by Shea Ernshaw
The fire crackles, spitting out sparks onto the wood floor that darken and turn to ash. I walk to the bookshelf beside the fireplace, examining the spines of each book, looking for a way to make him understand without telling him what I know—what I can see.
“Why are you so certain it’s real?” he asks, reading my thoughts, and I let my hand fall away from one of the books. I shift onto my heels and turn to face him. He’s stepped closer to me, so close I could reach out and touch his chest with the tips of my fingers. I could take one swift step forward and tell him everything, tell him all my secrets, or I could press my lips to his and silence the turmoil rattling around inside my head. But instead I ignore every urge snapping through my veins.
I draw in my lips before I speak, careful to control each word. “I want to tell you,” I say, a thousand tons of stones sinking into my stomach. “But I can’t.”
His eyes flatten on me at the same moment the fire ignites over a dry log and floods the room with a sudden burst of glowing orange light. I was right about Bo, and I was also wrong: He didn’t end up in Sparrow by accident. But he’s also not a tourist. He came for his brother—to find out what happened to him. And what he found here is far worse than anything he could have imagined.
The pressure in my head expands, the cottage walls start to rotate off axis like a carnival ride out of control, and I feel like I might be sick. I can’t stay in here with him. I don’t trust myself. I don’t trust my heart, thumping wildly like I might do something reckless that I can’t take back. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel, supposed to say. I shouldn’t allow myself to feel anything. It’s dangerous, these emotions, the fear pumping through my chest, cracking along each rib. My head isn’t thinking straight; it’s tangled up with my heart, and I can’t trust it.
So I walk to the door and touch the knob, running my fingers around the smooth metal. I close my eyes for a half second and listen to the sounds of the fireplace behind me—warmth and fury, the same exploding conflict happening inside my head—then I open the door and steal out into the evening light.
Bo doesn’t try to stop me.
THE OUTSIDER
A year earlier, five days into the start of Swan season, Kyle Carter left the Whaler Bed-and-Breakfast just as the rain lifted. The sidewalks were slick and dark, the sky muted by a cloak of soft white clouds. He had no destination. But the allure of the marina drew him closer.
He reached the metal gangway that led to the marina, rows of boats lined up like sardines in a tin can, and he spotted a girl walking down one of the docks, ebony brown hair loose and sweeping across her back. She looked over her shoulder at him, settled her deep, ocean-blue eyes on his, and then he found himself stumbling after her.
She was the most stunning thing he had ever seen—graceful and enticing. A rare species of girl. And when he reached her, she stroked a hand through his dark hair and pulled him close into a kiss. She wanted him, desired him. And he couldn’t resist. So he let her spool her fingers between his and pull him out into the sea. Their bodies entwined, languid and insatiable. He didn’t even feel the water when it entered his lungs. All he could think about was her: warm fingers against his skin, lips so soft they melted his flesh, eyes seeing into his thoughts, unraveling his mind.
And then the ocean drew him under and never let go.
ELEVEN
My mind stirs and rattles with all the secrets held captive inside it. I won’t be able to sleep. Not now that I know the truth about Bo, about his brother’s death.
And I need to keep him safe.
I make a cup of lavender tea, turn on the radio, and sit at the kitchen table. The announcer repeats the same information every twenty minutes: The identity of the two drowned boys has not yet been released, but the police don’t believe them to be locals—they’re tourists. Eventually, the drone of the announcer’s voice bleeds into a slow, drowsy song—a piano melody. Guilt slithers through me, a thousand regrets, and I wish for things I can’t have: a way to undo all the deaths, to save the people who’ve been lost. Boys die all around me. And I do nothing.
I don’t realize I’ve dozed off until I hear the ringing of the telephone mounted to the kitchen wall.
I jerk upright in the stiff wood chair and look to the window over the sink. The sun is barely up—it’s morning—the sky still a subdued, pastel gray. I stand and fumble for the phone. “Hello?”
“Did I wake you?” It’s Rose’s voice on the other end.
