Welcome to Castle Cove

by Kory M. Shrum

  My face could light a match at this point.

  “Just don’t date him unless you want everyone in town to know your business,” Kristine says, wiping down the bar.

  The other bartender snorts. “It’d be so worth it just to run a hand over that rock-hard ass while—”

  “Reese,” Kristine says. “Not in front of the children.”

  Several girls congregating at the end of the bar giggle. They can’t be older than 21. Reese only gives them a devilish wink.

  “Why doesn’t he appeal to you?” I ask Kristine, hoping for clarification.

  “Your ride is here,” Kristine nods toward the door. “If he gives you any shit, let me know.”

  “You’ll beat him up for me?” I laugh, gathering up my things and placing a generous tip on the bar. Kristine nods appreciatively at the bills.

  “Don’t have to. I’ll tell our mother.”

  I slide off the barstool and thank Kristine again for all her help. She eyes me approvingly. “I hope to see you again. Soon.”

  I grin, feeling that warm heady sensation again.

  Choice 35

  Give Kristine my number

  Naw, just call it a night

  Find out the truth about Castle Cove

  “Can we get coffee first?” I ask, reaching behind me to fasten my seatbelt.

  A lopsided smile seizes his face. “Yes. You’ll probably want it by the water anyway. I’m sure it’ll be cold.”

  “As long as you aren’t taking me to the cove, so you can drown me and leave my body to be dashed against the rocks,” I say.

  His face lights up. “Right.”

  He throws open his door and walks around to the back of his sedan. He opens the trunk, the door lifting overhead. The car dings incessantly, alerting us that the driver’s door has been left open.

  Spencer is oblivious to all of this as he rustles through a cardboard box, that scratchy sound of compressed fibers unmistakable. “Perfect.”

  He slams the trunk and climbs back into the driver’s seat.

  He’s holding a pair of earmuffs. Giant earmuffs.

  “It won’t be that cold,” I say. “Will it?”

  “You’ll understand when we get there.”

  The heater is still on full blast and the car is downright cozy as I settle into the seat.

  We lapse into silence on the way to the coffee shop. When we pull up at The Magic Bean, I’m surprised to see that they’re still open so late.

  I go for a large caramel macchiato, and Spencer gets a large black coffee, no sugar, two creams.

  “I’ve been thinking about the best way to break this to you,” he says.

  And again I find myself tensing, expecting the worst.

  “Whatever I show you first will make the rest easier if it’s shocking, right?” he asks, but he seems to be talking mostly to himself, not me. “You’ll have an easier time accepting the rest if the first reveal is undeniable.”

  I’m not sure how I feel about this plan to shock me. But I don’t interrupt him. My coffee is warm between my palms and the soft lights of Castle Cove make the city seem unusually alive. It’s so sleepy during the day. But it feels as busy as Baltimore once the sun dips behind the horizon, even though it can’t be more than a third its size.

  “So we’ll start at the cove,” he says. He actually sounds excited. “Midnight during the waxing moon is a great time to see the sirens.”

  I imagine a lighthouse-type structure on the edge of the rocky cliffs which plays loud, annoying siren sounds.

  Spencer takes side streets out of town to Canyon Road. Once on Canyon Road, it’s only beautiful ocean views as far as the eye can see. The water shimmers in the moonlight, the frothy white crests glowing, and the moon herself half full in the dark-blue sky. Absolutely gorgeous.

  Once the road curves about a mile outside of town, Spencer pulls over. He puts his coffee in the holder between the radio dials and gear shift and reaches into the back for the jacket and earmuffs. He offers me the jacket. I take it, setting my coffee down long enough to slip my arms through.

  He leans across my lap with polite apologies and opens the glovebox. He pulls out a black metal flashlight from a pile of documents, presumably the owner’s manual and registration.

  “There’s a path here that leads down to the beach. It’s a little steep but we can do it. You’ll want both hands free.”

  I slip my paper cup into the remaining empty holder. With the earmuffs and flashlight in hand, he gets out. I exit, following him.

