The Wicked Deep

by Shea Ernshaw

  “How did you get her up here?” I ask, inching closer to Bo. Olivia is leaning against the metal railing, and the entire walkway shudders when I take a step.

  “I didn’t. I saw her walking to the lighthouse.” He swallows and grips the knife tighter in his hand, held firmly out in front of him. The blade glints with rainwater. “I knew it was my only chance.” So it was Marguerite who lured him. Maybe she thought she could seduce him, prove to me that she could have him if she wanted. But instead Bo hunted her. She never had a chance to even touch him. And now he’s going to force her over the ledge. It will look like suicide, like sweet, popular Olivia Greene took her own life by flinging herself from the town’s lighthouse.

  “Please,” I say, stepping closer to Bo. The walkway shivers beneath me. “Doing this won’t bring your brother back.” At this, Olivia’s expression changes. She didn’t know about Bo’s brother, that he was drowned in the harbor last summer, but her eyes light up and her lips tease into a smile.

  “Your brother?” she asks inquisitively.

  “Don’t fucking talk,” Bo snaps.

  “Your brother was drowned, wasn’t he?” she prods.

  I can just barely see the side of Bo’s face, and his temple pulses, rain spilling off his chin. “Was it you?” he asks with gravel in his voice, taking a single, swift step forward and pressing the blade against Olivia’s stomach. He might just gut her right here if she gives him the wrong answer. He wants his vengeance, even if it means spilling her blood instead of forcing her over the railing. Murder instead of suicide.

  Again Olivia smiles, eyes swaying over to me as if she were bored. She can see it in my face, in the tense outline of the real me hovering beneath Penny’s skin. Marguerite is my sister, after all—she knows me, can read the truth better than anyone. “Of course not,” she answers sweetly to Bo. “But you should ask your girlfriend; maybe she knows who it was.”

  I feel my chest seize up, ribs closing in around my heart and lungs, making it hard to draw in air and pump blood to my brain. “Don’t,” I say too softly, hardly loud enough for her to hear.

  “You probably want to know why I brought all those people to your island, why I wanted the summer solstice to happen here.”

  I don’t respond, even though I do want to know.

  “I wanted you to see that no matter what we do, no matter how many times we steal a body and pretend that we are one of them . . . we never will be. We’re their enemies. They hate us. And if given the chance, they will kill us.” She nods her head at Bo, as if he were the proof. “You have been playing house for too long—too many summers in that body. You think you have friends here; you think you could make a real life in this town. You think that you can fall in love—as if you were entitled to it.” She sneers, left eyebrow raised. And even though the rain cascades down her face, she still looks beautiful. “But they only like you because they don’t know what you really are. If they did, they would hate you. Despise you . . . they’d want you dead.” She says this last word as if it tastes like metal. “He”—she flashes her gaze at Bo—“would want you dead.”

  The knife is still pressed to her belly, but she leans into it, staring at Bo. “Ask your girlfriend what her real name is.”

  My heart stops completely. My eyes blur over. No. Please, I want to beg. Don’t do this. Don’t ruin everything.

  “She’s been lying to you,” she adds. “Go ahead, ask her.”

  Bo turns just enough to look me in the eye where I’m pressed up against the wall of the lighthouse, palms flattened against the stone.

  “It doesn’t change anything. . . .” I start to say, trying to keep the truth from spilling up to the surface.

  “Doesn’t change what?” he asks.

  “How I feel about you . . . how you feel. You know me.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  Olivia’s smirk reaches her eyes. She’s enjoying this. This is what she’s wanted all along: for me to realize that we can’t change what we are. We’re killers. And I can never have Bo. Not like this, in this body. The only way a Swan sister can truly keep someone is by drowning them, trapping their soul in the sea with us.

  “My name isn’t Penny,” I say, the confession ripping at my insides. My lips quiver, rainwater dripping over them and catching on my tongue.

  The knife in his hand starts to lower, and his gaze cuts through me. The realization of what’s coming next is already settling into his eyes.

