by Maher Tegan
Unlike the value of standard antiques, the better the historical story or mystery on a rare piece, the more money it brought regardless of what the value would be without the backstory. Willa was capable of checking them for bad magic, but it wasn’t one of her strengths like it was mine. She was pathologically organized, though, and there were bare spots in the shop that she wanted—or rather needed—to fill. The mess in the back wasn’t doing anything for her mental health, either.
We were the fourth generation to work in the family business, and we’d learned the hard way to never sell an item or even let a potential customer touch it without cleansing it first. I might be a goof-off but not when it came to that. That was one of the many reasons I justified diving as much as I did. The reef had ripped open many a hull, and hurricanes had sunk a fair few, too. As a result, our bay was full of all sorts of goodies just waiting to be discovered.
Most of it was only worth anything to someone who appreciated the mystery of something long lost found, but we’d found our share of valuables, too. We’d discovered numerous gold medallions and coins dating back to the 1600s, and once, we found a large sterling-silver jewelry box still intact and full of jewelry valuable enough to add a nice chunk to the family fortune, especially after we’d traced it back to a duchess who’d left her husband to sail to the new world with her servant lover.
“Loose the lines, poppet, and let’s get to it!” Larry’s pegleg tapped against the deck as he ran the mainsail up and Eli jumped to get the jib.
One thing about Larry: he immersed himself in the sailor’s life. I don’t just mean he lived on a sailboat, drank copious amounts of rum, and had a large, colorful vocabulary, though that was all true. He also wore a pegleg even though he had a perfectly good prosthetic, and he insisted he lost his leg to a Great White that he, of course, killed for daring to maim him. In truth, he lost it in a freak lawnmower accident. Mentioning that, though, would get you keelhauled.
In fact, he played the part of sea rogue so well that I’d about fallen over when Maris had told me he had a master’s degree in astronomy. Just goes to show you never really know a person. Though to be fair, the shark story should have been a clue that all was not as it seemed.
I hopped onto the dock and unwound the line from the portside cleat and tossed it onto the boat, then did the same with the line on the starboard side.
“Ready to sail, Capt’n,” I said with a small salute toward the bow.
“Steady as she goes, then!” he called, slapping on his ratty captain’s hat as he fired up the engine. He’d use it to get us out of the marina, then switch to sails. We had a good wind, so we wouldn’t need it more than that.
Once we were in the bay, Eli trimmed the sails then assumed his favorite position on the foremost part of the bow. The wind ruffled his chestnut hair, blowing it loose from the rubber band that held it at the nape of his neck. A few years before, his barber had been out of town when Eli was due for a cut. By the time the guy’d returned, Eli had decided he liked his hair a little long. Or rather, he’d decided he liked irritating both my father and his mother by not keeping it trimmed. Now he wore is just long enough to gather in a short ponytail. Truth be told, he looked a little pirate-ish where he stood.
“Ahoy, matey!” he called, grinning at me over his shoulder. He’d taken his shirt off, and I was a little jealous that it took me a week to get as tan as he could in ten minutes.
‘Ahoy!” I called back, then made my way to where he was, grabbing a mast line when we hit a swell. The water was still a little choppy, but not too bad. The important part was that it was mostly clear. Visibility was important, and we were luckier than if we hadn’t had the reef. The water would have still been murky from the storm without it.
“I’m glad we decided not to cancel today,” I said, enjoying the sun on my face and the sound of the sea slapping the hull as we cut through the chop. “It would have sucked to wait another two weeks to do this.”
“Ye’re tellin’ me,” a gruff voice grumbled from behind me. Larry was making his way toward us, barely touching a line for balance. “I’m the one’s gonna be landlocked that long.”
“Yeah,” Eli said, one side of his mouth curving up in a half-smile. “How are you ever gonna rest without the ocean to rock you to sleep?”
Larry cut him a grouchy glare. “Don’t remind me. I ain’t slept on land in so long, I probably won’t get a wink bein’ away from my own rack. But there’s nothin’ I can do. Our brother needs some help, and Maris can’t do it alone.”
