The Wicked Deep

by Shea Ernshaw

  She will drown him like all the others.

  “Please,” I beg, staring into eyes that can’t focus—that only see her. “Come back with me.”

  He shakes his head slowly. “I . . . can’t.”

  I clench my jaw and wrap my hands around the back of his neck, forcing him so close that our bodies slide weightlessly together. I do it without thinking, without breathing. I crush my lips to his. Water spills between us, and I taste the sea on his skin. I dig my nails into the base of his neck, trying to spur him from his waking dream. My heartbeat drives against my chest, and I press my lips harder. I open my mouth to feel the warmth of his breath, but he doesn’t move, doesn’t react. Maybe this won’t work—maybe it was a mistake.

  But then one of his arms slides around me, bracing against my shoulder blades. His mouth parts open, and the heat from his body suddenly pours into me. His other hand finds my cheekbone and then weaves through my hair. He draws me in deeper, folding me in the circle of his arms. And with my lips, I wipe away the memory of Marguerite Swan from his mind. I take him from her, and he lets me. He kisses me like he wants me more than he’s ever wanted anything. And for a second, none of it feels real. I am not swimming in the harbor, wrapped in Bo’s arms, his mouth sweeping over mine, my heart pattering wildly against the cage of my chest. We are somewhere else, far away from here, coiled against each other under a warm sun with warm sand at our backs and warm breath on our lips. Two bodies bound together. Fearing nothing.

  And then he pulls his mouth away, slowly, water dripping between us, and everything focuses into a single narrow pinprick. I expect him to release me, to resume his swim across the harbor, but he keeps a hand tangled at the back of my skull and the other against my back, our legs kicking rhythmically beneath us. “Why did you do that?” he asks, his voice raw and near breaking.

  “To save you.”

  His eyes glance out at the dark forbidding sea, as if waking up from an all-too-real nightmare.

  “We need to get back to shore,” I tell him, and he nods understanding, his eyes still bleary and unfocused, like he’s still not entirely sure where he is or why.

  We swim side by side back to the dock. We’ve drifted farther away from it than I realized, the current drawing us out to sea, and after several minutes of swimming hard, we finally reach it. He wraps his hands around my waist and hoists me up to the edge of the dock, and then he pulls himself up after. We’re too cold to speak, collapsing onto our backs on the dock, heaving in the chilled night air. I know we need to get inside and get warm before hypothermia sets in—a real possibility out here. So I touch his hand and we both rise, jogging up the wood path to his cottage.

  * * *

  We tug off our shoes and Bo kneels down beside the fireplace—a few embers are still alive beneath the charred logs—while I curl up on the couch with two wool blankets held tightly over my shoulders. Otis and Olga appear from the bedroom, stretching and looking sleepy. They’ve been spending all their time in here with Bo; they like him. Maybe more than they like me.

  Bo adds more logs to the fire, and I crawl onto the floor beside him, stretching out my arms to warm my palms against the meager flames. My teeth chatter, and my fingertips are wrinkled. “You’re freezing,” he says, looking down at my trembling body beneath the blankets. “You need to get out of those clothes.” He stands up and walks back into his bedroom, returning a moment later with a plain white T-shirt and a pair of green boxer shorts. “Here,” he says. “You can wear these.”

  I consider telling him that I’m fine, but I’m not fine. My shorts and tank top are so drenched that they’re starting to soak the blankets as well. So I stand up, thank him, and take the clothes into the bathroom.

  The white tile floor is cold beneath my feet, and for a moment I stand scanning the tiny bathroom. A razor and a toothbrush sit beside the sink. A towel hangs from the rack. Hints that someone has been living in this cottage after so many years vacant. I slog out of my clothes then drop them heavily onto the floor in a pile. I don’t even bother folding them.

  Bo’s shirt and boxers smell like him, minty and sweet, but also like a forest. I take in a deep breath and close my eyes before stepping back out into the living room. The fire now crackles and flames spark up the chimney, filling the cottage with warmth.

