“Start at the beginning,” Lola interrupts.
“I am!” he shouts back. He takes a drink of his beer then licks his lips. “The Swan sisters”—he continues, glancing around the group to be sure everyone is watching, everyone is listening—“arrived in Sparrow on a ship named . . . something I can’t remember.” He raises an eyebrow and grins. “But that’s not important. What’s important is this one thing: They lied about who they were.”
“They did not,” Gigi Kline yells up at him.
Davis scowls at this second interruption. “All girls lie,” he says with a wink.
Several guys around the fire laugh. But the girls boo. One even tosses an empty beer can at his head, which he just barely dodges by ducking.
Gigi snorts, her head shaking in disgust. “They were beautiful,” she points out. “It wasn’t their fault that all the men in this town couldn’t resist them, couldn’t help but fall in love, even the married ones.”
They weren’t just beautiful, I want to say. They were elegant and charming and winsome. Unlike anything anyone in this town had ever seen before. We grew up knowing the stories, the legend of the sisters. How the locals in Sparrow accused the three sisters of being witches, of possessing the minds of their husbands and brothers and boyfriends, even if the sisters didn’t intentionally set out to make the men fall for them.
“It wasn’t love,” Davis barks. “It was lust.”
“Maybe,” Gigi agrees. “But they didn’t deserve what happened to them.”
Davis laughs, his face turning red from the heat of the fire. “They were witches!”
Gigi rolls her eyes. “Maybe this town just hated them because they were different. Because it was easier to kill them than to accept that the men in this place are thick-skulled, misogynistic assholes.”
Two girls standing near me break out into laughter, spilling their drinks.
Bo looks at me, eyes piercing, then speaks low so only I can hear. “They were killed for being witches?”
“Drowned in the harbor with rocks tied to their ankles,” I answer softly. “They didn’t need a lot of evidence back then to find someone guilty of witchcraft; most of the townspeople already hated the Swan sisters, so it was a pretty swift verdict.”
He stares at me intently, probably because he thinks we’re making the whole thing up.
“If they weren’t witches,” Davis counters, staring down at Gigi, “why the hell did they return the following summer? And every summer since?”
Gigi shrugs like she doesn’t want to have this argument with him anymore, and she tosses her beer can onto the flames, ignoring him. She staggers away from the bonfire down to the shore.
“Maybe you’ll be taken by a Swan sister tonight!” Davis shouts after her. “Then we’ll see if you still think they weren’t witches.”
Davis pounds the rest of his beer and crushes the can in his grip. He’s apparently completely over the idea of retelling the story of the Swan sisters as he clumsily steps down from the stump and slings his arm back over the pixie-haircut girl.
“What did he mean ‘return the following summer’?” Bo asks.
“On the first of June the summer after the sisters were drowned,” I begin, staring at the flames working their way through the dry beach wood, “locals heard singing from the harbor. People thought they were imagining it, that it was only the horns of passing ships echoing off the ocean’s surface, or the seagulls crying, or a trick of the wind. But over the next few days, three girls were lured into the water, wading out into the sea until they sank all the way under. The Swan sisters needed bodies to inhabit. And one by one, Marguerite, Aurora, and Hazel Swan slipped back into human form, disguised as local girls who emerged from the harbor, but not as themselves.”
Abigail Kerns staggers up to the bonfire completely drenched, her usually frizzy, dark hair slicked back with seawater. She crouches down as close to the fire as she can get without tumbling into it.
“That explains all the soaking-wet girls,” Bo says, looking from Abigail back to me.
“It’s become a yearly tradition, to see who is brave enough to go out into the harbor and risk being stolen by one of the Swan sisters.”
“Have you ever done it—gone into the water?”
I shake my head. “No.”
“So you believe it could really happen—that you could be taken over by one of them?” He takes another drink of his beer, his face lit by the sudden burst of flames as someone tosses another log onto the coals.
“Yeah, I do. Because it happens every year.”
“You’ve seen it happen?”
“Not exactly. It’s not like the girls come out of the water and announce that they’re Marguerite or Aurora or Hazel—they need to blend in, act normal.”
“Why?”
“Because they don’t inhabit bodies just to be alive again; they do it for revenge.”
“Revenge on who?”
“The town.”
He squints at me, the scar beneath his left eye tightening, then he asks the obvious question. “What kind of revenge?”
My stomach swirls a little. My head pulses at my temples. I wish I hadn’t drunk so much. “The Swan sisters are collectors of boys,” I say, pressing a finger to my right temple briefly. “Seducers. Once they have each taken a girl’s body . . . the drowning begins.” I pause for effect, but Bo doesn’t even blink. His face is hardened suddenly, like he’s stilled on a thought he can’t shake. Maybe he wasn’t expecting the story to involve actual death. “For the next three weeks, until midnight on the summer solstice, the sisters—disguised as three local girls—will lure boys out into the water and drown them in the harbor. They’re collecting their souls, stealing them. Taking them from the town as revenge.”
Someone to my right hiccups then drops their beer onto the sand near my feet, the brown liquid spilling out.
“Every year, boys drown in the harbor,” I add, staring straight ahead into the flames. Even if you don’t believe in the legend of the Swan sisters, you can’t ignore the death that plagues Sparrow for nearly one month every summer. I’ve seen the boys’ bodies being pulled from the harbor. I’ve watched my mom console grieving mothers who’ve come to have their fortunes read, pleading for a way to bring back their sons—my mom patting their hands and offering little more than the promise that their hurt would eventually dull. There is no way to bring back the boys who’ve been taken by the sisters. There is only acceptance.
And it’s not just local boys; tourists are persuaded into the water as well. Some of the boys standing around the bonfire, whose faces are flushed from the heat and the alcohol in their bloodstreams, will be discovered floating facedown, having swallowed too much of the sea. But right now, they aren’t thinking about that. Everyone believes they’re immune. Until they’re not.