Bridget leans back and smiles at me, tears brimming in her eyes. I could look into them until my last breath. Until the ocean boils over. They feel like the same thing.
“I think so, Liney.” Bridget’s mouth sets in a determined line, and she grips my hands. “I don’t know what happened to your sister next,but that man offered her a place by his side. Power beyond this island. By not killing me, she refused. If you need to stay, to find out…”
I’m tempted. To leave this place without seeing her again, to always wonder what happened to her, may drive me mad. Yet can I trust my sister one more time? She’s misused my good faith every day on this island. Lied to me. Hurt me, though she’d say it was all in service of my survival. Necessary.
But for all my threats against our sisterhood, that connection is deeper than simple blood. Her protection comes with its poisons, but she did save me. Misguided as she might be, there was never a time in this chaos that she abandoned me. And if Bridget can still see the humanity in her, I can too.
“You don’t need to stay with me,” I tell Bridget. “You don’t owe her anything.”
“I know,” she says, squeezing my hands. “Let’s find her.”
32Elle
To Rise
Exhaustion courses through me as strong as the stiletto’s power did. The fury-fueled determination to destroy this place I had only moments ago drains with every breath. Like the spiral’s last threads of connection to me are extracting rather than granting energy. Every nerve is frayed like a tree after it’s been struck by lightning. Too much even with Douglas’s help. Clumps of meat fall around me, but I can’t move.
In the pit of my stomach, the muscles of my calves, the back of my throat, I’m deteriorating. The rot has finally caught up to me. Is this why Pratterman used others for his work?
I should form my next plan, escape, but I need to recoup my strength. I hope Bridget made it to the lighthouse in one piece. What if I sent her to an in-between nothing? What if I destroyed her? Yet something in my gut has me convinced she arrived where she needed to.
The water begins to lap behind me. It’s been still since swallowing Mr. Pratterman. I haven’t processed that fact. Mr. Pratterman is gone.Consumed by those he used as fuel.
I’m no longer bound to anything.
I turn around. There’s something bright in the water. A small orb of light below the surface. The same color as the dagger’s glow.
Douglas. Relief floods through me. Withered hands from within the water hold him up as far as they can reach. They saved him. Despite their torment, and my hand in it, they brought him back to me.
Douglas doesn’t belong here. They feel it as much as I do. I swallow back a sob as I reach over and tenderly pluck him out of the water. He glimmers in my hand, small and vulnerable.
When he forms back into the man I know, the smile on his face is brighter than his light was.
“I knew you could,” he whispers, kneeling beside me.
“He was a man. Mortal. This whole time.” My jaw trembles. “He tricked me. I was a fool.”
The sweltering air of the spiral weighs me down almost as much as my guilt. Every action I took was for a man. No different from my father or Thomas. Pratterman’s trick was in the beliefs he held over me: that I was unworthy and he was divine.
So many deaths. For nothing. For ash in my mouth and rot in my veins.
“Thank God,” Douglas mutters. “You wouldn’t be here now if he were anything he’d claimed.”
True. I shift over and lie on the ground.
“There’s something by your…” Douglas points beside my right ear. I turn. A dark clump of viscera as big as my whole arm has fallen beside me. It doesn’t unsettle me as it should.
“I’m going to destroy the spiral. The island. Everything,” I say, looking back up through the staircase that will soon collapse without its landlord. That’s all he was, wasn’t he? “It must end now, before someoneelse finds it.”
“Not before you leave here, though,” he finally says. It’s half question, half hope.
I nod. “Though I’m a tool of this place. Is it better if I’m gone with it?”
Douglas sits beside me. His hand dangles inches from my own on the floor. “Perhaps your sister needs you still.”
Bait. Ever a game between us. Creaks and splashes echo across the water. I don’t have long before this place makes my decision for me.
“She has Bridget,” I mumble, but one leg twitches against the stone. Even at my weakest, I can’t leave others to do my work.
