He was a giant adder writhing in her embrace. A sea serpent stranded on land. A soaring, sinuous monster with dripping venomous fangs. Hissing and twisting.
Lina held on, held tight. She had sworn she would all those nights ago. But her arms could no longer fit around his body, and her nails scrabbled frantically, fruitlessly to find a grip on his scales. She slid and slipped, clinging to the monster’s neck as it uncoiled, as it and she rose high into the air.
She dug her nails in. She would not lose him now, not when she’d come so far, not after everything. She would not lose here.
The serpent dashed its head against the ground, the impact jolting through her bones, rattling her teeth. Something in her rib cage screamed. Lina clenched her jaw.
It was an illusion. It was magic, a spell cast to make her let go. She knew what she was holding. Knew the true shape of the boy she held in her arms.
“Thomas.” His name was a ragged gasp.
The monster shuddered and melted in her arms. A pulsating mass of hot sinew and skin. It grew hair. Matted fur reeking of rot and musk, pricking and scratching her palms and cheeks. Her eyes watered at the stench. He was a rabid brown bear. Eyes rolling, jaw snapping, claws raking scars across the cobbles.
A voice shouted at her to remember what she was holding. And she did, she did, she was holding Thomas Lin. The boy who had won his freedom from a witch. The boy she’d admired for two long years. A boy with sun-kissed hair and sea-tanned skin, with dark brown eyes that held a hundred untold secrets.
Lina bit through her bottom lip. Hot blood dribbled down her chin.
The bear tossed its head. Her arms felt like they were about to break.
Hold on.
The bear sniffed the air. Its spine contorted. Twisted. Disappeared.
She was standing, holding fire. A white-hot coal burning bright between her cupped palms.
Flames engulfed Lina. Scorched through the layers of her skin as if it were paper, curling it, blackening it, flaking it into glowing ash. Wave upon wave of furious heat. Her cheeks blistered.
She spun, flailing in terror, trying to beat the flames away.
Where—
The flames snarled. A sea of roiling red and orange stretched in every direction, endless. A fire that would never burn out. The illusion was made real because she’d started to believe in it. Lina’s eyes stung with smoke. She stumbled and fell, squinted at her grazed palms and found them empty.
Her fingers spasmed, opening and closing on air and flame. On emptiness.
Gone.
Thomas was…
When the queen turned the lad into fire, the girl’s heart failed her. She lost herself to fear and forgot what she was holding. She and the lad burned alive. Burned until there was nothing left.
Lina’s throat seized with anguish, with heartrending panic. She tried to recapture the feel of him in her arms, his weight, his shape. But it was like trying to embrace the reflection of the moon on the sea, to clasp smoke or hold hands with a shadow.
Who was Thomas Lin? How well did she really know him?
She pictured herself holding him, kissing him, as she had imagined so many times before, her favorite daydream. How many times had she spun in her head how it would happen, how it would all unfold? The details and scenery changed, but the ending was always the same…save for this time.
Because now she could only remember kissing Eva. The swoop of heat in her stomach, the dark thrill of lips and teeth and tongue. Of a sky set ablaze and eyes that gleamed like starlight on the sea at night. The silky feeling of black hair tangled between her fingers.
Thomas Lin had always been a daydream. A dream that paled in comparison to a memory that was so much more real.
She’d lost him. She would burn here forever. Because her heart and courage had failed her. Because she had not held on. Because she had let go, and the fire was all around her, burning her to ash. She did not love him enough to keep him. She did not even know if she loved him at all.
Lina let out a sob. Heat boiled the tears off her cheeks.
Arms snaked around her waist from behind. Hands cupped hers, cold and steady and unwavering. “You know what you are holding. Did you cause me so much trouble over him for nothing? Do you dare think you can disappear from me without finishing what you started? Keep fighting.”
Lina felt like she was coming apart, and coming back together.
