what? They’re my team. They’re here for me. I hadn’t considered that they might’ve thought I was dead. I didn’t consider them at all. I sit down at our makeshift floor table and cross my legs meditation style. “Come. Let me start from the beginning.”
Ryan was dead.
“I heard his neck snap, but I didn’t know who it was until he hit the ground. Everyone was screaming. Police sirens were getting closer. I was ready to give up.
“I figured, what the hell is the point? Maddy was screaming and drunk. She wouldn’t give me the Venus pearl. Until the merrows came.”
I pull down the zipper of one of my pockets and pull out a thin silver chain. A fat, smooth pink pearl hangs on a tiny hoop. “My mother stole it from Shelly, the oracle, a long time ago. I gave it to Maddy as a gift before I knew what it was. What I was.
“That’s when Gwen found me. She figured out how to find the oracle.”
“That I did.” Gwen smirks. “So we stole—what was it?”
“A bicycle,” I say. “We went to the train.”
“How did you know where to go?” Kurt glances between me and Gwen.
“Scrying, my dear Kurtomathetis,” Gwen answers sweetly. “How do you know how to do that?” Kurt leans forward.
“I know many things.” Gwen leans forward, too, just to show how unintimidated she is by him. “What would you have done? Threaten the pretty necklace with your sword until it answered you?”
“Easy,” I say, putting hands between them. “Gwen held the necklace up to the map, and it hit right on Central Park like a magnet. Shelly was there, waiting for us near Turtle Pond.”
“What did she look like?” Layla asks.
“Like a blobby fish,” Gwen says, shivering. “Drooping and wrinkled. I had no idea oracles were so hideous.”
“They aren’t,” Kurt says softly. “Not all of them.”
“Shelly—don’t laugh at her name, you guys. She’s cool, okay? Said she was the youngest of the remaining five oracle sisters. That’s why she’s got the fewest powers. She was talking in this rhyme, all vague. Why are supernatural people so vague?”
“When you live forever,” Kurt says, “you get bored. Riddles, games, quests. It’s part of our life.”
“O-kay.” Layla’s eyeing the Venus pearl spinning in my hand. “If you gave it back to her, why do you still have it?”
“She gifted it to me.” I shrug. I wonder what would happen if I offered it to Layla. Would she throw it back in my face? I wish I’d never given it to someone else first. “Something about my bravery and good looks.”
“I bet,” she says drily.
Kurt nods to Gwen. “And what happened to your hands?” As a reflex, Gwen balls them into tiny fists behind her back. “Elias showed up,” I say.
“Gwen’s ex-fiancé Elias?” Layla asks. “Champion of the East whatever. I thought he disappeared.”
“He was dead,” I correct. Before they can interrupt me again, “I’ve never been around dead bodies, but I’ll never forget the smell. Bits of his skin were falling off, but he was still strong. He spoke in Nieve’s voice.”
They’re silent. Nieve, the silver witch of my nightmares.
“I recognized the voice from my dreams.” I push my plate of food away. “I’d swear on anything that Nieve was the one pulling the strings. Can she do that?”
“I wasn’t alive when Nieve was at court,” Kurt says. “The king banished her after she killed the queen and led the rebellion against the throne. They say she was able to make you see things—cruel things, nightmares. Until your mind was weak enough to control.”
His eyes fall back on Gwen. “How did you get rid of Elias?”
Gwen lifts up her chin defiantly. She holds out her palms to show us the black scabs of burn marks. “I took Triton’s dagger and drove it into him.”
He shrinks back, surprised. “Oh…”
We’re quiet for a moment. Gwen gets up and walks away from us. She leans on the side of the ship and watches the mountains of clouds left behind in our wake.
Layla rests her hand on my knee. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?”
I place my hand on top of hers but don’t answer.
Kurt is staring at Gwen. “Is there anything else?”
Gwen with her smoke-bending magic fingers. In the Sea Court, the merfolk who still have traces of magic have to register with the court and king. The merfolk fear magic the way humans fear lunatics with guns. They think it’s unpredictable and unreliable. Gwen is by no means registered. After everything she’s