Nor hadn’t thought it possible to fall asleep in that cold, dark room, but she must have because the next time she opened her eyes it was to the shrill sound of voices and the pounding of frantic running overhead. A cascade of water spilled down one of the walls; it bubbled up between the cracks in the stone floor. A man was leaning over her, his face obscured by the flashlight he shined in her eyes.
Nor jumped to her feet. The man drew the light away. “Come on,” he said, motioning for Nor and the others to follow him. “We need to get you out of here.”
Gage gave Nor a look. Should we trust him? he asked with his eyes, but Nor was too distracted by the man to pay much attention to anything else.
“Hey,” Savvy said, gently shaking Nor’s shoulder. “Who is this guy?”
He had three long scratches, like claw marks, across his cheek, and his eyes were the same gray-blue she saw when she looked in the mirror. “I think he’s my father,” Nor said quietly.
Savvy looked at her with widened eyes. “No shit,” she breathed.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Quinn Sweeney said urgently. “This place is going to be nothing but ashes by dawn.”
Gage reached down and took Nor’s hand. “Let’s go,” he said quietly. Nor nodded mutely. Of all the things that might have happened here, she’d certainly never expected to find him. Father. Even the word itself felt foreign.
They followed Quinn Sweeney up the winding staircase, their feet splashing through water that had already risen over the first few bottom steps. At the top of the stairs, they paused to let him catch his breath. He coughed wetly into a handkerchief. A splatter of blood stained the white linen.
They were standing in what, many years before, must have served as the Halcyon family’s dining room. As it was now, nothing was left to suggest that the room had ever been grand. A stained and moldy mattress lay on the floor. A thick layer of dust and debris covered everything but the broken grand piano in the far corner of the room. Quinn dropped tiredly onto the piano bench and ran his fingers across the out-of-tune keys.
A gust of wind blew in through the broken window. It whipped Savvy’s blue braids back and forth like flags caught in a storm.
“So what’s the plan?” Gage asked. “How do we get out of here?”
“Out?” Quinn gave an empty laugh. “There is no getting out. Trust me, I’ve tried every possible escape route there is out of this hellhole.”
A feeling of dread washed over Nor: the only door that led to the rest of the hotel had been boarded and nailed shut. “What do you mean?” she asked warily.
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to make you think escaping was possible,” Quinn said. “I’m afraid all I’ve done is delayed the inevitable for you. Your mother’s power may be waning, but that hasn’t made her any less dangerous. If we try to escape, she’ll only kill you, and whatever death she has in store for you will be far worse than anything you’ll experience down here.”
A surge of water suddenly gushed up from the cellar. Savvy scrambled onto Gage’s back. Sena Crowe splashed across the room and attempted to kick down the door. But it was no use.
“Your mother has killed just about everyone else. I didn’t think any of us who are left would want to die alone.” Quinn watched the water rise with indifference. “You know, at first I thought we’d die in a fiery blaze; instead we’ll drown. I find that comforting. I’ve never much liked fire.”
The water was rising so fast Nor couldn’t keep her balance. She toppled over and landed with a splash, banging the side of her hip painfully against the floor and planting her hand on a shard of broken glass. Outside, the wind screamed and howled. The sky had turned a hopeless black.
“She won’t kill me, but at least now she won’t be able to kill you because of me.” He hesitated, then said, “Like she killed my mother and so many people before her.”
Nor looked at Savvy, who was trying to stay on Gage’s shoulders as the icy water inched higher. Sena Crowe was turning his shoulder black and blue by throwing himself against the door again and again.
“There’s no point,” Quinn called. “Even if you do escape, Fern will kill anyone left here if she thinks it might bring back her power. She will make it rain fire. She will make the earth split open and swallow us whole.”
Nor pulled the shard of glass from her palm. She stood and walked quickly through the water. It was painfully cold. The closer it got to her chest, the harder it got to breathe. Where is it all coming from?
She nudged Sena Crowe away from the door. After wedging her fingers behind one of the boards nailed across it, she pulled until she felt the wood give and crack. Splinters pierced the soft flesh under her nails. One by one, she ripped the boards away from the door and tossed them into the water while the others watched, dumbstruck.
