Something compels him to kneel. The song is a hum,herhum, words he can’t decipher in a tongue so old that no one alive would know it. He’s in the water.Wait—why am I in the water?His jeans are drenched, and then his shirt soaks through as he lies back in the shallow end of the water, his head on something soft. It’s the girl. His head is in her lap, and his heart is suddenly tumbling up his throat. Her eyes are like the moon, her skin like glass, her beauty unlike any other.
The sky’s color shifts to bubble gum, a dance to lure in the moon, time passing all too quickly. He’s about to speak, but then, like the shatter of a dam, he remembers the news reporter, the drownings, Aziza’s warnings of banes and blessings.
And he knows. He justknows.
The trees rustle, repeating what those men said before their deaths:You are beautiful.
He lifts a hand to the hair falling over her cheek, brushes it back. Her song falters, and Driss thinks it’s because of his touch, but that can’t be true, can it? The haze clears just a tiny bit, but the water closes in. It laps against his earlobes, and he imagines it’s the feather of her lips.A killer, he thinks with sudden clarity. He’s never met one before. He never thought a killer would look like this—so beautiful, so unreal, so...
“Sad,” he murmurs before he can catch himself. “You are sad.”
The song stops.
The girl’s eyes widen. Narrow in confusion. He thinks he’s said the wrong thing, but then why does she look at him differently now? As if she’s awakening from a dream, as if she’s seeing him,reallyseeing him, her eyes catching on his, dropping to his mouth for a single, treacherous heartbeat. In that beat of absolute stillness, their faces inches apart, he wonders what it would be like to kiss her. This girl he’s only known from afar, this girl who has lived a life in the canvas of his mind. Is a taste of love worth dying for?
She shoves him off her lap and into the water, and Driss remembers fear when pain shoots up his skull.A killer.He scrambles to his feet and runs, runs,runs. Hops on his stolen motorbike and chances a glance back to the water’s edge. She’s watching him, red silks and eyes like the moon. All dark tresses and slender limbs and—
The air collapses out of his lungs.
Her feet.
Driss revs the motorbike and swerves back into traffic, narrowly missing a truck. The man rolls down his window and curses in a mix of French andTacl?it, unaware that Driss can’t hear right now. He can barely focus, barely keep his hands on the bike.
Because he’s finally realized what Aziza had been warning him of ever since the skies broke.
She’s called the Qandisa, and her tale goes like this:
A man wanders to the water’s edge, lured by her song. Herests his head in her lap, and the last thing he sees before he drowns is her beauty. Her beauty, a thing not created for him but one he tried to take for himself anyway.
The Qandisa, with eyes like the moon and the feet of a goat, had a name once, before she was wronged by a man so thoroughly that her vengeance denied her death. Her retribution pinned her to the river, where she lures and kills men to this day.
A tragic story, Driss knows, but that’s what it’ssupposedto be. A story.
She wasn’t supposed to be the girl he’d been taking the long bus route to see from afar every day since the rains began. His grandmother wasn’t supposed to be worried about a myth.
And thatwasher by the river. Driss is surer of her existence than his past self was certain she was a tale to keep boys from venturing out at night.
It takes him three tries to shove his key into the lock. Aziza is by the stove sautéing onions when Driss steps in. He’s equal parts relieved and dismayed she isn’t fussing by the door, but it’s only been minutes since his shift ended, so of course she isn’t worried yet.
She’s real, he wants to say.You were right.
“How was work?” Aziza asks him.
She tried to kill me.
He should tell her. Tell the authorities. Do something. The words crowd on his tongue as Aziza waits.
I wanted to kiss her.He still does.
“You know, Saturdays,” he says, pulling on a smile.
Later, when he drops into bed, he doesn’t pull out his Rubik’s Cube to sort through his thoughts. Just drifts off to the river, where a girl with eyes like the moon and hooves for feet drowns him to sleep.
Karim’s mom pays double on Sundays, but Driss would have worked for free, if only to keep his mind busy. The bus pulls in just when his shift ends, but Driss accepts Karim’s offer this time. Their route doesn’t go anywhere near the river.
It doesn’t help, and he thinks of her anyway. He thinks of the sorrow in her eyes, the way it tugged at something he had locked away inside his chest. He thinks of that beat in which her gaze dropped to his mouth, as if she might have had the same thought as him. The Qandisa. He is falling in love with a girl he’d previously only ever seen out of the window of a bus. Not a girl, theideaof one.
A killer.
