The Wolf Witch (The Keys Trilogy Book 1) (7 page)

“So,” he said, swallowing a yawn and showing the red, wet inside of his mouth and his bright white teeth. “You wanna come for a ride?”

“On the boat?”

“Sure. I’ve got some time before I have to get ready for the sunset cruise. We’ll only go out about a mile.”

“I don’t...I mean...I don’t have a wetsuit or anything like that,” said Blue, conscious that she smelled strongly of sweat and bleach.

“You don’t need one,” said Gabe. “I only wear this because it’s easier than slathering on sunblock every time I get in and out of the water. Go grab your bikini – it’ll be fun.”

Blue went up to her room, trying not to run as she went. It was one thing to look enthusiastic, another to look desperate. She quickly changed into her sensible black bikini (the tiny flowered one was way too tryhard for a boat trip) and cursed the growth of stubble on her legs that she’d had no time to do anything about. For a second she considered giving them a brief swipe with a razor, but in her current dumb, fluttery state of mind it was probably a great way to go about accidentally opening a vein. Gabe would just have to deal with her hairy legs. Besides, if he was the kind of manbaby who freaked out over any kind of female body hair then he wasn’t worth her time.

Not that she was assessing him in that way. Yet. Obviously.

“Don’t. Look. Desperate,” she told her reflection in the mirror, and scrunched back her hair as best she could. The smell of dust and cleaning products lingered, but she hoped the wind and waves would wash it away. No point dumping perfume on top of the bleach and floor cleaner - it would just make her smell even weirder.

He was already on the boat when she came back out. A paranoid little part of her thought he was going to drive away, like those mean boys who asked her to the dance just so they could watch her walking around on air and laugh when she fell. Hard to believe people were still pulling that old
Carrie
trick in this day and age. Harder to believe that she had fallen for it.

But then that was back in Houston; she had never believed anyone could be quite that cruel until she moved there.

She hurried to the end of the jetty. “Hey.”

“Hi,” he said, and when he looked up there was a brief, dark, male look in his eyes. Just a split second, but enough to let her know that what he saw pleased him, and that she wasn’t making a total fool of herself. He held out a hand and helped her down into the boat, making her heart beat faster for all the wrong reasons. The boat swayed and the gap between it and the jetty seemed like it could swallow her whole. When she set foot on the boat she wanted to step back; such a heaving, unstable surface.

“You okay?” said Gabe, when she was on board.

“Yeah,” she said, although she wasn’t. The thing dipped and lurched beneath her and already she had a terrible feeling that her empty stomach was going to be in knots before they had even loosed the mooring. “I may as well tell you I’m not really used to boats. Probably don’t have the best sea legs.”

“Relax,” he said, handing her a little orange foam life vest. “We’re not even going that far out. I’m assuming you can swim?”

“Of course.”

“Then you have nothing to worry about.” He untied the boat from the jetty, then reached down beneath a seat and fished out a large, crumpled tube of sunscreen. This he tossed to her.

“Seriously?” she said. “I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m not hurting for melanin here.”

Gabe shook his head. “Put it on. I’ve seen people darker than you get burned out on the reefs. The water acts as a reflector. Be sure to get the backs of your knees.”

She didn’t answer back. There was no point anyway; he had started the engine and wouldn’t have heard. Her stomach gave a nervous roll as the boat drew away from the end of the little pier, and she could have yelled right then - take me back - but before she knew it the gap between boards and boat had widened to what looked like half an ocean, and there was no turning back.

The boat rocked and shuddered under her. She opened her mouth and breathed the salt air in deep, deep, just to remind herself that it wasn’t like the last time. Not like it was with the stink of death all around and not knowing if the next thing to nudge your oar was going to be a body, floating and bloated to grotesque Violet Beauregarde proportions. Everything wet and filthy.

Let me die dry, Lord. All I’m askin’ is that I die dry.

“Okay?” Gabe yelled over his shoulder.

“Yeah. Fine,” Blue shouted back, filling her palm with coconut-smelling sunblock. It chased away the other smells, the ones she could never forget. And it wasn’t so bad once they were moving. The faster Gabe went, the smoother it felt, like the boat was skimming across the surface of the water instead of pitching and wallowing around in it.

