Chapter One
Shadow Island did something to the light in April. The angle of it, maybe, or the way the water caught the surface and threw the reflection back doubled. Whatever the reason, the hour before sunset turned the whole island gold.
The sand held warmth from the afternoon even as the air came off the ocean sharp and cool. Ahead, the beach stretched wide and quiet, still early enough in the season that she had most of it to herself.
Karissa Squier slowed down to admire the view properly.
She’d been trying to paint this light since Monday. Had four attempts drying back at the rental right now, each one failing in a slightly different way. They were too yellow, too orange, too flat, or too precious.
Her professor would’ve said she was overworking it. “Stop trying to capture it. Let it happen.” Easy advice from someone who wasn’t staring at the actual thing.
She pulled out her phone and took a picture she knew she couldn’t duplicate. Insurance that the view was real, not inspiration.
Sighing, she tucked the device away and kept walking, nearly two full hours ahead of schedule.
Her mom had woken that morning with a headache that spent the whole day graduating into something worse. By 5:00, the barbecue—their last night on the island tradition, something her dad took genuinely seriously, with a marinade and everything—had been quietly retired in favor of a pizza order.
Karissa had eaten two slices at the kitchen table while her parents settled onto the couch. Mom horizontal with a cold cloth over her eyes while Dad found a show on the television, the volume down.
By 6:00, there was nothing left for her to do but watch her mother suffer.
Why not now?
After kissing her parents’ cheeks and promising to be back by midnight, she pulled on a light blue jacket and headed out.
Derrick’s rental was half a mile up the beach. She’d made this walk so many times over the past week that her feet knew it without consulting her. Past the cluster of mermaid wind chimes on someone’s fence post, past the stretch where the boardwalk lights had already flickered on, past the narrowing where the dunes pressed close to the water. Out here, she could almost believe she was the only person on the island.
Tomorrow, they’d drive back to Ohio. Tomorrow, he’d be back on campus two states away.
This was it. One last night.
And though she hated that her mom was sick, Karissa was also glad for these extra two hours. She wouldn’t see Derrick until summer break, and she wanted to melt into him for as long as she could.
She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear and pictured his face when he turned around and saw her there.
“There’s my baby.”
Her toes always curled when he called her that. They’d been together for three years now, since their junior year of high school. Two years strong with her at college in Ohio while he went south to Tennessee.
And he still called her his baby.
The house came into view. It was a big rental, with two decks and a pool, the kind of place that fit twelve comfortably and cost the kind of money Karissa tried not to think about. A Frisbee sailed out of the backyard, and a golden retriever went tearing after it into the surf. Music pulsed from somewhere, the bass traveling through the sand before the melody did.
More people than she’d expected.
More girls too.
She slowed, scanning the crowd around the pool. Red cups, laughter, someone’s playlist running loud enough to replace her pulse. But no Derrick.
Good. She’d find him inside. Make the entrance on her own terms instead of walking into a crowd where she’d have to smile and introduce herself to these new strangers and perform.
She slipped around to the front and let herself in.
The living room was empty. Kitchen too. Just stacks of abandoned cups and open bags of chips on the counter. As if in competition with the beat outside, more music thumped through the ceiling from the second floor.
She took the stairs.
Already smiling. Already composing the moment—surprise, it’s me, I couldn’t wait, I know I’m early—when she heard it.
His laugh.
Then a sound that wasn’t laughing.
She knew what it was. Her body understood a full second before her brain caught up, a sick dropping sensation she tried to argue away even as she continued to move down the hall.
Don’t.
She did.
The door at the end sat open two inches. She pushed it just enough.
Derrick was in bed. Not alone.
The girl’s bright-pink fingernails raked down his back.
He didn’t even pause.
Neither of them looked at the door. Karissa might as well have been a ghost.
She stood there long enough that she had no excuse—long enough that there was no version of this that was a mistake or a misread or a trick of the light. Before she started crying, she turned on her heel.
Down the stairs. Through the kitchen. Out the back.
No one stopped her. No one even looked her way.
I’m a ghost.
The first tear didn’t fall until her feet hit sand.
