Perilous Waters (5 page)

“We make a good team,” she said, trying to coax a hesitant Lyla onto the gangplank.

“Thanks to you. All I do is have fun with them. You carry the clipboard and make sure everyone follows rules and things like that,” Julia said, lifting Lyla by the waist and hoisting her up before she had a chance to raise a protest. She followed this with Maya, Dominic, and the rest of the kids, one right after the other without missing a beat.

“I think you underestimate yourself,” Angie said, guiding the children up the wooden walkway. “I would be in over my head without you.”

The midnight blue water drew her gaze. It was impossible to see through, and a chill skittered up her spine at the thought of the lightless depths of the harbor. “Careful,” she told the kids, made uneasy by the fact that the only thing keeping people from falling into the water was a thin piece of chain.

Sightseers wandered along the wooden decks, and several of the kids ran ahead as they boarded. “No, no… don’t run,” she called out, but as usual her voice didn’t project the way the other counselors’ voices did.

She looked to Julia, who urged the last camper on board before setting her hands on her hips. “Rainbow Rockers! Get back here—the train has
not
left the station.” Julia’s voice cut loudly over the rumble of the crowd. Angie released a pent up breath, casting a grateful smile Julia’s way before scrambling to keep Dominic from getting too far ahead.

As they toured the Bounty, the fact that any of the children might lean too far over the rail and fall into the ocean was a constant pressure on her mind. They were so little. Anything could happen to them. Angie’s fingers tapped subtly against her thigh, so lightly that only someone who knew to look for the nervous habit would see it.

“David’s group is here, too,” Julia said. “Hey Mr. D-Dog. How’s the Dog Pound?”

Angie’s tapping stopped the moment she spotted David. This was his second summer working at Adventure Camp, and he was the one who had helped Angie and Julia get their jobs.

Warmth enveloped her heart as she watched him up ahead, looking goofy and sweet in his fluorescent orange counselor shirt. He was in charge of the oldest group, which meant he had to deal with middle school-aged kids, several of whom looked ready to fall over from boredom… and several of whom were a head taller than Angie. At a smidge over five feet tall, she had breathed a sigh of relief when the summer camp director had assigned her and Julia the youngest group of all.

Lyla leaned over the chain. “Where are the fishies?” she asked, turning her head so that the ends of her pigtails dangled over the chain.

Angie swallowed tightly and held out a sticker. “Remember, stay away from the edge.”

“What is up with these kids?” Julia asked, holding Dominic like a sack of potatoes over her shoulder. “They are
way
too determined to find a way to drown themselves. It’s like they have no fear of death!”

“Let’s go below deck,” Angie said, trying to breathe through the knot in her chest as she urged Lyla away from the edge. “At least they can’t drown themselves there.”

Weekly field trips were never easy, but she had to question the camp director’s reasoning in bringing kids to the Tall Ships Festival. The event looked like it would be fun without kids, she thought as she maneuvered the children down the steep steps into the dim belly of the ship. When she reached the bottom she took up a flyer promoting a cannon battle reenactment on Sunday. She folded the crisp paper into fourths before tucking it into the back pocket of her denim shorts. Maybe David would want to go this weekend. Even though they worked together, there wasn’t much of a chance at work to really
be
together at work.

She snuck him a smile across the crowded ship. As he smiled back, his vivid blue eyes making her blush, a whisper stole through her mind.

Daughter…

Her heart stuttered to a stop as she froze in place. She turned her head, searching for the source of that haunting voice. Kids asked for ice cream. They jumped on barrels and tried to climb into hammocks. They whined about feeling too hot and stuffy. Angie remained immobile, her breath slowing as David’s smile tensed and promptly faded.

“Angie,” he called out. “Are you okay?”

The word ‘okay’ echoed in a world gone gray, a vision of the past sweeping over her. She realized everyone was talking. Kids still pulled at her shirt, asking for things, but their questions sounded far away, little more than inquisitive sounds, the syllables blending into each other in reverberating echoes.

