by Mara Webb
Justin coming here would be a collision of two worlds. In the few days since my arrival, I felt changed. I had a purpose and a community, I had magic. I wouldn’t be prepared to give that up even if he begged me to come home. That didn’t mean I didn’t want him to try, just that I would reject it immediately. I wanted to be wanted, but have the power to say no.
“She’s coming,” Greta mumbled. I don’t know if she intended for me to hear it, but she must have said it out loud for a reason. When we got into the house I slumped into the armchair in the living room and Fitz jumped onto my lap. I laughed at the realization that I was now both the owner, and patient, of a cat. He was my dentist. A cat was my dentist.
“A werewolf was here, is that right?” Greta asked.
“Yes,” I replied. I fussed Fitz behind his ear, and he purred gratefully. “It didn’t hurt me, it just stood there.”
“When there is a shift in the atmosphere, these things can happen. Those with dormant werewolf genes can be activated and then it’s a matter of restoring peace to the place to keep everything under control. There are a few families with werewolves in their ancestry,” Greta explained.
“Effie said her great-grandfather was a werewolf. Maybe she was activated by my arrival,” I suggested.
“That’s not what you think though, is it?” she said, gliding through to the center of the room to get a better look at me.
“I think it’s the sheriff,” I sighed. I hadn't discussed this theory with anyone yet and I hoped that Greta would give me the benefit of the doubt. I didn’t have much experience with my intuition yet, but there had been something about that wolf’s eyes the resonated with me. I couldn’t ignore the walkie talkie outside the window either.
“That makes sense, he and Effie are second-cousins, they have the same great-grandparents,” Greta said.
“What?” I sat forward, causing Fitz to slide off my lap and tumble onto the ground. In an effort to save face, he began licking his paws as if his fall was intentional. “She’s never mentioned that. She told me she’d made a pass at him, but he’d rejected her. She can’t have known, right?”
“Ha, oh she knows. Look, there aren’t that many people living out here and second-cousins can legally get married, or at least I’m sure I read somewhere that they can. It’s frowned upon, but I have heard Effie wax lyrical about that man’s abs on more than one occasion, so she clearly thought she had a shot.”
“But wait, Miller could really be a werewolf? What do I do?” I asked, leaping to my feet.
“Sadie?” It sounded like Kate. Greta blew a quick kiss and disappeared before Kate walking into the room. Maybe I shouldn't be so concerned about finding a copy of my house keys out by the rocks, it seemed like everyone had access to the house anyway. I considered that, as Kate and Effie were sisters, either of them could have mentioned that they were related to Miller.
“Hey,” I nodded as she came in, spotting Fitz on the carpet and pointing at him.
“Fitz! I wondered where you’d gone. I’m not due a checkup for another four months so I didn’t even think to check at the dentist’s office,” she laughed.
“If you were so worried about me, you could have called or come in for an unscheduled assessment. I might have thrown in a free polish for you,” Fitz joked. They both laughed and I remained baffled by the situation until Kate turned her attention back to me.
“Anyway, Sadie! I figured you might like to come play GPS roulette with me today. It would help you get to know the island better; I’ve got lemonade in a mini cooler in my backpack and... Ryder insisted that someone was with you in case the wolf strikes again. He’s been on some research mission and apparently they don’t just come out at night under a full moon,” she grinned.
“Ryder, huh? Are you babysitting me at his request to get into his good books? Greta already filled me in on you and Effie being second-cousins with Miller,” I teased.
“Yeah, it’s a bummer that there are like, two major hotties on the island and I’m related to one of them. Second-cousins aren’t off limits, just FYI, but Miller has made it clear several times that he thinks that you shouldn’t date anyone that is invited to a family reunion,” she huffed.
“Do I need to change my shoes?” I asked, looking down at the flip flops I had discarded when I had gotten into the house.
“Boot up, let’s go,” she said, passing me a baseball cap. It had a small cartoon pizza slice on the front, but the visor was deep enough that it would shield my eyes from the sun. I refilled my water bottle and Kate lead me out of the house onto the sand and we double back along the beach to get to the main street. “You’re thinking about Miller,” she said after a few moments of silence. “I can sense it.”
“How?”
“I can’t read minds exactly, but I can feel that you are getting a soft spot for him, you mentioned him earlier anyway, so I already knew he was on your mind,” she smiled. Kate pulled her cell phone out of her shorts pocket and opened an app that appeared to show a map of the islands. She pressed a symbol at the bottom of the screen which had two dice, they began to tumble.
“I think he is the werewolf,” I said, checking for signs of fear or horror on her face. She didn’t even blink.
“Is that a problem? If you have an issue going after guys with weird hobbies then you have come to the wrong place girl,” she laughed. “Okay, looks like we are back to the mountain!” I had to jog to catch up to her, she was walking so fast and I still wanted to talk about the shifter sheriff.
“Is he dangerous?” I asked hesitantly.
