Page 41 of Witchlore
“I’m doing what you want, I’m being helpful!” My teeth chatter as I walk down to the ocean, the skin on my arms pimpling against the frigid wind. “You’re trying to manipulate a creature that has lived for hundreds of years. It’s not going to work. We have to get their attention.”
“You’re going in?” Bastian exclaims, running alongside me. The water is freezing and my socks are instantly soaked. “Tell me what you’re doing!”
“Stay here, it isn’t safe for you.” I stumble into the shallow waves, already feeling the pull of the tide, ready to drag me out and under. I’m going to let it.
“How do you get their attention?” Bastian yells after me.
“You get drowned!” I call back, and with that, I dive under a big wave.
CHAPTERFIFTEEN
It’s icy, it’s dragging, it’s everything I remember from the first time I was saved by the selkies. It was right before college: I was alone, I slipped beneath the waves and was tumbling until a slick, oiled body righted me. I’d felt them before, when I’d been allowed to swim in the sea in my childhood, their wide tails and their cool bodies flush against me and, occasionally, their coal-gray heads popping up beside me, gun-black eyes blinking. They were good companions for a lonely child and when the moment came, they saved me. I know just how to bring them to me again. All I have to do is let go. Stop swimming. Stop trying to push myself back up to the surface, let the weight of my jeans drag me under and close my eyes against the salt and the sound of waves churning. I only have one thought in my mind: it’s Elizabeth, jumping on her trampoline, her golden hair flying in the air, the sunlight catching it and making it shine like a halo. If the selkies don’t reach me in time, I think it’s a pretty good last thought to have. I don’t mean to, but a quiet, desperate voice that I haven’t heard since the bathroom slips into my consciousness:Maybe there’s a better way to get to Elizabeth.
I feel something against me as I sink under the tide, a sleekbody sliding against mine. I force my eyes open, catching that curious, coal-dark glare in swirling brown and gray water. I stare at them, knowing they must choose to save me. The eagerness of my own thoughts shocks me:Please.
Then it’s sudden. I’m being pulled up and I break the surface, gasping with the air pushing into my lungs and the cold wind whipping my face. I kick to keep my head above the water, rolling with the waves crashing in a stormy symphony around me. A seal head looks at me, its inky eyes watching me struggle.
“Hello, fellow skin changer.” Selkie voices aren’t melodious, the way people imagine mermaids to be: they’re rough, like dried coral. “Why do you come to our waters?”
“I need a bone from Kilgrimol,” I say, gasping as a wave tries to pull me under. I swallow a mouthful of salt water, rough and stinging, and cough brutally.
“You risk your life for this?”
“It’s for a spell, to bring someone back.”
“Someone you love?”
“Loved, love, yes.” I struggle to keep my head above water. My legs are tired. I should have stripped my jeans off. “Can you help me?”
The selkie gives me a long, steady look. Seals usually look happy, adorable, but selkie eyes have a depth in them, as black as the deep ocean floor.
“I will do this if you swear to be careful with your life. This is the second time we have pulled you from the tides. There will not be a third.”
I gulp back salt water and tears—I can’t tell which is which out here—and everything is becoming gray; the frothing, slate ocean, the bitter-cold wind, and the sky pressing down on me.
“I… I promise to try,” I say. I don’t blink as I look into its eyes.I feel like it’s examining me entirely, seeing everything I’ve done since we were last together. Maybe selkies can do that; I’m not sure. They have ancient power inside them, their magic unyielding and mesmerizing and wildly unpredictable. It could very well decide to let me drown.
“That is sufficient.” It swims closer, bigger and stronger than a gray seal, and I wrap my arms around it, clinging to the barnacles that adorn its back, a sturdy body that has swum in these waters longer than time can tell. “We must dive for it. Our magic will help you, but your breath may fail.”
“Let’s do it!” I shout as a wave tries to tug me away from it. I heave my shoulders above the water, taking one last deep gasp of air before we plummet beneath the waves. Selkies are fast and deadly. Swimming with one is like the descent of a diving hawk. It’s so fast it’s almost nauseating. I barely feel the water passing me, rather that there is immense pressure around me, increasing by the second, and freezing, deep coldness squeezing my face and arms and legs. The deeper we go, the tighter the air in my chest becomes and the sharper the pain in my head, as if someone has put a vise around it and is pinching, slowly. Still, I hold on for dear life, just a little farther, because if I let go now I will absolutely drown here, deep beneath the waves.
The abyss below the crashing waves is quiet, eerie, becoming nothing but gray shapes and sudden looming rocks, silver bodies of fleeting fish and wondrous broad, ragged tails of other selkies. Then suddenly, tombstones. Timeworn gravestones from bygone ages, the drowned town of Kilgrimol, its churchyard turned from a grassy hill to a watery, sandy grave. I see a bone sticking out of the ashy sand, white as dried cuttlefish, catching the little light that pierces this low under the sea. I flail my hands for it, telling theselkie we must stop, and with a flash of teeth, it has the bone in its mouth. Then, with a wide swish of its great tail that has my hands scrabbling to hold on, we are surfacing. The journey upward seems agonizingly long, the bubble of air in my lungs shrinking painfully until I feel as if it is just the tightest squeeze behind my eyes—a little bit farther, just a little bit—my eyes are closing, my grip slipping—then we break the surface and there is air again. I’m gasping, I’m wide-mouthed and so desperate to gulp down wind and salty air that I swallow mouthfuls of a wave and choke violently, my chest screaming with pain.
“It is done,” the selkie says. “Remember your promise.”
Blinking stinging salt out of my squinting eyes, I can see Bastian standing knee-deep in the waves, shouting words that I can’t hear. The selkie bobs beside me with the bone in its mouth. Absurdly, I think of René. My legs are so tired and I still need to try and get back to shore, but the hardest part is done surely. I’m nearly there.
“Thank you.” I cough, leaning forward to take the bone from its teeth. It feels like a shell, smooth and weathered, and as soon as I touch it, light explodes from inside me. I disappear into a world that isn’t mine, a memory that isn’t mine, with only one thought to hold on to:Not again.
I am in pain. The wound in my thigh is on fire and I can’t move. All I can see is the nurse above me, telling me that I’ll be all right, that I’m going into surgery. I look down and see the remnants of my green uniform as they cut it off me.
“Come in from Ypres,” the nurse is saying. “Another batch, just as bad as the last.”
“Gas?” someone asks. I look up into the face of a redheaded doctor in a white coat, his face serious.
“Bayonet wound to the thigh and then shrapnel wounds.”
I can remember getting it, slipping in the mud of no-man’s-land, the stinging pain that had me falling before anyone could help me, and then the explosion. I was drowning in mud, and now it’s like the bright hospital lights are burning me. I can smell the sea, hear English voices.
