I open my eyes. I trace his lips with mine. He looks at me like I am a girl brought in with the tide, rare and scarred and broken. A girl found in the roughest waters, in the farthest reaches of a dark fairy tale. He is looking at me like he might love me.
“I’m scared,” I whisper up at him.
“Of what?”
“Of letting myself love you then feeling my insides collapse when I lose you.”
“I’m not going anywhere without you.”
Promises are easy to make, I think but don’t say. Because I know he believes his own words. He believes that what we feel right now will rescue us in the end. But I know—I know. Endings are never so simple.
I sink back against the wall. His hand still touches my forearm, not letting me go.
“How does it end?” he asks, as if his thoughts trailed mine. “What will happen on the summer solstice?”
Memories cascade through me, all the years past, the summers that slid to a close, dead bodies left in their wake. “There will be a party, just like the one on the beach.” I pull my arm away from his grip, tugging the sleeves of my sweater down over my hands and crossing my arms, feeling suddenly chilled. “Before midnight, the sisters will wade back out into the harbor, relinquishing the bodies they’ve stolen.”
“And if they don’t go into the water? If Gigi stays locked up during the solstice?”
My lungs stop drawing in air. She will die. She will be trapped inside Gigi’s body indefinitely, pushed down into the dark, dark, dark recesses of Gigi’s mind. She will see and hear and witness the world, but Gigi will resume control, unaware that a Swan sister is now imprisoned inside her, buried deep within. A ghost inside a girl. The worst kind of existence. A punishment befitting the torment the sisters have caused. But I don’t tell this to Bo. Because I can’t be sure it’s true, since it’s never happened before. A Swan sister has never stayed inside a body past midnight on the summer solstice.
“I’m not sure,” I answer truthfully.
Bo’s eyes have strayed to the window, he’s considering something. “I have to kill her,” he finally says. “Even if she didn’t kill my brother, she’s killed others. She doesn’t deserve to live.”
“You’d be killing Gigi, too,” I say.
“I know, but you told me before how the town has killed girls in the past, hoping to stop the sisters, but that they always got it wrong.” His eyes search mine. “This time we won’t get it wrong. You can see them. You know who they are. We can find out where the third one is and we can end this for good. No one else has to die.”
“Except three innocent girls.”
“Better than a hundred more boys. Or two hundred. How many more centuries do they keep returning to this town before someone stops them? They never got it right in the past because they never knew for sure which girls were inhabited. But we know. And there’s one right down there, locked up.” He points to the window and his sudden urgency scares me. I never thought he’d be this serious, that he’d really want to do it. But now he’s talking like we could march down there and end her life right now, all based on my ability to see what she really is.
“And you could live with yourself after that?” I ask. “Knowing you killed three people?”
“My brother is dead,” he says coldly. “I came here to find out what happened to him, and I did. I can’t just walk away now.” He removes the hat from his head and drops it onto the chair. “I have to do this, Penny.”
“You don’t.” I move closer to him. “At least not right now . . . not tonight. Maybe we can find another way.”
He exhales then leans into the window frame. “There isn’t another way.”
I reach out and touch his arm, forcing him to look at me. “Please,” I say, tilting my chin up at him. He smells like the earth; he smells wild and fearless and I know he could also be dangerous, but when I’m this close to him I don’t care what he is. “We still have a few days until the solstice. There’s time to figure something out. All those books in your cottage—maybe there really is a way to stop the sisters without killing the girls they’ve taken. We have to look; we have to try.” My fingers slide down to his hand, the warmth of his palm burning me, setting me on fire, making me dizzy.
“Okay,” he answers, tightening his fingers through mine. “We’ll look for another way. But if we don’t find one . . .”
“I know,” I say before he can finish. He will kill Gigi Kline just to get to Aurora. But he doesn’t fully understand what that will mean: taking a life. It will change him. It’s not something he can take back.
The sun has managed to sink into the ocean in the span of time that we’ve been in my room, and I switch on the lamps on either side of my bed. “One of us should stay up to watch the cottage, make sure she doesn’t sneak out,” Bo says.
I doubt she’ll try to escape, but I nod anyway, agreeing. Her odds aren’t good back in town. Lon and Davis are surely looking for her. And I’m guessing she knows she’s safer here—hidden in the cottage. Her mistake is that she thinks we’ll protect her from them. Especially with Rose on her side. When, in fact, we’re plotting ways in which to end her life.
SISTERS
Magic is not always formed from words, from cauldrons brewing spices or black cats strolling down dark alleys. Some curses are manifested from desire or injustice.
When she was alive, Aurora Swan would sometimes leave shards of broken glass or a rat’s tail on the doorstep of a woman who hated her—hoping an illness might befall the woman or she might stumble on a loose stone while strolling down Ocean Avenue and break her neck. They were merely small omens, common hexes of the day to bend fate in her favor. Not real magic.
Hazel Swan could often be found whispering wishes onto a blood moon, her lips as swift as a hummingbird in flight. She enchanted the moon, wishing for things she craved—a real love to wipe all the others away.
Marguerite was more direct in her efforts. She would slide her fingers along her lovers’ throats, tell them that they were hers, and if they refused her she would ensure they never loved anyone else ever again. She promised revenge and torment and the full wrath of her fury if they dared deny her. She swished through town as if she were made of the finest French silk, arrogant and imperious. She wanted power, and everyone knew it.
But their hubris would eventually catch up to them.
The sisters might have portrayed themselves scandalously, wicked and witchy. But they never practiced magic in a way that justified their demise. They were not witches, in a historical sense, but they did have a gravity about them—a thing that pulled you in.
They moved with a graceful ease, as though they were trained ballerinas from the Académie Royale de Danse in France; their hair was a hue that wavered between caramel and carmine, depending on the sunlight; and their voices had the singsong of a whistling thrush, each word a fascination.
They never stole the souls of newborn babies or cast potent spells to make the rains unending or the fish in the harbor uncatchable. Nor had they the skills to spin a curse as everlasting as the one that bound them now.
But magic was not always so linear. It was born from odium. From love. From revenge.