Revel

by Maurissa Guibord

  He’d come to take me.

  Whether to save me from the edge of the world or take me to the other side, I didn’t know or care. My chest and throat were on fire, bursting from the need to breathe.

  He floated closer, his arms open. The angel’s hands were warm on my skin, like the warmth of a fire when you come in from the cold.

  He pulled me to him and kissed me.

  With the press of his mouth, I felt a gasp of breath. Sweet, intoxicating air rushed into me. But not enough. The little taste of it brought a spasm of desperate need, an animal panic for more, and I clutched the angel’s head and drank the breath from his lips in coughing gulps until he broke away. Then his long fingers cupped the back of my head. He laid a hand against my chest, calming me, slowing me down. Now his mouth returned to mine and I breathed him into me. Inhale. Exhale.

  Bliss.

  I wrapped my arms tighter around the angel. Something was happening to me.

  Every inch of my skin pulsed with sensation at the touch of the water, his hands, his lips. The angle of his mouth on mine changed, became something else. Something dark and sweet and just as elemental as breathing.

  I felt myself being pulled deeper and deeper. Into the kiss and oblivion.

  Something struck the water and surged beside us in a white plume of froth. But I couldn’t focus on anything but my consuming need for air. For this kiss.

  A hand grabbed me and I was yanked sideways and pulled upward, upward.

  I broke the surface of the water gasping. My chest ached and the side of my head throbbed. Weakly I kicked at the water as small waves lifted and dropped me. The air felt good, so cool in my throat.

  But I was tired. Somehow all I wanted to do was float down once more.…

  “Delia!” someone shouted. A strong hand grabbed the back of my T-shirt and supported me in the water.

  “Are you okay?”

  I sputtered and nodded, unseeing, to the voice. “Y-yes.”

  “C’mon.”

  It was Sean. He was beside me in the choppy sea. I could hardly move as he gripped my arm and dragged me toward the Widowsong, which rose as high as a skyscraper before us.

  Back on the dock, I sat on an empty wooden lobster trap. I was swaddled inside a thick gray blanket, my hands clamped around a cup of hot liquid that I drank without tasting. I couldn’t stop shivering. Or thinking about the creatures that had clung to the bottom of Sean’s boat. Or the angel. I put shaky fingers to my lips as I remembered his mouth on mine.

  Maybe he wasn’t real. Maybe I’d just had some kind of freaky near-death experience.

  I dismissed that. No one ever says, “Go toward the light—and the really excellent kisser.” Whatever he was, he was real.

  “Thank goodness you’re all right,” Gran said. “I should have known, after seeing what they did to Ben’s boat, that something like this might happen. But I thought maybe—” She broke off.

  What they did to Ben’s boat. The words drifted over me like a vague, black cloud. They.

  The memory of those monstrous faces swam before me again: green and black, their heads looking obscenely human. Like men, but with veiny, bald scalps and black sunken holes where their ears and noses should have been. They had elongated torsos and short curved legs that had clung to the boat.

  “M-monsters,” I said. My voice came out in a high-pitched waver that didn’t even sound like me. “There were sea monsters under the b-boat.”

  I blinked up at the two of them, waiting for a laugh or a slap on the back to jar me out of this nightmare. I waited for them to tell me I’d imagined the whole thing.

  Sean Gunn simply gave a nod. “Yeah.” He looked over at Gran. “It was the Glaukos. Two of them. The First Ones don’t want your girl here to go.”

  Gran nodded. “Guess they made it clear enough.”

  I could only stare at the two of them for a few slack-jawed seconds. “You mean you know about this?” I finally snapped. “About what’s out there?” I pointed a shaky finger toward the water and then snatched it back under the blanket again. “The monsters?”

  “Glaukos,” replied Gran. “They serve the First Ones.”

  “Ow!” I winced and pulled away from Sean, who’d tilted my head and was exploring the lump on my temple with gentle fingers.

  “I couldn’t see much down there, but I was afraid the Glauk’s tail might have gotten her,” he muttered, moving my head this way and that. I felt like a melon being inspected for ripeness. “No,” he said after a moment’s probing. “None of the spikes broke the skin.” He gave my hair an encouraging tousle. “That’s good.”

