Ash
Well, that’s it. It’s over.
I don’t know what else I could have done, though. I had to tell her.
Maybe if I’d told her sooner. Maybe if we hadn’t gone to her mother’s, and I’d gotten us those steaks and grilled them instead.
I could have taken the time to tell her the right way, over a nice, quiet dinner, and she’d have been more receptive.
Then again, maybe there is no right way to tell the woman you love that you’re mostly human, but a little bit divine.
And yeah, I love her. I’ve been in love with her from the first time I saw her swimming in the lake, plowing through the water
like some kind of single-minded torpedo.
Or maybe it was all the times I heard her calling for Violet, or caught her leaving food out in her front yard for Daisy.
It doesn’t matter. It’s over, but I can’t take the time to mourn it now. I have to go save Emma.
I’ve changed into hiking gear and am putting things in a backpack to take with me to the island—flashlight, mosquito repellent, bottled water, and, just in case things get gnarly, my brass knuckles and bowie knife—when there’s a knock on my front door.
My heart leaps so much at the thought that it might be Frankie, I’m embarrassed for myself. Get a grip, Ash.
Still, as I hurry to the door, I rehearse mentally for what I’m going to say to her. Having a goddess as your grandmother is no different from having any other kind of grandmother—only instead of delicious comfort
dishes, like your grandmother used to make, mine makes mortal enemies.
But when I get to the front door and see who’s standing there, I’m disappointed.
“Isn’t it past your bedtime?” I ask the DeLong boys.
“It’s only eight o’clock,” scoffs Eddie. “What do you think we are, kids?”
“I think you have school tomorrow,” I say. “You should be home, doing homework.” Or whatever it is kids do at night.
“Are those real antlers?” Robby demands.
He attempts to barrel past me for a closer look at Guy’s chandelier, but I block his path by stepping onto the porch and closing
the door firmly behind me.
“Yeah, they’re real,” I say, hoisting my backpack onto one shoulder. The smell of smoke is stronger now. Those girls are really
going to town on their ritual fire. “Look, I know you’re here for the rest of your money. I’ll get it and the gum to you tomorrow—”
“Don’t you want to hear our report first?” Eddie demands.
“Later. For now I want you guys to go back to your grandparents’ and stay inside. It’s too dangerous to be out here tonight.”
Robby snorts. “That’s exactly what those dumb girls tried to tell us.”
I freeze as I’m locking the door behind me. “What girls?”
Eddie jabs a thumb toward the back of my house . . . and the lake. “Those girls down there. That’s what we came to tell you.
You told us to watch The Kraken and report back to you. Well, we watched it, and—”
“—and a bunch of girls just came over in a boat from Center Island,” Sammy interrupts his brother. “A boat they stole from
the Rubensteins!”
“Yeah.” Robby looks livid. “Just like they stole The Kraken from the Blancos.”
I’m alarmed as much by the kids’ words as the casual way they’re delivering them. “Where are the girls?” I ask. “What are
they doing?”
“They’re down by your dock.” Eddie shakes his head grimly. “And I don’t think you’re gonna like what they’re doing.”
I begin to circle around to the back of my house. “Go home,” I growl at the boys. “Now.”
“But we want to help!” Robby trots after me.
“I appreciate that.” Frankie wanted to help, too. But none of them have any idea what they’re up against. I don’t want to
scare them unnecessarily . . . but this is the time to be afraid. “And you can help by going home and making sure your grandparents are okay, and that they stay inside, no matter what they hear.” I give
Eddie a long look over my shoulder before I duck beneath the deck. “Get your little brothers inside. It’s not safe for them
out here. Got that?”
Something in my voice must have gotten through to him, since Eddie nods and lays his hands on the shoulders of his brothers.
“I got it.” To the boys, he says, “Come on, guys.”
Robby protests, looking back at me. “But—”
“Come on.” Eddie grips them hard enough to make Sammy call out, “Ow, buttface, you’re hurting me!”
But they’re leaving. I watch Eddie steer them through my yard and out onto the road. When they disappear behind the hedges
to their own yard, I turn and head down to my dock . . .
Where I discover that Eddie was right: I do not like what is going on at all.
There are girls everywhere. Tall girls, skinny girls, short girls, chubby girls, all clad in long white robes and carrying
flaming torches, even though I turned on the outdoor lights before coming down, so the dock is lit up brighter than a convenience
mart. The girls are laughing gleefully—probably a lot like they did when they robbed Mrs. Baumgarten.