“No,” I lie.
“I stayed up all night,” she says. “Mom kept feeding me cakes, hoping it would help me forget everything that’s happened in the last week, but I was so jittery from all the sugar that it made it worse.”
I feel distracted, and Rose’s words slip ineffectually through my mind. I keep thinking of Bo and his brother.
“Anyway,” Rose continues after I don’t respond, “I wanted to tell you not to come into town today.”
“Why?”
“Davis and Lon are on some kind of crusade. They’re questioning everyone; they even cornered Ella Garcia in the girls’ bathroom at the Chowder, wouldn’t let her leave until she proved she wasn’t a Swan sister.”
“How’d she prove it?”
“Who knows. But Heath heard that she just started bawling, and Davis didn’t think a Swan sister would cry so hysterically.”
“Isn’t anyone stopping them?”
“You know how it is,” Rose says, her voice drifting away from the phone briefly like she’s reaching for something. “As long as they don’t break any laws, everyone would be relieved if Davis and Lon actually figured out who the sisters were—then maybe they could put an end to all of this.”
“There’s no ending it, Rose,” I reply, thinking back to my conversation with Bo last night in his cottage. He wants to end this too—an eye for an eye. One death for another. But he’s never taken a life before—it isn’t who he is. It will change him. I hear a ding pass through Rose’s phone.
“Heath is texting me,” she says. “I’m supposed to meet him at his house.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t leave your house either,” I warn.
“My mom doesn’t know about Heath yet, so I can’t invite him over here. She thinks I’m meeting you for coffee.”
“Just be careful.”
“I will.”
“I mean be careful with Heath.”
“Why?”
“You never know what will happen. We still have a week to go.”
“He might drown, you mean?” she asks.
“I don’t want you to lose someone you care about.”
“And what about Bo? Aren’t you worried you’re going to lose him?”
“No,” I say too quickly. “He’s not my boyfriend, so I don’t . . .” But I feel the lie churning inside my chest and it takes the weight out of my words. I am worried—and I wish I weren’t.
Another text chimes through her phone. “I gotta go,” she says. “But I’m serious about not coming into town.”
“Rose, wait,” I say, as if I have something else I need to tell her: some warning, some advice to keep her and Heath safe from the Swan sisters. But she hangs up before I can.
* * *
I pick up my mug of cold tea from the table and walk to the sink. I’m about to pour it out when I hear the creaking of floorboards.
“Were you practicing reading the leaves?” she asks from the doorway.
I turn on the faucet. “No.”
“You should practice every day.” She’s chewing on the side of her lip, wearing the black robe that hangs loose across her frame. Soon she’ll be so tiny that the wind will carry her away when she stands on the cliff’s edge. Maybe that’s what she wants.
When I meet her eyes, she’s looking at me like I’m a stranger, a girl she no longer recognizes. Not her daughter, but merely a memory.
“Why don’t you read the leaves anymore?” I ask, rinsing out the mug and watching the amber tea spiral down the sink. I kn
ow this question might stir up bad memories for her . . . but I also wonder if talking about the past might bring her back, shake her loose from her misery.
“Fate has abandoned me,” she answers. A shiver passes through her, and her head tilts to the side like she’s listening for voices that aren’t really there. “I don’t trust the leaves anymore. They didn’t warn me.”
The old silver radio sitting on the kitchen counter is still on—I never shut it off before I fell asleep last night at the table—and music quietly crackles through the speakers. But then the song ends and the announcer promptly returns. “She has been identified as Gigi Kline,” he is saying. “She left her home on Woodlawn Street on Tuesday morning and hasn’t been seen since. There is some speculation that her disappearance may have something to do with the Swan season, but local police are asking anyone who may have seen her to contact the Sparrow Police Department.”
“Do you know Gigi?” Her voice shakes as she asks it, her eyes penetrating the radio. The announcer repeats the same information again then fades to a commercial.