She shut her eyes and remembered the sunburst of warmth in her chest when Thomas had carried her home, remembered him following her into the revel despite his fears, remembered him coming to rescue her with Finley. She clung tight to those memories, clung tight to him.
Thomas. I’m holding Thomas Lin.
Maybe she didn’t feel the same way about him that she once had. But those feelings had still been real, even if they’d shifted, even if they’d changed. Love or not, naive or not, foolish or not, what she had felt for him was still real. And she had come all this way to save him, so she would. She’d made him a promise. She’d dragged him back into all this, and she would drag him back out.
Darkness smothered the flames. Black smoke ruffled her hair.
She held on to the shape of him while Eva held on to her. The Witch Queen burning with her, the tight embrace keeping her safe and whole. The blistering heat faded. The smoke started to lift.
The air tasted of salt and sea, of rain, and of that first fresh inhale after the rain, after the storm had washed the world clean. Lina knelt at the foot of the stone pillar with Thomas in her arms. His eyes were shut, but he was breathing.
Eva relaxed her grip on Lina.
Everything had gone quiet save for the waves lapping hungrily against the fourth side of St. Casimir’s square. The shadows grew deeper, darker, and more velvet, clouds chasing across the surface of the nearly full moon.
But a faint glow still leaked through, limning the words carved deep into the pillar’s stone with silver. Marcin, standing watching them, read aloud: “‘Our love keeps us from drowning.’ Or should it be ‘Our love keeps us from burning’? Seeing as you would jump through fire for her.” He looked past Lina. “So, Eva, what will you do now?”
33
Eva
“I would have spared you the choice.” Marcin’s hair twisted in the salt breeze. The rest of his body was unmoving, legs pinned firmly to the ground with frost, with ice that looked black in the moonlight. “I didn’t want you to get attached. I didn’t want you to have to hurt.”
Then why didn’t you help when Natalia was still alive? When I tried to find a way to break the tide’s hold over the island and almost died?
“If you had let me take care of things, if Natalia had left me in charge, I would have set you free from this, but you wouldn’t let me. You know what it costs to calm the dark tide. You know what the magic requires.”
Of course she did. The spell was burned into Eva, listed like the ingredients in a cookbook or an old grimoire.
Take the life of the one you love and mix with the tears you shed for them. Add three drops of blood, three strands of hair, and feed it all to the sea by the light of May’s first full moon.
And so they came to the moment, from which there was no escape. Eva stood, looked down, gaze locking with Lina’s. Lina’s breathing hitched.
Was it love, this searing ache in the hollow inside her chest? This awful twisting in her gut? This absolute refusal to allow that life to extinguish itself for the sake of Thomas Lin? There was certainly something she wanted here—Lina’s fierce devotion to Thomas that she envied and craved for herself.
Eva suspected she had ruined any chance of that merely by being herself.
Black water bubbled through the cracks between cobbles. Ribbons of liquid darkness unfurling like hungry smoke. Spreading and swallowing up the ground. Swallowing up St. Casimir’s Square. Soon to swallow up the
rest of the island.
She could not afford to fail again.
She would not fail again.
But she would also no longer give the tide anything more than she was willing to give it.
“Will you do as Natalia did and chain yourself to the pillar in her place?” said Marcin. “Or will you let the city sink to save the two of you?”
Eva looked away from Lina, gaze returning to that flame of red hair, to those fiery hazel eyes. To Marcin, who had raised her, who had betrayed her, who would drown her, punish her, because she would not make the choices he wanted her to make.
Marcin, who had taken a piece of her heart long before she had sealed it inside a bottle and cast it out to sea.
“You forget.” Eva yanked one of her red string bracelets off and tied a knot, and then another, and another, and another, fingers fumbling with the loops. Chains slithered through the shallow water, iron grinding, grating over stone. “You forget that I love you, too. That out of everyone save Natalia, I have loved you most.”
