CHAPTER 41
Irounded on the spring, wading in. “Give him back.” The words clawed their way up my throat. “Give him back!”
But the water didn’t stir. No one else crawled out of it.
Despair threatened to drown me more readily than the strid ever had.
I couldn’t lose Kessian. Memories of him blazed through me in a grieving wildfire.
How he’d made me laugh when we first met, the steady way he’d listened to me ramble, that quiet night spent at my pottery wheel.
I couldn’t accept that we’d never spend another night like that. I’d only barely accepted my own death by sacrifice, I couldn’t accept Kessian’s.
Laurelie coughed up a lungful of strid water. My heart warred between disbelief that she was here, doubting my reality, hoping she was, and grief that Kessian had been traded for her.
She could have answers. The strid had spoken to him, said something. Maybe she knew.
“Laurelie? Are you … Is this real? What happened?”
She clutched her head, pulling aqueous weeds from her hair and blinking around in confusion.
“Did he trade places with you? Is he still— Can we go back?”
She didn’t respond, staring past me at the house. I turned to see torchlight flushing through the gardens like hounds. Voices filtered closer, some I recognized. Fae’s was among them.
Oh God. What could I say to them?
I lost him. I tried to hold on, but the strid stole him away. I traded my lover for my sister.
The image came back to me. Those bilious liquid shadows forcing his mouth open and spiriting down his throat like a plague of insects fleeing the light.
I refused to believe he was gone. If Laurelie was here beside me, we could get Kessian back somehow.
“Laurelie, listen,” I said.
But she was getting up and running toward the torches. Their glare fell upon her. I shielded my eyes from it.
Someone said, “It can’t be.”
Then one of the torches dropped from the hand of the person holding it, and Fae marched out of the glare and threw their arms around their lost sister.
“Are you— Is it really you?”
“My God. How is she alive?”
And someone else said, “Where’s Kessian? Where’s Tal?”
“I’m right here,” I said, but they didn’t hear, and I stopped expecting them to.
Something about this wasn’t right. It tugged at the corners of my exhausted instincts.
I reached into my pocket for the watch. My fingers brushed metal. It was still there, still flickering between the new and the rusted, tarnished images of itself. I opened it and could hardly make sense of what I saw.
There were four hours left.
But … that shouldn’t be the case. There’d only been minutes left before.
If the Bloodstream had somehow given me more time, I wouldn’t waste more questioning it. I had to get Kessian back. I racked my brains for what could have caused this sudden skip backward, how it was possible.
My fingers ran over the cool, semitransparent surface of the pocket watch in my fist. It had counted down the final hours of our lives. Sometimes it had run fast.
What if it hadn’t been skipping ahead? What if … What if I—this future version of myself—had skipped back, and used up that time in another memory. One my past self hadn’t lived yet?
It twisted my brain, thinking of time like this. As squiggles and loops rather than a straight line. But as I connected the dots, it started to make sense.
There was one way to test if time travel still worked, but I did not want to waste the precious time I had. I needed to pick the right moment. To fix this. For good.
Though, if history was fixed … But I had to try. I picked at the seams of all the events leading up to now, trying to pull out the stuffing. What was I missing? What thread could I follow that would convince the strid to give up Kessian?
I’d once asked the wraith, “What do you want?”
To go home.
But where was home? Grandad had alienated his own children in favor of his grandkids.
My mum resented me and pushed me out to preserve the rest of the family.
Marlowe had broken us for the sake of an inheritance and his own pride.
The houses we lived in were haunted, the very waters flowing through Shearwater were drenched in blood, and the rest of it belonged to Warwick.
Everyone in this town clung so hard to each other and the past that when they’d been pulled apart, their claws tore great rifts in their futures.
It struck me then. We’d explored all the mysterious deaths in the strid. All but two.
When we’d examined the death glow left by the wraith on my grandfather’s body, there’d been two names amongst the others. Mine and Kessian’s, yet neither of us had died. Neither of us had merged with the wraith.
Yet.
As I heard Laurelie burst into tears, I touched the dial on the side of the spectral watch and turned it back, uncertain it would work until the wedding melted away, replaced by Lunaris’s kitchen.
Through a gap in the bedroom door, I could see Kessian and I wrapped around each other, making the bed creak.
I’d lived this moment, but I still felt as though I’d intruded as I quietly stepped outside and closed the door to give them—us—privacy.
Now I’d confirmed I could go back in time, I knew the event I needed to circumvent would come in only a few minutes, and as if sensing my resolve, the Keepers appeared before me.
“You understand what you must do?”
“I think so.”
“Then come with us.”
They led me away from Lunaris, to the spring where it all began, ended, began again in an endless loop. I stood at the edge with just my toes in the water.
“A word of caution: Resentment is contagious, and the wraith has many years of it.”
“So do I.”
“Yes. And you must let go of it and convince it to do the same.”
“I will.” I had to. I wasn’t losing anyone else.
