by Mara Webb
“Yeah, that guy sucked,” Kate laughed.
“Isn’t it nice to see you bonding over a mutual dislike of someone,” I mocked.
“Sadie is meeting the other peacekeeper today,” Greta said, emerging from the wall that the kitchen shared with the hallway. I don’t know where she’d been for the past twenty minutes, but I guess she had been right earlier. This had been her house before it was mine, maybe she was just floating down memory lane.
“Oh right, do you want us to come and spook them?” Effie said.
“What?”
“You know, let this punk know who’s boss?” Effie clarified.
“Why would I want that?” I asked.
“I don’t know, I just have a lot of rage left over from the straighteners thing. I’m trying to use it constructively,” Effie shrugged.
“So threatening a stranger would be a good use of your time?” I laughed.
“I’ve said it a thousand times, Eff,” Kate smiled. “We need to get a punching bag in our living room. I think we both need to have an outlet when the desire to hit something reaches boiling point.”
“I’ll contribute to the cost of it,” I said.
“Are you going to meet this person too?” Effie asked Greta, ignoring my offer.
“I don’t know about that,” Greta replied, sheepishly.
“Come on, it’ll be fun,” Kate said.
“Kate, are you going?” Effie asked. “You text me and said you had a big business proposal. You said Sadie had given you the green light, whatever that means.”
“That was less than fifteen minutes ago, and what I said was that I would think about it,” I said. “There’s a lot of planning that would need to go into it, we’d need to figure out where to get the boxes, how we would distribute them, how we would take orders, what would go in them…”
“Boxes?” Effie said, her forehead crinkled.
“Why don’t you two talk it out? I don’t need an escort. I’ve gotta get going in a minute anyway,” I said. “I wanted to get to Coaled Water first.”
“You’re not going to try anymore solo spells, are you?” Effie winced.
“No, actually,” I huffed. “I drowned last time I tried it, and I’m not keen on dying today.”
“I’ve got somewhere to be too,” Greta said. In an instant she faded into thin air and left the three of us sitting at the kitchen table staring at the empty space that she had just occupied.
“I have arrived!” The kitchen door was gently nudged open by a small black cat, and I chastised myself for not enforcing a ‘knock first’ policy. It was Fitz, my familiar.
“Were we waiting for you, fuzz face?” Kate asked.
“No need to be rude, I’m here to support Sadie in her hour of need,” he purred.
“I’m pretty sure her hour of need would have been when she was drawing pentagrams in chalk on her bedroom floor and walking off into the sea,” Effie hissed.
“Yeah, we wouldn’t be in this mess if she hadn’t accidentally died in the water,” Kate added.
“Excuse me, but I am her familiar, not her guardian. Don’t you find it fascinating that a woman with two guardians, two best friends that are both powerful witches and who is cousins with the ghost of a previous peacekeeper… someone with all of that still managed to perform magic on her own and get herself swept off to the dark island? Seems like some of the safety measures in place could do with revisions,” Fitz pouted.
“I love it when you all talk about me like I’m a toddler, but I’ve got places to be,” I smiled, standing up out of my chair and walking my dirty dishes over to the sink. “Are you coming with me? Is that why you’re here? Am I not allowed to walk anywhere by myself anymore?”
Kate and Effie both tried to shake their heads dismissively, but Fitz was nodding.
“Nope, no wandering about for you,” Fitz said.
“You are a small cat, what could you possibly do if I got into trouble?”
“I’m a shifter. I choose to spend time in cat form when I’m not human,” he reminded us.
“Yeah, I heard that you spent a summer as one of those baboons that breaks into people’s cars in South Africa,” Kate teased.
“I heard that you got addicted to the movie, ‘Anaconda’ because Jennifer Lopez was in it and you shifted into some gross little beetle in case they came back to film a sequel,” Effie laughed.