“I’ve dated guys that aren’t werewolves that were plenty problematic, you can’t expect his behavior to reflect the one thing you think you know about him. So he might shift into some four-legged creature every now and then, does that mean he isn’t a good guy?” She stopped and turned to me. “If Miller is a werewolf like you think, then he is new to this, it’s probably super scary to be him right now. He probably would appreciate having someone to talk to about it.”
I looked up at the mountain that we were standing at the base of. We would probably pass by Greta’s car again; I should speak to someone about finally getting that thing dragged off the road.
“What about Ryder?” I said.
“Oof, you didn’t come here to play,” she laughed. “Are you making moves on them both? I can’t say I blame you, but jeez, leave some for the rest of us.”
“No, I meant… what is the hunt? Ryder said something about a hunt after he saw the wolf. Is he planning to hurt Miller?”
She looked somber and lost in thoughts for a moment, the brightness of her eyes dimmed. She wasn’t moving now, like a statue or a photograph. When she returned to me, her mood had changed. “I’ve warned Effie to keep an eye on things while we are up here. I felt a calling to play the game today, I’m sure you know that those things happen for a reason.”
“You can communicate through your magic? Why do you have a cell phone then?” I asked.
“I can communicate with my sister like this, sometimes my mom too if she is paying attention. If Ryder is part of a wolf hunt, then yes, there is about to be trouble. I think we all consider the outer islands to be the source of the trouble around here, but we have conflicts on the main island too. If Miller has been ‘activated’ or whatever, then an opposing force will have been triggered at the same time.”
“There is always balance?”
“Yes. When Greta was killed, there was a disparity in the magic energy on the islands, you were brought here to make things right again, but in the time between her death and your arrival there was clearly a lot of other stuff going on that we will now have to deal with. For now though, we have to deal with this...”
I followed her eye-line down to a pile of human bones on the ground between the trees. We had been walking slower as the steepness of the mountain increased, so I hadn’t noticed how far up we’d made it. I considered the idea that I only seemed to find bodies in Kate’s company, but f
ollowing the theory that everything happens for a reason, maybe she was meant to find them, like a search dog or something.
The bones were clean. The size of them, and their position in relation to each other, indicated that this was not an animal’s grave, and the lack of anything other than bones pointed to the death having happened a long time ago. There was a distinct hole through the skull, a bullet wound.
“This is where the app was taking me,” Kate mumbled. “More and more it seems that I get randomly assigned co-ordinates that help me discover something useful. I’ve spoken to other players; it doesn’t happen to them.”
I crouched down beside the legs of the skeleton, the body looked as though it had been hastily buried at some point and some of the bones were still partially submerged in soil. There would be no analysis of the bones by a scientist, Ryder said everything was handled by folks on the island.
I reached a hand forward to touch the bones, Kate put her hand on my shoulder, clearly warning me that what I was doing might be considered gross by most standards. I shrugged her off.
As my fingertips touched the skeleton, a vision of the owner hit me as clear as if they were standing right in front of me. I could see the face vividly; it wasn’t one I recognized but it looked familiar. I pulled my hand back; all it had taken was a second or two of contact and I had seen the face of this dead body.
I now had to put a name to that face and figure out why this body would have been buried close enough to Greta’s car that I could see it through the trees.
I sensed that they were connected.
17
“I have to say, I’m impressed,” Miller said. He had been watching me draw for ten minutes and it seems he had assumed I would be terrible at it. I almost didn’t want to mention that I’d taken a bunch of art classes.
I was creating a sketch of the face I had seen when I touched the bones. I wasn’t sure how long the memory would hang around, so I had hurried down to the police station, briefly explained what had happened and demanded a pencil and some paper.
“Is this looking familiar?” I asked.
“Yeah, as soon as you drew the eyes, I recognized them, but I was curious as to how much detail you could add to a drawing of a face that you have technically never seen. I’ve never seen anyone do this before, I think you are going to make things really interesting around here,” he grinned. I looked at him expectantly. “Wait, that’s Chris Davick, no mistaking that face!”
“How is he related to the others? How has he not been reported missing?” I said.
“Who would normally report someone missing?”
“Loved ones, like family members or friends?” I replied, not understanding why he had asked.
“And what if you have no friends and your family hates you? Who reports you missing then?” he said. Ah. A man has been missing, possibly killed, and no one has involved the police because they don’t care. What a sad life this guy must have led.
“Could one of them killed him?”
“Chris was a calm, pleasant guy. This didn’t sit well with several members of that blood-thirsty group of people he is related to. They wanted to bring the chaos back. In my mind that means that they are currently all my number one suspects for Chris’s murder and Greta’s. With those two gone, they would be free to start an all-out war, they might not have expected you to show up so soon,” he explained.
“Can I speak candidly?” I said. He nodded.
“There is a tunnel system that connects the islands, there is an entrance on the beach at the base of the cliffs. I think Simon knows about it, and possibly had the ability to move the boulders that Greta had put there. She was trying to stop people sneaking about to do illegal stuff.” He stared blankly at me. “You already know this though don’t you. You know this because when you ran away from my house the other night, that is where you ran to.”