She gingerly made her way to the front to join him. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure. What?”

“What’s with the eyes?”

Gabe laughed, his own eyes screwed up against the glitter of the sun on the water. “Superstition. Something my grandpa said some of the old Cubanos used to do. The really old guys, the ones who could remember Spain.”

“What does it do?”

“Nothing. It’s a superstition. Superstition doesn’t do shit, except make you feel better.” He cut the engine. “And maybe score you days off every month.”

“You go to church?”

He grinned. “Hell, no. But the story goes that the eyes get all confused when the full moon’s shining; can’t tell the moon in the water from the moon in the sky. That’s how you get wrecked; moon’s a trickster.”

Blue hung onto the side. The boat was rolling again. “You believe that?”

“Nope, but I take the days off anyway. And Kate can’t do a damn thing about it.”

Kate owned the hotel. In an off-moment Charmaine had allegedly once called her the Great White Queen, and Stacy had loved it so much she had all but forgotten Kate’s real name. Kate was from New York originally – tall, model-thin and blonde. Blue tried to imagine her passing up her cut of Gabe’s cruise revenue for three days out of every month and couldn’t do it.

“How on earth do you swing that?”

Gabe pulled out a long boat hook and stretched it out towards a large, orange buoy. “Easy. We just tell the moon story to the tourists and they lap that shit up. Local color. Total bullshit, but it gives them a story to tell when they go back to Wisconsin or Kansas or wherever.” He jumped down into the bottom of the boat and pulled over the diving equipment. “Kate bitched the air blue about it at first but then there was the accident.”

“Accident?”

He picked up the sunscreen. “Lift your hair,” he said. “I need to get your back. When you’re face down in the water it’s the first thing to burn.”

She did as she was told, the steady motion of the waves beneath her doing nothing to settle either her nerves or her stomach. “What accident?” she said.

“You know that Palm Court place down the beach?” he said, his hands smoothing over her back with a businesslike touch. “Well, when Kate first bought this place they were our direct competition. And they were killing it. They’d take people out no matter what shape the moon was in and Kate was
pissed
; she actually sat me down and told me if I didn’t step up and do full moon cruises then she was going to fire me and find an instructor who would.”

“So you did?”

She felt his breath on the back of her neck as he exhaled. “Nuh uh,” he said. “But the Palm Court guy did. Think he was from Key Largo or something. Whatever – he wasn’t superstitious. He took these honeymooners out on the second day of the full moon; some yuppie kids from North Carolina. And that’s when it all went wrong.” He slapped her lightly on the back of the shoulder. “Okay, you’re done.”

Blue turned. “Thanks. But what do you
mean?
Went wrong?”

“Well, she drowned,” said Gabe. “The bride. Or at least that’s what they said. They found water in her lungs but I guess it could just have easily been hypercapnia. Dead space. You see, you don’t use all of your lungs when you breathe out. You only exhale a certain percentage of the air you breathe in, right?”

“Right,” she said, wondering what on earth had possessed her to come out here in the first place. There was no way she was getting in the water now. Not in a million years.

Gabe picked up a snorkel and held it up to his mouth. “What happens sometimes is that people breathe in through the snorkel, like so.” He demonstrated. “Then they exhale through it the same way. See? That way the CO2 you breathe out gets caught in the tube and when you breathe in you breathe it back. It fills up the dead spaces in your lungs and you get hypercapnia, which is basically CO2 poisoning. You get confused, sluggish, dizzy, weak and eventually – if you don’t get out and start breathing normally again – dead.”

Blue was aware that she probably looked like a rabbit in the headlights, but she couldn’t seem to remember how to blink. Gabe looked perfectly cheerful, like he was teaching a fun science class to a bunch of enthusiastic sixth graders.

“And you want me to get in the water?” she said.

“Relax. I won’t let you die.”

“Good. Thank you. That’s...very nice of you.”

He laughed. “I told you – I know what I’m doing. All you have to do is remember to exhale through your nose from time to time.”

