Deep Betrayal (Lies Beneath #2) (27 page)

His smile faltered, and he crouched down to rinse the grit from the handle. The copper glistened in the sun.

“So how do we get behind the falls?” I asked.

“I told you. There is no ‘we’ in this. You’re staying onshore. If I’m not back in an hour, I need you to tell Maris what happened. It’ll be up to her if Maighdean Mara can be stopped.”

Calder stripped off his T-shirt, kissed me, and holstered the dagger through one of his belt loops. He ran into the lake and made a shallow dive. I gasped as the last ripples disappeared, terrified that I’d seen him for the last time.

Without a second thought, I peeled off my sweatshirt and ran in after him. Jagged rocks cut my feet. Stones turned under my weight, and I wavered like a tightrope walker before diving in. Calder must have sensed me in the water. As soon as I was swimming, he closed the space between us.

“No, Lily,” he said, his eyes like cold fire.

“You need my help,” I said.

He shook his head, sending water droplets flying off his chin. “I won’t let you go into the falls. It’s too dangerous.” I started to protest, but he stopped me, saying, “If I let you help with the first part, will you promise to do what I say after that?”

“That depends.”

“Lily, please …,” he said, his exasperation clear.

“What do you need me to do?”

He sighed. “Your hearing has been awfully good lately.”

I pushed my hair off my face. “What am I supposed to listen for?”

“I want you to shut your eyes and listen,” he yelled in my ear. “If you keep them open, your sense of sight will dominate, and you won’t be able to hear what I need you to hear.”

“If you think I’m going to be able to hear her over this—”

“Not Maighdean Mara. I need you to listen for the gap. Mother always talked about a gap of sound. A gasp of air, I think. I need to hit that gap to get behind the falls”

My eyes drifted up the nearly two-hundred-foot fall. All I could hear was a constant, roaring growl. It drowned out the higher pitched spray and muted the gulls circling overhead. If Calder thought I could hear anything more, he was overestimating my senses.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“Lily, close your eyes, please.”

He pulled me against his chest and supported me so I wouldn’t have to tread water. I wrapped my arms around
his neck and kissed him. He hadn’t transformed. I could feel his legs against mine. The blade hung heavily against his hip. If he was going in without me, if this was, perhaps, our last kiss, I wanted to make it worth it. He must have felt the urgency, too, because he kissed me back, more fiercely than ever before.

When he let me go, I took a deep breath and tried not to be afraid.

“Be still, Lily. Can you hear it? I can’t.”

“I don’t hear anything,” I said, which was a lie. I could hear the raging growl of the falls. I could hear my heart beat in my ears. I could hear his breath, raspy in his throat. I could feel someone staring at me. I searched the shoreline, then turned around to see the lake behind us. Nothing. No one.

“Listen,” Calder begged. “Try hard.” He turned me around so he was behind me, his warm hands encircling my waist, and I was facing the falls. I wanted to hear what he thought was there, and at the same time, so desperately did not. It was all so jumbled in my mind. If I could hear a space of silence amid the roar, it would bring me one step closer to believing. But if Maighdean Mara was real, that meant facing a monster. On the other hand, if there was no gap in the watery curtain, if there was no Maighdean Mara, the monster I needed to face was more terrifying to imagine. The ancient mermaid might kill my body, but knowing my father was a murderer would kill my soul. My heart crumpled in on itself, and I nearly sobbed at the thought.

But then I heard it.

Like a hiccup.

As if Copper Falls was catching its breath, before crying
aloud itself. The sound—or rather the absence of sound—was gone before my mind registered it, but I knew it as certainly as if it had lasted a full second.

My body must have reacted, because Calder asked, “Did you hear it?” His voice was both amazed and terrified.

I didn’t answer him, listening for it again. I counted in my head so I could pace it.
One Mississippi. Two Mississippi
.… I got to twelve, and this time tried to determine its exact location. But it was too quick.

I counted to twelve again. The third time, I picked up the source, low and to the left, behind an enormous black boulder.

I raised one shaking hand and pointed.

“You’re sure?” he asked, and I nodded.

“Make sure,” he said. “I’ve got one shot at this.”

