway of 37 Culpepper Avenue.
Kessian tumbled out of the grandfather clock after me, water still spewing from its door.
He crawled on his arms, dragging his legs.
I scrambled back, too, whipping my head around in search of the wraith, but it had gone. Kessian sat with his back against the staircase banisters, blinking water from his eyes.
I checked him over for wounds, but apart from red impressions on our arms where the wraith touched us, we were unharmed.
“You’re all right?” I said.
“Yeah. Yeah, it didn’t hurt me.”
I sighed with relief and sat back to appraise the house. “Why did it bring us here? Isn’t this where we’d end up if the memory had ended as usual?”
“Maybe not.” He pointed through the arch into the living room, which was teeming with clocks. We were further along in time than the Culpepper Avenue of the Bloodstream.
Kessian pulled the spectral pocket watch out and let his head fall back against the banister with a painful knock. “We only have five more hours.”
I might have despaired, but something about the entire situation struck me differently from our other encounters with the wraith. I opened my own fist to show him what I’d found at the bottom of the spring.
Kessian’s eyes widened. “That’s the watch we found in your grandad’s study.”
“It was at the bottom of the strid. That must have been where the wraith took us. Presumably the watch has been there since the day I nearly drowned.” I ran my fingers over the engraved edges, trying to wrap my head around two strange elements to this development.
“I’m going to say something crazy,” Kessian said.
“All right …”
“Maybe this is the day we’re meant to plant the watch, and the wraith brought us to the correct time after ensuring we found the watch in the first place?”
I shuddered. “That makes it sound like the wraith is helping us.”
“Maybe it’s been trying to? If you think about it, the only way this whole mess gets fixed is if we went into the Bloodstream. It’s been trying to lure you in by taking your loved ones.”
“Why not just take me?”
“I don’t know if it can. It’s a part of you. It can get through your wards. Maybe that means it can’t enthrall you, either.”
It did sound mad, but I’d begun to wonder if the wraith wasn’t as malevolent as it seemed. Grandad had spoken to it as if he’d known who the wraith was. He’d transferred the powers of the Keeper to it, and it had given them to Kessian.
Kessian had somehow held on to his cane throughout the whole ordeal. Probably tried to give the wraith a beating with it. He used it now to help himself to his feet and make his way up the stairs.
I followed. Anticipation of what we’d find warred with my desire for a hot fire and dry clothes.
In these brief moments of quiet between harrowing memories and near-drownings, I remembered that this had started with a kiss under a tree.
The prospect of going home and falling asleep in his arms kept my body moving in spite of a bone-deep need to lie down.
That feeling would be all the more pressing for Kessian, who moved stiffly and slowly up the stairs with an iron grip on the banister and his cane.
No one occupied the study except the dervish of notes and clutter, which had expanded from our last visit. Kessian rooted through a few drawers until he found a letter opener. “Use this to engrave the watch. And maybe try to make it quick. We’ve lost another hour.”
I sat down to carve the combination to Warwick’s safe.
I’d cursed the ambiguity of this message before, but with time ticking away, I didn’t have the hours to spare or the space available in the small watch for anything longer.
The fire set in his office would burn away any message I left on paper. The watch would at least survive.
Once finished, I set the rusted pocket watch in the center of Edwin’s desk.
The moment I did, the world blurred, sucking us back into the Bloodstream once more, back to the version of the house lost in time on the edge of a river.
Consulting the watch, its hands seemed to race compared to the sluggish tick of the second hand in the pantry. We had three hours left.
We didn’t prevaricate over where to go next. The wraith was at the center of all this, and the first time it had been seen was the night it took Laurelie.
In Edwin’s study, we turned the hands of the floral clock to the numbers corresponding with the date of her death. It didn’t thrill me to revisit every death in my family like the world’s most morbid pilgrimage, but happy memories wouldn’t yield answers to our questions.
The office washed away, once again replaced with my teenage bedroom.
For a moment, I thought we’d accidentally entered the same memory as the last. I still slept in my bed, one foot kicked out to keep cool, Laurelie curled up around her crocheted egg.
Her dark hair puddled around her on the pillow, disconcertingly like blood.
Her eyes opened and stared across at me like she’d never been asleep. Slowly, she rose from her bed and went to the window. Her own familiar, a long-haired tortoiseshell cat named Mari, followed her, its tail like a feather duster held in the air. Laurelie whispered to my sleeping form, “Taliesin?”
I didn’t stir. Convinced I was truly asleep, she padded out of the room, turning the door handle so softly it barely creaked.
Unlike my father and I, she moved with determined steps. Her eyes were bright and alert. No music lured her out of her bed. She went willingly.
Kessian and I only lingered long enough to glance out the window to see what had drawn her attention. I let out a soft gasp at the sight.
The spring was alive with dancing lights. Red stars like comets flitted through the mirrored surface, gathering most densely around the shore in a glowing foam. It looked beautiful and deadly, the magic of the strid made bloody by the deaths of all who’d drowned a few days ago.
There was no sign of the wraith.
We descended the stairs after her, following her out into the night. She had slipped on sandals and marched halfway across the lawn already. At the water’s edge, she waited.
