5. Chapter 5 （Hailey）

CHAPTER 5 (HAILEY)

T he next day, I find myself on a boat with Miriam and Johnny in the middle of Sawtooth Lake. This body of water is much smaller than Sockeye Lake and at an altitude two-thousand feet higher. We drove four-wheel ATVs up narrow trails to get to the lake. I have no idea how they got the boat up here, but it was already tied up to a small dock when we got here. Maybe it lives her year around.

Miriam and Johnny are unusually quiet today, but I don’t mind the silence.

The air is cool and crisp. It feels like it’s cleaning out my lungs as I pull in breath after deep breath of fresh mountain air into my body. At the southern end of the lake, the over-ten-thousand-feet-high peak of Mount Regan rises majestically against a clear blue sky. Patches of snow cover the north-facing side of the mountain, despite the late-summer season. I haven’t spent much time in the mountainous wilderness, so I visually drink in the spectacular views as I keep breathing the clean air.

I met Johnny and Miriam in the lobby, dressed in a similar outfit to what I wore yesterday. But after they explained the higher altitude, and I saw what they wore, I put on warmer pants, socks, hiking boots, and grabbed a fleece jacket before we set off. I huddle into my outer garment now as I wait for the others to decide what we’re doing today.

Johnny pilots the small boat across the glass-clear and smooth surface of the lake. Miriam sits beside him, staring over the edge of the boat. Occasionally, she glances at a map on her cell phone. Maybe she’s looking for geographical coordinates. There’s no cell phone reception up here, but GPS signals transfer via satellite.

Finally, she taps Johnny’s shoulder and points to her screen. We must have arrived at the correct spot. For what, I don’t know, but Johnny’s practically vibrating with excitement.

He turns toward me, a weird glimmer in his eyes. He rubs his hands together as if he’s the villain in a movie. Unease unfurls along my spine. “Right,” he says, “time for another lesson. We’re doing pretty much what we did yesterday, but on a bigger scale and from this boat.”

Miriam’s not looking at me. She keeps staring into the water as if its depth contains the answer to a question she’s grappled with for a long time.

“How do I center myself and connect with my element if I can’t touch it?” I’ve never worked magic without actually physically connecting with water.

“Ah,” Johnny says, shooting Miriam a sideways glance. She’s still mesmerized by the water. “You’ll reach out with your senses and connect with the water on the psychic plane.” This seems so straightforward that I’m surprised I haven’t tried it myself before. “Close your eyes,” Johnny tells me. “Picture the three of us in your mind’s eye, but also put us in the configuration we had yesterday.”

I didn’t know that I could manipulate positions on the psychic plane, but I incorporate what I saw yesterday with where we are today. Soon, the two images merge so that we’re now sitting in a triangle similar to yesterday’s. “Now what?” I ask.

“Watch what Miriam and I do.”

Just like yesterday, Miriam glows intensely, but some of the light rays flow downward, through the boat and into the water. Johnny’s neon-blue threads also spread through the boat and into the water. I mimic his pattern and, to my surprise, immediately feel the calm that always spreads through my body when I’m connected to my element.

“Great,” Johnny exclaims. “Okay, Miriam. You’re up.”

I’m focusing on keeping my connection with the water on the psychic plane and don’t open my eyes to see if Miriam is making another whirlpool, but I feel the boat moving in what feels like a circular pattern. Around and round, we go in lazy circles. If we traveled any faster, I’d probably get dizzy and puke.

This time, Miriam siphons energy from me but in a small but steady stream. She doesn’t grab and pull the way Johnny did. Instead, it feels like power gently trickles through me, cleansing me as it travels from the lake to Miriam.

After a while, the gentle rocking of the boat and the steady funneling of energy lulls me into a trance. And I’m startled when the boat abruptly stops. My eyes fly open to see the boat resting at a slight angle against the exposed lake bottom. Walls of water surround us, and they’re so tall I can no longer see the peak of Mount Regan. Eerily, the swirling liquid walls make no sound. They silently rotate, and I have to look away to avoid getting dizzy.