She felt Julia shaking her, trying to get her to snap out of it. Everyone on the ship was likely staring at her by now… wondering if she needed a hospital or if something were psychologically wrong with her. Those were her last fleeting thoughts before she was pulled into the past.

She wasn’t sucked through time physically. As Julia would call it, she walked the past like a purposeless ghost. The world was a colorless landscape of grays and silvers and dark, shifting shadows. Her spirit was lifted from her corporeal form, away from David and Julia, up through the ship until she hovered above deck. She saw the masts change, their sails becoming full as the ship itself transformed… it morphed into something larger and wider, with several more rows of cannons lining the decks. Men raced across the ship and drew swords and daggers. Groups of them loaded cannons and fired. Angie could hear no sound. Moreover, she could still feel the connection to her body, rooted to its spot in the present. This wasn’t Historia, the spell that took her into a point in a place’s past. This was a vision. Something triggered by the sight of the ship she was on, or by the Fates themselves.

Whatever it was, her struggle to stop it from happening did nothing. Her mind already tried to come up with plausible reasons why she stood like stone while children in her care clamored for her attention, but as the force of the portent overwhelmed her, she gave up on that final tie to the present.

A whimper escaped her lips as she released the last strand of her resistance. As she did, sound washed over. Clanging swords and booming cannons. Her senses remained limited and the sounds often came after the corresponding action, with men’s lips moving out of tandem with the voices that followed like sound through water. She strained to listen to the words and try to understand the reason her spirit had been sent here. Men shouted over the roar of the ocean and called out in between furious explosions. Angie’s spirit-self tilted her head, frustrated at the garbled noise she knew was talking. At last she heard a few words clearly over the chaotic jumble of noise. Although she couldn’t understand the words, she recognized the language as Spanish.

She turned her face away from the Spanish sailors, looking in the direction of their cannons. She watched as men poured onto the ship and created a gory scene of death and bloodshed. Sailors sliced each other open with cutlasses and daggers. Splintered wood flew across the ship and impaled limbs and torsos. The ruthless men on the attack were in no discernible uniform. A few were bare chested and several wore gaudy shirts with frills and lace. She stared, trying to understand who they could be. Why had she been sent here? What sort of war had she fallen into?

And then her gaze was drawn up to the mast of the attacking ship. High in the grayscaled sky she saw a large flag of darkest black flying with grim pride atop the other ship. Upon the black flag, a white skull grinned above crossed-swords.

Pirates!

Battle cries punctuated the strange atmosphere. They spoke in English, although it was difficult to understand since they screamed and made feral noises like madmen, frothing for war.

Angie flinched at a pirate who came very close to her, even knowing she couldn’t be seen. Someone new boarded the ship. Thinner than the others, with narrow shoulders where the others’ were wide. This one was young, a cabin boy, perhaps, because he stood a head shorter than most of the others, and his face held no hint of stubble. For being so young he fought like a wild fiend, his teeth bared as he slit a throat, his cutlass sweeping down in an arc and causing larger men to back away. He spoke with authority to the other pirates, and that’s when Angie noticed something else… something she hadn’t considered while watching the events unfold before her.

The general distinction of this pirate’s body could have made him a slender male.

If it weren’t for the obvious fullness of her chest.

Angie’s lips parted and her eyes grew wide. This was a woman. A woman pirate.

And by the looks of the dead men around her, she was a pretty good one.

The pirates had fully overrun the ship. The sound of cannon explosions grew fewer and fewer, until they ceased all together.

One of the pirates stood at the female’s side. The other pirates cheered. Angie tried to make out words, but the scene abruptly swirled through the mists of time, its icy chill entering her body like a vortex. She tried to look for detail, anything about the year and place. If the Fates had sent her a vision, it wasn’t without a reason. This would be the time period of their next mission, and she wanted to research key events in history that might pose an easy opening for the Sorceress to break through the nether.