  I sit on the floor beside Bo and pull the blankets around me. He doesn’t turn to look at me; he is staring into the flames, biting his lower lip. While I was in the bathroom, he changed into dry jeans and a dark blue T-shirt. Both of us are now rid of our waterlogged clothes. “What happened out there?” he asks.

  I tighten the blankets across my chest. The rain batters against the roof; the wind howls. “You were being led into the harbor.”

  “How?”

  “You know how.”

  “Olivia,” he says, as if the name has been trapped on his lips for days. “I could see her . . . out in the water.”

  “She was calling to you. Her voice infiltrated your mind.”

  “How?” he asks again.

  “At the boathouse she whispered something in your ear. She claimed you as hers, making it impossible for you to think of anything or anyone else. It was only a matter of time until she beckoned you. Since you’ve remained on the island, hidden, she couldn’t physically pull you out into the water, so she had to slip her voice into your mind and make you come in search of her.”

  He shakes his head, unable to rectify what has just happened to him.

  “Olivia Greene,” I tell him bluntly, “is Marguerite Swan. She was waiting for you out in the harbor; she would have pulled you to her, her lips on yours, and then she would have drowned you.”

  He leans forward against his knees, teeth clamped shut. I stare at the scar beside his left eye, his cheekbones are starting to blaze from the heat of the fire. My focus slides back to his lips, to the way they felt pressed to mine. “But how do you know that?” he asks. “How can you be so sure it’s Marguerite Swan who’s taken over Olivia’s body? And not one of the other sisters?” He squints, like he can’t believe his own question, that he’s even asking it.

  “You just need to trust me,” I say. “Marguerite wants to kill you. And she won’t stop until she finds a way to do it.”

  “Why me?” he asks.

  “Because she saw you with me at the boathouse.”

  “What does that have to do with anything?”

  My fingers tremble slightly; my heart pushes against my ribs, warning me not to tell him the truth. But the truth tastes like letting go, like the sharpness of sunlight on a spring day, and my head begins to pulse with every heartbeat. “I can see them,” I confess, the words tumbling out before I can catch them.

  “Them?”

  “The sisters. I can see Aurora inside of Gigi Kline and Marguerite inside of Olivia Greene. I know whose bodies they’ve taken.”

  He straightens, lifting his elbows away from his knees. “How’s that even possible?”

  I shake my head, the air gone from my lungs, and a shiver races up my entire body.

  “You can see them and you haven’t said anything?”

  “No one knows.”

  “But . . .” His mouth dips open, eyes narrowed on me. “You can see what they really are?”

  “Yes.”

  I stand up, crossing my arms. I can tell he’s trying to piece it all together, make everything fit. But his mind is fighting him. He doesn’t want to believe what I’m telling him could be true. “How long have you been able to do this?”

  “Always.”

  “But how?”

  I lift my shoulders. “I don’t know. I mean . . . it’s just something I’ve always been able to do. . . . I . . .” I’m rambling, getting lost in the explanation. In the deception beneath the truth.

  “Can your mom see them too?”

  I shake my head.

  He frowns and looks down into the fire, rubbing the back of his neck with his right hand. “Do they know . . . do the sisters know
you can see them?”

  “Yes.”

  Again his mouth parts open, searching for words, for the right question to make this all make sense. “What about the third one—the third sister?”

  “Hazel,” I answer for him.

  “Where is she? Whose body has she stolen?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You haven’t seen her yet?”

  “No.”

  “But she’s out there somewhere?”

  “Yes.”

  “And she hasn’t killed anyone yet?”

  I shake my head. “Not yet.”

  “So there’s still time to find her and stop her.”

  “There’s no stopping them,” I answer.

  “Have you tried?”

  I can’t meet his eyes. “No. It’s pointless to try.” I think about my encounter with Gigi in the boathouse. I had thought—foolishly—maybe I could talk to her, the real her. Aurora. Maybe some part of her was still human, still had a beating heart that would be tired of the killing. But Lon interrupted us. And I sense she’s too far gone anyway. My words would never be enough.

