Step by halting step, I did. She caught my hands and drew me down, drew me against her. Her heart beat erratically. Her skin was cold and sharp with salt. She smelled of sea and stone, and there was nothing soft in her, but she held me, and I wept, and my tears made channels in the salt.
“Little bird,” she said. “I thought you would be safe.”
“I wasn’t,” I said. “He threw me in the water. You weren’t there, and he tried to kill me. I don’t know how I didn’t drown.” Blame was a thorn in every word. I couldn’t help it. I knew why she had stayed, and still I hated her for it. I hated her for choosing Sophie over me.
“Neither do I,” she said. “But you didn’t drown. You lived, and you’ll live now. Both my beautiful girls will live.” She said it like she was making a promise to herself.
“The Six-Wing took Sophie,” I told her.
She stiffened. “No,” she said. “No, no, no, that can’t—she can’t—”
“She said it wouldn’t hurt her,” I hurriedly added. “She said it needed both of us.”
“Yes,” she said with some relief. “It needs you both. But once it has you both, it’s done.”
“But we can stop it,” I said. “Sophie and I. If we’re together, we can destroy this place.”
I sat up, pulling away from her. She pressed her palms to my cheeks, her smile fragile.
“I have dreamed of you a thousand times,” she said. “I wish that you had stayed away. But I know that you can do this.”
“I will,” I said with all the boldness I could muster. “And then we’ll go home. You and me—and Sophie.”
“I can’t go home,” she said. “I wish I could, little bird, but there isn’t enough of me left.”
My eyes had adjusted in the dark. And so when I looked at her this time, I saw what I hadn’t before. Broken, ragged black wings, growing from her back. They were grafted to the salt, vanishing beneath it. Blood stained the wall around them, and fresh wounds wept where the skin had opened.
“This place gets inside of you,” she whispered. Her pupils were pinpricks; her irises filled her whole eyes. “It gets inside of you, and you’ll never scrape it all out.”
32
I STOOD ON the gray rock, the taste of salt on my lips where I had pressed a kiss against my mother’s cheek. Live, she’d told me. Please just live. But I hadn’t wanted my last words to her to be a lie. I love you, I’d said instead.
Abby held my phone now, recording; Liam held my hand. We faced the ramshackle village, and we steeled ourselves one last time as we started forward.
“It’s quiet,” Abby murmured. “Not to be cliché, but—”
“They don’t need to come for us,” I said. “We’re coming to them, remember?”
“If it’s what they want, doesn’t that mean it’s a bad idea?” Liam asked.
“There isn’t a good idea in this scenario.”
There was a shadow in the doorway of the church. I expected wings and empty eyes, but it was a man, his shoulders slightly hunched and his face obscured by the dark. We walked forward.
“We can’t let them take me,” I said. “I don’t know exactly what happens if they do. But I have to make it inside with my will intact.”
“We’ve got you,” Abby assured me.
“All the way to the end,” Liam added. He squeezed my hand. For a moment I saw, as vividly as if it was truly laid out in front of me, the future that might have been. The future that belonged to Sophia Hayes: a summer of endless sunlight, of hard work, of evenings learning Liam Kapoor by heart. A future flung open to possibility, hers to choose. And she’d choose him. They’d travel, drink coffee in cafes, wander side streets, hike trails. They’d go everywhere until they found the here they wanted to stay in, and having seen the world, they’d build their own.
But I was Sophia Novak, and my future was not one of endless possibility. It was as unyielding as the rock beneath our feet. It was the church, and it was what lay inside, and there was nothing else beyond it that I could see. That I could even hope for.
We’d reached the church. It seemed larger than it had before, grander—and the shadows within it were far too deep. The man in the doorway stepped forward. William Hardcastle’s echo looked at me and smiled.