Chapter 18

18

T he words had drifted over the gathered crowd like snow, landing softly and silently, and transforming the landscape. Curious faces turned rapt. Confused faces turned content. Bored faces turned mesmerized. The movement of the performers fell into a rhythm, almost like choreography. The arms of the wood nymphs swayed and fluttered in perfect synchronicity. The frost fairies seemed to be floating around the Holly King like they really had swirled down from the dark of the sky in a kind of twirling dance. The lights that glowed from their fingertips darted and dipped through the gathering twilight, like lightning bugs. Whether it was the excitement of having an audience or simply sheer luck, our modest pageant had transformed into something much more than a reluctant group of teenagers going through the motions. I felt the thrill that only a theater kid can feel, the feeling that your performance has transcended the mess and frustration and monotony of rehearsal, and has been elevated to something more—something cohesive and enchanting. Something magical.

I tore my eyes from the performance and turned to grin at my mother and aunts, sure that they were as surprised and impressed as I was, but none of them were looking at me. They were staring, utterly entranced by the performance as well. My grin widened, and I enjoyed myself for a minute watching their expressions. Then I leaned over and spoke into my mother’s ear.

“So where would you rank this year’s pageant compared to the year Persi beat up that kid?” I asked, chuckling.

My mother didn’t answer. She was still staring at the pageant.

I laughed. “Hello? Earth to Mom! Come in, Mom!”

She didn’t reply, and I felt the smile slide off my face.

“Mom?”

I waved my hand in front of her face. She didn’t so much as flinch.

Unease pooled in my stomach, cold and congealed. I reached out and took her by the shoulder, shaking her roughly. “Mom!” MOM!” My voice had risen to a shout now, but I didn’t care. Something was wrong. Was she having a seizure or something? A stroke? “Rhi? Something’s wrong with Mom!” I cried.

I was so focused on my mother that it took me a moment to realize that Rhi hadn’t responded. I turned to see her staring with the same rapt attention as my mother, her eyes following every movement of the performers on the platform. I stepped past my mother and tugged on Rhi’s arm.

“Rhi? Rhi!”

She didn’t react at all. It was as though I didn’t exist.

Heart hammering now, I turned to Persi. Though a glance told me she was unreachable, like Rhi and my mom, I shook her shoulder anyway, my fear spilling over into something like frustration. I had to stop myself from slapping her. I whirled on the spot instead, searching the crowd before grabbing the arm of the woman in front of me. She was clearly a tourist, sporting a sweatshirt that said, “Get Spooked by the Sea in Sedgwick Cove.” She turned to glare at me, and I recoiled from her, dropping her sleeve at once.

“What’s your problem?” she snapped at me.

“I’m so sorry,” I replied breathlessly. “I… I thought you were someone I knew.”

The woman narrowed her eyes at me before turning around again. I began to scan the crowd more carefully now. Nearby was a family with three small children. At first glance, they seemed to be caught up in the performance, too; but after a moment, the toddler in the stroller began to fuss, having dropped his sippy cup on the ground, and the man behind the stroller bent to retrieve it. The other man, who had one of the children on his shoulders, turned to see that all was well. The little girl on his shoulders caught my eye and smiled shyly at me when she saw me watching. Beside this family was Phoebe, who I remembered meeting on my first day in Sedgwick Cove. She was the woman who ran the Historical Society. I hurried toward her and tapped her on the shoulder, holding my breath. She didn’t turn.

“Phoebe?” I said once, and then again, louder. She didn’t respond. Nothing existed for her but the pageant. I may as well have been a ghost.

I turned my head, my thoughts whirling faster than my body, as I found one familiar face after another: Davina, Ostara, Maricela. Every person I knew from Sedgwick Cove seemed to be entranced in the same way, utterly unable to pull their eyes from the performance, even as the tourists around them chatted and laughed and munched on concessions.

It’s a spell , I realized. It’s some kind of spell, and the only people affected by it are the witches.

Except for me.

The realization caused the cold dread in my stomach to spread like ice water through my veins, until the tips of my fingers and toes tingled with it. I didn’t know what to do or what to think. Would the enchantment—or whatever the hell it was that held them all in thrall—break with the end of the pageant?

The idea shot through me, sharp and clear. End the pageant.

Throwing one last anxious look at my mother and my aunts, I began to weave through the packed crowd as quickly as I could, mumbling apology after apology to anyone I jostled. At last, I reached the edge of the platform. It was about waist high, and I used my arms to boost myself over the lip of the stage. I ignored the angry shouts of the audience members nearest me, and shook off the grasping fingers of a man who attempted to pull me off the stage. I darted around to the side of the stage, masking myself behind the swaying mass of wood nymphs. I was looking for one nymph in particular, and after a moment, I spotted her in the middle back row.

