April ran until her lungs felt like they were going to burst. “Come on,” she said to absolutely no one but the darkness. She was shaking, radiating with cold and fear, and so she didn’t talk anymore.
She screamed.
“Come on!”
The boat wasn’t even a dot on the horizon, long since swallowed up by the night and the sea. The mini mansion was behind her, lost behind a curtain of fog. And April stood, looking out at the place where she thought he’d gone into the water.
“Gabriel . . .” The word was almost a sigh. “Come on.”
Surely sword-wielding billionaires know how to swim, April thought. But just that quickly, she remembered black-and-white headlines and old grainy photographs—stories of a boy who had washed up on the rocky shore, alone and afraid, spat out by the sea.
She just had to hope that the sea would spit him out again. She hadn’t found her mother yet. She needed her key. She was still mad at him but also grateful because he had just kinda sorta saved her life, and she kinda sorta felt like it might be her turn.
So she walked down the rocky shore, calling, “Mr. Winterborne!” even as a little voice in the back of her head whispered that he’d been in the water too long.
It was starting to look like maybe the ocean wanted him back.
April wasn’t a very good swimmer, but she could dog paddle and she could float.
She could fight.
When she saw something bobbing in the water, she ran into the waves, pushing against the current, screaming, “Mr. Winterborne!”
But absolutely no one shouted back, and when she realized the thing in the water was just the big, flat crate that had fallen overboard, she almost wept. But she didn’t have time for weeping, so she yelled, “Gabriel!” then threw an arm over the crate and kicked, trying to reach the place where she thought he’d gone in. She tried putting her head underwater, but it was too dark. It was too cold. She’d stopped shivering, and something told her that was a bad thing.
“Gabriel?” she whispered, like maybe the whole thing might have been a very bad dream.
She could feel her grip on the crate slipping, her hands too cold to hang on. The shore was too far away. Ms. Nelson and Evert Winterborne might as well have been on another planet, and April knew she was on her own.
Like always.
Maybe it would be okay just to close my eyes for a little bit, a little voice inside of April said. Maybe it would be okay just to let go of the crate.
But something was shimmering in the distance. Like a mirage. Like that lady who lived in a lake—April thought someone was trying to give her a sword. Which seemed silly until she remembered: sword.
So April started kicking and praying and pushing the big crate until she reached the dark figure floating on the waves, the hilt of the sword still sticking out of the place where chest and shoulder meet.
“April.” His voice was faint, his face an eerie, ghostly white. Even as she reached for him, he seemed a million miles away. “Save yourself.”
“No!” April shouted, pulling him closer. “I’m gonna get us to the shore and then—”
“No. Just you, April.” He choked and gagged, the words ragged and as cold as the water. “Only you.”
“No! I’m gonna get help. I’m—”
But then he surged, grabbing on to her with a power she didn’t know he still had. “Let me go, April,” he choked out. “Let me go, and save yourself.”
“Please,” she begged as his arms went slack and his strength seemed to ebb away like the tide. “Please don’t leave me alone.”
“No one knows . . . alive. Can’t tell. Secret.” His eyes fluttered closed, and the last word was nothing more than a ragged breath: “Safe.”
His grip softened. His head fell. Had she not heard his ragged breath, she would have sworn that he was dead. And, sadly, that wasn’t their only problem.
The current was strong, and the fog was growing thicker by the moment. April was so turned around she didn’t even know which way to kick. All around her, there was nothing but water, and for a moment all April could think about was what ten-year-old Gabriel must have felt the first time he washed ashore. Cold and lonely and afraid. But he hadn’t died then, and he wasn’t going to die now. April wasn’t going to let the ocean win.
She just had to get him out of the water. She just had to get him warm. She just had to keep him from bleeding to death. But April was so cold and so tired.
“Wake up, Mr. Winterborne.” Her teeth hurt as they rattled together. “Please. You have to give me my key back. You have to tell me what it fits. You have to tell me what to do. I need you to wake up!” Then a cold, hard fact settled down on April, heavy enough that she was half afraid that it might sink them. “I need you.”
And then lights broke through the darkness: the shoreline, the cliffs, and a mansion bright in the distance.