Halfway Drowned (Halfway Witchy Book 4) Page 13

  Eli said nothing, but his eyes were round with surprise. Whatever he’d been expecting, it wasn’t a lesson in McEwan family witchcraft.

  Brendan shrugged, palms up. “I--uh”--

  I could smell the fear on him. It clung to his breath like yesterday’s wine. He looked at me, and now there was something else on my friend’s face. Emotion raced across his features like storm clouds, leaving him uncertain and ready to flee. A small part of me was glad that he understood the power of my will, because whatever patience I had for these men was quickly draining away. Something had been close to Wulfric, and that something was swimming free down there because two nerds were afraid of ceding control to someone more intelligent.

  The last thread of my patience parted without a sound. I put a hand down on the workbench, drawing lazy symbols while looking down. Thump. Thump. Thump-thump. Brendan’s heart sped up as he watched me, and my lips curled in what was supposed to be a smile. He moved away from me in a tiny gesture that only I noticed.

  “This is my lake, and by extension, my town. That means I have an unwelcome visitor who is in defiance of the very rules that have kept Halfway safe for more than two centuries. I need you to fix this lens, and quickly. Then, when the job is done, I need you to help Eli find some information.”

  Nobody spoke for a long moment, then Brendan moved away from me. He steadied himself with a hand on the bench, then took the lens back. “I can fix it, Carlie.” He sounded curiously neutral, but I wasn’t looking for enthusiasm. I wanted results.

  “And the other thing?” I prodded.

  “Um, the information?” At my nod, Brendan turned to Eli, the picture of accommodation. “What do you need?”

  Eli sensed the dynamic of our group was changing, but made no comment other than to answer the question. “Deep water. I need anything that might be off the map, but it’s got to be far deeper than the rest of the lake. An odd place of”--

  “You don’t need me for this. Carlie,” Brendan interrupted. “You need people who know the land and people who know the past.”

  “I thought that was you?” It seemed logical to me, but Brendan was shaking his head.

  “It is, to a point. You need more than one person for this, and I don’t think you’re going to like it.” He grinned, but it was forced and a touch sour.

  “Oh.” I let the facts sink in, knowing I’d painted myself into a corner. I filed one answer away for later, asking the question that could fill in the blanks. “Who is the other person?”

  “Exit Wainwright. He was mining this area before there were cars, so I’d call him a pretty good source for the secret corners where water might be deep enough to hide something that doesn’t want to be found.” Brendan told me this with an air of authority, which seemed a lot more normal to me despite the fact that I was the reason things were so tense.

  “Is Exit, um, human?” Eli asked with some trepidation. He was reaching maximum weird for one day. It happens around me quite a bit.

  “Very. Nice guy, and really knows the area, too, but we’ve tried to protect him from bringing up too much of the past. It’s full of sadness, but he’s tough. I’ll text him and arrange for tea or lunch. He was--well, he was put into suspended animation for a century by a warlock, but Carlie fixed the spell,” Brendan said.

  “And the warlock,” I added.

  “Naturally.” Eli fought the urge to roll his eyes, but his curiosity overwhelmed him. “What did Exit do before he was, um, before the bad thing happened to him?”

  “He was a mining engineer under President Roosevelt, and really good at it, too. He mapped and explored and sampled a lot of the area around Halfway. I can’t believe I didn’t think of him immediately, but I guess anytime Anna is in the picture, I get a little unreasonable,” I explained.

  Eli waved a hand elegantly, as if my response was the most natural thing in the world. “Do tell, who is Anna, and why does she make you less than your usual effervescent self?”

  I wanted to give him the stinkeye, but he was right. “Well, it’s like this”--

  Brendan interrupted with enthusiasm. “Anna is a super-hot girl who seduced Wulfric, had his baby, and Carlie doesn’t like her. She likes her brother, Alex, because he’s a good dude. But as far as Anna goes, it makes Carlie crazy because she thinks that sharing a daughter with Wulfric means that she might lose him to Anna. Anyone with half a brain can see that isn’t going to happen, but everyone has their Achilles’ heel, and for Carlie, it’s Anna.”

