Page 134 of The Sister's Curse

The Kings of Warsaw Creek were knee-deep in water.

That song—the song of thunder rolled over me, through me. I let go of my thin protestations.Fuck that.Fuck what I was supposed to be doing, all the rules I was required to follow. I wasn’t a cop anymore. That authority had been stripped from me. I came to this place, this haunted, sacred place, not as a cop. Not as Nick’s fiancée. Not as my father’s daughter. But as myself, something dark and terrible, and powerful beyond all the identities given to me by men.

I was. Alone…Iwas.

Water swirled around my knees, and the Rusalka whispered in my ear, “Give in.”

“What are you?” I asked.

“I have always been here. I wore Dana’s skin for a time. I would wear yours if you’d let me.”

She whispered to me of the forest, of this land I belonged to. I was what I had always known, deep in my dark dreams in the middle of the night, when my breath caught in my throat. I was anelemental power of my own, and I decided what I would do. I was beyond the judgment of these men.

But they were not beyond my judgment.

I cast the shotgun into the water. I had no need of it. There was nothing stopping what was coming next, a wall of floodwater, full of debris, bearing down on us. Roaring water swept down over the island, obliterating Dana’s grave.

I inhaled, and the Rusalka stepped into my skin as easily as if she stepped into a dress. Water washed around my waist and swallowed the men before me. I was buoyant, not touching the earth. I splayed my hands in the current, approaching the men. The floodwater caught me, roaring, pulling me down and under.

A gunshot rang out in the water. Someone screamed.

I laughed, with Rusalka’s voice.

I was suspended in the maelstrom. It was silent here, beneath the water’s surface; I could hear only my own heartbeat. Sliding around in the current like an eel, I dodged the branches of an uprooted tree. There was no fighting it; there was only surrendering to the black water sweeping down. At that moment, it was a greater force than all of us.

I was not afraid. Rusalka had made me almost boneless, twisting my body in the current, around tree branches, past the debris of a wrecked boat. Rocks scraped my cheek. My fingers curled into claws slashing into the dark, where the water was unexpectedly warm. I was a passenger in this, her element.

Sumner was clinging to a piece of flotsam. He saw me.

Face twisted in rage, he lifted a gun in his cuffed hands. Dimly, I realized he must have taken Jasper’s gun from him.

He fired.

I reached out to embrace him. I dragged him down, down intothe depths, feeling his pulse under my fingers wrapped around his neck. I thrilled in feeling his muted scream, the vibration of bubbles, the thumping of blood in his throat. I thrilled in feeling him still as water flooded into his lungs, making him heavy as stone.

—

A green flash washed over me. I remembered my mom and me, coming up against that polluter in the forest all those years ago.

I stared at the interloper. He was in his twenties, thin and stringy, his hands blackened with grease. My mom stood before him with a handgun, and his fingers twitched as he lifted them.

“What should we do with him?” Mom asked me. “Should we let him go?”

I looked at the oil slick staining the ground. A little milk snake slithered out of the puddle, gasping.

That infuriated me. I plucked the snake from puddle and tried to clean it off with my shirt.

“No.” I said it with the haughty authority of royalty passing sentence upon a peasant. I was queen of these woods, after all. “He deserves to die.”

Mom peeled her lips back and smiled at that man.

She gestured toward the chemicals with the muzzle of the gun.

“Drink it,” she ordered.

He blinked. “Are you crazy? I can’t drink that.”

She pulled the hammer back with an ominous click. “Drink. It.”