I couldn’t tell what, but I knew for absolute certain something had changed.
“There now, my guppies. There now. It has been a while since I’ve done what I just did to you.”
“What just happened?” Trudy demanded.
The witch let out a happy sigh. “You and the boy proved yourselves to be the princess’s friends. How touching. How warm. So I have rewarded your friendship. You three will share everything now. Your lives. Your fates.”
“No, you did not,” Shoal said, miserably. “You did not! I hardly know them. They are not really my friends! You did not!”
“Of course I did. I hope you see now that it is useless to fight me. I know too many words. Too many secrets. And I have friends here, much worse than my jellies. Yes. I will rest now. But we will talk later, my guppies. I have no doubt. Yes, we will, my three little Flotsam.”
With that, the witch closed her eyes. She sighed an exhausted sigh and fell silent.
CHAPTER 7
I didn’t feel cursed. More like itchy and twitchy from all the weirdness and fear and excitement. And guilty.
“Uh, hey, listen,” I said with the waves booming behind me. “I shouldn’t have popped off at the witch like that. It’s just, you know, I’m verbal. That’s what the school counselor says: ‘Thatcher must learn to quell his overabundant verbal energy.’ She means I talk too much. I do it whenever I’m angry. Or nervous. Or bored. Or sometimes it’s just because my mouth is moving and it sort of takes on a life all its own and—”
“Thatcher?” Trudy said.
“I’m still talking?”
“Yes.”
“I’m sorry. And not just for talking right now.”
“I’m beyond furious,” she said, each syllable like the sharp blow of a hammer. Then she took a breath, and the taut lines of her face softened a little. “Being sorry doesn’t get us anywhere. But I know you were trying to help. What we need to do now is head back to the boardwalk and sell cotton candy.”
“Cotton candy?”
“It doesn’t have to be cotton candy. It could be taffy. People want taffy, and I will provide it. I will be Trudy the taffy girl.”
Shoal, who’d been busy affixing tape over the sleeping witch’s mouth, sealed the box and latched it. “It’s the curse. It’s taking hold of her. It will take you too. You will be a slave to worthless souvenirs and non-nourishing foods and carnival games. At the end of summer, when my family drags themselves across the cold sand and walks into the waves to sink, to drown, to drift, you will be with us. You are like us now. You are Flotsam.”
“What? Don’t be ridiculous,” Trudy said with a laugh. “I’m fine. Maybe a little stretchy. Stretchy and pully. Taffy makes you happy, get your happy taffy!”
I grabbed her by her arms and screamed in her face. “Trudy! Get ahold of yourself! It’s the curse. You don’t really want to sell taffy. Think! You’re a detective! And a superhero! And … and you want to run the ring-toss game. Toss a ring, everyone’s a winner, everyone gets a prize!”
Oh, no.
The curse had its hooks in me too.
I could feel myself pulled in the direction of the boardwalk, as if the midway were a giant magnet and I were made of iron filings. A tunnel was closing down over my mind, and I just wanted to stand behind the counter of the ring-toss game and take money from tourists and give them rings to toss and bark out the mindless ring-toss chant all day long. Everyone’s a winner. Everyone gets a prize.
“No!” Trudy and I both said at the same time.
“Fight it,” she said.
We locked eyes. Okay. If she could hold out, then so could I. At least for a little while.
I picked up the box and took a few marching steps toward the surf when Shoal grabbed my wrist.
“What are you doing?”
“I’m tossing this thing into the sea. Hopefully the fish will gobble it up and this will all be over and I can go back to my uncle’s to pack my things and catch the next bus to Phoenix and sit outside on the front porch for a few months until my parents get home and Trudy can use her detective powers to find stray dogs and you can … do whatever it is you do.”
“No,” Shoal said. “Give her to me. We still need her.”
“What for?” Trudy asked as I reluctantly handed the witch-box to Shoal.
Shoal gazed out over the water, her mouth drawn in a grim line. “The witch’s magic is already in effect. It is like a disease. You two are infected, as am I and all my family. You may have resisted the first tugs of the curse for now, but the magic is still working its way through you. It will get worse.”
