Of course. They were teenage girls going to their first dance and they wanted to know if there would be boys there. According to Soheila, there wouldn’t be. And if the door to Faerie closed forever these undines would be the last of their species. I was sending them to their extinction. And they knew it. I felt their minds probing mine. Their frantic thoughts traveling up the fingertips of my outstretched hand.

Don’t make us go! Don’t make us go!

Their high-pitched screeching searing my brain, I tried to reason with them. “But you’ll die here. Your sisters will be waiting for you on the other side.”

I might as well have been shouting at a tornado. In fact, the air around me was beginning to spin. The watery maelstrom was spreading into the air. It tugged at my clothes and whipped my hair into my face.

“I think I’m just pissing them off,” I shouted into the wind. I started to pull back from the water, but before I could, a translucent hand broke the surface and clamped onto my hand. It was cold and gooey as jelly, but with a grip like a lobster claw. I opened my mouth to scream but got only a mouthful of water as it pulled me into the pool.

CHAPTER THREE

THE WATER WAS ice cold. The shock of it pushed all the air from my lungs and turned my limbs into useless sticks. Unable to resist the undine’s grip on my arm as she pulled me into the center of the pool, I sank like a stone before we were both sucked into the whirlpool of revolving undines.

When we were eleven, my friend Annie had dared me to ride the Whirl-a-Gig at the Feast of San Gennaro festival in Manhattan’s Little Italy. It was a rusty metal drum that looked like a cake tin and it had reduced my insides to batter when it spun. This was ten times worse and the hand I clutched wasn’t Annie’s: it was a cold gelatinous fish hand of an alien creature. Still, I held on tightly as the whirlpool whipped me in circles. I tried to look into the creature’s eyes to discover why she had dragged me into their mad dance. Her eyes were full of a manic glee that would have chilled me if I hadn’t been already frozen to the bone. Up close, their mossy green was variegated with veins of gold and chips of silver mica. They gleamed like marbles of polished agate. Looking into them was like staring into something elemental: the night sky or the center of an exploding atom. Cold, indifferent, and beautiful, they sucked me into their depths as surely as the whirlpool pulled me down to the bottom of the pool.

As I stared into her eyes, my head was full of a high-pitched hum that crowded out every other thought. It was like trying to study with your college roommate blasting out heavy metal.