“What happened to you?” she can’t help but ask.

  He winces, teeth flashing white in the moon. “Your sister bit back. But it won’t last.”

  There had been blood on Sasha’s cuffs. Pride riots inside her.

  “I’ll be fine by morning.” He doesn’t wear the mutilation with the horror a human would feel, losing an eye; he isn’t fussed about the blood, or even bothering to stem its flow—he isn’t driven by the same instincts that would have clamped onto an actual person. But he is in pain, distracted and disheveled by it. He’s weakened. The realization is a glimmer of light. “Are you worried?” He reaches out, hand deceptively tender, to touch her face.

  Lil steps back, out of reach, but only just. “Wait. Not yet.”

  Frustration flares in his eyes. He drops his hand back to his side.

  “I want to know a few things,” she continues. Behind her, the house and the trees hold very still. “What brought you here?”

  He looks surprised and then a little flattered to be asked. He stuffs his hands in his pockets, considering his answer. His shadow stretches longer than hers, flickers here and there. For an instant, she sees not the head of a man, but the maw of a coyote grinning at her from the ground. “This town was wasting away before I got here. That’s my kind of thing. But there’s power here. I felt the pond. It called me. And that? Captivated me, like a light on a hill.” His breath comes quicker. Hungrier. “It led me to you.”

  “The Pecan Festival? You were just messing with me?”

  “We were playing,” Theon replies lightly. A cat who feels no guilt over taunting a mouse. It’s impossible to know what most people are to him, other than prey.

  She narrows her eyes. “Sasha?”

  Theon hesitates a beat. “I thought she’d give up way more easily than you. Guess I was wrong there.” He presses a hand gingerly over the wound. “But I did something, didn’t I?” He opens his mouth, a snake scenting the atmosphere. “I can feel it. You’re weaker. The boundary is all cracked open now. Are you mad?”

  Is she mad? She wants to tear open his veins with her teeth. Lil nods against the knife in her throat. Theon has been playing human for a long time, but he still doesn’t comprehend love. He’d never have struck at Sasha if he knew.

  “I thought maybe she’d die, but she didn’t, did she?” He reads her face, finds the answer. “Nah, she didn’t.”

  Theon has been striking blows wherever he can, hoping to get right here: Sasha, injured and out of commission; Lil, alone, boundaries susceptible, no recourse left.

  This time, when Theon stretches out his hand, she doesn’t flinch. Lil stays as still as a deer on the other side of a rifle as warm fingers, tacky with blood, touch her cheek. He spreads his palm along the line of her neck and jaw. It’s different from Jason’s broad, sure touch, dispelling the memory like dust. Lil endures. Theon’s mouth goes soft with triumph.

  “I win,” he breathes. The orchard shudders. The trees will brown over winter and turn barren and hard. Maybe, one day, they’ll even drop infants at their roots. And Theon, unrelenting, will consume it all, drop by drop, leaf by leaf, person by person, until there’s nothing left of them. Nothing left of her, because where else can she go?

  “You’ll stay,” he says as if reading her mind. Perhaps he is. “I don’t want you to go. I can be Jason if you want. Or I can be—I can be whatever you want me to be. You’ll see.”

  Again, she says nothing, just breathes, in and out, as if his thumb, grazing her cheekbone, doesn’t feel like the curve of a claw.

  “I want to show you something.” She glances in the direction of the orchard’s cold, dark, and still center.

  Theon follows her gaze. “Show me.”

  As they walk through the orchard, he lingers over her, a dog nipping at her heels. They don’t speak as the trees grow wild as fables, the ordered rows that have been Lil’s whole life dissolving into brush and undergrowth, vines and thorns.

  Theon’s breath is short and panting. Pain, she thinks. “Wait.” He clenches her shoulder for support.

  Lil stops. Bearing up under his touch. Theon suppresses a snarl, swallows it back down. “Slower,” he says grudgingly.

  Glancing down, one of his feet is also…not right. She hadn’t noticed in the dark, but blood mottles it too. The limb, when he steps, flops, like there isn’t solid bone in it anymore.

  She makes no move to help him, but lets him lean on her.

