crying out loud, now where did Scotty go?”
Zach stood up and dropped the towel he’d wrapped around his shoulders. “Wasn’t he over there?” he asked, pointing a short distance toward shore. “He was a minute ago.”
“Damn it, all of you quit fooling around,” Colleen said. “It isn’t funny. I want to go” Phillip and Rob jumped back in the water. Rob yelled for Scott. Phillip turned in the water and yelled toward shore. I felt all the blood drop out of my head as if I were a human thermometer plunging toward zero.
“You’re serious?” cried Colleen, now panicked. She held Scott’s glasses tightly in her fist. “Scotty!”
There was a boat anchored nearby, but I couldn’t see that anyone was on board.
Colleen yelled, “Somebody do something!”
Phillip and Rob got back into the boat. Calder ran into the water and made a shallow dive, swimming under the boat and popping up on the other side. He shook his head at me.
“Scott!” I cried from shore. My worst nightmare. Coming true. How had they done it? We’d been with them the whole time. Except for Pavati … she’d come later.… Could she have acted so quickly? Water spirit, my ass. This was Pavati’s doing.
A hundred feet down shore, an oblong shape on the sand caught our collective attention.
“Scotty!”
My friends all jumped in the water and raced for it. Calder got there first. He lifted Scott’s limp body off the sand, cradling him in his arms.
“Is he alive? Is he okay?” Colleen asked.
“I can feel him breathing,” Calder said.
“Scotty, c’mon, man. It’s me, Rob. Wake up. Should we slap him?”
Calder’s eyes met mine as Scott coughed up water and rolled toward Colleen’s voice. “Big,” he said. “Big fish.”
28
CONVINCED
My friends didn’t stay the week. Instead, they packed quickly and headed home the next morning. Jules looked at me expectantly, as if she wanted me to come home with them, too. I didn’t make eye contact with her as Calder and I waved from the ferry office, watching the van turn left at the stop sign and head out of town, back to their lives where the worst they had to worry about were dead cell phone batteries.
When they were out of sight, Calder said, “I know what you’re thinking, so stop it.”
“You said I could trust you. You said my friends wouldn’t get hurt.”
“I said Maris and Pavati wouldn’t get to them. And I don’t think your friend is that hurt.”
I shot him a scathing look. “Pavati attacked him.”
“It wasn’t them. We were with them the whole time.”
“Not Pavati. She came late.”
“It wasn’t them. It hasn’t been them. Not once this whole time. I made the wrong assumptions. Maris told us the truth. They haven’t hunted in a while. They’re so past gone they can’t even bring themselves to eat. You saw what a mess they are.”
“A less experienced hunter then,” I said, my voice falling low.
Calder grabbed me by the shoulders and spun me around to face him. “It wasn’t your dad, Lily. He isn’t hunting, and even if he was, he wouldn’t take one of your friends.”
“How can you be sure? Maris was right. You can’t monitor him twenty-four/seven. And how is he supposed to live off the happiness of his family”—I choked on the sarcastic sound of my words—“when he’s never home?”
“There is another explanation.”
“Don’t make me laugh.” I couldn’t believe Calder was buying into this. “Don’t go grasping at fantasy. You can’t go blaming five attacks and two murders on a mythical being.”
“It wasn’t so long ago you would have said I was mythical,” he said.
I turned and walked away, marching up the hill. Calder didn’t let me go that easily. He was right at my side before I’d taken four steps. I fought back tears and refused to look at him.
“You,” I said. “You’re buying into Maris’s lie because you can’t face the truth. We’ve lost Dad forever.”
“I’m not ready to believe it, Lily. It took me forty years to find a father, and I won’t give up on him now.”
I stopped and turned around to face him. “You think that’s what I’m doing? Giving up?”
“Well, aren’t you?” He cocked his head to the side.
“I’m trying to be realistic.”
“Since when?” he asked, without a hint of sarcasm.
“Since now.”
He smiled and drew one finger through my hair. “I like the girl who welcomes fantasy better. Where is she?”
“To believe in a water spirit goes against everything I believe in.”
“What did you tell me once? That ‘God created the great sea monsters.…