Chapter Ten

Caribbean Night

Ariane sat with Wally in Troll’s Restaurant in Horseshoe Bay. Plates that had been piled with battered fish and french fries now bore nothing but a few smears of catsup and tartar sauce. They’d already materialized in Whyte Lake as before, then made their way down to the Horseshoe Bay Motel and used the computer; the desk clerk, remembering Wally from earlier in the day, had just waved at them as they passed. They had printed out a map showing the location of Cacibajagua Island and Wally had looked up the weather they could expect. Though there was no forecast for Cacibajagua itself, he’d easily found one for the relatively nearby Turks and Caicos. “Weird,” he said to Ariane, turning toward her. “There’s a storm forming, even though hurricane season is over. Usually they only get a few evening thunderstorms in December. But this is a big one – the sky is already overcast over hundreds of square kilometres, and they’re expecting heavy rain and wind within thirty-six hours. High of 82 Fahrenheit for tomorrow.”

“What is that in Celsius?”

Wally grinned. “Around 28.”

She smiled back. “Well, at least we won’t be materializing in freezing water for once. And overcast skies – that’s good, isn’t it?”

“I guess. But if it storms...” Wally bent back over the computer. While he studied the satellite images on the screen, she studied him. She’d only known him for two months. He still looked young for his age, but along with the few centimetres he’d gained since they’d met had come quite a few more muscles, too.

And she’d kissed him.

She still couldn’t believe she’d done that. It had just kind of...happened. It had seemed like the right thing to do. And it had been...nice.

More than nice. Quite wonderful, actually.

He’d looked up at her suddenly, and she’d glanced away, hoping he hadn’t seen her blushing – or maybe hoping he had.

That wasn’t the only wonderful thing that had happened today. The connection she had felt with her mother, the connection built on the Lady’s blood they both shared, hadn’t vanished when they’d returned to Horseshoe Bay. She could still feel it – and that meant she’d never lose her mother again. It had given an added glow to the past few hours and an added relish to the food, which she’d devoured. She’d been using a lot of power and not replenishing it, so the fish and chips and a generous helping of apple crisp with ice cream had vanished in remarkably short order – short enough order that even Wally, the human vacuum cleaner, had remarked on it.

Now, as darkness gathered on the water across the street and park from where they sat, they had to plan their next move.

“I think we go now,” Ariane said.

“It’ll be the middle of the night when we arrive,” Wally pointed out. “And we don’t know what we’ll find. We might not even be able to find enough fresh water to materialize in.”

“Better to find that out tonight than in the morning when Rex Major is already on his way,” Ariane argued. “If we end up having to go to the Turks and Caicos to find a pool, then get a boat to take us to the island at first light, we’ll need every minute we can spare.” Until she’d said that out loud, she hadn’t realized that that might actually be what they’d have to do. She frowned. “How much money do we have?”

Wally looked around to make sure nobody could overhear him then leaned in close. “We’ve got about $2,000 in cash with us,” he whispered. “Hidden in the lining of my backpack.”

Ariane’s eyes widened. “That much?”

Wally nodded. “I’ve been carrying it everywhere I go,” he said. “Just in case.”

“Then that’s the plan,” Ariane said. “We go straight to the island if we can. If we can’t, we get as close as we can and hire a boat in the morning.”

She hushed as she saw the waitress approaching, the same one they’d talked to earlier in the day. “Can I get you kids anything else?” she said.

“No, we’re good,” Wally said.

“Here’s the bill, then,” the waitress said. “No rush.” She gave them a smile – a rather knowing smile, Ariane thought – and went to greet a family of four that had just come in the door.

“She thinks we’re on a date,” Wally said. He’d clearly seen the waitress’s expression, too. He gave Ariane a shy grin.

“Little does she know we’re actually plotting to save the world from an evil sorcerer,” Ariane said. But she felt her own mouth curve into a smile. “I’d rather we were just having dinner before going to a movie.”

“Me, too,” Wally said.

“Some day,” Ariane said.

That produced an awkward silence. Ariane drank the last of her Diet Coke to cover it, then got to her feet. “Let’s get going.”