  “Hot? Like, how hot?” Eli gave me an appraising look as he mentally prepared to compare me to Anna. I fought the urge to kick him.

  “Oh, dude, you have no idea.” The conversation shifted into a mode like I wasn’t even present. “She used to hula hoop in her garage, and people always found a reason to walk by, if you know what I mean,” Brendan enthused.

  “Hula hoop?” Eli closed his eyes for a second, considering the possibilities. “That is kind of . . . different.”

  “Hey! Perv brigade! Back to reality, okay?” I glared at both of them for their display of interest in Anna and her disturbing ability to make hula hooping into something erotic.

  It was as if I hadn’t spoken. “Oh, and she’s a cat. Or a werecat, but you understand the difference.”

  Eli held up a hand. “No I don’t. A werecat?” He put his hands up like cat ears, wiggling them. “Meow, cat, rargh? Like that?”

  “Yeah, but bigger. I think that, technically, she’s a jaguar. Or a panther. I can never keep the big cats straight when they’re all one color, but yeah, full on. Drops to all fours and takes off like a jet, and she’s really quiet when she’s in animal form. It’s a bit weird to have her watch you eat breakfast.”

  “Really? That’s the weird part, not a woman who can change into a cat?” Eli said in disbelief.

  “Well, yeah.” Brendan shrugged, helpless to deny the nature of Halfway.

  Eli sat stunned for a second, then shook his head. “I guess we need to find--how do you reach Anna, anyway?”

  “Same as everyone else. We text her. Did you think she couldn’t use a phone because of her paws?” I asked.

  Eli shot me a hard look. “Look, just because your life is weirder than mine is no reason to troll me.”

  “Oh, I’m not trolling you. If I did that. We’d need to go to the mill pond bridge,” I said reasonably.

  “Let me guess. That’s where the troll lives?” Eli asked, and Brendan grinned at his discomfort.

  “Naturally. They’re under bridges, Eli. You don’t think they’d live somewhere crazy, like a townhouse?” I smiled at his discomfort and left. I would need a quiet word with Wulfric before bringing Anna onboard our little venture.

  Exit was another issue entirely, but I had help if I played my cards right. I needed Gran, and that’s who I was going to recruit.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Exit, Stage Left

  Gran watched me over the rim of her teacup, the weight of her stare growing in the uncomfortable pause. I’d refused not one but two offers of an egg sandwich, followed by one of her brownies, a slice of cake, and a bowl of grapes that glistened invitingly. Everything smelled slightly off to me, save the tea I was drinking, and even that wasn’t quite right. I was either getting sick or my impatience was making me unreasonable. It was probably both, because I could feel my face draw up into an expression of disbelief, watching Exit Wainwight take yet another polite bite of his sandwich. It was like watching some medieval princess eat in front of a room full of suitors.

  I waited for Exit to get situated and finish chewing, a feat that seemed to take the better part of an hour. He chewed. And chewed. And then, he chewed some more and delicately wiped the corners of his mouth with a napkin. I decided he wasn’t eating like a princess, he ate like Gus, except there was no weird judgmental stare in between bites.

  “You’re really m
aking that egg sandwich last, aren’t you?” Gran asked him, as close to an insult as would ever cross her lips.

  Exit merely nodded, clasping the remains of his lunch in a long hand. He was a tall, rangy guy, and his knees touched Gran’s table despite having pulled his chair out. He wore jeans and a modern golf shirt, a far cry from the original clothing I’d found him in after his century of magical sleep in an abandoned mine. All in all, he was doing rather well, though I thought his chances of surviving lunch were slim if he didn’t hurry up. The three of us were in Gran’s kitchen after he’d answered my text, but it looked like only two of us might leave alive if he didn’t answer my question.

