Chapter 32

The water was frigidly cold, but as I was pulled down, it weirdly got warmer. Now, I knew in the back of my head that being super cold and then getting warm all of a sudden should set off more alarm bells. Like dying of hypothermia.

Reality being what it was, being drowned was more of an issue for me than dying from the cold of the water.

Webbed fingers wrapped around my wrist, and I blinked as soft pink light grew around me. Again, weirdness, because I'd never really thought of the afterlife as being pink. Maybe Barbie had gotten it right all along?

A blink and then a face hovered in front of me, long blonde hair swirling through the rough current. Suzy smiled and then Feish shoved her out of the way, bubbles floating furiously from her mouth, as she shook her head and bobbled side to side.

I reached for them both and pulled them into a group hug, only then realizing that I was really holding my breath.

No, I wasn't holding my breath, but I wasn't breathing water like my two friends either. Kind of in limbo between breathing and not.

Come on, we gotta get you to the surface, we can hold you in this stasis for only so long. Suzy's voice was all around me, in my head, in the water.

The two of them each grabbed one of my hands and hauled me up from the depths. I got glimpses of Suzy's double-finned tail, pinks and purples that glittered with reflective light. That was the source of the glow—it had come from her tail of all places.

Feish swam hard, as if she would get me to the surface first. I knew why, though—it was so she could really yell at me.

We weren't even all the way through the surface before it began.

"Why did you send me away, only to get into the ocean and try to drown without me?" Her eyes were wide, as if she were holding back a much louder version of what she'd just hollered at me.

I coughed and hacked up a good deal of ocean water. "Thanks. Why am I not freezing?'

"You're avoiding my question!" Feish slapped a handful of water at my face.

"Because we are with you." Suzy grinned, though the grin slid. "We can share our water magic with another person, if we choose."

I smiled. "Thank you. I would have drowned for sure."

"Was that your plan?" Feish snapped. "I should have given you my special tea before I left, that would have kept you in one place!"

I grimaced at the thought of her special tea. If I never drank it again, it would be too soon.

"Look, I thought…I thought there was no way to solve this. But we had the whole situation wrong. I need to get back to the castle without anyone seeing me, I have to speak to a ghost there—he has the answers we need to solve this. Can you help me get up the coast of the island?"

Suzy looked over my head at Feish. "Crash said to keep her in one place."

Feish snorted. "Two problems. One, she never listens and will do as she pleases. And two, he is not the hero of this story. She is. So, she decides."

Suzy laughed. "I agree. I just wanted to make sure, because he and Eric are going to be pissed when they find our meeting spot empty."

She tightened her hold on my hand and began to swim against the current, as if it were nothing. Feish swam on the other side. Occasionally glaring at me. "You were going to do something bad, weren't you?"

I sighed, which couldn't be heard over the water and wind around us. "Feish, what would you do for the people you love? I know the answer. I know the answer because you're here. Both of you are here. If there was only one way to fix this, I was willing to face that."

Suzy's hand tightened on mine, as if she feared I'd slip away. She looked over her shoulder at me, her blue eyes pinched with worry. "And you think you found another way? Please tell me you found another way."

"Yes." I hoped so anyway. "Like I said, I have to speak with a ghost in the castle. As soon as I do that…as soon as I do that, I think I can fix this."

Feish burbled so loudly I did hear it over everything else. "You mean the spell, everything?"

"Everything." I kicked a little harder, hoping I was right. Hoping that Phillipa's and Alan's assessment of this other ghost would be enough to help me…save the world. Enough to save me too.

Crazy. I was crazy. Because there was still a tiny part of me that wondered if I was the right person for the job. I tried to take a deep breath to calm myself and ended up sucking in a lungful of salt water.

"Don't breathe it in!" Feish smacked me on the back, which just plunged my head under the water again in the middle of a coughing fit.

Suzy pulled me closer, her laughter contagious. "Don't die, Bree. We need you."

Hacking and choking, I couldn't do much but let them drag me along, like a naughty toddler who didn't want to leave the toy store. They each took a hand and towed me through the choppy water. Which left me staring up at the sky, watching the color change, shifting from a bright blue to deeper shades as the sun slowly set.

"I don't have much time," I said. "The vampires will be awake soon, and I really think it would be best if I avoid them."

"What's the plan, Stan?" Feish barked.

"You two will drop me off. One of you waits for me in the shallows. The other goes and let's Crash know what's going on." My heart constricted. "I left a note, but…I didn't mention details. I didn't have time."

That was the problem about running from your enemies. Sometimes things got left unsaid. I explained as best I could about Bramble. About how she really was helping Evangeline, and Remy had his own agenda. And I reminded them that Bramble could still manipulate memories. Though maybe not so much without her wand.

"Okay, okay, I will go and tell him," Feish burbled. "He would never believe if it doesn't come from me."

I hid a smile, my feet touching some sort of rocky bottom. We were just below the castle, on the western side. "You're the best, Feish."

"Well, yes, of course. I know that. Are you just realizing?" She snorted and dove back into the water.

Suzy and I watched her go, crouched so only our heads were above the surface. "She was frantic when we found you. She hadn't gotten far before she met up with me, and then…for lack of a better word, we could feel you in the water."

I looked at my friend. She'd changed after her time with the melusine. Her beauty held a new depth to it, an age and wisdom that hadn't been there before. "Thank you. I couldn't do this without my friends—without my family."

