I shook my head to clear the image and fixed my eyes on Lily’s face. Soaked it up. Memorized it. Her auburn hair captured the scarce bits of sunlight that broke through the trees. Each strand was a slightly different color, reflecting light like little rainbow beads. It cascaded down her back in loose curls. Her arms and legs were long and limber. She was surefooted. Her voice …
I snapped out of my reverie when I realized they’d moved too far for me to hear them anymore. They trudged on until the path stopped, as did the dense understory. The deciduous forest gave way to pines, now sparsely spaced in the silty soil.
I dug my cell out of my pocket and waited for Pavati to pick up. “Listen. Slight change of plans.”
Pavati’s voice came shrill through the phone.
“Let me talk to them first,” I said. The new plan was taking shape as I spoke. “I don’t want the older one to be unnecessarily nervous when you separate them. Give me five minutes and then show up. The younger one wants to turn back anyway. Use that opportunity. I’ll distract the older sister. You offer to walk the younger one back to the house. Tallulah can knock her out as soon as you get her out of her sister’s sight.”
I clicked the phone off and shoved it into my pocket.
The Hancock sisters stopped to admire the lake from the higher vantage point—or at least, one of them did. Sophie was picking bark off a pine tree, looking bored.
I made a little noise so as not to scare them with my sudden appearance. Still, Lily whirled around with a yelp. I put up my hands, palms forward, to calm her down.
“Whoa. Sorry. Didn’t mean to scare you,” I said. That will come later.
A huge smile spread across Sophie’s face, but Lily looked less certain.
“Hi, Calder,” said Sophie. “What are you doing out here?”
“Same thing as you,” I said. “Taking a walk. What do you think of the view? Pretty spectacular, isn’t it?”
Lily agreed, and she turned back toward the lake. “I heard they have sailboat races around Madeline Island sometimes.”
“Not till summer.” I thought about her reaction to Jack Pettit’s warning back at the house and said, “Hey, it’s getting kind of cold.” Hopefully I’d get the same defiant reaction from her. That would keep her from wanting to go back with Sophie once Pavati showed up. “For a girl,” I added.
Lily’s chin pulled up and her mouth tightened.
Bingo.
A familiar laugh broke out of the woods, and Pavati and Tallulah sauntered up the path toward us, heading in the direction the Hancock girls had just come from. Tallulah feigned surprise when she saw us standing there.
“Oh,” said Pavati. “Hello there, sweetheart.” She fixed her hypnotic eyes on Sophie, and I could feel the electricity in the air. I stole a look at Sophie, and she was—just as I knew she would be—getting that glassed-over look our prey assumed seconds before we dragged them under. Having been on the receiving end of Pavati’s gift, I knew what Sophie was feeling. The spell acted as a sedative; she didn’t feel much. Humans rarely fought back. Tom Hancock had been one of the few. I hoped resistance wasn’t a family trait.
“Oh, I didn’t expect to see you here. These are my sisters,” I explained to Lily. She would never let Sophie go with strangers. I still wasn’t much more than that myself, but I hoped my introduction would ease her concerns.
Tallulah looked at me, surprised. We hadn’t talked about this kind of personal approach.
Pavati didn’t seem to notice. She was still smiling intently at Sophie. “You’re cold,” she suggested, and Sophie nodded, instinctively pulling Lily’s cardigan closer around her.
“Listen, Lily,” I said, summoning as much charm as I could. “If you’d like to keep exploring, I can show you something. It’s just a little farther up the path.”
“Sure,” she said. Her pupils dilated, and I gave a short nod, which Tallulah picked up.
Tallulah said, “Well, how about we walk your sister back home, then?”
“That sounds great,” I answered for Lily, and although I was looking only at her, I heard her little sister repeat the word great.
And just like that, they were gone, and I was alone with Lily. A wave of nausea rolled over me. There was something about her that terrified me, and I broke eye contact. Lily shook her head and looked back over the lake.