  “My name is Hazel.”

  He shakes his head a fraction of an inch. The knife is now lowered at his side, his mouth forming a hard, unyielding line.

  “Hazel Swan,” I concede.

  His eyes sway briefly and his jawline tightens, and then he goes perfectly still, like he’s solidified into a statue right in front of me.

  “I should have told you before. But I didn’t know how. And then when I found out why you came here, I knew you’d hate me. And I just couldn’t—”

  “When?” he asks matter-of-factly.

  “When?” I repeat, not sure what he means.

  “When did you stop being Penny Talbot?”

  I try to swallow, but my body rejects the motion. As if Penny’s body and mine are battling each other. Fighting for control. “The first night we met.” I brush a wet clump of hair away from my forehead. “After the Swan party on the beach, Penny brought you back to the island. That night, she woke from sleep and came down to the dock before sunrise. It was a dream to her. She waded into the water, and I took her body.”

  “So that night on the beach, when we talked by the bonfire and you told me about the Swan sisters . . . that was Penny? Not you?”

  I nod.

  “But everything after that night . . . has been you?”

  Again I nod.

  “But you remembered talking to me on the beach, and things about Penny’s life.”

  “I absorb the memories of the body I inhabit. I know everything about Penny.”

  “That’s not the only reason,” Olivia chimes in, happy to fill in the holes I’d like to avoid.

  I close my eyes then open them. Bo has turned fully away from Olivia and is now staring at me. I’m the threat now. I’ve hurt him. Lied to him. Made him trust me and even love me. “I’ve taken Penny’s body every summer for the last three years,” I confess.

  A blast of wind barrels into us, sending a surge of rain against the windows of the lighthouse.

  “Why?” Bo manages to ask, though his voice sounds strangled.

  “I like her life,” I say, the first time I’ve admitted it aloud. “I like being here on the island.”

  “Oh, Hazel, if you’re going to tell the truth, you might as well tell him everything,” Olivia interjects.

  I shoot daggers at her, wishing she’d just shut up. I should have let Bo push her over the edge. I shouldn’t have stopped him. But now here she stands, bringing up every lurid detail of my past. And calling me by my real name.

  “I used to come here when I was still—”

  “Alive,” Olivia finishes for me, raising both eyebrows.

  “You lived here before?” Bo asks.

  “No.” I don’t want to tell him about Owen. About my life before. It doesn’t matter now. I’m not that girl anymore. That girl drowned in the harbor two centuries ago . . . and this girl is here, alive, right in front of him.

  “The first lighthouse keeper had a son,” Olivia fills in for me. “His name was Owen Clement. He was handsome; I’ll give him that. But I never understood what she saw in him. He had no money, no estate, no lucrative future. Yet she loved him anyway. And she was going to marry him. That is, if his father hadn’t accused us of being witches and drowned us in the harbor.”

  I cringe at her sharp account of Owen and me. As if it could be summed up so crisply. A single breath to tell our story.

  “Now Owen is buried up on Alder Hill in the Sparrow Cemetery. That’s where she went this morning—to his grave.” She says it like an
accusation, like I have betrayed Bo with this single act. And maybe I have. But it’s not the worst offense, not by a mile.

  Bo looks stunned. He’s staring at me like I have ripped his heart from his chest, squeezed it between my clawed fingers, and crushed it until it stopped pumping.

  Where he once saw a girl, he now sees a monster.

  “It wasn’t like that,” I say. “I went to say good-bye to him.” But my words seem frail and ineffectual. They don’t mean anything anymore. Not to him.

  “So you see, Bo,” Olivia continues, hair whirling about her face, Marguerite Swan grinning and swaying beneath her skin as if she were suspended in midair. “Your sweet Penny is not who she says she is. She is a murderer like me, like Aurora—her sisters. And she only comes back to this island because it reminds her of the boy she used to love. And if you think you care about her, love her even, you might want to consider that she is a Swan sister, and seducing boys is what we do. You might only love her because she has spun a spell to make you think you do. It’s not real.” Olivia licks her lips.

