Read Mistwalker for Free Online Page A

collected in the bottom of the tub, slinking toward the drain.
    Downstairs, Dad raised his voice, then the back door slammed. I didn’t hear it so much as feel it, an unexpected slap. Twisting the tap off, I listened to the silence that followed, then the low hum of his truck driving away.
    They’d always known what I did, but tonight they had to admit it. The space gouged out of this house, this family, it was—
    I was never afraid I’d get in trouble for cutting off Coyne’s gear. It was the
telling
that scared me. The confessing. Having to look at my mother and my father afterward. Having to look at myself. Having to say it out loud:
    It was my fault Levi was dead.
    Not in some roundabout, butterflies-in-Africa-starting-hurricanes-in-Maine kind of way. My little brother would have been a Bailey. He had a soft smile, and notebooks full of art. Full of good song lyrics that Nick and Seth put to bad music. He made stop- motion movies, and flipbooks, and plans to give up the sea entirely.
    He could’ve; he would have.
    Except I leaned in his doorway that night. I waited for him to pull out his ear buds and ask me, “What up, Willard?”
    And instead of saying “Let’s go find the Grey Man” or “Nothing, I just wanted you to know I ate the last of your Trix on purpose,” I tossed him the keys to the
Jenn-a-Lo.
    He caught them on the first throw.

 
     
    THREE
Grey
    There she is again, thinking about me.
    I transfer my calipers to my left hand and peer at the music box on my desk. The coils are tightened, the clockworks pinned. Nothing rattles when I lift it to my face.
    Turning the copper key, I hold it—master of time, the god of the figures trembling on top of the box. If they dance, it’s because I wish it. If they hang forever in anticipation, that, too, is within my grasp.
    But I let the key go, and it slowly unwinds. The “Maple Leaf Rag” is more a waltz at this pace. The figures circle each other, their copper skin glinting with each mechanical turn. Placing it in the window, I watch them sway against the line of the horizon. Tonight’s sunset is red and bright—sailor’s delight.
    And mine, too, for she’s thinking of me. She must be realizing, as I once did, that something lives on this rock. Tomorrow I shall stand on the cliff and wait. I will be the pale star that blinks on the horizon. I will be ethereal and tempting.
    If there is any balance in the world, any justice between the heavens and the earth, she’ll see me. Is that not the true nature of this curse? I’ve no chance of collecting a thousand souls. Nor did Susannah, nor any other Grey to stand on this island. The only escape is through another. A willful, if stupid, choice—she must say yes. She must choose this mantle.
    I do believe she’ll come. I could wish for it, for her to appear at my breakfast table the same way my books and toys and oddments do. But the bindings of the curse are clear: anything that I
want
will be mine.
    Only by happenstance and the slightest shift of fog can I get what I
need.
    Tomorrow I’ll hold back the mist, arrange myself handsomely. The wind will finger through my hair while I stand and wait. If there’s any justice at all, I’ll meet her eyes across the water and become her fascination.
    Already she’s thinking of me.
    Now I just need her to come.

 
     
    FOUR
Willa
    “I could take Latin next year,” Bailey said, “but I’d have to drop welding so I can drive all the way up to Herrington.”
    My head hurt. And much as I loved Bailey, I didn’t know if I could go another two hours dissecting her senior year schedule. Since I wasn’t going to college, I planned to take the five classes I needed to graduate. That would let me get out at one, so I could go pull traps with my dad. Well, that’s what it used to be. I figured I’d be getting out at one to go pull bloodworms now.
    That’s what I was doing—sorting them at the cellar, anyway. The room was too cold and stank of fish and mud.