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Carmine is on one knee, punching the deck. The wood beneath his fist is bent. He punches again and again.

“He’s going to sink the boat,” Laro says, a little awestruck.

Another punch and water seeps through the splintered panel.

“The bridge!” Koreb cries.

Charles lets me go, and I drop to the floor, gasping for breath.

The boat rattles twice more.

My mother is on the floor, blood all over her face. She juts her foot into Charles’s ankle as he approaches. He stumbles.

“Hah!” she cries, and my mind clears enough to see the blood is coming from her eyes.

He blinded her. Jesus Christ.

“Mom!”

With one last booming shudder, the boat tips. It’s taking on water. Charles grabs Mom by her braid and pulls her out the door, kicking on her heels. I follow on my elbows.

“Get the other one across the bridge,” Charles says.

The door to the outside is open. There’s just water. No bridge. What is he talking about?

My ankles are still tied. I can’t get up, but I try to elbow-climb up to the lolling rear door without sliding back.

I’ll drown in liminal water if my feet are tied together. I stop and pull at the knot around my ankles. Charles may not be a sailor or a scout, but it’s tight, and the boat is tilting so hard I can’t seem to get good leverage.

“Luna!” It’s Carmine, outside, shoes covered in water. “Behind you!”

I roll before Laro can grab me. The inertia of the tipping boat sends him into the window separating him from his father.

“Son! Invite me in.”

“You are not my king anymore!” Laro pulls me up and spins me around.

I use the torque to punch him in the face. He’s thrown back.

“I’m still your father.”

“You turned your back on me!” Laro rights himself and punches me.

The brightest thing in the liminal is the stars in front of my eyes. I go flying with the slope of the sinking ship.

“Get her out.” The water laps against Carmine’s calves.

“Get yourself out,” Laro mutters, grabbing me by the shirt and dragging me out the back door, away from him.

“Carmine!” I cry, reaching for him as he gets smaller and smaller.

Outside, on the rear deck, Charles barks orders. Viaro laughs. It’s the most beautiful sound I’ve ever heard.

Laro drops me. I immediately tug at the ropes around my ankles.

Viaro stands on the water, wet to one ankle and one calf, as if he’s on a staircase. He’s not sinking. His sleeves are soaked to the shoulder.

“Lunagirl.” Mom crawls to me and puts her hand on my ropes. She can’t see through the bloody meat in her eye sockets.

“Mom, what did they do to you?”

“It’s nothing.” Mom works the knot. She’s stronger than I ever imagined. More precise than she should be. “You shouldn’t worry.”

She gets it. Finally, the last knot opens. Laro reaches for my feet. I curl away, but I’m too slow. He whips the rope away, offering no explanation as he watches the shore.

It’s the stage-set version of Central Park, with a short cast-iron fence set into a thicket of shrubs.

Scout is on the other side, on the bike path, puking up gray water.

Other vampires in tattered, soaking fabric do the same.

Their frustrations are knotted around anger and fear. Where did they come from?

Viaro dunks his hands in the reservoir and pulls out a man.

Not a man. A white-faced, hissing vampire draped in wet rags, writhing and shaking, heaving for breath.

“Your bridge has collapsed, Monsieur Bourbon.” Carmine’s voice comes from above. He’s standing on the edge of the tilted roof. If this boat sinks, he’ll sink with it.

Viaro flings the writhing vampire to shore. Ario catches him and drops him on the other side of the cast-iron fence to join Scout and the others.

Charles has built a hidden bridge from living vampires, who can neither drown, nor die, leaving them in eternal starvation so he can walk to a boat. Now Viaro has removed enough of them on the boat side to make crossing deadly.

“Boss,” Koreb says, “what do we do?”

Charles is still looking up at Carmine.

Viaro pulls out another one.

“Oh, no.” The big vampire shakes his head as if he’s noping out of this mess. “I’m done.”

He takes two steps back, then runs three steps with the speed of a vampire, launching himself higher than any human could, but only halfway to shore, as if he didn’t expect he’d have to go all the way there.

Viaro jumps, catches Koreb by the heel, and lets him drop into the water.

He’s under the surface before Viaro lands back where he started with an ankle-deep splash.

“Listen,” Mom says. “Seriously. I don’t want you to worry about me.”

I don’t know what to worry about. Finding a good eye surgeon or Charles coming my direction with rage surrounding him.

Carmine leaps between us, shaking the boat as he lands. Charles is a similar stature, but Carmine Montefiore is bigger in my eye, taller in my heart, greater in my soul. All of my senses flutter in unison, like white flags in the same wind.

Carmine turns down toward me and says over his shoulder, “Go.” Then he faces Charles.

On the shore, a ravenous vampire screams, pointing at us. He screams again, climbing the fence. It’s Mom and me. It must be.

“Mom,” I whisper, “I don’t think we’ll sink. I think we can swim to the shore.”

“I told you not to worry about me.”

“You’ll at least float.” Laro has twisted the ends of my rope around his hands, leaving a lot of slack. Fast enough to turn into a blur, he loops the rope under my mother’s arms and pulls her up against him, face to face. “If you’re strong, you can swim. Are you strong, Strega Mother?”

“Stop it! What are you doing?”

He puts her between us as he ties my mother to him. She gets her elbows between but can’t get out, and I can’t get to him without hurting her.

“Let her go, Laro.” My voice has a threat inside it, but it’s empty. My mother’s view of people’s energy has been cut off. I am in thrall and cannot enter him again.

“Kick, witch.” Laro jumps into the reservoir and sinks like a stone.

Carmine does not move one scrap of his attention from Charles. “You will die for touching my wife.”

“Mom!” I scream, then look back at Carmine, who stands in silhouette against the starry sky. “Help!”

“Kings do not fight kings,” Charles says to him.

“Until they do.”

“I am twice over what you are but once.” He shows his rings, then sweeps his hand over the expanse of the situation. “You cannot fly over the water. You will stand there until this boat sinks, and I will rebuild my bridge, starting with your living body.”

Carmine replies, but my ears are blocked by panicked whooshing.

“Mom!” I crouch on the edge, looking into the opaque gray water.

I’m going to kill that little fuck. He’s going to beg for madness.

“Mom!”

As if called, Laro bobs to the surface with my mother tied to him like a flotation device. His limbs are flaccid underwater, but he throws his head back and—bloody-toothed, golden-skinned—he howls with power.

“Mom, no.”

Her eyes are vacant and her neck is torn open.

“Kick, witch!”

She kicks hard, like an Olympic swimmer half her age, displacing enough dead water to move them toward shore.

On the edge of the boat, I bend my body and stretch it to dive in. I have no plan, but Laro’s not just swimming away. My mother is not his personal survival kit.

The boat lurches and sinks faster. I gasp, slipping as the deck tilts. I reach for something to hold on to. Carmine catches me.

“Ready.” He’s not asking, but telling me that I am ready to be flung like a rag doll over a twenty-yard expanse of water.

I see my mother and Laro from above, kicking without a wake, Viaro looking up at me from the hidden bridge of bodies, Scout shaking on shore. I have never been so terrified, because even here, in the liminal space between life and death, physics exists, and the law of gravity will not be broken.