“But aren’t you also cursed?” I asked. “You go back to sea and float on the waves at the end of summer?”
“The Drowning Sleep, yes.”
“Then how is it you’re not stuck on the boardwalk, selling T-shirts or whatever?”
“Because,” Shoal said, “I have been inoculated.”
“Great, then let’s get Trudy and me inoculated too.”
“It is … not that simple.”
“Yeah. I didn’t think it’d be,” I said. You don’t suffer a spell cast by a witch who’s capable of destroying an entire city and then go get a shot from a nurse.
“But I will try,” Shoal said. “I require a container of some kind, one that can be filled with water and then tightly sealed.”
“I have such a device. I call it my water bottle.” Trudy produced one from her backpack.
“It will suffice.”
We watched as Shoal warily crept up to the surf and filled the bottle with seawater.
“What do you think of her?” I asked, too low for Shoal to hear.
“I’m not sure. I still have a lot of questions. All we know for certain is that she’s a thief.”
“Maybe. But we don’t know what Griswald was doing with Skalla’s head in the first place. Lots of questions, not enough answers. If there’s a chance she can remove the curse from us, I think we have to trust her.”
“Okay. For now.”
Shoal returned with the filled bottle. “We shall do this away from the beach. Once they’ve licked their wounds, the jellies will return. And they are not the worst of Skalla’s minions. We must find temporary refuge. Somewhere with privacy. A place where they will be reluctant to show their faces.”
“How about the taffy shop?” Trudy said. And then, realizing what she’d said, “Oh, crud.”
Shoal wanted a place off the boardwalk and beach, and Trudy reasoned we needed food—rock fights burn a lot of calories, and Shoal in particular looked pale and shaky—so we trooped over to a mostly empty pancake house called Pantastic’s. We settled into a corner booth and ordered breakfast. Trudy asked for protein cakes, I got a mountainous construction of pancakes and whipped cream and strawberries, and Shoal ordered smoked salmon and clam juice. It was an odd breakfast. For one thing, we were eating with a head at our feet, the What-Is-It?? crammed into Trudy’s backpack along with her crime-fighting gear. But the pancake house was a good place for this kind of meeting. The piped-in music covered our voices, and once the surly waitress delivered our food, she hid on the other side of the restaurant so she wouldn’t have to get us anything else.
I glopped syrup and butter around on my plate. “What’s the deal with the witch now? Is she napping?”
“Casting the Flotsam spell over you and Trudy cost her, so she must rest,” Shoal said. “She wouldn’t have expended so much of herself if she didn’t see you as a threat. She thinks you are my friends.”
“We’re not,” I snapped, and instantly felt sorry. I knew I should apologize, but before I could, Shoal continued.
“It does not matter if we are friends or not. Skalla thinks we’re friends. And that makes you her enemies, which is why she was willing to spend power to keep you from thwarting her plans. She must sleep awhile to regain her magical strength, but I do not know how long.”
“But with her mouth taped up, what more can she do?” Trudy asked.
“Some of her spells are already in place, brewing in the sea and gaining potency. I do not know what their purpose is, but it is very bad. And do not presume a strip of sticky fabric can stop her for long. She lost her body and still managed to sink our city. She may just be a severed head, but she is the most powerful severed head my people have ever faced.”
Trudy carved her pancakes into geometrically perfect squares. “It looks like we’ve got our work cut out for us. First we’ll have to stretch the taffy until it achieves optimum pliability and—”
Oh, no, not again. “Trudy, you’re losing it,” I said. “Try to stay on topic. The key is placing the bottles so close together that the ring bounces off, which makes it hard for the mark ever to win the big teddy bear and I’m talking about ring toss again, aren’t I?”
Trudy confirmed it with a grim nod.
“I am sufficiently refreshed,” Shoal said, putting down her fork. “It is time to perform some magic of my own. Come with me.”
We found privacy behind a closed-down seafood restaurant that still smelled like fish.
