Page 4

THE ONE BELOW IS WHERE SHE BELONGS.

I felt it before I understood it. Not pain. Not exactly fear, either, though fear was definitely somewhere in the neighborhood, banging on the door and asking to be let in. A tug. Deep in my chest, right behind my heart, like somebody had hooked an invisible line straight through my ribs and given it one hard, deliberate yank.

Martha.

Aideen's voice, and it was wrong. Aideen didn't wake up like that. Aideen woke up sarcastic, or sleepy, or mid-complaint about something I'd eaten. She did not wake up like a foghorn going off in the middle of the night, sharp and sudden and entirely without her usual smart mouth attached.

I knew, before she said another word, that something was very, very wrong.

Chewy's taco hit the ground.

That, more than the journal, more than Aideen, more than the look on Barney's face, was how I knew this had gotten serious. Chewy did not drop tacos. Chewy would sooner drop me.

Arthur and Otis were on their feet in the same instant, hackles up, both of them turned toward the water. Mona let out a low, rolling growl that I felt in my back teeth.

The swamp started moving.

Not bubbling. Not boiling, the way it did sometimes when something big shifted underneath.

Parting.

Slow. Deliberate. Entirely too calm. Like whatever was under there had all the time in the world and wanted us to know it. Like something was walking, unhurried, straight toward us, and didn't care one bit that we could see it coming.

Kai moved without a word, putting himself between me and the water in the half-second it took me to blink.

I moved too — beside him, not behind him, because I had spent four months and more bruises than I could count learning exactly how to do that. We were done, completely and forever done, with the stay-behind-me routine.

Barney backed up, hands white-knuckling the cover of his journal, eyes locked on the page as if it might still have something worse to say.

It did.

"Oh, shit," he whispered.

"What?" I didn't take my eyes off the water.

He turned the journal around so I could see it. His hand was shaking hard enough that the pages fluttered.

One final line, freshly written, ink still gleaming wet like it had just been laid down by an invisible pen.

THE ONE BELOW FOUND YOU.

2

The swamp didn't just part.

It gave birth.

Something rose up out of the black water where it had split, and for one long, horrible second, none of us moved. None of us breathed. Even the cypress trees seemed to be holding still, waiting to see what the water had decided to cough up.

It was shaped like a woman.

Or it was trying very hard to be one. Black swamp water, mud, and clumps of moss held together in something like a human silhouette, and beneath it all, just below the surface, something silver kept moving. Sliding. Like it was looking for a way out from the inside.

Her hair — if you could call it hair — hung in wet, dripping ropes down what would eventually be a back. She didn't have a face yet. Not really. Just a smear where a face should be, featureless and wrong, right up until her bare feet touched dry land.

Then it started to form. Slowly. Like something was sculpting her out of mud and memory, one horrible inch at a time.

And when she finally had eyes, she used them.