“Eva! Hey! Eva!” I called in an exaggerated whisper. Eva didn’t turn. She continued to sway and wave her foliage-covered arms in perfect synchronicity with the other nymphs. I tried again, louder this time. Finally, throwing my last remaining bit of caution to the wind, I ran across the stage, ducking down so that I would be hidden by the other performers until I reached her.

“Eva!” I cried, taking the sleeve of her costume between my fingers and tugging on it. “Eva, can you hear me? Eva, answer me!” I took her by the arm and pulled, forcing her to face me, but though she twisted her body in my direction, she continued to chant the words, to wave her arms as though she was a sleepwalker in the depths of a dream.

“We are the keepers of forest, of flame! We are the beacons of sun! Of spring!” she repeated over and over again, her voice going hoarse, her eyes glazed as though she had a fever that had rendered her incoherent. Her gaze was vacant, devoid of reason or understanding. Again, I felt like a ghost, invisible and silent, no matter how loudly I screamed. I released her, and she whirled right back into sync with the others. Tears were pooling in my eyes, and I couldn’t force them back. They spilled down my cheeks as I allowed myself one moment of panic. Then, I brushed them away impatiently. Falling apart now would solve exactly nothing. Instead, I made use of my new vantage point, peering through the frolicking nymphs to examine the crowd of upturned faces in front of me. Surely, there must be one witch, just one, who was unaffected by this madness like I was.

My eye was drawn to a little figure standing apart from the crowd. I don’t think I would have noticed her at all in the gathering darkness if it wasn’t for the sudden, violent flares of light emanating from the nearby tiki torches. Something about the figure was familiar, tickling my recognition like a breeze, until a particularly bright flash of firelight glinted off the colorful beads on the ends of her braids.

It was Bea. And she wasn’t staring at the pageant like everyone else.

Hope swelled in me, sudden and strong. I waved my arms frantically over my head, but it wasn’t enough to attract her attention. I let my hands fall to my side, a strange new sort of anxiety rising in me as I watched her. She wasn’t paying the slightest attention to the spectacle on display only a dozen yards from where she stood. I scanned the shadows that hemmed her in for a sign of Xiomara or Maricela, but they were where I had last seen them, in the midst of the crowd, faces blank and hypnotized by the pageant. Why wasn’t she with them? Why wasn’t she, like the other witches, in a trance?

At that moment, the Holly King and the Oak King came at each other, their staffs meeting mid-swing with a loud crack, sending a shower of sparks and snowflakes drifting up into the air. The crowd cheered in reply, and Bea threw her hands up over her ears at the burst of sound. Her eyes were bright, and I realized in the flash of light that it was because they were full of unshed tears. Then she shifted her gaze away from the giant puppets, and her eyes found mine at last.

She looked at me. I looked at her. Then, something shifted in the shadows behind her.

No, not something in the shadows: the shadows themselves. They peeled away from the ground, from the trees, from the walls of the building she stood in front of. They pooled and swirled and then spun upward into a sort of dervish, before settling into a recognizable shape: long and thin, human, and yet so terribly not.

The Gray Man.

“Bea, behind you!” I tried to cry out, but the fear was smothering my voice, choking me, and the words came out in a strangled, breathless whisper.

As though she had sensed the danger, Bea turned and saw the figure standing there. She’s going to run, I thought. She’s going to scream. Bedlam is about to break out, and this whole festival is about to disintegrate into panic. Maybe that will be enough to break the spell.

The Gray Man reached out and extended a hand toward her. Bea stood motionless. I couldn’t see her face, couldn’t understand why she wasn’t backing, stumbling away. Was she, like me, immobilized with fear? Was she as helpless in her shock, as incapable of self-preservation?

And then, before I could do more than open my mouth to call out to her again, my breath stopped. My heart stopped. Everything around us seemed to stop. All except for Bea, who reached out her hand and placed it in the Gray Man’s. I watched his long, smoky fingers curl around hers, saw his ghost of a face twist into the suggestion of a grin. And then they turned together at a run and were almost instantly swallowed by the dark.

“Bea!” I shouted after her, but it was useless. The tumult in the street overpowered my voice completely—I could barely decipher it in my own ears.

It had to be magic, the way Bea and the Gray Man had melted through the throngs of people. No one had even glanced at them, too caught up in the music and the lights and the spectacle of it all. Without thinking, without caring that I was running toward the very thing that wanted to claim me, I bolted after her. Because what choice did I have? There was no one else who could help her.

