TEN
I start a fire in Bo’s cottage.
I know I shouldn’t trust this feeling, this unraveling in my heart. It will only end up in a tangled heap. But I need to protect him. Watching Olivia run her fingers up his throat, touching the hard line of his jaw, a sickening lump of dread wretched up from my stomach. Don’t let yourself care, I recite in my mind. Boys die all too often in this town. But maybe Marguerite’s words didn’t work, didn’t stick. Maybe he resisted. I just need to keep him safe until the summer solstice, keep him from wandering out into the sea in search of her, and then he will leave the island and this town, and we’ll never see each other again. Simple. Uncomplicated.
I stand up once the flames have ignited over the logs, sending sparks in a cyclone up the chimney. Bo is sitting on the couch, elbows on his knees, forehead pressed into his palms.
“What did Olivia whisper to you?” I ask, sitting down beside him.
He drops his hands, forehead lined with confusion. “I don’t know.”
“Do you remember anything?”
His thumb taps against the side of his knee. “I remember her.” His eyes lift, staring into the fire. I don’t think I want to hear what he remembers about her, but he tells me anyway. “She was so close, it was like her voice was inside my head. And she was . . . beautiful.” He swallows immediately after he says it, like he can’t believe his own words.
I push up from the couch and cross my arms beside the fire.
“I can’t stop thinking about her,” he adds, shaking his head, squinting like he could squeeze her from his mind. But it’s not that easy.
“That’s how it works,” I say, bending down to put another log on the growing flames.
He stares up at me. “You think she’s one of them?”
“I know you don’t believe any of this, but how can you explain that you can’t remember what she said to you? And that you can’t stop thinking about her; that you’re suddenly so captivated by her?”
“I’m not—” But his words break off. He knows I’m right: He knows his mind keeps slipping back to thoughts of Olivia Greene. Her fingertips against his skin, her eyes sinking so deeply into his, it was like she was looking at the exact center of his soul. A part of him craves her now, wants her as much as she wants him. And it tears at him. He won’t be able to stop thinking about her until they’re together again. “I don’t know anymore. I don’t trust my own thoughts.”
I pace across the room. How do I undo this? How do I rid Olivia from his mind? I don’t think it’s ever been done before—I don’t think it’s even possible. He belongs to her now.
I run my tongue along the inside of my teeth. “You have to get away from here. You have to leave town.”
Bo stands up from the couch, and the movement makes me flinch. He walks to the fireplace, stepping in front of me, willing me to look up at him, but I can’t. He unsettles me, cracks apart my insides, and I bite down on the feeling, willing it away.
From beneath my eyelashes, I see his lips flatten together, and our breathing seems to settle into the same rhythm. I want him to speak, to cut through the silence, and all at once I feel light-headed, like I might reach out for him to steady myself. But then his lips open and he says, almost like a confession: “My brother was drowned in Sparrow.” His eyes cease to blink, his body a stone outline in front of me.
“What?” I lift my gaze.
“That’s why I’m here. Why I can’t leave . . . not yet. I told you he died, but I didn’t tell you how. He drowned here in the harbor.”
“When?” My fingertips begin to tingle; the hairs on the back of my neck rise on end as if a cool breeze were gliding across my skin.
“Last summer.”
“That’s why you came to Sparrow?”
“I didn’t know about the Swan sisters. I didn’t know about any of it. The police told us that he’d committed suicide, that he’d drowned himself. But I never believed it.”
I shake my head a fraction of an inch, trying to understand.
“His name was Kyle,” he starts. It’s the first time he’s said his name out loud to me. “After he graduated high school last year, he and two of his friends took a road trip down the coast. It was supposed to be a surf trip; they planned to drive all the way to Southern California, but they never made it that far.” He chokes back something, an emotion threatening to spill past his bulletproof veneer. “They stopped in Sparrow for a night. I don’t think they had any idea about the town, about the drownings. They were staying at the Whaler Bed-and-Breakfast. Kyle left his room sometime just after sunset . . . and he never came back. His body was found the next morning tangled in a fishing net not far from shore.”
“I’m . . . sorry,” I manage, barely above a whisper. A ripple of something shudders through me. A pain that I crush back down.
“He had a scholarship to Montana State in the fall. He had a girlfriend who he wanted to marry. It didn’t make any sense. I know he didn’t commit suicide. And he was a good swimmer. He surfed every summer; it’s not like he would have accidentally drowned.”
He takes a step back, unmooring me, and I let out a swift breath I didn’t even realize I had been holding in. “None of them committed suicide,” I say, thinking of all the boys who’ve waded out into the harbor, lured to their death.
