“You’re still floating,” I said.
She looked down at her feet and laughed gently, a laugh not unlike the trill of birdsong.
“What would I do without you?” she said.
“Be burned at the stake.”
“Or crushed to death with rocks.”
I tried to smile, but really I was thinking about Mary’s college roommate again, and about how my sister was no closer to being able to control her powers than she was when she was a kid, getting stuck on the ceiling in the living room or tangled up in the branches of a tree.
Then she winked, and she was Mary again, no longer something more fragile and lost than the sister I’d grown up with. She left me alone in her room, and I sat on the bed, feeling the coolness of the blankets that hadn’t been slept in. I lay down, folding my arms behind my head, shutting my eyes, and taking a deep breath of rose-filled air.
The roses were out of control this year. Peter trimmed them, cut them back, but they just kept persisting. They were thriving in this rain; if we weren’t careful, they’d take over the entire house. You wouldn’t be able to see anything of the Fernweh Inn except bloodred blooms and dark-green vines and sharp little thorns. Like Sleeping Beauty stuck in a tower surrounded by things that could prick. Except there weren’t any princes on By-the-Sea. We didn’t need princes; we saved ourselves.
“Georgie?” came Vira’s soft whisper from the doorway.
I heard her walk over to the bed and felt the mattress dip as she sat down next to me. I scooched so she could lie down, then I opened my eyes and looked at her. Vira’s signature cat eyes were smudged, like she’d been rubbing her eyes. Her hair was knotted into a bun on the top of herhead. She wore black lace gloves, and she smelled like rain.
It was still coming down; the attic was filled with the patter of water hitting the roof and running down the windows.
“The streets are starting to flood,” Vira said, nudging her chin toward the outside, toward the enormous double windows that faced the front yard.
“Really?”
“Just an inch or two. I saved a kitten on my way over here. It’s in the kitchen now; Aggie is trying to feed it cucumbers. I think I’ll name it Rain.”
“Poetic.”
“What are you doing in Mary’s room?”
“I didn’t want to be alone.”
“But youwerealone.”
“Now I’m not,” I said, and snuggled against her side. “I sent out a siren call to you, and then you appeared.”
“The ferry’s broken,” Vira said.
“That was my mom.”
“I sort of guessed.” She turned so she was on her side, propping her head up with her hand. “Is she...”
“She’s doing something; I’m not sure what. She said she had to wait until the moon was good again.”
“Mysterious.”
I rolled onto my side too, so we were facing each other. “I think something is going on with Mary,” I said. “She seems... this is going to sound weird.”
“I’ve known your family my entire life; it sort of takes a lot to faze me now.”
“When I look at her I just get this feeling, like... I don’t know. She seems smaller. She wasn’t here the night Annabella was... the night she died. She told me not to tell anyone. I don’t know where she was.”
Vira fell onto her back again. She considered what I’d told her with a serious expression on her face, her forehead a mess of wrinkled lines.
“You don’t think she...”
“Of course not,” I said quickly.
