Chapter 2 #2
“I didn’t choose this place,” I snapped, clenching my hands in anger.
I was tired and cold, and my stomach was as hungry as the deepest crevice in the Grand Canyon.
“ You dragged me here. It’s not my fault we had to jump overboard because of Isaac.
If I’d known this was going to be a trip to the swamps, I would have gladly fetched my boots, but Isaac preferred to let his mercenaries beat me black and blue…
Sorry, I just didn’t have time…” I stared at him, hoping I wouldn’t start crying.
And I hoped he wouldn’t yell at me or say anything caring because then I would definitely burst into tears.
I just wanted to lie down somewhere and sleep.
The men looked from me to Nathan and back again.
It remained silent for several heartbeats before Nathan wordlessly dropped to his knees and motioned for me to climb onto his back.
With my head held high but incredibly relieved, I walked through the undergrowth past the other men, threw my arms around his neck, and he lifted me onto his back.
“I guess I’ll have to carry you, then,” he said as he started moving.
Offended, I remained silent for a few minutes, but eventually, the good feeling of being able to rest prevailed.
I buried my nose in his hair, which still had the wild, adventurous smell of salt water.
It felt so good to feel him, his strength with which he held me tight and carried me effortlessly through the night.
My mind was full of contradictory longings and wishes, full of questions, but they disappeared with each of Nathan’s steps as if the air was sucking them up and storing them for me until tomorrow.
I could only guess at the landscape because it was too dark, but come tomorrow, we would be in a completely foreign world.
Everything would be distorted, perhaps even between Nathan and me.
I heard the owl hooting again, and in the distance, there was rustling as if something was scurrying through the undergrowth. Possibly a coral snake.
“Nathan,” I asked after a while close to his ear.
“What?” His steps smacked energetically against the swampy ground. Thank God I didn’t have to walk!
“Are you going to carry me for a year now?”
“What? Why a year?”
“Well, we’ll have to stay here for months or a year, you said. Without shoes, I can’t go anywhere without you.”
He laughed loudly, so loud that the others behind us probably heard it too. “Don’t get too excited, princess. I’ll get you some.”
His laughter sounded beautiful and sent a tickling sensation through my stomach that electrified me all the way to my socked toes. Abruptly, he stopped. “I’m sorry about earlier.”
“Because of the trunk?”
He awkwardly pulled out his cell phone, turned on the flashlight, and shone it down the path to get his bearings.
“No, not that.” He laughed again and put the phone back.
“Or maybe yeah, a bit, even if it was necessary. No…I meant you’re right about everything you said before.
I didn’t mean to yell at you like that, I’m just exhausted.
” He glanced at me over his shoulder. His face was so close to mine.
It was blurry, indistinct, and dark in the night, but his eyes were like reflective lights yet deep like the universe.
Suddenly, I thought of something Dad had once told me when I was a child. There are only two ultimate truths in life: Everything born dies. And everything changes .
Naturally, he was correct. Mom was born and died.
So did my budgies Banana and Balou. I’ve grown and gotten older.
I also traded in my pink bed with the crown on the headboard for a four-poster bed even though I swore at the age of eight that I would sleep in that bed until I was ninety.
Even the New York skyline had changed since my early childhood and not only because of 9-11.
Everything was like a river in constant motion. Even now.
I suddenly felt strange, almost like an abducted princess carried off to a wild land by a pirate. And right now, during this tiny fraction of my life, I no longer knew what I truly wanted.
Nathan or Dad.
When I awoke, I was rocking gently as if in a cradle.
The distant quacking of wild ducks penetrated my consciousness, but I remained still with my eyes closed, too tired and too agitated to become part of reality yet.
The surface beneath me was hard. I had tried several times to turn over in my sleep, but it had been impossible due to the lack of space.
I was on my back, legs drawn up, feet planted.
Sunny warmth fell on my eyelids and something soft as a feather tickled my forehead.
It felt like a makeup brush, which logically couldn’t be.
