Ravencliffe (Blythewood series) by Carol Goodman

flock of pigeons that had joined us. Raven clucked back to them.
    “They’ve seen her, too. We have to hurry.”
    He ducked his head and folded his wings. We were suddenly diving, caught in a current of wind that was rushing us to the East River. I heard the water—and smelled it: the reek of refuse mingled with a tang of salt where the river met the tides from the bay. And then we were caught in those tangled currents of air.
    “Hang on,” Raven yelled above the roar of the river. “She’s there on the pier.”
    We were fighting the wind to reach the shore where a lone figure stood on the edge of an old rotting pier. Even over the shriek of wind and water I could hear her ragged breath—because I was
meant
to, I realized. She was a soul in danger and I was a Darkling. I was meant to save her. My wings itched under my skin, my ears burned, I felt my heart beating with hers in fear—
    Of what?
    She looked over her shoulder, but there was nothing there but shadows.
    Shadows that writhed like snakes.
Tenebrae
. She was running from the
tenebrae
. They reached out for her . . .
    She screamed and plunged into the river. Raven dove toward the water, but he couldn’t reach for her because he was holding me. I stretched out my arms for the girl, but when she saw us she screamed and flailed away. Still I was able to grab her wrist.
    “I’ve got her!” I screamed.
    But something was pulling her away from me. She was caught in a current—but no ordinary current. It wasn’t pulling her to sea; it was dragging her down into a whirlpool. I’d heard stories of dangerous tides on the East River. The sailors and wharf rats had a name for the river.
    “The Hellgate!”
    Raven’s voice was tight with fear. “It traps souls—even a Darkling’s soul. If you’re caught you’ll spend eternity there! You have to let her go.”
    “No!” I cried. The fetid stink of the river rose out of the churning maw—all the refuse of the river concentrated here like a foul breath belched from a hungry mouth.
    It
was
a mouth, a hungry, gaping mouth that ate souls. I couldn’t let this girl sink into it, but Raven was right. We would be trapped if I didn’t let her go. I felt her hand slipping from my grip. Her eyes locked on mine. I saw terror in them—and
more
. I saw her life, the glimpse a Darkling was granted of a dying soul. I heard a dying woman say her name—
Molly
—and saw a windowless room where bent-backed women sewed until their fingers bled, and the dirty floor on which she slept. Then I saw a man whose face was blurred by shadows
.
He had lured her away from her family with promises of a sweeter life, but then he had locked her away into another hell. This hell was pretty and soft, full of satin and velvet and feather beds . . .
    The vision became blurry when it moved toward the bed, and I wondered if Molly was trying to shield me from seeing what happened there or if she was too ashamed to let me see.
    I’m here with you
, I said, not out loud, but inside her head.
You’re not alone.
    I felt something relax in her.
You have to let me go
, she told me,
before I turn into a monster.
    I cringed at the word
monster—
and her hand slipped from mine.
    “No!” I shouted, reaching for her, but Raven was pulling us back, out of the way of something that shot past us and dove into the water. Raven shouted something as the water broke over us. It sounded like a name:
Sirena
.
    “Who’s Sirena?” I asked.
    “One of our fledglings. She’s too young to try to save a soul from the Hellgate whirlpool. She might get stuck there—”
    Before he could finish, the girl Darkling broke the surface of the water and rose straight up. In her arms she held Molly. Only it wasn’t the flesh-and-blood girl who’d held my hand, but a luminous transparent phantom. A soul. Molly was dead.
    “Can’t we try to save her?” I cried.
    “Sirena has saved her soul,” Raven said. “That’s more than we could do.” He was already