The Feast Approaches

The dead man on the table was twenty-six years old. His name was Marcus Webb, and he had drowned three miles from shore in water that barely reached his knees.

Wren knew this because Della Voss had told her, in that matter-of-fact way morticians develop when they've spent enough time elbow-deep in other people's tragedies. Della had been Mire's End's secondary mortician for thirty years—primary now, technically, since Elias's funeral home had become a crime scene the town was collectively pretending didn't exist. She was Lolly's younger sister by nine years, built like a heron, all angles and patience, with hands that moved with the practiced gentleness of someone who understood that even the dead deserved kindness.

"Shallow water blackout, most likely," Della said, adjusting the overhead lamp until the light fell flat and even across Marcus Webb's face. He looked surprised. Drowned people often did. "Happens to free divers. They hyperventilate before going under, pass out before they feel the need to breathe. Could happen in a bathtub."

"He wasn't in a bathtub," Wren said. "He was standing in tidal pools."

"Then he wasn't a very lucky man." Della set a tray of instruments between them. "Are you alright?"

Wren flexed her left hand—the one that had been injured, the one that now pulsed in perfect synchronization with her heartbeat, the one that was no longer entirely hers. The skin had healed clean. Too clean. The scar was silver-white and smooth as river glass, and when she pressed her thumb against it, she could feel something underneath that was warm and patient and aware.

"I'm fine."

The word came out wrong. It always came out wrong now. Too deep, with harmonics that shouldn't exist in a single human throat—her voice and something else's voice, braided together like rope. She'd been speaking less since the funeral home. Tommy had noticed. Sebastian would have noticed, if she'd let him near her. But Sebastian was elsewhere, doing whatever people did when they'd discovered their employer had been harvesting souls, and Wren was here, trying to pretend she could still do normal work.

Della watched her for a moment, then said nothing. She'd known Wren since childhood. She knew what the Calloway women were. And she'd seen what came out of Elias's funeral home three nights ago, when Wren had emerged shaking and wrong-voiced with Tommy Vetch staggering beside her, both of them soaked in fluids that smelled like the marsh at low tide. Della hadn't asked questions. She'd simply handed Wren a cup of tea that was mostly whiskey and said, "You'll want to keep your hands busy. Trust me."

Wren trusted her. So here she was, standing over a dead fisherman in Della Voss's modest mortuary on Thornhill Street, trying to perform a routine embalming without falling apart.

She reached for the trocar.

The moment her fingers touched the cold steel, Marcus Webb's soul sat up.

Not his body. His body stayed exactly where it was, flat on the table, face slack with that mild expression of surprise. But his soul—hazy, translucent, flickering at the edges like a candle in wind—rose from his chest and turned to look at her.

Wren had always been able to see souls. Her father had called it the Calloway gift. Her grandmother had called it the Calloway curse. Either way, it had always been like watching smoke through glass—present but distant, muted, separate. She could observe. She could not interact, not without binding.

This was different.

Marcus Webb's soul strained toward her like iron filings toward a magnet. It pulled and pulled and pulled, and Wren could feel its hunger—not malevolent, just desperate. The desperate need of a dying thing to touch something living. And beneath that hunger, she could feel something else. The thing in her blood—the fragment that had synchronized, that had become part of her—reaching back.

She dropped the trocar. It clattered against the tray, and the sound was very loud in the quiet room.

"Wren?" Della's voice, sharp with concern.

"He's still here." Wren's layered voice was barely a whisper. "He's right here, Della. He's looking at me."

Della went still. She couldn't see what Wren saw—she didn't have the blood for it—but she'd grown up in Mire's End. She believed in what she couldn't see the way she believed in the tide. Without question. Without resistance.

"Should I give you a moment?"

"That's not—" Wren stepped back from the table. The soul followed, tracking her, its hollow eyes fixed on the scar in her palm. "That's not going to help."

Because she could feel it now, clearly and completely, without the buffer that had always existed between her and the dead. Marcus Webb's soul was aware of her—not as a mortician, not as a bystander, but as something it recognized. Something it wanted. The fragment in her blood pulsed warmly, and she understood with sick certainty that the dead could feel it too. Could feel the thing that had made a home in her body and recognized it as a door left open.

She was the door.

She was the door, and every soul within range was pressing against her, trying to get through.

"I need to go," she said.

"Wren—"

"I need to go."

She left Della standing over Marcus Webb's body with the instruments laid out and nowhere to put them. She didn't take her jacket. She didn't close the door behind her. She walked into the grey autumn afternoon with the fog curling around her ankles like something affectionate, and she didn't stop walking until she reached the waterfront.

