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T he razor-thin edge of the page sliced through Aisling’s thumb, drawing her back from where she had wandered, wading into the fog inside her own head.

She glanced down; blood was blooming from the cut in shining beads.

Those beads multiplied and grew until each joined with the one beside it, on and on until they formed a solid, crimson line that rippled as her vision swam.

The line swelled into a fat, round droplet that threatened to drip down onto the page of the book she was holding.

Still, Aisling could only stare. And stare. And st—

“Hello?” A girl stood impatiently in front of the desk, one hand on her hip and the other supporting an overfilled plastic binder. She narrowed her eyes at Aisling. “I need to use one of the computers? School project.”

Mindlessly, Aisling raised her stinging thumb to her lips and sucked.

The salty tang of blood filling her mouth threatened to drag her mind back into the dark, so she quickly pulled her hand away and tucked it between her thighs.

She looked towards the two computers, where the librarian had taped an Out of Order sign.

“Dial-up’s been down since the storm,” she said flatly.

“Encyclopedias are in the back corner.” The sullen teen huffed and rolled her eyes.

Not a Brook Isle native, Aisling recognized by the girl’s frustration with the island’s sparse amenities.

Heaving another loud sigh, she pivoted on her heel and stalked from the library.

With only one hand now, Aisling worked her way through the pile of books on the desk in front of her.

Open, turn to the title page, stamp. Property of Brook Isle Public Library .

Close, stack, repeat. Once, she would have been enthralled to dig through the boxes of donated novels.

It might have taken her three times as long to stamp them all, unable to resist reading the first few pages of each, and inevitably checking several out for herself before they could even be shelved.

Once.

Now, her body moved on autopilot so that her mind could be elsewhere—or, on those rare good days, nowhere at all. But those days were few and seemed to grow further and further between.

Briar ambled back to Aisling’s side after having finished a lap around the library.

He’d found the bowl of water she left out for him; his jowls were soaking wet when he rested his chin on her thigh.

Aisling added the book she’d just stamped to the pile then dropped her hand to scratch his head absently.

The girl had been the first visitor to the library for hours, and although Aisling was usually glad for the silence, today it seemed particularly vacuous. There was too much space in it—too much space to think, to feel.

Abruptly, Aisling rose to her feet. She had half of her shift yet to go, and two more boxes of books to stamp and sort, but the task could wait for someone else to finish.

She roughly pulled on her jacket and fished in her pocket for the keys with one hand while fumbling to clip the leash to Briar’s collar with the other.

As she moved away from the stalwart protection of the desk, she felt as though she couldn’t get out of the library fast enough.

The swell of her thoughts chased close behind, nipping at her heels until she slammed the heavy oak door against it and turned the key in the lock.

For just a moment, she leaned forward and rested her forehead against the cold, damp wood.

She waited there until the sounds of the street crept into her consciousness and slowed her racing heart.

She was fine. This was fine. This was home.

Aisling let Briar’s leash hang slack and nodded to him. “Go on,” she murmured. He obliged, towing her in the direction of the docks. He knew better by now than to lead her to the forest.

Burgeoning, ever-expanding dark clouds filled the sky and blotted out the afternoon sun.

They’d held Brook Isle in a state of perpetual twilight since they’d blown in from the west. The lightning seemed to have slowed some today, but the frequency of its strikes waxed and waned like the ebb and flow of the tide: sometimes quiet for hours, only to pick back up once again.

To open the door to Elowas was a dangerous thing, and difficult—it had been almost a month since Aisling and Rodney left the Wild, but Merak was still casting.

The echoes of their power rippled through the weakened Veil, gathering overhead and manifesting as this unending storm.

Aisling had known it was unnatural from the lightning’s first strike, when she hadn’t smelled petrichor, but spent magic.

No one else on the island would have known the difference, but to her it was as stark as day and night: one scent pleasant, the other foreboding.

The storm hung stubbornly over Brook Isle, those continuous strobing flashes relentless and without rhythm.

The first night, it was nearly impossible for the island’s residents to sleep for more than a few minutes before the next flash lit up the sky, brighter than any they’d seen before.

The old adage about lightning never striking the same place twice didn’t hold true: there was a particular patch of mossy ground near the edge of the forest that was struck time and again, over and over until the soft green pillow had burned away to nothing, leaving only hard, cracked earth.

It had calmed since its onset, but still the storm lingered.

Experts deemed it a true abnormality: a rare typhoon that had formed over the Pacific and was held in place by alternating streams of atmospheric circulation.

A handful of environmentalists from the mainland had come to conduct a study on it.

By now, it was little more than a nuisance to the island’s residents.

But to Aisling, the storm was a dark reminder of what she’d been through. Of what was still yet to come.

“Ash!” A voice called out to her from the coffee shop up the street.

Aisling’s grip tightened on Briar’s leash. She was so close to the shore, had come so close to making it through town without running into anyone. She forced a smile to her lips that hurt her cheeks. “Hey Seb, what’s up?”

Seb jogged toward her, jostling his drink and wincing when the hot coffee spilled over his fingers. He wiped his hand dry on his jeans when he stopped. “I was thinking of getting the group together to go into the city next Saturday. See some Christmas lights, maybe get dinner. Are you in?”

She could hardly fathom returning to the city. Brook Isle felt foreign enough as it was; the rest of the world felt too distant and strange to exist at all.

“I’m sorry Seb, I promised I’d help Rodney with some maintenance on the trailer.” The lie rolled off her tongue. They seemed to be coming easier and easier lately.

“Do you need help?” he asked earnestly. “I have some tools; whatever I don’t have, my dad’s probably got laying around his garage.”