“How do either of you have any friends?” Fitz complained. “If you get into trouble, Sadie, then I am more than capable of helping you out. If either of you get into trouble, you’re on your own.” He was scowling at Kate and Effie, but once Kate leant down to rub behind his fuzzy ears, he seemed to quickly forgive her.
“I’m going to Coaled Water first, but you’re welcome to tag along,” I said.
“Oh, to visit your aunt?” he replied.
“Did you all know that she was my father’s sister? Did none of you think to tell me?” I shrieked.
“Dude, her picture is literally on the wall of your dining room. You have a whole family tree in there, we can’t be expected to point out every relative of yours on the islands, there are too many!” Kate shared, looking to her sister for back up.
“She’s right, Sadie. You should really go into the other room and check out some of those faces,” Effie nodded. I just found the pictures creepy. In some scary movies the eyes in old paintings move, and I had a real fear that I would see something out of the corner of my eye that would scare me right out of the house and send me running down the beach screaming.
“Let’s get to Coaled Water and I can come back and study the dining room wall later,” I said.
“Where are you meeting the new peacekeeper?” Effie asked.
“The woman from The Bureau said to be ready to take a call from her, so I guess she’ll let me know,” I hummed. “Probably somewhere neutral right? Some sort of middle ground. I can’t imagine she would do it in the café.”
“Yeah, the beach or the cliffs or something,” Fitz said. “Come on, Sage always has tuna for me, and my stomach is rumbling like crazy down here.”
I grabbed my purse and headed for the door, Fitz at my heel. The weather was, predictably, humid. I was making a habit of keeping a hair tie on my wrist so that I could pull my locks up into a bun at short notice. I wondered if I would have to share my familiar with the other peacekeeper too. I considered asking Fitz about it, but he was too busy talking about a documentary he’d watched the previous night.
“It’s funny, because Alcatraz was never that hard to escape from, not really. Obviously, any pipes leading out of the main prison had bars across them to stop prisoners shimmying along to get to the outside, and these were rounded bars, don’t forget! Rounded bars are, famously, much harder to saw through. Even if they did manage to hack at them, they had to do it little and often to avoid attracting attention from the guards,” he rambled.
“I thought no one ever escaped,” I contributed.
“Oh, Sadie,” he scoffed. “How wrong you are. Escaping wasn’t the hard part, it was surviving the swim to the shore of San Francisco, that was where the real challenges lay.”
“Surely an escape attempt only counts as successful if you survive the escape?” I said.
“If you got the timing right, knew the tide patterns and—”
“How many inmates know the tide patterns?” I interrupted.
“I am trying to tell you about something that I thought you’d find interesting,” he complained. “Considering there is a new peacekeeper and that they are stealing one of the men that are in love with you, I figured a distraction would be welcome.”
Well, he had me there. I chose to keep my mouth shut for the rest of the walk through town towards Coaled Water. It was early enough that the streets were quiet, a few people rolling up the metal shutters that protected their businesses overnight and the screeching of distant seagulls.
A few posters seemed to have been plastered over the shutters on both sides of the main
road, the streetlamps were wrapped in them too. The colors were bright enough to entice me over for a closer look.
“What’s that?” Fitz asked, looked up at me from the ground. From his angle it seemed he was unable to read the text.
“It’s a poster for an event, something about wildlife photography,” I explained.
“Oh, she’s still doing that, huh?” Fitz grumbled.
“Who’s doing what?”
“Every year, Cindy Saco submits photographs for the Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest. She hasn’t won, obviously, but throws herself a party anyway. It’s more a fundraising thing, she sells off her work to the highest bidder so that she can carry on taking pictures of birds for a living,” Fitz said.
“Oh right, and do a lot of people go to that?” I asked.
“I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but this place is hardly overrun by interior design studios,” he laughed. “This is one of the few places to buy art anywhere on the islands. Most people have at least one Saco piece in their houses. Have you never noticed the mountain goat picture in the café?”
