Night Tide

by Kory M. Shrum

  Eyes peered at her from the darkness, yet she didn’t seem deterred. She was about to enter the woods anyway.

  He closed the book and ran his hand over the cover. His fingernail caught on the embossed tree stamped into the leather. In the tree were six birds. He knew the species. Any wood scout would’ve been able to name them too: a crow, a heron, a hawk, an owl, a blue jay, and a swan. But the swan was black, not white, as evidenced by its inked-in body.

  A shiver ran up his spine.

  Of all these books in the entire shop, what were the chances that Gladys would pick a book about sirens at random?

  Grayson returned to the desk and opened the inventory file on the computer. There were only six books on sirens in the whole shop. Six out of nearly seventy thousand titles. The chances seemed small indeed.

  “So if it isn’t random,” he said, aloud. “Then what is the connection between the sirens and The Dark Mother?”

  He spoke aloud but there was no answer. No more books slipped from the shelves to the floor. He strained, listening intently to the hum as if expecting an answer.

  His phone buzzed suddenly and he yelped, squeezing the books to his chest.

  “Come on,” he muttered. He lifted his phone from the desk and saw Abby’s name above the incoming text.

  He opened the text and read: Hey, how are you?

  He took a breath, and tried to steady the wild hammer of his heart. Same. You?

  Same. This sucks, she wrote.

  Yeah.

  What are you doing?

  At work. You?

  Lying in bed staring at the ceiling like a weirdo

  He looked at the books on the desk. He opened the cover again and stared at the woman entering the menacing woods. He counted those eyes watching her.

  It made him think of the stories he’d heard about the Western Woods. West of the territory line, the forest was supposed to be full of old, ancient creatures. Dryads for starters, who craved human flesh and who would eat a person while they were still alive. Wendigos did much the same, but also dragged people to their underground dens. Then they overwintered, snacking on their captives until they went aboveground again.

  As a tenured professor at CCU, his mother would know more about this book and its stories. He would ask her later what she thought the connection between The Dark Mother and the sirens might be.

  He typed, we should find out what happened.

  We know what happened.

  I don’t think we do, he replied.

  ?

  There was the storm and the sirens came into the cove. What if there’s a reason for that?

  ?????

  They’re not supposed to be in the cove. What made them come in like that?

  You think there’s a reason?

  Yes, he wrote. Not just a reason but probably someone to blame.

  Abby didn’t seem to have a response for that.

  Don’t you want to know? What if it saves someone’s life?

  Not Landon’s life. Landon was dead and even in Castle Cove, he would probably stay that way. But Grayson was thinking about the next time someone was in the cove and the sirens broke the boundary of Heart’s Rock. What then?

  He typed out, For next time.

  It seemed like she wouldn’t write back. For minutes he stared at the screen. He put the phone down and searched the computer for the other book, The Dark Mother and Her Children. There was no listing in the computer. He checked his spelling twice, but nothing.

  How many secret treasures—like a hundred-year-old book—were hidden in this old dusty shop? Grayson couldn’t help but wonder.

  His phone buzzed.

  Sure, she wrote back. I’d want to know. But my mother will shit a brick if we start “investigating.” She’s already on the case.

  Do they have a lead?

  He traced the embossed tree with his fingers. His hand kept going to the blue heron.

  Not yet, she wrote. Promise you’ll take me with you if you plan on “investigating.”

  He smiled at her incessant use of quotation marks. What her mother did was no doubt investigating without quotation marks. Whatever sleuthing they would undertake—tomorrow or next week—certainly merited that distinction. They were not professionals.

  His phone buzzed again but it wasn’t a text message. It was an alarm for closing time. He powered down the computer and checked all the windows and back door to make sure they were locked up. He saw a book sitting open on a stool. A page turned.

  “Don’t stay up too late reading, Gladys,” he said and smiled to himself. “You’ll be dead tired tomorrow.” That was the one problem about making jokes with ghosts. One could never tell if they were appreciated.

  At the register, he wrote a note for Ms. Monroe, officially “checking out” the two books that Gladys had recommended. This was the shop’s policy, that he was allowed to borrow any book from the shelves that he liked, as long as he brought it back in the same condition he’d found it and made sure he recorded what he took.

  He always did.

  He flipped the open sign to closed, and with the two books under his arm, he stepped out onto the porch. His keys clanked against the wood as he locked up. He drove home in silence with the radio off, the two books sitting in the passenger seat beside him.

  When he got home, he found a note from his parents on the kitchen table.

  Gray,

  Took Tanner to his game. Might be back late, especially if they win. Pizza! Pizza! Leftovers in the fridge. Text us when you get home so we know you’re okay. Someone came by the house looking for you. See the note. Call us if something comes up.

  Mom and Dad

  A twinge of disappointment tightened his chest. He’d forgotten about the baseball game and he never missed Tanner’s games. Even when his parents couldn’t make it, Grayson was always there. He hadn’t even thought about the game. It wasn’t like him to have something so completely slip his mind.

  That’s what happens when your best friend dies, he thought. The mind vacillates between forgetting it happened—pretending nothing had changed—to being slammed with the reality of it again and again.

