the way he’s pulling on my wrist, almost hard enough to dislocate it. He looks down at it and remorse dawns on his face as he slowly releases it, then rubs the red welt his fingers have left.
“I’m sorry, kid.”
His fingers are rough and misshapen. There are sore-looking red circles there, popped blisters, and scabs all over his palms. I pull my hand away from him. “Are you a ghost, too?”
“I’m a guide,” he says.
“A guide for what?”
“I took your momma across. You were a kid then, so you don’t remember.”
“Of course I remember. You don’t think I remember my own mom dying?”
“Sorry, kid. Anyway, that was my job, taking her across. And it’s my job to take you across, too. When you’re ready. And you ain’t ready.”
I stare at him hard. “You … you …” And suddenly I remember it all. My little fishing spot on the river. I went out there every day during the summers. My mom bought me that expensive new pole for my seventh birthday, and she would pack lemonade for me in a blue cooler and tell me to bring home a shark. And then one day that boy showed up, that funny-talking kid. He said he was waiting on a girl. My mother died three weeks later, and I never went back to that fishing spot again. “That—that was you?”
“You remember me?”
“I remember you catching all the fish in the river and letting them go. I was so angry.” And then a realization hits me. “You … guided my mother? To where?”
“Across the river. To the place of the dead.” He thunks on his temple as if to say Where’s my head? “She—you—you are both river guardians. Royalty among the river dwellers. You probably didn’t know that. She didn’t know much about it, either, when I guided her.”
“Wh-what?” I can’t say anything more.
“The water is no place for final resting. It’s always moving, too volatile. People who meet their deaths on or near the river need someone to guide them somewhere quiet, safe. Across the river. That’s where you and your mother come in.”
“And you? You are a guardian, too?”
He shakes his head. “My only job is to fetch the guardians and do what I can to protect them. I don’t have your power. You have great magical powers, Kiandra.”
I raise my eyebrows. “Like what?”
He chuckles. “Kiandra, you have no idea what you can do.”
I just sit there, numb. The idea is crazy. It’s crazy enough to be seeing these ghosts, but that my mother and I could have powers, could be tied to the water in that way? Nuts. “I think you have the wrong person. I do not have powers. I can’t even put on a wet suit. And I nearly drowned in the river. Twice,” I say, but all the while I’m thinking about my visions. About how my mother always loved the water so much, and how her skin was always clammy and smelled damp. How when she finally disappeared into the river forever, despite the horror of that event, a small part of me said, Well, of course she did.
He comes in close and sits on the bank next to me. He smells like pine needles and something spicy-sweet. “Do you need me to prove it to you?”
I nod. “That would be nice, since it’s kind of impossible to believe.”
“You didn’t have to rent a kayak to go across the river, kid,” he says.
“What? Are you saying I can part the waters? Or walk on water?” I joke.
He smiles. “Which would you prefer?”
My jaw drops. “I was only kidding.”
But his face never changes. I get the suspicion that he’s serious. “But you don’t want to go over there,” he says. “If you’re over there, you ain’t alive. And I’m trying to keep you alive. So don’t try to go over there again, okay?”
“If I have such control over water, then why did you have to save me from drowning twice?”
“Because you don’t know how to use your abilities, kid. Until you do, you can’t protect yourself from nothing,” he says, shaking his head. “You are Mistress of the Waters. That’s no small thing.”
“Mistress of the Waters?” I say the words, tasting them.
“Yeah.” Then he mutters, “Pretty much the sorriest Mistress of the Waters I’ve ever come across.”
I cross my arms. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
“I’ve brought dozens of your ancestors across. But you are … different. I’m not supposed to take you across. Not yet. But damned if