The town was preparing for the Feast of the Drowned.

It was everywhere. Paper lanterns strung between the buildings, their rice-paper surfaces painted with symbols that were older than the town itself—waves and spirals and shapes that might have been fish or might have been something else, depending on how you held your head. Booths were going up along Harbor Street, selling saltwater taffy and hot cider and charms against drowning. The festival had been Mire's End's tradition for over a hundred years: a celebration of those the sea had taken and returned, a thanksgiving for the drowned dead who washed ashore and could be properly mourned.

Wren had always hated the Feast. Even before she understood what her father did, even before she knew about souls and bindings and the thing in the marsh, she'd hated it. The lanterns looked like eyes at night. The songs they sang were in a language no one remembered. And the way people smiled—too wide, too fixed, the smiles of people performing normalcy so hard they'd forgotten what actual normalcy felt like.

She found Tommy on the pier, sitting with his legs hanging over the edge, watching the water.

He'd been avoiding her. She knew this the way she knew the tide schedule—in her bones, without needing confirmation. Three days since the funeral home, and in those three days Tommy Vetch had developed a talent for being elsewhere. When she entered a room, he found a reason to leave it. When she spoke, he looked at a point approximately six inches to the left of her face. The saint tattoos on his arms—St. Jude, St. Christopher, St. Michael—seemed darker, as if he'd been tracing them with something. Ink. Pen. Prayer.

"Hey," she said.

He didn't turn around. "Hey."

She sat beside him. The wood of the pier was slick with moisture, and somewhere beneath them the water moved with that thick, sluggish quality it got when the marsh was expanding. The fog was heavier today. It pressed against the boats in the harbor like something trying to get in.

"You've been quiet," she said.

"Been busy."

"Doing what?"

Tommy's jaw tightened. He was twenty-five but looked younger, especially now, with his gaunt cheeks and the shadows under his eyes that suggested he hadn't been sleeping. His hands were shoved deep in his jacket pockets, and she could see the faint tremor in his shoulders that meant he was either cold or afraid. In Mire's End, the two were practically the same thing.

"Thinking," he said finally. "About Rose."

Your sister, Wren thought. Your sister whose soul was one of the ones we freed. Whose canister was glowing amber in that room behind the machine, labeled in Elias's careful handwriting: R. Vetch — Fragment 1 of 3.

p>"She's free now," Wren said carefully. "The machine—the reversal. It should have released them."

"Should have," Tommy repeated. "Yeah."

He still wasn't looking at her.

"Tommy."

"Your voice sounds different." He said it flatly, the way someone states a fact they've been carrying for days. "It sounds like—like more than one person. And when you walked into Della's this morning, the lights flickered. And the flowers on the counter died. All of them, Wren. Every single one, just—" He made a gesture with his hand, a wilting motion, and finally, finally turned to look at her.

His eyes were frightened.

Not of her. For her. That was worse.

"I don't know what you are anymore," he said. "And I've been praying about it, and I still don't know. St. Jude is for lost causes, and I keep asking him—if you're the lost cause, or if I am for staying."

Wren opened her mouth. Closed it. The thing in her blood pulsed steadily, and she could feel it now, the way she could feel her own heartbeat—a second awareness layered over her own, calm and ancient and patient. It didn't push. It didn't demand. It simply waited, the way the marsh waited, the way the tide waited.

"You should trust your instincts," she said quietly. "If you need to walk away, walk."

"That's not what I'm saying." Tommy pulled his hands from his pockets and pressed them against his knees. The St. Jude tattoo faced upward, the saint's eyes turned away. "I'm saying I need you to tell me what's happening to you. And I need you to tell me the truth. Not the version you think I can handle."

The truth. Wren stared at the water. The truth was that something old and vast had retreated through a crack in reality three nights ago, and when it left, it hadn't taken everything with it. A piece remained. The piece that had been in her hand since the cannery, the piece that had burrowed into her blood and bone and being. It was still there. It was still growing. And she could feel it now, not as an invader but as an extension of herself—a new limb she hadn't known she was missing.

"I don't know," she said. And that, at least, was true.

They sat in silence as the fog thickened around them, and somewhere out past the harbor, a bell buoy rang in the grey.

She went back to Della's that evening because she couldn't stay away. Because Marcus Webb was still on the table, and his soul was still there, and if she didn't face it now, she'd never face anything again.