At first I’m too far away to tell what they’re doing. All I can see is they’ve anchored the Rubensteins’ pontoon boat at the
dock. I feel a little bit of relief, because at least if they’re over here on this side of the lake, they’re not at Satan’s
Seat performing the sacrifice ritual.
But then I see what they’re doing.
As I stand there, one of them gleefully pulls the drain plugs from a pair of my Jet Skis. Then they all cheer as another one
swamps the third.
“Hey!” I yell. “Stop that!”
All the girls stop laughing, then turn their heads to look at me as I thunder down the steps to the dock.
“What the hell are you doing?” I roar.
I can’t believe this. The Jet Skis aren’t all they’ve destroyed. They’ve sunk my boat. My twenty-two-foot Chris-Craft Deluxe
Utility I bought for Gaia. And they’ve sunk it! I can see the nose sticking up from the surface of the water. “What the fuck!”
As soon as I reach the dock, I snatch an oar from the grip of one girl just as she’s about to use it to swamp another kayak.
“Stop it,” I cry. “What do you think you’re doing? This is private property, you know.”
“Oh, we know.” One of the girls, her hair longer than the others—all of them seem to have weirdly cropped hair, like Meg’s—smirks
at me. “We know who owns it, too.”
“Me.” I glare at her. “I own it.”
“Uh, excuse me, but the property records say it was purchased by the Olympus Foundation.” The girl steps more fully into the
circle of light thrown by the lamp overhead, and I finally recognize her.
Haley.
“Right,” I say, wondering what she’s up to. “That’s where I work. What’s this—”
She takes a step closer to me. “So then you must know Olympus’s chief executive officer.”
My gut tightens. “You mean . . .”
“Samantha. Samantha Stephens.”
I nearly sigh with relief. So Haley doesn’t know. She doesn’t know that Gaia—my Gaia—is the Gaia. She only knows the fake name Guy’s been using for the last half a century, a fictional character from an old TV show
she loves.
But how could Haley know? Sure, she’s got some magic. That’s undeniable. But no one except family—and now Frankie—knows who Guy really
is, and even then, only our very closest family members. Emma and her parents certainly don’t—
It’s all right. It’s going to be all right.
“You could say that we’re acquainted, yes.” No need to tell her Samantha isn’t only my boss but also my grandmother. “Why?”
“Because we have a message for her.”
“Yeah? What’s that?”
“Tell her,” Haley says, “that we’re sick and tired of her sitting around and not doing anything as the world burns—literally
burns. She could stop it, if she cared. But she doesn’t care, does she?”
“I know for a fact that she does care.” I try to subtly check out the other girls to see if any one of them might be Emma. It’s hard to tell, though, since,
except for Haley, they’re all covered in so much grime, it’s difficult to see their faces. Their legs—bare beneath the white
robes—are covered in scratches and bites, and one of them has a gash that looks like it might be infected. “She’s always recognized
the urgency of climate change. In fact, out of all the business leaders I know, Samantha Stephens is probably the most committed to sustainable practices and climate action—”
“Oh my God.” Haley is laughing. “She created climate change. That’s why we’re here. We know who she really is . . . and what she’s taken from us.”
I stare at her, the sinking feeling I’d had returning in full force. She can’t mean what I think she means . . . can she?
“What she’s taken from you?”
“What we hold most precious: our future.” Her smile vanishes. “So we’re going to take from her what she most holds precious. Get him, girls.”
And before I know what’s happening, the witches are on top of me. I’ve been tackled by girls before, but never quite like
this. The last time was during that threesome in Berlin, but those girls weren’t that interested in me. These girls are, but
not in a fun way.
“Hey!” I cry in surprise as the girls swarm over me, shoving me to the hard wooden dock. I won’t lie—at first it’s not unpleasant. It’s kind of like being tackled by puppies. They’re soft and squirmy and it doesn’t really hurt that much.
At least, not until one girl roars very close to my ear, “Get him in the dick!”
“What? No, don’t—”
Fireworks explode in front of my eyes as searing pain courses through my body. I think I might pass out.
“Oh, no, I missed!” cries the girl.
“That’s okay, I got him in the balls,” shouts another.
