Page 1 of Immortal Game

PART

I

The night that changed the course of the Fury sisters’ lives began as all the others before it had. Shea sat motionless in the bay window that overlooked the front yard, scowling down at her chessboard. The pieces were cheap, shiny plastic, with green felt bottoms that reminded her of a pool table. At eleven years old, Shea didn’t care what they looked like. She loved them all the same.

She loved how each of them crackled with their own silent power. She loved the beautiful, harmonious sense they made. Here within these sixty-four squares lay an entire world like an ocean, infinite and ever shifting. One where Shea never encountered a problem she could not solve or tumult she could not quell. There existed only tension and the release of tension, latent possibilities, and—

“Shea.” Her older sister’s voice sliced clean through her focus. Aideen sounded annoyed, which suggested that she’d been standing in the doorway for quite some time. How longhadAideen been standing there? Couldn’t she see that Shea was in the middle of something? “Hello? Earth to Shea.”

“What?” Shea snapped. She couldn’t contain her irritation, although she hadn’t tried very hard.

“So youarealive,” Aideen replied pleasantly. “Step away from the board and have some fun for once. We’re going to catch crayfish.”

Shea reluctantly peeled her gaze away from the chessboard in front of her, where all the pieces had been laid out in a pretty, complicated gridlock. Her eyes ached, but her body buzzed with the thrill of an imminent breakthrough, her mind with the pleasant exhaustion of deep thought. Splashing around in some dirty water couldn’t possibly be more fun than this. Not that Aideen would understand.

But with her sister twinkling at her like that, what else could Shea do but follow her? It’d been ages since Aideen wanted to leave the house, much less go on any sort of adventure. Shea sighed resignedly. To make sure she wouldn’t forget her idea, she recorded her most recent move in her notebook—the dark blue one, with a rocket ship on the front cover—and set down her pen.

“Fine. I’ll go.”

Aideen beamed. “You won’t regret it.”

They got their bikes from the shed and walked them down the driveway. Shea, Aideen, and their mother lived at the very top of the neighborhood’s tallest hill. Aideen coasted down the slope: no brakes, rising out of her seat, her hair lit by the fading June sun. Watching her felt like analyzing a chess game, with a thousand different dangers and possibilities unfolding.Be careful, Shea wanted to say. But she bit her tongue. What did it matter if the worst of her fears came to pass? Even if Aideen fell and broke an arm, she’d heal overnight.

Their crayfishing spot was a creek hidden deep in theGallaghers’ property, past the rickety, half-rotted treehouse and through a dense thicket of maples. By the time they reached it, the terrain had grown treacherous. The earth was damp and uneven from where the crayfish had built their little chimneys of mud. Shea did her best not to trample them as she trudged toward the water.

Aideen propped her bike up on its kickstand. “Think we’ll catch a lot of them?”

Shea shrugged. “I’m going to catch more than you.”

Aideen flashed her a grin. “We’ll see about that. Either way, I bet we’ll have enough for dinner for a whole week.”

Shea, for her part, was skeptical. This was not clean water, and if they ate them, they’d probably die. But if she said the wrong thing, she’d ruin this. Aideen would withdraw inside herself again, alone in that dark place where Shea couldn’t reach her. The right words didn’t come to Shea like the right chess moves did. So, she kept her mouth shut.

Aideen toed off her shoes and rolled up the cuffs of her jeans. She was sixteen, and right now, she looked it: carefree and wild, her eyes and cheeks aglow with exertion. She splashed into the water with a little shriek, and the current eddied around her ankles. “Come on. There’s no sharks in here. And probably no dryads.”

Of course there were no dryads. Unless you counted Aideen—which Shea didn’t—fae hadn’t freely crossed to this side of the Veil in more than one hundred years. Shea refrained from comment as she yanked off her shoes and waded into the water. The cold, at least, was a welcome shock against her sweat-damp skin.

“Do you remember how to catch them?” Aideen asked.

“Yes,” Shea replied, only a little sourly.

When Shea lifted one of the stones from the bottom of the creek, a crayfish scuttled out in a cloud of silt. Shea snatched it by its tail, but before she could triumphantly pull it from the water, it pinched her. On reflex, she dropped it and hissed in pain.

Aideen laughed, delighted and full-throated. Shea tried to glare at her, but her sister’s amusement was contagious. She had to bite down on her lip to keep from smiling as Aideen scooped the crayfish into her palms. It seemed perfectly happy and docile there, its carapace gleaming with streaks of blue and rust. It brandished its tiny claws at Shea like a boxer in the ring, but it did not make any attempt to escape.

“How did you do that?”

“Magic, obviously.”

It occurred to Shea just then that it had grown darker—and eerily silent. Mist slid through the trees like the slow roll of the tide. It leached all of summer’s heat from the air. Ice crept delicately across the surface of the water, and frost bloomed on the grass. Shea shuddered at the sudden cold. How was it possible? In the space between one breath and another, winter had descended on them.

“What’s happening?”

“I don’t know,” Aideen said. “I haven’t done anything.”

Aideen stared fixedly at something behind Shea. The crayfish slipped from Aideen’s hands, and her face went as white as bone. Shea dared to look over her shoulder, her heart beating wildly in her throat.

A man and a horse stood on the opposite bank.