“. . . can’t reach her. Went missing today too. So tragic.”

My heart picked up speed. My mother was missing? She’d only just left for Ireland three days ago, right before Ashling’s graduation. I struggled upwards through the sedative, and opened my eyes to an empty room. The nurses were gone. Like moving through thick mud, I raised my left hand, the I.V. hanging from it. I fumbled for it with my other hand and yanked the drip out. A hiss of pain escaped my mouth as the hospital tape pulled on my skin and hair; a trickle of blood dripped down my arm from the injection site.

Within moments my mind began to clear. They probably hadn’t given me as strong a dose as they thought. Still, I took great care as I sat up and slid from the bed, my legs wobbly underneath me. I had been dreading phoning Mom, telling her that Ashling was . . . missing? Dead? I didn’t even know the answer to that. I was afraid she’d be happy. I didn’t think I could handle that.

The police would say Ashling was dead, but I just didn’t believe it. I didn’t think that Luke and Bres thought she was dead either, and for what it was worth, that brought me some comfort. I’d seen what had dragged her down into the depths; it hadn’t been a shark or a killer whale. It had been humanoid, with a single eye and a mouthful of teeth.

I sat back on the edge of the bed and considered everything that had happened from the moment Grandpa had wrapped his fingers around my neck. The voices in my head, the feeling of finally having all the pieces of who I was fit together, the dream, the monsters in the water. Luke and the power he displayed. Either I accepted that I’d been inducted into a world I had never known—one with magic and monsters, where even I, the daughter of a woman who didn’t want children, had power—or I accepted that I was losing my mind and that all of this was just a psychotic break. There was no middle ground.

Which was it going to be? Ashling was the tie breaker. If I accepted I was losing my mind, then Ashling was dead.

I would take magic and monsters if it meant Ashling had a chance of being saved.

It seemed that Grandpa’s stories and ramblings were true. I’d seen a monster for myself; I couldn’t doubt they existed. They’d stolen Ashling away, like some horribly twisted fairy tale.

Fomorii. The word whispered across my mind and with it came a shard of anger. That was what had taken Ashling. Luke and Bres had spoken of them, as if they would be satisfied now that they had my sister. “We’ll see about that,” I muttered.