“Bea! Wait!”

I leaped from the edge of the stage and hit what felt like a solid wall of people. With no other choice, I started shoving my way through. I ignored the startled and angry shouts, spewing a steady stream of preemptive apologies that I wasn’t even convinced anyone could hear. I didn’t want to apologize. I wanted to scream so loudly and so fiercely that every person around me would stop in their tracks, and turn to listen. So that everyone would have a taste of the terror licking its way up my bones, burning away my self-control, my logic, my self-preservation.

I couldn’t let Bea go where the Darkness would lead her, wherever that may be. I couldn’t let it happen.

I ducked around families with overstimulated, sticky-faced toddlers in strollers, and groups of tourists in masks and gaudy witch hats. I could smell booze and incense and greasy street fair food, all wrapped in the constant pungent scent of smoke from the torches, and it made my head spin. Laughter and shouts and music and the constant discordant jangling of bells assaulted my ears from every direction, disorienting me. I suddenly found I couldn’t stand to be in the crowd another moment. I stumbled through a sudden gap in the crush of bodies, only to find myself on the edge of a circle that had formed around a secondary pair of street performers.

I was momentarily blinded, throwing my hands up in front of my face in terror until I realized what I was looking at: they were juggling flaming torches, faster and faster, so that the individual flames became glowing circles suspended in the air. I stared in frozen wonder, my eyes dazzled for a moment before my adrenaline surged again, reminding me why I was running in the first place; and I took off again across the circle, skirting the performers who called out in alarm that I’d gotten too close. People were shouting at me, but I couldn’t care. I had to get to Bea. Perhaps the terror was as clear on my face as it was in my head, because the people who made up the opposite wall of the crowd hastily jumped out of my way, parting like the sea at my frenzied approach.

Once I’d emerged from the other side of the wall of people, I stared around again, wildly scanning the street for any sign of her—of him. Was it possible I was the only person who had seen him? Bea certainly had. But why would she go with him? Didn’t she know what he was? But then I thought of Eva, of how overprotective she was.

Bea’s a good kid but she scares easily. I don’t need her crawling into my bed with nightmares for the next week.

What could possibly be more nightmare-inducing than The Gray Man—the Darkness itself? Whatever sanitized details Eva and her family had chosen to share with Bea, the Gray Man certainly could not have been among them. Bea had no idea whose hand she had just taken, and somehow, that made it all immeasurably worse. As I ran, dodging, pushing, and weaving to find a clear path out of the festival, I feared I would lose them entirely and then… I shuddered, refusing to allow my brain to complete the thought. I didn’t know what the Darkness wanted with Bea, but I knew that whatever it was, it wasn’t good. I plunged heedlessly onward.

How could such a tiny town hold so many people? They seemed to have multiplied now that I had to fight my way through them. Desperate not to lose Bea, I climbed awkwardly up onto the base of a street lamp so that I could see over the seething mass of people, my eyes scanning the darkness for some sign of them. At last, I spotted them disappearing around a corner from Main Street down one of the side streets that would, I knew, lead them down along the harbor. Dread flooded through me as I watched Bea’s tiny form slip out of sight. I couldn’t let the Gray Man take her anywhere near the ocean. What if he tried to walk into the water with her, to steal her, like he had with me? The very thought felt like a punch to the gut, causing what little breath I’d managed to maintain while running to huff out of me. My head spun as I jumped down off the lamppost, and I had to grip a stranger’s arm to right myself before mumbling a half-apology, and tearing off down the street again.

The worst part, as I weaved and dodged and tripped through the crowd, was that I couldn’t shout out for help. What could I say that anyone would believe? And if they did believe it, that in itself would present a new kind of danger—a danger to the carefully hidden secrets of Sedgwick Cove, and the families who lived there. I could be putting even more people I loved in harm’s way by calling out, but by keeping silent, I might be making it possible for the Gray Man to… my mind wouldn’t let me finish that thought. If I allowed myself to imagine what Bea’s fate might be, I would lose what little grip I had left on my self-control.

At last, with a grunt of effort on my part, and a chorus of annoyed shouts and dirty looks from those around me, I managed to force my way through the rest of the crowd. I broke into a real run as I darted around the straggling groups on the outskirts, which became fewer and fewer the further I got from the pageant stage. I skidded to a stop at the corner where Bea and the Gray Man had turned and paused a moment, both to ease the burning cramp in my side, and to peer cautiously down the street from a concealed spot behind a clump of bushes. I could no longer see either of them. I stared wildly around for the street sign, and saw that it was Hydrangea Street—this was definitely the road they’d taken, but how had they traversed it so quickly? Had the Gray Man used some kind of magic to transport Bea more quickly? But he shouldn’t be able to access that kind of magic. The Covenant was designed to prevent that—so how was this even happening? It ought to have been impossible.

