The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook (22 page)

“With a broken arm? Great idea,” said Cara.

“I’ll do it,” Max insisted. “I can still use my fingers a bit. It’s not like the hand is completely useless. Enough to snap the leash anyway.”

Before they could stop him, Max had grabbed the leash from its coat hook and was outside. The door closed behind him.

“That’s just great,” said Jax. “What if the man gets in
him,
too?
Then
what? Because he wasn’t with us last night, he isn’t as safe as we are. He’s got no protection.”

“You have to tell him that,” said Cara. “
We
do.”

They expected sounds of growling and biting outside, but none came. Cara felt nervous. It was too quiet.

“I have to see,” she said, and opened the door a crack to peer out.

At the end of the porch Max was lying facedown, turned away. Rufus was leashed to the rail—but he was also hunched over Max, gnawing.

Gnawing.

“Max!” she cried, and without another thought she jumped out and was on him. The dog was growling and snapping, but she didn’t care—she dove past him, grabbed Max and dragged him, and then he rolled over and was crawling, too, and they were at the door and the dog was biting at their shoes, had one of Cara’s shoes off and pulled it right off her foot so that her sock-foot dragged across the porch slats. … She felt the dog’s wet mouth on her ankle and a pang of fear, but then Jax was there and they were in.

Jax slammed the door closed again.

Breathing hard, she grabbed Max’s shoulder.

“Max! Where’d he bite you?” she asked.

Max rubbed his eyes and then raised his broken arm weakly. Halfway between the elbow and the wrist the cast was almost gnawed through, with a gouge in it that was nothing but a pulpy, dirty mass of plaster and gauze.

There was something on it that looked like blood, red smudges and smears, but she realized it wasn’t Max’s blood. It was the red water soaking Rufus’s fur.

The not-dog’s teeth hadn’t reached Max’s skin.

They lay there, recovering.

“Children?” called Lolly. “What’s all the ruckus about? Are you playing too rough out there?”

Rolled eyes.

“Just—uh, just
playing
normal!” called Jax. “Sorry! We’ll try to be quieter.”

They waited for a second, making sure she wasn’t coming out into the hallway.

“Thanks, Car,” got out Max finally. “He faked me out. He let me clip him, and then he knocked me down. I held him off with the cast, but—”

“How does it feel?” asked Jax.

“It’s OK, I think. A little sore. I’ll have to get it fixed—”

“Max, listen,” said Cara. “You can’t take on the Pouring Man. What we did last night? It gave us some protection from him. Facing him down, I mean. But you don’t have that protection. So you have to be really careful of him.”

“Promise, Max?” asked Jax. “Let us take the risks.”

Max just groaned, a groan of frustration. Or annoyance.

Then he said, “I totally remembered, by the way.”

“Remembered what?” asked Cara.

“What the witches said. We had to memorize it. ‘Eye of newt and toe of frog, wool of bat and tongue of dog. Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting, lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing.’ ”

“What’s a howlet?” asked Cara.

“No idea.”

“Probably an archaic form of
owl
,” said Jax. “Luckily, we don’t have to dissect anything for this particular charm.”

“Thank the lord for small mercies,” said Max.

“Say it how it really sounds,” said Cara, curious.

“Tir biþ tacna sum, healdeð trywa wel wiþ æþelingas; a biþ on færylde ofer nihta genipu, næfre swiceþ,” recited Jax.

It sounded very strange—as though Jax was speaking in tongues, which Cara had seen once in a horror movie Max forced them to watch that involved snake-handling.

“So, nothing to, like, chant?” asked Max. “No toil and trouble?”

“You’re off the hook,” said Jax.

The three of them were huddled just inside the back door that led outside from the kitchen, down a narrow gravel path through their small backyard and beneath the pitch pines to the water. Their dad had gone to sleep in his own bed, instead of on the couch in his office, for once, so he was two floors up, and—they hoped—wouldn’t be able to hear them.

“Once we make the salt lines and cast the charm, each of us stands in position. You have the positions, right? Everyone’s clear on that?”

As soon as it was midnight they had to draw three lines in salt, one from the back door and two from the back corners of the house, all the way down to the water. Then they had to walk along those lines and sprinkle herbs they carried in china bowls—part of an herbal charm, Jax called it, that included dried seasonings from their mother’s spice cabinet, things like thyme and fennel. It was part of a “tenth-century Anglo-Saxon charm,” according to Jax, passed along to the selkie by someone else, and that was all Cara had taken in.

The selkie was a messenger, Jax said.

Cara felt nervous. Her palms were sweating.

“Jax,” she whispered when Max stepped back into the kitchen for a second to glug down some water. “You can ping me, during this, OK? But only till the minute it’s over. If you need to.”

“OK,” whispered Jax solemnly. “Thanks.”

“Each of us holds their talisman,” said Max, back again. “In the right hand and tied with a white string around the right wrist. Check?”

“Check,” whispered Cara.

She had one of her mother’s lipsticks, Max had a small jeweled comb, and Jax had a bracelet with their mother’s name spelled out on it, from when she was younger.

“Check,” said Max.

“So after we draw the lines and sprinkle the herbs, we take up our positions. At the door and corners. And we wait there for nine minutes with our eyes closed, then open them and wait for another three. Closed for nine, open for three, got it? Nine and three are significant numbers in the charm, for some reason. And no talking during
any
of this. Silence is as important to the ritual as any words would be. Got that? A single word could
wreck
it.”