  Bo drops his palm from the back of his neck. And I can see in his eyes that he’s starting to believe me. “Fuck, Penny,” he says, standing up and taking a step toward me. “So Lon and Davis were right? They do have a Swan sister locked in that boathouse?”

  I nod.

  “And Olivia . . . or Marguerite—whatever her name is—is trying to kill me?”

  “She’s already slipped into your mind. She can make you see things that aren’t there, feel things that aren’t real.”

  “When I saw her,” he says, “in the water . . . waiting for me. It felt like I needed her, like I’d die if I didn’t get to her. Like . . .” He swallows back the words, choking on them.

  “Like you loved her?” I finish for him.

  “Yeah.” His eyes find mine.

  “She can convince you that you’ve never loved anyone quite so much or ever will again.”

  He clenches his fists together at his sides and I watch the motion, his forearms flexing, his temples pulsing.

  “And then you were there,” he says, recounting the moment when I jumped into the ocean after him. “I could hear you but I couldn’t focus on you. You seemed so far away. But then I felt your hands. You were right in front of me.” He looks up, the darkest centers of his eyes like the darkest depths of the ocean. “And then you kissed me.”

  “I . . .” My voice feels strangled in my throat. “I had to stop you.”

  A beat of silence. My heart stumbles, catches, restarts again.

  “After that,” he says, “I didn’t feel her calling me anymore. I still don’t.”

  “Maybe we broke her hold on you,” I say, my voice feeling small.

  “You broke her hold on me.”

  Words tangle up on my tongue. All the things I want to say. “I needed to bring you back. I couldn’t let you go; I couldn’t lose you. I couldn’t let . . .” The weight of my honesty rattles the very center of my ribs, my stomach, the place just behind my eyes. “I couldn’t let her have you.”

  I don’t allow myself to look away from him—I need him to speak, to wash over my words with his own. In his eyes, a storm waits at the edges. His hand lifts, and his fingers slide up the ridge of my cheekbone and behind my ear. The sensation of his fingertips against my skin unweaves the stone knitted together at the base of my heart. I close my eyes briefly then open them again, a craving rising up inside me, pure and uncorrupt. He pulls me forward, and I pause only a feather’s width from his mouth. I look into his eyes, trying to root myself in the moment. And then he kisses me like he needs me to root him here too.

  His lips are warm and his fingertips cold. All at once I am wrapped up in him: his heart battering just beneath his chest, his hands in my hair, his mouth searching my lower lip. He is everywhere, filling my lungs and the space between each breath. And I feel myself falling, tumbling like a star dropping from the sky and spinning toward Earth. My heart stretches outward, becomes light and jittery.

  This moment—this boy—could tear me apart and upend everything. But in the heat of the cottage, wind rattling the glass in the windows, rain pelting the roof, with our skin flecked with salt water, I don’t care. I let his hands roam my chilled flesh and my fingers weave up the back of his neck. I don’t want to be anywhere else. I only want him. Him.

  Love is an enchantress—devious and wild.

  It sneaks up behind you, soft and gentle and quiet, just before it slits your throat.

  * * *

  I wake on the hardwood floor beside the fireplace, Bo asleep next to me, his arm folded over my hip bone. He is breathing softly against my hair. My eyes skirt across the living room, remembering where I am: his cottage. The fire has turned to coals, all the logs burned down, so I shimmy from beneath his arm—his fingers twitching—and slide a fresh log into the fireplace, pushing it through the coals. It takes only a moment for the flames to reignite.

  I cross my legs and run my fingers through my hair. I smell like him, his T-shirt still against my skin. I know I can’t leave him alone now. Marguerite will try again. And I won’t let her have him. This thing I feel for him is working its way into my bones, like water through cracks in my surface. When it freezes, it will either shatter me into a million pieces or make me stronger.

  I pick up one of the books sitting on the floor next to me, flipping through the pages. There are notes in the margins, paragraphs highlighted, corners dog-eared. The ink is faded and smeared in places.