“Oh!” I exclaimed. “Maris is going, too? I didn’t know that.” In all of my twenty-eight years, I couldn’t remember Maris ever being away from the Clam.
“Yup,” he replied. “We’re gonna do a reunion of sorts while we’re there. We haven’t seen that part of our family in almost five years.”
I couldn’t imagine going five days without seeing my family, let alone five years. Sometimes they made me crazy, but I wouldn’t trade them for anything. Well, maybe my twin brother, but he was different. He was the one closest to me in personality, which meant in addition to being funny and easy-going, he was also stubborn and willful. Those traits served me well, but I didn’t like running up against them in him. Mom had always joked that she’d gone a week over her due date because we were busy arguing over who got to make the trip first. In the end, I’d won.
“How far out should we go?” Larry asked, eyes on the horizon.
“I think we’re gonna do a shallow dive, so let’s keep it at a couple miles,” Eli said. “That way we can cover more area.”
The bay was shallow and didn’t hit more than twenty feet deep until the reef, which was about three miles out. In most places, it wasn’t even that deep. We’d been diving for so long that we could both hold our breath for plenty long enough to explore a bit before we had to come back up for air even without magic.
Movement in the water caught my eye and I grinned when I saw a small school of dolphins shoot around the bow. I hurried toward the stern, careful to brace myself with the lines so I didn’t go overboard. It wouldn’t be a big deal, but Eli and Larry would never let me live it down.
Sure enough, fins flashed in the sun as the dolphins jumped and rolled, playing in the boat’s wake. Even though it happened all the time, I never got tired of seeing it. I plopped down on the transom and dangled my feet over while I watched them play.
I smiled when the water churned and spiraled upward, forming another dolphin, this one made of sea water. It leapt over the foam in the wake, and I didn’t have to turn around to know that Eli was standing behind me. It was one of his favorite tricks, and he knew how happy it made me. Suddenly, the dolphin morphed into a shark that leapt from the water. It chomped its jaws down on my bare foot then lost form and collapsed back down into the ocean with a splash.
I squealed and jerked my foot up, laughing. Even a fake shark was enough to scare the bejesus out of me.
“That never gets old.” He grinned as he took a seat beside me and peered into the water.
“The water’s still a little murky,” I said.
“Yeah, but I think it’ll be okay,” he replied. “We’ll hit the sandbars. Visibilty should be fine there, and we haven’t explored them for a while. I already told Larry, if that’s okay.”
I lifted a carefree shoulder. It didn’t matter to me where we went as long as we were on the water, and the water over the shoal wouldn’t be as deep.
We sat in comfortable silence for a few minutes just enjoying the view. The dolphins got bored after a bit and left to find other adventures, but we were both happy just passing time watching the water churn behind the boat.
Larry’s voice broke the quiet. “Comin’ up on the shoal. Tide’s almost high, but I’ll stay on this side all the same.”
He spilled the wind from the sails, and I smiled when a seagull that had flown a little too close squawked when they luffed. The flapping sound sent a little jolt of adrenaline through me because it
meant it was go time. Larry feathered the boat to a near standstill and we helped him drop anchor before we retrieved our goggles, fins, and snorkels from a storage cubby under a seat.
“While y’all are gone, I’m just gonna examine the backs of my eyelids for a bit. If you need me, holler,” Larry said as he opened a beach chair and settled into it.
“Will do,” I said as I pulled on my fins and slapped toward the transom where we’d jump.
“Here,” Eli said, handing me a mesh bag he’d designed just for us.
“Ready?” I asked, grinning at him as I snapped my mask on, leaving them on my forehead.
“Ready!” he said, then jumped.
Chapter 3
T he water was a little cooler than usual because of the storm, but that was a good thing. Sometimes it could get uncomfortably warm in the summer; I liked it best when it had just a bit of bite. After all, if I wanted to take a bath, I’d stay home. Since we were sitting over a fairly deep spot, I struck out for the shoals that were fifty yards or so away.