  He was stalling, and I didn’t know why. Naturally, I used my reasonable powers of persuasion as he fussed with his cup of tea, but he appeared to be fully immune to my stinkeye, so I put a hand on his arm and glared up at him.

  “You’re stalling,” I explained, again the picture of reason. “It makes me want to turn you into a toad.”

  He considered this for a maddening, silent span, then nodded. “You might, but then you wouldn’t get your answer.” His brown eyes fairly twinkled at me, which naturally made me even angrier. To my disgust, Gran did nothing but give us both a neutral smile. Exit is a handsome man with black hair that he combs to one side, giving him a rakish appearance, but just then he looked like a cocky teenager who knows he’s winning at life.

  I could almost feel myself reaching for a mild spell to freeze one of his toes or some other minor inconvenience, but he relented with a sad smile, and my mood drained away into something dark. I’d seen that kind of smile before, and on his face, it meant he was going to talk about the past. For Exit, most of the past isn’t just bad, it’s dangerous.

  “When we met, I told you of Bartolomeo Fumafreddo, the man who led me to explore this area?” He asked, and I noticed he’d shaved his mustache. It made him look younger.

  “The wanderer, you called him?” Gran’s recollection was excellent. Exit merely nodded, looking down at his plate again, and I wondered if he was going woolgathering.

  He wasn’t. “The same. Bart tended towards--let’s call it excitability. It was his nature to become wrapped up in the fantastic and make the ordinary into something amazing. He was more than a salesman or huckster, I’m not implying otherwise. He just covered so much ground that to him, there was always something wondrous just around the corner. As I’m sure you know, he had no idea how close he was to the truth.”

  The mountains were filled with wonder. And danger.

  “In the years I’d known him, only one thing ever seemed to give him pause, and that was when he lost two men in an accident. It was a year before I arrived here, and Bart wouldn’t speak of it or allow further investigation beyond the recovery of their bodies,” Exit said, folding his napkin into a series of shapes while looking down. He was sifting memories that were second hand, but the danger was close.

  “Where?” Gran asked.

  Exit pointed to the northwest. “Just beyond the lake. Two men drowned. Experienced men who knew the land, but not this land. Their bodies were pulled out of the lake three days later, I’m told, but not before something had raked them from end to end. Animals, said the local men who brought them into town.”

  “And you don’t believe that?” I asked. I knew I didn’t, and I’d been born decades later.

  He shook his head once. “No, and neither do you. Bart found a great deal of unexplained things in these mountains, but not one of them resulted in corpses. This event did, which is why it’s notable to me even today. I’d not given it any thought until that ship made itself known, but it seems to have some bearing on the current situation in Halfway.”

  Exit lived outside Halfway, working as a mountain tour guide for a friendly company that didn’t ask too many questions. He’d acquired a small piece of property from some mysterious benefactor who looked exactly like Gran, and he was a regular in town, even eating at the diner once or twice a week where we would catch up on his activities. For someone who’d been born in the nineteenth century, he fit in well.

  It dawned on me that I’d never really asked him about his life outside the issues after his awakening, mostly because we spoke when I was busy cooking a window full of diner tickets. I made a mental note to correct that oversight, and then looked to Gran as a way of including her in my next question.

  “Have the two of you spoken about any of the strange things Bart saw when he was traipsing around the woods?” I knew they had tea, but wasn’t sure if he’d opened up to Gran. His wife’s death had been raw, meaning he could easily still be in mourning.

  Exit’s bark of laughter shocked me. “Have we. There isn’t enough time to discuss every rumor or sighting that Bart heard about. But this thing, the ship? There was no sign of such a magnificent artifact, Carlie. There were no stories, no hints, nothing.”

  “About the ship. You didn’t say there were stories about things connected to the ship,” I corrected.

  “No, I didn’t, but not because I was omitting the truth. Bart’s men were drowned in a place that was hard to find, difficult to explain, and worth avoiding.”

  Gran raised a finger. “You said the men were drowned. Not that they drowned.”

