Marked By Tide

Chapter 1 - The Border

Nerida's POV

I count my breaths because if I count my breaths I don't have to think about the wet warmth running down my side, and if I don't think about the wet warmth running down my side I can keep running.

One.

The wet leaves under my feet are a problem. I'm slipping every third step. My right hand is pressed against the wound just below my ribs and my left hand is shaking so hard I can't trust it for balance, so I'm pushing off trees with my elbow when I have to, which is now, which is the next tree, which is —

Two.

I can hear him behind me. Not close. Not far either. The thing about Jareth is he doesn't run. He never runs. He walks at the pace of a man who has all night, and he keeps you in sight, and he lets you tire yourself out, and he closes the distance when you can't go any further. He's done it before. Twice. I was thirteen and fourteen and I didn't know yet that running was just another thing he was waiting to punish me for.

Three.

The tree I push off has bark that scrapes the skin off my elbow. I don't feel it. I feel the next breath instead. I feel the wet patch growing on my side under my hand.

And I feel the other thing.

I've been feeling it for a minute now, maybe two, and I haven't let myself name it because naming it costs attention I don't have. But it's there. Ahead of me. Not behind me where Jareth is — *ahead*. A pull. Low in my chest, under the wound, deeper than the wound. Like a hand closed around something behind my ribs and started, very gently, to draw me forward.

Toward the trees that are wrong.

Four.

Because the trees are wrong. I noticed it three steps ago and I'm only admitting it now. The trunks are getting wider. The canopy is climbing. The undergrowth should be slowing me down and instead the ferns are *moving* — leaning, parting, getting out of my way, which is a thing I am hallucinating because I have lost too much blood. Except the pull in my chest doesn't feel like blood loss. It feels like the opposite of blood loss. It feels like the only part of me that isn't emptying out.

Five.

A branch catches my hair and I lose three strands and a sound that almost turns into a scream. I swallow the scream. I have been swallowing things for five years. I can swallow one more.

The pull tightens.

It's not in my head. Something ahead of me is *aware* of me. I don't know how I know that. I know it the way you know someone has walked into a dark room behind you — the air changes, the weight of it changes — and the air ahead of me has weight now, has attention in it, and the attention is pointed at me like a face turned toward a sound.

Six.

I should be afraid of that. A smart animal would be afraid of that. I am running toward something that knows I'm coming and I am running *faster*, and I don't understand why except that every step toward the wrong trees loosens something in my chest that Jareth has had bolted shut for five years.

The memory comes whether I want it or not. The kitchen. The Tuesday-night kitchen with the bad fluorescent light over the sink and the smell of the takeout he'd brought home like that was a kindness. The letter on the table. *Dear Ms. Bramwell, congratulations on your acceptance to —* and his face going still the way it does when he's choosing what version of himself to be.

Seven.

I'd said it out loud. *I'm going.* Three syllables. I've been saying them in my head for five years and I picked Tuesday to say them with my mouth.

He went to the knife block. He didn't take a knife. He took the *machete*, the one he keeps for the yard, the one he sharpens on weekends while listening to whatever podcast he's currently letting me know is informing his worldview, and I had a full second to decide whether I was going to stand there and let him do it or whether I was going to run.

Eight.

I ran. He cut at my arm. I got it up just enough that the blade came across the meat of my forearm instead of my throat. Then he swung the other way and the blade went into my side and I don't want to remember the sound it made coming out, so —

Nine.

The pull yanks.

Hard, this time. Not gentle. Ahead and to my left, something *moves* — fast, low, big, a shape I catch only as a tear in the dark between two trunks — and the pull in my chest lurches toward it so violently I stagger, and for one impossible second I am not running from Jareth at all. I am running *to*. To the shape. To the eyes I haven't seen yet but already feel watching me come.

Ten.

Ten and then back to one. Start over.

One.

I am running toward the reserve.