Suzy laughed and shook her head. "You could. You just don't realize it yet. When you left me with the melusine, even though it was my choice, I was angry. Angry that I'd needed to make that choice. But I had to learn that I was strong enough, Bree. Just as you are strong enough."

My heart clenched, sadness rippling through me. "I am so, so sorry."

"Don't be. It was an important part of making me stronger. I could always fight for my people, my love. But I had to choose to fight for myself. That was much harder, to stand up for me." Her eyes bored into mine. "I think…I think that is what you're facing now. We can be here. We can support you. But what you face…I think you will face on your own, in the end."

I didn't like that I felt the truth of her words, to the soles of my feet. "You came out better for it."

"I did. Or at least, I hope I did." Her smile showed off some of her sharper teeth. The ones that seemed to have come with her double tail. "You'd better go. I'll pull the water from your clothes when you're all the way out."

I didn't understand that last bit, until I stood shivering on the sand. Suzy swam forward, laying on her belly so she could wrap her fingers around my ankle, and the water soaking my hair and clothes wicked away like I'd been put into a massive hair salon dryer.

"Go. I'll be here."

I got moving because I knew it wouldn't be long before the night was fully on us.

I hurried up the sand hill, sliding and slipping backward, breathing hard, cursing the fact that I hadn't thought to train more in the sand, which was ridiculous—how could I have known how it was going to be?—and then finally got to the top.

The grass was trimmed short, and there was no hiding place. The best I could do was scoot across and get to the wall of the castle and press myself flat.

"It's about damn time!" Alan snapped in my left ear, and I slapped a hand over my mouth to keep from screeching.

"What the hell, Alan?"

"I've been consorting with demons!" He shook his head and I realized that he was completely disheveled. His hair was all standing straight up (what was left of it) his pants and shirt were impossibly dirty, the material torn. In short, he looked like he'd been in a back-alley dust up with a bunch of lawyers bigger than him. "Do you know how difficult it was to convince them to read their contracts? I've got them going over their demands, so I took the opportunity to slip away."

I stared at him. "Okay, so good job."

He snorted. "They won't let me go for long. I just...wanted to say…that I…that Vesuvius will likely be upstairs in the tower room where I found the music."

His face contorted as he said the words, almost as if he himself hadn't quite known what he was going to say until he'd said it.

"Okay. Where are you going to be?"

"Well, obviously I have to go over these contracts. I'll…I'll keep them busy as long as I can. There are a lot of them, Bree. And I think they can harm the living and the dead." He made that funny face that meant he was trying not to feel any emotion, kind of a puckering of his lips, nose, and eyes.

"Baby Jaysus," I whispered. "Are you…worried about the rest of us?"

His shoulders hunched. "And so what if I am?"

My eyebrows shot up. "Thank you, Alan. For looking out for me…for everyone."

His whole body ruffled, like a rooster getting dripped on in the rain. "I have to go."

Without another word, he slid through the wall behind us, leaving me on my own. Weird to think that after all this time, alive and dead, Alan was having some sort of crisis of conscience.

I didn't have a lot of time to think about that though. I needed to find a way into the castle, to the tower, and back out again without being seen. My hand went to the pocket of my dress.

I still had my little hunting knife which was really the only weapon on me. Good enough. The wand I'd taken from Bramble…well, that was a little bit more complicated. I didn't want to think about what I could or couldn't do with it, considering what I'd learned about the potential side effects of a spell that was done wrong.

Keeping my back to the wall, I made my way along the edge of the castle as quickly as I could. My clothing kept catching on the rough edges of the stone, like tiny hands snagging at me. Bad imagery, the last thing I needed was a thousand little hands trying to grab me.

Nope, I did not need to go there, not one bit.

Focus, girl, focus!I could almost hear Gran's voice. Around the first big curve of the wall, there was a depression in the ground and a set of stairs leading under the castle.

Much as I didn't want to go down, back toward the dungeon that I'd been stuffed in, I doubted this led to it—there had been no doors out of the dungeon. I blew out a sharp breath and hurried down the steps. The last light of the sun dipped below the sky as I reached the bottom, plunging me into total darkness.

Reaching blindly forward, I ran my hands over a wooden door, fumbling for the handle. Cold iron met my fingers, and I fiddled with it until I heard a click of the mechanism opening. I'm sure it wasn't that loud, but honestly it sounded like a freaking shotgun going off in the dark.

Wincing, I slid through the doorway and shut the heavy wooden door behind me, another click that reverberated down my spine.

The room was pitch dark, smelled of old musty leather and the faint scent of long dried dirt. My bare feet agreed—I wasn't on tile, but on a dirt floor. The question was, could I find my way to Vesuvius from here?

Or maybe…maybe I could bring him to me?

Swallowing hard, I let my connection to the dead rise within me, urging it carefully forward. Too much connection and the dead would draw me right in—Dr. Mori had taught me all about that.

But as the sensation of the dead started to float around me, I found that I could pinpoint those closest to me more clearly than before. I'd thought they'd all be at a distance, behind that barrier that had held Alan back initially.

But there were dead in the castle. I could feel Robert three stories above me, to my right. I could sense a ghost to my left, higher even than Robert. That could be Vesuvius. But I could also sense others…dead, that were…almost dead? Not quite dead? They were on the same floor as me. Here.

"Oh shit." I swallowed hard, realizing that I wasn't detecting zombies (which would have been preferable at that point) or ghosts (downright amazing as far as I was concerned).

No, I was sensing the vampires as they began to rise at the end of the day.

Jaysus on a donkey, I was in trouble.