  He turned to regard Gran with respect. “Correct. According to Bart, they were drowned, and not accidentally. A conscious effort to hold two strong, capable men underwater and kill them in a manner most foul.”

  Gran’s finger made lazy circles on her teacup as she considered her words. “To the northwest? That’s outside what used to be Wulfric’s lands, isn’t it?”

  “It is,” I answered.

  “Which means that something is there, or was there, and didn’t wish to be found.” Gran looked to Exit, who began to pull away from her instinctively. He knew what was coming.

  “Can you show us?” She asked.

  The silence stretched as he closed his eyes, tracing second-hand steps and rumors to a location he’d only heard about. “No, I can’t.”

  “Why?” I snapped. I felt my temper flaring and took a breath. Gran gave me a sharp look but said nothing as the blood pounded in my ears. I really needed to look into anger management at some point, just not right then.

  “I would, but I’m not sure I can physically get there. From what I know, there’s an impassable deadfall that covers an old stream bed. It was overgrown even in my time, but now, I can’t imagine what kind of dense forest and brambles are covering the access to it,” Exit said while making motions with his hands. He indicated some kind of a wall, or barrier.

  Gran looked thoughtful. “I’ve never heard of this deadfall, and I’ve been here my whole life. Could it be gone?”

  “I wouldn’t know, but it might take some rather special activity to get over and around it,” he said. A sly smile crossed his lips as he looked at me and Gran in turn. He knew we could fly, or hover at speed, as I called it, but even that might not surmount some natural barriers.

  “The first thing to do is find it. The second thing to do is go over or around it, and the third thing is where we’ll need help,” Gran said, ticking off points on her hand.

  “Wulfric?” I asked. We’d need him to go into the water, although the idea of sending him somewhere that men died gave me chills.

  “Among others. I’ll ask Anna and Alex to drop by and speak to us, but we’ll also need your scientist to come along. He’ll be able to determine if the setting is natural, and we’ll handle anything else that might be lurking about.” Gran stood, setting her teacup down with command authority. “Go get Wulfric at the shop, and then tell-- Eli, is it?” I nodded, and Gran continued. “Bring them here. I’ll reach out to Anna and Alex. Can you tell me a specific place they should begin looking, Exit? They move faster than we do, and they’ll have a head start.”

  “The far northern bay has a side pocket of sorts. It’s directly west and
can’t be more than a hundred yards wide. I know the deadfall was there, up an incline. At one point, it might have been an oxbow, but there were definitely kettle holes that filled in over the years. Trappers used them as larders for trout and other fish they would net. We did it, too, but on the other side of the lake,” Exit said.

  “Kettle holes?” It was a new term to me.

  “Little round ponds, some of them the size of this table. Scoured out of rock by the glaciers, and a handy place to put things like water. Or trout,” Exit added.

  “I’ve seen them. The swimming holes just past the Limberlost Cabins, right?” I asked Gran.

  “Those, and hundreds more. Most of them are off trail. I haven’t gone swimming in one of them since I was a girl,” Gran recalled. Her eyes were distant and a bit sad, which made me sad, too. I wondered if she was thinking about things that can never be again. I know I was.

  “How long before everyone is here?” Exit asked. He stared mournfully at the half sandwich in his hand.

  “Long enough that even you can finish that,” I chided him, standing to go rally my troops. I felt like we were closer to something, but I wasn’t sure what. That’s how most days had been for me lately. Uncertain and filled with disquiet.

  “An hour. We’ll have plenty of sun, and I’ll put some supplies in the truck. I’ll bring my own things with me, just in case,” Gran added, and I knew that meant she would be packing major magical heat. I fingered my charms out of habit, nodding.

  We were going back to the woods, and if history taught me anything, it would be anything but fun.

  Chapter Twenty-two

  Leftovers

  We stood in front of Gran’s truck, a cloud of uncertainty hanging over us despite the bright sun.

  “Gran, you remember Eli?” I asked. We had a moment of bright chatter, then Exit held up a well-worn piece of paper.