I didn't know I was. Some part of me has been mapping this for years, since I was old enough to put a finger on the map at school and read the name *Tidemark Reserve* and store it the way I stored every other thing I might need someday. Two miles north of the high school. The fence came down eight months ago in the housing-crisis vote, and the news has been calling the reserve a disaster zone ever since — every construction crew that pushes in gets hit with weather they can't explain, and the federal task force keeps writing reports that don't help, and nobody who goes in there comes out without losing equipment.

Nobody goes in there.

Something in there wants me to.

The trees thin. Ahead of me is a line — not a fence, not a wall, just a *change* in the undergrowth, like one kind of forest ends and another kind begins. The pull is a fist around my heart now, and it is pulling me across, and I don't have a plan for what happens after but my body has already decided, because the only thing on the far side of that line is the thing that is reaching for me, and the only thing on this side of it is my brother.

I cross.

The change is immediate. The air gets cooler. The pull in my chest *blooms* — opens wide, floods warm down into my stomach, and for one second the wound doesn't hurt, for one second I am not dying, for one second something on the other end of that pull holds me up from the inside.

And the sound of him behind me — the steady careful sound of his boots on the leaves — *stops*.

I keep running for another six steps before my brain catches up with what my ears just told me. Then I stop. I shouldn't stop. I stop anyway. I turn.

He's at the line.

Twenty feet behind me, on the other side of the change in the undergrowth, my brother is standing with his hand around the handle of his yard machete and the blade is wet with what I now realize is *my blood* — enough of it on the steel to be visible from here, dark and slow. His right sleeve is dark too. His shoes. The front of his shirt.

He looks at me.

I have seen Jareth's face do a lot of things. The public face he wears for social workers. The management face he uses when he's correcting me. The rage face the two times in my life he's lost control badly enough to use it.

I have never seen the face he's wearing right now.

It is *nothing*. There is nothing on it. His mouth is slightly open. He is looking at me the way you look at something you don't understand. He takes a step toward me.

He doesn't cross the line.

His foot comes down on his side of the change. He stops with his weight on it, like he meant to keep going and his body just refused. He looks down at his own foot. He looks at the air in front of him. He looks at *me*. And his face does something then — a flicker, just a flicker, of *fear*, the first time in my life I have ever seen Jareth afraid of anything.

The pull in my chest flares again. Closer now. Behind me and to both sides. Whatever it's attached to has moved up while I wasn't looking, and it is near, and it is between me and the line, and it is letting Jareth see exactly how near it is.

That's why he's afraid. He can't see it. But he can feel it the way prey feels it.

The satisfaction that hits me is so pure and so wild that I almost laugh.

I almost laugh.

I am bleeding out in a forest with a stab wound in my side, and my brother — who has owned me for five years, who stabbed me an hour ago, who has been calmly walking behind me waiting for me to die — is afraid of a line in the dirt and the dark behind me, and I almost laugh.

I find my voice instead.

I have not used my voice with Jareth in any way that mattered in five years. I have answered him. I have said yes and sorry and whatever was the right answer to get the next ten minutes safer. I open my mouth in the trees and a word comes out, low and ragged, and the word is:

"What."

His head jerks up. His eyes find mine.

"What's wrong, Jareth." It comes out flat. It does not come out like a question. "Why aren't you coming."

"Nerida." His voice. *His* voice, doing the management thing, the calm-down thing. "Come back across. I'll take you to a hospital."

I laugh.

It hurts my side enough that I almost go down on a knee, and the sound that comes out of me is wet and broken and not a sound I have ever made before, and I laugh anyway, because the *audacity* of the man cannot pass without acknowledgement.

"You're not taking me to a hospital, Jareth," I say. "You're going to bury me. You took the *machete*. Not a kitchen knife. The one you sharpen on Sundays. You weren't planning to *stop* me. You were planning to *finish* me."

His face recalibrates. I have watched him do it at this exact angle a hundred times.

"Come back across the line."

"No."

"Nerida. You're bleeding. You don't know what's in there."

Behind me, in the dark, something *breathes*. Big enough that I feel the warmth of it move the air at the back of my neck.

I don't turn around. I keep my eyes on my brother.

