Chapter 23
Iwas gasping and choking as a pair of hands grabbed me by the back of my hair, and yanked me up and out of the tide pool. The rocks were slick with algae, and I fell hard, feeling the bright sting of pain as barnacles sliced through my hands and my forearms as I threw them out to catch myself.
Salt water burned in my throat and streamed from my mouth and nostrils, as the same hands began to thump me on the back. Coughs wracked my body, which was now shaking so violently from the cold that my vision was blurred.
“What the actual fuck is wrong with you? Are you trying to kill yourself?”
I knew that voice, but my brain felt clouded in a heavy fog of confusion, and I couldn’t place it.
Every one of my senses felt like it was being assaulted now that I surfaced, both from the pool and the vision that I had found within it.
How long had I been lying there, half-submerged in the moonlit water?
Everything felt numb and tingly, and colder than I’d ever been in my life.
“Did you hear me?” the voice asked again. “Are you trying to kill yourself, Wren Vesper?”
“Y-y-yes,” I managed to choke out, along with another dribble of water.
“Yes, you heard me, or yes, you’re trying to kill yourself?”
I blinked harder, my vision clearing along with my brain, so that I finally realized it was Nova who had pulled me out of the pool.
“Yes, I h-heard you. N-no, I’m not trying t-to k-k—”
“Oh my goddess, stop talking. I can barely understand a word you’re saying, and you’re going to shatter your teeth.”
I stopped trying to answer her, and instead tried to get my teeth to stop slamming together, without much success. I felt something blessedly warm and soft fall down around my shoulders. Nova had taken off her coat and placed it around me.
“Come on, we’ve got to get you in out of the cold before you get hypothermia. My house is closest. Can you stand?”
Without waiting to see if I would answer, she grabbed me under both arms and, with a grunt of effort, hoisted me to my unsteady feet.
I swayed, but managed to keep my legs under me somehow as she half-dragged, half-carried me back toward the Manor.
It was slow progress—every inch of me was numb and shaking, and the ground around the tide pools was slippery and treacherously uneven.
The lights of the Manor didn't seem to be getting any closer as we made our slow, freezing progress across the beach.
It hadn't seemed that far when I'd set out, and now the house seemed miles away—or maybe that was only the disorientation and the cold messing with my perception.
As my head began to clear, it also began racing.
How long had I been out here? The moon was high in the sky now, and the stars had all come out, winking down at me like they knew something I didn't.
You saw the whole thing from up there. What happened to me? I wanted to ask them, though I knew the answer would be only cold, distant silence.
At last, the rocks beneath our feet gave way to sand, and then to the narrow boardwalk that led up to the front garden of the Manor.
Nova muttered angrily under her breath as she heaved me up the last few steps and into the house.
We didn't bother being quiet, with Ostara away.
She was the only person in the house Nova would ever tiptoe around—everyone else was probably terrified of her, or at least had given up any hope of exercising any kind of authority over her.
We staggered up the stairs to Nova's room, where she hefted me unceremoniously over the threshold, and closed the door. I stumbled over to the corner of her bed to sit down.
"Don't you dare! No sleeping! If you fall asleep, you might not wake up," she snapped at me. "Straight into my bathroom and take a hot bath. Then I'm going to yell at you some more."
"Looking forward to it," I muttered, as I dragged myself into her bathroom, where I stopped in the doorway, blinking in shock.
I'd never been in Nova's bathroom before.
It looked like a bathroom you might find in a five-star hotel, all white marble and chrome finishes.
Beside the double sinks was an enormous vanity with lightbulbs lining the mirror, and gold-tiered trays crowded with enough makeup products to open a Sephora.
There was a clawfoot bathtub on a small platform by the windows, and a walk-in shower that could easily accommodate ten people.
I started toward the bathtub, and stopped.
The thought of submerging myself in more still water, even if it was hot and full of bubbles, made me shudder even harder than the cold.
If I looked down into it, would I find myself falling again into a dream I hadn't asked for? My rescue from the tide pool had happened so suddenly and unexpectedly that I hadn’t even thought to look for the piece of sea glass that had signaled the onset of the vision.