I’m writhing in pain on the deck. She got me, all right. She got me good, right in the tenderest place on a man’s body. I’ve
been in fights before—not many, thanks to my being so funny and charming, but some—and the only other time I’ve ever been
hit in that area, it was by a woman. Men know the pain of a knee to the balls too well, and so rarely inflict it on other
men.
Women have no such reluctance.
“Stop.”
The rough hands that had been holding me to the ground suddenly disappear. I open one eye to see what’s happening and spy
Haley looking down at me. In her white robe, with her long, somehow still-lustrous blonde hair framing her face, and the glow
from one of the dock lights forming a sort of halo behind her head, she looks almost angelic.
Until she leans even closer and opens her mouth.
“We know who you are,” she says to me. “You’re Ashraf Merit. You’re one of her grandchildren.”
“I’m not.” My voice sounds strangely high. I clear my throat. “I’m not. My name is—”
“Ashraf Merit.” One of the girls who tackled me holds up my wallet, open to my driver’s license. “It’s him, all right.”
Shit.
“Look,” I say. “I don’t think we got off on the right foot. Yes, my name is Ash Merit, but—”
“You know, I wasn’t sure this was going to work.” Haley sounds weirdly pleased. “But here you are. Your timing really couldn’t
have been better.”
I try to get away, but it’s hard to move when there are several people pressing their knees into your back. “My timing?”
“You heard me.” Haley leans down until her lips are only an inch or two from my ear, then whispers, “Look, I know who your
grandmother really is. And can I just tell you how flattered I am that Gaia would send you, her favorite grandson, to try
to stop me?”
It’s hard to tell which is making me feel more nauseous, the fact that Haley knows who Gaia really is, or the pain in my balls.
“I wouldn’t say I’m her favorite—”
“You are. Everyone knows how much you mean to Gaia. Which is why you’re going to make the perfect sacrifice.”
“Sacrifice?” This is bad. Really bad. “Me? No, no, you’ve got the wrong guy. You don’t want me. Gaia doesn’t care about me. I’m just her financial advisor. You want
my uncle Derrick. He’s Gaia’s favorite. That’s why I got her a house here, so she can be closer to Derrick.”
I know I should feel bad about throwing Derrick under the bus, but I don’t. He’ll be fine. He always lands on his feet. And
he’s got Jessica. I have no one.
But Haley isn’t listening.
“I also know how much money Gaia really has,” she goes on. “And I have a feeling that she’s going to be willing to part with
quite a lot of it for your safe return.” She holds up my phone, which the other girls had dug out of my pocket along with my wallet, and grins. “Why don’t I just give her a call and find out how much? I assume she’s your emergency contact, right?”
I blink up at her, horrified, as the true reality of my situation sinks in. Haley isn’t only a powerful witch. She’s also
a con artist, out to scam as much money as she can from the witch influencer community . . . and my grandmother.
But before I can say a word to warn her—or, more importantly, her followers, who haven’t done anything to deserve the reign
of terror that’s about to befall them—Haley straightens and shouts, “Tie him up!”
Her lackeys hurry to do so, using the blue bow line from my own now almost completely sunken boat.
“Wait,” I say. I struggle, but there are so many of them, and they’re surprisingly strong for having spent so much time eating
nothing but acorns. “You don’t want to do this. My grandmother will never—”
Negotiate with criminals, I’m intending to say. But before I get the chance, Haley leans forward again and whispers, “So you
aren’t going to play along, huh? Big mistake. I’d have been willing to cut you in if you cooperated. Oh, well, I guess we’ll
have to do this the hard way.”
And then, without another word, she raises her hand and gently blows. Black powder flies toward my face, and the next thing
I know, I’m coughing.
“Wait,” I say again. Only it’s getting hard to breathe. “Wh . . . what was that?”
“Nothing for you to worry about,” I hear Haley say.
But I am worried. Because suddenly, I can’t see her anymore. It’s like someone switched off the dock lights. But that’s impossible because the switch to the dock lights is all the way up at the top of the stairs leading to my back deck, and we’re all down here. . . .
And why am I so sleepy? I can’t remember ever having been so sleepy. My eyelids have slammed shut, which might explain the
sudden darkness. They’re so heavy, I can’t lift them. I can’t move any of my other muscles, either.
“Just a little devil’s weed,” I hear Haley coo in my ear, “to help you relax.”
No. Not now. I need to save Emma! I need to save Francesca! I need to . . .
Sleep.