Once we were over the shoals, I turned to Eli. “One for the money!”
“Two for the show!” he replied, delivering the second line of our dive ditty.
“Three for the treasure, now go, dive, go!” we said together, then took deep breaths and dove.
No surprise, the storm had nudged the shoals around a little. There were three of them in total, each twenty or so feet wide, where the water was only ten feet deep. Then there were deeper channels between them where the water dipped to up to twenty feet deep. Larry had explained how and why they were formed that way, but suffice it to say, wind, location, and tides were responsible.
I spent my first breath just relaxing and fish-watching. Even though the water was still a little cloudy, I had decent visibility. After a couple minutes, I surfaced for more air and decided it was time to go to work. I pulled my metal detector from my bag and hit the button to turn it on, then dove back down. I’d only gone a few feet along the bottom when the red lights on it blinked and the machine vibrated. Using the little spatula end of it, I moved the sand as gently as I could to keep from clouding the water, then slid my fingers under the sand, too.
Sure enough, my fingers closed around something that felt like a coin. I picked it up and brought it in front of my mask, then curled my nose when I realized I’d found a modern quarter. I stuffed it in my bag so I wouldn’t keep finding it over and over, then moved on.
It went like that for fifteen minutes or so. I found a couple pieces of sea glass and an old button that might make for good souvenirs for the shop, but nothing world-shattering. I was just about to move to the next shoal over when my detector went off again, this time over an area too large to be a coin. I shoved the sand around, sifting through it with my fingers so I wouldn’t miss anything. When I didn’t find anything on the surface, I dug a little deeper. About six inches down or so, I hit paydirt in the form of what felt like the corner of a box.
Adrenaline coursed through me and the fine hairs on the back of my neck stood up like they did whenever I found something exciting. I was almost to the end of my air supply but didn’t want to risk losing the find in the murky water before I at least got it uncovered. I dug a little quicker, trying to pull the sand away faster than the hole filled back in. Finally, my hand closed around a leather handle. My air was nearly gone, so I shrugged my bag off and shoved the string down and around the handle, then pushed my way toward the surface.
I sucked precious air in, then looked around for Eli. He bobbed to the surface fifty feet from me.
“Hey! C’mere—I found something!” If we could get the box out of the sand far enough, Larry had a winch we could use to drag it to the boat. I didn’t want to attach anything to that handle to drag it out of the sand, though, because I didn’t want to damage it any more than the sea already had.
Eli swam toward me. “What did you find?”
“A box of some sort. Maybe a chest. It has a leather handle on it, but I can’t get it uncovered enough to pull it out. It’s marked with my bag.”
He grinned. “Let’s go see what you’ve found!” With that, he sucked in a lungful of air and dove.
By the time I swam back to the box, he was already digging with both hands, so I joined him, drilling my hand into the sand a couple of feet away in the direction the box was sitting in the hopes of finding a handle on that end, too. If we could get ahold of it from either end, that might make it much easier to pull out.
After ten or fifteen seconds, he tapped me on the shoulder and motioned for me to move back. When I did, he rolled his shoulders and focused on the box. I realized what he was about to do and shook my head. Magic underwater was tricky. I didn’t doubt his abilities, but I really didn’t want to damage that box.
He didn’t see me in time, though, and green light flashed as he cast the spell. Rather than move the sand or pull the box to the top, or do whatever it was he’d intended, the magic bounced off the sand and my armlet almost burned me, it got so hot. I barely managed to push to my left in time to avoid it. Eli glanced at me, brows knit behind his mask, and shrugged.
I jumped and spun around when something tapped me on the shoulder. A long, broad blue tentacle waved at me, then motioned for me to move. I followed it back to where I assumed it disappeared over the edge of the shoal into the deeper chasm that ran between them and grinned. Chet, a real-life baby kraken, was peeping at me over the edge, his giant brown eyes glimmering with happiness. He was too big to fit his body onto the shoal, but apparently the channel was deep enough for him. Barely, from the look of things. Thank goodness the tide was high.
