Ashes on the Waves

by Mary Lindsey

  She turned her back to climb the rest of the way up the ladder. I stuck my fingers in the hole in the lining under the chair and felt silky fur within. The pelt had been stuffed into the cushion from underneath.

  “You were in there wrong and wouldn’t come out,” she said, “which is why she died. Once she no longer lived, I had no other choice. I did what it took to get you out.”

  I put my hand in my lap. “So you made the claw marks, not me.”

  She said nothing as she dumped the contents of another shelf.

  I stood. “I’m not a demon, you are.”

  Still on the ladder, she twisted to face me. “No. You are the worst kind of demon. You are a sickening reminder of what he did. His evil has passed straight down to you and I won’t allow him the joy of ever seeing your face. You even look like him.”

  She turned away and grasped the ladder, sobbing.

  A horrible realization hit me and tingles crawled under the surface of my skin. He was still alive somewhere in this house. “Where is he?”

  “I don’t know!” she screamed.

  I backed toward the door. “What happened?”

  She climbed down the ladder and grabbed twisted finials on the back of the desk chair. “Sometimes it’s impossible to stop loving someone. No matter how horrible he is, you just can’t stop.”

  She sat in the chair and buried her face in her hands. After some deep breaths to compose herself, she continued. “Six years after my sister died, it was clear he didn’t love me and would never love me, despite my feelings for him. I offered him the amulet in exchange for my pelt. Immortality for freedom.” She took a shuddering breath. “He then informed me that he had destroyed my pelt.”

  She folded her hands in front of her on the desk, the distant, crazed look returning. “I planned my revenge for weeks, waiting for the famil

  y to leave.” She met my eyes. “That’s the summer you met Anna.”

  After pulling several hairpins from her unraveled twist and dropping them on the inky surface of the mahogany desk, she ran her hands through her hair. “I put him in a place where he would long for the light the way I yearned for the sea. I would leave him in there as long as he had held me captive to that point. Thirteen years.”

  She was undoubtedly mad and capable of terrible acts. Fear flooded my body in a nauseating rush as the implications of her insanity crystallized. “Where is Anna?” I whispered.

  As if I hadn’t spoken, she continued. “I made a bargain with the Na Fir Ghorm. If they would lock him up in a place with no light for thirteen years, I would do their bidding for the duration.” She laughed and stood. “With the amulet on, he could not die. He could only suffer . . . like me.” Purposefully, she rounded the desk and stopped right in front of me. “Like you.”

  I grabbed her arm and gave her a shake. “Where is Anna?”

  “She’s sleeping,” she calmly replied.

  Staring into her glazed eyes, I had no doubt she had fallen into madness. “Where?”

  She remained completely calm—eerily and unnaturally detached. “Something happened in the night and she never awoke. The priest came this morning and they buried her in the family crypt behily cryptnd the house.”

  40

  And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

  Of my darling—my darling—my life and

  my bride,

  In her sepulchre there by the sea—

  In her tomb by the sounding sea.

  —Edgar Allan Poe,

  from “Annabel Lee,” 1849

  I shoved Miss Ronan away and sprinted to the front doors, ripping them open as the pain ripped my heart apart. I ran around the corner of the house and past the fountain to the back side of the mansion. I’d never been behind the structure.

  Three crypts stood side by side. All three structures were constructed from slabs of weathered white marble with thick, arched iron doors that overlapped, meeting in a sharp point. Heavy locks held the doors in place. Carved angels in various stages of mourning stared down in mock empathy from the apexes of the crypts’ roofs.

  “Anna!” I screamed, mindlessly yanking the doors of the first structure and then the second. “Anna!”

  Flowers lay strewn on the step of the third one. Lilies. She had to be in there. I pounded my fist on the doors and they clanged under my blows. “Anna!”

  Terror-induced delirium collided with my rational thought, driving reason into oblivion. Surely this was a nightmare from which I would awaken at any moment. Anna had been fine when I last saw her. The doctor said she was going to be well in a few days. I banged on the doors again as if I expected her to rise from death and throw them open from within.

  My Anna was inside the crypt, locked away from me.

  Dead.

  I’d never hear her voice or her laugh. Never touch her body or breathe in her lily scent again. I slumped down, laying my cheek against the cool metal door of her tomb. “Anna,” I whispered.

  The sea wind gusted and a gull called from overhead as if the world, unlike my heart, had not just shattered into millions of irretrievable fragments.

  “A craftsman will be flown in to carve her name next week,” Miss Ronan said from behind me.

  It was impossible to breathe. My thoughts whirled in an incoherent tangle through my brain.

  “This was where Frank was to be laid to rest,” she said. “Suiting, don’t you think?”

  Suiting? I stumbled to my feet, discordant rage pounding at my brain, begging me to grab her. To hurt her. “You’re behind this. You killed her, didn’t you? You’re in with them on this wager?”

  She held up her hands. “No. I didn’t kill her. Otherworlders are forbidden to kill humans.” She shook her head. “I warned you, didn’t I? I didn’t kill her, you did. With your selfishness. I told you to stay away, but you just kept coming back.”

