Night Tide

by Kory M. Shrum

hi grayson. i’m reese. i have some questions about what happened last night. can you talk?

  Grayson looked at the text for a long time. Reese was probably not a reporter, given the shorthand text speak. Hell, maybe they weren’t even out of high school. Was this about sports or graduation or something?

  He wrote back, I can talk.

  He carried his books into the living room and collapsed onto the sofa. No sooner did he get the pillow under his head did the phone ring.

  He sighed and accepted the call. “Hello?”

  “Hi,” a woman said. That answered the first mystery. Reese was a woman, not a man. And she sounded like a young woman from what he could tell, but not as young as he was imagining. Maybe her twenties? “Is this Grayson?”

  “Yeah. And you’re Reese?”

  “You got it,” she said.

  He could hear the smile in her voice. He wasn’t sure where to go from here. His silence probably conveyed as much.

  “I’m calling because I’ve got questions about what happened last night.”

  “Are you with the police?” He knew well enough to know that he shouldn’t give details to just anyone. After all, this woman could be a reporter or just a nosy—

  “Let’s call me a liaison. I already spoke to Detective O’Reilly. You can call her and confirm that it’s okay to talk to me if you’re worried. If you’re smart, you would.”

  “Are you a reporter?”

  “No. I’ve been asked to look into what happened so that’s what I’m doing.”

  Asked to look into it by whom? he wondered. And he wondered what it was about Reese that made her qualified for this job.

  Was she calling his bluff? She sounded so young.

  He said, “Can I call you right back?”

  “Sure. I’ll be here. My shift doesn’t start for another hour.”

  “Shift where?”

  “Alpha’s. I’m a bartender.”

  Grayson thought he might have seen the name Alpha’s above one of the bars near campus, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “Okay, just a minute.” He hung up and called the police station’s non-emergency line.

  “Castle Cove PD.”

  He recognized Yvonne Jenkins voice immediately. “Hi Officer Jenkins. This is Grayson Helmson. Is Detective O’Reilly around?”

  “Sure, honey. One second.”

  He flinched at the use of honey, but couldn’t remember a time that Yvonne hadn’t called everyone that. Honey. Sugar. Sometimes she added the word bear to the end of the affectionate title: Honey bear. Sugar bear. Though she’d seemed to drop the latter once he’d turned sixteen.

  “Here she is.”

  The phone clicked and Grayson heard the intake of breath. “Grayson, you there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You okay?”

  He realized that was concern in her voice. The sort of knee jerk reactive fear that crept in when he called his own mother when she wasn’t expecting it.

  “I’m fine,” he said, knowing she’d hear nothing else he said until he assured her. “I’m calling about Reese.” Here he realized he hadn’t gotten her last name. “The bartender from Alpha’s.”

  “Oh, yeah.” All the breath left her at once. “She’s all right.”

  “She wants to ask me about what happened and I wanted to make sure that was okay before I said anything.”

  “Yes, it’s fine. She’s not officially with the police department, but she is investigating on behalf...” She seemed to search for the right word. “She’s investigating on our behalf.”

  Grayson had a sense that it was likely far more complicated than that. “So I can tell her what happened to Landon?”

  What happened to Landon... His chest tightened.

  “As long as you aren’t going to tell her something you haven’t already told me.”

  The question hung in the air between them.

  “No, there’s nothing else,” he said, wondering when he would be old enough that he no longer needed to constantly reassure the adults around him. Or maybe it was just the human parents in Castle Cove who were having such a hard time.

  “Then tell her what you know. She’s a good person. Clean record. She’s just trying to get us some answers.”

  Me too, he thought, feeling the weight of the books against his chest.

  “If that’s all—” she began.

  “Yes, that’s it. Thanks for taking my call.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Then the line clicked and his cell phone returned to the home screen. It was a picture of the three of them—Abby in the middle with their arms thrown over her shoulders. They were all smiling and laughing. He remembered his father taking that photo before they went to senior prom.

  He dialed Reese back.

  “We good?” she asked by way of hello.

  “We’re good,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

  “Actually I’d like to talk in person, if that’s okay,” she said.

  He was about to offer that she come by his house, but remembered what she’d said about work. “When?”

  “I can come by your place tomorrow if you’ll be home or you could come to Alpha’s tonight. It’s up to you.”

  “Is Alpha’s 21 and up?” he asked.

  “Oh, right. You’re eighteen.” She covered the phone with her hand. He heard her ask someone a question and he thought heard the gruff voice of a man responding. “You can come by if you want. Nick is working the door and he’ll let you in. Just give him your name and say you’re here to talk to me.”

  “I can’t tonight, sorry,” he said. Dragging his introverted self to a bar sounded like an awful idea for many reasons. Not only would it make his parents’ anxiety spike, but he was dead tired. He hadn’t slept worth a damn the night before and he wasn’t entirely sure sleep would come tonight either.

  “No problem,” Reese said, the bar noise rising behind her. “I’ll come by your place tomorrow afternoon if you’ll be home?”

  Grayson didn’t have work tomorrow and didn’t think his family had plans. He’d wanted to go check on Abby but that could be done anytime.