  I cradled my head against one hand to peer up at him. “Why? Would that hurt more?”

  “No,” he said calmly. “But you’d probably be dead in twelve hours. Either from the flesh-eating infection they usually carry or the convulsions.”

  “Oh,” I said weakly. When I managed to get past the image of my gangrenous head falling off during a seizure, I asked, “Why did they attack your boat?”

  Gran looked to the water with a worried frown. “The Glaukos only do what they’re ordered to do.”

  “There was a First One down there. He obviously told them to stop the boat,” said Sean. “I’ll bet it surprised them when you fell out.”

  “Gee, I hope I didn’t scare them too much,” I muttered, automatically reaching to adjust my glasses. They were gone. “Just great,” I muttered.

  No wonder everything looked so fuzzy. Now what was I going to do? I didn’t have another pair with me, and I was practically blind without them.

  I wasn’t too nearsighted to see Sean grinning at me, though. He was probably thinking See? I told you to sit down. It was nice of him not to say it. I’d put both of us at risk with my idiotic plunge off the side of the boat.

  I pulled the blanket tighter. “That was really brave of you. You could have been hurt. Thank you.”

  “No problem,” said Sean, wrapping the towel Gran handed him around his neck.

  “Who was he?” I asked. “The one down there who—” I broke off, not sure of how to put it. French-kissed me back to life?

  “He was one of them. A First One. He’s called Jax.” Sean’s smile faded and he looked uncomfortable. Despite my chilled state, I felt hot color creep into my cheeks. I wondered how much Sean had seen of the rescue operation.

  “Trespass Island belongs to the First Ones,” said Gran. “I tried to tell you before, but it didn’t seem like it would matter if you weren’t going to be staying here. The folks who live here … well, we’re sort of tenants, I guess.”

  “First Ones?” I repeated. “Are they some kind of monsters too?”

  “Demigods of the sea,” said Sean.

  “Demigods?” I was starting to sound like a not-very-bright parrot, but I just couldn’t help it.

  “Of the sea,” Sean added, apparently trying to be helpful. “Those’re the only ones that seem to have survived to the present day. Only ones we’ve got here, anyway.”

  It was like some bizarre dream. But the throbbing pain in my head, the texture of the woolen blanket on my skin, those felt real enough.

  Other things had felt very real too: I remembered the consuming feel of the angel’s mouth, the tantalizing feel of the water, of him enclosing me in strong arms like iron bands. If Sean hadn’t pulled me away, what would have happened? Would he have taken me all the way down? Drowned me?

  And could I have done anything to stop him?

  And would I?

  I swallowed.

  “How do you feel?” said Gran, watching me.

  “I’m okay,” I assured her. “Thank you,” I told Sean. “You saved my life down there.”

  “No problem.” Sean cleared his throat. “Well, I’ll let you two sort things out.” He hesitated, as if looking for something else to say. “Go ahead and keep the blanket,” he finally told me, and left.

  Gran leaned over and rubbed my arms through the scratchy wool, in a brisk no-nonsense fa
shion. “At least now you know,” she muttered. “Part of it, anyhow.”

  “Know what?” I squinted, watching Sean walk away.

  Gran paused. “About Helen.”

  My attention snapped back to Gran’s face.

  “Your mother didn’t leave Trespass, Delia. She escaped.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Right after they get hit on the head is never the best time to tell someone they’re trapped on an isolated island surrounded by sea monsters. Not that there’s ever a good time for that kind of thing.

  “Seeing the Glaukos like that,” said Gran. “That must have been darned unsettling.”

  “Unsettling?” I repeated. “It feels more like reality just got yanked out from under me and I’ve been tossed on my butt into the Twilight Zone.” I was back at Gran’s, lying in bed with an ice pack on my forehead. Maybe I wasn’t poisoned by a lethal tail spike, but my headache was so bad, I almost wished I had been. “How long has it been like this?”