“This is good,” Shoal declared. “Skalla’s creatures do not like places where fish is eaten.”
That made sense to me. If there was a place called Suburban Boy Burgers, I don’t think I’d choose to hang out there much.
Shoal asked Trudy if she had something sharp, like a pin. Trudy had sewing needles, thumbtacks, safety pins, a hat pin, an “I Los Huesos” pin, and those pins with the little plastic colored balls on the end that you stick in a map.
“Yes,” Trudy said. “I have a pin.”
Shoal took a few of the map pins.
“Are we going to be sticking ourselves with those?” Trudy asked.
Shoal told her we were, so Trudy dug in her backpack again and produced some alcohol swabs and Band-Aids. “Infection is a dangerous foe, as surely as any jelly creature.”
Shoal swirled the bottle of seawater. Little plankton particles danced like glitter in a snow globe.
“We are all made of the ocean,” she said. “We began as fish who learned to crawl onto land, who learned to breathe air and eventually became us. And the ocean remains inside us still. Our blood is seawater. Our hearts govern the currents within. We are all part of the Great Soup, and the sea is the broth. After many years of trial and investigation, my father’s sorcerer recovered oil from an extinct fish that contained the ingredients to combat Skalla’s magic. But all we had were a few precious drops. Not enough to rid us of the curse, just enough to help one of us resist the pull of the boardwalk, for a little while. My father gave it to me and charged me with the task of locating Skalla and bringing her to our summer palace. There, perhaps she could be… persuaded… to undo her evil magic.”
Summer palace? Magic fish oil? Soup? The more Shoal talked, the less I understood.
“The fish oil magic is in my blood. Now I will share it with you. I only hope it is enough to help all three of us resist the call of the boardwalk until we find a more permanent solution.”
Using Trudy’s pin, she pricked her finger and let three drops of blood fall into the water. Spidery threads dissolved and turned the water pink.
“We’re not supposed to drink that, are we?” This summer had been unpleasant enough without me having to go vampire. But that’s not what Shoal had in mind. She handed the bottle to Trudy, and Trudy pricked her finger with a deft jab of another pin and bled into the water.
It was my turn. I swabbed my finger and the pin, and then before giving myself too much time to think about it, stuck myself.
It hurt worse than I expected, and I thought Shoal and Trudy should know that, so as I bled into the water bottle, I described to them in precise detail how much it hurt. I have a good vocabulary, and at one point Trudy actually took down a few notes.
In truth, it wasn’t the pain that kept my lips flapping. I was trying to cover up something else, a strange feeling that, by mingling my blood with theirs, I had bound myself even more to these two girls whom I hardly knew.
When I had a Band-Aid over my throbbing fingertip, Shoal took the bottle and shook it around, mixing the rose-colored water.
“Sea and blood,” she said, “the soup of life.” And then she whispered some other things that weren’t in English. It sounded nothing like “hocus pocus” or “abracadabra,” but it did sound like magic, and as she continued to speak, the water lost its pink color. Within moments, it just looked like plain sea-water again. Shoal dumped the water out.
“There,” she said, giving the empty bottle back to Trudy. “It is done.”
And I did feel a little different, a little more like myself. The need to stand around hollering, “Everyone gets a prize!” was still there, but not as urgent.
“How about you, Trudy? Still obsessed with taffy?”
But Trudy didn’t respond.
I looked over toward her. Or, rather, toward where she’d been standing.
She wasn’t there anymore.
There was just her hand, desperately clutching, as she disappeared down the storm drain.
The steel bars that should have prevented anything larger than a milk carton from falling into the drain were bent back like pipe cleaners. Looking down into the concrete-lined channel, I spotted one of Trudy’s sneakers lying in the muck like a dead animal. I scooted through the gap in the curb and dropped with a splash into muddy water. Shoal followed.
I picked up her shoe and we took off at a run through the stinky darkness. Twigs and leaves and fast-food wrappers and cigarette butts and pulpy rotted I-don’t-know-what washed over our feet and ankles. The channel ended several blocks away at the beach, where the filthy water flowed past more bent steel bars and down a trough into the ocean.