  “That’s not true,” I bark.

  “Oh, no? Perhaps you should tell him about his brother. Tell him how good you are at seducing unsuspecting outsiders.”

  My knees buckle, and I dig my fingernails into the wall of the lighthouse to keep from collapsing. I can’t do this.

  “What was your brother’s name?” Olivia ponders. “Doesn’t matter. I’m sure you resemble each other, and how could my sister resist the chance to seduce two brothers? It’s just so perfect.”

  “Stop it,” I tell her, but Bo has taken a step back against the railing, and it rattles beneath him. His hair is soaked, his clothes soaked. We all look like we’ve been swimming in the ocean, drenched, the three of us trapped together on this walkway, caught by the wind and whatever fate has brought us here to this point. Centuries of deceit now tearing me apart. The truth more painful than anything I’ve ever felt. Even more painful than drowning.

  “Was it you?” Bo asks, and the way he says it feels like he’s just thrust the knife straight into my gut.

  “I didn’t know at first,” I say, fighting through the heat of tears that push against the rim of my eyes. “But when you told me what happened to your brother, I started to remember him. You look so much alike.” I clear my throat. “I didn’t want to believe it. I was different last summer. I didn’t care whose life I took—I didn’t care about anything. But I do now. You helped me see that. I don’t want to hurt anyone anymore, especially not you.”

  “This entire time, you knew I was trying to figure out who killed him. . . .” He gets tangled up on the words. Then he finds them again. “It was you?”

  “I’m sorry.” Another breath.

  He looks away, not even listening to me anymore. “This is why you could see what Gigi really is, and Olivia?” His eyes shift to look at Olivia and then me, like he’s trying to see what lies inside us. “You could see them because you’re one of them?”

  “Bo,” I plead, my voice sounding weak.

  “You drowned my brother,” he says, and he takes one quick step forward and locks his body around mine. His breath is low and shallow, and he brings the knife up to my throat, pressing it just beneath my chin. My eyelids flutter. I lean my head back against the wall. His gaze tears through me. Not with lust but rage. And I sense in the fury pumping through his stare, through his fingertips where they hold the knife, that he wants to kill me.

  Olivia’s eyes flash to the doorway. This is her chance to flee. But for some reason she stays. Maybe she wants to see him slit my throat. Or maybe she just wants to see how this plays out.

  “How many have you killed this year?” Bo asks, like he’s looking for another reason to slide the blade across my throat and let the life drain out of me.

  “None,” I mutter.

  “My brother was the last one?”

  I nod, just barely.

  “Why?”

  “I don’t want to be that person anymore.” My voice is a whisper.

  “But it’s what you are,” he spits back.

  “No.” I shake my head. “It’s not. I can’t do it anymore. I won’t. I want a different life. I wanted it with you.”

  “Don’t do that,” he says.

  I try to clear my throat, but I’m shaking too badly.

  “Don’t act like I changed you. Don’t act like you care about me,” he says. “I can’t trust anything you’ve said. I can’t even trust how I feel about you.” These last words sting the worst, and I grimace. He thinks I made him love me, that I seduced him just like Olivia did. “You lied to me about everything.”

  “Not everything,” I try to say, but he doesn’t want to hear it.

  He drops the knife from my throat. “I don’t want to hear anything else.” His eyes are like stone, rimmed with hatred for what I am. Mine are pleading for forgiveness. But it’s too late for that. I killed his brother. There is nothing more to say.

  I have made myself his enemy. And now he recoils from me.

  And just as the beam of light from the lighthouse passes over his face, he turns away, the rain slamming against his back, and ducks through the door into the lighthouse.

  His shadow moves through the lantern room and disappears down the stairway. “He doesn’t love you, Hazel,” Olivia says, as if to console me. “He loved what he thought you were. But you’ve been lying to him.”

  “This is your fault. You did this.”