“Go!” she sputtered. Gage hoisted Savvy higher onto his back. The water circled them like a beast. Though there wasn’t a hint of weariness in his face, Nor could see that it took everything Gage had to keep himself and Savvy from being swept away. With Sena Crowe’s help, he managed to get through the doorway. Sena Crowe stepped through after them.
“Nor!” Gage yelled. “Come on!”
The water had risen to her collarbone. If it rose any higher, she wouldn’t be able to keep her feet on the floor. Some water splashed into her mouth, and it had a metallic taste, like limestone or granite. Or blood.
Nor looked back at the piano, where her father had been sitting. He was gone. She swam to the piano and groped around under the water until she found her father’s wrist and pulled. “Don’t do this!” she cried when he surfaced.
“Nor, please,” he sputtered. “Do you have any idea what it’s like? A few weeks ago, your mother’s power started to weaken, and I woke up and found years of my life suddenly gone, vanished without a trace or a memory. I found loved ones buried, dreams long dead. Let me go. Please.”
Nor tried to imagine what it was like to drown. Perhaps it was peaceful, as if all you had to do was surrender and let death wash over you, like watercolor paint saturating a piece of paper.
Or maybe it was something else entirely. Perhaps a death by drowning was eerily quiet because the water had stolen your voice. To scream, you had to be able to breathe. Under that serene facade was violence. Under that mask of apathy was terror.
“Let me be free of this hell,” he begged.
Nor looked into his pleading eyes. With quiet irony, she noted that out of all the things Fern had told her about her father, she’d never mentioned that Nor had his eyes. “Not like this,” she said.
Mara, the third Blackburn daughter, wasn’t spoken of very often. This was most likely because her Burden had terrified the fellow islanders.
Mara’s mental capacity and disposition had never evolved beyond those of a child, a sweet child who could hold death in her hands as gently as a flower. And like a bouquet, she’d gifted death to ailing neighbors and eased them peacefully into the afterlife. For those in agony, Mara’s Burden was truly a blessing, a gift of mercy. For the mourners left behind, it was more difficult to view it that way. Their lack of appreciation and understanding became clear when sweet Mara was found floating facedown in the waters of Celestial Lake.
No record existed of exactly how this wide-eyed Angel of Death had aided her neighbors’ passings, and Mara wasn’t known to be a particularly communicative or intelligible young woman.
As Nor leaned over Quinn Sweeney, however, she instinctively knew exactly what Mara had done. Tenderly, Nor leaned over her father as if to kiss him farewell and filled her lungs with his last breath, like sipping air through a straw. Then she let him go, and the water slowly pulled him under. The serenity in Quinn Sweeney’s handsome face told Nor with utter clarity that at least in death, her father had finally found some peace.
Nor waded through the doorway and down a hallway. At the end of the hall, she climbed a flight of stairs that was still just beyond the water’s icy reach. It wouldn’t be long, though, before it reached up here, too. Suddenly Nor couldn’t stop shaking. What had happened to the other people in the hotel? Had her mother really killed all of them? Or had they, like her father, simply given up first?
“Well, that sucked,” Savvy said when Nor caught up with them. She shivered and pushed strands of wet blue hair off of her face. Sena Crowe helped her to her feet.
Gage pointed out a window. Nor could see Charlie’s skiff rocking up and down on the restless waves, a tiny beacon of hope. “Thanks to you,” Gage said, “we might actually be able to get out of here.” Instead of making Nor feel better, though, it made her feel worse. Every step they took to reach that boat would be a fight. And even then, there was no guarantee they’d make it back to Anathema in the storm. All thanks to me.
The sky was so dark it was as if someone had extinguished the stars, had wrapped the moon in a shroud and buried it deep underground. The rain pounded against the window.
“You should go,” Nor said to the other three. “Before the storm gets any worse.”
“What about you?” Savvy protested.
“Someone needs to stop my mother.”
“Nor . . .” Gage said quietly, shaking his head. He looked at her and that was when Nor realized that, until now, she’d never seen him afraid. She put her arms around him. He froze, and then he slid his hands around her waist and pulled her closer to him.
“I want to say you’ll be okay,” he said quietly, “but I’m not sure if that’s true.”
