if her thoughts were mere delirium, if everything he’d told her of his efforts, and her bleeding, and the baby at her breast was the truth and not a lie. But the pistol and the bullet couldn’t be denied.
“Was this for me?” she asked. “You’d take me back to Grayport or shoot me?”
“Molly, please. Don’t—”
She fired.
Through the billow, as the kickback knocked her off the edge, she saw the bullet make a ripple in his shirt, near his heart. He was dead before his face ever registered the shot.
Molly fell and hit the water. Night exploded in the splash. She swatted at the surface but the creek rolled her under and the noise, the sound of everything alive, disappeared. Cold crushed her, and her skin shrank tight around her bones.
She didn’t know if she was sinking. She was moving. She was gone. She didn’t try to breathe but let the agony embrace her. Dizzy and alone, she waited for the end.
Cora, Molly thought, seeing colors in the dark.
The colors terrified her, causing her to kick and try to swim. The water dipped and corkscrewed, twisting up her gown. She did her best to right herself and fought the urge to gasp until at last she cleared the surface, coughing but alive. The air sent vivifying tingles through her veins, but she was tired and the cold drained the spirit from her arms. The current was increasing as it barreled down a slope. She caught a branch half-mired in the mud along the shore, but her weight tugged it free. She held it for support.
The creek opened wide and seemed to spill across a plain. The current pulled her sideways. The branch kept her up. She briefly felt the ground, firm enough to stand upon, but suddenly the water churned downward like a mudslide and Molly and the branch flowed toward a river. It was calmer in appearance, oddly white beneath the moon, massive and engorged and strewn with tiny flowers.
Molly held tight. The river took control. She imagined it would take her to the sea unopposed, and parts of her desired that, and others stayed afloat.
Chapter Twenty-Four
And then I found her, Tom thought, unbelievably alive.
He’d distrusted her for months, but this was something new. The story she’d related and the plainness of the telling, all the facts lining up with terrible precision—she was either being honest and entrusting him with everything, or lying so atrociously he couldn’t bear to think it. She was General Bell’s daughter. She had shot her own brother. He believed it, every word, in spite of every reason not to.
The vision of her clinging to the branch wouldn’t leave him so he followed it back, reversing course up the Antler, trying to think of where a creek might have merged with the river. She must have floated for hours, if she had started near Kinship, in water so cold it had weakened him in minutes. But if anything was surer than her talent for disaster, it was her lightning-proof, powder-charged talent for escape.
She’d told the story start to finish with enough vivid detail that Tom was left to focus most keenly on the gaps. She had described John Summer and their private conversations but had naturally withheld specifics of their intimacy. He pictured them together: Molly’s mouth pressed to John’s, Molly’s breasts, Molly’s hips. Once he started, it was difficult to stop. Molly’s knees.
She’d described her brother’s looks but not their physical resemblance. She had General’s Bell’s nose—did Nicholas, as well? Tom was led against his will to visualize the child, little Cora, like a newborn Molly, light as fleece. What had taken her? The potion, or the waters of the creek?
He thought of the gun in Molly’s hand and wished he could have fired it.
“You’re sure your brother is dead?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“He might have lived. I was shot—”
“I didn’t miss,” Molly said. “I shot him in the heart.”
She focused on a mouse hole opposite the bed, a crevice at the bottom of the wall near the corner. She’d been looking at the hole when there was light enough to see it. Now the twilight hues had hidden it from sight and still Molly stared, disconcertingly immobile. He could just see her face outlined beside him. If she breathed, he couldn’t hear it.
“What of John Summer?”
Molly shook her head in weary resignation. “Nicholas drowned a man for threatening us. He must have killed John.”
“Your baby,” Tom said, catching on the words. He blotted out the thought