"I saw phantoms," she whispered. "Shadows in the water as they moved like nightmares. Coming for me.Grabbingmy leg and trying to pull me under. Iknowthey weren't real. They couldn't have been, but—"
"Nobody can tell you what you saw in the water. Whether it was real or not, you saw it. Youfeltit in that moment. You've lived with it for all these years. Have you told anyone about them?" I asked, pressing closer to her to try to use my body to comfort her. Under no illusions that I knew the whole truth regarding the accident, I regretfully knew that pushing her to talk about the shadows was the limit for the day. I wouldn't learn the truth of Odina's hatred just yet, not with the way she shivered in my arms as she thought back to those phantoms.
Nightmares come to life, and yet she was comforted by a living embodiment of everything she feared in the water. I suspected my Isa also had a nightmare inside her, waiting to come out when I unlocked the part of her she so carefully controlled.
Containing her would be like holding a demon in my arms, and I looked forward to the fight.
"My grandmother says that water is sacred. That the veil between life and death is thinner in it. I was drowning, half dead already. She says what I saw was real, that I'm one of the few people to experience it before I die. They tried to take me, but they couldn't so they took Odina instead," she whispered, a tear dripping down her face as she cried for the sister she'd lost that day.
Whatever had caused it, Isa wore the guilt of it on her soul. Maybe that was why she'd suffered through years of abuse at her sister's hands before putting a stop to it.
"It sounds like your grandmother thinks it's a good thing," I murmured, inching my body away from hers so that she had to be on her own for a few moments.
"She thinks it shows how strong I am. That they couldn't claim me as theirs," she scoffed. "But they would have if my mother hadn't pulled me out of the water. Everything had gone dark already. There was nothing but blackness and the sound of flames roaring in my head.”
"Flames?" I asked, stilling at her side suddenly as the memory of my mother's lips moving as she burned on the pyre echoed in my brain.
"They said it was just the sound of the current," she sighed. "That the woman screaming was my mother on the shore before she dove into the water."
Flames hovered at the edge of my vision as I said the words I didn't really want an answer to. I hadn't paid any attention to the date on the reports, hadn't bothered to care about the details beyond how it would influence my understanding of Isa. "When was the accident?"
"I was five," she responded.
"The day, Isa," I said, my voice sharper than I'd intended.
"June fourteenth," she said, her face turning more serious as she studied me curiously. My head roared with the connection, my mind working to convince me that coincidences happened sometimes. With anything else, it might have worked.
If it hadn't been the fourteenth anniversary of my mother’s death.