  Like a body tumbling in the moonlit surf.

  He sank into the dining room chair with tears in the corner of his eyes. He felt the image pressing in on him again. He bit his lip so hard that it bled. But at least the image was gone and he was in his body again.

  He texted his parents.

  I’m home. Tell T I’m sorry I missed the game.

  His mother wrote back almost instantly, as if she’d been holding the phone at the ready exactly for this moment.

  He understands. Are you staying in tonight?

  He practically heard the plea in her voice.

  I’m home for the night, he wrote as if throwing her a bone. He slid the books onto the table. I’ll be reading.

  Eat something. Call me if you need something. ANYTHING, she instructed.

  OK. And that was the end of it.

  Grayson left the books on the table and went into the kitchen. He made himself a plate of leftover Chinese, wanting to eat it cold this time, and added a heap of salad too.

  He didn’t look at the second note until he sat down at the table again.

  “Reese,” he read aloud, forking noodles into his mouth.

  Neither the number nor the name were in his parents’ handwriting, both of which he knew by heart. That meant the note must’ve been tacked to the door or stuffed in their mailbox while they were at work.

  So who was this mystery person? He didn’t know anyone by the name of Reese. If it was a cop or someone wanting to follow up on Landon’s death, wouldn’t they just have called him? Or maybe this was a reporter. There were two newspapers in Castle Cove.

  Unlike the rest of the country where the newspaper was dying a slow, bloody death, they were doing just fine in Castle Cove—both the respectable paper, The Cove Chronicle, and the gossip rag, The Daily Bite.

  The only problem was
that Grayson detested speaking on the phone. He certainly wasn’t going to call some stranger for a chat.

  “Here’s hoping this is a cell phone,” he said. He typed in the number and opened a new text message.

  This is Grayson H. You came by my house?

  No answer.

  He finished his dinner, rinsed his plate in the sink and when he opened the dishwasher to slide the plate into the rack, he heard the phone buzz on the kitchen table.

  hi grayson. i’m reese. i have some questions about what happened last night. can you talk?

  Grayson looked at the text for a long time. Reese was probably not a reporter, given the shorthand text speak. Hell, maybe they weren’t even out of high school. Was this about sports or graduation or something?

  He wrote back, I can talk.

  He carried his books into the living room and collapsed onto the sofa. No sooner did he get the pillow under his head did the phone ring.

  He sighed and accepted the call. “Hello?”

  “Hi,” a woman said. That answered the first mystery. Reese was a woman, not a man. And she sounded like a young woman from what he could tell, but not as young as he was imagining. Maybe her twenties? “Is this Grayson?”

  “Yeah. And you’re Reese?”

  “You got it,” she said.

  He could hear the smile in her voice. He wasn’t sure where to go from here. His silence probably conveyed as much.

  “I’m calling because I’ve got questions about what happened last night.”

  “Are you with the police?” He knew well enough to know that he shouldn’t give details to just anyone. After all, this woman could be a reporter or just a nosy—

  “Let’s call me a liaison. I already spoke to Detective O’Reilly. You can call her and confirm that it’s okay to talk to me if you’re worried. If you’re smart, you would.”

  “Are you a reporter?”

  “No. I’ve been asked to look into what happened so that’s what I’m doing.”

  Asked to look into it by whom? he wondered. And he wondered what it was about Reese that made her qualified for this job.

  Was she calling his bluff? She sounded so young.

  He said, “Can I call you right back?”

  “Sure. I’ll be here. My shift doesn’t start for another hour.”

  “Shift where?”

  “Alpha’s. I’m a bartender.”

  Grayson thought he might have seen the name Alpha’s above one of the bars near campus, but he couldn’t be sure.

  “Okay, just a minute.” He hung up and called the police station’s non-emergency line.

  “Castle Cove PD.”

  He recognized Yvonne Jenkins voice immediately. “Hi Officer Jenkins. This is Grayson Helmson. Is Detective O’Reilly around?”

  “Sure, honey. One second.”

  He flinched at the use of honey, but couldn’t remember a time that Yvonne hadn’t called everyone that. Honey. Sugar. Sometimes she added the word bear to the end of the affectionate title: Honey bear. Sugar bear. Though she’d seemed to drop the latter once he’d turned sixteen.

  “Here she is.”

  The phone clicked and Grayson heard the intake of breath. “Grayson, you there?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You okay?”

  He realized that was concern in her voice. The sort of knee jerk reactive fear that crept in when he called his own mother when she wasn’t expecting it.

  “I’m fine,” he said, knowing she’d hear nothing else he said until he assured her. “I’m calling about Reese.” Here he realized he hadn’t gotten her last name. “The bartender from Alpha’s.”

  “Oh, yeah.” All the breath left her at once. “She’s all right.”

  “She wants to ask me about what happened and I wanted to make sure that was okay before I said anything.”

  “Yes, it’s fine. She’s not officially with the police department, but she is investigating on behalf...” She seemed to search for the right word. “She’s investigating on our behalf.”