I could see what he meant. Anything that got caught in the turbulence would be battered and beaten against the razor-sharp rocks, and the gap was so quick—a fraction of a second—there was no room for error. “How do you get in?” I asked.

“I need to make a beeline for the gap. If I hit it at the right moment, I should get sucked in behind the falls.”

“And if you don’t hit it?”

“Seriously, Lily, you should go.”

“I’m not going to leave you.”

“You think it’s by that boulder?” He didn’t look convinced. “I’ll have to be quick.”

“Positive,” I said.

His breath came out slowly against the back of my neck. “Good girl.” He took off his watch and handed it to me. “Take
this and go back to shore. Give me an hour. If I’m not back by then, well …”

I strapped on the watch and Calder left me, diving down deep. I watched for some sign of him—a splash, a flash of arm, but I heard the gasp of air and never saw him again.

Panicked, I counted in my head and timed my dive, swimming as fast as I could for the boulder, praying I could hit the spot right as my internal timer hit the twelve-second mark.

It couldn’t have been more than twenty feet deep here—nothing compared to the depths we’d dived to before—but the velocity of the falls churned the lake into a watery nightmare. It pounded at my temples and bellowed in my ears. The currents pulled me toward the boulder’s center, tossing and pinning me down.

The force of the falls pressed me to the rocky lake bottom. My fingertips met the boulder.
Twelve
, I thought. I waited for that infinitesimal vacuum of sound and air. When I heard the gasp, the falls parted and sucked me through.

I
was inside the cave behind the falls. I whispered Calder’s name, but only the walls whispered back. Dank and rough, as if carved by a giant pickax, the rock walls seeped to the point of dripping in the small puddles around my feet. The aroma of rotted fish coated my mouth and a coppery tang settled behind my teeth. Pinprick beams of light crisscrossed through the cavern where moles had burrowed through the surrounding ground, finding weak spots in the rock. Their toothpick bones crunched under my bare feet.

I waited for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but
there was nothing to see. Whispering Calder’s name again, I felt him reach for my hand and pull me to his side. He shook his head in apparent exasperation, but he didn’t scold me. He couldn’t have believed I would let him go in alone.

Neither of us dared to speak too loudly or too much. This was hallowed ground. Had any human being come so far before? As far as I could tell, there were no large bones on the floor.

“We should have brought her an offering,” whispered Calder. “How stupid can I get? I guess I never really thought …”

“Wait, I have this,” I said, digging in my pocket. “It’s not much, but it
is
tobacco.” I handed him the pack of cigarettes I’d found on the hillside, and he sniffed at it before slipping the four remaining cigarettes into his hand. He tore off the filters and peeled the wet paper.

“Follow me,” he said, and we crept deeper into the cave, my hands on his back. He stopped, reacting to something I couldn’t see. He ground the wet tobacco between his palms and sifted it in a line across the stone floor.

“What do we do now?” I asked.

“We wait.”

“How long?”

“Not long. If she’s here, she already knows we’ve come.”

We slid down the wall to wait. Calder rolled the dagger’s handle around in his hands. The only sounds were the constant dripping and the muted roar of the falls above us, like traffic on a distant highway.

Calder grabbed my wrist and took back his watch. He hit
a button and illuminated our faces. “Forgot this had a light,” he said. “Sorry, that would have been helpful before.”

Only then did I see the worry on his face. I almost wished he’d turn off the light. Calder bent his head and whispered something in an unfamiliar language, repeatedly. Although I couldn’t understand him, I was certain he was practicing for the confrontation.

After what felt like a very short time, he stopped whispering and checked his watch. “It’s already been an hour,” he said. He held his wrist up and aimed the light around the cavern. The carpet of bones reflected back the light. Below them were thousands of small, green-patinaed discs. Calder reached forward and raked his hand through some of them. He crawled away, scattering the bones as he moved.

“What are you doing?”

“There’s nothing here,” he said.

“What are you looking for?”

“Your soggy cigarettes are the only offering here. There’s nothing else. No new copper, no tobacco, no wild rice …”

“I don’t know about the copper, but wouldn’t tobacco and rice have rotted over time? You don’t really expect that to still be here?”