A dignified walk turned into a run, which turned into a stumble that resembled forward momentum.
No destination or direction. She only needed motion, because standing was impossible and going back to her parents was worse. The beach unspooled ahead of her, and the sky kept doing its thing, stacking up bands of amber and deep rose to the west, all the beauty she’d spent the week trying to paint sitting right there completely apathetic to the fact that she was falling apart.
She was a college sophomore. She was twenty years old. She was crying on a beach in Virginia because she’d been stupid enough to believe a boy who had, in retrospect, given her every reason not to.
How long?
The question arrived in a whisper and wouldn’t leave.
The smart thing was to call her dad to come get her. Go back. Eat the last two slices of pizza and let the night pass. She’d do that in a minute. She just needed to get far enough that she couldn’t still hear it—the sound of him, with someone else, not even noticing her presence.
Karissa was so busy not noticing that her foot was deep in a hole before she could even gasp. A deep one some kid dug and abandoned, and the parents didn’t bother to fill in. Her ankle turned hard to the outside.
Pain detonated up her leg. She went down before she could catch herself, hands hitting the sand, knees following, the impact rattling through her whole body. She pressed her forehead to her knee and breathed and waited for the worst of it to pass.
“Easy now.”
Karissa jerked up.
A woman stood a few feet away. Fifties, maybe, but still trim and youthful. Dressed in a tailored jacket over dark trousers, a string of small pearls at her throat. Put-together in a way that seemed to belong somewhere better-lit than a beach at dusk. She had a calm face, fine-boned and watchful, and the expression on it was pure concern.
“Let me see.”
She crouched beside Karissa before Karissa could answer, hands moving to her ankle with a steadiness that seemed practiced. Maybe she was a nurse or doctor.
“I’m okay.” The words came out wet with leftover tears, which did nothing for the credibility of the statement.
“Mm.” The woman worked carefully, rotating the ankle a fraction. “Not broken. But it’s going to swell.” She sat back on her heels. “Can you stand?”
Karissa tried. The woman took her arm and helped her up, absorbing her weight when the ankle buckled.
“There you go.” She kept ahold of her. “Where are you headed?”
“Back to our rental.” Karissa glanced down the beach. It was a long walk when both legs worked. “Past the boardwalk.”
“Quite a bit of ground on a turned ankle.” The woman’s grip on her arm tightened. “My car’s just over there. I’ll drive you.”
Something in Karissa flickered. Not alarm, exactly. More like the faint echo of every warning she’d ever received. Don’t get in cars with strangers. But this woman had pearls on. She was old enough to be her mother. And the ankle throbbed with every breath.
“Thank you. That’s really kind.”
They moved slowly up through the dunes, the woman bearing her weight without complaint. Karissa hopped and winced and tried not to lean too hard.
“I’m Karissa.”
“Annie.”
Such an old-fashioned name for someone so smartly dressed. Karissa almost said so, but pain kept her lips pressed together.
They reached the road, and Annie guided her to a dark-colored sedan parked at the verge. Annie opened the passenger door, and Karissa settled into the seat, the pain dropping one register as the pressure left her foot.
Karissa reached for the seat belt. “The rental is back that way.” She pointed behind them.
Annie started the engine. “I know.”
Karissa opened her mouth to provide the address. Stopped.
“I know.”
She reached for the door handle. “I’m okay now. I can—”
Annie’s smile didn’t change. Her eyes did.
A needle sank into Karissa’s thigh.
Adrenaline flooded her system, and she scrabbled for the handle even faster. But Annie wrapped her hand around Karissa’s long hair and pulled until she couldn’t move.
“What…” The word came out wrong, the consonants blurring, her tongue suddenly enormous. “What did you…?”
The door was right there. Handle right there. But her hand wasn’t moving the way she was telling it to.
Annie reached across and reclined Karissa’s seat in one smooth motion. All the way back.
“Shh.” Not cruel. Almost tender. “It’s already begun.”
***
Cold.
That was the first thing Karissa sensed. Motion followed. Slow and rhythmic, a rocking her body understood before her mind did. Water slapped something hollow beneath her.
