The Wicked Deep Read online

  “Drowned on accident or by intention?”

  Olivia, who is standing on the other side of Bo, laughs hard and sharp. She must have overheard his question. “It was murder,” she answers for me, peering down at him. Her coral lips arch into a smile. She thinks Bo is cute—who wouldn’t?

  “It wasn’t murder,” Lola counters, swaying left then right. “It was an execution.”

  Olivia nods in agreement then looks across the bonfire. “Davis!” she calls. “Tell the legend.”

  Davis McArthurs, who has his arm around a girl with pixie-cut dark hair, grins and walks closer to the fire. It’s tradition to recount the story of the Swan sisters, and Davis seems rather pleased with himself to be the one to do it. He finds an open stump and stands on top, peering down at everyone around the bonfire. “Two hundred years ago—” he begins, voice booming, far louder than is necessary.

  “Start at the beginning,” Lola interrupts.

  “I am!” he shouts back. He takes a drink of his beer then licks his lips. “The Swan sisters”—he continues, glancing around the group to be sure everyone is watching, everyone is listening—“arrived in Sparrow on a ship named . . . something I can’t remember.” He raises an eyebrow and grins. “But that’s not important. What’s important is this one thing: They lied about who they were.”

  “They did not,” Gigi Kline yells up at him.

  Davis scowls at this second interruption. “All girls lie,” he says with a wink.

  Several guys around the fire laugh. But the girls boo. One even tosses an empty beer can at his head, which he just barely dodges by ducking.

  Gigi snorts, her head shaking in disgust. “They were beautiful,” she points out. “It wasn’t their fault that all the men in this town couldn’t resist them, couldn’t help but fall in love, even the married ones.”

  They weren’t just beautiful, I want to say. They were elegant and charming and winsome. Unlike anything anyone in this town had ever seen before. We grew up knowing the stories, the legend of the sisters. How the locals in Sparrow accused the three sisters of being witches, of possessing the minds of their husbands and brothers and boyfriends, even if the sisters didn’t intentionally set out to make the men fall for them.

  “It wasn’t love,” Davis barks. “It was lust.”

  “Maybe,” Gigi agrees. “But they didn’t deserve what happened to them.”

  Davis laughs, his face turning red from the heat of the fire. “They were witches!”

  Gigi rolls her eyes. “Maybe this town just hated them because they were different. Because it was easier to kill them than to accept that the men in this place are thick-skulled, misogynistic assholes.”

  Two girls standing near me break out into laughter, spilling their drinks.

  Bo looks at me, eyes piercing, then speaks low so only I can hear. “They were killed for being witches?”

  “Drowned in the harbor with rocks tied to their ankles,” I answer softly. “They didn’t need a lot of evidence back then to find someone guilty of witchcraft; most of the townspeople already hated the Swan sisters, so it was a pretty swift verdict.”

  He stares at me intently, probably because he thinks we’re making the whole thing up.

  “If they weren’t witches,” Davis counters, staring down at Gigi, “why the hell did they return the following summer? And every summer since?”

  Gigi shrugs like she doesn’t want to have this argument with him anymore, and she tosses her beer can onto the flames, ignoring him. She staggers away from the bonfire down to the shore.

  “Maybe you’ll be taken by a Swan sister tonight!” Davis shouts after her. “Then we’ll see if you still think they weren’t witches.”

  Davis pounds the rest of his beer and crushes the can in his grip. He’s apparently completely over the idea of retelling the story of the Swan sisters as he clumsily steps down from the stump and slings his arm back over the pixie-haircut girl.

  “What did he mean ‘return the following summer’?” Bo asks.

  “On the first of June the summer after the sisters were drowned,” I begin, staring at the flames working their way through the dry beach wood, “locals heard singing from the harbor. People thought they were imagining it, that it was only the horns of passing ships echoing off the ocean’s surface, or the seagulls crying, or a trick of the wind. But over the next few days, three girls were lured into the water, wading out into the sea until they sank all the way under. The Swan sisters needed bodies to inhabit. And one by one, Marguerite, Aurora, and Hazel Swan slipped back into human form, disguised as local girls who emerged from the harbor, but not as themselves.”