“That’s my point. It’s been a long time since anyone has made any offering. Anything dropped over the falls would have been sucked inside like we were. There’s nothing here.”

“So what does that mean?”

“Maris was right. We’re not the only ones who forgot about Maighdean Mara. Her human followers have forgotten
her, too. She’s been neglected for a very long time. No wonder she’s gone off to fend for herself.”

“If she’s not here, how do we find her?” I asked.

“We’re going to need more help.”

Later that night, after Calder had left to look for Dad, I sat on the porch roof, utterly defeated. In all of Calder’s years in the lake, he’d never seen sign of Maighdean Mara. In all the searching Calder and Dad had done for Maris and Pavati, they’d never seen any evidence of her. In all my experimentation, I’d never once heard the voice of a monster in the channel. What chance did we really have of finding her? And if we did find her, what chance did we have of stopping her?

Doubt weighed heavily on my thoughts. We stood a much better chance of stopping the killings if Dad was behind them. But I couldn’t go there. Try as I might, it was impossible to imagine him that way—snatching Scotty so quickly no one else noticed. Bringing him down so deep, the surface was undisturbed.

I forced my thoughts back to Maighdean Mara. The dagger was real after all. And so was the cave. But other than the wind-chime carving, I had no clear image of what Maighdean Mara even looked like. Every time I tried to picture her as a killer, it wasn’t a monster I saw. Instead, I imagined a staggeringly beautiful face, with dark spiraling hair and violet eyes that evoked the sky after the rain. Pavati.

Outside my open window, there was no wind, no birds, no June bugs bouncing against the screen. It was easy to hear the water lapping at the shore, and with it an
unfamiliar humming. When the humming turned to soft laughter, I moved to the window. The outdoor lights were off, but the moon beat a path of light across the water to our dock. I thought I could pick out some dark shapes near the shore. Dad?

I snuck outside, being careful not to let the front door slam, and picked my way across the yard. As I got closer, I heard bits of conversation, an “I can’t” and “It’s too hard.”

It wasn’t Dad. It was Sophie. She sat cross-legged in the dark at the end of the dock, centered in the beam of moonlight, talking to herself. I’d never known her to sleepwalk.

“Sophie?” I whispered through the night air. She didn’t respond.

I crept closer. More indistinct murmurs. I thought someone said “sunglasses” (or “fun classes” or maybe “my guess is”). And then another voice, raspy in the night. “You have to set it up. Two days should give me enough time to prepare. Tuesday at dusk. Can you do it?”

Sophie said, “How am I supposed to—”

“Tell him to go to the flat rocks—south of town—he’ll know the place. You
must
get him there.”

“And if I do, you think you’ll be able to convince him?” Sophie asked.

“Sophie,” I called again.

This time Sophie startled and whipped around, half crouched, half ready to bolt. There was a small splash from the water, but when I got close enough to see, there was nothing there.

“Who were you talking to?” I asked.

“No one.”

“Don’t lie to me. Was it Dad?”

“It wasn’t Dad,” she said.

“Someone else then?”

There was a small
pip
of a sound, and Sophie turned toward the lake. I was not entirely surprised to see Pavati’s face emerge from the inky blackness—I had been imagining her so clearly just moments before. She folded her arms across her withered chest and tapped her fingers against her arms, making it clear that my presence was unwanted. Her face, yellow as the moon above her, squinted at me from the darkness, her eyes sunken in the sockets, her cheekbones protruding.

“I’ve always liked your sister better,” she said. “You’ve been problematic since the beginning.” She rose a few inches higher in the water, and her dark hair lay flat against her razor-sharp jaw and over her pointed shoulders.

I pulled at the back of Sophie’s pj’s, trying to get her to retreat, but she must have been transfixed, because she refused to move.

“What do you want?” I asked, not wanting the answer because there was nothing I was willing to give her. “Are you here to kill us?” My body buzzed with a dark, prickly heat.

Pavati grimaced as she sensed my mood, and she looked away without a word. Sophie made an apologetic sound.

“Then what?” I asked, thankful that the sight of my terror repulsed her. Right now, it was my only weapon.