Karissa forced her eyes open.
Open sky. Dark and indifferent. A half-circle moon. Stars much brighter than usual. The air smelled of salt and fish and something underneath. Copper, or iron, or maybe the stench of her own fear.
Her hands, bound by some type of rope, didn’t move when she told them to. Her legs didn’t either. She lay in the bottom of a small boat…completely naked, she realized. The world kept rocking and the sky kept going and she was so very cold.
“Please.” The word scraped out of her. Barely more than breath.
Annie stood at the prow with her back to Karissa, arms up, face tilted toward the sky. A long white cotton gown hung from her frame, the fabric thin and soft with age. It looked less like clothing and more like a curtain pulled from a dead woman’s cedar chest.
She spoke, but not to Karissa.
“The boundary opens.”
Her voice was low, the cadence structured, like something learned by memory and repeated until it wore a path. She reached into a bag at her feet and drew out a bundle of dried herbs—dark and woody-smelling, bitter on the air—and dropped them into the water.
“As it opened before. As it opened for her.”
A small glass bottle followed, its contents dark, swirling briefly before the water swallowed it. Between the louder phrases, Annie’s lips moved with words Karissa couldn’t make out, and the words she could were worse.
“She who refused them. She who was cast out and cast in.” A pause. The boat rocked. “She surrendered herself to the water, and the water kept her. It holds her still.”
Karissa’s fingers moved. A centimeter. Two. Her limbs tingled as feeling crept back in.
She kept very still while she worked at freeing herself.
Annie moved to the center of the boat, lowering herself to one knee beside the bag. More items came out—a small jar, a length of cord, an object wrapped in cloth that she unfolded with special care and arranged on the bench the way you’d set a table. She spoke over each one, her tone dropping to a note above tenderness.
“Her death was the first gift. Her rage was the second. What she left behind is not a curse…but a door.” She placed each item with deliberate hands, touching them the way someone touched things they’d waited a long time to use. “I have stood at that door. I have kept faith with it. Five years of patience. Five years of waiting for the stars and the tide to agree.”
The cloth fell back from the last item.
A knife. Handle wrapped in dark cord. The blade caught the moonlight.
Understanding what was coming landed in Karissa’s chest like ice water, and the fingers she’d been moving so carefully stopped.
She had to get away.
With no other choice, she rolled. Her shoulder hit the side of the boat, and for one terrible second, the lip of it was right there, the black water right there—
A hand caught her hair.
The pain was white and total, wrenching Karissa back before she could tip the balance. She came down hard against the hull.
Annie repositioned her without hurry and without rage. Pulling harder, she didn’t stop until Karissa was on her feet, her back to the other woman’s front. Exposed to the open air and the open water and the indifferent sky.
Karissa tried to pull away, to launch into the water. Strong arms and the relentless tug of her hair kept her in place.
“It won’t be long.” The terrible patience of the delivery was its own kind of horror. “You won’t understand now. But what you’re part of is real. It was real long before either of us.”
She raised the knife.
“Please.” Karissa’s voice broke through louder than she thought she had left in her. “Please…I’m going home tomorrow. My parents are right down the beach. They’ll be looking for me—”
“They cannot reach this water.” Annie’s voice shifted, gone somewhere deeper, almost reverent. “This is the place where she went under. Where she kept breathing long past when she should have stopped. Where she cursed them all with her last swallow of air.” The knife pressed closer. “She was owed. She never collected. I am collecting for her, and she will give me what was always meant to pass between us.”
“Who?” Karissa needed to know.
“The witch of Shadow Island.”
Keep her talking.
“What’s her—”
Annie sliced.
The drag of the blade completed its path before the pain arrived—hot and bright, her brain refusing to process it as real. The warmth flooded down and the reality of it arrived all at once.
At her ear, Annie’s voice broke through the pain, urgent and cracking, the long-held composure finally splitting open.
“Take it.” The words climbed through the register. “Take what’s owed. I’ve done everything. I have honored you with blood, with patience, with my whole life given over to your work.” A sound came out of her that had nothing liturgical left in it. “I won’t be passed over again. I am not my sister. I did not fail. Take it. Accept it.”
