Page 104 of The Narrow

“I don’t know how much you know,” she begins.

I blink, shaking my head to clear it. “It’s all muddled,” I manage. I grab her hands. “You said you’d go back with her.”

“I don’t have a choice. Not if I want to save you,” Del says. “It’s okay. I got more years than I was supposed to. I got a chance to meet you. That’s more than I should have had.”

“You should have haddecades,” I tell her, my throat tight. “I don’t want to lose you, Del.”

“Delphine will live,” she says.

“But Grace will go back to that horrible place. And you—Del—you’ll be gone,” I say.

“I was never supposed to exist in the first place,” Del reminds me. “Eden, we don’t have much time. I just wanted to tell you—I wanted to say...” She trails off helplessly.

I lean forward and kiss her. Gently, carefully. She kisses me back, all grief and longing and things we will never get to say.

It isn’t fair. She never got to live. Not as Grace or Delphine or Del. All of them were stolen by the Narrow.

“I never got the chance to love you,” I say. I step back from her. Inches from the edge of the Narrow, my feet planted firmly. “I can’t let you die again.” I can feel Maeve rising up through the dark water once more to claim me. I look past Del to Veronica and the others. Veronica’s expression is contorted in fear and the agony of helplessness. We are all just frozen here. Trapped.

I am done being trapped. I am done with surrender.

I wrap my hand around Veronica’s silver pentacle, still hanging around my neck. “I love you,” I say. Maeve’s spirit wraps around me, dragging it toward the dark. “I love you all.”

Veronica screams, as if she realizes immediately what’s happening. But she’s too far away and too late as I spin around, holding Maeve at bay for a second, two seconds—

Long enough to jump.

35

THEY SAY THENarrow drowns all it takes, but they are wrong. I know because I watched a girl fall in. I watched the water fold over her as she vanished instantly into the dark.

And six years later, I kissed her warm lips. I felt her heartbeat under my palm and her breath on my skin. A miracle like that, you don’t waste. You don’t let it get dragged back under.

So I jump. And I take Maeve down with me.

We hit the water. What little light there is on the surface is obliterated instantly as we plunge below the surface. Bits of wood and leaves and dirt strike my skin, but it’s hardly noticeable next to the pummeling of the water itself. My lungs burn, my flesh is ice. Maeve tears herself free of my body, desperate to reach Del, but I wrap my limbs around her, tangle my hand in her long dark hair. She cannot escape me. I am too close to death, and she has become too real.

My arm scrapes against a rock, pain jolting through my body. Maeve thrashes and strikes at me. I hold on.

The water slams my back against some unseen obstacle. What little air is in my lungs goes out of me at once. My grip fails. Maeve twists free of me as my vision goes dark, as my sense of my own body fades.

And then I’m not in the river. I’m standing in the dark, in silence except for the dripping of water from my hair and my clothes. Beyond me is only an infinite black. I’m not cold. I’m not hurting.

I’m not anything.

There comes a slow, cruel laugh behind me. I turn, and there it is. The bright room. The ratty couch, the pills spilled over the coffee table. Luke, glassy-eyed. Dylan, his elbows on his knees, looking straight at me.

“Where do you think you’re going?” he asks. “There’s nowhere to go from here.”

I look behind me at the emptiness that I mistook for darkness. It’s not night but a vast nothing. That’s why I can never get away—this room, this light, is all that exists.

I’m back in the room. Dylan pats the cushion beside him. “Come on. Get comfortable. Have something to relax.”

Where was I a moment before?

The Narrow.

“You were right here. You never left,” Luke says, his empty eyes fixed on me.

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