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.