Angela barely saw the nixie's hands, just flashes of silver quivering before her eyes. They did not cut, as she feared they might, but landed like acid burning. Angela reeled back with a cry in a voice she didn't recognize, but still her hands reached out for John's. In a moment they touched and held fast.

The nixie screamed, Oddly enough, John had expected the sound of an animal, but this noise was terribly human. The nixie whirled between them, now mostly water and that horrible scream twisting from her throat and light, the coldest, bluest light he had ever seen. It was almost blinding, but John didn't care. He held fast to his wife's hand. "Angela," he whispered. He couldn't wait to tell her what he had experienced. Water and darkness and the wickedly beautiful face of the nixie, smiling as she bound him into the midst of all her other treasures: pretty rocks, jewelry, the bleached skeletons of both animal and human. The watery sleep. The oblivion of time.

Angela blinked back hard, washing the nixie's touch away with her own tears until she could see John's face watching back at her with so much love that she felt her heart would burst.

"I won't give up on you," he whispered at the same time she did.

He was free. The green chains had fallen away, and all that stood between him and Angela was the nixie, the strange creature both ghost and fey. She no longer wanted him, she wanted vengeance upon Angela.

Angela felt the corpse near her, the dead man she had fed. What stories had he and the nixie fed? What had happened at the mill? What children's horror and imagination perked because of what went on here? Don't give up, he said. Stand strong, wait her out.

But the nixie was so strong.

You gave her gifts, beautiful trinkets she accepted.

John felt Angela's grip slipping. But it couldn't be the dead man. John, too, saw the corpse, floating in the water nearby, ghastly pale in the darkness; the pond's light had vanished, and only the nixie's light remained.

Angela felt more tears.

She has no power over you. And with a smile, more alive than dead, the corpse sunk back into the water.

She would not take Angela. "Hang on," John whispered.

The nixe's whirling force was like a storm of wind, water, and ice.

Angela took a deep breath and tightened her grip. She would not faint. She would wait it out.

Around the pond the breeze howled, warm and cool at the same time as the end of summer was. It smelled like woods and life and night. It did not care what happened in the pond. It blew through the trees, regardless of time, as the full moon watched above.

And, finally, the nixie gave her final scream. Like a tower crumbling she collapsed with nary a splash, only glowing ripples of turquoise in the dark and still water.

Angela and John's fingers slid into one another, and the two fell, crying, into one another's arms as the first light of orange dawn lit the sky somewhere beyond the woods.

The End.