Serpent's Kiss: A Witches of East End Novel (34 page)

The cell phone buzzed on the metal shelf. She glanced at it, juggling the books. Curious. It was Matt. Her heart pounded. She grabbed the cell and walked over to an isolated carrel and set the books down, taking a seat, bending down to hide her head.

“Hello?” she whispered.

“I’m calling to give you a heads-up,” Matt said, his voice devoid of emotion.

“Um … okay,” she replied, letting her own voice flatline.

“There’s a tail on you. If you’re still hanging around those homeless kids, they’ll be found and deported if they’re not citizens.”

“Deported? What on earth are you talking about?”

Matt exhaled into the phone, and she had to pull it slightly away from her ear. “You told me they were foreigners. Remember? I wrote it down in my
notebook
.”

Great. They were speaking in code.
Notebook
with emphasis—or was it aggression?—was a flagrant reminder of the piece of paper with the girl’s name on it and of Ingrid’s snooping around.

Matt continued. “You called them, quote, ‘foreign,’ close quote, and you said, ‘They don’t know this culture.’ I have it written down.”

“Impressive,” Ingrid said flatly.

“Well, the chief read my notes because I’m in—”

Ingrid waited, then couldn’t wait any longer. “You’re in what?”

“Never mind,” he said. “I just wanted to warn you, Ingrid.”

She was about to lie again, proclaiming the pixies were gone, but she was tired of this game. She tapped her foot. “Okay,” she said coldly.

“Okay,” echoed Matt. She couldn’t tell if it was an angry
okay
. Perhaps a little sad. No. It was just a plain, boring
okay
.

They both waited for the other to hang up, and it took so long, Ingrid started to feel a bit wistful, missing Matt, so before she actually softened and broke down by saying good-bye, she hit the End button and returned to the books she had set down in the carrel.

“Freya, Freya, wake up!”

Freya felt a hand tapping at her face. She lay supine, arms stretched out at her side, the long skirt a heavy weight on her limbs. All the aches and pains and knots in her neck were back, as they had been when she arrived in 1640. There was sand beneath her, and she could hear the waves crashing in the near distance. She opened her eyes. It was dusk, and she saw a face she recognized, a face she dearly loved. A smile spread on her lips.

Killian. He looked pale and drawn, leeched. She sat up and hugged him with all the strength left in her body. He kissed her face, her neck, burying his nose in her hair.

“Am I home?” she said hopefully.

He shook his head and removed an energy bar from his pocket. “Eat. Get your strength back,” he said, ripping the package open, burying the wrapper in the sand.

Freya was glad to have it, even if she’d always dismissed them as cardboard before. She was famished. Her throat was dry. It was hard to swallow, but after a few bites, she felt her body begin to renew itself again; it would be enough until she had a decent meal. “How did you get here?”

“I felt something shift inside me … sort of like an alarm … I could feel that you were in danger. Now that we’ve found each other again, I’m attuned to your spirit. So I followed you through the portal into the timeline,” Killian explained. “I had to do a few more shifts to get you safe.
My gift
, by the way, space and time, moving objects about, manipulating the passages, which means screwing around with the continuum—like reconstructing the greenhouse so fast.”

He caressed her face. “Since the bridge collapsed I can’t do it very easily, so I’m glad I saved most of what is left for this. We’re not supposed to do this. It upsets the natural balance: chaos theory, the butterfly effect. A long time ago we had posted guards to keep the timeline safe, but they’re gone now, so I had to be very careful. Why would Joanna and Norman send you back here?”

She explained everything to Killian in a hurried breath. “For you, Killian. We need to find Anne. She might be able to help us.
When
is it?” Color had begun to spread through her cheeks, and she had become frenzied, worried that it was already too late, that Anne had been hanged.

“It’s the night of the day I found you except things are a little different. You never made it to the square. I don’t think you ever met John Barklay,” he said to answer her question.

“Fuck!” said Freya. “That means he never got to talk to Anne while she was chained to the tree. Never got to put her cap back on or give her water.” She slipped a hand inside her skirt and the pouch of gold coins was still sewn into the seam. She had all her gold again, and that was disappointing. “This is so confusing,” she said. “We need to get you in proper clothes, then find Anne. Can we go back in time a little more?”

“I don’t want to risk it, I have to make sure I have enough power to get us back home. Whatever we need to do, we need to do now.”

The treasure expedition was nothing at all as Freddie had envisioned. He had anticipated something exciting, walking about the deck with wind and ocean spray in his face, rigging, pulling, feeding lines, winching, cleating ropes, and such—the thrill of unfurling the sails, catching the wind in them, then harnessing it. Freddie loved to wear himself out physically, using his body to maximum capacity until it was sore and he collapsed from all the effort he had expended. Kind of like sex. That’s how he had pictured it.

It was nothing like that.

First, they had taken all his effects from him, including the new cell phone Joanna had bought him. He’d barely had enough time to text Freya and his dad to tell them he had gotten the job. Then he and Captain Atkins, along with a rough-and-tumble crew of young men, had flown in a private plane to what Freddie had gathered was a Caribbean island; he overheard “St. Lucia,” as much as they tried to keep him in the dark. After a drive, during which Freddie was blindfolded, they boarded an eighty-foot-long, three-mast schooner, which was beautiful, but then Captain Atkins kept Freddie confined to his berth under lock and key as they weighed anchor. It wasn’t in an unkind way, though. The captain said it was for Freddie’s own good. He wasn’t to know the exact spot where the treasure was to be excavated until they arrived close to it. The only view Freddie was afforded during the trip was through a little porthole where he could see water rushing and frothing past, but that was all. He did enjoy the occasional swell, about five to six feet high he judged—a calm sea.

