before and after she tried kissing me on the beach. “Gwen, look at
me.”
She doesn’t.
But Layla does. Her lips are trembling. I can smell it on her,
anger like kerosene, like the blue fire eating away at the ship now
that the rain is settling.
I ready myself to jump off.
“You stay put.” Nieve wags her finger at me, and my body feels
like it’s wading against the current. I grip my scepter tighter,
fighting against the force of her magic.
“Don’t look surprised, Tristan,” Gwen says, finally meeting my
eyes for a second before looking back down at Layla.
That’s the thing. “I am. How can you do this?”
“I don’t understand,” Nieve says, “how you can pass over my
Gwenivere for this creature. When Gwenivere told me her advances were
futile against your human, I pictured something a little more-lush.”
“You fought alongside me-”
“No.” Gwen’s eyes, the gray eyes that stared right into mine as
she helped me find Shelly, are shadowed. “I fought against you. You
were just too blind to see it.”
Everything crashes over me. The way Archer tried to save her when
the merrows attacked us in Florida. The way she helped me find
Eternity. One step closer to finding it for Nieve. Nieve, always one
step ahead. “It wasn’t Sarabell who killed the avians. It was you.”
“Oh no, that was Sarabell,” Nieve says. “I told her I’d spare her
dear cousin if she did as I asked. Foolish girl.”
“Then you let in Jesse,” I say. “ Look at me, Gwen.”
Finally, she does. One, two, three seconds go by and she turns
away again. “You mean nothing to me, Tristan.”
But she’s wrong. I know the way she looked at me, sitting on the
beach, laughing. She wasn’t faking our friendship.
“Why?” I ask her. Even in the dark I can see the sad grimace on
her face. “Because your husband sliced you up so now you hate the
world?”
Her laugh makes me shiver. “Elias didn’t give me any scars. In
fact, he was afraid of me. He wanted to marry me thinking I’d serve
him, be his private witch. Instead, I made him hide in the dark. I
made his nightmares come to life.”
“But you said-”
“No, you said Elias did this to me. I let you believe it. Every
scar I have I wear proudly because it reminds me of what I am and
where I come from.”
“And where do you come from?”
This time, Nieve answers. “From me.”
I think of every time I’d see Gwen in the corner of my eyes. The
white of her hair. They don’t have the same faces, but the haughtiness
is there. With them side by side, I can see it now.
“My brother made me throw her away. The king, my brother, made me
leave her. She was deformed in their eyes. Merrows, we call them. We
leave them to die in bottomless holes in the sea. Then he locked me
away and I healed her. I loved her and I fixed everything so that she
could return to court where she belonged. And I did it for all my
children. Never as good as Gwenivere, but Archer is the beginning of
something new. Together we will make a better kingdom. Without fear of
living on the outside. And you will give me what I want, Tristan Hart,
or you will watch your human die.”
I hold the Scepter of the Earth in my hands. The quartz glows so
brightly that I fear I’ve lost control. Layla tries to shake her head,
even with a knife at her neck. She doesn’t want me to do it. But I’ll
find another way to fix it, to make this right.
I hold the scepter by its base.
The quartz faces the silver witch.
Her eager hands rise from the wave, ready to snatch it.
The blast comes from the pier, behind Gwen.
“ No. ”
Nieve loses her balance and falls into the water with a splash.
I hop over the deck onto the mast, which forms a bridge between
the ship and the pier. My eyes are locked on Layla, who struggles
against Gwen’s grip. Gwen throws the knife to the ground and puts a
hand over Layla’s nose and mouth. “No!”
They dive.
On the pier, Kurt shoots another bolt of lightning to where Nieve
floats. It blasts hard and hits the ship. The mast spins beneath my
feet and I fall, hitting the back of my head on the wood before
crashing in the water.
I swim, screaming in the sea with every bit of breath I have.
She’s gone.
They’re gone.
The night is black and the storm is gone too.
Water dries against the heat of my skin. I think I’m burning from
the inside out. I run back onto the pier, holding onto my scepter like
a baseball bat, and swing with all my strength.
Kurt with his big, stupid violet eyes. How did I not see it? He’s
got an inch on me, maybe two, but the similarity is there. His face,
familiar in the way my own is. Right now, I want to bash it into the
back of his skull.
He moves side to side, avoiding my swings, but he doesn’t swing
back. “I had to!”
“No, you didn’t!”
“Would you have given your power away to the sea witch? Would you
have let her be the end of us? All for-”
“Say it!” I shove him with all of my weight. “For a human? In case
you hadn’t noticed, that’s the way I was raised!”
“Are you finished?”
I laugh, bitter and ugly and hateful. “I’m not even close to
finished.”
He raises his trident at the same time I raise my scepter. The
metals clash, sparking at every turn. I bet he didn’t think I paid
attention during our lessons. But I did. I mirror his every move. Side
shuffle, three o’clock, turn, and six o’clock.
It pisses him off, Mr. Predictable. He sucks in the air around us
and blasts me with his trident. My quartz absorbs the blow, taking the
force deep into the crystal. I have to hold the scepter hard so it
doesn’t shake out of my hands.
From the corner of my eye, I see that the battle is coming toward
us. The Sea Guard clusters on the beach and kneels in Kurt’s
direction. They hold their swords up. One of them says, “Sire-”
“This is between us.” Kurt holds his hand up to stop them. And I
want to laugh, because I know I had the same look on my face the first
time Kurt called me “sire.”
Then there are the others, Frederik leading his Alliance, Penny,
and Kai. In the back of my head, I can hear Shelly saying, “And in
darkness we will remain.”
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Kurt says.
I hold out my arms. “It’s too late for that.”
We both extend our weapons and fire again. The light of my quartz
and the lightning sparks of his tridents are white-hot beams clashing
at the center. This whole time, he’s underestimated me. As a man. As a
friend. As an opponent.
“Stop!” The scream comes from the left. Thalia is going to walk
right in the middle of our fire. “Stop it!”
I pull away first and a spark of the trident hits my chest. I fly
back and hit the balcony of the pier, cleaving the wood in half.
“Tristan was going to trade his scepter for Layla,” Kurt shouts.
“I had to do it.”
“Where is she?”
I gesture at the black water. “Gwen and Nieve took her.”
“We will figure this out,” he says.
“In case he forgot,” I get up and thunder back to him, “Layla
can’t breathe underwater. She might already be-”
“Nieve wouldn’t,” Thalia says, pleading back and forth to both of
us. “Not knowing what she means to you.”
“You never even wanted to be here, Kurt,” I say. “Why don’t you go
back to your cougar girlfriend and have her read you some more bedtime
stories about your new father.”
Kurt’s fist slams into my cheekbone. Thalia’s shaking, putting her