But I knew what I saw. And I also knew that the word impossible likely didn’t apply in a place like Sedgwick Cove.

Suddenly, a figure came out from between two of the houses on the lefthand side of the street, loping with an easy stride, hands in pockets. A cheerful whistle drifted up the street. As I watched, wondering if I should hide from the figure, it passed under a pool of light from a streetlamp, and recognition hit me like a slap to the face.

“Luca!”

His name burst from my mouth before I had even decided whether I should call attention to myself or not. He looked up, startled, and then spotted me. His face broke into that slow, broad smile, and he waved a hand.

“Hey, Wren! What’s going on?”

How could I even begin to answer that question? I replied with one of my own instead.

“What are you doing here?”

Luca gave me a strange look. “I thought I’d come down and check out the festival after hearing you all talk about it so much.”

Oh right. The festival. The event of the year had turned into little more than an obstacle in my path, as I’d fought my way through it to find Bea.

“You know, I’m pretty sure you’re going the wrong way if that’s where you’re headed, too,” Luca said, his smile tentative as he nodded his chin toward the main road I’d just come from.

“Oh, yeah. I mean… no, I was already there. Listen, did you see a little girl and a… um, well, a taller person… come down this street just now?” I asked, stumbling over the words as I struggled to make them sound even slightly normal.

Luca frowned at the obvious tension in my voice. “Hey, are you okay?”

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” I gasped, though I knew I sounded anything but. “I need to know if you’ve seen?—”

“I did see a little girl come down this way, but she was by herself,” Luca said, and I could see a bit of my own tension reflected in his face now. “Why?”

I hesitated. It had to have been Bea—it was too much of a coincidence. Had the Gray Man still been with her? Was it possible that Bea could see the Gray Man, but Luca couldn’t? Maybe he was only visible to witches? I didn’t have the time to work out the details.

“It’s my friend’s little sister. We can’t find her, and?—”

“She looked like she was maybe eight? Braided hair with beads?” Luca said.

“That’s her! Did you see which way she went?” I said.

“Yeah, she turned left down at the end there,” Luca said.

“Thanks,” I cried, and took off in the direction he’d pointed.

“Wait! I’ll help you look!” Luca said, and started jogging after me.

“No, you don’t have to do that. Go enjoy the festival,” I called over my shoulder, but he ignored that.

“I won’t be able to enjoy it if I think some kid’s gone missing. Let me help,” Luca said.

I didn’t have the time or energy to argue. Finding Bea had to be the first priority. And if we found someone—or something— else with her… well, I’d cross that troubling bridge if and when we got to it.

“Okay, fine. Come on.”

We hurried all the way to the end of Hydrangea Street, pausing only long enough to peer down the narrow cobbled alleyways that ran between some of the houses, but there was no sign of her. Finally, Hydrangea spilled out onto Harbor Street, the street that ran the length of the wall along the water, toward the cove and the beaches. The street was completely deserted, with the exception of one couple sitting on a bench facing the water, and I didn’t bother asking them if they’d seen which way Bea had gone. Frankly, they looked too preoccupied to notice anything at all. I looked frantically down the street in both directions, but saw no sign of Bea or the Gray Man.

“Shit. Shit!” I hissed between teeth that felt glued together with stress.

“We can split up,” Luca said, coming to a stop so silently beside me that I jumped at his nearness. “I’ll go left, and you go right.”

“But how will I?—”

“Have you got your phone?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“I’ll call you if I spot her.”

I bit my lip, hesitating again. I really didn’t want to drag Luca into this. He was so nice, so… normal.

“Wren?” he prompted, looking confused.

“Uh, yeah,” I said, shaking my head and deciding on the spot. “Yeah, fine. Just… Luca, be careful, please.”

Luca grinned. “It’s an eight-year-old kid, I think I can handle it.”

“Please, Luca. She’s… she’s shy. If she sees you chasing after you, she might… might take off or hide or something, and then we’ll never find her.”

Luca’s smile folded into a frown. “You’re worried she’s in trouble.”

I nodded, my fear choking me.

“Okay. I’ll keep my distance if I can,” Luca said, and with a reassuring nod, he took off at a run, headed north up the shoreline.

I watched him for a few moments, heart in my throat, wondering if I should go after him, before dragging myself back into the present moment. No. Bea was the one I needed to focus on right now. She was the one in immediate danger. Finding her had to be the priority, even if it meant… well, I just had to hope that Luca could take care of himself.