  Abigail Kerns staggers up to the bonfire completely drenched, her usually frizzy, dark hair slicked back with seawater. She crouches down as close to the fire as she can get without tumbling into it.

  “That explains all the soaking-wet girls,” Bo says, looking from Abigail back to me.

  “It’s become a yearly tradition, to see who is brave enough to go out into the harbor and risk being stolen by one of the Swan sisters.”

  “Have you ever done it—gone into the water?”

  I shake my head. “No.”

  “So you believe it could really happen—that you could be taken over by one of them?” He takes another drink of his beer, his face lit by the sudden burst of flames as someone tosses another log onto the coals.

  “Yeah, I do. Because it happens every year.”

  “You’ve seen it happen?”

  “Not exactly. It’s not like the girls come out of the water and announce that they’re Marguerite or Aurora or Hazel—they need to blend in, act normal.”

  “Why?”

  “Because they don’t inhabit bodies just to be alive again; they do it for revenge.”

  “Revenge on who?”

  “The town.”

  He squints at me, the scar beneath his left eye tightening, then he asks the obvious question. “What kind of revenge?”

  My stomach swirls a little. My head pulses at my temples. I wish I hadn’t drunk so much. “The Swan sisters are collectors of boys,” I say, pressing a finger to my right temple briefly. “Seducers. Once they have each taken a girl’s body . . . the drowning begins.” I pause for effect, but Bo doesn’t even blink. His face is hardened suddenly, like he’s stilled on a thought he can’t shake. Maybe he wasn’t expecting the story to involve actual death. “For the next three weeks, until midnight on the summer solstice, the sisters—disguised as three local girls—will lure boys out into the water and drown them in the harbor. They’re collecting their souls, stealing them. Taking them from the town as revenge.”

  Someone to my right hiccups then drops their beer onto the sand near my feet, the brown liquid spilling out.

  “Every year, boys drown in the harbor,” I add, staring straight ahead into the flames. Even if you don’t believe in the legend of the Swan sisters, you can’t ignore the death that plagues Sparrow for nearly one month every summer. I’ve seen the boys’ bodies being pulled from the harbor. I’ve watched my mom console grieving mothers who’ve come to have their fortunes read, pleading for a way to bring back their sons—my mom patting their hands and offering little more than the promise that their hurt would eventually dull. There is no way to bring back the boys who’ve been taken by the sisters. There is only acceptance.

  And it’s not just local boys; tourists are persuaded into the water as well. Some of the boys standing around the bonfire, whose faces are flushed from the heat and the alcohol in their bloodstreams, will be discovered floating facedown, having swallowed too much of the sea. But right now, they aren’t thinking about that. Everyone believes they’re immune. Until they’re not.

  It makes me nauseous, knowing some of these boys, who I’ve known most of my life, won’t make it through the summer.

  “Someone must see who drowns them,” Bo says, his curiosity evident now. It’s hard not to feel drawn in by a legend that repeats itself without falter or fail ea
ch season.

  “No one has ever seen the moment when they’re taken into the harbor—their bodies are always discovered after it’s too late.”

  “Maybe they drown themselves?”

  “That’s what the police think. That it’s some sort of suicide pact devised by high school students. That the boys sacrifice themselves for the sake of the legend—to keep it alive.”

  “But you don’t believe that?”

  “It’s pretty severe, don’t you think—kill yourself for the sake of a myth?” I feel my heart beat faster remembering summers past: bodies bloated with seawater, eyes and mouths caught open like gutted fish, as they were pulled onto the docks in the marina. A chill sweeps through my veins. “Once a Swan sister has whispered into your ear, promised the touch of her skin, you can’t resist her. She will lure you into the water then pull you under until the life spills out of you.”

  Bo shakes his head and then finishes his beer in one gulp. “And people actually come to watch this happen?”

