Brightly (Flicker #2) (18 page)

She shook her head. “What’s gotten into you?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“This isn’t like you.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I…” She paused, feeling strangely lost. “I don’t know.”

He smiled like she’d said something funny and extended his hand. “Come here.”

This time, she didn’t hesitate. She couldn’t, not with him watching her with those eyes, looking as if he’d been waiting for a hundred years. She went to him, wading carefully in the cold water until she could place her hand in his.

When she touched Filo’s skin, her vision didn’t intensify, though Filo’s Sight was sharper than hers. She didn’t have long to think about it, though, because Filo was threading his fingers through hers and drawing her closer.

“Filo…” she whispered, her pulse kicking up. The rushing of the sea was loud in her ears.

“It’s me,” he murmured. “It’s just me.”

And then he was bending his head and she was rising to meet him without having to think about it. Touching him had always been complicated, but now, here, it was easy. She didn’t have to worry about how he was feeling or if it was all right to touch him, because she already knew. The sea began to swirl around her legs, the water rising, and she didn’t care.

Filo’s hands came up to cup her face. Slowly, reverently, she slid her hands up to rest on his shoulders. How was it that she had never touched his shoulders before? Her eyes fell shut. Inside her, waves were crashing.

His mouth should have been soft, but when he kissed her, a hot shock of pain lanced from her lips down to her legs. Alice recoiled from him as her eyes flew open—

And she was standing in front of the Brightly house, half-turned toward Lee, who was gripping Alice’s wrist hard. Somewhere beyond the trees, the merfolk song was rising. One by one, the house lights blinked on.

Lee’s hair was messy, pulled by the cold wind sweeping across the island. The moonlight drained the color from her skin, but her eyes blazed green. “What are you doing?”

For a moment, Alice was too dazed to answer. The ground seemed to tilt beneath her. “I don’t know.”

With her free hand, Lee brushed impatiently at the copper strands of hair blowing across her face. “Do you remember walking out here?”

“No, I was—”
I was standing in the sea. I was with Filo.
But that was wrong.

Lee’s grip eased a little, but she didn’t let go. “You were talking in your sleep. That’s what woke me up. When the singing started, you got up and walked into the hall. I spoke to you, but it was like you couldn’t hear me. I followed you downstairs, and outside, and then I decided enough was enough and I grabbed you.”

Alice shook her head. The singing was growing louder, washing over her skin. “I must’ve been sleepwalking.”

“Have you ever done that before?”

“Not that I remember.”

“You should talk to Nasser about it. He’s probably already awake.”

“I’m not bothering him right now. There’s no need. He’s busy enough as it is.”

“But—”

“I’ll talk to him in the morning,” Alice assured her quickly. “It can wait a few hours.”

Lee shook her head. She dropped her voice to a whisper. “What if it’s the merfolk?”

“It’s not.”

“You don’t know that.”

“I’m not one of these normals, Lee. I know the signs of enchantment. If the music were affecting me, don’t you think I’d be able to tell?”

Lee stared at her for another moment, like she had half a mind to drag Alice straight to Nasser. Then she released her wrist. “I don’t know,” she said grimly. “But Nasser will. Talk to him so I don’t have to.”

“I will,” Alice promised, absently rubbing her wrist with her other hand. But with the music swirling around her and the memory of her dream still fresh, rising behind her eyes every time she blinked, she didn’t know if she meant it.

When Filo and Henry reached the shore, the sky was the color of a bruise and the setting sun was throwing their shadows long. Taking one of Henry’s detours on the way back to Brightly had become routine, so when Henry turned onto an unfamiliar trail, Filo had followed him without complaint. For once, he didn’t mind letting someone else guide him.

Red and orange light played over the water as Henry gathered a few pieces of driftwood and built a small fire on the beach. Filo sat cross-legged on the sand and studied Henry’s hands as he worked. They were hands that could cast spells, play the piano and capture a butterfly without harming it equally well.

When Henry looked up at him, firelight flickering across his face, Filo looked away. He could feel his heartbeat drumming in his throat. From the corner of his eye, he watched Henry pull off his shoes and dig his feet into the sand, which still held some of the day’s warmth.

As dusk fell around them, the only sounds were the distant crashes of the sea and the crackle of the fire between them.

“I wish you could see this place the way it should be,” Henry said, leaning back onto his elbows. “This time of year, the whole island comes alive. Everything else falls away. The fey and the animals aren’t so shy. It’s warm enough to spend the whole night outside. And there’s this time, right around the middle of July, when it feels like it’ll last forever—like the summer will never end and it’ll never be cold again.” He shook his head. “It feels all wrong right now. The island’s almost empty. People are gone who never used to leave.”

“Like your mother?” Filo ventured.

Henry went very still. He plucked a flat stone from the sand and squeezed it in his fist. “She’s dead, you know,” he said. “My mom.”

“I… I thought she might be.”

“You did?” Henry glanced up.

Filo nodded. “Whenever someone mentions her, you get this look—like something sharp is digging into you and you’re trying not to show it. I’ve seen that look before.” He knew it well: After they arrived in Bridgestone, Nasser, Jason and Lee had all shared that haunted, pained expression. Even now, it sometimes flashed across their faces. “What happened to her?”

“Remember when we said that the merfolk were aggressive? That someone drowned?”

Filo opened his mouth to speak, but all that came out was, “Oh.”

“It was the beginning of March, before we noticed people getting sick. The only trouble then was that this new colony was forcing the old one out. One night, my mom and I took the motorboat around to Nemo Cove. Just the two of us, to see if we could talk to them. It should’ve been fine.”

