Cold crept up and wrapped me from head to toe. It kissed my bare skin, and left crystal droplets in my hair and eyelashes that glimmered like tears when I opened my eyes.
I was barefoot, wearing gym shorts and a thin T-shirt that didn’t stand up to the bone-deep chill all around me. Sharp points scraped against my heels, and I made the mistake of looking down.
Nothing was under me. I could see straight to the bottom of the cliffs, or at least to the blackness where the bottom should be. The water hissing between the rocks drifted up to my ears. The only thing holding me up was a rusty iron balcony, floor studded with small points to keep someone from slipping and plunging into the ocean.
My toes were on the edge. If I looked straight ahead, I could see the lit windows of the manor, glowing amid the fog as if the entire house were floating.
Everything in me stopped, from blood to breath. For a second I just stood there, like a dumb cartoon coyote right before she realizes the road has run out and goes splat off the cliff.
Then it all came rushing back in a wave of panic. “Oh shit,” I whispered, afraid anything louder than exhaling would dislodge me and send me tumbling. “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit . . .”
I felt myself start to sway as a gust of wind buffeted the lighthouse. It whined through the broken panes surrounding the giant light bulbs, and a tear slipped out of my eye as my vision ricocheted wildly from the rocks below to the silver-bellied clouds above.
There wasn’t time to ask how I’d gotten here. I was going to fall. I was going to die.
There was no way except straight down. The platform swayed and creaked when I so much as shifted my weight, and the wind threatened to peel me off the platform. Even the ground on the back side of the lighthouse, facing away from the cliff drop, had to be forty feet down.
I was stranded, as far away from help as if I’d been on the moon.
I blanked out then, from the gut-wrenching but not unfamiliar feeling of being one step from death. I tried to twist my neck and look behind me for a way back into the lighthouse—the way I must have come up—but all I saw was the sheen of shattered glass in the moonlight, the huge panes encasing the beacon lamp reflecting my terrified eyes back at me from a hundred jagged angles.
“Help,” I tried. My voice didn’t even rise to my own ears over the howling wind. “Help me. . . .”
I was shaking so hard I was worried I’d plunge off the platform no matter how I tried to stay put, and my mind started to jump frantically, like a jittery screen catching flashes of picture through static.
I could hear my own screams inside my head, not from now, standing in the cold, but from a long time ago, walking along a rainy sidewalk in Portland, Oregon. Mom dragged our duffel bag and her sack of tarot cards, candles, and all the other set dressing she used in her act. I hauled her folding chair. We’d made almost sixty bucks with her fortune-teller act, and I’d pulled two credit cards from women who left giant, gaping purses slumped next to them while Mom stroked their palms and told them what they wanted to hear.
“Will you look at this crap, now,” Mom said, pointing at a short woman hunched over a folding table. We were at a farmers market–, street fair–, hipster walkabout–type place that Portland had everywhere on the weekends. This woman didn’t fit in. She was old, and not in the soft, friendly hippie way most of the older women who worked the fake fortune-teller circuit were. She looked like she’d seen some stuff, face all lined, eyes bright as beads and sunken into her head like one of those apple dolls. Her hair was white streaked with black, like dirty snow, and wrapped in a faded red scarf.
Mom snorted. “Fake Gypsies are so old-school,” she said, shouldering her bag again. Mom was a great cold reader—she could take one look at you and tell you all sorts of stuff that sounded like she must have an inside track to all the bullshit psychic powers she claimed. But I thought she was wrong this time. The woman at the table was flipping plain playing cards, one after the other, playing the fastest game of solitaire I’d ever seen. Her scarf wasn’t affected—it was as faded and old as the rest of her. Her skin was dark and weathered, and I thought she probably wasn’t a fake but the real thing—a Romani who’d somehow ended up reading cards for yuppies on a rainy street corner.
“I’m hungry,” I said, wanting to change the subject. I didn’t want Mom’s poisonous tongue turned on this old lady, who clearly had enough shit to deal with. Mom shrugged, like, What do you want me to do about that?, and walked on. I would have followed her, except the old woman looked at me. I don’t mean glanced up to see if I was a mark or on the job like her, but looked at me, burned a hole right through me with her black eyes.
“You,” she whispered, almost like she was telling me a secret. Her hands faltered and stopped on her cards. “You can’t see darkness, but it’s all around you.” Her accent was sharp and from somewhere in the neighborhood of Brooklyn, not Eastern Europe like I’d guessed, but no matter where she was from, that didn’t change the fact she made me intensely uncomfortable.