"Neither do you," I say. "But it knows me. Can't you tell? It came to the line for me. Not for you." I take a step backward, away from him, deeper in. "You can't cross, can you. You tried. You can't."

His jaw works. He doesn't answer.

"I hope it kills you," I tell him, and my voice is shaking now — not from fear. "I hope you stand at this line for the rest of your life and you cannot cross it and you cannot reach me and you cannot reach anyone you decide is yours, and I hope I am the last thing you ever wanted that you could not have."

The mask drops. The real one comes out — the one only I have ever seen.

"You ungrateful little —"

"*Bye*, Jareth."

I turn.

I run.

I run before he can finish the sentence, because I have heard him finish that sentence a thousand times, and tonight is the first night of my life that I do not have to wait for him to.

And I run *toward* the pull now, openly, because there's no more pretending it isn't there. It's the only thing holding me up. Every step away from Jareth and toward the dark trees loosens it wider, warms it more, and I am bleeding out and I am being reeled in and I cannot tell anymore which one is going to take me first.

I make it maybe a hundred yards before I have to take my hand off the wound to push off a tree, and the second I do the warmth comes faster, and I have to put the hand back, and now I'm moving on elbows and hips alone.

The counting stops working. I lose it at four. I try the alphabet. I get to *G*.

Something is wrong with my eyes. The canopy is closing in — not the trees, my *vision*, the edges going dark — and I know what this is. I have been waiting for it since the first time my own father slapped me at eight and I learned that bodies have limits and the limits are knowable.

I am going to faint.

But the pull doesn't dim with the rest of me. Everything else is going out like a tide pulling back from a shore, and the pull stays, bright and warm and *close*, closer every second, and I understand — in the last clear room left in my head — that the thing on the other end of it is running to catch me before I land.

My legs give. I go down on my knees first — that part I feel, the cold wet of the leaves through my jeans — and then sideways, slow, like the world is being deliberate about putting me down.

I land on my left side. The side that isn't bleeding. The last useful decision my body makes before it stops making decisions.

The canopy is above me. *High*. Higher than I would have believed before tonight. The trees here are older than anything I've ever stood under, and I am looking up at them through the dark tunnel my vision is becoming, and they are beautiful, and I am sorry I won't get to see them in daylight.

I hear it then. To my left. Fast and large, not the careful measured noise of a man on two feet, and I know what large things in forests are, I'm from a place that has news stories about them —

— and I'm not afraid.

The pull is *roaring* now. It has a direction and the direction is the thing moving toward me through the trees, and some animal part of me that Jareth never managed to kill lifts its head and says *there. that. yes.*

I think *good*.

I think *good, because I'd rather be found by the thing that came to the line for me than touched by my brother one more time.*

Something stops beside me.

I can't turn my head. But there's warmth against my throat now — slow and steady, a pulse against my pulse that is not mine — and I am too far gone to understand what's touching me, but my body knows it isn't Jareth, and my body lets go of the last of the strength holding it together.

Then there are eyes.

Two pairs. Low to the ground in the dark above me, catching what little light is left in the canopy. Blue, both pairs. One steady — the kind of steady that watches. One darker, almost storm-colored — the kind of dark that *waits*. They are very close to my face.

I look at them. They look at me.

And the pull that has been reeling me in for a mile finally reaches the end of its line and *snaps* —

Low and quiet and internal. Like a tendon I didn't know I had pulled tight, and whatever it was bolted to has just been bolted to *something else*, and the something else is on the other end of those eyes. Both pairs. At once.

I do not have a word for what just happened to me.

I do not have time to wonder.

The dark takes me.

The last thing I'm aware of, before it takes me completely, is that I am being lifted — hands now, actual hands, large and careful and warm, sliding under my back and my knees, and the hands are shaking very slightly, the way a man's hands shake when he is trying very hard to do something gently.

And somewhere far above me a voice says — low, wrecked, certain —

*"I have her. Go, Soren. Go. I have her."*

I don't know who *her* is.

I don't know whose voice that is.

I don't know —

The dark.