can I get? I guess I never really thought …”
“Wait, I have this,” I said, digging in my pocket. “It’s not much, but it is tobacco.” I handed him the pack of cigarettes I’d found on the hillside, and he sniffed at it before slipping the four remaining cigarettes into his hand. He tore off the filters and peeled the wet paper.
“Follow me,” he said, and we crept deeper into the cave, my hands on his back. He stopped, reacting to something I couldn’t see. He ground the wet tobacco between his palms and sifted it in a line across the stone floor.
“What do we do now?” I asked.
“We wait.”
“How long?”
“Not long. If she’s here, she already knows we’ve come.”
We slid down the wall to wait. Calder rolled the dagger’s handle around in his hands. The only sounds were the constant dripping and the muted roar of the falls above us, like traffic on a distant highway.
Calder grabbed my wrist and took back his watch. He hit a button and illuminated our faces. “Forgot this had a light,” he said. “Sorry, that would have been helpful before.”
Only then did I see the worry on his face. I almost wished he’d turn off the light. Calder bent his head and whispered something in an unfamiliar language, repeatedly. Although I couldn’t understand him, I was certain he was practicing for the confrontation.
After what felt like a very short time, he stopped whispering and checked his watch. “It’s already been an hour,” he said. He held his wrist up and aimed the light around the cavern. The carpet of bones reflected back the light. Below them were thousands of small, green-patinaed discs. Calder reached forward and raked his hand through some of them. He crawled away, scattering the bones as he moved.
“What are you doing?”
“There’s nothing here,” he said.
“What are you looking for?”
“Your soggy cigarettes are the only offering here. There’s nothing else. No new copper, no tobacco, no wild rice …”
“I don’t know about the copper, but wouldn’t tobacco and rice have rotted over time? You don’t really expect that to still be here?”
“That’s my point. It’s been a long time since anyone has made any offering. Anything dropped over the falls would have been sucked inside like we were. There’s nothing here.”
“So what does that mean?”
“Maris was right. We’re not the only ones who forgot about Maighdean Mara. Her human followers have forgotten her, too. She’s been neglected for a very long time. No wonder she’s gone off to fend for herself.”
“If she’s not here, how do we find her?” I asked.
“We’re going to need more help.”
Later that night, after Calder had left to look for Dad, I sat on the porch roof, utterly defeated. In all of Calder’s years in the lake, he’d never seen sign of Maighdean Mara. In all the searching Calder and Dad had done for Maris and Pavati, they’d never seen any evidence of her. In all my experimentation, I’d never once heard the voice of a monster in the channel. What chance did we really have of finding her? And if we did find her, what chance did we have of stopping her?
Doubt weighed heavily on my thoughts. We stood a much better chance of stopping the killings if Dad was behind them. But I couldn’t go there. Try as I might, it was impossible to imagine him that way—snatching Scotty so quickly no one else noticed. Bringing him down so deep, the surface was undisturbed.
I forced my thoughts back to Maighdean Mara. The dagger was real after all. And so was the cave. But other than the wind-chime carving, I had no clear image of what Maighdean Mara even looked like. Every time I tried to picture her as a killer, it wasn’t a monster I saw. Instead, I imagined a staggeringly beautiful face, with dark spiraling hair and violet eyes that evoked the sky after the rain. Pavati.
Outside my open window, there was no wind, no birds, no June bugs bouncing against the screen. It was easy to hear the water lapping at the shore, and with it an unfamiliar humming. When the humming turned to soft laughter, I moved to the window. The outdoor lights were off, but the moon beat a path of light across the water to our dock. I thought I could pick out some dark shapes near the shore. Dad?
I snuck outside, being careful not to let the front door slam, and picked my way across the yard.