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I shook my head.
“So, is the psych eval still on the table?” Nova asked, her tone snarky but her eyes wide.
Eva and Zale both ignored her. Zale was still gazing out over the waves with a searching look, as though he thought a small hand might still pop out of the water at any moment. Eva, however, was still looking at me with that same intensity.
“Some witches do have visions, you know,” she said.
“I’m not a witch!” I cried, the words bursting from me in my confusion and burning my throat all the way up. “I mean… I don’t even know if I… I’ve never…”
“Come on,” Eva said, trying to haul me to my feet. Zale saw what she was doing and caught me under my other arm to help. My legs were shaking, but they managed to hold me up. I pulled the towel more tightly around my shoulders as a violent shiver rocked through me. “Let’s get you back up to the fire. You’ll feel better when you’re warm again. I grabbed your phone, you dropped it over at the base of the cliff. Nova, can you get her shoes?”
Nova rolled her eyes but walked over to retrieve my discarded flip-flops. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw her bend over and pick something up out of the sand and stare at it. But by the time I had turned my head, she was walking toward us, expression neutral, and nothing in her hand except my flip-flops.
I took one last look at the waves crashing in on the shore, and shivered. There was no other way to explain it: someone—or something—had lured me into the water and had not intended to let me escape.
16
As I walked down the path from the beach, I could see a few figures still milling around the garden, folding up tablecloths and stacking dishes. I knew the polite thing to do would be to offer my help, but I couldn’t afford awkward questions about why I was dripping from head to toe, so I made for the house instead.
My mom was inside in the sitting room with Rhi. I stayed in the darkened hallway, far enough from the light of the room that I didn’t think she’d be able to tell I was wet.
“Wren! I was starting to…” She stopped herself. “Did you have a good time, honey?”
“Yeah, it was great,” I lied. “The other kids were really nice.”
She frowned a little and squinted at me. “Is your hair wet?”
I forced a laugh. “Oh, yeah. There may have been a bit of a water fight when all the ice in the coolers melted.” I rolled my eyes, praying she would buy it.
Whether my acting skills were improving, or she’d had a little too much mead, I wasn’t sure; but she laughed, too. “I’m so glad you had fun.”
“Yeah, but I’m exhausted,” I told her. “See you in the morning!”
I was careful not to overdo the cheerfulness in my voice—I didn’t want her to get suspicious and start interrogating me. I waved, pretended to stifle a yawn, and trudged up the stairs to my room, closing the door behind me with a sigh of relief.
I stripped off my wet clothes, too sore and tired to shower. I examined myself in the mirror on the wall. Several impressive bruises were blooming on my legs and torso from when I’d half-tumbled down the cliff face in my race to the beach. I slipped on a pair of pajamas from my drawer, and then sat down on the bed, where I began working a brush through my salt-tangled hair, thinking hard.
I refused to believe I had imagined it all. It would have been one thing if I’d gone all the way down to the beach, only to discover that what I’d seen had been an animal, or a drifting piece of trash. But I’d seen the boy clearly, the outline of his limbs, his bright hair. I’d watched him walk toward the water, and I’d watched him disappear into it slowly. And then, when I’d finally reached him, I’d felt the solidness of him for one, brief moment, before he crumbled to sand in my grip—actual sand.
Eva had suggested a vision, but that didn’t fit. You couldn’t touch a vision. Or maybe you could if you were a witch? My head was starting to ache.
I decided to stop trying to understand what I’d seen, and instead ponder why I might have seen it. Why would someone have a vision if they weren’t crazy; because I refused to believe I’d suddenly lost my grip on reality. If it had been a vision, could it have been a premonition? A warning of some kind, and if so, of what? It seemed so implausible. I’d never had an experience like it before, and…
Actually, no. That wasn’t true.
I thought back to the night in the theater. There was no way Freya could have been there in the catwalk, and yet I’d definitely seen her. And there had been something else—a dark, menacing figure. Had I simply imagined them? And then in the garden, during the seance. I hadn’t seen anything strange, but I had felt it and heard it, too. My mind had conjured both of those memories in the moments after Zale rescued me. There was something almost indefinable about all three experiences—a sort of thread running through them, connecting them together in my mind. They’d been very different experiences and yet, in some strange inexplicable way, they were the same.
I laughed darkly. Yeah, they’d all been the same because they’d all scared the shit out of me, I thought.
I didn’t want to tell my mom about any of it. I knew she would want to help, but I also knew that she had only just barely agreed for us to stay in Sedgwick Cove for the summer; and if she thought I was being haunted or something like that, she’d pack our bags before I could even argue. I considered maybe asking Rhi or Persi, but I barely knew either of them, and there seemed a pretty good chance they’d just turn around and tell my mom anyway.
I thought of Eva, of the way she had looked at me, intently. Like shebelievedme.
I decided I would go see her the next day. I’d only known her a short time, but there was something about her that I trusted. My gut told me that if I confided in her, she would find a way to help me.
I laid down, staring up at the ceiling. Just making the decision to talk to Eva had loosened a small bit of the tension now coiled inside me. I closed my eyes and tried to clear my mind. Tomorrow, I’d get help. Tomorrow, I’d find answers.
As if it had been waiting for me on the other side of consciousness, and perhaps triggered by the events on the beach, my childhood dream was waiting for me. I dreamed once again of the Gray Man walking me to the sea, the same dream I’d always had. I clung to just a thread of lucidity as the dream unfolded, enough to remember, dimly, that I had never been afraid of the Gray Man in all the years I had dreamed of him. But though the dream was the same as it had always been, one detail had changed.
