The queen’s voice, shrill and high, echoes above the chaos as she sinks to the sand. “Kill them!”
The guards spring forth. Anna continues to laugh, her human legs kicking at mine. My blood has stained her dress, her skin, her hair. It only makes her laugh harder. So hard she doesn’t even try to escape—she’s reveling in it too much.
Over the noise—the laughing, the lockstep of the guards, the screaming townspeople, I hear it. The voice I’ve always known as well as my own.
“Evie.”
Nik.
He’s crawling toward me with Hansa’s aid. The look in her eyes tells me her healing cannot help—he’ll soon be dead, like his father. Nik knows it too, his voice shaking. “Evie, I love you. I’m sorry I didn’t say it until today. I’m sorry . . .”
“Tante, hold Anna still. Please. Don’t let her up.” Hansa’s magic is strong and she uses a binding spell like Anna used on me. One I never learned.
Still, only when I know Hansa has Anna pinned do I let go. Anna is screaming at me, struggling against Hansa’s magic, but I drown her out. My hands find Nik, and I bring his bleeding body to my chest. “I love you, too. And I won’t let this be the end.”
Confusion crosses his face. The skin there has lost its color. His breath comes in pants, his lungs struggling against my bodice. The blood from our wounds runs together, like finding like.
I shut my eyes, my mother’s words coming to me. I don’t need octopus ink. I don’t need gems or potions or charms. I just need the words and the will.
I am a witch. I am and I always will be. The magic is in me and it is enough—I suppose Annemette taught me that.
“I love you, Nik,” I repeat, and then I start my mother’s spell. The words coming like I’ve known them my whole life, and maybe I have.
“Líf. Dau?i. Minn líf. Sei?r. Minn bjo?. Sei?r. Sei?r.”
My skin begins to burn, white hot, heat radiating from my bones outward, steam in the air. Tears come to my eyes, and I know they’re black—Mother’s eyes didn’t do that, but I’m my own kind of magic. They drip onto Nik’s skin as I begin to shake. My eyes roll back for a moment, and the last thing I see is color returning to his skin, his cheeks pinking like we’ve been together all day at sea.
I force my vision to clear. I need to see him. I need to.
His eyes flash open. He knows what’s happening. He knows it like I did the day my mother died.
I will see to it that he is safe.
That he lives a long life.
That he can rule his people without fear.
I will see to it.
With the last of my strength, I leave Nik and push my failing body onto Anna’s, tight as a corset. Tighter than the magic Hansa used to paralyze her. My tante steps back, tears in her eyes, and helps Nik to his feet. He’s almost completely healed. He will be fine.
Anna is the only threat left, but I have plans for her.
With my last breath, I take ahold of her—this girl I loved, this girl who came back to me. Used me. Ruined me. Ruined every person who ever loved her so that she could be human again. Ruined for revenge.
I get to my feet and heave her toward the water. My hands burn fingerprints into her skin as she tries to pull away.
“What are you doing?” she shrieks. I can feel her heart beating wildly against her bodice. Against my heart—still in my chest.
The clouds are clearing overhead. The wind has died down. The lightning vanished. Her magic is leaving this world, and soon she will too.
Her blue eyes grow wide. She’s realized that she’d gotten what she wanted. She’s just a girl, like she was before—and it’s made her vulnerable to people like me.
I smile at her, and there’s no pity in it. No joy. Nothing but rage.
“This life is not yours to live.”
With that, I do the only thing I can to reverse Anna’s final magical act. To keep my loved ones safe. To stop her threat cold.
I return Anna to the sea.
BELOW THE SURFACE
The tide claimed the two girls, one with curls of raven black, the other with waves of butter-blond. Its water was crisp, despite the summer night. All veins of magic swirled under the surface, mixing with the blood and death that bound the girls together.
The raven-curled girl’s heart was failing. Her time was up, spent on the boy above. The one she’d always loved. Always protected—even from herself.
But she would win—the blonde’s lungs were seizing. The raven-curled girl could feel them sputtering and shuttering as she held tight to the girl’s chest, driving them both down, down, down. As deep as the cove would allow. To the bottom, home to that bewitched octopus, her father’s corpse, and the fresh bodies of the guards the blonde had killed with a sweep of her fingers.
So many dead, but the prince was alive. Her boy. Her own borrowed breath in his chest. She‘d sacrificed herself for him again.
As the cool remnants of magic swirled around them, the girls plunged to the sandy bottom. The blonde’s back lodged in the cove floor, the raven-haired girl’s body flushing streams of blood into the water, more of her life fleeing through bullet holes.
Light was failing as fast as their bodies, the strong moon barely reaching these depths. Still, the raven-curled girl wouldn’t give in to the darkness. Her heart was barely beating, but her eyes were open, watching the blonde struggle and fail to break free.
She wouldn’t die first. She couldn’t.
She had to know her boy would be safe—her family, her home—from the monster beneath her fingertips.
Just before the raven-curled girl’s heart finally stopped, the blonde went still. Her blue eyes stuck wide, blank. Her rosebud lips forever parted, water seeping in.
The girl had really drowned this time. There’d be no coming back.
The raven-curled girl opened her mouth and accepted the ocean. Let it sweep in and claim her along with the magic still singing in her veins. Still skimming over her skin—it would live longer than she.
Then, a darkness fell across the pewter light of her vision. The end, pulling the curtains shut.
No.
The octopus. The giant one. The one that haunted the cove. Her beast—a product of her spell of abundance. A mistake. An aberration.
The animal was swift. Vengeful. Spiteful.
“Líf . . . líf,” the girl started, the words dying in her mouth, drowned in salt water. She wasn’t sure what to say other than to tell the octopus to go. Live. Live away from this battlefield. Let her rest with her father in peace.
But the octopus smelled the ink in her veins and the magic it held, and it began to feed. The beast’s tentacles trembled with power as they slithered across her wounds, mingling with the water, with her blood, with her spell that controlled its life for the past few months. The girl’s eyes rolled back into her head as fresh magic entered her veins.
“Líf. Líf.”
Suddenly, a great spasm of white light shot up between them. Connected them. Magic as old as the sea itself threaded the octopus’s life and hers.
The light drew the great beast closer to the girl’s prone form, barely alive. Barely anything at all. The tentacles reveled in her blood. Tried to capture it. The magic between them was a magnet, pulling all of it to all of her.
“Líf . . . ,” she repeated again, no breath in it. Seawater washed the word down her windpipe, pushing the oxygen out of her heart, her blood. Until she was one with the sea. Her soul water itself.
The light flickered and grew, engulfing both the girl and the octopus in its warmth, shooting past the water’s surface, to the moon and the magic still hovering in the air above. With the light came an equal darkness, seeping across the cove in a sheet of black.