I couldn't bring myself to risk it. If Nova was this angry with me now, she'd be furious if I almost drowned again in her bathtub.
I looked over instead at the shower. I didn't trust my wobbly legs to hold me up in there, but fortunately, I could see a long, narrow bench I could sit on.
Breathing a sigh of relief, I stripped off my soaking wet clothes, and fumbled with the controls until I got the water to turn on.
I screamed in alarm as the water began to shoot out of eight different showerheads set into the walls on all sides.
Nova's sharp voice rang out from the other side of the bathroom door. "What's going on? Do I need to rescue you from yourself again?"
"I'm fine," I called back. "I just wasn't expecting this shower to be a car wash," I added under my breath.
The shower was a good idea. As soon as the hot water started hitting my body and my stiff muscles began to thaw, it was hard to stay on my feet.
I sank down onto the bench seat, and just let the various jets pummel me until I started to feel like a human again.
Little by little, my limbs regained sensation, and the goosebumps on my skin that I was beginning to fear might be permanent disappeared.
I had small stinging cuts and scrapes on my palms and my knees, so I washed them carefully.
Then I lay my head back against the marble wall of the shower and closed my eyes, letting my mind wander back at last to the shadowy place I had left behind in the tide pool.
Ambrose. The Geatgrima. The Gray Man.
The witches of Sedgwick Cove had always known what the Darkness wanted.
But we had never known why, or how he had tried to obtain it in the past. Now, I had the answers to both of these questions.
The Darkness had been a man. Just a man with a shattered heart.
That shattered heart had undone him, led him down a path from which there was no return.
With each bargain, he had drifted further from himself, from that beating heart that had loved even harder than it had broken, until he turned himself, unwittingly, into a monster who couldn’t love at all.
It had never occurred to me, in all the time I had known of the Darkness, to consider that it had been born of human folly.
But of course it had. What in this world had wreaked more havoc, wrought more chaos and destruction, than a man who had been denied what he desired?
My eyes flew open. For a moment, I'd almost forgotten where I was.
It seemed even remembering the vision brought me slightly outside of myself.
I'd have to be careful about that. I stood up and found, to my relief, that my legs felt steady now.
I turned off the water and wrapped myself in a fluffy white towel from the stack next to the bathtub.
"Here." A hand was suddenly thrust aggressively around the door, holding a pair of pajamas and fuzzy socks. "You can wear these."
"Thanks," I said, taking them and putting them on. Nova was easily several inches taller than me, so I had to roll up the pant legs before I could even locate my feet to pull on the socks. I wrapped my dripping wet hair in the towel, and let out a long, resigned sigh. Time to face Nova.
She was sitting on her bed, legs folded under her, her arms crossed tightly over her chest like she was trying to restrain herself from physically shaking me. Her expression was already defiant, so I braced myself for what would be more confrontation than conversation.
“Explain. Now,” she demanded, slapping her hand on the bed in what I assumed was a command for me to come sit down. I shuffled over, and folded myself up on the end of the bed, facing her.
“I was… scrying,” I said.
Nova’s expression, already harsh, hardened even more. “I said explain, not lie through your teeth.”
“I’m not lying,” I said quickly. “I… okay, well, my mom and my aunts agreed that I should be trying to develop my spirit abilities, now that all the spirit witches are connected to their guides again. I’ve been trying out different methods of communication, and I found that I had the most luck with… with different types of scrying.”
“And during your lessons, did your mother and your aunts not make it clear to you that when scrying in water, it’s more effective if you don’t drown yourself in the process?” she asked in an angry monotone.
“That’s not… I really wasn’t…” I stammered, and then sighed again. “It’s… complicated, Nova.”
“I’m fairly confident I can keep up,” she replied.
“Something happens when I scry,” I said. “It happened to me once before Samhain, when I was trying to connect with Asteria. I sort of… fell out of this reality and into another one.”
Even Nova couldn’t control her expression. I watched her eyes widen, her eyebrows disappear into her bangs. “What the hell does that mean?” she finally asked, through barely moving lips.