I glared at her. She’s just trying to scare you, I told myself. It’s just a hard sell, and it doesn’t work, because marks don’t like feeling scared.
“Well, could you tell the darkness to back off?” I asked. “Because I need to go with my mother.”
She moved so fast she almost jerked me off my feet, grabbing my wrist and pulling me to her. The cards went flying all over the sidewalk, fluttering around me like dead birds.
“You and your mother are fakes, but I’m not,” she grated. “And I tell you, death will come for you three times. Once in your past and twice more in your future.”
“Lady, back off!” I snapped, pulling away. I was a lot bigger than her, but she had one of those wiry old-lady grips that’s like a handcuff. The big glass globe sitting on her folding table fell off and shattered on the sidewalk as we struggled.
“I’m trying to help you!” the woman barked. “You’re just a girl, you don’t deserve what’s coming!”
“Hey!” Mom dropped our bag and ran back to me, trying to wrestle us apart. My legs tangled with hers, and I fell. I could have told her not to bother; the old woman, who looked frail, was Hulk strong.
She shoved Mom off, sending her sprawling on her butt, and then grabbed my hand again so it was palm up, snatching one of the shards from her glass globe with her free hand. Before I could even react, she’d scratched an X into my palm, deep enough that the pain made my eyes water and that my blood flowed freely, like I’d dipped my hand in a jar of red paint. “That’s a mark against the evil eye,” she hissed in my ear as I yelped in pain. “Use it to ward off what’s coming.”
“Get away from my daughter, you crazy bitch!” Mom screamed, taking the old woman to the ground, slapping and clawing at her. The old woman’s scarf came off and her hair spilled out, soaking up rainwater.
Somebody in the crowd let out a long whistle, universal grifter signal for “Cops!” Mom and the woman let go of each other, panting, and Mom pulled herself up, grabbing her stuff.
“You are fucking dead, I see you again,” Mom snarled at the old woman. “I mean it.”
Mom grabbed me with her free hand and pulled me along, the two of us fading into the crowd as a pair of Portland bike cops came flying up. I looked back once at the old woman as Mom dragged me away toward the Greyhound station. She still lay on the ground, breathing hard, cheeks red. Her clothes and hair were soaked and clung to her skinny body. She looked wispy and defeated, but when she locked eyes with me I could still feel her words echoing inside my head.
Use it to ward off what’s coming.
I walked behind Mom, hand wrapped in her pajama bottoms to the stop the bleeding, still dragging the chair with my good arm, and feeling numb. She made me wait until we got all the way to Ashland to get stitched up in a free clinic, and in the intervening few years, the X-shaped scar had smoothed and faded, but it was still there.
That was the same numb feeling I had now, the feeling of being so completely cut off from anything I recognized as real that I couldn’t begin to think my way out of it. Usually I was good at that—getting myself out of trouble, but that was regular trouble. Getting caught shoplifting, forging excuse notes, boosting Mom’s boyfriend’s Chevelle and driving it out to the desert when Mom and I lived in New Mexico to get drunk and smoke pot around a bonfire with the other burnouts and losers from my latest school.
I heard a sound behind me, a voice.
“Ivy, don’t move.”
Doyle.
I tipped and felt one foot slide off the edge of the platform.
For a heartbeat, I touched nothing, suspended in the air as I finally lost my balance and fell. Then a scream ripped out of me as Doyle’s hand clamped on my arm. He pulled me toward him, but it was too late. We plunged together, and the ground flew at us. The roaring of the waves blended with the roaring in my ears, and I went limp, waiting for the impact.
There was none. I hadn’t moved. Doyle and I had tipped back, landing hard on the iron deck, me on top of him. Doyle’s skin was fever-hot against mine, clammy and burning.
He coughed. “I told you not to move.”
I rolled off him, staring down at him as he winced, a thin trail of blood working its way from the corner of his mouth. “God, why did you do that?” I groaned.
“I might not have if I’d known you were going to flip the fuck out when I touched you,” he grunted, pushing himself up and swiping at his bloody lip. “What the hell were you doing up here in the first place?”
I tried to help him up, but I was shaky and he was sweaty and I lost my grip. He sat down hard again and let out a moan, clutching at his side.