  “Morbid tourism, we call it. And it usually turns into a witch hunt, locals and tourists all trying to figure out which three girls in town are inhabited by a Swan sister—trying to determine who is responsible for the killing.”

  “Isn’t it dangerous to speculate about something you can’t prove?”

  “Exactly,” I agree. “The first few years after the sisters were drowned, many local girls were hanged because they were suspected of being taken over by one of the sisters. But obviously they never hanged the right girls, because year after year the sisters kept returning.”

  “But if you were inhabited by one of these sisters, wouldn’t you know it, remember it? Once it was all over?” He rubs his palms together and turns them toward the bonfire—worn hands, rough in places. I blink and look away.

  “Some girls claim they have a cloudy recollection of summer, of kissing too many boys and swimming in the harbor, staying out past curfew. But that could be from too much booze and not because a Swan sister was inside them. People think that when a sister takes over a body, she absorbs all the girl’s memories so the girl can resume her normal life, behave naturally, and no one will suspect she’s not herself. And when the sister leaves the body, the sister blots out all the memories she doesn’t want her host to recall. They need to blend in because if they were ever found out, the town might do something awful just to end the curse.”

  “Like kill them?” Bo asks.

  “It would be the only way to keep them from returning to the sea.” I press all my toes down into the warm sand, burying them. “Kill the girl whose body they inhabit.”

  Bo leans forward, staring into the flames like he’s recalling some memory or place that I can’t see. “And yet you celebrate it each year,” he finally says, sitting up straight. “You get drunk and swim in the harbor, even when you know what’s coming? Even though you know people are going to die? You’ve just accepted it?”

  I understand why it seems odd to him, an outsider, but this is what we know. It’s how it’s always been. “It’s our town’s penance,” I say. “We drowned three girls in the ocean two centuries ago, and we’ve suffered for it every summer since. We can’t change it.”

  “But why don’t people just move away?”

  “Some have, but the families who’ve been here the longest choose to stay. Like it’s an obligation they must endure.”

  A soft breeze rolls suddenly through the crowd, and the bonfire snaps and flickers, sending sparks up into the sky like angry fireflies.

  “It’s starting,” someone calls from the waterline, and those clustered around the fire begin moving down to the beach.

  I stand up, still in my bare feet.

  “What’s starting?” Bo asks.

  “The singing.”

  FOUR

  The moonlight makes an eerie path down to the water’s edge.

  Bo hesitates beside the bonfire, resting his hands on his knees, his mouth an even, unbreakable line. He doesn’t believe any of this. But then he stands up, leaving his empty beer can in the sand, and follows me down to the shore where people are huddled together. Several girls are totally soaked, shivering, hair dripping down their backs.

  “Shhh,” a girl whispers, and the group falls totally silent. Totally still.

  Several seconds pass, a cool wind slides across the water, and I find myself holding my breath. Each summer it’s the same, yet I listen and wait like I’m about to hear it for the first time. The start of an orchestra, the seconds of anticipation before the curtain lifts.

  And then it comes, soft and languid like a summer day, the murmuring of a song whose words are indistinguishable. Some say it’s French, others Portuguese, but no one has ever translated it because it’s not a real language. It’s something else. It curls up off the ocean and slips into our ears. It’s gentle and alluring, like a mother whispering a bedtime riddle to a child. And as if on cue, the two girls standing closest to the waterline take several staggering steps into the sea, unable to resist.

  But a group of boys go in after them and drag them back out. The time for dares has passed. There will be no more coaxing girls into the harbor, no more taunts to swim all the way out then back again. The danger is suddenly stark and real.

  The lulling melody coils around me, fingers sliding across my skin and down my throat, tugging at me. Begging me to respond. I close my eyes and take a step forward before I even realize what I’ve done. But a hand—solid and warm—grabs ahold of mine. “Where you going?” Bo asks in a hush as he pulls me back to his side.

  I shake my head. I don’t know.