Della had covered him with a sheet. His soul hovered at the foot of the table, flickering, agitated. When Wren walked in, it turned toward her with a movement that was almost violent—whipping around like a dog that had heard its name.

"I need to finish this," Wren told Della.

Della looked at her for a long moment, then nodded and stepped back. She settled into the chair by the door, hands folded in her lap, and watched with the patient, unflinching attention of a woman who had been dealing with death her entire life.

Wren approached the table. She pulled the sheet back. Marcus Webb's body looked the same—surprised, pale, waterlogged at the extremities. But when she reached for the trocar again, his soul moved.

It came close. Too close. Close enough that she should have felt nothing—souls had no physical presence, no weight, no warmth—but she felt him. Felt the cold of deep water. Felt the pressure of something vast and dark rising from below. Felt the moment his lungs had filled not with water but with something thicker, something that had hands and intention and wanted him specifically.

And then he spoke.

Not with sound. Souls didn't speak with sound. But Marcus Webb's soul opened something—a connection, a channel—and words formed in Wren's mind with terrible clarity.

You're the one. You're the one it's been waiting for.

Wren's hand trembled over the trocar. "What?"

The marsh. It's been waiting. Since before the town. Since before the names. It needs a keeper. Someone to hold it. Someone strong enough.

"I'm not—" Wren's voice cracked. The harmonics in it wavered, layered and strange. "I'm not keeping anything."

It's already inside you. You let it in. And it's so grateful. It's been so alone for so long. Do you understand? It doesn't want to eat anymore. It wants to belong. It wants someone to hold all the pieces together. That's what keepers do. They hold.

"Stop."

It learned from the one who wears the gentleman's body. Learned that capture doesn't work—souls fight capture, souls resist. But invitation... invitation works. It invited you. And you accepted.

The fragment in Wren's blood pulsed warmly. Affectionately. Like something that had found its way home.

"I didn't know," she whispered. "I didn't know what it was."

It doesn't matter what you knew. It matters what you are. And you're the first one in a very long time who's strong enough.

The soul flickered. Its edges were softening, dissolving. Seven days after death, souls dissipated—Marcus Webb was running out of time.

Be careful. The gentleman wants what you have. The thing inside you. He'll try to take it. He'll try to make you give it willingly, because taken things fight and given things don't. That's what he learned too. That's what he's always learned.

And then Marcus Webb's soul was gone. Not dissipated—gone. Snapped out of existence like a soap bubble, leaving nothing behind but a cold spot in the air and the lingering sensation of deep water and vast, patient darkness.

Wren stood over his body for a long time. Della didn't speak. The mortuary was silent except for the hum of the refrigeration unit and the distant sound of the town preparing for the Feast.

She completed the embalming with steady hands and a heart that felt like it was being squeezed by something with too many fingers.

That night, Tommy couldn't sleep.

His room above the bait shop on Anchor Street was small and cold, the window cracked to let in the salt air because the alternative was suffocating in the smell of rubber and diesel that seeped up through the floorboards. He lay on his narrow bed with the saints on his arms facing the ceiling, and he prayed—not for sleep, not for peace, but for understanding. For the wisdom to know whether the girl he'd called back to Mire's End was still the girl he'd written to, or something wearing her face.

He'd written the letter. That was the secret he carried like a stone in his chest. He'd found his grandmother's old papers, found the records of what Elias had done, found the list of souls. Rose's name had been there. Rose, who had drowned at fourteen. Rose, whose soul Tommy had assumed was long dissipated, long gone to wherever souls went when their seven days ended. But no. Elias had caught her. Had bound her in amber glass and kept her like a firefly in a jar, and Tommy had thought—if he could bring Wren home, if he could point a Calloway at what Elias had built, maybe it would be enough.

And it had been enough. The machine was destroyed. The canisters were opened. Rose's soul, wherever it was, was free.

But Wren's voice sounded like two people speaking at once, and the flowers died when she walked past, and Tommy didn't know if he'd saved the town or delivered it to something worse.

He was halfway through a Hail Mary—his lips moving soundlessly, the words as automatic as breathing—when he heard the knock.

Not at the door. At the window.

Tommy's eyes opened. The room was dark. The cracked window let in a sliver of fog-thick moonlight, and through the glass, he could see a shape.

Small. Slim. Dark hair plastered wet against a pale forehead. A face he knew as well as his own—the same sharp chin, the same wide-set eyes, the same slight overbite that had made her look perpetually surprised, even when they were children.

Rose.

Tommy sat up so fast the room spun. His heart hammered against his ribs with a