9. Chapter 9
Ijerked away, my eyes widening. But the face pressed to the glass, eyeing me with an unnerving intensity. How was someone alive inside a sunken ship?
I turned to Janeira, who gestured back toward the gap, and we swam for it. Once we surfaced, I scraped the hair out of my eyes.
“Who was that?” I asked. “How did a ship get down there?”
“It’s a long story.” Janeira hoisted herself up onto a nearby rock. “Care to sit?”
“I’m good.” I spent enough time on land. “So? What’s the story?”
“A coven of witches used to live on Dusk long before the Arrowoods and Everharts landed here,” Janeira explained. “For a long time, pirates plagued the island. The merfolk and the witches banded together to keep them at bay, and most of the pirates left this place. But one ship remained under the command of a pirate captain who had unrequited feelings for a witch on Dusk. Well, I say witch, but actually...” Janeira shot me an amused look, “... she was part witch and part mermaid, just like you.”
I beat my tail to lift myself up above a large wave. On Dusk at least, mermaid hybrids were almost unheard of. The merfolk community rarely ventured onto land long enough to make connections with land dwellers. After the struggle I had endured trying to fulfill my body’s requirements for more ocean time, I could see why.
“This captain hadn’t conquered the island thanks to the combined efforts of the fae, the dryads, and the witches. But he had another plan in mind; he captured merfolk in nets and threatened to kill them if his love didn’t join him in leaving Dusk forever,” Janeira continued. “But she had little patience for blackmail. She cursed the ship to trap everyone on board in an endless bubble of time, a moment that never moved forward or backwards. The pirates would stay aboard their ship for eternity.”
“But why haven’t they died in there?” I asked. “Don’t they need food and water?”
“The spell suspends them in time,” Janeira said. “Their bodies stay in the same state they were the day she cast the spell. But that isn’t the only condition of their torment.”
There was more? How did a witch-mermaid have the power to cast such a complex spell that had clearly lasted for centuries after her death?
“Go on.” I didn’t have time for her dramatic pauses, even if she did.
“Patience.” Janeira glared at me as if I were a petulant child. “Through their portholes, as you just saw, they can see various pockets of time through the ages. Whenever a significant event happens here on Dusk, another porthole will reveal the time to them.”
My heart lifted with the next wave. Was this what Freddie had thought could give them access to unlimited phoenix eggs? A shipwreck with portals to various other times?
“Are you telling me that if someone was to go into that ship, they could access multiple other points in Dusk’s history?” I asked.
“That’s where your cousin may have misunderstood,” Janeira said, splashing the water with her tail. “Nobody can enter the ship, Maeve. Many have tried, both merfolk and land dweller alike, for centuries. The land dwellers may have forgotten, but plenty of our youngsters still try to gain entry. None have ever succeeded.”
My mind boggled with the onslaught of new information. Freddie had given Isadora the impression they could dip into the ship as and when they felt like it to ensure their plan worked. Did he actually know how to get into the ship, or had he just thought that with his resources and assumed intelligence, he could do what nobody else could before? Although, in fairness, nobody had cursed Dusk to this extent before, so I couldn’t pretend his ability to break barriers didn’t speak for itself. Even if it was through sheer idiocy rather than smarts.
But something told me that Freddie didn’t know how to get inside, or even about this shipwreck in the first place. He had intended to demand answers from the merfolk, by hook or by crook.
My eyes glazed over as I stared into the water. As expected, this was just another long shot lead that had led nowhere.
***
After I had thanked Janeira for her help, I returned to the hospital to stay with Dad. Sleeping in a chair felt even more uncomfortable than a bed and, as such, I got little shut-eye. But I didn’t really want to sleep, anyway. If I really had as little time with him as Sandra said I did, I didn’t want to miss a moment.
I texted Ben, Kira, and Allison throughout the night, keeping them updated on every little change, and venting whenever a sob session reared its ugly head. By the time the sun rose, I had cried enough to fill the coffee cup in my hand.
We had scraped the bottom of every fruitless barrel and explored every nook and cranny on Dusk to find a way out of this. But then, I had read enough to know that sometimes curses consumed civilisations. Dusk wouldn’t be the first and it surely wouldn’t be the last. Maybe our plight was just another tragic story that would warn others for centuries to come, our suffering an example of what would happen to those who acted on emotion first and thought about the consequences later.
But what scared me more was that Janeira had seemed confident that the merfolk, and by extension I, could weather this magical storm. I didn’t want to live in a world where I had lost everyone I cared about. How could I go on having watched everyone I loved die? Dusk wasn’t my home without them.
But I dropped my empty cup on the floor when Kira texted me: Meet us at the scuba centre! We think we’ve got it!
“What?” Sandra asked, jerking out of her sleep.
“I’ve got to go.” I kissed Dad’s forehead and hurried to the door.
Sandra didn’t reply as I dashed out, but I had faith she would stay with him while I was away. I got into the car and called Kira the second I closed the door.
“We need your boat!” Kira said the moment she answered the phone.
“For what? What’s happening?” I asked.
“We might have a plan,” Kira said. “Bronwyn’s amulet!”
“Yeah? What about it?”
“It opens gateways! If we can get to the barrier, we could use it to-.“
“To breach the barrier and get everyone out?” How hadn’t we thought of it before? “I’m coming! I’ve just got to get Ben and I’ll be right there.”
A quick text to Ben had me driving to the park in the centre of Dawn, where he and Adrian had gone walking to get a break from their hospital obligations. I pulled into the car park across the road and hurried into the park. I had too much adrenaline to wait around for them and not nearly enough patience.
As I jogged down the main path, I noticed small groups of people in worn clothes gathered in various places, smoking cigarettes emitting coloured smoke and sharing baggies of things. Wow, the end of the world had brought out people’s despair in different ways. Well, I couldn’t judge, given how I hadn’t cared too much about boozing while on the road.
When Ben and Adrian appeared from around a corner, they hurried to meet me.
“What’s the emergency?” Ben asked.
“Kira thinks she’s worked out a way to get us off the island,” I said. “Bronwyn’s amulet can open magical gateways, and we’re going to take the boat out to see if it works.”
“And you stopped by to take us with you? How sweet,” Adrian said, clasping his hands together and smushing them to his cheek in a mockery of his statement.
“Actually, just him. You can go away,” I said. “Are you coming, or what?”
“Try and stop me.” Ben placed a hand on my arm, and I turned to hurry back toward the car with him, but we stopped dead in our tracks as four men stepped into our path.
Multi-coloured stains adorned their jackets and pants, and their hair and beards splayed about their faces as if they hadn’t touched a comb or trimming scissors in weeks. One of them stepped forward, pulling the hood of his hoodie down.
“Did I hear you right?” he asked, revealing a cracked tooth when he talked. “You’ve found a way off the island?”
“Not... officially,” I said. “It’s just a theory-.“
But I stopped talking the second he pulled an athamé from the holster on his belt.
“Oh, don’t worry,” he said. “A theory is good enough for us.”