by Mara Webb
The high street was getting crowded with people that were trying to get a look at the guitar store. I guess that this was viewed as big news around here; they didn’t even know about the dead body inside.
“Have you guys kissed yet?” Kate asked. I felt my cheeks glowing red with embarrassment. My mouth opened and I spluttered a few sounds to demonstrate my shock but was unable to say anything. “I’m just kidding, but you should see your face!” she laughed.
“Why don’t we talk about your love life instead?” I smirked.
“Oh, please do! Okay, so first of all I think I’m in love with a guy named Tim. The annoying thing about that is that I never pictured myself dating a guy with a name like Tim, but the heart wants what it wants,” she sighed.
“Tell me everything!” I shrieked, surprised by my own enthusiasm. We were nearing the beach now and the café was coming into view. I knew that she would probably stop talking as soon as we got within earshot of her sister so I wanted to get as much info as I could before then.
“We met playing GPS roulette. I got sent to a location up on the mountain and ended up in a clearing that I hadn’t seen before. Who should wander into that very same spot, but Tim! He likes bands with angry lead singers and he’s allergic to garlic. Not a vampire though, I checked,” she laughed.
“He told you that the first time he met you?” I asked.
“Yeah, I ask a lot of in-depth questions, so I learn about people quickly. Anyway, we’ve been on three dates now and I’m pretty sure that GPS roulette lead me to my soulmate. It’s all super cheesy, I know,” she sighed. She had a sparkle in her eye as she spoke about him.
“Does Effie know?” I said.
“Heck no! My sister is like a guard dog when it comes to my dating life. She has scared off almost every guy I’ve ever introduced her too. I get that she is trying to protect me, but she would happily keep me single forever. Don’t say a word,” she urged. I mimed zipping my mouth closed and throwing away the key.
We stepped into the café and Effie gave us a nod of acknowledgment as she rushed past us both with a plate of eggs in each hand. Kate took a seat at the breakfast bar and I walked around to the cash register to help with the line of customers waiting to pay.
“Have you heard about that funny business on the high street? Someone said there were fireworks going off from that music place. Won’t someone think of the birds,” an old lady cried as she handed over a pile of coins.
“It wasn’t fireworks ma’am,” I assured her. I think she would have been more horrified if she knew the truth, so I kept it to myself.
“I suppose you’ve been off dealing with that bank robbery on the high street, eh?” The old lady had gone and a middle-aged man in a business suit was counting out paper money from his wallet in front of me.
“It wasn’t a bank robbery. We aren’t sure if it was a robbery at all, actually. But it was at The Guitar Yard,” I clarified.
“Those darn musicians,” he grumbled. I handed him his change and exchanged small talk with the three customers behind him before Effie got back from the table she was serving.
“Miller said you guys would be out all day on Wilmore,” she said.
“Yeah, change of plans,” I shrugged. “First of all, it seems that the people that live there, apart from the housekeeper, are all missing.”
“Red flag,” Kate and Effie said at the same time, then high fived each other.
“Yeah, your whole family is missing, dude. Some police officer came in here looking for them and then the customers overheard. The gossip mill around here is crazy,” Effie laughed. “Oh, speaking of red flags…” she muttered.
I followed her eyeline to the door of the café and out towards the sand beyond it. Ryder, a man that had also claimed to be my guardian, was running towards us.
“How do you have two hot guys fighting over you again?” Effie asked.
“Just lucky I guess,” I replied.
“Sadie!” he said as he walked through the door. He was out of breath and glistening with sweat. “I need to speak to you outside. It’s urgent.” What now?
6
Ryder ran a store on the high street called ‘Opt Out’. It was a place that specialized in hiking equipment, tents, and backpacks. There was also a bunch of stuff in there that I didn’t recognize, but then again, I’d only been inside a couple of times.
Greta had faked a passion for the great outdoors in order to spend more time with Ryder. She’d had a huge crush on him and was hoping that he would become her guardian if she willed it to happen. My arrival on the island seemed to have triggered some ‘genetic destiny’ in both Miller and Ryder, and now they were both my guardian.
My dead cousin was less than thrilled about it. Her guardian had been her dad, whereas I had two eligible bachelors vying for my attention.
Ryder held the café door open and gestured that he wanted me to speak with him outside. Effie performed a loud wolf whistle as I walked out of the door and I flapped a hand in her direction to get her to shush. Effie and Kate were still laughing by the time the door closed behind me and I was standing on the sand.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I think you know, don’t you?” he said. I shook my head. “It’s the wolf. He’s up to something.”
Ryder hated Miller. Maybe hate is the wrong word to use, but he had made it clear that he thought Miller was bad news. The issue was that both of them had inherited something that had been activated when I got here. Both were my guardian, but Ryder was also a hunter. A hunter of werewolves specifically.
Apparently there hadn’t been a werewolf on the islands for a long time. The whole mess had started with Greta’s murder, and now here I was rolling my eyes as Ryder started another rant about ‘wolf activity’. In the last few days he’d left me several voicemails with his ‘theories’. I’d just text him back with the moon emoji, what else was I supposed to say?