Karissa tried to hold the blood in, tried to cry, to speak. Tried to understand.
Derrick appeared, but he was quickly replaced by memories of the drive down from Columbus. Her dad had let her pick the playlist, and she’d picked all the old stuff he liked too. He’d sung along badly to every word, and her mom had complained from the back seat, but only with a smile plastered on her face. It had been completely ordinary in the way that didn’t seem like it needed to be remembered.
She hadn’t thought to remember it.
What will Mom and Dad listen to on the way back home?
The boat tilted, and there was no more cold, because there was no more anything. Only the water closing over her and the stars disappearing and the sound, very far above, of a woman still demanding what she was owed.
Chapter Two
Carmen Crowe smiled as she glanced around her family’s temporary abode. The rental house looked like a place that had learned to hold its breath through storms.
It sat on pilings above a narrow strip of scrub and dune grass, with weathered gray siding and a wraparound porch that faced the water as if daring the Atlantic to come a little closer. The windows were wide and salt-fogged at the corners. The steps creaked in a way Lewis claimed was charming and Carmen claimed was a lawsuit waiting to happen.
She’d lost that argument. She lost most of them here, which was either a vacation miracle or an early sign of a change she should be concerned about.
This morning, the house smelled like sunscreen, bacon, and the coconut conditioner Belle had knocked over in the bathroom. Carmen stood at the stove in bare feet and sleep shorts, sliding scrambled eggs onto a plate while Lewis blended something loud and aggressively neon behind her.
Ariel had music going from a phone propped against the sugar jar, some pop song Carmen was probably too old to recognize. Belle sat cross-legged on a barstool with a paperback open in front of her, though she hadn’t turned a page in at least ten minutes. She was watching the blender with the kind of suspicion usually reserved for unfamiliar wiring.
She wrinkled her nose. “That’s green.”
Lewis shrugged. “It’s tropical.”
“It’s green.”
“It has pineapple, mango, banana, spinach, and love.”
Ariel snorted from the table. “You always say love like it’s an ingredient.”
Lewis poured the smoothie into three glasses and slid them across the counter. At thirty-seven, he still had the unfair advantage of looking like a man travel brochures hired to lean against sailboats.
His dark-brown hair had grown longer during the trip, curling slightly at the ends from salt and humidity. A trim beard framed a smile that showed up easily, especially when he was annoying his children.
The beach had already deepened the tan in his skin, and his honey-brown eyes carried that permanently amused look Carmen had fallen for years ago. “It is when you’re a father underappreciated by the tiny goblins he serves.”
“I’m twelve, not tiny. And I’m not drinking pond juice.” Belle drew her legs up in front of her like a protective shield. “I’m sorry if that hurts your feelings.”
Lewis pushed one of the glasses toward Carmen. “Tell your daughter she’s rude.”
Carmen took a sip. Cold. Sweet. Better than it looked by a considerable margin. She set it down and looked at Belle with great sincerity. “Your father is devastated.”
Belle narrowed her eyes. “You like it?”
“It’s cold and sweet. What’s not to like?”
“You like asparagus, so I’m not sure if I trust your judgment.”
“Asparagus is fine.”
Ariel gagged. “Mom. No.”
Carmen kept her face straight through tremendous personal effort.
Lewis caught the almost-smile anyway. He always did, through some kind of marital sonar that had only gotten more accurate with the years. He leaned in to reach for the toast and kissed her cheek. “You slept?”
She hated to lie.
“Some.”
“That bad?”
“Not bad.”
He gave her a look over the bread bag. It said he knew exactly what not bad meant. It also said he’d let her have this one.
She took another sip of the smoothie and turned back to the stove, though the eggs were done and the bacon had been draining on paper towels for five minutes. She just liked having something in front of her hands. A task to finish. A project to manage.
Outside, gulls argued over some scrap in the dunes. A truck rumbled past on the road. Beneath it all, the ocean kept up its steady rhythm. A week on the island, and she still hadn’t decided whether that sound settled her or got under her skin.