  “I’m thinking four or five,” she added.

  “That’s fine,” he said, switching the phone to the other ear. “I should be home.”

  “Cool. We’ll talk then. Night.”

  Grayson thanked her and ended the call. Then he opened the text message thread he had going with Abby and wrote, you OK?

  The texting bubble appeared and disappeared for a long time. He braced himself.

  No, she texted.

  Then, I miss him.

  Me too, he wrote.

  Do you think we could’ve done anything differently? she asked. He wasn’t a great swimmer. We shouldn’t have made him go out there.

  Grayson called her. “Hey.”

  “Hey.”

  He knew immediately that she’d been crying. Her voice was thick. He wondered if the throat, like the eyes swelled when one cried. He would have to ask his dad. His dad wasn’t a doctor, but he understood basic anatomy pretty well.

  “And no,” Grayson said firmly. “No we couldn’t have done anything differently.”

  “I feel like we did something wrong,” she said. She sniffed. “I keep feeling like maybe if I wasn’t fucking around with a siren I could’ve gone into the water and saved him.”

  “You couldn’t have,” he insisted.

  “How do you know?”

  “Because female sirens are territorial. If you’d come into the water and tried to...” He searched for a word. “Interrupt they would’ve attacked you.”

  “What?” she sounded genuinely surprised. “I thought they only drowned people accidentally.”

  “They’re not violent except during mating and self-defense. My mom said they’re pretty desperate to conceive so—”

  Abby didn’t seem willing to let go of her guilt yet. “When that storm rolled in we should’ve kept him on the rock. He was already having a
hard time. If he’d stayed—”

  “There’s no guarantee that the sirens wouldn’t have come onto the rock with us. And if they’d planned on going into the cove anyway, maybe they would’ve just hopped in after us. Then we would’ve been even farther from shore.”

  A rock orgy or dead in the water. Not great choices, he thought but had the good sense not to say.

  “So he was going to die. No matter what we did,” she whispered.

  “We can’t blame ourselves for this. He should’ve tried to get to the shallows before—”

  “God, Grayson! We can’t blame him either,” she huffed into the phone. “He’s dead!”

  “Right. You’re right. There’s no blame. Period.”

  For a long time they said nothing. He listened to her soft breathing through the phone and found comfort in it.

  Then she said, “You said you thought someone caused the storm.”

  He looked at the book in his hand.

  “I didn’t say someone caused the storm. I said that I think there’s a reason they came into the cove even though it’s out of bounds.”

  “My mom thinks they got confused.”

  His heart sped up. “What do you mean?”

  The rustle of fabric, either Abby sitting up or turning over in her covers, rustled in the phone. “Because of the attack on South Beach.”

  “But we were on Hunter’s Beach.” It was Grayson’s turn to sit up, leaning back against the sofa’s throw pillows.

  “Right. But the attack from last week was on South Beach.”

  Grayson visualized the geography of Castle Cove in his mind.

  Castle Cove city was bordered by wild forests in the north and west and oceanfront on the east and south. On the far east was the first of three beaches: North Beach. No sirens, sharks or even jellyfish had ever been seen on that beach so it was considered the most family friendly. That’s also why it was crowded as hell. There was never parking in the east lot. It was also the most desirable because it was the only beach of the three that had a gentle wooden walkway to take beachgoers down to the shore. Both Hunter’s Beach and South Beach just had dunes and a sandy, trodden path from the upper ridge down to the water. It made getting back to one’s car hell after a long day of sun and swimming.

  Hunter’s Beach was the name for the u-shaped strip of beach surrounding the cove. It ended on each side where it met the sharp cliff faces and deep water.

  Swimming in the cove, Hunter’s Beach, was the second best choice—for those who could stand the trek up and down the sandy ledge. Its waters were considered the calmest, being the most protected from wind from the open sea. And as long as swimmers stayed close to shore, the risk of predators or injury were low.

  The third beach, South Beach, followed Canyon Road out of town toward the interstate. Few people went to South Beach. The strip of sandy shore didn’t even have an official parking lot. People just parked their cars along the side of the road and walked down to the water.

  The waters were rougher here, and sirens came to South Beach all the time, especially after dark. In fact, people went to South Beach hoping to run into the sirens.

  “What happened on South Beach?” he asked. Because if someone was at South Beach after dark, they must’ve known what they were in for.

  “They were new,” she said. “So it’s possible they were fodder.”

  It was a known fact to long-time residents of Castle Cove that one didn’t find this place on a map. It couldn’t be found in an internet search or on a satellite view. Residents only heard about Castle Cove when they received mysterious job offers or acceptances to an interesting university, with full funding. But usually it was someone inside the town who brought new people in.

  But not everyone invited into the town were invited so that they could be a member of this strange little community. Others were invited for dinner.

  Grayson often wondered if he’d only survived until adulthood because his parents had been so useful to the town. Maybe it wasn’t his street smarts at all. Maybe it was pure luck. After all, his mother was the premier folklorist at the university. She protected and cultivated its long, dark—and utterly unique—history.

