Page 80 of The Wild Beneath

Walker is certainly dead by now.

Evan starts crumbling around the edges. If he himself hadn’t gone overboard, Walker would be alive.

He tries not to hyperventilate.

Walker sinks deeper. The ocean’s melody encircles his torso, increasing in volume. The sea whispers her instructions into his bones. Pulled down by his ankles, he is welcomed into a thicket of kelp.

He is not awake; he cannot fight it, sinking until he reaches the bottom.

Walker could not have stopped it if he tried. The sea has her own plans. She was the one to sing the first song and she’s held the story ever since. The timing is hers alone.

There is nothing to do.

Because people can turn into other things, even when they don’t want to.

Chapter 29

Annie’s cheek is covered in sand.

She’s stiff and cold. The waves roar onto the beach while gulls squawk overhead, fighting over a crab leg. Everything has shifted out of place. The sounds are wrong: amplified, storming. Too close. Painful.

The last thing she remembers is screaming.

Now she’s lying on the sand. Wet, cold, crusted in the salt of the ocean and her own tears. She can’t hear Walker at all.

Annie sits up, face to face with the sea. The sun is rising in the distance and a haze floats over the empty, slack water. She asks it to give her a sign, to give her his sound back, this beach that delivered him in the first place.

Nothing.

Her skin prickles, stinging, as a thought clicks into place: Walker is gone.

Is he dead?

Her eyes find their way from the horizon to the sand around her feet. The slew of new debris. Her gaze stalls upon a circular piece of wood... Half a steering wheel. She knows this broken circle. She brushes away sand and seaweed until she finds the names carved into the wood: Annie, Mara, Aiden.

Amphitrite’s broken helm.

She asked for a sign, and here it is. They’re all dead. Her parents, and probably Walker too.

The ascent back to the cabin takes triple the time it should. Her feet don’t listen to her. She misses a rung on the ladder and skins the palm of her hand. At the top, a muddy puddle captures her out of nowhere. Her boots get stuck ankle-deep. Then, a branch of the downed maple trips her on the path to the porch.

In the kitchen, she longs to hear Ruth’s voice. She wants the clatter of her rummaging through the cabinets. A squirrel darts across the metal roof, and it sounds like the trampling of elephants. The shrill chirp of crickets is like fire alarms.

She lowers herself to the floor, covers her ears, and stays there.

Evan doesn’t get back until the next day.

Annie hears him coming—­his plodding steps on the round stones, the creak of the porch stairs under his weight. He’s breathing hard as he hesitates outside the door. Is that his speeding heartbeat she hears? She flinches at the heavy knock. As she opens the screen door, she gasps at the sight of Evan’s cheek. The right side is swollen and red.

His face crumples.

Annie pulls him inside the cabin. Holding on to his arm is a ballast, some proof of life. Proof that she, herself, is still living. He stands there, his hands now covering his eyes.

Annie waits.

Seconds creep by.

“It was so much worse than we thought,” Evan says. He won’t look at her. “I got thrown into the console by a wave. I blacked out. I don’t know for how long.”