They scanned the garden with a horrible, cunning intelligence and when they caught sight of me, I wanted to sink into oblivion.
Despair overwhelmed me as I cowered before the creature.
I watched as its jaw unhinged like a snake, readying to devour me whole.
Unable to run, unable to move at all, I closed my eyes, praying for a quick end.
But nothing happened.
When I opened my eyes, the statue had returned to its spot, nothing more than stone.
“It was just the poisons,” I tried to reassure myself. I breathed in more of the laurel.
Magenta blood rained down from the trees, staining my flesh. I could feel the hot substance sink into my skin, tainting my insides.
“I don’t want to be here anymore,” I murmured as the pond began to boil, festering with swarms of unseen beasts. A strange hum reverberated through the clearing and I swore I could see the air around me shape into waves.
I fell to the ground, unable to stop the shivers racing through me.
It was cold, so very cold. Wind whipped by me, laced with snowflakes. They grimaced at me, their impossible faces filled with rage. The trees lashed out their arms, like drowning men flailing to be saved.
I tucked my knees up to my chest, trying to make myself as small and unnoticeable as possible. The wind’s howling stopped, though the trees still danced in its madness.
Then there was a new sound.
Footsteps approaching from behind. Soft as a silken whisper, they tiptoed through the grass, making their way closer to me.
I scrunched my eyes shut.
If this was my end, I did not want to witness it.
Cool fingers cupped my cheek and a gentle voice murmured soothing sounds of comfort.
“Oh, come here, dear heart.” The voice was as familiar as the hands that scooped me up, stroking my hair with fingers long dead.
With an incoherent cry of gratitude, I threw my arms around the ghostly form of Eulalie and wept.
“You’re not real. You can’t be real,” I repeated, my cries muffled in her layers of nightclothes. Eulalie had died in the middle of the night, falling off the cliffs beyond Highmoor and smashing into the surf below.
She looked like a ghost, soft edged and illuminated with an inner glow. Her coloring had been drained away and she existed only in shades of gray, flickering oddly in the now-moonlit forest, like a cuttlefish struggling to remain camouflaged as a predator approached.
“I’m as real as you need me to be,” she said, tightening her hold on me.
My heart pounded in my chest so hard that it felt bruised and raw.
“Eulalie isn’t a ghost,” I protested. “She’s been in the Brine for years.”
She cupped my face with mottled hands, silencing me. “I hated being trapped anywhere in life. Why should death be any different?”
Her easy smile took my breath away.
I’d forgotten how beautiful she was.
Little bits of memory fluttered in my mind, almost remembered but flitting away before I could fully grasp them.
“Oh, my littlest sister,” she cooed, pressing a kiss to the top of my head. “What a mess you’ve gotten yourself into.”
It felt so good to be held, to be comforted like this. I hadn’t realized how crushed and wilted I’d become until my sister wrapped her arms around me. I nestled closer to her, my forehead against her neck, as I would have when she was alive, when I’d been so much smaller.
The memory of this sensation nearly swept me away, a riptide pulling across time.
I knew what this was supposed to feel like.
I’d done this before and I remembered it…almost.
“Why can’t I remember you? Why can’t I remember that year?” I bit my lip. “Why am I the only one who sees what I see?”
Her sigh was long and soft, the gentle swell of sea-foam reaching the shore. “A lot of things happened back then. None of them particularly pleasant.”
“Tell me,” I insisted. “Please.”
She twirled her finger around one of her loose ringlets, carefully considering her words. “There was a very cruel woman who wanted to reach out and hurt others as much as she’d been hurt herself…and she used the gods to do it.”
“The gods?” I echoed. “That’s who I wanted to talk to. That’s why I did all this.” I gestured to the spilled flask of tea, the now-crushed laurel leaves. “I need to find out more about why we’re connected. Why I can do all…this.” I waved my arm about the clearing. Rainbow prisms as large and as tangible as butterflies danced in the air. “Are we…are we somehow related to—”
“Oh, littlest sister,” she interrupted. “There’s more than one way for a god to touch you.” She tapped at my forehead meaningfully.
It was as though I’d been peering through a pair of binoculars set improperly. The world had been blurry and indistinct until Eulalie reached out to adjust the focus and suddenly everything crystalized into place. The images were crisp and sharpened with color.
I saw everything.
I remembered everything.
My mind felt like a sketchbook caught in the wind, flipping through pages of the past, each memory an illustration drawn out in my own hand.
Papa remarrying.
Eulalie’s funeral.
Piles of slippers, sparkling and lustrous at first, then tattered to sad bits of spent leather.
Rosalie and Ligeia, their eyes frosted shut, mottled blue, and never to wake.
Bare feet spinning on point, over and over, without music, without partner…
I gasped as the last page of the book was revealed.
Her.
The wraith.
Black tears streaming down her face even as her lips curled back, making us dance to her own tune.
“Kosamaras,” I whispered.
Eulalie nodded sadly.
Kosamaras.
Sister to the goddess of the night. Harbinger of nightmares and madness. The bringer of delusions, illusions, tricks of the mind, and despair.
I had not been touched by the divine.
I’d been assaulted by the uncanny.
Kosamaras had taken my sisters and I captive, holding our thoughts in her twisted hands, making us see what she wanted, what we feared.
Eulalie’s grip on me tightened, her pale eyes impossibly sad. “You don’t need to remember this, Verity. Some things aren’t worth it.”
“But…” I sorted through the memories. The night of the fire. Papa’s death. Cassius saving me, seeing me when no one else could. “It ended, didn’t it? It’s over. Annaleigh, she saved us. Somehow…Why am I still seeing things?”
She pressed her lips together. “You’ve always seen things differently. It’s what makes you such a good artist. But when Kosamaras touched you…” She tapped at the center of my forehead again. “It opened something up. Something that didn’t go back together as it should. That’s why you’re here now.” She glanced back through the woods as if she could make out the glowering shape of Chauntilalie. “He chose you.”
“I know,” I confirmed. “Do you know what he’s trying to do? What it is he wants from me—from my children?”
The words felt so wrong. I didn’t have children. Not yet.
“It doesn’t matter. You just need to get out. Go back to Highmoor. You can’t stay here, Verity. You can’t stay with these people.”