Page 32

Thomas sat in the back of the ambulance and stared dead ahead. Directly in front of him was a lake, wide and dark, its water cut with diamond crests beneath the midday sun. To his left—beyond the road and the houses and the dunes stuffed with beach grass—was the sea, flat and blue. The Atlantic, and not the cramped and sunless Sound.

Endless, crystalline ocean. Cold, bottomless depths.

He’d failed.

His side gave a screaming ache and he shifted slightly, a wide sterile pad tugging at his torso. The paramedics had arrived on scene not long after he and Reed stumbled out of the collapsing house, smoke in their lungs and Adrian Faber hobbling between them. The EMTs had insisted Thomas be seen, in spite of his repeated assertions that he was fine.

It was just a graze.

It felt like the end of the fucking world.

That night at the Turners’ party, he’d seen Vivienne sitting in the moonlight and thought she looked just like a siren. It was nothing compared to the way she’d looked as she waded out into the the black waters, sinking beneath the glassy surface without a ripple.

I love you , she’d told him. And then she’d gone.

He’d fought after that. Hard and furious. By the time he’d splashed into the waters after her, she’d been nowhere to be found. He’d stood in a puddle up to his shins. The endless sea of black was gone. Where the night had once appeared to stretch on for miles, there was only a wall. Only a single earthworm, wriggling in the dirt.

All around him, the house gave a horrible shudder. Dirt fell around him in clods.

Walsh , he’d heard Reed shout. We have to go!

He’d spent enough time working on houses with his uncle to know when the foundation was compromised. A basement flood like this—in a house by the sea, where the earth was being slowly eroded—it wouldn’t take much to bring it down.

He’d slammed bodily into the wall. More dirt came around him. Fetid water kicked up around his feet.

He’d done it again. Again, ignoring Reed’s continued entreaties for him to leave.

He’d never been able to tear open the skies. That was Colton Price’s forte. He could only step through an existing opening—feel that stale, suffocating pop of nothingness, and then emerge onto the other side. But things were magnified here—amplified by the pulsing of a ley line, deep beneath the ground. Faber had said as much, as he’d coughed up spiders in the living room.

If Vivienne could pluck something clean out of her head, who was to say he couldn’t force himself through the sky? He’d barreled into the wall again. The water was ice around his ankles. It lapped furiously at his feet. He slammed his shoulder into the dirt as skulls went toppling from their necropolis, plunking into the shallow water like pale white boulders.

Again. Again. His body screamed for him to stop.

There’d been a great, buckling crack—the sound of the house falling down around his ears.

He didn’t know when he quit. When Christian Price began howling, maybe. Or when Reed descended on him like a madman, cursing so violently in his ear that it rattled him back to awareness.

Now he watched the assembled firefighters stand by and monitor the building’s collapse. It sat in a heap of wood and glass, the shingled roof gone concave. Torn to the studs, just like he’d promised. Nearby, Philip Farrow was being loaded into the back of a police car.

It didn’t bring him any satisfaction.

In the front yard, being gingerly prodded at by paramedics, knelt Christian Price. Thomas had watched him desiccate, down in the root cellar. It all happened so quick. Vivienne went under, and the elder Price began to laugh—a deep, triumphant sound—holding his hands out before his face like he expected a parcel full of secrets to drop into his arms.

That hadn’t been what happened. Time seemed to warp, stretching around him like sunlight refracted through a glass. His fingers thinned, spindling like bone. Threads of white shot through his hair, his cheeks going sunken, until he’d looked like a living, laughing skeleton, hands still held in open supplication before the dark.

He’d reminded Thomas of his own father then—flayed lean by guilt, frantically muttering Mary’s Canticle at vespers: from this day on, all generations will call me blessed . Now Christian Price groveled in the grass, his hands upright in his lap. His mouth moved over and over in a single, muttered phrase. It was the only thing he’d said in hours.

“I’ve seen it. I’ve seen it. Did you see it?”

“Walsh.”

He glanced up. Reed stood alongside Adrian Faber, both of them looking as exhausted as he felt.

“There’s a detective here. He wants us to go down to the station for questioning.”

Thomas thought about this. Philip’s mantra rang in his head: Keep it in the family. The Farrow family was dashed to pieces. There wasn’t anything left of it to keep.

“What are you going to do?”

Reed shrugged. “Go, I guess. I don’t care—I’ll tell them everything.”

“Think they’ll believe you?”

In the yard, Christian Price began to yell as a weary-looking officer tugged him onto his feet. “I’ve seen it! I’m telling you, I’ve seen it !”

Reed grimaced. “Maybe,” he said. “But probably not.”

He didn’t bother asking if Thomas was okay. They both knew he wasn’t.

“Walsh,” he began, and then clamped his mouth shut. He scowled down at him. Beneath his eyes, the bruises had begun to yellow. He sighed thinly and tried again: “She made her choice. You couldn’t have stopped her.”

And that was that. It was all the goodbye he got. It was, he supposed, probably more of a goodbye than he deserved. Thomas watched them head for Reed’s Jeep, feeling nothing. When they were gone, he fell back to looking out at the water.

He was so lost in its depths, he hardly noticed when a car pulled up and Colton Price stepped out.

They met eyes over the sleek silver roof. Colton gave him a single curt nod, and Thomas felt an impossible squeeze of hope. The back passenger door clicked slowly open, catching in the light.

Out slid Vivienne Farrow, still dressed in his T-shirt.

He hopped from the back of the ambulance, not caring that he was lumbering—lurching, really—the pain in his side searing in protest. He ran, and so did Vivienne. They met in the sandy middle of the street, her arms flinging around his neck, him bracketing her middle, until she was lifted entirely off the ground, her limber dancer’s legs hanging against his.

He didn’t know how long it was before he finally lowered her back down. A minute. An hour. He stared down into her face, breathing hard. She smiled up at him. Her eyes were bright, burnished gold in the light. It stole the breath from his lungs.

Say it back , she signed, a mirror of what he’d said to her that night in his bedroom. I’ll help. “I love you, V-i-v-i-e-n-n-e.”

“I do love you,” he said solemnly. “Since day one.”

And he meant it.