  His father worked as a head biochemist at EB labs. They’d worked on everything from blood substitutes to studying the metamorphic changes in werewolves and shifters. His father seemed particularly interested in the metabolic differences between those who had been born with the ability to shift and those who’d acquired it through infection.

  The bottom line was their work here was important. It supported Castle Cove’s wellbeing. Grayson—with his love of nature and the water—wasn’t. Would he be on his own now that he was eighteen?

  Grayson realized Abby was speaking again. “They’d gone down to the water but hadn’t got in it. I think the sirens only come if you touch the water. That’s how they know you’re there, right?”

  Before Grayson could affirm that he also thought this was true, she was barreling on.

  “So these people weren’t in the water. They were on the ledge. And another freak storm rolled in and they’d started to walk back to their cars and that’s when four sirens had come out of the water after them.”

  “But they can’t leave the water.”

  “Well, no one has seen them out of the water. But these people said they did and practically chased them up the embankment.”

  “No way.” He couldn’t believe it.

  He could practically hear her shrug. “That’s what they said, but my mom thinks they were exaggerating. She says that they were pretty drunk when they gave their statements. Anyway, she suspects that there’s some connection between the weird storms that keep rolling in and the sirens’ strange behavior.”

  It wasn’t much to go on, this connection between freak thunderstorms and agitated sirens.

  “Anyway, enough about that. What were you doing before you called?”

  He looked at the two books on his lap. Then he told her about the books and Gladys’s recommendation.

  “Send a pic,” she said.

  He dutifully snapped two pics of the books in his lap and texted them to her while she waited. There was a pause as she looked at the pics, then her voice returned, though a bit farther away. Grayson suspected he was on speaker phone now. But if her mom was at the station, then she was home alone.

  “I can’t read the title on the leather one. Is that a tree?”

  “Yeah,” he replied. “It’s called The Dark Mother and Her Children.”

  “Creepy.”

  He laughed.

  “What does it have to do with sirens?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll have to read to find out.”

  Finally, she said, “About last night.”

  “I meant what I said.” He wanted to get that out there before she had a chance to do anything ridiculous like apologize again. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  She sighed. “Does this mean I can go to bed?”

  He smiled. “Get some rest. I’ll talk to you tomorrow.”

  Once the call ended and he was once again sitting in his dark quiet house, he turned his attention to the books.

  He decided to begin with the first book. It told a story about a woman named Vendetta, who lived in a small barony with her six brothers and a little sister. The sister died of starvation shortly after her mother did. The family had been wealthy when her parents had first married, but had lost their wealth with time because of a demanding and greedy queen who brought ruin to the people through extensive (read: expensive) military campaigns. In one way or another, the queen became responsible for her whole family’s deaths, events picking off her father and brothers one at a time.

  While she was still alive, Vendetta’s mother had been a woman who worshipped the old gods. It was her mother who told her the story of The Crone Tree, which Grayson learned, was the tree depicted on the front of the cover.

  This tree had many names—The Tree of Knowledge, The Tree of Life and so
on. But inside this tree that could not be torn down or destroyed was the soul of a goddess.

  Vendetta’s mother believed that this goddess would help anyone, but particularly women, who prayed to her in their time of need. They need only be willing to give her a sacrifice.

  When Vendetta had only one brother left, she and her brother walked into the wilderness to find this tree. At this point they were on the brink of starvation themselves, so they were willing to believe in old gods. They walked through the woods in the dead of winter for many miles.

  They had just found the tree when some of the queen’s soldiers found the pair. They killed her last brother and raped her. It is said that these two sacrifices were more than enough to awaken the sympathy of The Crone.

  After Vendetta buried her brother beneath the tree and made her way home alone with only her grief as company, she had no life left in her. She died from cold and hunger that night in her bed. The following morning, just before the sun rose, she was visited by her six brothers, who were now demons.

  They asked her if she wanted to be a demon too, with immense power, so that she could vanquish the evil queen. Vendetta agreed and with her six demon brothers, they rode to the castle, killed the queen’s soldiers and slayed her court. Lastly, Vendetta killed the queen herself, finally avenging her family. After they killed her, they razed the castle. The castle ruins that now overlook the sea just east of the cove were supposed to be what was left of that very castle.

  It was said that the goddess was so impressed with Vendetta’s strength and will, that she offered Vendetta immortality in exchange for hunting down and destroying The Crone’s enemies.

  The front door burst open. “WE ARE THE CHAMPIONS MY FRIENDS!”

  Heart hammering, Grayson slammed the book closed just as his brother Tanner ran in, covered head to toe in dust and tossing his glove dramatically on the couch.

  “Off!” his mother cried. “That’s filthy.”

  Tanner dragged his glove off the couch. “Gray, we won!”

  “Whoa! High-five!” Grayson put his hand up and the kid gave it a hearty slap, his grin at full-wattage.

  “Go take a shower. Now,” his father begged, swatting at the glove-shaped outline of dirt now stuck to his sofa.

  “You can tell me all about it later,” Grayson assured his brother, when he looked ready to refuse. “Go on.”