“So, what did you want to show me?” she asked.
“Um. It’s a rock formation. Just up ahead. Follow me.” I walked past her, and my hand brushed against hers. Electricity hummed on my fingers, and I was sure she felt it, too. She lifted her hand to her face and examined it.
“Something wrong?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “Unless I’m about to have a seizure.”
“You’re not having a seizure,” I said, laughing. I dialed back my emotions to mitigate the electrical impulses that flowed naturally through my body. Fear, anger, any intense feeling—in this case, a raging bout of nerves—always had to be kept on low. If I let my emotions take over my body, I could make a tree spontaneously combust just by leaning against it. It was my least favorite aspect of my makeup. Any resemblance to eels disgusted me. I preferred to think of Maris as the only slithery one of the four of us.
We stepped through the trees and up to the edge of the cliff. Basswood Island was at its closest point here, and I could still see the remains of our campfire from the night before. A trickle of gray ash caught in the wind and licked up from the spot.
The water and sky were now the same charcoal gray, turning Basswood into a dark, woodsy spaceship hovering in the air. I hoped Lily wouldn’t notice how stormy the sky was getting so I could stretch this out a few more minutes.
Paper birch and aspen fringed the edge of the cliff, their gray-green bark a thin skin compared to the shingled bark of the pines. The aspens grew haphazardly, clinging to the bank, often shooting out in precarious angles over the water. I crept to the edge and started to climb down the bank, using an aspen as a railing.
“What are you doing?” Lily asked.
I could hear the alarm in her voice. I took as deep a breath as my lungs would allow and exhaled all the emotion out of my body. “Take my hand,” I said. “I’ll help you down.”
Lily looked at it hesitantly, then slowly slipped her hand into mine. It was unexpectedly warm. I wrapped my fingers around hers, which sent a strange electricity shooting up my arm. I glanced at Lily, but she didn’t seem to feel it.
“Watch your step,” I said. She found her footing and we eased our way down about eight feet to an iron-colored rock that jutted out into the lake, about ten feet above the water level. The rock was pockmarked with natural indentations that were full of old rainwater now warm from days of sun. Microscopic insects skated across the surface of the pools.
“Oh, this is so cool,” she said. “It’s so wild … and primal.…”
“Definitely wild,” I said, “but it gets cooler. Lie down and look over the edge. There are sand martins roosting in holes in the sandstone.”
I wasn’t trying to be hypnotic in any way, yet she followed my lead. Was she responding to me or the scenery? She gripped the edge of the rock with her fingertips and brought her chin past its edge.
“I can’t see anything,” she said.
“You can’t?” I lay down beside her, my shoulders extending past the edge of the rock, and curled around the edge to see. “You probably have to lean out more.” Lily pushed herself out farther and bent her head. She wriggled forward a little more, and then there was an intake of breath and her back muscles tensed. Before I realized what was happening, she was toppling over the edge and falling into the freezing water below.
I looked up, and Maris stood over me, peering down into the concentric circles that marked the spot where Lily had disappeared.
11
CHANGING PLANS
“What the hell?” I jumped to my feet. “You pushed her?” I looked desperately around for something to reach down to Lily. But the
re was nothing long enough. Panic gripped my thighs. “What do I do?”
“Do?” Maris looked at me with incredulity. “What are you talking about? You were looking to make a rescue … so rescue her.”
“Geez, Maris. In the freaking water? Are you insane? We had a plan. Sophie is our girl, remember?”
The lake was onyx, with patches of flinty gray where the sun hit it. We peered over the edge of the cliff, looking down into the black chops. Directly below us, the water churned into a butter-colored froth against the cliff edge.
Lily came up with an audible gasp. I could feel the cold piercing her skin. She reached behind her head with one shaking hand and came away with blood. Maris and I took a big step back from the edge so she wouldn’t see us.
“H-help! S-s-someone! Calder!” Lily called.
