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The chill was instantly painful, every cell and nerve screaming simultaneous alerts that something was very, very wrong. That the water was much too cold, the temperature much too low, and I was in too much danger.
I bobbed up, sucked in air, pushed frigid water from my eyes. I grabbed at the closest sheet of ice, looking for a fingerhold so I could claw my way onto it. But my fingers and toes were numbing, and it was hard to grab. And there was no point in it, I realized, my brain logy. If I was in the water, I might as well aim for the ice the kid was actually on.
I paddled through the slush, pushing ice out of the way, my fingers blue with cold, to the ice floe where Stephen lay crying, hands gripping the edge of the ice. He wore a T-shirt and shorts and was probably as cold as I was.
“Hi,” I said at the edge of the water, trying not to let him see my teeth chatter. “You’re Stephen, right?”
He nodded, his enormous blue eyes filled with terror.
“Excellent. I’m Merit, and I’m going to help you get back on the boat.”
“Are you a mermaid?”
“Not exactly,” I said, and turned the ice toward the boat, kicking as I pushed us toward it. I was suddenly in swimming lessons again on a kickboard—except those lessons had never been in freezing water in the middle of the Chicago River.
I kicked as hard as I could, and could feel the river freezing around my feet. I was kicking upstream and each kick was getting harder, like swimming in thickening sand.
“Life buoy!” I managed through chattering teeth, and caught it one-handed. “Stephen, honey, let’s get this on you, okay?
“Hang on!” I said. “Pull him up!” I yelled, to whoever could still hear me, and they began to haul him over the side of the ship.
“Stephen!” His mother had made it to the lower deck.
“Here!” a man called, holding out a hand to help pull me on board. But that hand seemed so far away, and it seemed to get smaller and smaller. I couldn’t understand how that was possible, how the world could shrink. And as his hand moved farther away, the brutal ache of cold that had lodged in my bones like a cancer began to fade.
I slipped under and began to sink like a stone. I wasn’t buoyant, my clothes were heavy and waterlogged, and the thickening water slowed my progress toward the surface.
I opened my eyes in the dark water, watched light skitter across the thickening ice. I kicked and pushed up, even as ice shoved me around in the water like bullies in a junior high hallway. But the ice above me was congealing, solidifying into a cap above the water below. I dug at the ice with numb fingers, but it was too solid to dig through, too large to simply push aside. Panic clawed at my throat, my lungs begging for air.
Dark spots appeared in my vision. As I sank into the water again, panic faded to a kind of resigned acceptance.
I hadn’t thought to wonder what drowning would feel like, but I wouldn’t have guessed it felt like this. There was no panic now, just the realization that I’d gone under, and I’d probably run out of oxygen soon.
Thinking-Me was separate from Drowning-Me, and the first watched the second with dissociative curiosity. Am I drowning? How strange.
I hadn’t managed to be married for very long, I thought. It would have been nice to be married, to be the First Lady of Cadogan House, for a little while longer. To be with Ethan for a little while longer.
Ethan, I thought. Ethan. Ethan.
The word, his name, the knowledge of him, was a match strike in a dark room. It snapped me from fading consciousness, from the lethargy and acceptance that aching bones and muscles longed for. Anything to take that pain away.
Ethan.
I kicked up, pushing with every joule of energy my body could spare, hands pointed above me to stab through ice, when a hand appeared in the water, grabbed me by the back of my jacket, like a puppy being pulled from danger by the scruff of her neck.
I broke the surface and gasped for air, the ache of cold slicing through me again like a white-hot dagger.
I let him pull me onto the boat and fell to my side, coughed up what felt like liters of river water.
“Sentinel, I may never let you out of the House again.”
I nodded, let him help me sit up. Everything ached, and I couldn’t stop the shakes that racked my body. “Not . . . bad . . . idea. Also fix the weather, probably.”
He pulled off my wet jacket, wrapped a thermal blanket of shimmering silver around me, then pushed damp hair from my face.
“I heard you say my name,” he said.