  There’s a soft patch of tall grass beside a large boulder. He shines the light on the ground there and reveals the sloping path, a mixture of jutting gray rock, brush, and sand.

  He keeps his light trained on the path. He puts the earmuffs around his neck and waves me forward.

  We slowly descend the slope to the looming beach below. When my feet hit sand, I sink into it.

  The cliff above looks much higher than it did when we crept down. And I start to worry that maybe I will in fact die here tonight. What is stopping this guy from bashing my head against the rock and moving on? It’s so far out of the way, no one would find my body for days…or longer.

  And you’re the idiot that left the bar with this guy. I start to get nervous.

  “Why didn’t we just park in the South Lot,” I ask him. Where there are cameras and maybe even people.

  “It closes at dark,” he says. “And I couldn’t be sure we’d find a siren that close to town. But this is good. Are you ready?”

  I look out over the beautiful black ocean and the moonlit waves crashing against the shore. “Ready for what?”

  “We have to lure one in.”

  “Lure what?” I ask, my pulse rising.

  “Take off your shoes and wade into the surf,” he says. His voice is high, a little excited. And it’s that more than anything else that tells me whatever we are about to do is a little dangerous.

  “I promise this will make sense in a minute,” Spencer says. “Can you please just take off your shoes? You have to be barefoot in the water. That’s how they’ll know you’re here. But don’t go too far in. I’m not a good swimmer.”

  I came all this way for the truth. I guess I can’t chicken out now. I bend down and slip out of my shoes, rolling up my pant legs to mid-calf.

  Then I step tentatively toward the water.

  “That’s far enough,” he says, sounding nervous over the sound of crashing waves. “It’ll reach—”

  Whatever he says next is swallowed up by the sound of a wave crashing into the shore and washing over my bare feet and up onto my calves. The water is cold. I step back instinctively, but another wave is right there to replace the one being sucked out to sea.

  Then a third and a fourth. I hear Spencer call my name. “Look. Here he is.”

  I turn and gaze out over the water. Sure enough there’s a dark head poking out. Just the crown and eyes, the nose still submerged. We lock eyes, and a strange sensation washes over me.

  “Where the hell did he come from?” I ask. Because he has to be a hundred feet from shore and floating. Not swimming. Just sitting there. Is there a rock underwater? Otherwise, I can’t believe anyone is just sitting out there in the dark in the ocean after midnight.

  Isn’t this guy afraid of sharks? Hypothermia? Undertow or—

  His head dips down under the water and disappears.

  “Is he drowning?” I ask. I look back at Spencer, unsure.

  “Get out of the water!” he cries. “Back up!”

  I turn back, wondering what has pushed Spencer from excitement to straight up fear when I see something amazing.

  The water is glowing. An oval-shaped pool of light, ribbons of teal and gold are moving under the ocean waves toward me.

  Spencer grabs hold of my arm, pulling me back. “He will drown you! Come on!”

  But the man is emerging from the water, and he is a man. Beautiful, naked, standing in the surf. My eyes slide down his body, noti
ng his perfect proportions and…endowments. He must be twenty feet away from me now. And he’s smiling. I can see it even in the light of the half moon.

  He extends his hand toward me, welcoming me into the water.

  Into his arms.

  I step forward, pulling away from Spencer. I feel the water around my legs deepen, the sand sliding away. The man smiles wider, moving toward me as I move toward him. The cold water up to my knees now. Then the middle of my thighs.

  And over it all a song swells. A sweet, heady music.

  Something soft snaps over my head, covering my ears. The ocean waves die to a distant hush.

  But it’s the transformation of the man that is most startling.

  He isn’t this beautiful statue anymore, a stone David come to life. Now he is more creature than man.

  Along his back are strange ridges not unlike fins. His hands are comically large, like paddles, with moonlight showing through the webbing. And his skin seems to be covered in large scales, almost like metallic plates of armor.

