Heiress of Nowhere

Chapter 1

Some say the sight of a killer whale, with its black shroud and ghost-white eye patches can stop an animal’s heart mid-beat. That the sea wolves are agents of the demon Orkus, zealously guarding the mysterious Parish Isle off the southern tip of our Orcas Island.

People whisper these things as if they were fact.

I tell myself they are only stories.

Terror floods me. My throat cinches shut, my hands slip against the paddle.

It is Shadow, with her gray saddle patch.

She bridged the half mile between us frighteningly fast. From weeks spent trying to draw her, I know her to be a behemoth, twice as long as my canoe, with the heft of a six-ton armored tank.

Her hide gleams like a piece of the sea itself, sunlight breaking across her back as if on stone.

I jam my sketch pad into my leather satchel, and something else splashes behind me. Another dark shape surfaces, dorsal fin flopped to one side like a cowlick. Shadow’s daughter, Scull.

I grip the sides of the canoe, my feet skidding across my pencils.

Shadow shoots me a baleful look, then slips below the surface.

“Huh…” My breath stumbles out of me. I fumble my paddle, feeling trapped in this mile-wide watery corridor, which sits between the two main legs of Orcas Island.

Koa always said I had a death wish. Everyone knows to keep your canoes out of the sound when the killer whales are roaming, especially in summer when the salmon swarm.

But the salmon haven’t come. And out here, away from the grand yet suffocating estate of Nowhere, the island teems with color and life. Life that may wish to devour me.

Paddling furiously, I scramble toward the shore at least a thousand feet away, holding my breath. Scull rolls beside me, porpoising as if to play.

Go back, little one, before your mother tears me apart.

No one comes between a mother and her young.

Still no sign of Shadow. She could surge from the depths at any moment, overturn me, drag me into waters cold enough to freeze my blood. Then it would be over for Lucy Nowhere, before she’d ever stepped a toe into the world.

The ocean begins to tremble, and I look wildly around.

Shadow erupts like a volcano from my other side, a raspy haah thundering from her blowhole. Spray blinds me. My canoe rocks violently, a cork in a tidal wave. Languid and menacing, she glides alongside me, so close my paddle could touch the white scars etched into her flank.

My breath wings in and out, and the sickening memory of the seal head found on the beach two weeks ago churns my stomach.

Rumors flew that someone had ventured too close to Parish Isle.

That the Orkus had sent its sea-wolf minions to leave the severed head as a warning—stay away, or end up like the cannery worker slain the year I was born.

And here I am alone, dangling myself like a worm on a hook.

“I—I’ve been told I have a head made of cast iron,” I babble. “Might give you indigestion.”

Another loud breath erupts from Shadow’s blowhole, baptizing me with a mist that throws a rainbow in the sky.

“Well, you are magnificent,” I murmur.

My neck has begun to warm. I rub at the spot above my collarbone where the purplish whale-shaped blotch lies hidden beneath my kerchief. The mark of the devil, some call it. It has never flared like this before.

Time stretches thin. Shadow’s flipper rises, ribbons of water cascading down.

I close my eyes, bracing for the blow.

But the touch is gentle—a shove, almost a caress. My canoe glides toward the shore. Scull darts to her mother, bumping her playfully.

A giddy laugh nearly splits me in two. The underworld has measured me—and declined its claim. At least for today.

As my vessel quietly retreats, the stories of my arrival here float to mind. I drifted in on a green canoe, a mysterious baby still with her umbilical cord attached, no clue to my origins.

On a warm summer day a dozen years ago, my six-year-old self tried to board a ferry, hoping to find my parents. A man whom I had come to know as Mr. Dakon Sanders sat me down in a garden that faced the sea. “Lucy, your parents are gone, and they will not be coming back.”

Not quite understanding, I glanced up at his profile with its sharp cheekbones and generous outcropping of a nose. He smelled of cigars and pine needles.

His tongue clucked at my confusion. “They are gone, and that is that. But you are a strong girl. See that tree?” He nodded at a slender evergreen with red bark, a few feet taller than me.

“Pacific madrone, one of the most beautiful trees here in the Pacific Northwest. That one’s six years old, just like you.

Madrones are resilient. They always find the light, even if it means growing a little crooked.

That’s why you’re named Lucy, for ‘light.’ ”

No, I don’t have a death wish.

Maybe I just crave a family. Nowhere is the only home I remember, but it is not my home.