“Revenge.”
“The perfect justification for murder,” he adds, his stare slipping away from mine to look out over the hazy brume rising up from the sea like smoke.
“It’s not...” But I stop myself.Murder.That’s precisely what it is. Calling it a curse does not unmake the truth of what happens here each year: murder. Premeditated. Violent, cruel, barbaric. Monstrous even. Two hundred years’ worth of killing. A town reliving a past it can’t change, paying the price year after year. An eye for an eye. I swallow, feeling a pain in my chest, in my gut.
It’s as predictable as the tide and the moon. It ebbs and flows. Death comes and it goes.
Bo doesn’t press me to finish my thought. And I don’t offer to. My mind is now twisting like a snake into a deep dark hole. I lift my shoulders and shiver, the cold seething through me.
We peer out at the churning sea, and then I ask, “Why are you really here?”
“It was the last stop on the bus line,” he repeats. “I needed work.”
“And you’ve never heard of Sparrow before?”
His eyes slide to mine and the rain catches on his lashes, lingers on his chin, and spills from his dark hair. “No.”
Then something changes on the wind.
An abrupt hush breaks over the island and sends a quick chill across the nape of my neck.
The singing has stopped.
Bo takes a step closer to the edge of the cliff, like he’s straining to hear what is no longer there. “It’s gone,” he says.
“The sisters have all found bodies.” The words seem pulled from my throat. The quiet settles between each of my ribs, it expands my lungs, it reminds me of what’s to come. “They’ve all returned.” I close my eyes, focusing on the silence. It’s the fastest it’s ever happened before.
Now the drowning will begin.
A WARNING
We wait for death. We hold our breath.
We know it’s coming, and still we flinch when it claws at our throats and pulls us under.
—Plaque located on the stone bench on Ocean Avenue, facing the harbor (commissioned in 1925)
SIX
The soil squishes away beneath my rain boots. A steady, uninterrupted drizzle collects on the waterproof sleeves of my raincoat as I move back down the rows of the orchard.
Bo is back in his cottage. We parted ways an hour ago. And even though I thought about going back to bed—my head still pounding, my skin rattling against my bones—I decided I wanted to be outside, alone.
I find the familiar old oak tree that grows at the center of the orchard, where Bo and I passed by not long ago. But we didn’t stop here.
This is my favorite place on the island—where I feel protected and hidden among the old, rotted fruit trees. Where I let memories slide over me like a cool stream. This oak tree stands alone among the rest, ancient and weathered from the sea air—its growth stunted. But it’s been here since the beginning, nearly two hundred years, back when the Swan sisters first stepped onto land, when they were still alive.
I run my fingers along the crude heart etched into the wood, cut there by lovers long ago dead. But the heart remains, the bark fallen away, permanent.
I slide down against the trunk of the tree and sit at its base, leaning my head back to look up at the sky, speckled with dark clouds caught in the fickle ocean winds.
The Swan season has begun. And this little town tucked along the shore will not come out unharmed.
***
A storm is blowing in from the ocean.
The clock beside my bed reads eleven p.m. Then midnight. I can’t sleep.
