The Fires Beneath the Sea ebook (14 page)

They were saved. There were Max’s headlights.

Though he hadn’t said so, maybe he even thought she was imagining things.

“There’s no way you’re gonna convince me that thing coming out of the mirror was just some weirdo who likes spying on girls,” went on Hayley.

“Not so much,” admitted Jax.

He sat cross-legged on a thick rug on the floor and was eating sugary cereal from the box with his fingers. That was his habit when he was trying to think something through.

“I haven’t been a hundred percent honest with you,” said Cara to Hayley sheepishly.

“Yeah. No kidding.”

“I’m sorry,” Cara told her, and meant it.

Before this whole thing, she’d always thought of herself as pretty truthful, aside from the rare white lie to save someone’s feelings. She wanted to have integrity.

“So what the hell was it?” asked Hayley. “I mean there was that—face thing in the mirror—and the hands were stretching out longer than any hands could ever be, like they were groping for us….”

“You said he was in the tapwater?” said Jax, turning to Cara.

Cara kept her own hands cupped around her mug of cocoa, alternating between sipping and blowing on it. She’d toweled off, so she wasn’t still soaking, but both she and Hayley were wearing bathrobes and thick socks—Hayley had brought puffy pink bedroom slippers in her overnight bag—and had their hair wrapped up in soft towels.

“That was how he got in,” she said to Jax, nodding. “Through the pipes. Not the door.”

“Yeah, um, pipes? I’m not getting it,” said Hayley.

“He travels through water,” explained Cara. “He has to have water to travel. And he likes the nighttime, too. Maybe there was enough wetness in the pipes that he could move through them? But then he turned to steam when he came out, because it was too bright or dry in the bathroom for him to, you know,
materialize
all the way….”

“Before that,” said Jax, “you said he took the shape of Hayley?”

“He
did
,” said Cara. “He really did! Jax, I swear. I was inside the tent, and she’d gone out across the parking lot to the bathroom, and I thought it was her. I heard these hands scratching and scrabbling, you know, trying to undo the zipper on the flap in the dark? And I turned my flashlight on them and they were
her
hands. Her fingers! They looked just like them! So I told her to come in.”

“You invited him,” said Jax.

“It was meant for Hayley. But I guess I did.”

“I didn’t know he could do that,” said Jax. “Shapeshifting. He’s more powerful than I thought, that’s for sure.”

“Wait,” said Hayley. “
Shapeshifting?
But that’s, like, the sci-fi channel! You guys have got to be kidding me.”

“It’s a kind of mind-control, I would guess,” said Jax. “I can’t be certain, of course, but that would be a more efficient strategy, to make the observer
think
he looks a certain way. He’s not actually transmuting atoms or anything. ’Course, mind control’s a pretty good trick too.”

“Whatever!” said Hayley. “You guys need to tell me what’s going on. I mean, he was after me, too, right?”

“He won’t bother you unless you’re with us,” said Jax. “I’m pretty certain of that.”

“And, of course, I mean, you can go home now, if you want to,” said Cara. “I wouldn’t blame you, that’s for sure.”

“I don’t want to go home,” said Hayley. “At least—not while it’s still dark out. No thanks.”

“You’re pretty safe in here,” said Jax.

“We think,” added Cara.

“But then—what does he want from you?”

Jax turned to Cara, expectant.

“You know more now, don’t you?” he said.

His eyes seemed to be taking her measure.

“I had a dream,” she confessed. “A really realistic one. Mom was in it.”

“Oh,
man
. The creepy guy has something to do with your mother?” asked Hayley.

“He’s trying to keep us from her,” said Cara.

She leaned forward and set her empty mug down on a table, on a stack of her dad’s books. Then she sat back, feeling spacey … she twisted her favorite ring back and forth on her middle finger. Her mother had given it to her for her twelfth birthday: silver, with a round white and blue design that looked like an eye. She had said it was for good luck.
To ward off the evil eye
, her mother said.

“Um,” said Hayley. “Like, why?”

Jax shook his head, then looked sideways, checking with Cara.

“We don’t exactly know,” he said.

“There’s something going on,” Cara told Hayley.

“Yeah, I got that much,” said Hayley.

She was winding a strand of her yellow hair around a pencil.

“In the world. Beyond us. Some kind of a fight. And he’s on one side and our mother is on the other. And we’re supposed to be there, too. At least, I think that’s what she was telling me.… We’re supposed to be joining in the fight, but to do that we have to get to her. Or to the others, her friends, maybe? And she’s trying to help us, but he doesn’t want us to succeed, because he’s one of the bad guys. She called him dead.
One of the dead soldiers
, is what she called him, though I don’t know what she meant. She also said his name is fear. She said he works for the someone called the Cold Man. Or wait, the Cold
One
…”

Jax was gazing up at her from the floor, his cereal box forgotten, while Hayley stared from her armchair, Cara’s mother’s terrycloth bathrobe swamping her small frame.

“Huh. Well, you said a mouthful,” said Hayley.

There was a pause. Cara was overwhelmed herself—where had all that come from? She hadn’t thought about the whole thing before at all, at least not consciously.

“That’s more than I knew,” said Jax after a moment.

“She also said …,” started Cara, and turned to Jax. She hesitated, and then decided to take the plunge. “She said the visionary is me,” she went on.

She felt a little proud of it—the pride kind of escaped her control, surged up despite herself—but there was no good reason for that except being conceited, she reminded herself. It was only a dream, after all.
Her
dream.

Basically,
she
was the one who suddenly had the idea that she was the visionary. It wasn’t like her mother had come up and said it to all of them, in the flesh.