“Not really.” I think of Gigi spending the night inside the boathouse, probably hungry and cold. But it’s not Gigi who will remember being tied to a chair; only Aurora—the thing inside her—will recall these frigid, shivering nights for years to come. And she will probably seek her revenge on Davis and Lon—if not in the body of Gigi Kline, then next year, inside the body of another girl. Assuming they let Gigi go eventually, and Aurora is able to return to the sea before the Swan season ends.
“When your father disappeared, they announced it on the radio too,” she adds, walking to the sink and staring out the window, pushing her hands down into the deep pockets of her robe. “They asked for volunteers to search the harbor and the banks for any sign of him. But no one came out to help. The people in this town never accepted him—their hearts are cold, just like that ocean.” Her voice wavers then finds strength again. “It didn’t matter, though; I knew he wasn’t in the harbor. He was farther out at sea—he was gone, and they’d never find him.” This is the first I’ve heard her speak of him as if he was dead, as if he wasn’t ever coming back.
I clear my throat, trying not to lose myself in a wave of emotion. “Let me make you some breakfast,” I offer, walking past her. The sunlight is spilling across her face, turning it an unnatural ashen white. I open a cupboard and set one of the white bowls on the counter. “Do you want oatmeal?” I ask, thinking that she needs something warm to shake off the chill in the house.
But her eyes sweep over me and she grabs on to my wrist with her right hand, her fingers coiling around my skin. “I knew,” she says coldly. “I knew the truth about what happened to him. I always have.” I want to look away from her, but I can’t. She’s looking through me, into the past, to a time we’d both like to forget.
“What truth?” I ask.
Her dark hair is tangled and knotted, and she looks like she hasn’t slept. Then her eyes slide away from mine, like a patient slipping back into a coma, unable to recall what had stirred them from unconsciousness in the first place.
Gently, I pull my arm away from her, and I can see that she’s already forgotten what she said.
“Maybe you should go back to bed,” I suggest. She nods, and without any protest, she turns and shuffles across the white tile kitchen floor, out into the hall. I can hear her slow, almost weightless footsteps as she makes her way up the staircase and down to her room, where she will likely sleep for the rest of the day.
I lean against the edge of the counter, pinching my eyes shut then opening them again. Against the butter-yellow wallpaper on the far wall of the kitchen is a distorted, stretched-out shadow of me, formed by the morning sunlight spilling in through the window over the sink. I stare at it for a moment, trying to match up elbows and legs and feet. But the more I look at the gray outline against the sun-bleached daffodil wallpaper, the more unnatural it seems. Like an artist’s abstract sketch.
I push away from the counter and head for the front door. I can’t get out of the house fast enough.
* * *
The skiff floats perfectly still against the dock. Not a ripple of water or gust of wind blows across the harbor. The sun is hot overhead, and a fish jumps from the surface of the water then splashes back into the deep.
I’ve just begun untying the boat and tossing the lines over the side when I sense someone watching me. I whip around and Bo is standing on the starboard side of the sailboat—the Windsong—one arm raised, holding on to the mast.
“How long have you been out here?” I ask, startled.
“Since sunrise. I couldn’t sleep—my mind wouldn’t turn off. I needed to do something.”
I imagine him out here, climbing aboard the sailboat, the sun not fully risen, checking the sails and the rigging and the hull to see what’s still intact after all these years and what will need to be repaired. His mind working over the problems—anything to keep him from thinking about yesterday at the boathouse, about last night in his cottage. I have to stop them from killing anyone else, he had said to me. A promise—a threat—that he would find his brother’s killer.
“Are you going into town?” he asks, his jade eyes shivering against the early sunlight.
“Yeah. I have to go do something.”
“I’m coming with you,” he says.
I shake my head, tossing the last rope into the bow of the boat. “I need to do this by myself.”
He drops his arm from the mast and steps over the side rail of the sailboat then hops down onto the dock in one fluid motion. “I need to talk to that girl in the boathouse—Gigi,” he says. “I need to ask her about my brother, see if she remembers him.”
“That’s not a good idea.”
