lifted her. A moment later, she was sinking beneath the cool surface, the sheet unwrapping,
blood staining the goat’s milk in veins of pink. It looked like a strawberry sundae cup, the
kind with the wooden spoon.
“Don’t touch the milk!” Dawes was shouting.
“I’m trying to keep her from drowning!” Turner barked back. He had his hands cradled
around her head.
“I’m all right,” said Alex. “Let me go.”
“You’re both nuts,” said Turner, but she felt his grip ease.
Alex let herself sink beneath the surface. The cool of the milk seemed to seep straight
through her skin, coating the pain. She held her breath as long as she could. She wanted to
stay below, feel the milk cocoon around her. But eventually she let her toes find the bottom of the crucible and pushed back to the surface.
When she emerged, Dawes and Turner were both shouting at her. She must have stayed
beneath the surface a little too long.
“I’m not drowning,” she said. “I’m fine.”
And she was. There was still pain but it had receded, her thoughts felt sharper—and the
milk was changing too, becoming clearer and more watery.
Turner looked like he might be sick, and Alex thought she understood why. Magic
created a kind of vertigo. Maybe the sight of a girl on the brink of death descending into a
bathtub and then emerging whole and healthy seconds later was just one spin too many on
this ride.
“I need to get to the station,” he said. “I—”
He turned and strode out the door.
“I don’t think he likes us, Dawes.”
“It’s okay,” Dawes said, picking up the heap of Alex’s bloodied clothes. “We had too
many friends already.”
Dawes left to make Alex something to eat, claiming she’d be famished once the reversion was complete. “Do not drown while I’m gone,” she said, and left the door to the
armory open behind her.
Alex lay back in the crucible, feeling her body change, the pain leaching out of her, and
something—the milk or whatever it had become in Dawes’s enchantment—filling her up.
She heard music coming from the tinny sound system, the sound so staticky it was hard to
pick out a tune.
She dunked her head beneath the surface again. It was quiet here, and when she opened
her eyes it was like looking through mist, watching the last traces of milk and magic fade.
A pale shape loomed before her, came into focus. A face.
Alex sucked in a breath, choking down water. She burst through the surface, coughing
and sputtering, arms crossed over her breasts. The Bridegroom’s reflection stared up at her
from the water.
“You can’t be here,” she said. “The wards—”
“I told you,” his reflection said, “wherever water pools or gathers, we can speak now.
Water is the element of translation. It is the mediary.”
“So you’re going to be showering with me?”
North’s cold face didn’t change. She could see the dark shore behind him in the reflection. It looked different than it had the first time, and she remembered what Dawes
had said about the different borderlands. She must not be looking into Egypt this time—or
whatever version of Egypt she had traveled to when she’d crossed the Nile. But Alex
could see the same dark shapes on the shore, human and inhuman. She was glad they couldn’t reach her here.
“What did you do to me at Tara’s apartment?” North said. He sounded haughtier than
ever, his accent more clipped.
“I don’t know what to tell you,” said Alex, because it felt truer than most things.
“There wasn’t really time to ask for permission.”
“But what did you do? How did you do it?”
Stay with me.
“I don’t really know.” She didn’t understand any of it. Where the ability had come from. Why she could see things no one else could. Was it buried somewhere in her bloodline? In the genes of the father she’d never met? Was it in her grandmother’s bones?
The Grays had never dared approach in Estrea Stern’s house, the candles lit at the windows. If she’d lived longer, would she have found a way to protect Alex?