They took the bill to the front and Wally paid cash; then they went out into the dark, dank, drizzling night, crossing the street to the park to be away from prying eyes. Ariane held out her hand and Wally took it, his fingers warm in hers. She exerted a little of her power, drying them and pushing the raindrops away, so that they stood perfectly dry even as water pattered all around.

“Ready?” she said.

“Ready.”

She squeezed his hand, and together they leaped into the clouds.

Ariane felt both immensely large and frighteningly immaterial, like a giant shadow puppet cast on the clouds by some powerful light. As always, she felt the urge to let herself expand even farther, to join with the clouds and leave her consciousness behind forever, but she suppressed it, helped by the bright hard core of the shard of Excalibur she carried, the piece of steel that would never allow itself to be destroyed in that way. She was also helped by the sense of Wally’s presence, mingled with hers within the clouds in an intimate fashion that would be intensely embarrassing to think about too much, so she tried not to. Instead, she focussed her attention on the journey ahead.

Every time she used her power this way it became easier to navigate, to correlate the clouds and the land below with the features of the map she had consulted. They rushed away through the billows of vapour, not in anything like a straight line, following weather fronts to keep to the clouds, making short leaps across empty air in some places, dropping down into streams and lakes in others, the kilometres flashing by faster than the fastest jet. As always, Ariane had no sense of time passing, so she couldn’t be certain how long it took them to cross the continent diagonally from northwest to southeast, but it was still only the middle of the night when they flashed out over the Atlantic. She felt the salt water below, a different feeling than the land over which they had been passing: she could no more make use of earth than she could of salt water, but the earth was neutral, whereas the sea felt coldly inimical, mocking her power, all that water forever beyond her control.

The clouds were fresh water, though, and it was through the clouds they flashed, until the strange near-sight sense the Lady’s power gave her showed her Cacibajagua Island below despite the darkness all around. Shaped rather like a comma, with a round, fat part on the south end tapering to a long, curving tail at the north, it was no more than ten kilometres long and maybe half as wide where it was fattest. A small hotel crouched on the eastern side of the broader part of the island, between an inland airstrip and a long, wooden dock where several boats bobbed at anchor.

Most important, though, the Lady’s power showed her the small freshwater lake near the centre of the hilly interior. There was also a swimming pool at the hotel, but there’d be no way to materialize there without being seen, and so she took them down into the lake.

One moment they were amorphous mingled blobs of magical something-or-other in the clouds, the next they were solid Ariane and Wally. They spluttered to the surface and stood in shoulder-deep, milk-warm water.

Surrounded by hills that blocked all light from the resort, and with the sky overcast, the lake was pitch-black. Ariane knew Wally was close at hand, because she could hear him breathing, but she couldn’t see a thing.

More wonderful, she discovered she could still sense her mother, back in Victoria. The sensation made her smile in the darkness.

“Too bad we don’t need to develop film,” Wally’s disembodied voice said.

Ariane laughed. “I can tell where the shore is,” she said. “I can feel everything in the water...including you.” She reached out a hand toward him.

“Ow!” he said. “That’s my nose.”

“Sorry,” Ariane said.

His fingers found hers and she squeezed them as she had before they’d begun the journey. “This way,” she said, and led him toward what her Lady-of-the-Lake-powered senses told her was the nearest shore, just a few metres away. They clambered out onto big, rounded rocks, in air that felt as warm and almost as wet as the water had, and sat down while Ariane ordered them dry – although in this weather, they’d soon be sweating. She took off the coat she’d been wearing in Horseshoe Bay and stuffed it into her backpack. She could hear Wally presumably doing the same, then rummaging in his backpack some more; moments later a flashlight came on. “That’s better,” he said, and flashed the light around.

Dark water, green trees, black rocks.

“Not very informative,” Ariane said.

“Not the kind of terrain you want to stumble around in, in the dark,” Wally agreed.

And dark though it was, it was far from quiet. Sound filled the night: creakings and croakings and chirpings and warblings.

“They don’t have any big predators on Caribbean islands,” Wally said after a moment. “I’m sure I read that somewhere.”