  The rage subsided, displaced by a sorrow that caused my body to ache as if I’d been thrown against the rocks by the waves. A sob welled up in my throat. If only Anna had stayed in New York. “Who has the key?” I asked. “I need to see her.”

  Miss Ronan turned and headed away, loose hair whipping in the sea wind.

  “I have to see her!” I shouted to her back, unable to move. When she disappeared around the corner of the house, I slumped down on the marble stoop, no longer able to stand.

  My misery was all consuming, reaching deep within and ravaging everything in its path. No part of me, body or mind, was spared from its devastating power. The pain had no ebb or flow. It was a constant ever-increasing knell in my chest, timed to the beating of my broken heart. “Anna,” I whispered again.

  Too overcome to move, I remained huddled at her crypt door begging death to take me as well. But death was deaf to my suffering, and so I remained like this until well into the night.

  Lying on my back, I could imagine Anna looking down at me from the stars that winked between clearings in the night clouds.

  “Anna!” I screamed to the sky.

  I rolled in a ball on my side, fighting the pain in my chest that threatened to rip me apart.

  “Liam.”

  It was faint and sounded as if it rose from the very earth itself. I was dreaming awake. “I love you,” I whispered. A tear made its way to the ground under my cheek.

  “Liam,” her voice called again from my foggy imagination.

  “Yes, I’ll be there soon,” I answered.

  * * *

  “We should not have moved the girl,” one of the Na Fir Ghorm said.

  “Shut up,” the leader replied. “Ronan will now be indebted to us again. She was very useful in helping us with the wager.”

  Muireann shot to the surface, gulped air, and returned to the cave opening.

  She missed the first part of what one of them said, but it ended with, “He still loves her, so we have lost anyway.”

  “It isn’t over,” said the leader. “When we send the Selkie this time, he will have no reason to resist.
Human lust will dissolve any love that remains. He thinks her dead.”

  This was totally news to Muireann. She had seen the flying machines come and go delivering and taking strangers away, but she had no idea what had occurred. So it seemed Anna wasn’t dead, but Liam thought she was and the Na Fir Ghorm had moved her somewhere. Where?

  “Why didn’t you retrieve the amulet?” the leader asked.

  “We needed to get in and out as quickly as possible. Crossing the beach in daylight is risky. We almost couldn’t move the boulder even with all of us pushing. We called, but the male locked within didn’t answer. It was too dark to see inside. We just put the girl in the pit and sealed it back up before Brigid Ronan’s sleeping potion wore off.”

  “Go find the Selkie,” the leader said. “We’re sending her up again.”

  Muireann bolted as far away from the cave as possible. She needed to get to Liam and tell him what she knew. She surfaced and took a deep breath. The full moon gave her a clear view of the large dwelling. Most of the lights were off.

  And then she saw him. As if in a daze, he stumbled along the trail toward the jetty.

  She darte-1">She d along the edge of the rocks, barking. He didn’t even look over at her.

  Tripping and falling, he made his way over the jetty toward the end. She needed to transform to get his attention but was certain she wouldn’t be able to climb on the jagged, slippery rocks with her human legs.

  She swam to the end and waited, knowing that would be her best chance. Hopefully, he wouldn’t plunge off the side before he reached her.

  * * *

  A shooting pain seared the flesh of my calf when I lost my footi

  ng again and slammed into the sharp edge of a rock. I just needed to make it to the end of the jetty. Then I would be with her. “Anna!” I shouted. This time, I didn’t hear her faint call in return.

  Finally, I reached the end. “Anna!” I shouted again. I stumbled to a rock closer to the water. It would be awful to only knock myself unconscious and not make it to the sea. I was determined to never wake up without her again.

  “Stop!” a girl’s voice called. “Liam, no!”

  I teetered on the edge of the rock, taking a step back to check my fall. Shaking my head to clear it, I focused on Muireann’s face. She had half transformed and shouted to me from the water. “Anna’s not dead. Do you hear me?”

  Another trick by an Otherworlder. She was probably in on the wager too. I moved back to the edge of the rock near the water.

  “No! Liam. Brigid Ronan gave her a sleeping potion. She’s not dead. They moved her to another location.”

  As if slapped in the face, I sobered from my stupor. “Where?”

  “I don’t know. They called it a pit. It was in a cave under the house.”

  Every sensation was heightened as adrenaline coursed through me, pushing the misery aside and replacing it with hope. “Can you help me?”

  “Yes!” she said. “I’ll meet you on the beach where the two of you were bonded.”

  41

  Fearful indeed the suspicion—but more fearful the doom! It may be asserted, without hesitation, that no event is so terribly well adapted to inspire the supremeness of bodily and of mental distress, as is burial before death.

  —Edgar Allan Poe,

  from “The Premature Burial,” 1844

  Heart full of hope and light-headed, I collected candles and a lighter from the dresser in Frank’s bedroom and a thick bathrobe from his closet for Muireann so she wouldn’t be cold. I draped the robe over my shoulders, stuffed the extra candle in my back pocket, and lit the other one before opening the hidden panel from the room.

