Wrecked (2 page)
Authors: Anna Davies
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Book design by Lucy Ruth Cummins
The text for this book is set in Bembo.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Davies, Anna, 1982–
Wrecked / Anna Davies. —1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: After a boating accident off Whym Island, South Carolina, takes the lives of four friends and injures three others, seventeen-year-old Miranda meets Christian, a sort of merman who saved her life but was then charged by a sea witch to kill her.
ISBN 978-1-4424-3278-9 (hardcover)
ISBN 978-1-4424-3280-2 (eBook)
[1. Supernatural—Fiction. 2. Mermen—Fiction. 3. Witches—Fiction. 4. Blessing and cursing—Fiction. 5. Islands—Fiction. 6. Orphans—Fiction. 7. South Carolina—Fiction.]
I. Title.
PZ7.D28374Wre 2012
[Fic]—dc23
2011017941
Contents
For Dad
I
N MANY WAYS,
W
HYM
I
SLAND IS LIKE ANY OF THE HUNDREDS
of tiny islands dotting the South Carolina coast. It’s got year-rounders, plus an infusion of visitors that swells its population to more than five times its off-season size. It has windswept cottages, sprawling resorts, and a coastline that makes visitors catch their breath and immediately do some mental math, desperate to find some way to live there year round. And, like all islands, it has secrets. Everyone knows that, in the 1960s, the mayor ran off with his gardener’s wife, and everyone knows people can occasionally hear an otherworldly keening by the beach on Bloody Point thanks to a nineteenth-century shipwreck.
During the summer, year-rounders will avoid the ferry dock, the Upper Dock bar and restaurant, Burton Park, and
the town square commons, because they know these spots will be overrun by tourists. On the beach, the two groups, indistinguishable from each other to outsiders, will barely acknowledge each other with anything besides a chilly nod. Just like all the other islands in the Calibogue Sound.
Except the one thing that Whym has that other nearby islands—like Breton or Johns or Stuart Island—don’t, is an air of mystery. For one thing, Whym has unusual tides, which don’t always conform to the tide chart. This is annoying to fishermen, enchanting to visitors. Called witch tides by locals, low tide can suddenly, in an instant, turn into a relentless rushing high tide. Oceanographers say it’s a natural phenomenon caused by unusual plate tectonic activity. The locals explain that there’s a sunken island beneath the sea, ruled by a sea witch.
The visitors can’t get enough of that story. Which is why, during the summer, there are sea witch tours instead of whale watch tours, sea witch specials at all the seafood restaurants, and, of course, plenty of sea witch souvenirs at the postage-stamp-size Souvenir Shoppe, a weather-beaten shack that lies to the right of the Faunterloy Ferry dock. The Souvenir Shoppe, too, is just like any other souvenir shop on any other island. You know the ones: The floors are perpetually gritty with sand, there’s a thin layer of dust on all the shot glasses, ashtrays, and bells that are perched on high shelves, and there’s a line of cheap candy at eye-level for five-year-olds. On Whym, the Souvenir Shoppe also contains handmade puppets of the
mermen and mermaids believed to live beneath the sea. They all have slight smiles and hair made out of yarn and are usually only purchased by well-meaning grandmothers. Next to them is a shelf of mermaid food, which is simply multicolored fish pellets that children enjoy throwing into the water as the ferry is departing, as well as mermaid gloss, a sparkly lip gloss popular with visitors under ten.
And then, of course, there’s a shaky rack of postcards. The postcards always show the most beautiful images of the islands. They’ll show the sunset, the line of gorgeous willow trees that hide the row of mansions that regulars live in, a couple walking on the shoreline, just hazy enough to be unidentifiable.
On all of them, the same tagline: “Whym Island: Some things have to be seen to be believed.”
But that’s not exactly correct. What it should read is: “On Whym Island, some things have to be believed to be seen.”
“I
HAVE AN EXPERIMENT
,” G
ENEVIEVE
C
LARKE BEGAN
as she leaned forward on the driftwood log, toward the crackling beach bonfire. She paused, waiting for Darcy Scott to put down her beer bottle and Gray Hartnett to glance up from her iPhone. Miranda O’Rourke raised her eyebrow. Genevieve always had grandiose theories, and the later it was and the more beer she’d taken from the cooler, the more she tended to expound on them. But Genevieve had been Miranda’s best friend since seventh grade, and even when her experiments were ridiculous—like the time she convinced Miranda to sneak into a frat party at Coastal Carolina with her and pretend they were exchange students from Estonia—her enthusiasm made up for any absurdities.
“I’ll only do it if I don’t have to stand up,” Miranda cracked as she opened her Sigg water bottle and took a large sip. It was already almost midnight, and she had an exhibition soccer tourney tomorrow afternoon, which college scouts were supposed to attend. But she didn’t want the party to end. Not yet. After all, who knew how many nights like this they’d have left? School started next week, and then next summer they’d all be scattered across the country at colleges, embarking on their “real” lives. That was a thought that simultaneously terrified and excited Miranda. Sometimes, Miranda tried to close her eyes and imagine what it would be like to be surrounded by strangers, to not live steps away from the ocean, but she couldn’t. And right now, she didn’t want to.
“Okay, lazy,” Genevieve said, interrupting Miranda’s reverie. “Ya’ll don’t need to do anything. I’ll do all the work. I learned to read tarot cards this summer. And it sounds so stupid, but it works. Like, when I got it done at the beginning of the summer, the cards said I’d have a summer fling. And I totally did!” Genevieve crowed, obviously still thrilled about the
totally hot hookup
she’d had with a Columbia University rising sophomore when she was enrolled in a pre-college program in New York City during the summer. Or at least the hookup she’d claimed to have. That was the thing with Genevieve: It wasn’t like she
lied
per se, but she definitely often embellished, and more than once, Miranda had witnessed a flirtatious gaze across a crowded party on a Friday night become an all-out hookup
when she described it to everyone else on Monday morning. Miranda never called her on it, and Genevieve never seemed to feel guilty. It was as if, in her mind, she actually began to believe the things she said. Miranda wished she could be more like that.
Miranda was convinced that Genevieve’s faux-scandalous life was pretty much designed to be one step more scandalous than that of Genevieve’s mother, Jane. Jane had been divorced three times, and Whym Islanders were still up in arms that she’d been the one to inherit the sprawling seventeenth-century mansion on Witch’s Knee, the most exclusive area on the island. Jane had converted half the mansion into a yoga studio and had turned the once meticulously landscaped lawn into an organic vegetable plot. And Genevieve followed in her mom’s footsteps, attempting to scandalize the next generation of Whym Islanders by dying her hair bright red, getting a tiny silver stud pierced into her nose and a star tattoo inked onto her wrist, and ending almost every statement with a
no?
at the end, as if she were daring anyone to disagree with her.
“Did you sleep in his
bed
? I heard New York is full of bedbugs. I wouldn’t hook up with anyone there,” Gray drawled, wrinkling her nose and purposefully edging away from Genevieve. “Course, I’d never be in New York anyway. Too dirty.”
“It’s also full of hot guys,” Genevieve smirked as she pulled the cards out of her bag. The light from the bonfire was flickering on Genevieve’s face, making her look different than
usual—older, more sophisticated, like someone who had a whole different life back in New York. “Right, Miranda?” Genevieve asked.