Submerging (Swans Landing) (5 page)

I sighed. “Sailor. My name is Sailor, okay? Can you leave me alone now?”

“Sailor. The girl from the ocean. I’ll remember that.”

The hairs along my arms stood on end. “I’m not from the ocean. I came on a ferry, like normal people do.”

“Aye, keep your story straight and maybe people will believe it.”

Callum moved toward me and I tensed, my body poised to run if needed. Why had I never bothered to learn a martial art? How did I expect to protect myself from cute psychos who may or may not know what I was?

“A bit of advice,” he said. “It might be best to keep your songs to yourself in the future.”

Then he passed by without stopping, heading back down the road toward the village.

Chapter Six

“Where the hell were you?”

Pushing my hair out of my face, I looked up at Josh, who stood outside the hostel door. His hands were buried deep in the front pocket of his hoodie and his expression was stony, his eyes dark with fury.

He looked like a big brother, all protective and fierce, and I felt like I was being scolded for coming home too late from a date.

“I went for a walk,” I said as I brushed by him.

Josh grabbed my arm and spun me around to look at him. “You’ve been gone for hours! Do you know how worried I’ve been since I woke up and found you missing? Fiona said she had no idea where you’d gone, you were here one minute and the next—”

“Wait a minute,” I said, holding up my hands and brushing off his grip on my arm. “Who’s Fiona?”

He blinked for a moment. “Fiona.” He gestured at the door of the hostel. “The woman who runs the front desk. Fiona McIntyre.”

“So you’re on a first name basis with her now? What, did the two of you get all cozy while you were supposedly so worried about me?”

Josh shot me a dark glare. “I had time to talk with her while I was waiting on you to get back from wherever you’d wandered off to.”

I smirked. “I’ll bet Mara would be interested in hearing all about your new friendship with this Fiona.”

I’d meant it as a joke—Fiona had to be at least twenty years older than us—but Josh’s eyes flashed and his nostrils flared. He was too sensitive when it came to Mara Westray.

“Mind your own damn business, Sailor,” he growled. Josh stomped through the door of the hostel without waiting to see if I would follow.

The woman, apparently Josh’s new best friend Fiona, stood behind the desk sorting papers. She raised her eyebrows when we entered.

“There she is,” she drawled, eying me up and down. “Your brother had a right good fit waiting on you.”

“Well, now he’s being a right good ass,” I snapped.

Josh glared at me and then stomped toward our room. I took that as my invitation to follow. Once in our room, Josh unfolded a map he’d bought at the general store and studied it.

I sat down in the chair next to the window. I tried not to think about Callum and what had happened at the lighthouse, but the harder I tried not to think about it, the more I did. Should I tell Josh that this guy might know what we were? A gnawing feeling in my stomach warned me that I couldn’t brush him off.

“So,” I said, clearing my throat, “what’s the plan?” I was chickening out, but I didn’t want to have that conversation with Josh right now.

Josh didn’t look up from the map. “We need to look for clues.”

“What kind of clues?” If I was lucky, we could leave this place behind before Callum spilled our secret to all his friends in the village.

“I don’t know,” Josh said. “This was your idea. Didn’t you come up with a plan for once you got here in all those years you thought about this?”

My plan had always been to find my mother. I’d never considered the work involved in getting to that point. I’d certainly never imagined months of swimming across an ocean.

I’d always focused on the reunion between my mom and me. I’d thought about how she might look and what all the other finfolk she lived with were like. What would happen once I made it to Scotland hadn’t crossed my mind.

“Well?” Josh asked.

“We should go swimming tonight,” I said. “We’ll see if we can find something that will lead us to the finfolk homeland. A door, or I don’t know, a portal.”

Josh rolled his eyes. “You’ve been watching too many movies. There has to be a logical way to get there. You need a concrete plan in mind before you decide to go wandering all over a place we aren’t familiar with. This isn’t Swans Landing. We don’t know anyone here and we don’t know who we can trust to help us.”

I bit my lip. No way could I tell Josh about Callum. He’d freak and then blame me for wandering off on my own. It wasn’t like I’d gone out in search of someone to reveal our secret to. How was I supposed to know that some guy would sneak up on me during what was supposed to be a private moment?

“Fine,” I said. “You make the plan, since you’re the one with the map.”

After breakfast—Josh had a peanut butter sandwich and water, gag, while I had three candy bars—we headed down the main street of Pierowall. Now that I wasn’t in a rush to get away from everything, I could take some more time to look at the village, which was made up of mostly gray stone buildings and houses. I’d never before understood the definition of
quaint
or why people would describe something in that way, but if there was ever a time to use that word it was now. Pierowall was quaint. The homes were small, squat things with storybook chimneys rising from their roofs. Green fields and pastures rolled out to one side of the village, where cattle grazed, and on the other side, the semicircle bay sparkled and the shadow of Papa Westray emerged as the sun burned off the morning haze. The grass here was brighter than anything I had ever seen, a green so vivid and alive it almost hurt to look at it. Sunlight glittered on the water like it was full of diamonds.

But it wasn’t only the village itself that captured my attention, it was the vibrations I felt. They flowed up from the earth under my feet and hung in the salty air. This land was old and alive, and it called out to the finfolk part of me.

The village seemed to have enchanted even Josh. His gaze roamed over our surroundings for a moment, then he said, “It’s really nice here. Almost reminds me of home, in a way.”

The reminder of Swans Landing sent a sting through me and I crossed my arms, sniffing and tossing my hair over my shoulder, though the wind blew it right back into my face. “It’s okay,” I contradicted. “Nothing special.”