Some mornings, it was one. Some mornings, the other. This morning, she was still deciding.
“Can we go into town today?” Ariel reached for a slice of bacon like a snake attacking a mouse. “Not the art place. The actual town. With the ice cream shop. And the shirts with the crabs on them.”
Lewis slid more toast onto the plate. “Those are quality shirts.”
Ariel stuck out her tongue. “They’re ugly.”
A contract attorney, Lewis refused to back down. “They’re ugly in a charming coastal way.”
“Can I stay here if y’all go?” Belle turned a page without looking up.
Carmen’s response was instantaneous. “No.”
A sigh that must have come from the bottoms of her feet left Carmen’s youngest daughter’s mouth. “I knew you’d say that.”
“Then why ask?”
“Because sometimes miracles happen.”
Carmen poured a coffee for herself. “What would you do here by yourself for three hours?”
“Read.” Belle held up the book as evidence.
“You can read in town.”
“I can’t read while Ariel’s doing that thing where she has to touch every single item on every single shelf.”
Ariel pointed a piece of toast at her sister. “That’s research.”
“It’s chaos with fingers.”
“It’s tactile learning.”
Lewis’s grin was already growing. He had absolutely zero discipline when the girls got rolling, which was either his greatest flaw as a parent or his greatest gift. Carmen had been debating that one throughout thirteen years of marriage.
“We’re all going,” Carmen said, before he could defect. “Together. That’s final.”
Ariel folded her hands under her chin. “Can we at least get ice cream before lunch?”
“No.”
Ariel looked at Belle as though her sister had offered the ultimate betrayal. “Why not?”
Belle, the serious one, the reader, the one who actually slept through the night and remembered to close cabinet doors, considered this for a moment with complete solemnity. “Because sugar first spikes insulin levels.” The duh was left unspoken.
“But we’re on vacation.”
Belle shrugged. “Vacation doesn’t change biology.”
“It changes rules.” Ariel glanced at Carmen. “Right, Mom?”
“Do you really want an energy crash before we have fun?” Lewis, the saint he was, saved Carmen from being the mean one yet again.
A new horror crossed Ariel’s features as she stared at her father. “You’re supposed to be the fun one.”
“I am fun.”
Belle patted her sister’s shoulder. “I’ve changed my mind. Vacation ice cream before lunch is a reasonable position. I’ll permit it if I can stay home.”
“Have you ever seen me have an energy crash?” Ariel pointed her fork at her dad. “No, right?”
He looked at Carmen for help. To her own surprise, she was leaning on Ariel’s side.
One broken rule can’t hurt.
“If you need a tie breaker, I say ice cream before lunch while on vacation is okay.”
Carmen wasn’t sure which of the three faces looked more shocked. Was she always so rigid?
Lewis smiled, easy and shameless. “Really?”
She stabbed an egg. “I’m being the fun parent. It’s my turn.”
“You’re always the fun parent.”
She loved him for the lie. “That’s not true. I make them eat vegetables.”
His mouth popped open. “I make them eat vegetables. You make them eat all the vegetables. In exact nutritional ratios.”
Belle nodded solemnly. “That’s true.”
Ariel held up a strip of bacon like she was swearing an oath. “Remember the time she made us eat the beet salad?”
Would she never live that one down? “That was once.”
“Twice.”
“The second time was an accident.”
“You can’t accidentally make a beet salad, Mom.”
Carmen opened her mouth and closed it. The girls dissolved into laughter, and Lewis caught her eye over their heads, and the thing she felt—warm and aching and too large for the moment—was what she hadn’t let herself feel much in the past year.
She didn’t know what to do with how much she loved the three of them except keep them in her sight.
She was working on the rest.
A brand new season of the bestselling Shadow Island series by international multi-million bestselling author Mary Stone begins now!
Carmen Crowe came to Shadow Island to rest. The island had other plans.
After a difficult year, Carmen, her husband, and their two daughters are spending time on a quiet barrier island off the Virginia coast. The plan is simple. Rest. Recharge. Figure out what comes next.
Then a broken wall reveals a journal someone went to great lengths to hide.
Inside its pages is a warning that… Read More