Involuntarily, I opened my eyes and looked straight at a thick silver strand dangling over my face like a feathery vine.
Spanish moss. Then I remembered. We were in Louisiana.
I abruptly bolted upright, a mistake because my jaw was throbbing as if it had been hit again and the boat that had been my bed was rocking.
I vaguely remembered arriving at Nathan’s secret hiding place, but we had sailed a little further in the boats until the men had to lie down for a few hours. I had slept squeezed between two benches and in the back of the boat, Pan was snoring next to Sparta.
Goodness, he could easily saw through a bald cypress with it!
I looked around warily. The boat was next to a canoe with a small outboard motor.
Troy and Icarus were sleeping in it, their feet casually resting on a bench.
The boats were floating on a swampy body of water in the middle of the forest. For a few seconds, I felt like I was in my Southern room in New York.
A strange magic flowed through my veins.
Everything was strange but familiar. A dark army of ancient swamp cypresses towered over me, their bulbous trunks gray and scaly like giant elephant legs stuck in the swamp.
It was impossible to say if the area was merely flooded by the river or if it was the Atchafalaya itself.
I peered curiously into the crowns of the cypresses. There, thousands of silvery Spanish moss webs hung as if giant prehistoric butterflies had made their cocoons. In between, the morning light trickled through the treetops and bathed everything in a silver-green light.
“You like it, I was right.”
“Nathan?” I searched the area and spotted him not far from the boat.
He was sitting on a gigantic tree stump that protruded a good distance out of the water.
In this environment, Nathan McCormack seemed surreal.
His dark clothes blended in with the tree trunks and the dark green water, and his beaten face glowed unnaturally bright as if it were covered in a silver glaze.
“Who did that?” I asked, pointing to his swollen cheekbone. We had barely spoken about Isaac and the attack during the hectic and tense escape.
Nathan merely shrugged. “I don’t know, it happened incredibly quick.
I think Miller rammed the gun butt against my face.
” He grinned sheepishly but then became serious again.
“You took quite a beating too.” He tapped a spot under his eye.
“You’re potash blue there…but it goes well with your pretty eyes, so don’t worry. ” He smiled and this time it lasted.
A warm feeling flooded my stomach.
“Are you hungry today or are you still upset about the trunk?”
“I’m starving,” I confessed and immediately felt the huge hole in my stomach. “Besides, I’m only a little upset.”
“That’s good.” Nathan pointed to the boat I was sitting in. “There’s a backpack in the boat. We grabbed the stuff yesterday. It’s not much, but it’s enough to start.”
“Grabbed? Spontaneous transfer of ownership, then.”
“Yes, you mind?”
“Not at all. At least, not under these circumstances.” I looked around, spotted the dark blue backpack, and rummaged through it greedily.
“You can eat the sandwiches. No nuts, no eggs.” I glanced up and Nathan winked.
He seemed so different, perhaps because the others were asleep.
That way, he didn’t have to be careful about how he treated me and I was afraid that there would only be more conflict if the men found out what was going on between us.
If there was anything at all. And even if there was, it wouldn’t be as fatal as on the Agamemnon, but it would complicate everything.
I ate the sandwich in silence, listened to the birds chirping, and marveled at the mysterious nature. I felt something inside me, something hidden in the depths that had to do with my past. It seemed as if the surroundings were an image or symbol of it.
“You like it here,” Nathan stated again and I remembered that I hadn’t answered him earlier.
“Yes.” A few yards away, I spotted a great egret wading in the water, occasionally dipping its beak into the swamp. “But I don’t want to stay here for a whole year. I want to go to my dad. There are so many questions I need to ask him.”
He nodded. “I understand that, but there’s no other way. You know why. Besides, I’m afraid you’re not safe from Isaac even in New York. We also have to wait and see how your father reacts to Isaac’s pictures.”
“Isaac’s pictures?” Shocked, I swallowed the last bite and was barely able to get the next words out. “You still want to work with him…after everything he’s done…”
“He probably sent the photos to a contact on land long ago, who will have forwarded them. They developed a sophisticated system so that the source and origin cannot be located, but I didn’t understand it. Everyone has their job.”
