Chapter 23
Sea wolves leap and dive, sleek as minks. I grip the rails, just trying to keep my seat.
“I’ve never seen so many at once. They’re swarming.” A big one with a diffuse feather of a saddle patch floats alongside us, her dark eye fixed on us.
None of these sea wolves look familiar, yet something about them makes me feel as if I’ve known them all my life. The feather-marked one expels a loud belch of ocean spray that sounds like a roar. I shrink, limbs shaking.
“I say we make a run for it.” Nash keeps his tone casual, but his knuckles have gone white around the throttle.
“No. We might hit one and capsize.” Then we’ll learn if sea wolves have an appetite for human flesh after all.
Nash protests, but I hold up a hand, feeling a tide of emotions washing over me.
The one with the feather patch is the matriarch here, the queen.
I don’t know how I know that. I just do, same as I can feel the wariness she aims in our direction.
She is showing me her feelings, just as Jupiter did yesterday.
“We mean you no harm,” I quietly tell Feather, remembering how I spoke to Shadow a lifetime ago. I wasn’t sure if Shadow heard me, but she didn’t hurt me. “We’re just passing through.”
Another sea wolf explodes from the water not twenty feet ahead, crashing with such force that it’s like the rug has been shaken out from under us. Our vessel is shoved back in undulating waves, and my insides turn cartwheels.
Nash, holding tight to the grab bars, curses in fits. “I hope you’re right with your maker.”
As our vessel spins uncertainly, Feather exhales another misty breath. Only, to my ears it is a laugh, a snort, a long-winded sigh, and a salutation. You.
Me? She recognizes me?
She sinks back into the deep, her hide a moving stroke of black paint. Holding up her tail like a lady’s fan, she drops away, leaving a blistering ring of bubbles.
“They’re leaving.” Nash turns an astonished gaze to me.
Sure enough, the sea wolves drift in steady procession toward Parish Isle.
“Did you…” His eyes graze my neck. “What just happened?”
“I’m not sure,” I whisper, though the truth hums in my bones. A chorus of feelings presses through me—not my own, but theirs. I catch a wave of disappointment like the groans of children shooed away from some animal they want to pet.
Once, Daniel made me stand in the compass rose mosaic next to him, the two of us barely fitting in the twenty-inch-diameter circle.
With our noses nearly touching, he brought his index finger to his eager triangular smile, then whispered, “Lucy.” The dome caught my name and threw it all around, until it arrived back in my ear with the force of many voices.
Something similar is happening here, only I hear sea wolves.
Did my father hear them too?
I face Nash, panting slightly. “Let’s just go, please.”
Nash nudges up the throttle. The echo of Feather’s thoughts becomes a distant thrum. She is no longer concerned about me, or us.
Nash finds the sweet spot for planing before turning to look at me once again, my limbs pulled in and shivering.
The rim of his hat is wet and he wears a guarded look, a gambler who has not yet decided which card to play.
I feign interest in a floating tree trunk.
If he knew I could listen to the sea wolves, feel what they are feeling, he could accuse me of witchcraft.
No doubt witches are right up there with slayers on the list of those who cannot inherit estates.
Nash pulls a blanket from a cabinet and hands it to me. “Were we not just in jeopardy of losing our lives?”
I gratefully wrap the blanket around me. “They have never attacked humans,” I say, mustering the objectivity of a science textbook. “I’ve been watching a mother–child pair for months now. They are playful. They don’t care about us.”
“That one that came up alongside us looked plenty interested. What if one attacked my uncle?”
“The coroner said your uncle’s injuries came from a hacking blade.”
He winces. “ ‘Coarsely inflicted.’ It still could’ve been a sea wolf.” His hat wags uncertainly, and a scowl pulls at his face. “Maybe my uncle just got in their way.”
I hate to admit it, but it is possible. Even the bees sting if crossed. But like Shadow and Scull, Feather’s pod struck me as more curious than destructive, and she had cleared the path for us.
