Page 78 of The Water Witch (Fairwick Chronicles 2)

“Come aboard,” she said. “I ain’t gonna bite.” She grinned, her white teeth shining ghoulishly in the watery light. They weren’t as sharp as her mother’s, but they weren’t exactly human-looking either. I walked slowly up the steps, their wooden slats groaning under my weight. When I stepped onto the porch, the house swayed as though coming unmoored from its foundation. I glanced toward the stream and saw that even in the few minutes since I’d arrived, it had risen higher. Strange shapes bobbed on its swollen surface—branches, glass bottles, dead animals. There were live things, too. A whiskered nose poked out of the water and tried to climb onto the bank, but the current snatched it back into the water.

“Strange things have been moving through the woods all night,” said Lura. “Creatures heading to the door.” She scowled at me. “I guess you didn’t have much luck convincing the Grove not to close it.”

“No,” I admitted. “But I’ve found a way to keep it open. Lorelei still needs to go back, though. She’s a danger to folks here.”

Lura’s gaze moved toward the woods. “You know, I’ve sat here for close on eighty years watching these woods, hoping Quincy would walk out of them again. Then a few days ago my mother walks out instead. And now you want to take her away, too. This town won’t be happy until it takes everything away from me.”

“Lorelei’s killed men.”

“She tells me she hasn’t.” Lura looked up at me and raised the shotgun slightly. “And I believe her.”

I sighed. I remembered the brief time I’d spent with mymother in the labyrinth. For a moment, I’d been willing to stay with her there. Would I have listened to anyone who told me she was bad? Would I have let anyone take her away?

“Can I talk to Lorelei?” I asked.

Lura looked up at me, surprised. “You’re either braver or stupider than I thought. She’s not too fond of you. She might eat you.”

“I know, but is she inside?” I looked worriedly at the water, which had risen to the top of the porch and was now lapping against the front door.

“She’s upstairs in the bathtub,” Lura said. “She’s got to stay hydrated. Go on. I don’t think she’s modest, but if you hurt her…” The shotgun was still pointed at me. “I won’t let you out of here alive. Understand?”

I nodded and walked to the front door. Flickering water reflections circled the doorknob. When I pushed open the door, water lapped over the threshold like a cat that had been waiting to get in. The glass and tin wind chimes floated in the wavy light like fish. The ceiling, too, was soaked through, water dripping from bulging blisters of plaster and streaming down the walls. It looked as if the creek was rising to take back this house. I just hoped it waited until I got out of here.

I climbed the narrow staircase, my feet sinking into spongy damp floral carpet. Old photographs hung framed on the walls: sepia-colored prints of stern, square-jawed men and women standing in stiff, formal rows in front of this house. A more lively picture was a group shot of men in fishing waders, each holding a huge fish up to the camera. I looked closer and noticed that some of the men wore the Stewart plaid and the Stewart family features. So the Trasks and the Stewarts had been friends once. At the top of the stairs was a picture of a seated woman with a baby on her lap, a man standing behindher. I looked closer at this cozy domestic scene. The woman wore a high-necked white blouse and her blond hair was gathered on her head in a puffy Gibson girl updo. One hand cradled the baby’s head, the other grasped the man’s hand resting on her shoulder. Her smile somehow seemed to be for both of them, her eyes full of love. I almost didn’t recognize Lorelei, but that’s who it was.

As I walked down the hall I saw more pictures of mother and child. I stopped at one of a slim woman holding a two-year-old toddler by the hand. Again I almost didn’t recognize Lorelei. She was rail-thin, her hair dull and scraped back on her head in thin wisps, her face deeply lined with wrinkles, her shoulders stooped. I recalled that Duncan had said an undine was depleted of Aelvesgold after she laid her eggs. Lorelei had begun to fade fast after giving birth to Lura.

I lifted the picture off the wall, exposing a patch of wallpaper that still held the original bright, cheerful colors it had when Sullivan Trask decorated the house for his beloved bride and newborn daughter, and carried it down the hall toward the sound of splashing water.

The bathroom door was open. I saw the bathtub from the hall and heard splashing. “Can I come in?” I called.

“I suppose you will if I say yes or no,” Lorelei answered.

Taking that as a yes, I entered the bathroom. At one time it had been papered in a lovely water lily pattern, but now blossoms of mold bloomed over the water lilies and the paper hung in long strips like seaweed. Brass shell-shaped wall sconces clung to the walls like barnacles, their lightbulbs long burned out but now filled with flickering votive candles. Even the taps on the sink were shaped like shells.

I turned to the bathtub. Lorelei was stretched out beneath a froth of bubbles that sparkled in the flickering light. Her hair was piled high on her head in the same style as in the oldphotograph. “You were wasting, weren’t you?” I asked. “That’s why you had to leave.”

She shrugged. “I suppose. I did feel tired all the time,” she said, blowing at the bubbles. “Taking care of a human baby is so much more work than laying eggs.”

“So why’d you come back?”

“To mate. It doesn’t work in Faerie. Even the humans who wander in are no good to us.”

“Humans wander in?”

“Occasionally. Where do you think people go when they go missing? Sure, some of them are lying in a ditch with their throats slit or living new lives under assumed names in Mexico, butsomewander into Faerie. It happens all the time in the woods when the door opens on the solstice.”

I thought of the young men I’d seen with the undines in Faerie, of one in particular, a dark-haired man with sad eyes. “Did one happen to wander in about eighty years ago?”

Lorelei shrugged. “Time is different in Faerie. All I know is when it’s time to mate…Now that you mention it there was a sulky boy who kept begging to go back, but it’s not as easy to get back into this world as to get out of it.”

Except maybe tonight.

“So, is that why you won’t leave? Because you have to mate?”

Lorelei laughed and stretched one bare, foam-flecked leg up to the ceiling, daintily pointing her toe. “Oh, I’ve donethatalready. One of those pretty Stewart boys was quite accommodating. No, the reason I won’t leave is this.” She reached into the water and pulled out a dappled green oval. At first I thought it was bar of soap, but then I noticed it was glowing.

“Is that an egg? You’ve laid…” I peered into the tub, through a patch of foam near Lorelei’s feet, and saw a pile of green-spotted eggs—and one gold one. An Aelvestone.

Lorelei shifted uneasily. “I should have laid them in the Undine, but those damned Stewarts warded the house. Poor things,” she said, looking at the eggs. “They’ll die if they don’t get into flowing freshwater soon.”

Lorelei was gazing at the egg cupped in her hand with the same expression on her face as she’d had in the photograph of her and baby Lura. She had loved Lura, but when she had begun to waste away she’d chosen to go back to Faerie. Perhaps that meant her love wasn’t a very deep kind, but who was I—who hadn’t been able to love Liam enough to make him human—to judge her? Frank didn’t believe she was responsible for the murders of the fishermen—and now neither did I.

“I want to offer you a deal,” I said.

She looked up, the flicker of interest in her moss green eyes making her look momentarily human.

---