  Deeper they go into the trees, into a blanket of shadow. She steps over roots and stones and he follows her exact path. More than once, he slips, catching himself with nails that dig unnaturally far into her shoulder.

  But she ignores the claw that’s slowly shredding into her. Lil throws her thoughts, her soul, into the suffocating stillness, the water that’s calling to her. What she hoped, once, Jason could love and that Sasha might never have to see.

  They come out of the thickets and into the clearing.

  Theon shudders when he first lays his eye on it. Lil has always been in awe of its beauty too, of the sky’s reflection captured underwater. But Theon, slumping to the ground at its edge, breaks that spell. She pictures Mom in her desperation, kneeling at its base, cracking a shell open between her palms, prying it loose. Sasha, in her faith, doing the same. The water trembles, lapping higher, eating always at its own edges. Everything can be lost here, at the edge of the water.

  Theon spits a mouthful of blood on the hallowed ground.

  “It’s so…much,” Theon says, tender with awe. He crawls to the edge, where he stops, trembles. Salivates. He tips back his head and gazes in wonder at the tree, the moonlight turning golden treasures to silver stars above them.

  Lil keeps her eyes on the pond, its surface silken and dark. With every breath, her body grows colder and colder.

  Theon reaches for the water and jolts back. Staring at his feast, no idea where to start. He stands and backs up a step, then lurches forward to the edge again, a heady whine building in his throat.

  Lil moves to stand at his side. Sunless water flows through her veins.

  Theon’s longing fingers twitch. She slips her hand around his wrist. It draws his attention back to her. “Your skin is so cold.” Theon flips his palm around and holds hers too, like he’s learning from her. Like he thinks she means to teach him. “Thank you, Lilith. Really. Before you, I’ve never loved—”

  Lil steps into the water.

  She pulls.

  “What are you…?” Theon’s voice trails off.

  Knee-deep, Lil faces him, clamped onto his wrist, and the look on her face stuns him in place. He scents the trap. His nostrils flare, feet skittering at the edge of the pond. And another hand shoots out from the water and seizes his bad ankle. It is the pond’s. But it is also hers. The mirror of the hold she has on him, her grip’s reflection. Theon stops, snarls, jerks against it. But it doesn’t let go. Lil walks backward, deeper in, fingers tightening on his wrist. He twists his hand and claws at her skin, rending into the tender inside of her arm, but she doesn’t feel the pain. Trying to strike a wave is useless; it bends and flows on, untainted. She tugs—the pond tugs—and by ankle and arm, Lil yanks him into the water. Into herself.

  “What are you doing?” Theon asks, twisting against her grip. He grabs a handful of her hair in his fist. Lil stares at him from two places. From her body. And from inside the pond. It’s numbing and stinging all at once. She tugs. Waist-deep. Another hand surges up, snatches him by the back of his head and plunges him under.

  Lil holds him and holds him and holds him down. The surface ripples and boils as Theon thrashes. His shape shifts and unfolds enough to snap his arm free. He bursts up screaming and lunges for her.

  Claws sink into her shoulders and he snarls in her face. “Let me go!” Animal shock burns in his remaining eye. “You said I won. I won. I won—” Lil grabs him by the hair again. This is the duty and burden Mom passed on. With every pecan Lil tossed to the pond, the covenant between them deepened. Lil has cared for it faithfully for decades, and it answers her call now, pouring itself eagerly into her, embracing her into itself until they’re one body.

  She pushes him under; the water pulls him down. And Theon sinks again.

  He thought to consume them. He thinks his hunger is endless—he does not know what eternity tastes like. But he will.

  Once again, Theon fights his way to the surface and this time he shoves away from Lil, toward solid ground. He snags onto a root. “I don’t like this,” he threatens. “Stop it, I don’t like it. I’ll kill her, for real this time, if you don’t—”

  Lil and her reflection grab his ankle again and dig twinned fingers into his broken foot until he yowls and breaks his grip to swipe at her. She doesn’t feel human skin but skinny bone and fur under her hand. The creature is appearing under the human mask, the one that turned her home into a brutal hunting ground, that ate at their hearts, their children without mercy. No more. She pulls him deeper.

  Bloodied, one-eyed, Theon meets her gaze and fear floods his expression when he beholds the death in hers. Then pain. His scream becomes a heartbroken howl.