“Why not?”
“Olivia might be waiting for you.”
“I’m not worried about Olivia.”
“You should be,” I say.
“I think I can resist whatever powers of seduction you think she has over me.”
I let out a short laugh. “Have you been able to stop thinking about her since she touched you yesterday?”
His silence is the only answer I need. But I also feel a sharp stab in the core of my heart, knowing he’s been thinking about her all night, all morning, unable to shake the image of her. Only her.
“You’re safer here,” I tell him, stepping onto the skiff as it begins to drift away from the dock.
“I didn’t come here to be trapped on an island,” he says.
“Sorry.” I start the engine with a swift pull on the cord.
“Wait,” he calls, but I shift the boat into gear and pull away from the dock, out of reach.
I can’t risk bringing him with me. I need to do this alone. And if Marguerite sees him in town, she might try to take him into the harbor, and I don’t know if I can stop her.
* * *
Today is the annual Swan Festival in town.
Balloons bounce and swerve across the skyline. Children squeal for shaved ice and saltwater taffy. A red-and-yellow banner stretches across Ocean Avenue announcing the festival, with cartoon cobwebs and full moons and owls printed at the corners.
It’s the busiest day of the year—when people drive in from neighboring towns up and down the coast or board buses that shuttle them into Sparrow early in the morning, then haul them back out in the evening. Each year attendance grows, and this year the town feels close to bursting.
Ocean Avenue has been closed off to traffic and is lined with booths and stands selling all manner of both witchy and unwitchy items: wind chimes and wind socks and local boysenberry jam. There is a beer garden selling old-style craft beers in large steins, a woman dressed as a Swan sister reading palms, and even a booth selling perfumes claiming to be some of the original fragrances the sisters once sold at their perfumery—although everyone in Sparrow knows they aren’t authentic. Much of the crowd is dressed for the period in high-waisted gowns with ruffles at the sleeves and low necklines. Later
tonight, at the stage set up near the pier, there will be a reenactment of the day the sisters were found guilty and drowned—an event I avoid each year. I can’t bear to watch it. I can’t stand the spectacle it’s become.
I push through the crowds, winding my way up Ocean Avenue. I keep my head down. I don’t want to be seen by Davis or Lon—I don’t need an interrogation from them right now. I leave town and the bustle of the festival, reaching the road that winds through the brambles to the boathouse. There’s no way to access it except from this road; I don’t have a choice but to walk straight down it.
Seagulls turn and spiral overhead like vultures waiting for death, sensing it.
When the road widens and the ocean comes into view, flat and glittery, the boathouse seems small and plain, more sunken into the earth than it did yesterday. Lon is sitting on a stump against the right side of the boathouse. At first I think he’s staring up at the sky, soaking up the sun, but as I inch closer I realize he’s asleep, his head canted back against the outer wall. He’s probably been out here all night guarding Gigi, one leg stretched out in front of him, arms hanging limp at his sides, jaw hung slightly open. He’s wearing one of his stupid floral-print shirts, teal with purple flowers, and if it weren’t for the dreary backdrop he’d almost look like he was on a tropical beach somewhere, working on his nonexistent tan.
I move quietly, careful not to step on a twig or dried leaf that might give me away, and when I reach the boathouse, I pause to look down at Lon. For a brief moment, I think maybe he’s not breathing, but then I see his chest rise and his throat swallow.
The wood door isn’t locked, and I push it easily inward.
Gigi is still sitting in the white plastic chair, arms tied, chin to chest like she’s sleeping. But her eyes are open, and she slides them up to meet mine as soon as I step inside.
I walk toward her and pull the gag out of her mouth then take a swift step back.
“What are you doing here?” she asks, lifting her chin, her cropped blond hair falling back from her face. She stares at me through her lashes, and her tone is not sweet, but low, almost guttural. The waspy, flickering outline of Aurora shifts lazily beneath her skin. But her emerald-green eyes, the same inherited color of each Swan sister, blink serpent-like out at me.