Something squawked so loud Ariane’s heart jumped to double time. “I hope you’re right,” she said. Another squawk, or maybe a shriek, came from her right, followed by a splash. Something had just jumped into the lake. Wally flashed his light in that direction, but all Ariane saw was spreading ripples. “Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” she said nervously.

“That depends,” Wally said. “Can you sense the shard?”

Ariane closed her eyes and concentrated. The shard she carried with her sang its song as always at her side, and she could even sense the first shard, tucked away back in Saskatchewan, just as she could sense her mother in Victoria. The shard Merlin carried was hidden from her while it was in his possession. And the fourth, the one they thought was somewhere on this island...

Nothing.

Ariane opened her eyes – not that it made much difference – and said, “No.”

Wally turned and aimed his light away from the lake, into the surrounding jungle. The circle of illumination slid over what looked like an impenetrable tangle of vines and undergrowth. “We can’t hike through that,” Ariane said. “And we can’t just sit here all night. Maybe we should go to the Turks and Caicos, get a boat in the morning, or else come back when it’s light –”

“Wait a second,” Wally said. “I just glimpsed –”

He was twisted around on the rock where he sat. Now he aimed the light to Ariane’s left. She turned her head and saw what he had spotted: a signpost, shaped to look as though it had been roughly carved from driftwood, though it looked a little too perfectly roughly carved, if that made sense, like a prop from Disneyland’s Jungle Cruise. “Welcome to Lake Tanama (Butterfly Lake),” Wally read out loud. “No swimming.”

“Oops,” Ariane said, glancing uneasily at the water they’d just clambered out of. “I wonder why?”

“Some sort of parasite, maybe,” Wally said absently. “Could be Schistosoma worms.”

“Shkisto-what?” Ariane almost shrieked.

“But probably not!” Wally said hastily. “Wouldn’t you be able to sense them?”

“How do I know?” She stretched her awareness throughout the warm water. She had no idea what a Schistosoma worm even was, but all she sensed were small fish and... “Yuck!”

“What?” Wally said.

“Leeches. Down in the mud.” She shuddered and withdrew her awareness from the water. “No wading if we can help it.”

Wally shone the light on his own face, gave her a quick grin that was probably supposed to be reassuring but of course looked like a Halloween mask with the light under his chin, and then swung the light back to the signpost. “There’s more,” he said, moving the light lower. “Look.”

“The Resort,” she read on one carefully shaped and mounted piece of “driftwood.” The pointy end of it indicated a path into the forest. “The Jujo Cataract,” read the other sign. It pointed along the shore of the lake, where she now saw there was a boardwalk. They weren’t in uncharted wilderness after all. “What’s a Jujo?”

“That’s the name of the underwater cave that’s the whole reason for this resort,” Wally said excitedly. “And the Jujo Cataract has to be the freshwater waterfall that pours into it at this end. That path will take us straight to the shard!”

“If it’s there,” Ariane said, trying to temper the sudden leap of hope and excitement in her heart. But she was already getting to her feet. “Let’s go!”

The sounds of the warm, humid night suddenly seemed nothing more than the soundtrack of a Caribbean-vacation TV commercial as they stepped onto the boardwalk. Amazing what a touch of civilization can do, Ariane thought.

The boardwalk led along the shore of the lake, threading its way between rocks and jungle on one side and black water on the other. After a few hundred metres Ariane began to hear a new sound in the noisy night: the rush of water.

“You hear that?” she said.

Wally nodded. They hurried forward.

The boardwalk ended abruptly, becoming a square platform surrounded on three sides by a railing. To their right, the lake also ended, water pouring from it through a rocky gap and falling away in white spray into darkness beyond. “Dead end,” Wally said, sounding disappointed. “The water must tumble all the way down the hill before it drops into the cave.”

Ariane laughed at him. She felt almost giddy with hope. “Dead end?” she said. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”

He looked at her, face puzzled in the dim light the railing reflected back from the flashlight beam.

“I’m the freaking Lady of the Lake,” she said. She got down on her hands and knees. “Put the flashlight away and take hold.”

Wally laughed. “Right.” The light went out. She heard his backpack zip. She felt his hand around her ankle. She reached out and stuck her hand into the smooth curve of water falling into darkness, and then she and Wally fell with it.