  “The First Ones have always been here,” she answered, striding around the room. She set a tray of toast and hot tea on the side table. “This island belongs to them.”

  “And they’re demigods,” I said. “What is that exactly? Some kind of deity-lite?”

  This was probably uncalled for, but at that point I felt kind of woozy and detached. How could sarcasm make things any worse? Besides, I truly wasn’t sure what it meant. The little mythology I knew had never had any practical application.

  Hello? Isn’t that the whole point of mythology, not to have any practical application?

  “They’re descended from Poseidon,” said Gran. “When he …,” Here she hesitated, pursing her lips with an oddly prim expression. “… visited a mortal woman, their offspring would be half mortal and half god. A few of their kind have survived through the ages, and live in these waters.”

  Maybe it was the whack on the head or being nearly drowned, but I believed it. There was no way the things I’d seen today were anything natural or normal.

  “Descended from Poseidon. Okay.” I thought of the strange symbols I’d seen carved in the village, and of Gran’s mysterious trip down to the beach last night. “So. Do you worship these First Ones?”

  Gran tossed a napkin on the tray. “Worship them? Certainly not!” Color crept up her neck. “I’m a Christian woman.” She jerked a shoulder as if to shrug off the very idea. “But we live together, side by side. That’s how it’s always been here on Trespass.”

  “Side by side, huh?” I raised an eyebrow, then lowered it because that hurt the tail-whack spot. “It sounds more like they call the shots.”

  Gran looked uneasy. “It’s true, there are rules,” she admitted. “We don’t leave Trespass. A few of the fishermen have permission to bring their catches into Portland, buy certain things. But we have just about everything we need right here. The island is guarded by the fog you came through, and the reef. In other ways too. Like the Glaukos. But it’s just to keep the island safe from outsiders. The First Ones provide everything we need. They just ask for certain things in return.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Loyalty,” said Gran after a second’s hesitation. “It’s an old-fashioned thing, and I know you won’t understand, not being raised here. But they stick to their side of the bargain, and we stick to ours.” She sat on the edge of the bed. “The Accord was struck hundreds of years ago by the first sailors who wrecked here. They came from a boat called the Dover. We follow the rules and we live in peace.”

  “So what are the rules?”

  Gran’s face relaxed into a faint smile and her gray eyes softened. For a moment I saw what a pretty woman she must have been when she was younger. I wondered at what she’d been through in her life to make her seem so rough and hardened.

  Oh yeah. I forgot. She lived here.

  “Don’t make it sound so terrible. There’s plenty of time for learning your way around. Now that you’re staying.”

  “But you wanted me off the island. I thought it was too dangerous.”

  Gran raised her hands in a gesture of futility. “I thought you could leave before they knew about you. But now, you have no choice.”

  “What are you talking about?” I rubbed at my head and sat up. “That’s ridiculous. They can’t keep people here if they don’t want to stay.”

  “Hush now.” Gran’s eyes glanced to the partly opened window beside us. “Don’t talk like that. The First Ones are very powerful.”

  Her words brought back the image of a dark-haired angel with gleaming eyes. He didn’t seem like he wanted to hurt me. In fact, he’d saved me. Or had it been Sean who saved me? It was hard to remember, everything was so fuzzy and mixed up.

  “You’ll grow to love it here,” Gran went on quietly. “You’ll see. You’re home now.”

  Home. Wasn’t that exactly what I’d wanted when I’d come here? A place where I could fit in, make friends and find my grandmother? But now …

  This was a place of nightmares and monsters, surrounded on every side by water. And I was a prisoner.

  How could I ever be at home on Trespass?

  The next day I woke to sunshine streaming through the bedroom window and the sound of a bird chirping outside. The smell of something delicious and baked drifted to my nose, and I smiled. I sat up and groaned, feeling my head throb. “Oh yeah.” I touched the tender lump over my right eye. Sea monsters. Island. Demigods. Check.

  I’d slept late, I realized, and went downstairs to find a note from Gran on the kitchen table next to a plate of blueberry muffins. It said, Gone to work. You should rest.