My muscles tightened in response. “I can’t get in the water with her.” Maris knew that. I growled with frustration, “I haven’t had the chance to build up any tolerance to the lake yet. I won’t be able to hold back the change.”
“Fine. We’ll wait it out.” Maris looked up at the clouds. “She’ll be dead in a few minutes anyway.” Maris sat down on the rock. “Maybe this will be even better. You can carry both of his children home—one dead, the other clinging to life.” She seemed to play the scene out in her mind, and I could see she liked it.
A trawler sped by, close to shore but not seeing the girl in the water. It created an onslaught of waves that battered Lily against the jagged edge of the rock. She was pinned to it, then sucked back, only to be slammed into the rock again. Another wave lifted her up and smashed her right cheek against the cliff.
There was nothing for her to grab. There was nothing to put her foot on. Clouds roiled overhead.
A half second later my phone was at my ear. “Pavati, has Tallulah done anything yet?” I exhaled. “Well, don’t.… You heard me. We’ve got a big problem. I’ve got a big problem,” I corrected. “Just bring the little girl straight home. I’ll explain later.… Pavati? Are you listening to me?”
There was a “Yes” on the other end just as my phone beeped. Out of minutes. I chucked it into the woods.
There were no more screams from the water. I peered over the edge. Lily was vertical in the water, her arms extended, head tipped back. Her face went under, then resurfaced, only to dip under the waterline again. She exhaled and inhaled quickly with each resurfacing.
“Oh, man, I can’t believe I’m doing this.” I said, stripping off my clothes.
“You’re going in, then?” Maris asked, her voice bored.
“What choice do I have?”
We could both hear the “he-he-heh” of Lily’s desperate intakes and exhales. She couldn’t get the oxygen necessary for an effective plea. She didn’t have much time. I desperately hoped there would be no one else on the path this close to a storm. The last thing I needed was spectators.
I stood naked at the edge of the cliff and closed my eyes, my lips rolled inward. I wasn’t sure what I was waiting for—maybe something to convince me this was the stupidest thing I’d ever done. I’d never transformed in the water near a human I intended to release. As far as I knew, none of us had. If this was going to work, she couldn’t see me, and Lake Superior was notoriously clear.
The anticipatory tingling crept through my body, starting in my toes, then spreading upward and inward. It rode roughshod over my carefully cultivated self-control until my internal organs rammed around like bumper cars at a fair. The electrical flow was so strong my hair stood up on my head.
“Get it together, Calder,” Maris said as she examined her fingernails. “You hit the water with that many volts and you’re going to zap every fish within a hundred feet. It’ll be fish floats all over the place, and it probably won’t help the girl, either.”
I took one last look over the edge. Lily was gone.
I exhaled, blowing all the electricity out of me and into the air. It fizzed in the humidity. When I felt only a dull numbness, I dove.
A strangely smooth feeling came over me as I soared through the air. When I hit the black water, it was with such precision that it was like being threaded through a needle.
Down, down, at least three fathoms, until my hands touched sand. I opened my eyes and swam back toward the rock. I thrashed as the change happened, then beat my tail even more to stir up the sandy bottom. If I couldn’t resist the change, I had to make it more difficult for her to see me, but clouding the water made it harder for me to find her. I followed her scent, turning in a circle, my head meeting my tail. I crisscrossed my arms in front of me, feeling for something that didn’t belong.
When I struck something long but soft—not a branch, but an arm—I turned her around to face me. Her eyes were closed, her mouth slack. Pallid yellow particles floated in the water that filled her mouth. She was already gone.
I rocketed toward the surface, leaping twelve feet out of the water and landing on the rock better than any trick whale at SeaWorld.
Maris looked over without expression.
Grit from the rock stuck to Lily’s face and bare shoulders. I pressed my lips to hers and blew. Nothing happened. I blew again. And then again. She gagged and choked, then spewed a fountain of water. My silver tail thrashed violently against the rock. Maris stepped over me and threw her jacket over Lily’s face. She didn’t need to see the monster convulsing beside her.