We were used to walking everywhere we went, so we didn’t mind going on foot as we searched for any clue that might lead us to the finfolk. We explored the northwestern part of the island, studying the small gray homes and the coastline of Pierowall Bay. We walked as close to the edge of the cliffs as we dared. We stared out at the sea, looking for any unexplained landmasses within the shifting fog. The clouds had a way of rolling in suddenly, obscuring the horizon for a moment, then lifting to reveal clear skies and seas. It was easy to see how an island could become lost within them.

But despite all of that, we found nothing that brought us any closer to the finfolk homeland. I began to doubt it was even near Westray. Maybe we were on the wrong island. Maybe the fact that this island had Mara’s last name was a coincidence and not a clue.

“There has to be something here.” Josh sifted grains of sand and broken blades of grass through his fingers. We sat in the field near the lighthouse, listening to the wind howling over the cliffs and the caw of birds as they circled through the air around us. We had brought our lunch—peanut butter sandwiches—and created a makeshift picnic.

“Everything has been a dead end.” I pulled a piece of the crust off my sandwich and tossed it into the air, watching as four birds dove for it. There was a brief in-air battle, until one of the birds triumphantly snatched the crust away from the others and then flew off to eat it. “I don’t think the answer is here.”

“It can’t be coincidence. It’s not just Mara’s name. My dad—” He cleared his throat. “Our dad wrote about these islands. He had come here once, the year before he married my mother. He was searching for something and he wrote about coming to northern Orkney.”

I ignored the pang that shot through my stomach and focused on my lunch. I didn’t know much about my daddy, other than his name, Oliver Canavan. He had been married and his wife about to give birth when he and my mother first became involved.

And then he had died, drowned, in uncertain circumstances.

But I had no stories of him. No one had ever told me who he was, what he liked, what he wanted in his life.

“What was he looking for?” I asked, hugging my knees to my chest.

Josh shook his head. “I’m not sure. A key of some kind. My mom found me reading his papers and she took them away. I think she burned them all.”

We sat in silence for a while. The wind whistled around us, and in the distance I could hear the lowing of cows grazing along the rolling grassy hills. The air was thick with salt, as if the land were a part of the sea in a way. It was a good place for finfolk to live. I felt stronger on land here than I had in Swans Landing. The vibrations of the earth were different, more invigorating.

“He was a marine biologist, you know,” Josh said after a moment. His face was turned toward the horizon, where hazy fog drifted along the surface of the sea.

I hadn’t known this. I had never thought before to ask what it was our father did for a living.

“From reading his papers, I could tell he loved the ocean,” Josh went on. “He was drawn to it, probably by the finfolk genes inside him. He wanted to study it and the life within it.”

I smirked as I pulled at the grass near my feet. “Too bad none of his college textbooks could tell him about the finfolk. He had to get closer to them in order to study them.”

We both fell silent. We knew how this story ended. Oliver Canavan spent time with the finfolk, listening to them sing in the water during the new moon, getting to know them. Getting to know my mama. For which he lost his life.

I had visited his grave once. He was buried in the only cemetery in Swans Landing, right behind the little white church in the center of the island. I had been eleven years old, and my curiosity about the man who had fathered me had gotten to be too much, so I’d walked the short distance from our house to the graveyard.

His headstone had been gray and weathered like the others around it. It didn’t stand out in any way, and it had taken me a few minutes to find it as I walked through the graves, reading names of people I didn’t know. There were other Canavans in the cemetery since the family had lived in Swans Landing for several generations. Oliver Canavan lay among them, nothing special that made his grave any different.

I had stood in front of it for a long time, hoping to feel something that would let me know this really was my daddy lying in the ground. I didn’t know what exactly I had hoped for. Maybe some kind of residual connection to my mama still left in the air around him.

But there had been nothing. He remained, as he had always been, a name of a man who had once existed. He had died before I was born. I didn’t know if he had even known my mother was pregnant, or if he would have been happy that he had created me.

I closed my eyes and lifted my face toward the pale sun that barely broke through the gray clouds overhead. The scent of rain hung in the air, though it hadn’t yet started to fall.

“It was probably torture,” Josh said quietly. “Feeling this urge toward the ocean, but not being able to be a part of it. Not like he wanted to be.”

I opened my eyes again and studied Josh’s profile. We didn’t look much alike. My delicate features were a contrast to Josh’s more prominent ones. I had never seen a picture of our father. Whenever I tried to imagine him in my mind, his face was always a blank. Being partially finfolk, our daddy would have been Scottish and most likely some other western European blood was mixed in from his human ancestors as well. Josh had his mama’s light brown skin and dark hair and eyes, but his features weren’t hers. How much of our daddy was in his face?

“Do you think he wanted to be finfolk?” I asked. “To change forms?”

“He never said so in his papers, not any of the ones I read. But if he had been given the choice, I think he would have chosen a life tied to the water. He already had, as much as a human could.”

I laughed harshly. “A half-life, stuck somewhere between human and not. Hiding who we are, always afraid of what might happen if the rest of the world finds out about us.” I shook my head. “He should have been thankful he couldn’t change.”

Josh gave me an annoyed scowl. “I thought you hated humans, and were glad not to be like them.”

I looked away, digging my fingernails into my palms. “I don’t hate them. I hate how they take their place in this world for granted. They live such easy, simple lives, and yet all they do is complain.”

“Not everything is as simple as it looks.”

I shrugged. “Maybe, but here’s the simple fact: If our daddy hadn’t been so caught up in trying to be something he wasn’t, maybe he wouldn’t have died. This obsession he had with the water is what killed him.”