  “But why?” Theon sobs out. He is desperate to breathe; she is forgetting what breathing is. “I don’t understand. You let me in. I thought—” He shudders and—Jason’s panicked face peers out at her, his lips bloodless, water spilling from between them. One of his warm brown eyes is an empty, gory canyon. “Lil, why? I love you.”

  Lil stops her steady tugs. She lunges at him, grasps that hideous, familiar face and drags.

  They both go under.

  Here, there is no more screaming. They fight in the moonless infinity as the cold grows deeper and purer, claws scoring her belly, her fingers digging into the soft places where he already bleeds. Air escapes his mouth in bubbles. Rise toward a faraway surface.

  And down they go.

  This thing that is Theon has never felt anything like drowning before, and probably could never have drowned if he hadn’t put on such a human face for so long. He’d made himself just human enough to die at the mercy of Lil’s love.

  He twists and thrashes. One moment, she’s holding cheek and an ear—the next, her fingers grip antlers—then a wolf’s jaws snap too close to her neck. But water can subdue any struggling, panicked thing. Even as untenable as a riptide is, it has a tight hold.

  Minutes. Hours. Maybe even eons pass. Until he stops fighting. Claws ease from her skin. Teeth fall out of their death snarl. Limp hands slip from Lil’s. He aches with hunger no more. Heavily and soundly, he sinks.

  Lil floats. Water around, above and below and in her. She might linger in the forever of the pond, stay here where there’s no up, no down, no sound, only great, unknowable eternity. Will someone tend to her then? Offering her whatever golden pecans grow from the roots fed by her waters? Will Sasha?

  Water rushes in her ears and she closes her eyes.

  It’s very still in the deep.

  “Lil!” A familiar voice is close. A palm taps anxiously at her face, nearly a slap. “Lilith! Wake up!”

  And Lil coughs herself awake. Her throat is a slice of pain as water dribbles weakly down her cheeks. She gasps in a noisy, desperate gulp of air.

  Where is she? She was—in the water. Now—

  “You’re alive,” Sasha sobs, heaving her into her arms. “You’re okay.”

  Lil comes back to herself slowly, in ebbs and flows. More pain: her arms flare with deep scratches, her lungs burn for oxygen, her muscles tremble with exhaustion. All she is, actually, is pain, because she has a body again, and the fight is catching up with her.

  Lil recognizes the roots of the tree, her fist tightly squeezed around mud, and her sister, right there beside her, here in the place they now share. Faint stars peer through the branches overhead, enough leaves have dropped to allow moonshine to fall down on the pond. She lies on her back, her head pillowed on the torn, river-soaked material of Sasha’s knees. The rest of her is cradled by the pond. It let her go.

  “I’m here, okay?” Sasha mouths, a rasped oath. “I’m here.”

  The night is quiet. There’s no blare from the train, no growl of a hunter beyond the fences. And there’s not a ripple in the sated water.

  Epilogue

  It’s the last golden-syrup days of the harvest. Sasha sleeps in, and when she wakes, the breeze carries the first stir of December. She looks out her window at the orchard. Autumn is with Wyn, walking among the trunks. He’s been telling her all the wild things he knows and teaching her the language of the trees. It’s her mother tongue too. They can whisper together now in treesong, share secrets.

  Sasha smiles, spying as they wander inside the fences, picking ripe husks off the ground. She pulls her camera from the dresser, holding the two of them in her viewfinder. As she watches, Wyn bashes a pecan against a tree to get at the meat inside, while Autumn cracks hers under her sneaker. Wyn is wide-eyed at the abundance of the harvest; the trees near his and Neel’s home were barren. Slim pickings for hungry children. To him, the grasses and tangles of roots offer nothing short of a kingly feast. They invent their own games and chase each other around the reliable, sturdy rows. Another day, she and Sasha raked piles of leaves and introduced him to leaping into that mess of color. There are no hungry men to fear anymore.

  Sasha snaps a picture.

  She and Autumn leave the bed unmade on principle, and it’s always a rowdy tangle. Being with Pip feels as green and full of promise as spring leaves, even as frost gathers on their window pane.