  “No. You did this. You thought you could be one of them—human—but we’ve been dead for two hundred years—nothing will change that. Not even a boy you think you love.”

  “How the hell would you know? You’ve never really loved anyone in your whole life. Only yourself. I don’t want to be miserable like you, stuck in that harbor for eternity.”

  “You can’t change what we are.”

  “Watch me,” I say, and I push away from the wall and dart back into the lighthouse.

  “Where are you going?” she shouts after me.

  “I’m going after him.”

  TWENTY-TWO

  The bonfire outside the greenhouse is a smoldering heap of coals, unable to survive in this downpour. And everyone who had come to the island for the summer solstice is now gone. A party cut short by the return of Gigi Kline.

  The shadow of Bo is already headed down the path to the dock, and the wind and rain between us makes it seem like he’s miles away, a mirage on a desert highway. I open my mouth to yell down to him but then clamp my lips closed. He won’t stop anyway. He’s determined to leave this island . . . and me. For good.

  So I start to run.

  At the dock, the cluster of boats and dinghies that had been clotted together only a few hours earlier are now all gone. Only the skiff and the sailboat remain, thumping against the sides of the dock, the wind battering down on them like an angry fist.

  Out on the water, several lights sweep through the dark, still searching for Gigi, unable to locate her, while the others must have given up and returned to the marina. She might still be out there somewhere, hidden. Midnight inching closer. Or maybe she’s already gone beneath the waves, Aurora dissolving back into the deepest dark of the harbor. But if I know my sister, she will find a way back to shore so she can wait out the last few minutes until midnight. Savor these fleeting moments until she has to return to the brutal sea. And Marguerite will do the same. Maybe she will stay atop the lighthouse, staring out over the island, watching the storm push inland over the Pacific, until she’s forced down to the water’s edge in the final seconds.

  Bo is not in the skiff, so I scan the sailboat. He appears near the front starboard side, throwing the moor lines.

  “Where are you going?” I shout up at him, just as he tosses the last bowline. But he doesn’t answer me. “Don’t leave like this,” I plead. “I want to tell you the truth—tell you everything.”

  “It’s too late,” he replies. The auxiliary motor rumbles softly, and he walks to the steerin
g wheel at the stern of the sailboat. It sounds just like I remember from three years ago—a gentle sputter, the wind aching to push against the sails once the boat reaches the open ocean and can grasp the Pacific winds.

  “Please,” I beg, but the boat begins to drift forward from the dock.

  I follow it until there is no more dock, and then I don’t have a choice. Two feet separate me from the stern of the sailboat where the blue script letters painted on the back read WINGSONG. Three feet. Four. I jump, my legs catapulting me forward, but I fall just short. My chest slams against the side, pain lancing across my ribs, and my hands scramble for something to keep from falling into the water. I find a metal cleat and wrap my fingers around it. But it’s slick, and my fingers start to give way. Seawater splashes up against the backs of my legs.

  Then Bo’s hands tighten around my arms and pull me upward onto the boat. I gasp, touching my left side with my palm, pain shooting through my ribs with each deep breath. Bo is only inches away, still holding on to my right arm. And I look up into his eyes, hoping he sees me, the girl inside. The girl he’s known these last few weeks. But then he releases my arm and turns away, back to the helm of the sailboat. “You shouldn’t have done that,” he says.

  “I just need to talk to you.”

  “There’s nothing else you can say.”

  He steers the boat not toward the marina, but out to sea, straight into the storm.

  “You’re not going to town?”

  “No.”

  “You’re stealing a sailboat?”

  “Borrowing it. Just until I get to the next harbor up the coast. I don’t want to see that cursed fucking town ever again.”

  I press my fingers to my ribs again and wince. They’re bruised. Maybe cracked.

  The sailboat heaves to the side, the wind fighting us, but I shuffle to where Bo is holding tight to the steering wheel, maneuvering us right out into the heart of the storm. The tide swells; waves crash over the bow then spill out the sides. We shouldn’t be out in this.