  In his open mouth isn’t the sweet, inviting smile I thought I saw, but rows of needle-like teeth, gnashing.

  I scream and stumble back in the surf.

  The sand betrays me, and I fall, cold water rushing up the back of my legs and clothes.

  Strong hands are under my arms, hauling me up out of the surf.

  “Use your legs! Help me!” Spencer screams. “We have to get onto the rocks!”

  I let him haul me up and away from the ocean. My heart is pounding so hard I think my head will explode. My knee scrapes across the top of the rock as he drags me to my feet despite my heavy, wet clothes and the unforgiving sand and surf.

  A hand taps my shoulder furiously. But I can’t hear what Spencer is saying because the earmuffs are snug over each ear.

  “Look!” he mouths, stopping me on the top of a boulder before I can scramble up onto the next one. “Look!”

  I turn, following his pointed finger to the beach below. The man is standing there in the surf. His eyes are pitch black like the bottom of the ocean, except for the gleam of ghostly moonlight held in each orb.

  But it’s his face. It’s his face.

  It’s longer than it should be, and there are teeth jutting from the lower jaw, bearing an uncanny resemblance to an angler fish.

  “What the hell is that?” I feel my voice vibrate in my throat and chest. But I can’t hear it through the earmuffs.

  And so whatever Spencer says in reply is lost, too. A crashing wave sends fresh sea spray across my face. Spencer tugs me forward, encouraging me to climb again.

  He doesn’t have to tell me twice.

  The man—or whatever he is—seems unable to leave the water. But it doesn’t matter. I’m more than ready to leave.

  In fact, I can’t seem to climb the cliffs fast enough. And no matter how badly my legs shake and burn from the climb, I don’t stop until my hands touch the warm hood of Spencer’s car.

  Then I’m throwing open the passenger door and climbing inside.

  I snatch the earmuffs off my head. “What the hell was that?”

  My voice is deafening after so much silence.

  “A siren,” he says. “They guard the cove. They make sure ships, boats, whatever don’t find their way to Castle Cove uninvited. They serve Vendetta like everything else in this town.”

  “You just said a whole lot of things I don’t understand.”

  He runs his hand through his hair. “But you saw it, right? You understand that it isn’t human?”

  “No shit.”

  “I ask because you’ll never understand—let alone believe the rest—if you don’t understand that it isn’t human.” His eyes are wide and feverish in the dark.

  We are both fogging up the car windows with our rapid breath.

  “It wasn’t human,” I agree. “But that doesn’t mean I understand what the hell just happened.”

  He falls back against the seat as if greatly relieved by the news. As if he was jumping invisible hurdles I was unaware of.

  He licks his lips. “Sirens are just one of the creatures that live in Castle Cove. You’ve heard of vampires, werewolves, shifters.”

  “Folklore stuff. Myths. Legends.”

  “Yeah, but they’re real. And they’re here.”

  I fall back against my seat and try to understand this. Part of my mind rebukes it, rejects it. Vampires aren’t real. Werewolves? Is this guy crazy?

  But then I think of that lamprey mouth and the strange song that had entranced me, calling me into the ocean.

  “What was going to happen to me if that siren—”

  Spencer averts his eyes. “He would’ve raped you.”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “Your bare feet in the surf at night. That’s what drew the male. Sometimes it draws more than one, actually. The song creates a kind of glamour, showing you the sort of man you’re attracted to. And the song itself works as this bizarre seduction tool. It calls you.”

  I remember that pull, that tug through my abdomen, urging me forward.

  “I saw lights in the water,” I say. “Like those algae that light up.”

  “It was shifting form. So he could…” Spencer lets his voice trail.

  “So the sirens—mermen—whatever they are, they can just grow legs when they want?” I look out over the dark cliffs at the luminous moon.

  “There are even festivals. Where men and women volunteer to come down to the surf and be…taken by the sirens. It’s part of the treaty in exchange for their protection.”

  “Why in the world would they volunteer for that?”