If she hadn’t, she would have taken his magic the second they returned from the spring regatta; she would have thrown him into the sea cave and fed him to her serpent. If she didn’t love him, she wouldn’t have hesitated, and her hands wouldn’t be shaking now.
And if she hadn’t hesitated, things would never have gone this far. The Water Palace wouldn’t have flooded. Her sisters wouldn’t be panicked, divided. Lina would not have been hurt. She would not have been hurt.
Because that’s what caring did, in the end. It lowered your guard and got you hurt, got you killed.
Safer never to care at all.
Chains wound around Marcin’s legs, chipping off shards of night-black ice, snaking around his torso.
“You forget that I will suffer to lose you the way you did not suffer to lose me.”
Take the life of one you love and mix with the tears you shed for them.
If there was one person Eva was beyond certain she loved…
It should have felt like a victory. Like relief. A month ago, it would not even have been a possibility. Black waves roared, wrecking themselves against the edge of St. Casimir’s Square. Crashing, clamoring, rising higher. Spilling over.
The dark tide had come to take what it was owed.
Natalia’s life had calmed it. A witch’s life would work.
She would do as Caldella’s queens had done for centuries. She would let the sea eat her sorrow, taste the salt of her tears. One last time.
Marcin’s eyes were wide as saucers as she moved closer, cold fingers reaching to dust a lock of hair from his pale brow. A single tear raced down her cheek, but when Eva spoke her voice was steady. “My city will not sink. Natalia’s city will not sink. Because I am going to use your life—yours, Marcin—to save it.”
34
Lina
When the full moon finally rose above Caldella four days later, there were no dark waves to greet it.
Only a glittering emerald sea, a city sighing with relief, and music. Low and somber. Songs that were more ache than sound. Requiems, buoyed by the salt breeze, twining through the tightly stacked rainbow of town houses, played on a solitary violin. Played for all the boys who had lost their lives to the tide on moonlit nights like this one, boys both brave and frightened, and for all the witches who had sacrificed their hearts and selves to keep the island safe.
Lina tapped the blue window shutters in her cousin Ivy’s room as the final note of Finley’s playing wrung out, a tiny charm to banish bad thoughts, to stifle that creeping fear inside of her. Once. Twice. Three times, because three was the right number. She slid a headband that glittered like stars into her hair and smoothed down her spangled silver dress. Draped a pale feather boa over her shoulders and tied her blood-coral beads in a fancy double knot around her neck.
She hummed along as a new song started. A rowdier tune this time, a melody like freedom and fire, a melody of hope. Her oldest cousin, Julie, on pipes, upstairs in Uncle’s rooftop garden, seated amidst the orange blossom trees beneath the sailcloth awning where Laolao liked to smoke.
Downstairs, the aunties were keeping time; Lina could make out the steady, feverish click-clack of mah-jongg tiles even with the bedroom door closed. She went to open it.
Found it locked.
“Finley!”
No answer. Just the distant, familiar sound of Uncle clearing his throat.
“Finley!” Lina rattled the door handle. “Ivy! David?”
Another pause, longer, and finally a shuffle of footsteps. “Not so fun when you’re on the other side of the door now, is it?”
Lina cursed and smacked her palm against the wood. She could see her brother’s shadow moving through the crack at the bottom of the door. “I’ll climb out the window,” she threatened.
“Aye, and fall and die?” The lock snicked, and Finley eased the door open a smidgen, an impish sliver of handsome face peeking through.
Lina grabbed the door handle and pulled, leaning back on one heel, throwing all her weight into it. Finley did the same on his side, grinning.
“I swear to God!” Lina attempted to wedge a shoulder between the door and the frame.
Finley let go of the handle, and Lina was flung backward with a shriek as the door flew open, landing on her butt with a thump. A small white puff of a dog scampered into the room, yapping and eagerly trying to lick her face. “Tam! Leave off!”
Finley helped her stand.
Lina scowled. “You drew your eyebrow on crooked.”