“We got it, J,” said Max.

“Watches all say 11:57:24?”

“Yes,” said Cara.

She didn’t have a digital watch. She thought they were hideous and always checked the time on her cell, but she’d borrowed an old one of her dad’s.

“Here, too,” said Max.

“How did they time this whole ritual thing before there were watches?” wondered Cara.

“Probably counting, and I bet it took a lot of practice and discipline,” said Jax. “So we have it easy. And Max, your watch is set so you can punch in the alarm for nine minutes, right? So we know when to open our eyes?”

“Done deal.”

“At that point, when the whole twelve minutes are up, the warding charm is finished. The protection part of the rite. The rest is to make her welcome, or something. So we walk from our stations down to the water again, along those same lines of power where the salt is. And we all meet at the point where the salt lines converge. Right down there at the shore. We kneel and dip our foreheads in the water. We touch our right hands to our heart, with the talismans in them. And we say her name. Can you guys remember all that?”

“We’ll manage,” said Max.

“Then it’s back to the house, but this time face away from the sea. Stand still. Heads bowed. Don’t move. Just wait. If we’ve done it right, after a while we’ll get a sign.”

“Oh,” said Cara, “and we can’t forget to put this near the waterline.”

She’d brought one of her mother’s light, cotton sundresses, flung over a shoulder, because the selkie had said:
her clothes
. The instructions had said to place her clothes near the water and hold the talismans.

“OK,” said Jax.

“We all have our salt,” said Cara.

“We have to start walking and sprinkling the salt exactly at the stroke of midnight, remember,” said Jax.

“On my mark,” said Max. “I’ll say go.”

The moon was still hidden, so the only lights they had to walk by were the lights of their headlamps. With all the things they had to have in their hands for the ritual, there was no way they could also carry flashlights. Which made the headlamps necessary. Max had said that wearing his made him feel like a coal miner. Or a spelunker, Jax had added, and then had to explain to them that that meant
explorer of caves
.

Cara looked down and checked: salt and herbs in her left hand, lipstick in her right palm and tied around that same wrist with string. She still had to hold it, since there was no surefire way to secure the shiny metal cylinder by tying it.

“Go,” hissed Max, and Cara pushed the back door open. They went through single-file, shifted their salt shakers into the hands holding the talismans while their left hands held the herb bowls, and started walking and sprinkling the salt on the ground.

As they had planned, each of them struck out in a precise direction—Cara straight down toward the water, Max to the right corner of the house, Jax to the left.

Cara bent her head and aimed her headlamp at her feet, because if she tripped on the dark grass the salt or the herbs could go flying—one misstep could ruin the whole ceremony, Jax had warned. She held her breath. Her fingers shook as she tipped the salt shaker back and forth. The trees loomed up in front of her, and she was making her way through them—walking as straight as she could, slow and deliberate so as not to drop anything.… Slowly the waterline drew near.

A few feet away from it she bent and let the sundress fall into a heap, then kept walking. Just as she began sinking into the mud, the water lapping at her toes, she stopped and let the last of her salt drift down into the mud.

“Oh no!” came Jax’s voice plaintively from close by, somewhere in the marshy area before the trees started up. “I’m out of salt! And I’m not down at the water yet! It must have come out of my shaker too fast!”

It’s my fault
, thought Cara. They hadn’t had three salt shakers in the house, so for one of them she’d had to use a cinnamon container, and she recalled, now, how large the holes had been in the plastic lid for the cinnamon. She’d made a note to warn the others, and then, when they were distributing the different containers, she’d completely forgotten to mention it.

I’m sorry, it’s my fault
, she thought again—more loudly, if that was possible. She tried to send the thought in Jax’s direction, so he didn’t feel like it was him who’d messed up.

“Keep going anyway,” came Max’s confident voice from her other side. “Just keep going. That’ll be a gap in the line of defense, but we can work around it. We’ll have to.”

She saw Jax come down to the water, stuffing the empty shaker into his pocket.

Then they were all side by side at the waterline, at the convergence. They stood there awkwardly for a moment—Cara felt foolish; it was hard to believe anything real would come of this—then turned and began the walk back up, curving apart again as the salt lines separated. This time they were dropping herbs out of the bowls, pinch by pinch, which they lifted with their right thumb and forefinger. Cara retraced her steps back up to the house.

In a few seconds they were through the trees again and flattening their backs against the building’s back wall, standing at their stations. Cara’s station was the back door, where they’d all started out, and as she stood there with her eyes closed, everything went awfully silent—not even, she thought, the sound of a cricket. She stood in the blackness of her closed eyelids, feeling dizzy. Seeing the world kept you stable, she thought.

Then she heard the low growl of a dog.

It was Rufus—up front still, because the growl was very faint. In her whole life she’d never heard Rufus growl.

It must mean he wasn’t himself again. Yet.

But she kept her eyes closed. She couldn’t open them—it would ruin the ceremony. They had to be closed for the whole nine minutes, and she had to stand stock-still for those nine minutes too. No movement was allowed.

Fuzzy sparks pricked the inside of her eyelids—no problem, she told herself, that’s just electrical impulses, isn’t it? She tried to think what Jax would say: the science of it. It’s what always happens when you keep your eyes closed for a long time without sleeping. There’s no perfect black; there have to be interruptions in the blackness. So you imagine the sparks are pictures of things, images, while really it’s neurons firing or whatever—the energy of the brain.