  “The ones who live to tell the tale say that the experience is…” His face colors. “Well, that it’s worth it.”

  “The ones who live?”

  “Sometimes they drown,” he says. “The sirens can’t really leave the water and they don’t seem to understand how humans breathe.”

  I try to imagine all this. A strange festival where people march down the cliffs and put their bare feet in the surf. Where strange, beautiful sirens—to the entranced eye, at least—emerge from the ocean, ready and willing. And a town that just…what? Watches? Lets people be drowned accidentally?

  “Are you telling me everyone in this town is a monster?”

  “No,” he says, fiddling with the heat. “I’d say that about seventy percent are one thing or another—vampire, werewolf, whatever. And trust me there are plenty of things that you haven’t heard of.”

  “Like what?” As soon as I ask, I wonder if I’ll regret it.

  “There’s a tree in the Wayward Woods, miles beyond the West Territory Line called the crone tree. It’s supposed to be a sort of living goddess and the source of Vendetta’s power. There’s all kinds of shit in the Wayward Woods. A Wendigos, and fairies that eat children. Then there are the dryads that protect the crone tree. They shred anyone who crosses the West Territory Line. I’ve heard some people dump bodies in there, just so the dryads will clean up the mess.”

  It’s so hard to believe. So much to take in.

  “Who is Vendetta?”

  “They talk about her like she’s a god. And maybe she is. But it’s hard to know what’s real and what’s just superstition.”

  “Try me.”

  “They say she was human once, thousands of years ago. That she murdered some queen in revenge, but she had to sell her soul to an ancient goddess for the power to pull it off. The castle ruins is supposed to be what’s left of the queen’s Castle, from all those centuries ago.”

  “Doesn’t explain why so many…” I search for the word. “Creatures come here.”

  “They call her The Mother of Darkness. Every creature that exists is supposed to have come from her power. That she made the first of each.”

  I try to imagine such a terrifying woman.

  “So Vendetta is some kind of goddess they worship. More powerful than any of them.”

  “Yes.”

  “The origin of were
wolves and vampires and whatever else lives in the dark.”

  “Right.”

  I snort. “And she’s just walking around town?”

  “No. Ethan hides her. I’ve heard mention of a vault. Someone else called it a temple. Who knows where the hell she is. Castle Cove is bigger than it looks, especially if you go out into the woods.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?” I ask.

  “Because I want you to know what you’ve walked into. Humans who end up in Castle Cove unaware of the danger don’t last long. I should know.”

  I eye him suddenly. It’s the first time that I realize maybe he isn’t even human.

  “I’m human,” he says as if reading my mind. “And so was my sister.”

  Was.

  “What happened to her?” My voice is barely audible over the heat pumping through the car vents.

  “She disappeared off the lake trail behind Sunset Park one evening about two weeks after we moved to Castle Cove. I was stupid enough to believe that this was going to be a fresh start for us. We were both offered jobs here. Real convenient, considering I hadn’t even applied.”

  Could my job really be bait? Just a way to get me to move to this monster town?

  “You can only find Castle Cove if you’re invited,” he says. “Any local in town can tell you that. But what they won’t tell you is that not everyone is invited for the same reason. Some are invited so they can be with their own kind. But others are invited for dinner.”

  I try to grasp the notion that maybe I was lured into this town as a snack for one of its inhabitants.

  “Why would you stay then?” I ask. “If you’re human and it’s so dangerous.”

  “I’m not leaving until I get justice for Stephanie. Either I find her killer and destroy it. Or I die trying.”

  The anger sparking in his eyes frightens the hell out of me. But the picture of the man I’d been dodging all week finally comes into view. The pain. The resentment and suspicion.

  “What will you do?” he asks. “Are you going to stay or are you going to leave town?”

  It’s an excellent question. Do I want to stay here knowing what I know now?

  “I won’t pretend to know why you’re here or why you might want to stay. I’ll only say that if you do decide to stay, I want to finish the real tour. You need to know a few things about this town if you plan to survive in it.”