The Calling (Darkness Rising) (4 page)

Tell them what was going on. God, that sounded so easy. But where to start?

It began less than a week ago. No, that’s not true. It began a year ago. When Serena died. My best friend. Daniel’s girlfriend.

Serena had drowned. It shouldn’t have happened, not to the captain of the school swim team, swimming in a calm lake.

Then Mina Lee came to town. She called herself a reporter, but everyone figured she was a corporate spy. We live in Salmon Creek, a town of two hundred people that was built and owned by the St. Cloud Corporation, so they could conduct drug research. Mina came to Salmon Creek pretending to be writing an article on the local teens—what it was like growing up in a tiny corporate town. She’d really wanted to talk to us—and she was especially curious about Serena’s death, and Daniel and I began to think that she suspected the medical research was responsible.

A few days later we’d found Mina Lee’s body in a cougar cache. Had she been killed by the big cats? Or died of misadventure in the woods? Or had she been murdered and dumped?

We broke into her cabin and found files on all the teens in our class. Only two were missing. Mine and Sam’s. Sam had stolen hers. When confronted she said it was because she didn’t want others knowing her parents had been murdered. But we’d started wondering if there was more to it, if she might have had something to do with those murders, something to do with Serena’s death, too.

Then there was the note Daniel had found in Mina’s cabin. Four strange words in it, including
benandanti
. Italian witch-hunters. We knew the word because of Mina. She’d left him a note to call her, on a library book page about benandanti.

I’d recognized other words on that list.
Yee naaldlooshii
. Skin-walker. A few days before, I’d been called that by an old woman who’d said that’s what my paw-print birthmark meant. That I was a skin-walker. A shape-shifting witch. Crazy, huh? Except… I was. So were Rafe and Annie, who’d come to Salmon Creek looking for the girl who’d been another subject in an experiment to resurrect the latent skin-walker genes. That girl, apparently, was me.

So all that happens, and I’m trying to figure out how to tell Daniel I’m a skin-walker when the forest fire struck. Daniel, Rafe, and I got caught in it. We’d seen a fire-and-rescue truck, and Daniel got a bad feeling—he gets them; I’ve learned to trust them. Turned out it wasn’t fire and rescue. Who was it? I don’t know, but they’d been after us, and one man knew my name and had my eyes, and I was pretty sure I knew what that meant, but I refused to process it. Too much else waiting in the queue.

So how much should we tell the others? I trusted Daniel would know. Normally, we’d hash it out together. But today, I needed him to take charge and he did that.

As we walked, Daniel and I scouted the island to be sure there wasn’t any shelter. In order to get off it, we’d need to swim, which carried the risk of hypothermia. Not something we cared to do if there was an alternative. There wasn’t. The island didn’t have so much as a rock pile big enough to hide behind.

So we returned and Daniel explained to the others what had happened in the woods as we’d been fleeing the fire.

“It sounded like these people deliberately set the blaze,” he said as he finished. “Maya and I thought they were trying to clear Salmon Creek to get into the lab and steal the drug research. But if the pilot drugged the mayor, then that doesn’t make sense. We were already leaving town.”

“How do you know he was knocked out?” Sam asked.

“I saw the pilot grab the mayor’s arm,” Daniel said. “Right before we got on the helicopter. Mr. Tillson rubbed the place, like it hurt. Then Maya found the injection spot.”

“So they wanted Mr. Tillson?” Hayley asked.

Daniel shook his head. “We think whoever set the fire either bought off the pilot or planted one of their own guys. I heard Mr. Tillson say that the first helicopter had already landed in Victoria. That means whoever is behind this wanted ours. In the evacuation plans, we’re all supposed to be on that helicopter. Not Mr. Tillson specifically, though. Just an adult to chaperone us.”

“So in sedating him, they were getting rid of our chaperone,” I said. “They wanted one of us.”

I thought of the list Daniel had found, with the word
skin-walker
on it, and I thought of the man in the woods, who’d called me by name. So I seemed to be the one they wanted. But when I glanced up, Sam looked like a cartoon character with a “Who me?” bubble over her head.

“It doesn’t matter who or what was the target,” I said. “We need to figure out what we’re going to do now.”

“Why do we need to do anything?” Hayley said. “They’ll come looking for us.”

“Um, yeah,” Sam said. “That’s Maya’s point. The people who tried to kidnap us will come looking for us to finish the job.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Sam’s right,” Daniel said. “The first people who come for us will likely be the kidnappers. It’d be safer to get to a phone and call our parents.”

Everyone looked around. The mainland was a dark blob on the eastern horizon. To the west was Vancouver Island. About a kilometer of water separated the two.

“Umm…” Corey began. “Not to question your judgment, buddy, but that’s a bit of a swim. The water’s damned cold. I bashed my knee good in the crash, and I’m not the only one who’s hurting. I get what you’re saying, but the pilot’s radio seemed to be out, so they won’t know where we are. If we light a fire, someone out boating might see us.”

“That’s a good idea,” Sam said. “Or it would be. If we had matches to light a fire. Or if anyone was actually out boating.”

“Why don’t we just find a place to hide?” Hayley said. “That way, when someone does come, we can see if it’s a real rescue or not.”