  Work? Gran had never mentioned anything about a job. I was surprised she hadn’t left me any other words on what I should do. Maybe she’d thought I’d want to stay in bed, but I was far too restless to let a bump on my head confine me.

  I fixed some strong tea and had a muffin for breakfast, then wandered around the small house for a little while. It was very plain and sparsely furnished, though the walls were decorated with lots of framed needlework pieces. On the mantel was a black-and-white photo of a handsome man with slicked-back dark hair. His shining eyes crinkled at the corners as he grinned at the camera. This must have been my grandfather, Charles McGovern.

  It must have been very lonely for Gran here for all these years. I wondered if she’d ever considered leaving the island herself. She seemed like such a strong, determined person. If my mother had been able to escape, surely others had too.

  I stood and walked over to the bookshelves, tilting my head to read the titles. Luckily, I didn’t need my glasses for reading, only driving. And it seemed like I wouldn’t be doing much of that here. Unless you counted a golf cart.

  Gran’s books were a pretty varied assortment. Two Grishams. Danielle Steel. Agatha Christie. Audubon bird-watching. Fish Species of the North Atlantic. My finger stopped at a burgundy-colored hardcover book with faded lettering.

  “History of Trespass Island,” I read, pulling it out. “As recorded by Reverend Archibald Trent.”

  In the front there was a black-and-white photo of the author, dated 1962. He was a smiling silver-haired man with thick horn-rimmed glasses. Beneath his picture the caption read, “This book is dedicated to our brave and seafaring ancestors.”

  “Yeah, they would have to be,” I murmured.

  There was also a foldout map of Trespass. The shape of the island was sort of square, with chunks bitten out of two sides. It looked vaguely like a jigsaw-puzzle piece. In the middle the book opened to a section of photos. Most of them seemed to be pictures of the island from the author’s boyhood days. A small gray schoolhouse with a line of boys and girls arranged by height.

  Why did nobody ever smile in old pictures? The kids looked like they were posing for a mug shot.

  The next picture was a color photo of a painting in an ornate gilt frame. It was a portrait of a couple. The man wore a white wig and was dressed in a military coat with a sash. Next to him sat a woman on a cushioned ch
air. She held a small book in one hand.

  Portrait of British naval officer Benjamin Deare and his wife, Isabel.

  Deare was captain of the ill-fated Dover, wrecked off the coast of Trespass on March 17, 1776.

  This must have been Ben Deare’s great-great-grandfather. Actually, I wasn’t sure how many greats it would take to go back that far. I couldn’t see any resemblance between the stocky, red-cheeked man in the painting and the old man I’d met.

  “Knock knock,” said a voice at the screen door. Before I could answer it, the dark-haired girl named Zuzu drifted in, graceful and unhurried. She wore a tie-dyed sundress that looked like it would have been more in fashion about thirty years ago. The scent of coconut suntan lotion trailed behind her.

  “Morning.” She looked around with her wide-set, dramatically green eyes. “Is Maisie here?”

  “Um, no. She’s gone out.”

  Zuzu nodded. “She must be down at the gardens. There are lots of preparations to do with the solstice coming. I think the strawberries are nearly ripe, and she makes this unbelievable strawberry rhubarb compote thing with—”

  “Sorry.” I held up my hands to interrupt. “Do you always just walk into people’s houses like this?”

  Zuzu swept back a length of her dark hair, making a small braid decorated with tiny blue shells and silver beads jingle with the movement. “Didn’t you hear me knock?”

  “You said, ‘Knock knock.’ It’s not exactly the same.”

  “Huh,” said Zuzu, considering this; then she shrugged. “Well, we’re not formal around here.”

  “One big happy family, huh?”

  “That’s right,” she said with a smile, displaying gleaming white teeth that contrasted with her tan to perfection, and I found myself smiling back at her. Zuzu tilted her head, closed her eyes and drew in a deep breath. “Did Maisie make any blueberry cake this morning? I’m crazy about that stuff.”

  “No,” I answered. Then, realizing I wasn’t being exactly hospitable, I added, “There are muffins.”