I spent nearly every day inside that shop, concocting new scents made of rare herbs and flowers, my hair and fingers and skin always bursting with scents that couldn’t be washed away. The oils soaked into everything they touched. Marguerite was the saleswoman, and she was good at it, a natural peddler. Aurora was the bookkeeper; she paid bills and tallied profits from a small, wobbly wood desk behind the front counter. And I was the perfumist, working out of a windowless back room that should have been a storage closet—a place for brooms and metal buckets. But I loved my work. And in the evening my sisters and I shared a tiny home behind the shop.
“It doesn’t even look like the same place,” a voice says beside me. I flinch. Olivia Greene is standing next to me, a black umbrella held over her head to protect her sleek, charcoal-black hair from the rain. My eyes pass through her fair skin to Marguerite underneath.
“The windows are the same,” I say, looking back to the building.
“Replicas,” she answers, her voice more somber than usual. “Everything it used to be is now gone.”
“Just like us.”
“Nothing that lives this long can stay the same.”
“Nothingshouldlive this long,” I point out.
“But we did,” she says, as if it were an accomplishment to be proud of.
“Maybe two hundred years is enough.”
She blows out a quick breath through her nostrils. “You want to give up eternal life?”
“It’s not eternal,” I say. Marguerite and I have never viewed our imprisonment the same way. She sees it as our good fortune, a lucky draw of the card that we should live on for centuries, indefinitely perhaps. But she didn’t lose anything the day we were drowned. I did. She wasn’t in love with a boy who loved her back—not real love, like what Owen and I had. With each passing year we spent beneath the waves, each summer we rose again to claim our revenge on the town by taking their boys and making them ours, we lost a part of who we once were. We lost our humanity. I watched my sisters’ cruelty grow, their ability to kill sharpen, until I barely recognized them.
My wickedness grew too, but not to a place I couldn’t come back from. Because there was a thread that bound me to who I used to be—that thread was Owen. The memory of him kept me from slipping completely into the dark. And now that thread ties me to Bo. To the real world, to the present.
“We’ve spent most of our lives trapped in the sea,” I say. “Cold and dark and miserable. That’s not a real life.”
“I block it out,” she rebukes swiftly. “You should too. It’s better to sleep, let your mind drift away until summer arrives.”
“It’s not that easy for me.”
“You’ve always made things harder for yourself.”
“What does that mean?”
“This thing you have with that boy, Bo. You’re only dragging out the inevitable. Just kill him and get it over with.”
“No.” I turn to look at her, a shadow settled over her face beneath the domed umbrella. “I know you tried to lure him into the harbor.”
Her eyes twinkle, as if delighted by the memory of almost drowning the boy I love. “I just wanted to help you finish what you started. If you like him so much, then take him into the sea, and you will have him for eternity.”
“I don’t want him like that. His soul trapped down there just like ours.”
“Then howdoyou want him?”
“Real. Here—on land.”
She laughs loud and full, and a man and woman strolling past us turn to look at her. “That’s absurd and not possible. Tonight’s the last night to make him yours.”
I shake my head.I won’t do it.“I’m not like you,” I say.
“You’re exactly like me. We’re sisters. And you’re just as cold-blooded as I am.”
“No, you’re wrong about that.”
“Have you forgotten about Owen? How he betrayed you? Maybe if he hadn’t spoken up about the mark on your skin, you wouldn’t have been found guilty. You wouldn’t have drowned with us. You might have lived a normal life. But no”—her lips curl up at the edges, a wolf baring her teeth—“boys cannot be trusted. They will always do whatever they can to save themselves. They are the cruel ones, not us.”
“Owen wasn’t cruel,” I snap. “He had to tell them about the mark.”
“Did he?”
