Page 31 of A Dark and Drowning Tide

So much of that night was a blur. But she remembered the way the looks on their faces changed when they laid eyes on Aaron’stzitzit—andagain when they realized the two of them were alone. There was a hunger there, a terrifying pack-animal leer.

The look of men who realized they could do whatever they liked.

If you use magic, they’ll track you down, Aaron told her, his hand clasped in hers.Run.

More than anything, she remembered the sound of his scream, the sound of their jeers, the sound of his skull when it split. His blood spread over the cobblestones and shone like molten steel in the moonlight. She did what he said, in the end. She ran.

It was that moment that possessed her, that moment that haunted her. The cowardice of leaving him to his murderers, to go cold alone.

After Aaron’s death, Lorelei realized that there were hundreds and hundreds of ghosts in the Yevanverte. They rose from the floorboards as she stitched shoe leathers together. They pressed to the misty glass of her window as she tried to sleep. They chased her down the dark and winding alleys and leered at her from the rows and rows of stacked, colorful houses. Most of them were strangers, their eyes gleaming with cold, otherworldly light. Some of them, however, she recognized. A woman who’d lived in the house below them, walking the path toward the river every morning like a clockwork doll. A toddler who’d fallen ill some years ago, squalling through what sounded like fluid in his lungs. And worst of all: Aaron, his eyes wide, his skull concave, with blood unfurling around him like a horrible sunrise. Her parents hardly knew what to do with her, the daughter tormented by something they could not see.

And then she met Ziegler.

Day after day, for six long years, she had a carriage sent to bring Lorelei to her flat in the center of Ruhigburg. Day after day, she tutoredher in the sciences and magic and sanded off the harshest edges of her accent. Day after day, Lorelei returned to the Yevanverte exhausted. And then finally, on her eighteenth birthday, Ziegler gave her a gift: a place she had secured for her at Ruhigburg University. Lorelei could still recall the shape of that joy, almost too sharp to hold on to.

She’d barely made it through her first week when she marched from campus to Ziegler’s flat in the city center and told her she planned to quit. Because the moment she opened her mouth, all of her classmates knew exactly what she was. Many of them had never met someone like her before, but they had heard enough stories from their nursemaids to know exactly what kind of monster she was. The Yeva in thorns. The Yeva buried and forgotten.

A perfect villain. A perfect victim.

Ziegler stared at her as though she had spoken Yevanisch. She could not understand it at all, the idea that something as mundane as cruelty could keep Lorelei from the pursuit of knowledge.

What?she’d said.You want to go back to your father’s house and make shoes for the rest of your life? Look me in the eyes and tell me you’d be happy. No, you can’t. You’d be miserable. You’d be wasting your potential.

Would it really have been a waste to have grown up among her own people? To not have had to cut off pieces of herself? Those questions tormented her now. Maybe she would have been content with the hand God dealt her, had that night twelve years ago never happened. Maybe she would have been simply the cobbler’s eldest daughter, stitching leathers and hiding her magic and dreaming of far-off places.

But games like that were as pointless as they were punishing. Lorelei would never know that version of herself. She would never know how much of this bitterness within her was innate and how much had been shaped by the inevitable cruelty of living. Her story had been written long ago, in indelible ink and blood.

There was no hope of changing it now.

Eight

THAT NIGHT, LORELEI DREAMEDof drowning.

She sank below the surface of deep, black waters, so cold it snatched the last gasp of air from her lungs. Bubbles burst from her lips. Her hair drifted wildly around her, reaching toward the faint thread of light filtering in from above. But when she looked up, it was nothing but darkness overhead and darkness all around her.

In the distance, pale shapes came into view, beckoning her with their moonlit glow. As she swam closer, her vision rippled. She could barely make sense of what she was seeing. There were rows and rows of bodies, floating in a vast sea. One by one, their white faces turned toward her. And there, in the center, she saw them.

Ziegler, her eyes flung wide, her broken teacup in hand. Aaron, blood seeping from the wound in his head like a cloud of smoke rising.

The people she had failed to save.

Lorelei reached for them blindly. Pale hands clamped around her wrists, but she could not find it within herself to panic. After all the ways she’d failed, would it be so terrible to die? To let her limbs go lax and close her eyes for the last time. It would be sweet, after all these years of fighting, to rest.

You let us die, a voice hissed in her ear.

Lorelei jerked awake, gasping for air that would not come. Her entire body was paralyzed, save for her roving eyes. Her lungs burned as ifsomeone had filled them up with stones. A strange, weightless sensation bloomed in her skull. No, that hadn’t been a dream. Shewasdrowning—thistime, in open air.

Alpdrücke.

She could barely see the alp through the gloom and her own heady delirium. But she could see the glint of its sharp, yellowed teeth in thedark—and,of course, its damnable tarnkappe. The bright red cap bled through the darkness like a beacon. The alp crouched on her chest, drinking down her life force with every breath she failed to draw. She desperately tried to recall something, anything, that Sylvia had written about these creatures.

How pathetic, she thought,thatshewould save my life.

What was more pathetic, she decided, was that her very last thought would be of Sylvia. Lorelei grabbed hold of her racing thoughtsand—yes.She remembered now.

“Coffee,” she rasped.

The alp fixed its beady eyes on hers. Some of the pressure eased from her chest. Lorelei took the opportunity to scramble upright and put some distance between them. She pressed up against her headboard, grasping instinctively for the silver chain around her neck.