“Naw, it’s my real brow. It’s grown back.”
Lina squinted at her brother’s face and was sadly forced to admit that the eyebrow in question was indeed the real thing. “Well, it’s grown back crooked.”
“I think you’ll find it gives me a roguish charm.”
“Gross.” Lina elbowed past, whistling for Auntie Van’s dog to follow.
“And who are you all dolled up for? Uncle says you’re grounded.”
Which was why they were staying with him and Laolao and the rest of Uncle’s immediate family. So Auntie Van could enforce Lina’s prison sentence, as well as pop into the room Lina was sharing with Ivy every ten minutes to fuss and scold and pat her, as if to reassure them all that Lina wasn’t a ghost.
Lina paused at the top of the third-floor landing and batted heavily mascaraed lashes. “Would you like to carry me down?”
Finley leaned his hip into the banister and crossed his arms. “Not particularly, no.”
“Even though my ankle’s a little sore today and it’s your fault I broke it?”
Her brother stiffened. Lina’s heart beat off rhythm. The pipes wailing from the rooftop were suddenly extremely loud. But—
The bump in Finley’s throat bobbed. “You’re going to use that excuse for everything now, aren’t you? I’ll never be able to make it up to you.”
“Damn right,” said Lina. “I’m going to hold it over you for the rest of our lives. We’ll be ancient and wrinkled and shrunken to the size of peas, both of us walking with sticks, and I’ll still be whining, ‘Finley, you knob, buy me that necklace there—you owe me. Remember that time you broke my leg?’”
Finley’s mouth twitched.
They were going to be all right. It would always be there, the memory of her fall from the top of the steps of St. Dominic’s sticking like scar tissue. And maybe it was weird to try to make a joke out of it, but it helped ease the stiffness. They would be all right. They would keep working on it, like Finley would work on mastering his temper and Lina would work on her exercises, until they found a new way to move.
Finley swatted down his cowlick. “Hurry up, then.”
“What?” She didn’t actually need to be carried down.
He knelt, hands behind his back, ready to piggyback her. “You getting on or not?”
Lina climbed on.
Finley fake staggered and heaved an exaggerated groan. Lina smacked him. He took the stairs carefully, one at a time, passing by the living room and then the first-floor foyer, passing aunties laughing and ranting and gossiping, their voices so loud they likely carried all the way back to the Witch Queen’s palace. They dodged uncles hiding in armchairs with their fat fingers laced atop their rounded bellies; cousins and random kids, yawning and looking bored, playing cards or taking the piss, gnawing on gingerbread cookies and the flaky remains of egg tarts.
Of them, only Jana looked up and narrowed her eyes. Their cousin pushed what Finley teasingly called her doctor’s glasses up her nose.
Lina ducked her head. She’d already gotten the biggest scolding upon their return about taking better care of herself. Jana had given her strict orders to rest and a whole new set of strength-building exercises for her ankle.
Finley passed right out of the house and into the street with a promise that they were only popping out to check on the tide. Lina was unreasonably annoyed that they believed him, that they let him out. Because of course her brother had managed to weasel his way out of being punished for anything that had happened. He’d come back with her from the Water Palace like some kind of hero.
Auntie Van’s dog, Tam, scampered after them.
“Where are you—”
“Where were you planning on slipping off to?” Finley cut in. “Josef tells me Thomas Lin’s leaving the island tonight on a fishing trawler bound for Skani with no plans to return. He also said he heard Lin ask a certain someone to go with him.”
The wooden walkways leading down to the quay creaked, groaned. The fall of Finley’s steps and the click of Tam’s claws were washed away by the soft shushing of saltwater lapping at the boards.
Water no longer black as deepest midnight, as dark as a starless, moonless sky, but calm and shallow and shimmering. A brilliant emerald green set alight by the amber lanterns laced between the town house rooftops like bunting. Water a color Lina had only ever seen in the months after a successful sacrifice.
The Dark Tide Page 22