CHAPTER 40
Isnatched the watch off the bedside table and shot out of bed.
The note was a cracked whip against my sleep-addled mind.
The rest of the waking world came back to me in sharp relief.
The brightness of a room that had been romantically dimmed.
The horn blaring, the curtains flapping open and shut, the bed rattling.
Lunaris doing everything in her power to wake me.
It would have worked sooner, but the dregs of the sleep potion had done their job.
Lunaris conjured a fresh pair of jeans. I hopped into them, stuffing the watch into the pocket on my way into the kitchen. The front door was wide open.
I didn’t have time for shoes. I ran barefoot out onto the grass.
Across the gardens, fifty meters from me, Kessian approached the banks of the spring. Lights from the wedding pavilion winked off the water, music too distant to be anything but bass, mimicking the heavy thunk of my heart as I screamed, “Kessian!”
I’d already started running. I hadn’t played sports since high school, but the past few days had given me a few reasons to practice.
My legs ate up the distance. Kessian heard me and looked over his shoulder.
His expression was painfully familiar. Stubborn, determined, and in unquestionable pain.
The same one he wore when he’d relented about me sacrificing myself. He’d never intended to let me.
“Kessian!” I screamed. “Don’t do it!”
He didn’t listen. He tossed aside his cane on the grass and took a step to wade in. The tainted wild magic surged up from the depths to meet him, a scarlet tide buoying him across the surface. Each step rippled across a bloodred pool. I was closing the gap but still too far to make it.
“Kessian!”
Kessian limped more quickly.
“Don’t!” I screamed myself hoarse. “Kessian, please don’t!”
My pleas were cut short by an unearthly, serrated wail like cutlery scraped across ceramic. I nearly lost my footing as I darted a look into the trees.
The woods were dark, but the wraith was darker still, an inky shape crashing through the brush. It reached the shore in three sweeping strides, ungainly and on all fours. There was no trace of Laurelie in its body language. Its form had changed, hulking rather than lithe and eerily graceful.
Kessian reached the center of the spring, the wraith and I converging upon him. I didn’t slow.
“Tal, go back!” Kessian yelled.
“Like hell I will!”
The wraith and I reached the shore at the same time, but while I waded in, slowed by sodden jeans and the mucky bottom, the wraith slithered into the water like an eel. It pooled like black blood in the water, streaming toward Kessian with the predatory agility of a shark.
“No,” I whispered hoarsely. I was so close.
The blackness gathered under Kessian. He mouthed an apology. Then the wraith pulled him under. He slipped out of sight with barely a ripple.
I dove under after him.
Nothing should have been loud underwater, but the strid was. It raged, the howling gale of something lost that couldn’t find its way back to solid ground. I’d heard some variation of its song many times now, but it was nothing compared to this. The water crashed like cymbals, momentous and angry.
I could hardly see through the blackness. The spring seemed expansive, but I didn’t think the space we occupied was physical anymore. This was the cut in the world between the Bloodstream and the strid, the spring, the water that made up the blood of Shearwater. I swam into the dark.
At first there was nothing. Then came the winking glimmer of Kessian’s stars, distant as real ones, glowing enough to see his wide, terrified eyes and the shape of what held him.
The same crimson, corrupted magic that had once swirled around Laurelie twisted around him.
Circling him was the wraith, its movements graceful as a shark, more at home in water than on land.
I swam toward them, but a current fought me, held me back.
I moved as if through molasses while the wraith consumed Kessian.
It wrapped one hand around his throat, sickle-shaped claws far too near his jugular.
He instinctively pried at its fingers, then froze.
Through the gurgle of water in my ears, I could have sworn something spoke.
Kessian listened, wide-eyed and attentive.
No, I thought. Whatever it’s saying, don’t listen.
I tried to swim harder, but there was no fighting the current. Every muscle in me screamed with exertion while I made no progress forward, forced to watch as Kessian bowed his head, absorbing whatever he’d heard. Briefly, he turned in my direction. His eyes met mine.
No, please don’t, I thought desperately.
I could read his lips as he said, “Trust me.” Then something else I couldn’t decipher.
“No!”
The wraith ducked its head, and the antlers seemed to split apart.
The entire wraith did, like it had been unzipped, shadows discarded like old clothes, revealing the shape of Laurelie one layer at a time.
She looked pristine, untouched, the same as she did the day she died.
Laurelie was set free, but the empty cage now reached for Kessian.
The ribs opened like spider legs, holding him like a fly, and its skeletal face bent too close.
It didn’t have teeth, but its proximity made it look like it would bite.
I fought the current, but I could not move. The water was cold, but everything in me burned.
The wraith said something, and Kessian tipped closer as if enthralled. He nodded, and the wraith leaned forward like it really would bite him. Instead, the shadows crawled up Kessian’s face, pried his jaw open, and poured down his throat like the wraith was forcing him to drink poison.
Bubbles foamed from my mouth as I screamed.
The strid threw me out onto the shores of the spring, as if depositing me out of a bad dream into the waking world. Or the opposite.
Because Laurelie was coughing up water on the grass beside me, and Kessian was gone.