Is something else at work?
Mr. Sanders adamantly believed the sea wolves were not agents of some “fictitious demon.” Why would they be?
They’re at the top of the ladder, a divine species with no one to fear and therefore no one to answer to.
But might he have thought differently if he had known about my connection to the sea wolves? My father’s?
Or—had he already known?
Eighteen. Same age as he was when he began to understand.
My mouth has gone dry, and I move my tongue to moisten it. Perhaps my father began to feel and hear the sea wolves when he turned eighteen. Like me. But why us? And is there a connection between the arrival of my sea-wolf… sense and Mr. Sanders’s death?
I press my knuckles into my head, hoping there is no connection but feeling in my bones that there must be. Who—or what—was Mr. Sanders trying to protect me from?
By the time we empty out of the East Sound into open water, the buzzing inside me has cooled to silence. With more room to roam, and a calmer sea, I begin to breathe easier.
Nash, who has been watching me, tips his face to the sky. The clouds seem to be rubbed out but leave a film like chalk on a blackboard. “Well, sea wolves scare me. Know what scares me more?”
“A shortage of olives for your martinis?” I answer shakily.
He flashes half a smile. “Living a life where you’re afraid to take risks.”
I snort. “ ‘Safe’ is not a word that comes to mind when I think of you. I recall you and Daniel diving off Death Cliff in Cascade Lake.”
His gaze wanders somewhere else. “I was afraid to enlist. Afraid of what I would do with a gun pointing right at me, bombs exploding all around. I told Danny I was philosophically opposed to war. But the truth is I was more philosophically opposed to losing my limbs. Or my life.” He sinks lower into his seat, hat falling low.
Though I can barely see his face, somehow a window has been opened into a deeper chamber of him, one I have never looked into before.
“War would make anyone afraid,” I say cautiously, in case the window snaps closed in my face.
“Danny wasn’t afraid. Yes, I dove off Death Cliff, but only because he went first.”
“Surely you don’t blame yourself?” Daniel was hit in the chest by a stray bullet in Cambrai, France.
For weeks my mind turned over how it had happened, how long he had languished, and if he had died alone, as if imagining those moments could somehow erase some of what he had suffered.
“You couldn’t have done anything.” The words, so often repeated to myself, come out sounding hollow.
“That’s what I tell myself, but it never feels quite honest.” He shoves back his hat and abruptly guns the engine, cutting off conversation, water spraying like fine tears around us.
My grief was a silent thing, pages filled with harsh lines and wet with grief.
Daniel had been my light, guiding me from my loneliness, cutting the big house down to size.
But how did Nash mourn? He’d lost not just his cousin, but his best friend.
Nash had always been easy when Daniel was around, like a blue camas opening when the sun comes out.
When robbed of a crucial source of light, how much of the plant dies or fades?
Despite Nash’s charming, devil-may-care persona, something quietly changed.
We fly past neighboring West Sound, my heart soaring at the speed.
At last Far West Bay, the smallest of our two neighboring inlets, opens up to us.
Mr. Gotze owns most of the land here. Fishing scows and other vessels pass, but we hug the shoreline, out of their sight.
Tidy orchards and fields of lavender break up the long stretches of Douglas fir.
Halfway up the bay one of the log cabins in the Chinese camp comes into view. Did my father live there with the migrant workers? My mouth sours as Gotze’s eyesore of a cannery, held up by stilts, comes into focus at the pointed end of the bay.
“Land there.” I point to a five-hundred-foot bight just short of the Chinese camp. A handful of canoes have been parked on a stretch of shallow beach.
Nash slows the engines, staring from the Chinese camp to me. “Something tells me you’re not here for the scenery.”
I fold my arms tight, though the water here is as smooth as a lake.
Soon I will be meeting people with whom I share a common ancestry. But will I have anything in common with them? Will they recognize in me a kindred spirit? Or will I just be a strange, nosy intruder from Nowhere? A girl who does not belong here, or anywhere.