  Sasha pulls a chunky sweater over her head, careful not to tangle it in the chain of her necklace. Autumn made it for her, threading her half of the golden pecan like a pendant. It’s too important not to keep it safe, she’d said and looked at her bashfully through her lashes. Besides, I didn’t think we’d ever be ones for rings. Sasha never takes it off. It’s always right there, over her heart.

  Downstairs, it smells like mulling cider, the windows thrown open. Sasha flips through their vinyl, and puts a Nat King Cole album on. Lil is in the kitchen, opening the oven to pull out the sticky buns inside, wafting spicy caramel scents through the first floor. Autumn comes in with Wyn, and she bends to help him untie his shoes.

  They are finding a new rhythm. It’s been a month since the steamboat sank. At dawn, the morning after Sasha found Lil at the pond’s edge, the grass was frosty and rigid underfoot at the Clearwater orchard. After twenty-nine years of endless cycles of fall, winter is setting over the land.

  Some things are the same: Sasha still gets voicemails from ghosts, asking her to take over the same shift after shift in town. She goes when she feels like it. The town is still empty but relatively well-preserved, their own doll’s house. Together, Lou and Autumn are custodians of the fallow orchards, watching for newborns among the boughs. In and out of his shop, he’s still fixing things, and he comes over for dinner most nights. Sometimes there’s a window to fix in an old building. Lil repainted the firehouse door a glossy red. They do their part to keep alive what they can.

  Some things are changed forever. No more fires blaze on the ridge. Nothing flickers in and out like it might dissolve. Their snow globe is cracked; it’s holding, but it’s changed. Sasha can’t see all the ways that will matter yet.

  Autumn helps Wyn out of his jacket and hangs it with hers by the door, next to Sasha’s.

  “Hey.” Lil appears at her elbow and pokes her side. “Breakfast’s out of the oven, but it’s got to cool. Are we doing this?”

  It’s been their habit the past few days to take a small drive in the morning, somewhere different every day. Part of it is Sasha’s restlessness, her claustrophobia, and another part is Lil’s need to find and understand the crack they all can sense in the hull. So far, they’ve driven the length of the river inside their boundaries, thinking that since Sasha coughed the golden pecan up along the banks, the crack would have formed there. But, finding nothing, they’ve continued along the far edges to the north, where the neighborhoods bleed into kudzu-heavy trees, and down the southern edge where the abandoned train tracks have started to fuzz over with green vine. Without Theon screaming along the railroad, the tracks will soon disappear beneath the tangle.

  Lil starts the truck, and they roll down the driveway to the dusty highway. They pause there, uncertain.

  “Try left,” Sasha suggests lightly. They glance at one another, just from the corner of their eyes. Why not?

  They bump down the road, avoiding the same old potholes. Sasha peers into every shadow, on every property. She’s planning to continue the surveying project, just on the off chance they’ll find any more small faces peeping through the leaves.

  Sasha stares at the road. Some things are gone that can never be reclaimed. Sasha’s beautiful, grieving New York is ancient history, and the world out there is full of new problems she knows nothing about. And it’s possible that they’re now trapped here forever anyway, unaging, locked in a cell of their own making. Sasha sacrificed her escape for a home where she never fit. And yet—she can’t regret it. There, on the steamboat, dancing with Pip, she’d forged her own joy, rebelliously, in spite of pain, and history, and imminent destruction. They carved this town out for themselves, and made it safe, and made it theirs. If the circuit on that love is closed, and there’s no way out, well then, Sasha can just about live with that. She has everything she needs right here, in this pocket they made in the universe.

  But what about her twin? Can Lil bear it? Since the crack, she and Lou have both shed their favorite phantoms, their most seductive haunts. Russ and Jason are gone now, and they won’t be back.

  “Do you regret it?” Sasha finds herself asking. “Any of it?”

  Lil rolls down her window, letting the wind feather up her hair. Most of the burns Theon left on her skin have faded, but she didn’t come away unscarred. There will always be patches of pinched red on her shoulder and the curve of her rib. Many, many nights, late into morning, they’ve talked about the nightmare of Theon and Jason, Theon as Jason. Sasha’s held her as she’s raged and cried, trying to unspool the real from the lies. It’s a job that will never be done.