Great! I was hurt, so I kept quiet. Dad would faint if he saw me in those photos.
Nathan watched me. “It’s already happened. I can’t change it, so we’ll wait and see… Maybe your father will surprise us and react after all.”
“Your brother would have let Sparta drown,” I said heatedly even if it had nothing to do with it.
“I know.” Nathan said nothing more.
“Nobody deserves that. What if it wasn’t Sparta?”
Nathan glanced at the sleeping people, put his index finger to his lips, and shook his head. Then he mouthed tonelessly “Not here—not now,” at least that’s how I interpreted it.
I nodded.
His face darkened when he spoke again. “Isaac must never find you, Will. His hatred is much deeper than I realized.”
I leaned forward a little, which immediately rocked the boat. “You were afraid he would come on board. You changed course. I don’t understand. You said he would join you at the end of the three weeks anyway.”
“That was the official plan, yes, but I had my own from the start—just as Isaac apparently had his own. I always planned to release you here in the bayous, somewhere near the villages, of course, without him ever seeing you. But only me and the twins knew this plan.”
“Ilias and Pan?”
“Rayk and Kjertan, yes. They never liked Isaac and the feeling is mutual. He thinks they’re simple-minded. Not men you can hatch clever plans with. They think he’s a smug bastard.”
“You trust Ilias? Rayk?”
Nathan nodded toward the narrow boat in which Pan was lounging. “Yes. But I kept a few details from both of them.”
I peered into his serious face, his gray eyes silvery in the morning light. “You think you’re infallible on your own, don’t you?”
He looked back, concerned. “If I were infallible, Isaac wouldn’t have discovered the coordinates.
I keep wondering who it could have been if not Stan.
” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “I don’t even know if the person who threw you into the ocean was the same one who revealed the coordinates.
Basically, anyone could have gone onto the bridge while I was diving for you in the water.
So, anyone who knows anything about transponders. It doesn’t have to have been Stan.”
I looked at him. “Did it have to be on the bridge? What about your cell phone? When you were in the water, anyone could have used it, right?”
“It has a code. Nobody knows it.”
“Maybe someone brought a second cell phone on board.”
“It can’t be ruled out, although I’m fairly certain no one would have dared. Anyway, it could have been anyone.”
“The question is why did someone do it?”
“Because the plan was in danger. They wanted Isaac to come and finish the plan with all his might, no matter what it meant for you.” Again, he looked at the boats and put a finger to his lips.
I wondered which of the men he trusted. Pan certainly and Troy too.
Sparta was a questionable candidate, but what about Icarus?
He might have been the only one who could have made the ointment disappear without anyone noticing.
Obviously, anyone could have thrown it overboard unnoticed. No magic tricks needed for that.
I would talk to him alone about it later. Right now, I needed to sort out something else. “Do you know what Isaac wants to do to me?” I absolutely had to know because, in my opinion, he wanted me dead and he had wanted it from the beginning.
Nathan glanced at his hands and then back at me. “I knew that he would have no qualms about hurting you if your father didn’t meet our demands. That’s why I changed the agreed-upon course. But of course, there is…” He suddenly fell silent.
“What?”
“Quiet…the others are awake!” He rose elegantly and jumped from the tree stump onto the motorboat with a giant leap.
That was the end of the conversation because Icarus bolted upright with a startled cry, waking Troy, who was muttering something to himself.
Nathan, meanwhile, balanced skillfully, his arms outstretched horizontally.
I looked at him disapprovingly and he gave me a rueful smile before avoiding my gaze. He didn’t want to speak about it.
Okay, apparently there was something more concrete. It wasn’t merely about Coldville and the Hampton Oil Company. It had to be something serious, the real reason why Isaac hated me with all his heart.
I want to possess, to destroy, and to kill you . He didn’t have to say it, his eyes had told me. I could only hope that I was truly safe here.