He stilled, bracing himself for something that I might say next. I waited him out. He collapsed into the wooden chair opposite me and ran his hands through his hair. “How did you know?”
“Your eyes looked the same,” I explained.
“I had heard the stories, the rumors. I didn’t think any of it could be real. Somehow, when it started, I just knew. I don’t know what possessed me to go to you, but I must have thought you could help me. I shouldn’t have done that; you are so new to all of this and I probably scared you half to death. I went to the cave because I wanted to hide, I hadn’t known it existed until that night, I was just following my nose,” he sighed.
“So, you’re a werewolf and I’m a witch, but a week ago we were both just regular people,” I laughed. “In a way we are in it together then.”
“I guess, but I don’t think there’s much risk of you freaking out and attacking someone with your clawed feet though,” he said.
“You were avoiding physical contact with me when I got here, but then you had to drag me out of the water. That is what made this happen to you, isn’t it?” I hadn’t considered it until just now, but in a way, I was responsible for this. “My touch...”
I was lost in an idea, Miller looked up and saw that I was drifting through a sea of possibilities, considering my next move. “What do you need?” he asked, suddenly changing back into sheriff mode.
“Do you have Greta’s shoes? Were they removed from her body when she was collected from the cemetery?”
“Yeah, her clothes are in the evidence room. We keep stuff like that but then don’t get any professionals on the island that can do anything about it,” he said through a half-smile.
“I need to see it, all of it,” I replied. I had touched those bones on the mountain and seen the face of the victim. I already knew what Greta looked like, but I was hoping that my powers might be able to tell me where she last was. We know that the car crash was staged, we know she was shot. Where was she when the gun went off?
We walked out of the office where I had been drawing, through a locked door that required a keypad to enter and stood in a large room filled with rows of shelving units loaded with cardboard boxes.
“Feast your eyes on this,” Miller said. “I don’t know why we have this stuff, maybe it was all kept in anticipation of your arrival so you could solve all of these cases. We haven’t had anyone with your particular skills before.”
“How did Greta get things done?” I asked. I didn’t want that to sound as though Greta hadn’t been doing anything, but it seemed obvious that we had different abilities.
“Greta could move objects, she and that cat of hers used that ability to keep the land clean and free of trash. I think she could diffuse tension, but she never spoke about it, she would enter a room with people fighting and they would just calm down immediately and start discussing things rationally. She made a lot of motivating speeches too actually, got a lot of volunteer groups started on the islands.
“We would travel on the boats together, make sure everything was running smoothly with the treaties and then travel back, we didn’t speak all that much. She had a pretty obvious crush on Ryder so any free time she had she used to spend chasing him around the cliffs.”
“Which box is for Greta?” I said, reading the marker pen scrawl on a few of the nearest shelves.
“Over here,” he said, weaving around piles of boxes on the ground that had no permanent storage place yet. I wondered what was in all these boxes. It couldn’t all be murder victims' belongings, right? I feel like I probably should have looked up some crime statistics before I made my big move out here, then again if some higher power had coerced me to buy the café then it was all out of my control anyway.
I took the box out of Millers hands and set it down on the concrete, lifting the lid and peering in at the collection of things she had been wearing when she died. I spotted her sneakers in a plastic bag towards the bottom of the box and extracted one shoe carefully. The soul was muddy, dirt was deep into the tread and I worried that the flood at the cemetery might have compromised it.
I
pressed my fingers against the dirt and the images began to form in my mind. The sounds of the evidence room faded away, the ticking of the clock, the rattling of the pipes, Miller’s breath... all gone. I was standing on a dirt track and the scent of fresh bread was floating through the air, I could see a vaguely familiar outline of bare rock. The dark sand beach was down the sidewalk and to the left.
The bakery and the dark sand... I was on Port Wayvern.
I let go of the shoe and saw Miller leaning against the wall a few feet away. I had no idea how long I had been caught in the images my magic had created, but when he saw my body began to move, as if I was reanimated, he took a few steps closer and waited for me to speak.
“This isn’t mud, it’s the dark sand from Port Wayvern. She was on that island last, which makes me think she died there. I had suspected that it was one of the Davick’s that had killed her because of the damage to her car.
“It looked like it had been beaten with a golf club and they have a golf course on Tivercana. What if the Conerty’s killed Chris? They wanted to relaunch their feud in a more violent way and murdering a member of the Davick family, the one keeping things calm, that would be a sure-fire way to do it.
“Greta must have sensed that something was going on, gone to Port Wayvern to ask questions and been killed to further fuel the rage fire they were trying to build.”
“How sure are you?” Miller asked.
“Totally sure,” I said, standing up as the ache in my thighs had become too much in the crouched position.
“It’s been like five minutes since you were sure that it was Simon Davick.” Good point.
“We should speak to Rosie about her stalker, if she thinks it is Simon then I might have been right the first time. Maybe Simon killed Greta on Port Wayvern and is trying to frame the Conerty’s. Someone moved those rocks when you and Simon ran away from my house, was it you?”
