Deep Betrayal

chapter 31

LAIR AND LIAR



I was inside the cave behind the falls. I whispered Calder’s name, but only the walls whispered back. Dank and rough, as if carved by a giant pickax, the rock walls seeped to the point of dripping in the small puddles around my feet. The aroma of rotted fish coated my mouth and a coppery tang settled behind my teeth. Pinprick beams of light crisscrossed through the cavern where moles had burrowed through the surrounding ground, finding weak spots in the rock. Their toothpick bones crunched under my bare feet.

I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but there was nothing to see. Whispering Calder’s name again, I felt him reach for my hand and pull me to his side. He shook his head in apparent exasperation, but he didn’t scold me. He couldn’t have believed I would let him go in alone.

Neither of us dared to speak too loudly or too much. This was hallowed ground. Had any human being come so far before? As far as I could tell, there were no large bones on the floor.

“We should have brought her an offering,” whispered Calder. “How stupid can I get? I guess I never really thought …”

“Wait, I have this,” I said, digging in my pocket. “It’s not much, but it is tobacco.” I handed him the pack of cigarettes I’d found on the hillside, and he sniffed at it before slipping the four remaining cigarettes into his hand. He tore off the filters and peeled the wet paper.

“Follow me,” he said, and we crept deeper into the cave, my hands on his back. He stopped, reacting to something I couldn’t see. He ground the wet tobacco between his palms and sifted it in a line across the stone floor.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“We wait.”

“How long?”

“Not long. If she’s here, she already knows we’ve come.”

We slid down the wall to wait. Calder rolled the dagger’s handle around in his hands. The only sounds were the constant dripping and the muted roar of the falls above us, like traffic on a distant highway.

Calder grabbed my wrist and took back his watch. He hit a button and illuminated our faces. “Forgot this had a light,” he said. “Sorry, that would have been helpful before.”

Only then did I see the worry on his face. I almost wished he’d turn off the light. Calder bent his head and whispered something in an unfamiliar language, repeatedly. Although I couldn’t understand him, I was certain he was practicing for the confrontation.

After what felt like a very short time, he stopped whispering and checked his watch. “It’s already been an hour,” he said. He held his wrist up and aimed the light around the cavern. The carpet of bones reflected back the light. Below them were thousands of small, green-patinaed discs. Calder reached forward and raked his hand through some of them. He crawled away, scattering the bones as he moved.

“What are you doing?”

“There’s nothing here,” he said.

“What are you looking for?”

“Your soggy cigarettes are the only offering here. There’s nothing else. No new copper, no tobacco, no wild rice …”

“I don’t know about the copper, but wouldn’t tobacco and rice have rotted over time? You don’t really expect that to still be here?”

“That’s my point. It’s been a long time since anyone has made any offering. Anything dropped over the falls would have been sucked inside like we were. There’s nothing here.”

“So what does that mean?”

“Maris was right. We’re not the only ones who forgot about Maighdean Mara. Her human followers have forgotten her, too. She’s been neglected for a very long time. No wonder she’s gone off to fend for herself.”

“If she’s not here, how do we find her?” I asked.

“We’re going to need more help.”


Later that night, after Calder had left to look for Dad, I sat on the porch roof, utterly defeated. In all of Calder’s years in the lake, he’d never seen sign of Maighdean Mara. In all the searching Calder and Dad had done for Maris and Pavati, they’d never seen any evidence of her. In all my experimentation, I’d never once heard the voice of a monster in the channel. What chance did we really have of finding her? And if we did find her, what chance did we have of stopping her?

Doubt weighed heavily on my thoughts. We stood a much better chance of stopping the killings if Dad was behind them. But I couldn’t go there. Try as I might, it was impossible to imagine him that way—snatching Scotty so quickly no one else noticed. Bringing him down so deep, the surface was undisturbed.

I forced my thoughts back to Maighdean Mara. The dagger was real after all. And so was the cave. But other than the wind-chime carving, I had no clear image of what Maighdean Mara even looked like. Every time I tried to picture her as a killer, it wasn’t a monster I saw. Instead, I imagined a staggeringly beautiful face, with dark spiraling hair and violet eyes that evoked the sky after the rain. Pavati.