  He doesn’t release my hand, but squeezes it tighter, like he’s afraid to let me go. “Is it really coming from the water?” he asks, his voice low, still facing the dark, dangerous sea, like he doesn’t believe his own ears.

  I nod, drowsy suddenly. The alcohol in my body has made me weak, more susceptible to the call of their song. “Now you know why the tourists come: to hear the sisters’ song, to see if it’s real,” I say. The warmth of his palm pulses against mine, and I feel myself leaning into him, his firm shoulder an anchor keeping me from toppling over.

  “How long will it last?”

  “Until each of the three sisters has lured a girl into the water and taken her body.” I clench my jaw. “Day and night the ocean will sing. Sometimes it takes weeks, sometimes only a few days. All three sisters could find bodies tonight if girls keep wading out into the bay.”

  “Does it scare you?” I realize we’re the last two people standing at the water’s edge—everyone else has gone back up to the safety of the bonfire, away from the tempting harbor—but his hand is still in mine, keeping me rooted to shore.

  “Yes,” I admit, the word sending a shiver down to my tailbone. “I usually don’t come to the Swan party. I stay home and lock myself in my room.” When my dad was still alive, he would stay up all night sitting in a chair beside the front door to be sure I didn’t get drawn from my room—in case the urge to swim out into the sea was too great for me to resist. And now that he’s gone, I sleep with headphones on and a pillow over my head each night until the singing finally stops.

  I believe that I’m stronger than most girls—that I’m not so easily fooled by the sisters’ ethereal voices. My mother used to say that we are like the Swan sisters—she and I. Misunderstood. Different. Outcasts living alone on the island, reading fortunes in the cosmos of tea leaves. But I wonder if it’s even possible to be normal in a place like Sparrow. Perhaps we all have some oddity, some strangeness we keep hidden along our edges, things we see that we can’t explain, things we wish for, things we run from.

  “Some girls want to be taken,” I say in a near whisper, because it’s hard for me to imagine wanting something like that. “Like it’s a badge of honor. Others claim that they’ve been taken in summers past, but there’s no way to prove it. Most likely they just want the attention.”

  The Swan sisters have always stolen the bodies of girls my age
—the same age the sisters were when they died. As if they desire to relive that moment in time, even if just briefly.

  Bo blows out a breath then turns and looks back up at the bonfire, where the party has resumed in full upheaval. The goal of tonight is to stay awake until sunrise, to mark the start of summer, and for all the girls to survive without being inhabited by a Swan sister. But I sense Bo’s hesitation—that maybe he’s had enough.

  “I think I’ll head back to my camp and find a new place to sleep.” He releases my hand, and I rub my palms together, feeling the residual warmth. A spire of unnerving heat coils up the center of my chest into my rib cage.

  “Are you still looking for work?” I ask.

  His lips press flat, as if he’s contemplating the next few words, sifting them around in his mouth. “You were right about no one wanting to hire an outsider.”

  “Well, maybe I was wrong about not needing any help.” I let out a breath of air. Maybe it’s because he’s an outsider like my dad, because I know this town can be cruel and unaccepting. Maybe I know he won’t last long without someone to keep him safely away from the harbor once all three sisters have found bodies and begin their revenge on the town. Or maybe it’s because it would also be a relief to have some help with the lighthouse. I know almost nothing about him, but it feels as if he’s always been here. And it might be nice having someone else on the island, someone who I can talk to—someone who isn’t fading into a slow, numbing madness. Living with my mom is like living with a shadow. “We can’t pay you much, but it’s a free place to stay and free meals.”

  Dad has never officially been declared deceased, so there’s never been a life insurance check waiting for us in the mailbox. And shortly after he vanished, Mom stopped reading tea leaves, so the money stopped coming in. Thankfully, Dad had some savings. Enough that we’ve been able to survive on it these last three years—and it will probably get us through another two before we’ll need to find an alternative source of income.

  Bo scratches at the back of his neck, turning his head slightly away. I know he doesn’t have any other options, but still he’s considering it.