We look at each other, the seconds stretching out between us.
“Maybe you’re wrong about the Swan sisters,” he says, extending an arm to touch the mantel over the fireplace, index finger brushing over a scratch in the wood. The heat from the fire has made his cheeks flushed, his lips pink. “Maybe it’s just a story that locals tell to explain why so many people have drowned. Maybe someone really is killing them; maybe that girl in the boathouse, Gigi Kline, did do it. Not because she has some ancient witch inside her who’s seeking revenge, but because she’s just a murderer. And maybe she’s not the only one; maybe there are other girls who are killing too . . . who killed my brother.”
“But that doesn’t explain why boys have drowned in Sparrow for the last two centuries.” I need him to believe—to know the Swan sisters exist.
“Maybe it’s like a cult,” he answers, refusing to accept the truth, “and every generation, its members drown people for some unexplained sacrifice or something.”
“A cult?”
“Look, I don’t know how cults work. I’m just trying to figure this all out as I go.”
“So if you really believe it’s just some cult . . . then what?”
“Then I have to stop them from killing anyone else.”
“I thought you wanted to go to the police and tell them about Gigi Kline locked in the boathouse? Let them handle it?”
“Maybe that’s not enough. Maybe that’s not justice—for my brother, for everyone else who’s been killed.”
“Then what? What would justice be?”
“Putting an end to whatever is happening in this town.”
“Killing a Swan sister, you mean? Killing Gigi?”
“Maybe there’s no other way,” he says.
I shake my head. “There is another way—you can leave Sparrow,” I say. “You can go and never come back, and maybe someday you’ll even start to forget this place, as if you were never here at all.” I don’t mean the words I say. I don’t want him to leave. Not really. Except I need him to leave so he doesn’t get hurt, so he doesn’t end up like his brother.
A storm builds in the features of his face, a coldness in his eyes I haven’t seen before. “You don’t know what it feels like—this pain that won’t go away,” he says. “I know my brother would do this for me; he wouldn’t stop until he found out who was responsible for my death. And he would get revenge.”
“This town was built on revenge,” I say. “And it’s never made anything better or right.”
“I’m not leaving,” he says with such finality that I feel my throat tighten.
I look up at him like I’m seeing him for the first time, the resoluteness in his eyes, the anger in his jaw. He’s searching for a way to rid himself of the pain of losing his brother, and he’s willing to sacrifice everything, do whatever it takes, pay any price. Even end someone else’s life. “It wasn’t those girls,” I tell him, pleading with him to understand. “It was the thing inside them.”
“Maybe,” he answers, lifting his gaze. “But maybe there’s no difference between the girl and whatever evil makes them commit murder.”
The fire crackles, spitting out sparks onto the wood floor that darken and turn to ash. I walk to the bookshelf beside the fireplace, examining the spines of each book, looking for a way to make him understand without telling him what I know—what I can see.
“Why are you so certain it’s real?” he asks, reading my thoughts, and I let my hand fall away from one of the books. I shift onto my heels and turn to face him. He’s stepped closer to me, so close I could reach out and touch his chest with the tips of my fingers. I could take one swift step forward and tell him everything, tell him all my secrets, or I could press my lips to his and silence the turmoil rattling around inside my head. But instead I ignore every urge snapping through my veins.
I draw in my lips before I speak, careful to control each word. “I want to tell you,” I say, a thousand tons of stones sinking into my stomach. “But I can’t.”
His eyes flatten on me at the same moment the fire ignites over a dry log and floods the room with a sudden burst of glowing orange light. I was right about Bo, and I was also wrong: He didn’t end up in Sparrow by accident. But he’s also not a tourist. He came for his brother—to find out what happened to him. And what he found here is far worse than anything he could have imagined.
The pressure in my head expands, the cottage walls start to rotate off axis like a carnival ride out of control, and I feel like I might be sick. I can’t stay in here with him. I don’t trust myself. I don’t trust my heart, thumping wildly like I might do something reckless that I can’t take back. I don’t know what I’m supposed to feel, supposed to say. I shouldn’t allow myself to feel anything. It’s dangerous, these emotions, the fear pumping through my chest, cracking along each rib. My head isn’t thinking straight; it’s tangled up with my heart, and I can’t trust it.
So I walk to the door and touch the knob, running my fingers around the smooth metal. I close my eyes for a half second and listen to the sounds of the fireplace behind me—warmth and fury, the same exploding conflict happening inside my head—then I open the door and steal out into the evening light.
Bo doesn’t try to stop me.