  Grayson had a sense that it was likely far more complicated than that. “So I can tell her what happened to Landon?”

  What happened to Landon... His chest tightened.

  “As long as you aren’t going to tell her something you haven’t already told me.”

  The question hung in the air between them.

  “No, there’s nothing else,” he said, wondering when he would be old enough that he no longer needed to constantly reassure the adults around him. Or maybe it was just the human parents in Castle Cove who were having such a hard time.

  “Then tell her what you know. She’s a good person. Clean record. She’s just trying to get us some answers.”

  Me too, he thought, feeling the weight of the books against his chest.

  “If that’s all—” she began.

  “Yes, that’s it. Thanks for taking my call.”

  “Sure thing.”

  Then the line clicked and his cell phone returned to the home screen. It was a picture of the three of them—Abby in the middle with their arms thrown over her shoulders. They were all smiling and laughing. He remembered his father taking that photo before they went to senior prom.

  He dialed Reese back.

  “We good?” she asked by way of hello.

  “We’re good,” he said. “What do you want to know?”

  “Actually I’d like to talk in person, if that’s okay,” she said.

  He was about to offer that she come by his house, but remembered what she’d said about work. “When?”

  “I can come by your place tomorrow if you’ll be home or you could come to Alpha’s tonight. It’s up to you.”

  “Is Alpha’s 21 and up?” he asked.

  “Oh, right. You’re eighteen.” She covered the phone with her hand. He heard her ask someone a question and he thought heard the gruff voice of a man responding. “You can come by if you want. Nick is working the door and he’ll let you in. Just give him your name and say you’re here to talk to me.”

  Grayson Choice 10

  Spend the Night Reading

  Go to Alpha’s

  Grayson: Go to Alpha’s

  “I’ll come to Alpha’s,” he said. “Give me twenty minutes.”

  “Great, I’ll tell Nick to keep an eye out for you.”

  When they hung up, Grayson leapt up from the couch in search of a pen. He had to leave his parents a note or they would panic to come home and find him gone.

  There was a blue ink pen with no cap in the kitchen junk drawer. Despite the loss of cap, it wrote fine. Grayson told his parents where he’d gone and about the conversation with Detective O’Reilly, just in case they thought his sudden trip to a bar might have another motive.

  He backed out of the driveway, pausing to let the orange tabby, Pumpkin, cross safely. He drove north-northeast, toward part of the city where the CCU campus ended and the strip began.

  The cloudy night meant little moonlight reached the road. Instead, the orange glow of street lamps prevailed, casting long shadows along the street and adjacent walkways.

  Grayson was surprised to see so many people out on the streets despite the hour. Castle Cove didn’t really sleep, not with so many supernaturals in town. But they tended to flock in certain areas. The people he saw meandering through town now looked human and young. Then he remembered it was the weekend during summer break. Of course people were out. The good weather and warm night air beckoned them to enjoy it.

  Grayson had a hard time finding street parking outside Alpha’s so he chose to canvass the parking garage a block away. He found a space on the third level and locked up his little sedan, pocketing the key.

  On the street he almost collided with a group of giggling girls. One was laughing so hard she was wheezing.

  He flashed a polite smile and stood aside for them to pass. He spotted Nick as soon as Alpha’s was in view. The man at the door was large and beefy. He had tattoos covering his forearms. A hint of ink pe
eked out from under his collar, suggesting he had full sleeves. His shaved head was specked with black stubble from regrowth. Grayson wondered if he intended to grow it out or shave it again. It didn’t seem like something he could ask as he stood in front of the man.

  “Are you Nick?” he asked. His mouth was dry.

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m Grayson,” he said. He thought about extending his hand to shake, but that seemed inappropriate.

  Nick nodded toward the door. “Go on, then.”

  The rough wooden door opened easily under the push of his hand, revealing a bustling bar inside. In fact, it looked more like a pub than a bar to Grayson, who had in fact gone to London for a week for a crew tournament. It was the booths and casual atmosphere. There was no dance floor or electro-pop blasting.

  Behind the bar there was a woman with blond hair pulled up into twin ponytails. The black-tipped end of the ponytails brushed her shoulders. She seemed to feel his eyes on her because she looked up and waved him over.

  He slid onto the only open stool. “I’m Grayson.”

  “Reese.” And she did extend her hand with a wide, friendly grin. “Thanks for coming down. I couldn’t really leave. Kristine needed the help.”

  As if reading his mind she pointed at the woman emerging from the back with a case of beer.

  “That’s Kristine,” Reese said. “She owns the place.”

  As soon as Grayson saw her, he knew she was a werewolf. The glowing, golden eyes gave her away. She regarded him with a polite, but reserved smile.

  “Hey,” she said, before opening the cooler and beginning the restock.

  Reese was speaking again. “Like I said on the phone, I’ve been asked to investigate what happened in the cove the night you were attacked. We’re worried about the sirens’ behavior.”

  “They aren’t supposed to come into the cove,” Grayson said, placing his laced hands on the cool, wooden bar. There was something sticky there. “At least that’s what we thought. The closest they were supposed to get was Heart’s Rock.”