“Up to something?” I hummed. “Like what?”
“I’ll show you,” he said. He began walking towards the high street and I reluctantly followed behind. He didn’t take a route that I was familiar with. We turned off the sidewalk almost as soon as we got off the sand and weaved between buildings until, we were at the trees that sprouted up over the hills.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Do you trust me?” he said. I nodded. Greta trusted him, as did Kate and Effie. That was recommendation enough. “Then we should hurry.”
Several minutes of silent walking followed. The hill sloped upwards and we were headed in the direction of the mountains. I looked down at my sandals and watched them shift into a pair of hiking boots. I laughed out loud and Ryder turned back to look at me, realizing what had happened.
“You’re getting good at that,” he grinned.
“I don’t know how I did it, but I’m glad it happened,” I replied.
“I should have told you to change your shoes before we left the café, I just didn’t want Miller to have time to clean up and hide the evidence,” he said. Ryder was so sure of himself, so convinced that Miller had done something wrong. What if he was right?
“What are you accusing him of?” I asked.
“Wait and see,” Ryder said. “I can’t understand it myself, but maybe you can figure it out.”
The trees thinned out, the gaps between the trunks grew and we were soon at a clearing. In the middle of the space was a large, flat rock. It looked as though it had been placed there, but the moss and vines growing around its base gave it the illusion that it might have sprung up from the ground.
“Oh,” I gasped. The ground beneath my feet in the clearing was scorched, as if a fire had ravaged a small area of the trees and burned down the plant life in a perfect circle. The vines around the rock were green and luscious; clearly unsinged. Curious.
“You see it, right?” Ryder said.
“I…” I faltered. What was I even looking at? “Aliens?” I said with a smile.
; “I doubt it,” Ryder replied. “But not a bad guess. I just think that a rock like this, the burned earth… it means something, it has to.”
“You think Miller came all the way up here with a flame thrower and did this? He’s a busy guy, Ryder. I don’t know if he has a huge gap in his schedule for landscaping.”
“Look at the rock more closely,” he insisted. I stepped across black dirt, my feet crunching on burnt foliage and brittle sticks. The rock was slate gray in color, but there was something darker on it.
“Is that…?”
“Blood!” Ryder said. “I reckon so. I figured you might know if it was some sort of ritual thing.”
“You have massively overestimated my experience with weird stuff if you think I know anything about this,” I said, raising an eyebrow. “But you think that Miller came out here, created this whole space for himself and then threw some blood on a big rock?”
“It could be a feeding ground, or, or…” he stammered.
“I know you see the worst in him, but is there a chance that you have read into this too much?” I asked.
Ryder stood back from the rock, a few feet to my left. I saw his shoulders rise and fall dramatically as he let out a deep breath, clearly frustrated with the situation. I stepped closer and tried to make eye contact with him, hoping to reassure him that I didn’t think he was crazy.
“I don’t know why you trust him,” he said. I hadn’t noticed just how brown his eyes were before, like a rich velvet. I could see now why Greta has been so drawn to him. He had a climber’s body, slight and muscular. “He’s dangerous. I have to protect you, I have to… you spending all that time with a monster is making my life harder.”
“He’s not a monster. He’s my friend, he’s—” I stopped myself. What was Miller to me? All we had shared were a few moments, a little flirting here and there and that was it.
“I see it. I know,” he said. He looked pained. I could almost feel it in my chest. “Can you just promise me that you will stay alert? He’s the sheriff, I know you two have to go off around the islands together, so it’s not like I can go everywhere you go. What if something happens and I’m not there?”
“I’m a witch, remember?” I smiled. I lifted my hand up and touched the side of his arm. I had intended it to be comforting, but I pulled my hand back quickly after my fingers touched his skin. I had felt that same jolt of energy as when Miller had held my hand.
The look on Ryder’s face suggested that he felt it too. Oh boy.
“We should get back down to The Guitar Yard,” I said, desperate to break the tension.
“Huh?”
“The guy who runs the place was shot and someone smashed up the windows. It’s a huge mess,” I said.
“Do you think it was Miller?” he asked. I laughed but saw that he was serious.
“No! He was with me on Wilmore when it happened. Let’s just get back to the high street and try not to accuse Miller of anything illegal for five whole minutes, see how it feels,” I teased.
We walked back through the trees to the sound of bird song. I thought about what my life had been like before I moved here, how I’d never really heard the sounds of nature before. Even as we got closer to the high street, it was quiet. There weren’t many vehicles on the island, just the occasional bus bumbling along.
The calm didn’t last long though. By the time we reached The Guitar Yard it seemed like everyone in a one mile radius had come over to gawk at the crime scene. I couldn’t see Miller anywhere.
“You weren’t kidding,” Ryder muttered from behind me. “There’s glass everywhere.” I carefully stepped around the shards on the ground, despite now wearing more appropriate footwear than I had been earlier.
I stepped into the building, looking around for Miller. He was the sheriff; he should be here.
“Be careful back there, the body is behind the cash register. Don’t touch anything,” I said, listening out for sounds that someone was upstairs.