“How the hell are you going to tell the difference?” Sam said. “Ask them? And no one’s going to find the crash site. You know why? There
is
no crash site.”

She pointed out over the empty water. When the helicopter had dropped over the ledge, it had disappeared. Only a few small pieces of debris floated, already being dispersed by the tide.

“And we don’t know that the radio equipment wasn’t working,” Daniel said. “Whoever wanted that helicopter may know exactly where it went down.”

That didn’t keep Corey and Hayley from arguing that we should stay put, and Nicole from quietly agreeing. Which only pissed off Sam all the more. To us, the danger was obvious. We should be in the water already, swimming for Vancouver Island. To the others, it was too much to believe, too much to take in. Easier to think this was all a tragic mistake and that a rescue team would find us at any moment.

Eventually, Daniel and I managed to persuade them that no one was going to come for us. There was no shelter on this island, and there could be cottages just past the shoreline on the mainland.

Finally, they all agreed to swim for it.

S
WIMMING FOR THE SHORE
was not a simple matter. Daniel and I were soaked, but the others were dry from the knees up, and in October, they’d need that dry clothing. The problem was how to get it across.

There weren’t any backpacks in the debris floating from the wreck, but Daniel rescued a piece of plastic. The others stripped to their undergarments, wrapped up their clothing as best they could, and put it in the plastic. Daniel made sure Corey put his headache medication in, too. Corey got migraines. Bad ones. Unfortunately, all he had on him was a couple of tablets he carried loose in his pocket.

By the time we got to the water’s edge, we were all shivering so hard I could hear teeth chattering.

A layer of marine fog covered the surface. As I stood there with my toes in the icy water, tendrils of fog slipped around my ankles and I remembered a line about fog coming in on little cat’s feet.

Cats. Cougars. Skin-walkers. Rafe.

My stomach clenched and my toes clenched, too. I closed my eyes and struggled to ground myself.

“Can you see the land?” Nicole whispered beside me.

I pointed. “See the treetops above the fog?”

She nodded, then rubbed down goose bumps on her arms. “About earlier. I—I don’t know why I blew up like that.”

“Your dad just died.”

“I know…” She nudged a submerged rock. “I’m still sorry.”

“It’s okay.”

“Are you sure we should do this?” Hayley called from a few feet away. “It’s so cold. Is it safe?”

I looked over at her and Corey and Sam, standing along the shoreline, arms wrapped around themselves, their faces as gray as the fog. Fear and confusion on every face. Terror on Sam’s, as she stared wide-eyed into the fog.

Daniel and I went first. Kenjii circled me as I eased into the water. When she realized I wasn’t just taking a walk into the surf, she leaped in front of me, barking, ordering me to dry land. I continued on, up to my waist now. She snapped at my fingers and tried to herd me back to shore.

“Maybe there’s something out there,” Nicole called. “Didn’t someone catch a great white shark a few years ago? And we have plenty of killer whales.”

“Great whites don’t come this far inland,” I called back. “And I doubt this stretch of water is deep enough for orcas, but even if it is, they don’t attack in the wild. You’re only at risk if you’re jumping into their aquarium tank.”

“Kenjii just knows Maya doesn’t like to swim,” Daniel said. “Here, I’ll take her—”

He reached for her collar. She growled and he pulled back.

“Or maybe not…”

Kenjii lowered her head and whined, as if in apology.

“She’s scared and confused,” I said.
No, we are, and she’s sensing it
. “Just give me a sec to calm her down.”

I petted her and promised her it was okay. Once she’d relaxed, I told Daniel to go on ahead with her, so she couldn’t see me. She glanced back a couple of times, but when I seemed to be staying put, she let Daniel take her for a swim.

Corey went in behind Hayley, herding her. She was on the swim team, so she should be fine, but she was still disoriented from her near-drowning experience. Sam went next, her chin up, expression unreadable. Daniel had asked Nicole—who was also on the swim team—to go last and help anyone who fell behind, namely me.

I’d estimated the strip of water to be about a kilometer. That’s just over three thousand feet. Not a short distance. Not an incredibly long one either, or so I kept telling myself as I paddled through the frigid water. It was half of the distance from my house to the park gates. One sixth the distance of the Run for the Mountain event I did in Nanaimo every year. One twentieth the distance of the Harbour City Half Marathon I ran last fall.

Easy. Except for the fact that I loved to walk and run, but hated swimming. Part of my skin-walker heritage, I guess. When I get in water deeper than a bathtub, there’s this part of my brain that screams at me to get out, and no amount of self-talk ever silences it.

But maybe this time that part of my brain realized, as a cougar would, that there was a difference between swimming for pleasure and swimming for survival. While I was cold and uncomfortable, I stayed relatively calm. Even managed something close to an actual breaststroke, which I’m sure made Nicole happy, stuck at my snail’s pace as the others pulled away.

Every now and then I could make out Daniel’s dark shape as he glanced back to check on us. No one said a word. Only the splash of hands and feet hitting water broke the eerie silence. I couldn’t see how much farther we had to go. Couldn’t see how far we’d come. Just fog everywhere, my friends dark blotches in the gray.