  “I think they were your father’s books,” Bo says. His eyes are open, but he’s still lying on the floor, watching me. He must have heard me sit up.

  “Why do you think that?”

  “They were purchased from a bookstore in town. And there’s a name in the front of that one.” I flip back to the front cover where a piece of paper sits tucked into the crease. Handwritten with black ink on the paper is the name JOHN TALBOT. It was a book he had special ordered, or maybe put on hold. And an employee wrote his name on a slip of paper until he came to pay for it. “Your father was John Talbot, right?”

  “Yeah.” Beneath the paper is a folded receipt from the Olive Street Tea & Bookhouse. It’s dated June fifth, three years earlier. Only a week before he disappeared.

  “He must have been researching the Swan sisters,” Bo says. “Maybe he was looking for a way to stop them.”

  A scattering of memories crack through me, of the night I saw him moving down to the dock in the dark. The night he vanished. The rain fell sideways, and the wind ripped shingles from the roof of the house. But he would never return to repair them.

  He had been collecting these books all along, in secret, looking for a way to end the Swan season.

  “Are you all right?” Bo sits up, creases formed between his brows.

  “Fine.” I close the cover of the book and set it back on the floor. “And you’ve read most of them?” I ask.

  He nods, stretching upright.

  “And what did you find?”

  “Mostly speculation about witches and curses—nothing definitive.”

  “Anything about how to end a curse?”

  He shifts his gaze to me, exhaling. “Only the obvious.”

  “Which is?”

  “Destroy the purveyors of it.”

  “The sisters.”

  “The only way to end it would be to kill them,” he says.

  “But then both the Swan sister and the girl whose body they stole would die.”

  He nods.

  “And you still want to kill Gigi Kline?” I ask.

  “I want whoever killed my brother to pay for it. And if the only way to do that is to destroy both the girl and the monster, then that’s what I’ll do.”

  I brush both hands through my hair, catching on knots that my fingers must work through before I can twist my mass of hair over my shoulder. “Does this mean you believe in the Swan sisters now?”

&nb
sp; “I don’t think I have a choice,” he says. “One of them is trying to kill me.” The fullness of his lips seems amplified as he pushes them together, a rivulet of tension passing over his expression. It can’t be easy knowing someone—something—wants you dead.

  But what’s even harder is knowing it’s your fault. Marguerite wouldn’t want Bo so badly if he were just some random tourist. It’s because of me that she’s so intrigued by him. She loves a challenge. And Bo is the perfect prey.

  I stand up from the floor. Otis and Olga had been sleeping on the couch, curled up together at one end. But now Olga is awake, her ears alert, head turned toward the door.

  “I’m sorry you’re here,” I say, rubbing my palms down my arms. “I’m sorry you got dragged into this.”

  “It’s not your fault.” His voice is deep, his eyebrows angled downward, softening the hard edges of his face. “I came here because of my brother. I did this; not you.”

  “If you weren’t on this island with me,” I tell him, forcing the tears down so they don’t rise up. “Then she wouldn’t want you. I was wrong when I thought keeping you here on the island would make you safe. She’ll find you wherever you are.”

  “No.” He stands up too but doesn’t touch me, doesn’t run his hands up my arms to comfort me—not yet. “She’s not in my head anymore,” he says. “I don’t hear her voice, feel her thoughts. You broke whatever hold she had on me.”

  “For now. But she’ll try again. She’ll come for you, here to the island if she has to. She’ll physically drag you out into the water. She won’t give up.”

  “If I’m not safe, then you’re not safe.”

  “It doesn’t work like that,” I tell him. “It’s you she will drown. Not me.” My stomach begins to wrench and turn.

  “If you can see them, and they know it, then you’re in danger too.”

  I think of Marguerite out in the harbor, waiting for Bo, beckoning him with the promise of her lips skimming delicately over his. She is a wraith dredged up from the seafloor. She is vengeful and clever. She is single-minded in her hatred for this town. And she won’t stop.