Page 149 of Veil of Death and Shadow

The sun was gone, the final low rays of orange and pink that cast a faint glow over the water disappearing from sight. I floated, my foot dangling in the water over my board, trying to get the energy to get up and leave.

There was an unusual chill as the few remaining water droplets from my swim cooled against my skin. Shivering, I briefly debated the merits of tipping back into the water, stealing one last lap through the bay before fall truly started to settle in.

I knew it was a bad idea. Swimming alone out here, once it was dark, was asking for trouble. It was only too easy to slip beneath the surface, and let the quiet stillness take over—a small reprieve from the strange metallic air I’d been suffocating on for months.

Before I could think too much about it, I shoved my board onto the dock, piled my dry bag and oar on top of it, and then kicked off, plunging into the dark depths, savoring the sharp chill of the water like it was a rich, luxurious dessert.

With slow, smooth strokes, I swam into the middle of the bay. It was rare having the whole area entirely to myself like this. The quiet isolation, marred only by the handful of lights on in the surrounding houseboats made it feel like the entire lake belonged to me. Like I belonged to it.

As I shifted onto my back, staring at the gray-streaked sky above, the murky edges of the moon faded and brightened, as if a light switch had been flipped behind it.

This was, perhaps, the first moment of peace I’d felt all summer.

Things had been strange in the city. Intense.

There’d been countless disappearances, strange accidents, and odd stories on the news that hardly seemed explainable. Not to mention that the weather had been wildly unpredictable, even more than climate scientists could explain. In one day, we’d encountered all four seasons—ice storm to blazing-dry heat—unprecedented shifts in the temperature.

But even stranger than the unexplained events was the steady presence of something darker. Something suffocating.

Death.

I couldn’t put it into words, but I felt him growing closer, like a phantom slowly shedding its translucence, becoming solid.

Sometimes, I swore I could almost taste the traces of him in the air.

Oddly, it wasn’t an altogether threatening presence like I might expect—though I wouldn’t call it particularly inviting either. It was something cold and sharp, asserting his existence in the few moments I almost let myself forget he was there.

Even Sora, who’d spent our entire friendship declaring that there were no such things as curses or omens, seemed to sense that something was changing, shifting in the world—like we were on the precipice of something big, something the world could never come back from.

She didn’t speak of it often, only in the quiet moments of the night, when we were alone, coming home from a night out into the soft safety of our apartment.

I wasn’t sure whether to be relieved or not by this—that I wasn’t alone in this awareness. Other people didn’t really speak about it openly, usually only in the dark recesses of a bar where the steady buzz of booze gave them the courage to whisper about the strangeness, the sense of immanence in the air. But even when people didn’t discuss it, couldn’t put a name to it, I felt their lingering fear, their uncertainty clawing at me with every tight smile and averted gaze.

It was like the entire city was positioned on a cliff, and one small breath might send it plunging over into something new, something we could only imagine. We didn’t know what it was, what it might mean, but I knew we all felt it, on some level—a bubble waiting to burst on the next, deep inhale.

Mostly, I tried to ignore it. But here, with the steady waves rolling over me, I let myself linger in the heaviness for a moment, to take a breath and let the fear pour out of me, somewhere I could leave it behind for the next few months.

I let myself sink below the surface, watching the gentle light of the moon ricochet above me as the world stilled to a quiet.

It would be so easy to stay here, to just float away and fill my lungs, until the edges where my body ended, and the lake began, started to blur and overlap—an inevitable end I was simply rushing along.

Maybe Levi had been right. There was no fighting fate.

I closed my eyes beneath the water, my finger tracing the ring, as flashes of Sora pierced through the fog. It wasn’t fair to her—to leave her alone with this, another sister to grieve, not after everything she’d been through.

Slowly, I swam back to the dock, savoring each breath as it carved through my lungs.

When I pulled myself up, the biting wind sank into my bones.

Fuck. I hadn’t brought a towel with me. I wasn’t planning on a night swim and had counted on the heat of the sun to dry my skin from my earlier plunge.

It wasn’t until after I slid my shorts over my wet bikini bottoms and tugged my tank top over my head, resigned to being cold and miserable until I made it back home, that I noticed the lurking presence behind me.

Sliding my apartment keys between my fingers, a makeshift weapon familiar to every woman, I spun around, my jaw aching with how hard I clenched it.

“Hey Mars.”

Levi.

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