While a run-in with an octopus the size of a utility shed might have made most people either gasp in a lungful of water and drown or pull a Jesus and walk on water back to the boat, it didn’t bother me all. At least not this time. I ran into this particular kraken on a regular basis when I went diving on the other side of the reef. I’d met Chet—that was just the name I’d given him—a couple years ago, and he’d proven to be friendly and even helpful at times.
He nudged me a little, so I did as he asked and gave him some room. As soon as I did, he wormed his tentacle into the sand and gently pulled the box free. Once it was sitting on the surface, Chet flipped his tentacle upside down in a “what now” gesture, then pointed to the boat. He was asking if we wanted him to drag it closer. I held my figure up to him, asking him to hang on, then motioned to Eli to surface.
When we broke the surface, he was grinning. “Did you see the size of that thing?”
Assuming he was talking about the box rather than the kraken, I grinned back. “I did! It looks like an old steamer trunk. I wonder what’s in it.”
“No idea,” he replied. “Maybe nothing, but I can’t wait to see.” He pivoted toward the boat and held his hand up to shield his eyes. “I can’t see the dinghy, so I can’t summon it. You’ll have to.”
Larry kept a dinghy with a trolling moter tethered to the aft of the boat at all times in case of emergency or if he just wanted to putter without dragging the big boat out. Also, sailboats weren’t exactly made for fishing in shallow water.
Eli was an ace at a lot of things, but summoning wasn’t one of them. I closed my eyes and pictured the boat, then pulled my magic up. After I untied it, I willed it around the corner of the boat and toward us. Once it was a few feet away, I released my magic and swam around to grab its tether, then handed it to Eli. “Hold this. I’ll go ask Chet to lift the chest in.”
He nodded, and I dove back toward the trunk. Chet was still hovering in the channel between the shoals but extended his tentacle toward me when he saw me and flipped it over again in askance, then pointed to the dinghy that floated above us. We’d developed a handy nonverbal communication system over the years, and I knew what he was asking. I nodded and gave him a thumbs-up.
As he drilled gently into the sand with his tentacle, I had to admire how dexterous he was. Even though the appendage was every bit of twenty f
eet long, he had total control of it all the way to the tapered blue suction-cupped tip. Once he’d worked his tentacle under the trunk, he encircled it and lifted it toward the dinghy. I surfaced just in time to watch him settle it in the little boat with a soft thunk. I stuck my head back under the water and gave him another thumbs-up and a smile. He waved before slipping into the crevice, a swirl of sand following him.
“You ready to dig into our booty?” Eli asked from the other side of the dinghy, and it said a lot about how excited he was that he didn’t realize how that had played.
I raised a brow at him and grinned. “I don’t know about all that, but I’d definitely like to see what’s in the trunk.”
He rolled his eyes as he hoisted himself into the dinghy then held his hand down to me. “You’re just wrong in the head. C’mon up here and let’s see how rich we just got.”
I took his arm and he groaned as he tugged me into the little boat. “Holy jeez, Sage.”
I scowled at him as I scrambled into the boat and plopped down on the aft bench. “Not another word unless you wanna walk around with neon-green nipples for the next week.”
He reflexively crossed his arms as he sat down beside me. “That’s just mean.”
“Maybe,” I said, nudging him with my elbow and smiling at him, “but isn’t that one of the reasons we get along?”
“Well, yeah, but some things are sacred. Now, let’s check out our haul.”
The trunk was in surprisingly good shape considering how far down it had been buried, but it had definitely seen better days. The brass hinges, corner wraps, and bands around it were barely corroded, but the wood was scarred in ways that would suggest the damage had happened pre-sinking.
“It doesn’t look like it’s been in there very long, does it?” I asked, giving it a critical once-over.
