Page 108 of The Sister's Curse
At least my father never did that, for all his evilness. He put girls where they would be found.
I reached forward, stirring the water with my fingers. I tried not to think about the pollutants in it.
“Rusalka,” I whispered, “I want what you want. I want these men to pay. If you kill them outright, their reputations will live on. Even now, people are likely planning Quentin Sims’s funeral, canonizing him in their heads and with their words. They will admire the money and influence Sumner and Lister wielded. Help me take them down, ruin their reputations, dispel their power for all time.”
The words flooded out of me like a dark incantation.
The black water burbled, and Gibby whined softly.
The moon gleamed on the water, a distant, pale coin. I reached into the river for it, jammed my fist into the mud. I lifted the mud high above my head, letting poisoned water run down over my arm.
I opened my hand.
It was full of tiny pearls. Three of them, nestled among ordinary milk quartz and rusted iron slag.
I turned to the island at the oxbow’s center, where angry geese slept. Something moved underwater, undulating, toward the island. Whether it was a snake or something from my dark imagination didn’t matter.
It was leading me to the island.
My heart beat, slow and steady, against my rib cage. I told Gibby to stay. I stripped off my shoes and my jacket and left them on the shore. The river was poisoned, but I needed to risk this. My gun stayed behind, too. Somehow, I sensed that it would be rude to carry a weapon into the Rusalka’s domain. I waded into the water. The current swirled around my thighs, and silt pressed soft against the soles of my feet. I waded in up to my chest, feeling the warm water pushing against my sternum.
I took a deep breath to fill my lungs with air, and kicked off, letting my arms pull me through the slow current. Something brushed against me in the dark, maybe some debris or fish. Maybeshewas testing me, making sure I was brave enough to see what lay before me, on the island.
I inhaled and exhaled in time with my pulse, slipping through the water. I reached forward for the moon, feeling the water caress my cheek, keeping the island in the distance in sight.
Water streaming from my shirt and pants, I pulled myself up through the cattails of the tiny island. It was only about fifty feet wide, a teardrop shape in the center of the oxbow, shaded by a clump of trees.
The geese in their nests regarded me silently, raising no calls of alarm. They knew I was also of the forest, and I knew they wouldn’t deter me.
I closed my eyes and reached out as I had so many years ago, when I was dowsing, for water and for dead things. I visualized silvery water rushing all around me, staticky in texture. Maybe that was the Vapozene in it. It dug into the marshy center of the island with veins that thrummed and chewed into the mud. Years from now, this little island would be worn away and the river would rush straight through once more. The trees would drown, and the island would be forgotten—just like all the missing girls.
The ground was dotted with nests. But there was one place where there was no nest, no river birch tree, and where no grass grew. I walked to it, half seeing the pattern of water encroaching upon it. There was something not right about this place.
I found a flat rock about the size of my hand and used it to scrape at the sandy dirt. It was loose and glittering in the moonlight. I dug like a child hunting for shells at the beach, searching. This looked like that place in my vision, where Dana was curled in on herself in a burnt nest.
A splash sounded at the bank, and I turned, expecting Rusalka to appear. But it was only Gibby.
I scolded him. “You should’ve stayed at the bank.” I didn’t want him exposed to the toxic sludge here.
But he’d seen me digging, and he wanted to dig, too. He and I dug deeper, scraping away layers of gritty dirt streaked with black. Something had burned here, long ago, and stained the soil. Organic things that were burned tended to decompose quickly, but the crystals in the sandy soil here had been changed by fire, warped…fused together by unnaturally high temperatures.
I paused when my rock struck something black and hollow. Gibby snuffled it, and I brushed dirt away.
Bone. Smooth and black.
The geese watched us, every head on a silent, black, snaky neck turned to witness us.
I should’ve stopped and called someone, but we kept going, trapped in the spell of what we were uncovering. We scooped the sand away from the claws of ribs, from a clavicle. I swept sand away from vertebrae, from a jaw.
Human.Curled up in a fetal position, like a dead bird in a nest. Judging by what we’d excavated, it was a small human. Likely a woman.
I leaned forward to blow sand away from the clavicle. The remains of a charred necklace floated in the shallow grave. Even in this darkness, I could distinguish a moon and a river pearl.
A shudder racked through me at this discovery, this truth hidden away for so long. Moonlight flooded her bones, outlining evidence of her last moments on earth.
“Dana,” I breathed.
A deep, female sigh exhaled into the air, disturbing the roosting birds in the trees above me.
