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?”
“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.
“You can’t protect me,” I tell him. “Just like I can’t protect you.”
Olga hops down from the couch and trots between us to the front door, stretching up on her hind legs to scratch at the wood. She begins to mew, and it wakes Otis.
“I can try,” Bo says, moving closer, and in his eyes I see the ocean, and it draws me into him like the tide against the sand.
His hands find me in the firelight, grazing my wrists, my arms, then his palms slide up to my jaw, through my hair, fingerprints on my skin, and for a moment I believe him. Maybe he can keep me safe; maybe this thing threading between us is enough to keep all the terrors at bay. I suck in a breath and try to steady the two halves of my heart, but when his lips brush against mine, I lose all rooting to the earth. My heart turns wild. His fingers pull me closer, and I press myself against him, needing the steadiness of his heartbeat inside his chest and the balance of his arms. My own fingers slide up beneath his shirt: feeling the firmness of his torso, air filling his lungs. He is strong, stronger than most. Maybe he can survive this town, survive Marguerite. Survive me. I dig my fingers into his skin, his shoulders, losing myself to him. He feels like everything—all that’s left. The world has been shredded around me. But this, this, might be enough to smooth the brittle edges of my once-beating heart.