“I’m sorry,” I said. My voice had gone from nothing to sounding awful and bellowing inside my own head. The world still spun slowly, as the adrenaline from my imaginary fall worked its way out of me. “I don’t know what happened. I woke up, and I was on the ledge. . . .” I started shaking and couldn’t stop. I thought I was going to chip my teeth, they were rattling so hard. My vision tunneled down until all I could see were my muddy toes, which had started to turn blue.
“Sounds like you were taking a little midnight stroll courtesy of the Ambien fairy,” Doyle muttered. He stripped off his heavy canvas jacket and wrapped it around me, rubbing my arms until I stopped shaking. “I’ll get you home,” he said.
I stayed quiet as we picked our way back down the rusty metal stairs of the lighthouse, Doyle’s boots making a booming clang that got my head throbbing again.
“I don’t take sleeping pills,” I said once we were outside and I could see the faint porch light on the back side of the manor sending out a struggling halo in the mist kicked up from the waves below the cliffs.
“Well, maybe you should,” Doyle said. “Avoid any more sleepy-time adventures.” I started to tell him that, no, he didn’t understand, I could sleep like a rock anywhere—a bus, the back seat of a car, a motel with paper-thin walls where you could hear every inhale and exhale of the people in the next room, but he grabbed me before I could.
I let out a sound I wasn’t proud of—I’d like to say it was a yelp but it was more of a ladylike squeak, the kind an actual lady would let out if a mouse ran across her foot. “Easy,” Doyle grunted. I could tell his ribs were bothering him, but he slung me up in that damsel hold guys do, like I weighed less than nothing. “Rocks are sharp,” he said by way of explanation. “Don’t need to bloody your feet on top of the night you’ve had.”
Normally I’d fight, as much as I hated being touched, but I couldn’t muster the strength. Nor did I want to—my legs were rubbery and my calves screaming from the trip up and down the hundred lighthouse steps, and my feet were already bruised from the metal deck. As the shock of waking up drained out of me, I felt my eyelids fluttering, and I tucked my head against the warmth of Doyle’s chest.
“What are you doing over here?” I asked him as he deposited me under the sagging roof of the manor’s back porch. The granite blocks that made up the floor were wet and freezing, but smooth enough that they soothed the pain in my feet.
“I can’t sleep.” Doyle shrugged. I handed back his jacket, and he tucked it under his arm. “I like to walk at night. It’s peaceful. You feel like you’re the only person in the woods.” He flashed me a grin. In the half-light, I could see only the white of his teeth. “Except the cursed ghosts of all the Bloodgoods buried on the island, that is.”
I wrapped my arms around myself, chilled all over again. “You’re freaking hilarious with that crap. You afraid I’m going to wig out and kill you?”
“Nah,” Doyle said. “Your family’s crazy, but the last couple of generations have leaned more toward offing themselves, like your grandmother.”
I blinked at him. “What?”
Doyle took a step back. “Shit. You didn’t know?”
I spread my arms. I wasn’t so cold anymore, my heart pounding. “At the risk of sounding like a broken record, know what?”
“Never mind,” Doyle said. “That is really not my place to tell you. You should get inside. You’ll catch a cold being out here.”
He backed off the porch and ran, slipping past the hedgerow and turning into a slice of darker space against the darkness before he vanished from my eyes entirely.
I huffed out a breath that clouded in front of my eyes, shaking my head as I tried the back door. It was locked, but I found a loose window in the laundry room and popped the old-fashioned latch, sliding it up and climbing inside.
I landed in a heap next to a basket of clean sheets, just glad I hadn’t landed in them. The last thing I needed capping off a night of sleepwalking to my death was Mrs. MacLeod having a conniption about dirt on her laundry.
I made myself get up again and tried to wobble back to my room. I couldn’t even start to process what Doyle had said—although if my grandmother had killed herself, it was hardly a surprise. Whatever was off-kilter about Mom’s chemistry could be genetic. With my luck the same time bomb was ticking away in my own head. I’d had all the psych tests—you get shrinked a lot when you’re the troubled child of an itinerant single mother—and nothing too weird had shown up, but who knew? Underpaid school psychologists weren’t exactly brilliant profilers. You can’t even be diagnosed with a lot of stuff until you turned eighteen. I knew from my reading I was right at the age when a lot of schizophrenic people had their first breakdown. And here I was, losing time and sleepwalking and seeing things— No, I told myself sternly. I had already decided that was just a dream.
Either way, whatever the truth, it was too much for me right then. My sight wavered, and I collapsed right there on the kitchen floor, feeling the cool kiss of linoleum on my face before I passed out.