Outside my open window, there was no wind, no birds, no June bugs bouncing against the screen. It was easy to hear the water lapping at the shore, and with it an unfamiliar humming. When the humming turned to soft laughter, I moved to the window. The outdoor lights were off, but the moon beat a path of light across the water to our dock. I thought I could pick out some dark shapes near the shore. Dad?

I snuck outside, being careful not to let the front door slam, and picked my way across the yard. As I got closer, I heard bits of conversation, an “I can’t” and “It’s too hard.”

It wasn’t Dad. It was Sophie. She sat cross-legged in the dark at the end of the dock, centered in the beam of moonlight, talking to herself. I’d never known her to sleepwalk.

“Sophie?” I whispered through the night air. She didn’t respond.

I crept closer. More indistinct murmurs. I thought someone said “sunglasses” (or “fun classes” or maybe “my guess is”). And then another voice, raspy in the night. “You have to set it up. Two days should give me enough time to prepare. Tuesday at dusk. Can you do it?”

Sophie said, “How am I supposed to—”

“Tell him to go to the flat rocks—south of town—he’ll know the place. You must get him there.”

“And if I do, you think you’ll be able to convince him?” Sophie asked.

“Sophie,” I called again.

This time Sophie startled and whipped around, half crouched, half ready to bolt. There was a small splash from the water, but when I got close enough to see, there was nothing there.

“Who were you talking to?” I asked.

“No one.”

“Don’t lie to me. Was it Dad?”

“It wasn’t Dad,” she said.

“Someone else then?”

There was a small pip of a sound, and Sophie turned toward the lake. I was not entirely surprised to see Pavati’s face emerge from the inky blackness—I had been imagining her so clearly just moments before. She folded her arms across her withered chest and tapped her fingers against her arms, making it clear that my presence was unwanted. Her face, yellow as the moon above her, squinted at me from the darkness, her eyes sunken in the sockets, her cheekbones protruding.

“I’ve always liked your sister better,” she said. “You’ve been problematic since the beginning.” She rose a few inches higher in the water, and her dark hair lay flat against her razor-sharp jaw and over her pointed shoulders.

I pulled at the back of Sophie’s pj’s, trying to get her to retreat, but she must have been transfixed, because she refused to move.

“What do you want?” I asked, not wanting the answer because there was nothing I was willing to give her. “Are you here to kill us?” My body buzzed with a dark, prickly heat.

Pavati grimaced as she sensed my mood, and she looked away without a word. Sophie made an apologetic sound.

“Then what?” I asked, thankful that the sight of my terror repulsed her. Right now, it was my only weapon.

“Girl talk,” said Pavati through gritted teeth. She serpentined through the water in front of our dock, back and forth, in a fluid motion.

I took another step toward the house, pulling Sophie with me. Sophie tried to pry my fingers away.

Pavati closed her eyes and turned away from me in disgust. Sophie groaned, too, as Pavati said, “Would you please relax, Lily Hancock? You look disgusting. Deep breaths.”

She squinted at me again, then slammed her eyes shut like the doors to a vault. “God, I must have really scared you. I told you. I’m just here to talk. Your sister is hardly afraid.”

Sophie whispered, “Please, Lily. Just relax. It’s okay. Pavati is my friend.”

Pavati looked over her shoulder at me and turned around with a thin smile as my anxiety turned to a less repellant aura of confusion. “Why are you here?” I asked. “What do you want with Sophie?”

Pavati stopped swimming and laid her arms flat on the top of the water. “Based on what I’ve known about your sister, and based on what I saw of your talents last week, you two might be exactly what Maris needs.”

“I don’t follow. Why are you here?”

She sighed as if I were being unbelievably obtuse. “Mermaids need family, Lily Hancock. We’ve lost fifty percent of ours. Looks like you’re our key to gaining our brother back.”

“That’s not what we were—” Sophie said, but Pavati cut her off with a look.

“I don’t have any influence over Calder that way. He’s pretty stub—”

“I mean our other brother,” Pavati said quickly.