I wondered if I was meant to do something, like in the other memories.
Short of tying her down, I couldn’t stop her.
I could feel the inflexibility of history.
Whatever she was doing, she did it willingly, and if I were to stop her tonight, she would come back to do it the next night, or the next.
There was a special type of cruelty in making me watch.
The war between doing anything to stop it and the knowledge that I couldn’t tore at me.
I was here to cleanse Shearwater of the poison, but I couldn’t be cured. The things which had soured me couldn’t be undone.
From the pocket of her pajamas, Laurelie retrieved a shining coin, and my whole world twisted. It was old, copper, and bore the face of a centuries-old monarch. The same coin Marlowe had fashioned into a talisman for me.
She clenched it tightly in her fist, held it to her chest, closed her eyes and murmured, “I wish Dad would come back to life.”
With determination, she threw the coin into the spring. It broke the mirrored surface with a soft splash, the glowing red light coalescing around the place where it sank like a school of fish to bait.
She waited, and in the silence, it seemed nothing else would happen.
Then the woody song of a flute drifted through the reeds, and Laurelie’s hands, clutched to her chest in hope and anticipation, fell languidly to her sides.
Eyes glazed, she sat down in the grass and took off her sandals one by one, placing them neatly aside. Mari yowled fearfully before the music ensnared her, too, and she went placidly quiet.
Laurelie didn’t notice. She stood and extended one foot, tapping her toes to the water’s surface. The glowing red lights flocked to her, condensing around the place where she took one step, and then another, like a sinister swarm of fireflies.
Both feet planted, she waited, hands hovering like a gymnast on a balance beam. Then she walked forward, each step resulting in an exultation of light from the spring, until she stood in the very center of the pool. Her familiar watched from the shore, tail swishing.
The glowing lights in the pool moved less like fireflies now, more like an angry hive of bees coursing at her feet. The water bubbled. I reflexively grabbed Kessian’s sleeve, knowing what happened next.
The spring sucked Laurelie under. Her descent caused barely a ripple, only a singular drop rising into the air after her, scarlet with unnamed magic.
All the lights in the spring went out. Not in flickers or dwindling numbers like matches reaching their ends at different times, but like a flipped switch. It was impossible to see what happened below the black surface.
On the shore, a shadowy magic twisted through Laurelie’s familiar, strangling a terrified yowl from her before dragging her into the spring with a splash.
The music stopped. The spring was quiet. Then came the crunch of grass, and Marlowe hesitantly emerged from the trees. In one hand, he held the bone flute, its strange shape and pointed tines making it hard to distinguish as an instrument.
He cast a spell, drawing something from the bottom of the spring. The water rippled and broke as the shiny coin Laurelie had wished upon floated into his hand.
Kessian had a hand over his mouth, watching with horror, but my own feelings had become too big to swallow, the helplessness of watching too much to bear.
I had never been terribly violent in life, though there’d been times when frustration built up so strongly I thought my chest would burst like a rotted pumpkin. It all came out of me, all that pent-up rage, as I stomped across the grass and seized Marlowe by the throat.
Or tried to. I could not. I was no more material here than a mote on the breeze, and my fingers passed through his neck like a specter’s.
But he felt something. Goose bumps erupted on his skin, and he shivered violently, stumbling away and rubbing his throat where my hands had passed through. I hadn’t withdrawn them, still squeezing like I could tear apart the tragedy of our lives if I tore him apart first.
He staggered, and I went with him. Something slithered within me, making me corporeal. Marlowe’s eyes bulged. We both felt solid as he clawed at my invisible grip, tried to kick me.
I could hardly hear the water burbling behind me for the blood rushing in my ears, or Kessian’s cries to stop, his warnings. No, the thing that stopped me killing my uncle was the darkness crawling up my arms like smoke.
I recoiled, flailing my arms, trying to flick the ichor from them when I saw where it had come from.
In the same spot Laurelie had disappeared, the wraith rose up, wreathed in wet shadows and the aura of death.
Tendrils of it curled through the ground and into me like tributaries, like veins.
Kessian put an arm around me, trying to lead me away.
On the ground, Marlowe choked. He’d dropped the bone flute in the bush during our struggle.
It looked like driftwood, a crooked branch.
For just a moment, the shadows condensed transparently around the wraith, and I saw it—her—for who she really was.
Green eyes. A gangly, teenage frame.
Laurelie.
Things that had once been a mystery to me resolved, a picture made clear under the right lens. She could get through my wards because she was my twin. Coill Darragh couldn’t keep her out because it had accepted me, and she was family, a part of me.
Lights flickered on in the upper floor of the spa house.
Marlowe whimpered. The wraith uncoiled, straightening its hunched back, its head unfolding from within, sprouting antlers from the fissures in its head, no longer resembling my sister, just the ghostly residue of her rage and mine baptized in the spring’s wild magic, where I could only guess at what visions she’d seen.
The rest of this memory I knew. Torches bobbed toward us, and Mum’s scream followed.
I would throw myself at the wraith, and to both our surprise, it would blanch at the sight of me and retreat, forever embedding the notion that I controlled it, that it followed me, when really it had always been Laurelie, who couldn’t kill her twin brother.