I shook my head.
“Someone might have moved it… but my point is, she has made herself a big deal through shrewd marketing like this!” He gestured up toward the poster. I hadn’t added the personal touch to any part of the house since I’d moved in, it was still all to Greta’s tastes. Buying something for myself might give me a mood boost, and I’d need it after this morning’s meeting.
I pulled a flyer off the streetlamp and slipped it into my purse. Worst case scenario, I walk away from the exhibition empty handed, right?
3
“Welcome, child!” Sage bellowed from somewhere in the back of the store. “What have the spirits got instore for you today, on this the holiest of…” she stepped through a curtain and realized who it was that had stepped in off the street. “Oh, Sadie! I thought you might be a new customer.”
Sage had a habit of turning up the weird behavior on command. She seemed to think that people wanted this sort of thing, so who was I to question it.
“Sage, how are you?” I asked.
“I knew you would ask me that,” she smiled. Oh, she also had a habit of pretending to be psychic, constantly trying to finish my sentences, but always half a beat after I had actually finished them. It was bizarre. “I am well, and I believe you are well now too. Darcy tells me you had quite the conversation.”
Sage smirked at me, and I saw her eyes sparkle behind the thick lenses of her glasses. Darcy, her sister, had obviously gotten her caught up on the events from the dark island.
“When were you planning on telling me that you were my father’s sister?” I asked.
“I’m sure it would have come up at some point,” she smiled. “These things have a way of seeing the light of day. Besides, isn’t my picture up on the wall in your dining room?”
Shoot. I wish people would stop bringing up the fact that I should have known all this already.
“Listen, toots,” Fitz began. “You should have told her yourself, very uncool of you to let her die first and be told by your weird grim-reaper sister.”
“She isn’t the grim reaper,” Sage said. “Sure, you have to have died before you can see her, but that’s just a very small percentage of people, and she isn’t killing anyone. Doesn’t a grim reaper kill people?”
“I truly have no idea,” I replied.
“The thing to focus on is that you have more people in your corner than you know,” she smiled. That’s one takeaway, sure. Fitz was wandering around the store and sniffing at various display cabinets. We watched as something caught his attention and he crouched down, wiggling his butt in preparation to pounce. Sage ran over to stop him.
“Those feathers are not for you to sleep on!” she complained. “Those are—”
“Yeah, special magic feathers, blah blah blah,” he sulked.
“You could do better than him,” Sage laughed, handing Fitz to me in a squirming mess. His wriggling quickly forced me to put him back on the ground.
“I am not a pet,” he hissed.
“Hey, if it walks like a duck and sounds like a duck,” I teased.
“I’m no duck!”
Sage was rearranging things on the shelf behind the cash register, and I found myself watching her, as I had several times before, but in a new light. This was my aunt. She was a connection to my father. What should I ask her first? I mean, it seems obvious that I should ask her where he is, right?
Before I had the chance to posit my question, my phone started to ring. I swung my bag off my shoulder and onto the counter, diving through it with my hands in a scramble as I tried to find the source of the sound.
“Hello?” I answered. There was no caller ID on my screen, but I knew who it would be.
“Sadie, the meeting will take place at the marina,” the voice announced.
“Wait, I wanted to ask—” Dial tone.
“Wrong number?” Fitz smirked.
“No, that was the woman from The Bureau,” I replied dryly. The marina was a weird place to meet. When Miller and I would go off on our missions to the other islands we would always leave from there, did it mean something that she wanted us all to talk at that specific spot? “The meeting is at the marina.”
“Oof, I’m sorry,” Fitz said, tilting his head to the side sympathetically.
“It will be okay, child,” Sage soothed. “Would you like something to take the edge off? I can brew some calming tea.”
“You are both acting like you know something I don’t,” I said suspiciously. “It’s just a marina, we had to meet at a neutral place so why not there?”
