“It’s … heartbreaking.” I gasp and pull my hand back. “It hurts.” The island’s song seemed to be pulling from my own aching heart, resonating at the same level of pain. I feel it in my marrow, in the deepest parts of my grief. “It’s an open wound.”
Widow slowly backs away from the stone. “We should return to the camp. We can comb the beach at moonrise before we enter the ca—” She whirls and draws her cutlass.
“What is it?” Then I hear it, too. Hesitant footsteps. Someone is picking their way through the crystal maze and is headed right for us.
Somehow, I sense her before I can see her.
“It’s okay.” I put my hand on Widow’s sword arm.
“What is it?”
A weathered old woman appears between two of the stone outcrops and hobbles toward us, her gaze fixed on me.
“Ari. Queen of the Mermaids.”
Chapter
Eighteen
“Clytemnestra told me I’d find you here.” Ari stops right in front of me, her wizened body bent and her eyes whitened with cataracts.
“The witch?” Widow looks around at the stone walls, as if expecting Nessie to pop out.
“Witch?” Ari cackles, raising the hair on the back of my neck. “She’s a god to the likes of you.” She tries to draw herself up to her full height, though she only seems to get slightly less bent. “The same as I am.”
Widow crosses her arms over her chest and leans back, looking her up and down. “You don’t look like a god to me, and if my memory serves, you tried to poison Moira.”
“That wasn’t poison in the deadly sense.” She waves a hand. “Besides, Tinker Bell tricked me.” She squints up at me. “Though I see she’s met her fate for ill or for good.”
“In the end, it was for good.”
Widow is still on guard. “All right, but you still aren’t a god.”
“Not in this form.” Ari stops trying for the regal look and hunches over again, coughing as she goes.
“Wraith told me about you,” I say quietly.
Ari’s gaze snaps to mine. “Telling our secrets, was he?”
“He told me he loved you. He still loves you.”
Her cackle is even louder this time, and the lightning from the Neverstorm lights her face in eerie hues of silver and shadow. “If he loved me, he’d have let me go. He never would’ve come to the sea all those times, never would have promised to marry me, never would have left me alone to wonder what had become of him.” The bitterness in her seeps out like dark water in a stream. “And when I found him … He’d already claimed another.”
“He made a mistake.”
“And I bore the curse for it!” Her voice snaps like a dry twig.
“He asked me to help you. He made me promise I would try so that you two could be together again.”
“To assuage his own guilt. That’s all.” She uses her gnarled hand to pull back the cloth she wears draped over her head, her gray hair spilling out in a wild tumble. “He never cared for me the way I cared for him.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“Doesn’t matter what you think. None of it matters anymore.”
“Then why are you here?” I ask.
“I want to go home.” She looks past me at the sea. “I want to return to where I belong. Never again do I want to walk this island.”