Usually, in their family, it was Jax who knew things. It was Max who did things—sports, popularity, whatever—and it was Jax who knew things. She only half-believed she’d been singled out at all, frankly.

But then Jax surprised her.

“I suspected as much,” he said. “You see things. I hear them and I think about them. I’m more of an interpreter type.”

“You guys lost me again,” said Hayley, shaking her head in resignation.

“So Max is the arbiter? I wouldn’t want Max judging
me
,” said Cara. “Geez.”

“No kidding,” said Jax.

“Max is some kind of a judge?” asked Hayley. “In your game here?”

“It’s not a game,” said Jax. “Did the guy in the mirror seem like a game to you?”

“I wish it was a game,” said Cara.

“Max would make a good judge, actually,” said Hayley, and picked a mint-green marshmallow out of her cocoa, scrutinizing it.

“She has a major crush on him,” Cara told Jax, her eyes rolling.

“No, but for real,” said Hayley. “You’re kind of harsh on him. This summer, anyway. But he’s just trying to stay cool. It makes him lonely, but he has to, to keep it together. And he’s really a fair person, you know that? He’s always jumping in to make sure big guys don’t pick on little ones. You guys are way harsh.”

She shook her head and popped the marshmallow into her mouth.

Jax and Cara exchanged glances. Hayley might have a point, Cara thought with a pang of guilt—although Max could make himself pretty hard to be nice to when he was always locked up in his room wearing headphones. Or at the park jumping his skateboard. Again and again and again…

Still. He had his own way of dealing, and the past months hadn’t been easy for him either. Hayley was right about that part.

“Be that as it may,” said Jax.

“She said she couldn’t make it simpler for us,” said Cara. “Because just like you thought, Jax, he can read us, or at least read you, so as soon as
we
know where she is,
he’ll
know, too. So it’s got to be, like, this last-minute thing, somehow. The way we find her, I mean. It can’t be a slow hunt. She has to be revealed to us when we’re not expecting it, basically. Or something like that.”

“That does make it hard,” said Jax.

“I don’t know about you guys,” said Hayley, yawning, “but I kind of need to crash.”

“Keep the phone nearby, Jax,” said Cara, rising from her armchair. “And wake us up if it rings.”

Jax nodded quickly, anxious to be responsible despite being the one who’d been left at home like a baby.

“Will do,” he said.

They slept in so late that it was almost noon by the time Cara sat up in her double bed to blink at the fringe of bright sunlight around the window blinds.

She’d been woken by the jangling sound of Max and his friends banging in through the front door; now she could hear them downstairs. She sat listening as they went through the kitchen, opening and slamming cabinets and drawers. No doubt they were prowling through every available storage space looking for junk food.

She heard them laughing at the bottom of the stairs and had to assume that their night, at least, had been relaxed and uneventful.

“What time is it?” asked Hayley sleepily, opening one eye and stretching beneath the coverlet.

“Late,” said Cara. “And Max is home, so I guess that means you’re going to get right up and put your makeup on.”

“Shut
up
,” said Hayley, but she got out of bed, tossed on her pink robe, and padded into the bathroom in her cat-paw slippers. Cara heard the tap running and the sound of an electric toothbrush. Slippers, robe, electric toothbrush—Hayley didn’t travel light.

“Is everyone decent?” said Jax from the door.

Hayley closed herself in the bathroom, a bit of a prude considering the intruder was only ten. Then again, Hayley didn’t have brothers. She wasn’t used to the lack of privacy.

“It’s fine,” called Cara. “It’s just me.”

Jax opened the door and entered, fully dressed in what looked like yesterday’s clothes, with Rufus beside him.

“So they didn’t see anything during the night, right?” asked Cara.

Jax shook his head as the dog licked Cara’s outstretched hand, then bounded over to his favorite spot on the rug and curled up. Cara got out of bed and opened the blinds, flooding her bedroom with light.

The day, for once, was blue and clear. The water of the bay sparkled, stretched out beneath her.

She opened the window and cool, clean air swept in. She breathed deeply. Now that it wasn’t raining, she could leave it open….

“Listen, Car,” said Jax in a low voice, glancing quickly at the bathroom door. “The thing is, he’s getter stronger. Because it’s almost a new moon. You know, when the sky is darkest? In a sense, when it’s the deepest night.”

“What, like vampires or werewolves or something? He’s hooked up to the phases of the moon?”

“Yeah, like all the soldiers,” he nodded. “Like all the soldiers in the army of the dark,” he added ominously.

“You made that up,” said Cara.

“Nah, actually it’s a line from a game. I thought it sounded good. But the deal with him is, he hates the full moon, because it sheds light. It sort of turns night into day.”

“So then when’s this new moon coming?” asked Cara, going over to her closet, opening it, and staring in at the rack of empty hangers. Clean clothes were often hard to find since her mother had left.

“Problem is, it’s tonight.”

“What can we do?”

“Just be careful, I guess,” said Jax, but his small face was tight with concern.

“Like for instance don’t say ‘Come in’ to the bad guy, you mean?”

Jax sat down by Rufus, rubbing between the floppy ears.

“I’m not even happy about you and Max being out at night, with him there. But I guess you have to be. Right?”

“Well, there’s no other way to see the ocean,” said Cara.

“Actually,” said Jax thoughtfully, “there just might be. You can pull down satellite images—there’s a famous one of a red tide in California, so I know those phytoplankton can show up in the dark. In the picture I’m thinking of, you can see this bright turquoise color and the red, too, from way up in the stratosphere. Or thermosphere, technically. Or exosphere…”