Aisling shook her head, still keeping that same empty smile plastered across her face. “That’s okay. You guys go have fun. I’ll come next time.”

“Oh. Sure, okay. I’ll see you around, then.

” The disappointment was clear in Seb’s voice, and she had to turn away from his crestfallen expression.

The island was too small to avoid her friends forever, she knew, and she was running out of excuses to stay away.

She hoped that soon, they’d give up on her altogether.

When she reached the shore, Aisling let Briar off the leash to wander on his own while she picked her way over slippery rocks to stand at the waterline.

The ocean was dark, all choppy waves and churning sea foam.

Wind whipped across its surface, sending a fine, salty mist spraying into Aisling’s face.

She squinted against it. Idly, she considered that she should have been cold—freezing, even—but she wasn’t.

Wasn’t cold, wasn’t anything, really, besides grateful for the noise of the waves and the wind and the gulls.

She hadn’t looked like herself when she returned from the Wild, but a broken, feral version of the woman she remembered.

Her hair was unkempt and the clothes she’d worn for days—since Rodney had forced her to bathe and change after the battle—were wrinkled and loose on her too-thin frame.

She’d stood before the mirror, eyes unfocused, and plucked the leaves and twigs and blades of grass from her hair.

Her sweater. Her pants. Steadily, slowly.

Methodically dropping each one by one onto her bathroom floor.

She still hadn’t bothered to clean them up, instead just stepping around them to avoid standing directly in front of the mirror again.

Aisling was sure each time she passed that the woman it would reflect back would be even more unrecognizable than she had been that first morning.

Hollower, probably. She’d seen as much in Seb’s expression when he looked at her, though he tried to hide it beneath his friendly offer.

She glanced down when something rough grazed her wrist. Briar held a stick in his mouth, tail wagging and eyes hopeful.

Aisling took the stick and threw it down the beach, then tucked her hands into her jacket.

The right pocket held two folded bits of parchment: the notes Kael had written her, both times he’d invited her to meet him in his study.

Hurt shot through to her bones every time she felt them there, but she hadn’t yet been able to bring herself to remove them.

She lowered herself to sit on the ground, uncaring of the way the wetness soaked through her pants, and drew her knees in.

Mindlessly, she tossed the stick a few more times for Briar to chase after.

It wasn’t only for Kael that Aisling mourned now, but for herself.

She’d lost something far greater than the male she’d come to care for—she lost her innocence.

Her morality. She’d marked one faerie for death and had taken the life of another with her own hands.

She would never again be ignorant of the way it felt to carve a sharpened blade through flesh or the stickiness of hot blood spraying her skin or the sight of a life fading before her eyes.

She’d killed the Unseelie King. Snuffed his light out like a candle.

The memory of it had brought Aisling to her knees over the toilet, sick to her stomach night after night when she woke in a cold sweat, tangled in her sheets, crying out so loudly it hurt her own ears.

She was exhausted—mentally, physically, emotionally.

She could scarcely keep up with even the simplest tasks: shopping, cleaning, cooking, eating.

So, after a while, she stopped trying. She moved through her life like a ghost.

The events in The Cut shattered her in a way she was wholly unprepared for.

In a way that frightened her, sometimes, when she thought about it too hard: it frightened her to know what she was capable of.

It didn’t matter that she’d done it for the good of both of their realms, nor that Kael had willingly allowed her—had asked her—to do so.

The anger it left Aisling with frightened her, too.

That, she did her best to bury. It wasn’t an emotion she was well acquainted with; it felt dangerous and unkind.

A panicked yelp startled Aisling out of her thoughts and she was on her feet in an instant.

Briar was further down the beach standing frozen at the water’s edge, now barking furiously at the waves.

Hackles raised, he was so thoroughly transfixed by something in the churn that he didn’t so much as glance in her direction when she called him back to her side.

“Briar,” she tried again, louder. “Close!”

Aisling followed his line of sight to where a dark mass floated just beyond the break. It bobbed once before disappearing beneath a whitecap. She might have mistaken it for a harbor seal, but those rarely came so close to shore this time of year.

Briar’s baying sank to a low snarl, lips curled back to bare his teeth.

The sound was so uncharacteristic of the gentle dog that it brought goosebumps to prickle along Aisling’s arms. He remained rooted to the spot when she approached, even as she leaned over him to examine a dark, muddy streak that stained his white fur—a streak that, if she squinted, looked almost like a hand with long, spindly fingers had snatched at his neck.

With a heavy shudder, she hooked the leash once more onto his collar and tugged. Still, he wouldn’t budge. Aisling bent to retrieve the stick that lay forgotten at his feet, hoping she might use it to coax him away. Beside it, a print depressed the wet sand.

A bare footprint, fresh but eroding quickly with the tide.

Aisling frowned, crouching lower to brush the tip of one finger over the curved impression twice the length of her hand. It was strange, slightly misshapen with odd proportions. The thin toes pointed towards the water as if someone had waded in.

She snapped her head back up to peer into the waves once more, cold apprehension solid as a stone in her gut. There were only whitecaps and gulls now. Still, it felt as though she’d seen something she wasn’t supposed to.

The creature in the water now gone, Briar gave into her urgings and eased his defensive posture somewhat.

He kept himself as a sentinel between Aisling and the water as she towed him hurriedly away from the beach.

But even as they left the solitude of the shore behind and reached the busier main street, the sense of disquiet never lessened.

Without thinking, Aisling let her hand dip into her pocket again and felt for Kael’s notes.

She had been the Red Woman, and she had been his. As hard as she’d tried at first to reject that title, she wasn’t sure now who she was without it. She wasn’t sure she cared, either.

It had made her into someone not entirely herself.