“That’s how you get to the other islands, Sadie,” Fitz said. “She’s going to send either you or the new peacekeeper straight out on the boats to the islands. Either way, you will be left with one guardian.”
“I know that,” I winced. “But there’s no use worrying about it until it happens. My mom always used to say don’t worry about things that haven’t happened yet because then you worry about it twice, or something like that. I might be able to talk to this woman and straighten this all out.”
“She actually used to say you shouldn’t stress about something before it’s happened, but close enough,” Sage mumbled. I hadn’t yet confronted her over the photograph I’d seen in Darcy’s house of the two of them with my adopted mother. Maybe I wasn’t ready to have that conversation yet. I ignored her statement, declined the tea that she was about to pour hot water over, and made for the door.
“You’ll be back soon, won’t you?” she called as I reached for the handle.
“Yeah, I just need to deal with one life altering thing at a time,” I replied. She watched me leave, and I didn’t need to turn back around to know that. I could just feel her gaze on me. Was that part of my powers, or was it just general paranoia? Maybe a bit of both.
The streets were already livelier, and I seemed to be navigating them in autopilot mode. I didn’t need to really look ahead to see where I was going, my body was just taking me there. Fitz seemed to be able to sense that now wasn’t a good time for him to start rambling about something, so kept quiet. I appreciated it.
The tarmac soon merged with the sand, and I marched along the beach in continued silence. I couldn’t even seem to hear the water tumbling onto the shore or the birds overhead. We passed the café, the rocks at the base of one of the cliffs and then the marina came into view.
The silhouette of Miller in the distance was unmistakable. As was Ryder’s. There were two other figures there, and obviously one of them was the woman from The Bureau. That meant that the fourth person was the new peacekeeper. Might I have met them already? It felt like my legs got heavier in an instant, as if trying to stop me walking forward.
“Should I get Kate or Effie?” Fitz offered.
“No, I’ll be okay,” I lied. I had no way of knowing that. Was this even so big of a deal? Perhaps I didn’t need to be so fatalistic here, maybe th
ere was going to be an opportunity to take back some control before this was over. Moving to these islands had thrust me into a life that I never could have expected, but I finally had purpose. I felt like I was about to lose part of myself.
“Sadie,” Miller called out. He stayed in place, not stepping any closer as he watched me approach. Ryder was equally statuesque, by that I mean he was standing still, but he was also built like a marble carving. Wow, now was really not the time to be ogling at Ryder’s climber body. Especially when the mess between Ryder, Miller and me was the reason this woman had showed up in the first place.
“Hey everyone,” I said, forcing a smile. Where was I supposed to stand? I took my place in the sand equally distant from both the men and looked up at the woman stood across from me.
“Sadie, as you know your drowning incident, despite being brief, has activated another peacekeeper and now there are two of you,” the Bureau woman began. “Meet Mabel Alden.”
Alden? Of course she was an Alden. The peacekeeper role was passed down through the Alden family and I had been the next in line after Greta. So, who exactly was Mabel? She couldn’t have been much older than twenty, there wasn’t a single line on her face to age her and the sky-blue color of her eyes made her look other worldly. I’d seen those eyes before.
“Sadie!” Mabel squealed. “Sadie, I can’t believe it! I’ve heard so much about you! This is nuts, like super weird. I can’t even! Did you know this could happen? Like… wow! I figured I’d never get to be peacekeeper unless you like, died, or whatever, and then you did! But just for a second, which is crazy! But now I get to do it with you and it’s the best day of my whole life! I can’t even! Can you even?”
“What is happening?” Fitz giggled. I nudged him gently with my foot.
“As I’m sure you know, two peacekeepers and two guardians mean that you each pair off,” the Bureau woman continued. “Miller you will be with Mabel, and I believe you are heading to Tivercana first of all to meet with the Davick family to discuss a construction issue. Something to do with planning permission, I can’t remember the details… but anyway, that leaves Ryder and Sadie together.”