I rolled onto my back as my heart beat out a syncopated, lurching rhythm. Gritting my teeth while my skin tightened and ripped, I groaned in agony, trembling like an epileptic and sucking blood off my lip as my tail split and morphed into human legs.
Maris didn’t watch as I stood up and yanked on my pants. She stood coolly over the girl, who was still motionless on the rock.
“Lily.” I whipped the jacket off her face and shook her. “Are you okay? Oh, man. Lily.”
Her skin was as pale and translucent as her ivory tank top. A red line trickled from a gash on her cheekbone, and her lips, slightly parted, were the color of lilacs. Grains of sand clung to her eyelashes. She could have been a rag doll, flopping around in my shaking hands.
“Lily,” I called again. I rolled her onto her side. Her tank top rode up, exposing the tattoo on the small of her back: five words in elegant black script—No Coward Soul Is Mine.
She gasped, dragging in another ragged breath. “I-I’m o-okay,” she said. Her body shook in spasms.
“You’re not.” I balled up my shirt and scrubbed her arms with it, trying to rub color back into her skin. I didn’t want to touch her directly. Not yet.
“S-sorry,” she said. What was she apologizing for? Was she delirious? Had I waited too long? Had she lost some brain cells?
I kept scrubbing the warmth back into her limbs. I barely noticed Maris stalking away.
“H-h-how?” Her jaw convulsed and her teeth chattered so hard I feared they might shatter. She rolled onto one side.
“Don’t get up,” I said, ignoring the tightening sensation that was still going on inside me.
She sat up and vomited over the edge of the rock. That was just what I needed to calm myself down. I laughed so loud I startled her.
“Don’t worry. I’ve got you,” I said as I lifted Lily from the rock and climbed up the embankment. Cradled in my arms, she dipped her head into my shoulder. It was nearly the same rescue scene I’d planned for her younger sister. The sky darkened like ink spreading through a shirt pocket as the first raindrops hit my bare shoulders. Lily’s face was soft and relaxed. I curled my body around her to shield her from the rain and strummed her cheek with my thumb. I worried over the blue tinge that still lingered around her lips. I took a breath and realized I’d been holding it.
Slowly the house came into view. Jason Hancock was in the yard, helping the Pettit man throw tools into his truck. When Hancock saw me, he pushed off Pettit’s chest and came running. I stole one more look into Lily’s face. If Maris had any idea how I was feeling, she’d be all over my ass like a
shark on a seal.
12
I MAKE HER NERVOUS
Two days later I followed Lily to the Blue Moon Café and sat on the park bench across the street, waiting for her to come out, shoving french fries in my mouth as if they were linked together. I checked my watch. She’d been in there for twenty minutes. My knee bounced up and down. Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go. What are you doing? She wasn’t sitting at a table—I could tell that much—but she was taking too long to be ordering coffee to go. I glanced at my watch again.
A girl slid onto the bench beside me and smiled. My lips twitched in response. She was wearing a bikini top and soccer shorts, bobbing a flip-flop that dangled from her foot.
When I didn’t say anything, she stuck out her hand. “Katie,” she said.
Sometimes I really wished we didn’t have this effect on humans. It could be more irritating than flattering, and right now her timing sucked.
“Calder,” I said, wiping the salt off my fingers and shaking her hand. She made her hand go light and limp in mine.
“I don’t remember seeing you around here before, Calder,” she said. It was almost a purr, and I turned to look at her more closely. She didn’t take her hand back, so I had to let go first.
“My family has a sailboat down in the marina,” she said. “She’s called Ragtime. You should come by and check her out sometime. Maybe go for a sail?”
“I don’t know,” I said, fighting back a smirk. “I’m not much of a water person.”
“Well, maybe a movie?”
Lies Beneath Page 6