“Time has a tricky way of making the foulest memories far stickier than the ones that make us smile. If we can impart any wisdom, it is to be most at home in yourself, so you do not give in to that sick tide.”
“I will be.” But my heart beat a little faster. Did I know how?
“Then go,” said the Keepers.
While we’d spoken, the glassy surface of the spring rippled. The tines of each antler emerged first, the wraith’s head just above water, elongated like a horse’s skull. It stared at me. It waited.
I took a step closer, though my instincts railed against it.
It had attacked me so many times, it was more unnerving to see it still.
As I got closer, it twitched its head like an animal chafing against its chains, water softly splashing, but it didn’t lunge or give chase, so I pushed forward until I floated before it, treading water and summoning words, though I didn’t know if it understood me.
“I’m here to cleanse the poison.”
The water rippled with a vibration. It beat against me like it was blood throbbing through vessels. A heartbeat. Its song was still filled with all the fury from before, but I was more attuned to its pain. Perhaps because I hurt, too, fearing for Kessian and what would become of us if I failed.
The wraith circled me, its shadows leaving ink trails in the water. I tried not to flinch as it swept behind me.
In my ears, the strid sang, Come home, come home, please come home.
My home wasn’t just a place, but Shearwater had indelibly carved its initials into me, and I tried to let it in. Tried to sympathize with the wild magic that fed off of ephemeral, ever-changing things like belonging and family and acceptance.
The wraith sensed my willingness to help like a wasp seeking out a crevice in the wall in which to make a hive. I tried not to flinch as its claws wound around my throat, tilting my head back.
It blotted out the stars in the sky before it split apart. The shadows swarmed over me, into my nose and mouth, blotting out my vision. I felt myself sucked underwater, engulfed inside the wraith, my consciousness melting with its own.
In that cavernous nothing, there was only the rabbiting of my heart and the strange, breathless expanse of the water around me.
Then came a torrent of memory. Not my own, but the strid’s.
Countless people dipping their toes in its waters, hoping to steal a glimpse of the future.
Staying for an hour or a weekend, departing, the strid never knowing if that future came to pass.
The endless cycle of faces, so few of which it ever saw again.
So few who were familiar. So few who cared enough to wonder if the magic spring wasn’t exhausted, lonely, and lost.
It hated them. It hated how they squatted in homes that were otherwise empty through fall and winter.
It hated how they treated its magic like a novelty, a trick.
Where were the ones who said a prayer to the wild?
Where had the family gone, who’d lived here six generations?
Seven? And of the ones who stayed, how many had happy stories to tell?
So many splintered because all the flats were for bed-and-breakfasts.
Families hung drawn and quartered until Shearwater was less a home than a hotel.
Everyone it loved had left or no longer loved it back.
All those people it could no longer see.
People like me. They’d gone far from here, where the strid’s waters couldn’t reach, couldn’t see.
It had gone blind. The power of time and memories was only so marvelous when you got to see how the stories ended.
The viciousness of its resentment sucked me under, tumbling me in the undertow. I recognized these feelings, this desire to keep someone in a cage for fear they’ll fly away. I’d hesitated to bare my heart to Kessian for fear he’d break it. Kessian had pushed me away for fear I’d leave.
I tried to call out to the strid, press back with my own memories.
People change, people leave, but sometimes they come back.
I came back. If you cling too tightly, you’ll choke the life out of them, and their loved ones will grow to hate you, and the ones who depend upon you for their livelihoods no longer can.
Some of what’s happened isn’t because the world is ever-changing and unfair, it’s because you frightened people too much for them to find a home in you.
I didn’t know if it was my blood pounding in my ears or the strid’s. I waited in that vast nothing for some answer, some indication the strid understood what I meant. A part of me hoped I’d gotten through to it, but I was in the past, and I knew what the future held.
Without warning, the strid lashed out at me with its own rebuttal of memories.
Dad’s skull opened against the rock wall of the strid.
He’d worked so hard most days, there weren’t enough memories of us together to overshadow that one.
Laurelie wishing him back to life and drowning in Marlowe’s greed.
Traveling from one town to another with an open road and an empty heart.
Kessian kissing me one last time and not knowing it was goodbye.
That moment he turned his back on me to walk into the spring carved my heart open.
My own resentment bubbled up. The strid demanded to know with righteous fury, How was my desperate refusal to say goodbye to Kessian any different from the strid clinging to its residents?
The song in my ears fumed. My argument fell on deaf ears. What did I know? When I was just the same.
The briny water boiled in my lungs, turned my veins to tributaries.
I tasted smoke and salt and silt. Shadows condensed and clothed me as an ache in my head reached such a peak, I thought it was splitting open like a seed sprouting.
My fingers lengthened into claws. My knuckles popped.
When I exhaled, instead of bubbles, a stream of ink weaved through the water.
I struggled, swam toward a reflection of light rippling on the surface, but when I moved I felt like a passenger.
I emerged on the banks of the spring once more, but I was not myself. Shadows pooled around my feet. Antlers weighed heavy on my skull.
I was the wraith.