I turn to Bo.
Earlier, I promised him we would decide what to do with Gigi before midnight. Now there’s only an hour left, and I need to tell him something, some reason why he can’t take her life. Because taking a life comes with consequences.
But when I shift my gaze, Bo is no longer standing beside me. I scan the crowd of faces, searching for him. But he’s nowhere within the ring of firelight. He’s gone.
“Fuck,” I say out loud. How long has he been gone? How did I not notice when he slipped away?
“What’s wrong?” Rose asks, dropping her hand where she had been chewing on a fingernail.
“I—I think Bo went back to his cottage. I’m going to go check,” I lie. I don’t want her to know where he really is, what I realize in a sudden flash that he’s gone to do: kill Gigi. He couldn’t wait any longer, he couldn’t let me talk him out of it, so he snuck away.
It might already be too late.
“I’ll come with you,” Rose offers quickly.
“No. You guys stay here, keep an eye on everyone.”
Heath nods, but Rose doesn’t look so sure.
I spin around, about to cut through the mob of people gathered around the bonfire, when I’m hit with both relief and horror. Gigi isn’t dead, at least not yet, because she’s strutting up the pathway, heading straight for the bonfire and the party. She got out.
My lungs cease to draw in air. My heart ratchets up so that it’s beating against the back of my throat.
“Holy shit,” I hear Heath say behind me.
And then Rose asks, “What is she doing?”
She’s come for revenge.
*
Gigi escaped the cottage.
She must have broken through a window or forced her way past the barricaded door. She was tired of waiting for me to come release her. She’s already feeling the pull of the tide, just like me. The sea in our blood, in our minds, begging us to sink into the darkness and be purged from these bodies. It will only get harder to resist.
But now Gigi’s free. She’s out. And she’s surely really pissed off.
But where’s Bo? Maybe he didn’t go to kill her after all. Maybe I was wrong.
Gigi strides into the group, hair falling out of her ponytail, plain blue T-shirt and white drawstring pants one size too big because they’re clothes that Rose brought for her to wear. Most people don’t notice her as she pushes past them; they’re already too drunk. But as she winds her way through the dwindling crowd, I can tell she’s looking for something: someone.
Davis and Lon are standing just inside the doors of the greenhouse, hovering where the cases of beer and a nearly empty keg have been placed. Gigi spots them, mouth leveled into a sharp, determined line. She cuts swiftly up to the greenhouse. Davis sees her first, then Lon catches sight of her and actually takes a step back. He’s wearing one of his loudest, most obnoxious shirts tonight: pink and teal with rainbow-colored peacocks and hula girls. It’s actually hard to look directly at it.
Davis and Lon are the only ones in the greenhouse, and they could make a run for it, sprint out through the door on the far side of the glassed-in building. But they seem frozen, stupefied into inaction, which is exactly how I feel.
Rose and Heath, still standing near me, stare at Gigi with their mouths slightly agape.
Gigi slides in between Davis and Lon, fluttering her eyelashes up at Lon and tilting her head to the side. She grazes a finger around the rim of his cup, smiling, licking her lips. Still, the rest of the party has no clue what’s happening: that Gigi Kline has suddenly reemerged. A few drunk girls on the other side of the fire pit giggle loudly then stumble backward, arms looped together. Another guy who is standing the closest to the greenhouse has a cigarette between his lips and is taking long drags as if he were actually smoking, but the cigarette isn’t even lit. He’s too trashed to notice anything around him.
I can see Gigi’s lips moving, but she’s whispering so softly, I can’t make out the words. Her voice is slipping into Lon’s ears; she wants to take him with her, one last kill before she retreats into the sea for the winter. She wants her revenge for what he and Davis did to her. Then her gaze snaps to Davis, biting her bottom lip. She wants them both.
But before she’s able to brush her fingers across his cheek, he grabs her wrist and bends it away. “You fucking witch,” I hear Davis bark. Lon already looks entranced, staring at her meekly, like a dog waiting to be told what to do. But Davis has stopped her before she’s infiltrated the cracks in his mind. “I knew you were one of them,” he says, loud enough that we can hear. He towers over her, broad meaty shoulders, holding her arm locked at her side. But she doesn’t seem afraid. She smiles from the left side of her lips, amused. Her gaze penetrates his, and with his hand around her wrist, it’s enough to seduce him into falling desperately in love with her. I watch as his expression melts, turns sappy at the edges until his thick, bushy eyebrows fold downward, and he releases his hold on her. She runs her fingers up his jaw then lifts onto her tiptoes. She brushes her lips against his ear, whispering things that will make him hers.
And when she’s done, she threads her fingers through both Davis’s and Lon’s hands and begins leading them from the greenhouse. As she meanders past us, around the bonfire, her eyes glide over mine, but I don’t move.
Rose looks baffled. She doesn’t fully understand what’s happening. “Gigi?” she says when Gigi and Davis and Lon stride past. “What are you doing?”
“Thanks for saving me,” Gigi says to Rose, her tone guileful and distant. She’s already thinking about the sea, about leaving Gigi’s body and becoming part of the Pacific. “But they were right about me. . . .” She nods to Davis and Lon, standing obediently behind her. “See you next summer.”
“Gigi, don’t do this,” I hiss, and her eyes snap to mine. Our real eyes meet, beneath these human exteriors. And there is a warning in hers, a threat that I can read in my sister’s expression: If I try to stop her, if I do anything to prevent her from taking Davis and Lon, she will reveal who I really am. Right here. Right now. In front of everyone.
She tugs against Davis’s and Lon’s hands, pulling them toward the dock. But then a voice bellows from behind me. “It’s Gigi!” I look over my shoulder, and Rose has taken several steps away from the firelight, pointing down the path to where Gigi has stopped, Davis and Lon standing obediently on either side of her.
The crowd encircling the fire stalls their conversations in almost perfect unison. They stop laughing and slurping beers and swaying dangerously close to the flames. And instead, they all turn to look at Rose, following her outstretched arm down to Gigi.