He bent his head, turning the stone over and over in his hands. “She always wore these protective charms, the kind faeries can smell a mile off. The new merfolk were spoiling for a fight, really territorial, and the smell alone was enough to set them off. When they surfaced, they barely looked at us for a second before they attacked the boat. The boat flipped and they were grabbing my arms and legs, my clothes, pulling me under.

“I used my magic, the way I did when they took you. I think they were just startled at first, but then I caught one of them across the face with a spell and they let me go. For a second, when my magic lit the water, I could see my mom. She was right in front of me. She couldn’t hold a spell together long enough to drive them off. I tried to get to her, but I wasn’t fast enough. They dragged her away.

“The merfolk were swimming deeper and deeper, and I could only hold my breath for so long. I swam up and down, over and over, but I couldn’t dive deep enough to reach her. Once, when I came up for air, I saw something had bobbed to the surface. It was her. She was floating face-down. Already gone. They must’ve finally let her go.

“Davis and Clem found me later. They headed to the cove when we didn’t come home. Davis said I was just sitting on the beach, staring at the water. She was lying on the sand next to me. I must’ve done that, brought her back to shore, but I don’t remember it. I don’t remember completely losing it when Clem and Davis tried to move her, either, but I believe them when they say I did. Everything between finding her in the water and waking up the next day is blank.”

Henry got up, strode to the water and hurled the stone. It arced and landed with a splash.

“I couldn’t save her.” His voice was tight. “I did everything I knew how to do, and it wasn’t enough. What’s the use of magic if you can’t use it to save people?”

Filo stood, walking slowly over the sand until he stood just behind Henry. The salty wind whipping off the sea stung his eyes. He reached up to touch Henry’s shoulder, the way Nasser would’ve if he were here, and froze, taken aback by his own impulse.

Slowly Filo curled his hands into fists and jammed them into his pockets.

“We don’t talk about it,” Henry went on. “We haven’t talked about it since we buried her. Not really. I can’t figure out if that’s normal or not. Clem talks about her like it didn’t happen, like she’s on a trip and she’ll be back. Davis doesn’t talk about her at all. I know it’s hard for them, too, but that’s not why. They both think it’s better for me.”

“What do
you
think?”

“I don’t know,” Henry said, with a helplessness that reminded him of Nasser and Jason’s first days at Flicker. “Sometimes I need to talk about her, but I lose it the second I open my mouth. Sometimes I don’t even want to
think
about her, but I can’t help it. I’m all over the place. It’s ridiculous. I know it drives everyone crazy, but I don’t know what I’m supposed to do. I don’t know how people deal with this. No matter what I do, it all just…” He broke off, shaking his head.

“It hurts,” Filo finished, so quietly that he barely heard himself. “Everything does, for no reason. You try doing things a hundred different ways, but it makes no difference. Nothing helps. And everyone else knows how to keep it together, so you must be the crazy one.”

Henry looked over his shoulder at Filo. When their eyes met, for a heartbeat, everything else disappeared. For a moment, he and Henry were alone.

“Right,” Henry said. “Just like that. No explanation and no fix.”

When Neman and Morgan left, Filo felt as if they had ripped something vital out of him. He’d learned to live with the hollow spot in his chest, adjusted to breathing around it, and slowly resigned himself to the likelihood that it would never go away. Talking about it or not talking about it was irrelevant. It just hurt.

His friends wouldn’t know what to make of that, so he never told them. They didn’t understand why he missed Nem and Morgan in the first place, much less that there was no way to make all the jagged things inside him stop hurting. But as he looked at Henry, he thought maybe someone did.

“I’m sorry about your mother,” Filo said, and he was. He’d never had a mother, but he knew how the broken pieces ground together.

“It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not.”

For a second, Henry was silent. Then he picked up another stone and turned toward the sea. “No,” he agreed softly. “It’s not. But you know what?”

A warm wind swept down the beach, carrying with it the scent of the trees. Behind them, the fire leaped and crackled. Henry flicked his wrist, sending the stone skipping across the water.

“I did get to save you,” he said, looking over his shoulder at Filo. “And that’s something.”

Nasser couldn’t touch his patients without his fingers going numb.

The curse seemed to be growing stronger every day, its cold power increasing as it fed off the energy of its host. Even when he wore rubber gloves, prolonged contact with a curse victim’s skin turned his hands cold and numb. If he didn’t stop, painful pins and needles would crawl all the way up to his elbows.

Watching Davis go through his daily patient examination without being able to assist was frustrating, but there wasn’t much for it. At the moment, the best he could do was observe and compare the condition of their current patient, Carrie Han, to her condition yesterday.

Beneath the barnacles that climbed the arch of her left cheekbone and spiraled down her arms, Carrie’s skin had taken on a faint greenish tinge. That was new. Each breath rasped slightly in her throat. That wasn’t. She’d been breathing that way for two days, but neither Nasser nor Davis could find a cause. As he watched Davis take her pulse, Nasser noticed that the thin veins at her wrist looked unusually dark, darker than they had yesterday.

Carrie turned her head suddenly, as if she’d caught a snatch of a song nobody else could hear, and her curtain of blue-black hair shifted. Frowning thoughtfully, Nasser reached out and carefully lifted her hair back, exposing the side of her neck.

Several inches below her jaw, a dark green growth had sprouted. It didn’t look quite like the rough barnacles that covered her skin; this one looked more like an oversized scab than anything else, though Nasser had seen no wound on her neck during their previous visits. While Davis flipped through one of his notebooks, Nasser checked the other side of Carrie’s neck. Another growth clung there, mirroring the first.

“Take a look at this,” Nasser said, pointing to her throat. “I’ve noticed a lot of people getting growths here, on either side of the neck. It’s about the same spot on each person, too.”