  I located the trapdoor to the lower level and descended into the musty-smelling darkness. Taking the tunnel I had traveled with Anna, I made my way around the large boulder we’d hidden behind at the turn and ran to the beach. Muireann stood shivering at the cave entrance.

  She looked over her shoulder at the water as I wrapped the robe around her. “One moment,” she said before running to a grouping of rocks. She grabbed a pelt from behind it and ran back. “I don’t want the Na Fir Ghorm to steal it or anything. They’re looking for me right now.”

  “Why?” I asked, lighting a candle I held in my teeth.

  Again, she looked back at the beach. “They want me to come try to seduce you again.”

  She hesitated when I held the candle out to her. “That’s fire,” she said. “It’s dangerous. I don’t want it.”

  “The tunnel is dark. We need to be able to see. It creates light.”

  “I have a better idea.” She closed her eyes and chanted in a strange language. “We need to wait here for just a moment,” she said.

  “Why do they want you to seduce me?”

  She tilted her head and stared at the flame in my hand. “So they can win the wager.”

  The wager again. I blew out the candle. “What exactly is the wager?”

  “That human love is frail and will falter in the face of adversity.”

  Rage welled up from deep inside my chest and my face grew hot. “That’s what this is about? It’s a bet over whether love will last? Anna could be dying because of a stupid bet like that?”

  She nodded and pointed at the sky. “Look, here they come. They’ll light our way. No need for dangerous fire.” She tilted her head up to the golden clouds swirling overhead. “His female is in the tunnel somewhere. Please help us find her.”

  The Bean Sidhes grew bright and created a golden light that cocooned us and lit our path as we traversed the tunnel. “Anna!” I yelled.

  “They mentioned a boulder and a pit,” Muireann said, running to keep up with me. “Ouch.” She stopped and pulled a rock from the bottom of her bare foot.

  I slowed to let her keep up without running. “Anna!” I shouted again.

  Almost dreamlike, there was an answer. “Liam.”

  It came from just up ahead where the tunnel took a sharp right turn around the boulder. The boulder! My heart soared.

  “Anna!” I shouted.

  “Liam,” her beautiful voice answered. “Help me.”

  I stopped at the boulder, desperately running my hand along the edge where it met the wall. “I’m here. Where are you?”

  “D-don’t know.”

  Her voice came from underneath the huge stone. I dropped to my knees and dug at the ground at the base of it. It was solid rock with loose pebbles around it. No matter how hard I clawed, I would never break through.

  “Hang on. I’m right here.” I stood and put my shoulder to the stone and pushed. There was no way I could move it. “Muireann, I need you to go get help. Please go tell Francine what has happened and have her bring men to come move this—as many as she can find. Anna is underneath. Please hurry.”

  “I will get there much faster swimming.” She ran, a Bean Sidhe lighting her way, in the direction of the beach.

  “Anna?”

  Her voice drifted up from the far side of the boulder. “Please h-hurry. N-need you.”

  I crawled to the other side and ran my fingers along the bottom of the huge stone and found a gap between it and the floor. “Could you light this?” I asked a Bean Sidhe.

  Anna’s slender fs sleningers slid up through the crack, guided by the light. “L-Liam. I love you. P-please know that.”

  I placed my hand over her fingers. They were as cold as the ocean. “I love you too. We’re going to get you out of there.”

  “No. T-t-too late. Water. Love you.”

  The water had been halfway up the beach, which meant it was high tide. The water had probably risen almost to the top of the pit in which she was imprisoned. Panic slammed into me like the waves on the jetty. If I didn’t get her out soon, she would become too affected by the cold water to stay conscious and she would certainly drown. I couldn’t lose her again. I had to persuade her to fight for life. To stay.

  “Anna! Listen to me. Just h

  ang on a bit longer. Men are coming to move
the boulder. Just stay conscious and above water.” I squeezed her fingers. “Anna!”

  Her fingers twitched. “So c-c-cold.”

  “I know. We’ll have you right out.”

  Her voice was so faint I had to put my ear to the crack to hear it. “No. I’m warm now. It’s all good. Sleepy.”

  “Anna. No. Stay awake. Stay with me.”

  “Always with you. Love you . . . forever.” Her fingers went limp.

  I clutched onto her even tighter, as though somehow I could keep her very soul from exiting if I just hung on hard enough.

  Then time stopped. All sound and light disappeared, leaving me with nothing but the feel of her cold fingers and her last word repeating over and over through my mind. “Forever.”

  An unbearable ache consumed me entirely. I opened my mouth to scream, but no sound came out. It was as if a part of me had been removed. A significant part. Anna’s part.

  I crumpled over and ran my lips over her knuckles. “No. God, no.”

  But the vast, hollow emptiness in my chest confirmed what I already knew. No matter how hard I clung to her, I could not hold her here. She was gone. I’d lost her again.

  I released her fingers and they slipped away through the crevasse into darkness.

  42

  The agony of my soul found vent in one loud, long, and final scream of despair.

  —Edgar Allan Poe,

  from “The Pit and the Pendulum,” 1842

  Shouting came from up the tunnel toward the house. “This way,” Muireann called, running in from the ocean entrance.