I leaped through the remains of the grate with Shoal beside me and charged down the beach. At the surf line, Trudy was locked in combat with a fish. Or a fish-thing. Hunched over, it must have been at least fifteen feet tall, marching into the water on muscular green legs. A long dorsal fin ran down its spine, all the way to the end of its dragging tail. It held Trudy’s backpack in one arm. In the other, it held Trudy. She kicked and beat at it with her fists, but the fish didn’t even seem to notice.
Sprinting toward the water, I launched myself at the monster fish and caught it by the tail in a running tackle. The fish didn’t care. Sharp spines on its tail scratched my flesh. Breakers crashed over my head. I wouldn’t let go. But with a flick of its tail, I went tumbling, landing on my back in the shallower water. The fish turned to look at me. Its eyes were black and mindless. A mustache of tentacles as thick as baseball bats trailed in the water. It opened its gigantic mouth in a great gawp, then turned away and continued on, unperturbed.
“Hold on, Trudy!” I screamed, coughing saltwater.
Shoal darted by me in a flash. She took off like a cannonball and landed on the fish-thing’s back, then proceeded to smack its head with a length of driftwood.
I had never seen anybody fight so viciously. Not even in the movies. Not even in a video game. Blood seeped from under the fish’s scales, and its lips parted in a silent scream, its tentacles kicking up water as they thrashed in agonized fury.
Shoal’s assault worked. The monster dropped both Trudy and the backpack and retreated toward the safety of deeper waters.
“To shore!” Shoal called, scooping up the backpack and hugging it to her chest while I helped drag Trudy onto land.
On the beach, with our wet hair glued to our heads, we all looked like sodden rag mops. But we were alive, and we’d kept Skalla’s head out of enemy hands. The only sounds were our panting breaths and the strangely calm lapping waves.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get some distance from the—”
Shoal’s legs went out from under her, long tentacles wrapped around her ankles and dragging her across the sand. Several yards offshore, the fish stared at us with its dumb, glassy eyes.
Trudy and I each grabbed one of Shoal’s arms, her hands still gripp
ing the backpack.
“Let it go!” I screamed, my heels dragging across sand and rocks as the fish pulled her backward.
“No! It wants the head!”
“It’ll take you and the head!”
Trudy released her hold of Shoal, but only to take a folding knife from her pocket and slash away at the tentacles. The fish moaned in a hornlike baritone but kept pulling Shoal away.
We were losing her. I dug into her wrists with my fingers, fearing her arms would pop from their sockets. But my grip gave first, and Shoal slid away. In a last, desperate effort, I dove to the ground, hoping to grab Shoal by her hair, her ears, her throat—anything to keep her away from the gawping fish. Landing face-first, I reached out, my nails scraping her arms. Two more tentacles whipped out and attached themselves to the back of her head.
“Take it,” Shoal said, shockingly calm. She tossed me the backpack. I caught it on reflex. Then, “Seek my father!” she called. “Neptune House! The summer palace! After midnight! He cannot help you before then! The curse… I am still alive! I am still—”
And she was still saying that when the fish lifted her into the air and deposited her in its bathtub mouth. It closed its rubbery lips, and Shoal was gone.
The fish sank below the surface.
Waves gently rolled ashore.
I ran back into the water, feeling beneath the foam and gravel with my hands, looking across the waves for any sign of her. Every moment she was gone stretched into a new forever. I scanned the shoreline up and down, searching. When enough time had passed, I realized I wasn’t looking for a fish or a drowning girl.
I was looking for a body.
CHAPTER 8
We need to notify the authorities,” Trudy said, getting her phone out.
“You don’t think it’s too late?”
“The last thing Shoal said was she was still alive. If that fish was one of Skalla’s creatures—and considering it was the size of all three of us put together and walked on two legs and, ack, tentacles, then I’m pretty sure it was one of the witch’s pets—I don’t think it wants her drowned. It wants her alive. For … I don’t know what. So I’m going to assume we can still help Shoal.”
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