These pirates likely existed during the time of Spanish colonialism, which spanned centuries. She needed more to go on than that, and she tried to keep her spirit within the vision, but it was impossible. Whatever force had sent her into the spirit world now thrust her from it with equal strength. She stared at the woman whose cutlass dripped with dark fluid. Her eyes remained glazed with bloodlust as her proud chin lifted.

The winds of time blurred Angie’s eyesight as her consciousness returned to her body. The merciless Fates didn’t care whether she had been in the middle of watching a group of six-year-olds. Their magic left her gasping, covered in a sheen of cold perspiration, nauseous and unable to open her eyes.

Color seeped back into the world—too harsh, so vivid Angie couldn’t bear the onslaught of bright blue sky and orange and yellow t-shirts and faces that stretched with concern and morbid curiosity. She realized she wasn’t below deck anymore, and that she was on her back. She breathed deep, the sound a wheezing rasp that tasted of saltwater and the stale air of another era. Her lungs stuck against themselves. She felt as though she hadn’t drawn a breath during the entire vision.

The kids surrounded her. David stared down, calling her name. Mortification slammed against her body and she tried to hide, to curl away from the people who had seen her so vulnerable. She felt David’s arms around her and she could hear his voice, far off and muted. Her lips parted as she tried to respond, tasting the ocean air on her dry tongue.

“She’s okay,” she heard David say. “Thank you, no. She doesn’t need an ambulance.”

David had seen it happen before. The first time was when they were little and he shared the secret that he had been adopted. Sunlight had filtered through the branches of his treehouse, the dappled light landing on his hair and making him look like he might have magic powers, too. She had felt sad for him, despite his assertion that he didn’t remember his birth parents and that he was happy. His bright blue eyes remained serene in his summer tanned-face. He had smiled beneath his hair, as always in need of a haircut. As Angie watched him, she had foolishly tried to use her powers to look for his birth parents.

She had thought she could do so by peeking into his past. David couldn’t know about the magic. Her grandmother had told her how important it was that the power of the Fates remain secret, but she could tap into David’s past without him knowing, if she were careful.

The moment she had tried, she had ended up in a vision, and she had woken up much like she was now, with her head cradled in David’s lap. Except now she wasn’t eight years old, and now she wasn’t in a secluded treehouse.

David brushed his fingers against her cheek. “Are you all right?”

She nodded and sat up.

“It’s been a while since this happened.” His soft words tugged at her heart. “One second you were standing and the next you dropped like someone had knocked you out.”

“W-was I unconscious for long?”

“Only for a minute,” he said. “But, why does this happen to you? Have you been to the doctor about it?”

She wished she could tell him the truth, but this wasn’t the time to share secrets about magic. “It’s not about my health,” she whispered. “I don’t want you to worry, okay?”

“How can I not?”

She glanced around, sure that her face glowed crimson. She heard the kids’ piping voices asking Julia why she had fallen down, and a few onlookers whispered to each other and gaped at her.

“Just, trust me?”

David let out a pent up breath and helped her stand.

“Thanks,” she said, peeking up at him, their fingers still intertwined.

“Hey Mr. D,” one of the middle schoolers called. “Are you gonna kiss her?”

Several of the older kids snickered and one of them drawled a loud, “Stuuuupid.”

Angie lowered her head. “You should get back to your group.”

He gave her hands a quick squeeze before letting go. “If you feel weird or dizzy, have Julia come find me.”

Angie nodded and waved as he returned to his group.

Julia led the kids down the gangplank and Angie took the caboose this time. She murmured responses to Maya at her side, not truly listening to the girl as she mulled over everything that had happened.

They settled the kids on the grass, passing out snacks as they waited for the bus to arrive at the parking lot nearby.

“I’m so sorry,” Angie began once the children were finally occupied.

“It’s not your fault,” Julia said. “Was it another vision?”

Angie nodded. She adjusted her ponytail and cleared her throat, glancing around self-consciously. “I think I know what our next mission is going to be—”

“Uh… Angie?” Julia’s eyes widened as she looked out at the harbor. Her hushed tone made Angie’s heart jump with alarm.

“Did one of the kids fall in?” Angie cried, magic already forming in her palms.