“I’m not, either,” she whispered back. His hands moved up into her wet hair, and for a mere fraction of a second, Nor pressed her lips against his.
“I’ll go with you,” he murmured.
“No.” She pulled away and saw she’d left a smear of her blood on his neck. “Get the others home. Keep them safe.”
Nor squeezed her fingers together into a fist, and blood bubbled up through the gash in her palm. There wasn’t time to stay and argue. There wasn’t time for her to do anything now but to keep going up — to the roof where she was certain to find her mother pouring her wrath down on the rest of the world like the blood from so many wounds.
But that was the thing: Nor had stopped being afraid of blood a long time ago.
Nor pounded up the stairs to the hotel’s roof. She reached the door and pushed her way into the gale. The storm nearly knocked her back inside.
Fern had her back turned. A black veil was wrapped around her head. “Did you think you had beaten me?” she called to Nor. “Did you think you’d be lucky enough to defeat me?” She turned then. The black veil whipped in the wind like a wild animal. She finally looked like the harbinger of death and destruction that she was. Another roof. Another night of darkness and blood, of pain and anguish, like the one Nor remembered as a neglected little girl.
“Tell me, daughter,” Fern asked darkly, “do I seem defeated to you?”
She lurched at Nor and grabbed her by the shoulders. “Look at me!” Fern screamed. “Even the almighty Rona Blackburn would bow before me. She would tremble at my feet! I can bring the dead to life. I summon the shadows, and the shadows come! I am Hecate, Goddess of Storms, Lady of the Underworld, Enemy of Mankind. I am doom and death, misery and blame! I am the thing even the darkness fears!”
Fern’s tattoos crept across her skin like barbed wire or broken capillaries. Blood seeped from wounds crisscrossing her skin and trickled onto the wet roof. Her head and neck were squeezed into an unnatural shape by tight black vines.
“Then what does that make me?” Nor asked.
“You?” Fern cackled. “You are nothing! You are no one!”
Blood dripped from Nor’s injured hand. It mingled with her mother’s blood on the wet roof until it was just one dark red stream.
“But you said it yourself. I’m your daughter,” Nor said, raising her voice above the howling winds. The storm raged with renewed fury. Fern took a step back. She screeched when the wind tore a ribbon of skin from her cheek. Then another from her arm.
“I am Hecate,” Fern wheezed, “Goddess of Storms.” Her voice whistled through the holes in her face.
“That may be true,” Nor cried. “You may be doom and death, misery and blame, but none of those things frighten me. I know what misery is. I know what blame is. There is no pain that you can cause that I haven’t already felt.”
Another strip of skin was ripped from Fern’s cheek and carried off by the wind. She shrieked in confusion.
Nor started to laugh. “Don’t you understand?” she screamed. “Death and I are now friends! And you can’t hurt me or anyone else ever again. I won’t let you.”
The sky above them had become a black hole, an insatiable beast with its mouth open wide in a cry of terrible torment. Fern fell to her knees as her skin cracked and flaked like ancient porcelain. “I am the thing that the darkness fears!” she croaked before her jaw unhinged and fell away. Nor closed her eyes, preparing for the black sky to swallow her and her mother whole.
But then a memory pierced the darkness. Warm yellow light flowed through Nor’s palms as she remembered another glow, growing larger and larger until she recognized it as the lit bowl of a pipe: the pipe of her grandmother, who had spent all that time quietly waiting for her to return home. Nor pictured Apothia’s smile and recalled Savvy’s laugh. She remembered the feel of Reed’s hands on her skin, Bijou’s happy dreams, and the fact that alpacas hummed when they were content. She pictured Gage, battling those storming seas below, and her scars, evidence of all the times she’d battled death before and won. Nor held out her brilliant shining hands, and their light vanquished the shadows and black holes that surrounded them.
The rains stopped, the clouds broke, and the moon reappeared in a night sky no longer beastly with rage. The winds ceased howling. The ocean calmed.
“You’re wrong, Mother,” Nor said quietly. “I am the thing the darkness fears.”
And the rest of Fern Blackburn, unfurled like a spool of frayed ribbon, was swept up by the wind and hurled into the sky.