“I don’t think I can - ”

“- you can.” He handed her a snorkel. “In through the tube, out through the nose. If the tube fills with water you need to clear it. Just a hard, sharp breath out – like you’re saying the word ‘two’, but hard. That’s it.”

She felt dizzy already. “Am I really going to let you talk me into this?”

He patted her shoulder. “It’s fine. You’ll be surprised how shallow it is when you’re in. We’re right on the reef. And it’s worth it. Believe me.” He dipped a mask in the water and handed it to her. “Here’s the disgusting part; spit in it.”

“Spit?”

“Yep. Spit in it and just rub it around in there. Stops it from fogging up.”

When she tried to summon enough spit the feel of it in her mouth was enough to set her off feeling queasy again, so in her determination to look normal she spat maybe harder than she needed to. She swallowed hard as she did as directed, rubbing the saliva around in the mask with her thumb. The boat rolled once more and she wanted to be back in the hotel, with the soothing smell of bleach in the background, keeping at bay all the phantom stinks of that sad, drowned world.

The mask seemed to suck at the edges of her eyes, but Gabe said that was good. Meant it was watertight.

“Okay,” he said, sitting on the side of the boat, strange and froglike in swimfins. “When we go over the side, I want you to keep your body parallel to the sea bed, okay? Like you’re lying flat face down in the water. Don’t put your feet down, whatever you do, because you might touch the coral.”

“Why? Will it hurt?”

“It hurts the coral worse,” he said. “You can destroy forty years growth of live coral with a single touch. It’s that delicate, so you must never touch it, okay?”

She nodded. Was this really happening? Was she really going to deliberately fall off a boat in the middle of the ocean like this? What if she got swept away? She wanted to tell him no, that she was afraid, but that would lead to a whole bunch of things she wasn’t ready to tell him. Or anyone.

“Remember what we talked about,” he said. “Exhale through your nose, or you wind up breathing your own air back.”

“Right,” she said, trying to remember everything. It seemed overwhelming. “Oh God. This is really happening, isn’t it?”

He grinned, his teeth bright white in the sunshine. “Relax. I’ll be holding your hand the whole way. In through the tube, out through the nose. Keep your feet up, your body parallel and enjoy the show, okay?”

She took a deep breath and realized that the next one she took would be underwater. His hand was there – extended towards her, and she took it. He smiled briefly, his face lumpy and distorted by the mask and snorkel, and then they fell backwards together into the water.

The first thing she saw was bubbles and she was immediately conscious of her feet – get them up, get them away from the coral – but then she lost Gabe’s hand. For a second she almost panicked but then somehow she got turned around and the sight that greeted her was so beautiful that even if she had needed to breathe right away, she might have forgotten how.

His hand was in hers again. She tentatively sucked air in through the snorkel and was amazed to find it worked. In through the tube, out through the nose. Got it.

She hadn’t known what to expect, but it wasn’t this. She had imagined some murky dive in empty waters, interesting only to aficionados, but instead it was like she had fallen backwards into a giant tropical fish tank.

Jewel bright fish darted in and out of the coral – blue and yellow, black and red. Beneath her was a large greenish coral, all complicated creases like the surface of a brain. Swaying fronds of red and green seaweed and then a shimmering shoal of tiny fish, flashing out so fast that they made her breath come out in a series of surprised bubbles. Gabe gently tugged her hand and pointed, and there – just a little way away, shot through with the sunlight beaming through the crystal blue water - was a jellyfish. A big, wide-brimmed, pink-trimmed cellophane crinoline of a thing, fragile and beautiful as the reef itself, long stinging tendrils floating out beneath it.

It was so overwhelming that she almost wanted to go back up; she only had one pair of eyes and there was just
so much
to look at; disc shaped black fish with white, disdainful lips, electric blue tail fins beating through the waves, so many shapes and shades of coral that she thought her mind would burst with trying to absorb it all. Then, when she thought she had seen it all, there was a turtle, spotted flippers rowing over the reef with stately antique grace.

When they came back up she was amazed she had ever been afraid to go under.

“Cool, huh?” said Gabe, when she was clumsily flopping back into the boat, a sad comedown from floating beneath the waves.

Blue pulled back her mask, scrunching her eyes against the sunlight. “Cool? Slight understatement.”