The schooner had been rocking in place for a while when Captain Atkins finally came to Freddie’s berth. He handed him a wetsuit to don and told him to come up to the deck once he had it on, then he left the door unlocked.

The view of the island from where they had set anchor took Freddie’s breath away, a towering volcanic peak partly covered in rain forest with nary a sandy beach but craggy black cliffs lifting from the turquoise-green waters—the jagged peak like a black diamond, the trees clusters of emeralds. It was a perfect day, the sun warm but not overbearing, a soft tropical breeze, just hints of clouds in the cerulean sky. Captain Atkins and a scruffy-looking crew member helped Freddie into the scuba gear.

“You can scuba, right?” the captain asked. “You are trained and certified I presume.”

“Absolutely,” he lied, but he wasn’t worried. “Breathing underwater? No problemo.” Not only was he a natural swimmer, a natural athlete with excellent hand-eye coordination—he was also one with all that was sun and sea.

Harold smiled. “Well, not to worry, we have this nifty little thing.” The captain placed what resembled a watch on Freddie’s wrist. “It’s a top-notch, state-of-the-art dive computer. Even someone with zero experience would be able to follow rate of descent and ascent on this thing. Plus, we are giving you Nitrox in case you need to stay down there longer than anticipated. I’ll explain it all. No worries—you’re a strong boy. You’re going to love it, but don’t let yourself get too distracted by the colorful seascape.” He gave Freddie a pat on the back, then nodded at the scruffy guy with an Italian accent, letting him know they needed to be alone. “Come sit with me for a bit, Freddie. We need to look at the map.”

Finally, it was time to dive. Freddie swam following the instructions to a T. The prize was Hilly, so he was anxious to complete his mission and do it well. Beneath the water, the rock of the island continued for seventy or more feet deep. There was an array of caves and yawning craters beneath him, all encrusted with DayGlo coral reefs and orange elephant ear, netted barrel, and green finger sponges. It was like another land, the colors so vivid. He hadn’t ever seen anything like it before, not in all the other eight worlds.

He glimpsed a reef shark peering out from between rocks and kept going, then followed a hawksbill turtle, going in the correct direction according to his compass. He saw adorable sea horses and frog fish. It was wonderful to be back in the ocean again. This could certainly become a hobby for him and Hilly once they were together, he thought. He wished she were here now, sharing it all silently.

That was the thing; it was so peacefully quiet in the ocean depths. The twenty-first century was great, but it could get so loud, especially New York City—where Hilly said she wanted to work at a magazine once she graduated from college—always some noise somewhere. If it wasn’t cars and horns honking, it was a jackhammer or pile driver making one clap hands over the ears. Maybe Hilly and he could move to the Caribbean instead. He wondered if she would be agreeable to that.

Every now and then, he checked the diving watch to make sure he wasn’t descending too fast. He felt a pocket of warm water, a geothermal vent, pushing bubbles at him and swam through them, against its current. This would lead him to the tunnel swim-through where he would hopefully find the treasure.

He found it inside the recess where Captain Atkins had told him it would be, lodged between rocks: a long, slim gold-filigreed rectangular case. He pried it out, and it fell into his hands as if he owned it. It wasn’t too heavy, just kind of long and unwieldy. He strapped it to his back, then began timing his ascent.

Soon Hilly would be his.

Inside the carrel at the library, Ingrid had fallen asleep. Drool had pooled onto the page of the oversize book on which her head rested, mouth agape. She woke with a start, and looked down at the page with a black-and-white lithograph of a map of the Nine Worlds,
Yggdrasil
, the Tree of Life, at their axis, and saw a huge unsightly wet spot on it. She quickly wiped it off with her sleeve, looking around as she did so, but there was no one back here.

She’d had a dream. There had been so much water in it—clear, turquoise, not frightening but pure, inviting. It was so blissfully peaceful, just the lightest, quietest trickling and gurgling in the background. She had been reading about
Yggdrasil
, then studied its maps before she’d fallen asleep. She rubbed at her eyes. An enormous serpent coiled around
Yggdrasil’
s roots perpetually gnawing at them, animals fed on its sap, goats and stags grazed on its tender shoots, and yet still it persisted, regenerating, evergreen, supplying life with its élan vital, both its humanity and aggression.

The Norns were devoted to the tree, covering its nicks and sores with white clay from Mimir, the spring of wisdom and understanding, giving it offerings, saying prayers, pouring water over its branches and roots from the well of fate. The water dripped down from its enormous leaves and roots, falling down to earth, where it turned into dew.

The problem with the maps was that they all slightly diverged. For instance, Vanaheim, Ingrid’s home world, was located on some maps directly beneath Asgard, which was at the zenith, above the tiptop branches of
Yggdrasil
, whereas others placed Vanaheim on the same horizontal plane as Midgard (earth), located at the center of the holy tree. But all the maps placed Asgard at the top and Álfheim (land of the pixies) somewhere between Asgard and Midgard, which made sense if someone from Asgard had plunked the pixies down in North Hampton. But only Odin and Frigg remained in Asgard.

Water
, Ingrid thought.
Water. That is it
—the water from her dream. At least, it was one key she needed.