“There’s no one here,” Ryder replied. I walked over and saw that the bloodstained carpet remained, but the body was gone. I looked back and the shoe still lay in the middle of the floor.
“Maybe the funeral home came to get him already,” I muttered. Why wouldn’t they take the shoe? I know that Miller had told me a dozen times that they didn’t have a forensic team on the island, but surely the shoe would be added to evidence.
Something didn’t feel right. This place shouldn’t be unguarded, but there were no police anywhere. What had happened to pull him away from this building?
“So… when do you want to talk to Effie and Kate about the ritual site?” Ryder asked. I shot him a look. “Greta taught me a little magic; I can tell that the place I found in the trees is being used for something. I think that it’s important. Maybe it’s related to what happened to Jake today.”
“Let me just get someone from the police station to keep watch here,” I sighed. There was a strange taste in my mouth, almost metallic. I stuck my tongue out and opened my mouth like I was trying to catch rain drops. I had turned away from Ryder, but it seemed that he could still see me.
“You’re a strange one, you know that, right?” he laughed.
“Let me live my life,” I tried to say, my mouth still wide open. It came out more like, ‘let meh lif my lice’ and he laughed again.
“Sadie!” Miller said, running back into the building from the street. He had seen me first, but then spotted Ryder behind me. I was standing directly between them both, I could feel a heat in the air that hadn’t been there before.
I closed my mouth and looked back and forth at them, waiting to see who would speak first. Any movement that Ryder made, Miller immediately mirrored. I remembered something I’d read that reminded me of what was happening.
Two tigers in an Indian national park had started circling each other before launching into a fight to the death. They were fighting over a female that ultimately rejected both of them and went off with a third tiger. I didn’t have a third guy here to leave with though, I was stuck with these two.
“Easy tiger,” I smirked. That was the ice breaker that brought their attention back to the issue at hand. “Where have you been?”
“I got called out to a robbery. I figured it might be the same person that shot Jake, so I ran out to deal with it. The whole squad was there in full riot gear,” Miller explained. “It was a false alarm though; all we did was frighten the bank tellers when we stormed in.”
“False alarm?” I said. “Who called you there then?”
“I don’t know. Tom was there though, he treated us all to a rendition of Hit me with your best shot,” Miller shrugged.
“The Pat Benatar song?” Ryder asked.
“The very same,” Miller nodded. Tom was the only pilot on the island, he had been the one flying the plane that had brought me here. He had a passion for singing and didn’t necessarily care if you wanted to hear it or not. “Oh, did you call the funeral home?” he said, looking over at the space where Jake had been laying.
“Me?” I asked.
“Yeah, I was about to do it but then my walkie talkie started going off and I had to run to the bank.”
“Hang on, I didn’t call the funeral home, and you didn’t call them either. You were called away for a false alarm…” I was trying to put pieces together. Something hadn’t felt right when I returned with Ryder, now I knew why. “No one called the funeral home, but Jake’s body is gone. Who took him?”
7
I was sitting at my dining table with Kate and Effie. I don’t even remember who brought the take-out cartons, but we were all eating as if we’d been starved. Miller had set about trying to locate the dead body of Jake, understandably, and Ryder had walked me back to the café.
“So which one are you going for?” Effie asked in between mouthfuls of rice. “Hot guy number one or hot guy number two?”
“She’s not gonna choose,” Kate laughed. “She’s gonna string them both along until a th
ird, hotter option shows up, like that tiger thing. Did you read about that? She’s gonna have her cake and make out with it too!”
“You guys are the worst,” I snorted. “I’m not stringing either of them along, I don’t know what I’m doing…”
“Well, if I was in your situation, I’d be thrilled,” Effie sighed. “Do you know how hard it is to date around here? Even if you manage to find someone, you end up having your parents show up in the middle of your starlit beach walk and telling your beau embarrassing stories from when you were a toddler!”
“Oddly specific,” I laughed.
“Our parents are intense, man,” Kate agreed. “They used to show up at sleepovers with notecards covered in conversation starters for us all. It was so humiliating. It’s a good job we are both just so naturally awesome, because otherwise we would have had literally zero friends.”
“Are you trying to tell me that neither of you guys are dating anyone?” I asked. They both looked at each other and then sheepishly stared down into their dinner. “Hey, if you both get to butt into my life, then I am doing it right back!”
Kate shot me a look, widening her eyes to send a message. Oh yeah. I had forgotten that she was dating some guy she met through her GPS roulette game. I needed to change the subject quick, or risk landing her in hot water with her sister.
“Blood!” I yelled.
“Did you get heatstroke today?” Effie sniggered.
“No. Or at least I don’t think so,” I floundered. I put down my takeout carton and sat forward in my chair. “Ryder took me up into the woods today.”
“I bet he did,” Effie winked.
“Stop! Look, he thinks he found some sort of ritual site. There was a clearing in the trees up on one of the hills. It was all burned up, like someone had scorched a bunch of the plant life on purpose. It was in a perfect circle,” I began.
