I told them about Mary.
“This is a strange island,” Harrison said, dipping his hand into the new freshwater sea, as if to illustrate that notonlywas my sister turning into a bird, but we also had this flood to deal with.
“It’s never been quite this strange,” I said. “You missed many, many years of no floods and boring birdwatching and movie nights on the town green and uneventful summer solstices where hardly anyone even got naked.”
“Yeah, but... there was still magic and stuff, right?” Prue pointed out.
“Super-boring magic. Honestly. We don’t even own wands. Or pointy hats. It’s nothing like it is in the movies. It’s way more... normal.”
“Normalcy is underrated,” Harrison said.
When we got back to the inn, it smelled like vanilla and cinnamon; Aggie’s island-famous birthday cake. The three of us—under better circumstances I might have called us something cute, like the three musketeers or the three amigos or the three stooges, but under these circumstances I couldn’t bring myself to do so—stood in the kitchen and peered into the oven and watched an overlarge yellow circle rising to perfect golden perfection inside it.
“What’s this for?” Prue asked.
“Tomorrow’s our birthday,” I said.
“Really?”
“Yup.”
“Well, happy early birthday,” Harrison said weakly.
We decided to break for a few minutes to change into dry clothes. It seemed like a losing battle; as soon as we stepped outside again we’d be waist-deep in water and any cute thoughts of being warm and not soaking would be far behind us. But still, for now, it felt nice to peel off my underwear and bra and pull on warmer clothes: jeans and a turtleneck I hadn’t worn in five years at least, a heavy sweatshirt I used to wear to help my mother harvest herbs in the moonlight. I found thick wool socks and put them on under my rainboots. I piled my hair up into a bun on the top of my head. I wrapped a scarf around my neck and then I met the Lowrys outside Mary’s room. We wanted to see the eggs, to make sure they were safe. Safe from what, I couldn’t say.
Prue had pulled her hair into a wet ponytail; the back of her clean shirt was already damp where the end hit it.
The inn was strangely quiet. We hadn’t run into a single birdhead on our way to the attic.
The door to Mary’s bedroom was closed.
I wanted to know why my sister didn’t feel safe and who she was hiding from up in that tree. When I’d asked her, when she’d leaned in to whisper to me, all she had said, all she’d repeated, wasevil man.
“Well,” Harrison said. “Should you do the honors?”
I reached out and gripped the doorknob with a hand that hopefully looked a lot sturdier than I felt, and then I twisted and pushed the door open.
It creaked a little, an appropriately creepy creak that made Prue cross her arms over her chest and made Harrison take a tiny, imperceptible step back. I took a big, steadying breath that didn’t actually do anything to steady myself, and I stepped into the room and flicked the light switch on.
And of course nothing happened.
And of course then the hall lights winked out, and we were plunged into sudden, blinding darkness.
Prue grabbed my arm. Harrison shrieked. I reached back into Harrison’s trench coat pocket (him wearing that trench coat indoors seemed very Harrison-appropriate) and pulled out the flashlight I knew would be there. I flicked it on just as a low rumble of thunder echoed through the house.
“It’s the storm,” I said. “It must have knocked out the power lines.”
“It chose a most inconvenient moment to do so,” Harrison pointed out.
My sister had candles scattered throughout her room. I found a book of matches in her nightstand drawer and went around lighting them. A massive bolt of lightning pierced the sky and lit up our faces in severe yellow. The roof was alive with the sound of rain. Harrison shut the door and locked it, then, after a moment’s consideration, he pushed Mary’s bureau in front of it.
“Can’t really be too careful, can we?” he asked.
The candlelight caused a hundred different shadows tocome alive and dance across the walls of my sister’s bedroom. I placed the flashlight on the bed and pointed it toward the closet. The door was shut.
I thought of the floorboard that lay within it, the one Mary had pried loose years ago; in its long history, it had hidden other such treasures as jewelry stolen from me, cookies stolen from Aggie, cinnamon whiskey stolen from our mother.
I thought back, but I didn’t think it had ever held anything quite so precious as the last eggs Annabella would ever lay.
