"Do you see her?" Lyse called back to Arrabelle and Evan.
Daniela wished the answer were different: "No!"
The darkness was beginning to fade behind them, and with it went any hope of finding Arrabelle. No matter how hard Daniela looked, there was zero sign of her friend.
"We have to stop and go back," Evan yelled to Niamh, though she wasn't in charge of their progress-Eleanora and Hessika were the ones who needed to make the wind turn them around.
"She's gone," Eleanora said, but their progress did slow, the boat not shaking so badly now that it was buffeted by less wind. "There's no going back."
"We can't leave her," Evan said, hands waving in emphasis. "She would never leave any of us!"
Eleanora listened to his outburst, but then she firmly held her ground.
"It took her. Don't you see that?" she said, voice full of anger. "She's not here to be found. I should've known it would come to this . . . picking us off one by one, the bastards."
Daniela knew in her heart that Eleanora was right. The darkness was gone. No sign left to show it had ever been there, at all. Only miles and miles of placid, water-covered land stretching out behind them.
Daniela felt heartsick, but at least knowing that a part of Arrabelle had become one with the creature inside her was a kind of consolation. Crazy to think she had access to layer upon layer of Arrabelle's thoughts and memories. She pushed it all away, not quite feeling right about invading her friend's privacy. She decided she would keep that door locked for now.
"I'm not leaving her back there," Evan said, ignoring Eleanora. "Stop this thing."
Hessika waved her hand and the wind dropped away.
"It's a waste of time," Eleanora said, but Evan shook his head.
"You do what you have to do, but I'm going back to find her."
The boat had slowed enough for Evan to get off easily. He clambered over the side, his feet sinking into the silt beneath the waterline.
"Niamh?" he asked, but she didn't move.
"I'm sorry. I feel like I need to go with them," she said.
He looked disappointed, but he didn't get angry with her.
"I guess you have to do what you have to do," he said, and then, without ceremony, he began heading back the way they'd come.
They watched him trudge through the murky, ankle-high water, his form getting smaller and smaller the farther away from them he got. No one said anything, just watched him slowly disappear as he headed off into the unknown.
"Will he be okay?" Dev asked.
There was no answer.
• • •
The irony was they only traveled for another half hour before they reached the Red Chapel. To have lost both Arrabelle and Evan when they'd been so close was ridiculous. And Daniela still wasn't sure it was the right decision to let Evan go. Not that she had any idea what they could've done to make him stay. He'd been determined to go back and look for Arrabelle, and Daniela couldn't fault him for it. She knew it was a futile gesture. Whatever the darkness was, it had swallowed Arrabelle whole and spirited her far away. If she'd thought there was any hope of finding Arrabelle, she'd have joined Evan-but her gut instinct told her his search would bear no fruit.
The loss of Arrabelle had affected them all. Lyse had remained stoically quiet, but Niamh had curled up into a ball in the middle of the boat and refused to talk to Dev when she'd made overtures of conversation. Daniela knew part of it was feeling guilty she hadn't gone with Evan. He was the last remaining tie to her old life, and he'd been her coven mate for much longer than she'd known any of the Echo Park blood sisters. And yet she'd thrown her lot in with them without question.
Eleanora was harder to read. Death, and the process of becoming a Dream Walker, had changed her friend. The flinty granite of Eleanora's personality had fully asserted itself, killing any softness left inside her. She wasn't cold or mean in any way; there was just nothing left for Daniela to catch hold of . . . any empathic ability to connect to her old friend had been severed.
While Daniela watched, the landscape changed, the water drying up and becoming solid ground again. This didn't seem to deter the boat; it just kept floating along as if it were still on a liquid surface.
"Should we walk?" Daniela asked, but Eleanora shook her head.
She decided that this was Eleanora's ship and she, Daniela, was merely one of its passengers. After that, she'd kept her mouth shut. She would just have to wait and see how it all developed. She knew she was ready to leave the dreamlands behind and return to their world. There were a whole bunch of idiots back there who needed their asses kicked . . . and she was the one who was going to do it.
"That can't be it," Lyse said, and Daniela followed her gaze out toward the horizon.