I set my jaw and ground my teeth. If she thought I was going to turn over my father, she must have short-term memory loss.

“Easy, girl,” said Pavati. “Let me put it this way. Your skills as Halfs have me wondering about him. You say he isn’t hunting. I’ll take you at your word.”

I swallowed hard, wishing I could just as easily accept that as the truth.

Pavati continued, “But is he … normal?”

“Define ‘normal.’ ”

“Once Maris explained the truth to me about your father, I naturally assumed, since he never came back to the lake … all those years … that he wouldn’t be able to make the change.”

I stared at her without speaking.

“But Calder suggested that wasn’t the case. My next assumption was that delaying his natural development would have had some debilitating effects. Perhaps he is a little impaired?”

“He’s fine.”

“Is he sane?”

“Sane enough.”

“His brain hasn’t been addled by malice?” When I didn’t respond she started ticking things off on her fingers. “He isn’t unnaturally sadistic, melancholy, morbid, masochistic, neurotic—”

I held up my hand and stopped her list in its tracks. “Unnatural is an interesting word. He’s just going through some … growing pains right now.”

She sighed knowingly. “Maris said she always assumed he’d be a freak.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

“What part?”

“I don’t believe any of what you’re saying. You’re not here because Maris wants to bring Dad—or Calder, for that matter—back into the family.”

“Why would you say that?” asked Pavati, her voice a velvety seduction.

“If that were true, you wouldn’t have been so hard for them to find. Calder wouldn’t have had to use me, my friends …”

“You’ve got that backward,” said Pavati. “I think you mean if Calder hadn’t left the family, we would have been easy for him to find. And vice versa. And I promise—”

“Promises! What about your promise to Jack? What about the promise you made this spring?” I asked, and Sophie drew in a quick breath behind me. “Did you really go see him two weeks ago? Jack said you did, but Calder had a hard time believing it.”

Pavati tipped her head to the side like a seagull examining an apple fritter. “Jack saw me? He knows I came?”

“He said you came, but then you ran away.”

She sighed and looked at Sophie. “I’m trying to make good on my promise. I need to make good on that promise. But the timing is out of my hands,” she said. She moved her arms gently across the surface of the water, bringing her hands together, palms up.

“Whose hands is it in?”

She stared intently at Sophie in a way that made me squirm. Instinctively, I positioned my body between my sister and the emaciated mermaid. “Easy,” Pavati said. “I’ve always had a soft spot for your sister. She knows I would never hurt her.”

“Why was it so easy for you to leave Jack?” I asked. It was a question that had bothered me for months—ever since Jack first told me his history with Pavati. It was the question that had allowed me to doubt Calder’s feelings for me.

“I don’t understand what you’re asking,” she said, her gaze moving from Sophie to me. The water rippled softly across her shoulders.

Her confusion made me more uneasy than the expected answer. “You loved him.”

“If you’d like to call it that,” she said, shrugging. Her eyes burned like the aurora borealis.

I wondered how she’d feel if she knew it was Jack who killed Tallulah. Would she want to kill him just as they’d wanted to kill Dad? Was there enough love between Pavati and Jack that she’d feel at least a little bit bad when she dragged him under?

Pavati dropped lower, the water now grazing her chin. “I understand you went looking for Maighdean Mara today.”

“How did you know that?” I hadn’t made any attempt to hide my thoughts yesterday. Calder had never asked that I “blank canvas” my mind. Had it been Maris and Pavati watching us? Had they watched ambivalently as we risked our lives?

“Did you find her?” she asked.

“We did not,” I said, my face and voice like stone.

“Hmmm. Maybe Coyote has a better idea.”

“Coyote?”

“Go see Jack’s dad. He knows him,” she said, her Cheshire-cat smirk disappearing in the darkness.

MY SCRIBBLINGS

I do not need to breathe

to write these lines because air

is a luxury for the weak

and if I haven’t mentioned it,

that’s not me.

MERMAID STATS

Best Swim Time: 5 Min. 52 secs

Voices: Able to Project and Receive

Tail: None