“Yes.”
Again his mouth parts open, searching for words, for the right question to make this all make sense. “What about the third one—the third sister?”
“Hazel,” I answer for him.
“Where is she? Whose body has she stolen?”
“I don’t know.”
“You haven’t seen her yet?”
“No.”
“But she’s out there somewhere?”
“Yes.”
“And she hasn’t killed anyone yet?”
I shake my head. “Not yet.”
“So there’s still time to find her and stop her.”
“There’s no stopping them,” I answer.
“Have you tried?”
I can’t meet his eyes. “No. It’s pointless to try.” I think about my encounter with Gigi in the boathouse. I had thought—foolishly—maybe I could talk to her, the real her. Aurora. Maybe some part of her was still human, still had a beating heart that would be tired of the killing. But Lon interrupted us. And I sense she’s too far gone anyway. My words would never be enough.
Bo drops his palm from the back of his neck. And I can see in his eyes that he’s starting to believe me. “Fuck, Penny,” he says, standing up and taking a step toward me. “So Lon and Davis were right? They do have a Swan sister locked in that boathouse?”
I nod.
“And Olivia . . . or Marguerite—whatever her name is—is trying to kill me?”
“She’s already slipped into your mind. She can make you see things that aren’t there, feel things that aren’t real.”
“When I saw her,” he says, “in the water . . . waiting for me. It felt like I needed her, like I’d die if I didn’t get to her. Like . . .” He swallows back the words, choking on them.
“Like you loved her?” I finish for him.
“Yeah.” His eyes find mine.
“She can convince you that you’ve never loved anyone quite so much or ever will again.”
He clenches his fists together at his sides and I watch the motion, his forearms flexing, his temples pulsing.
“And then you were there,” he says, recounting the moment when I jumped into the ocean after him. “I could hear you but I couldn’t focus on you. You seemed so far away. But then I felt your hands. You were right in front of me.” He looks up, the darkest centers of his eyes like the darkest depths of the ocean. “And then you kissed me.”
“I . . .” My voice feels strangled in my throat. “I had to stop you.”
A beat of silence. My heart stumbles, catches, restarts again.
“After that,” he says, “I didn’t feel her calling me anymore. I still don’t.”
“Maybe we broke her hold on you,” I say, my voice feeling small.
“You broke her hold on me.”
Words tangle up on my tongue. All the things I want to say. “I needed to bring you back. I couldn’t let you go; I couldn’t lose you. I couldn’t let . . .” The weight of my honesty rattles the very center of my ribs, my stomach, the place just behind my eyes. “I couldn’t let her have you.”
I don’t allow myself to look away from him—I need him to speak, to wash over my words with his own. In his eyes, a storm waits at the edges. His hand lifts, and his fingers slide up the ridge of my cheekbone and behind my ear. The sensation of his fingertips against my skin unweaves the stone knitted together at the base of my heart. I close my eyes briefly then open them again, a craving rising up inside me, pure and uncorrupt. He pulls me forward, and I pause only a feather’s width from his mouth. I look into his eyes, trying to root myself in the moment. And then he kisses me like he needs me to root him here too.
His lips are warm and his fingertips cold. All at once I am wrapped up in him: his heart battering just beneath his chest, his hands in my hair, his mouth searching my lower lip. He is everywhere, filling my lungs and the space between each breath. And I feel myself falling, tumbling like a star dropping from the sky and spinning toward Earth. My heart stretches outward, becomes light and jittery.
This moment—this boy—could tear me apart and upend everything. But in the heat of the cottage, wind rattling the glass in the windows, rain pelting the roof, with our skin flecked with salt water, I don’t care. I let his hands roam my chilled flesh and my fingers weave up the back of his neck. I don’t want to be anywhere else. I only want him. Him.
Love is an enchantress—devious and wild.
It sneaks up behind you, soft and gentle and quiet, just before it slits your throat.
* * *
I wake on the hardwood floor beside the fireplace, Bo asleep next to me, his arm folded over my hip bone. He is breathing softly against my hair. My eyes skirt across the living room, remembering where I am: his cottage. The fire has turned to coals, all the logs burned down, so I shimmy from beneath his arm—his fingers twitching—and slide a fresh log into the fireplace, pushing it through the coals. It takes only a moment for the flames to reignite.
I cross my legs and run my fingers through my hair. I smell like him, his T-shirt still against my skin. I know I can’t leave him alone now. Marguerite will try again. And I won’t let her have him. This thing I feel for him is working its way into my bones, like water through cracks in my surface. When it freezes, it will either shatter me into a million pieces or make me stronger.
I pick up one of the books sitting on the floor next to me, flipping through the pages. There are notes in the margins, paragraphs highlighted, corners dog-eared. The ink is faded and smeared in places.
“I think they were your father’s books,” Bo says. His eyes are open, but he’s still lying on the floor, watching me. He must have heard me sit up.
“Why do you think that?”
“They were purchased from a bookstore in town. And there’s a name in the front of that one.” I flip back to the front cover where a piece of paper sits tucked into the crease. Handwritten with black ink on the paper is the name JOHN TALBOT. It was a book he had special ordered, or maybe put on hold. And an employee wrote his name on a slip of paper until he came to pay for it. “Your father was John Talbot, right?”
“Yeah.” Beneath the paper is a folded receipt from the Olive Street Tea & Bookhouse. It’s dated June fifth, three years earlier. Only a week before he disappeared.
“He must have been researching the Swan sisters,” Bo says. “Maybe he was looking for a way to stop them.”
A scattering of memories crack through me, of the night I saw him moving down to the dock in the dark. The night he vanished. The rain fell sideways, and the wind ripped shingles from the roof of the house. But he would never return to repair them.
He had been collecting these books all along, in secret, looking for a way to end the Swan season.
“Are you all right?” Bo sits up, creases formed between his brows.
“Fine.” I close the cover of the book and set it back on the floor. “And you’ve read most of them?” I ask.
He nods, stretching upright.
“And what did you find?”
“Mostly speculation about witches and curses—nothing definitive.”
“Anything about how to end a curse?”