Johnny’s stomping around the bottom in boots covered in mud. “Where is it?” he shrieks, and water barriers weirdly absorb the words. “You said this is where it would be.” He advances on Miriam, who’s also standing at the bottom of the lake right next to the boat.

She looks at the gadget in her hand. “According to the coordinates, it should be right here.”

“What are we looking for?” I ask, but the other two ignore me.

“It’s obviously not,” Johnny snarls. “Figure out what went wrong and try again.”

“Is it under the mud?” Miriam asks.

“I could help,” I say. “If you told me what it is we’re looking for.”

“Shut up,” they both shout.

And so, with a huff and maybe a small pout, I do. But that unease that started earlier now tingles much more along my spine. What the hell is going on, and what are they looking for?

Johnny comes back to the boat, and his face is so angry that I pull back. He takes no notice of me, however. Instead, he rummages around on the bottom of the boat and lifts out a long pole with a metal hook on the end. I think it’s for manually pulling a boat closer to a dock.

He angrily stabs the hook into the river bottom at regular intervals as he moves in a spiral pattern from the outside of the circular shape toward the center.

“You’re going to damage it if you use the metal end,” Miriam says.

“Shut the fuck up,” he throws over his shoulder, but he flips the pole around and now pokes with the wooden end instead.

Miriam starts to shake. “I can’t hold this whirlpool much longer.” Her voice sounds brittle.

Johnny doesn’t even glance at her as he answers. “Use the conduit.”

It takes me a moment, but when Miriam turns those violet eyes my way, I realize he’s talking about me. I’m the conduit.

Oh, fuck.

Miriam closes her eyes, and that steady trickle of power that felt so good suddenly turns into a vigorous pull that threatens to pull my organs out of my body through my skin.

I grip the sides of the boat with both hands and grit my teeth. “Stop,” I yell at Miriam. “You’re going to kill me.”

This apparently doesn’t concern her because the flood of power only increases, and I can’t breathe because the stream compresses my lungs together. Those irritating glimmering stars are back behind my eyelids, and I fight with everything I have against passing out again. I don’t like my odds of waking up this time.

A loud thump of wood hitting metal sounds, and Miriam’s grip on the power she’s funneled through me finally relents. As I force air into my battered lungs, she lunges toward Johnny. “Is that it?” she asks, her eyes glowing.

He ignores her, flings the pole to the side, and starts digging in the mud with his hands instead. Miriam stands next to him, wringing her hands.

I keep breathing in and out, eyeing the water walls and wondering if I can climb them to get away from these lunatics.

Johnny digs more frantically and then shoves both hands into the mud, gripping something under the surface. He pulls with all his might, and with a loud squelch, the mud releases whatever he’s gripping, and he falls backward on his butt, holding another long pole in his hand. But this one has three prongs at the end.

He gets to his feet and wipes the trident furiously with the sleeves of his jacket. Gold metal shines through the patches of mud.

“We found it.” Miriam claps her hands together and giggles. She’s still shaking with the effort of maintaining the whirlpool.

I touch the water wall to see if I can climb it, but my hand just passes through. Suction pulls, trying to force the rest of my body through the wall, so I hastily retrieve my hand. I rack my brain for how to avoid Miriam using me as a conduit again.

No solution appears.

I now worry about how to avoid a full-fledged panic attack.

Miriam pulls on Johnny’s arm. “Let me touch it,” she says. “I want to feel its power, too.” He flings his arm out, hitting her in the face, and she falls down. “What are you doing?” She sounds more puzzled than angry. Like she can’t believe he dares to treat her so shoddily.

Johnny looks down at her, a creepy smile on his lips and insanity shining in his eyes. “Taking what belongs to me,” he hisses, aiming the trident at her.

She has only enough time to form a perfect “o” with her lips before a loud zap shoots out of the artifact and hits her square in the chest. Her body turns into ice and then shatters into a million pieces that fall to the lake's bottom. Creepily, a shadow outline of Miriam stays in the air for a split second before it dissipates.

Johnny turns toward me, the trident swinging in my direction. But he didn’t think this murder spree through completely. Because without Miriam, nobody’s controlling the whirlpool and the walls of water come tumbling down with all the might of millions of cubic tons of liquid.

I lock my arm around the seat of the boat and hold on harder than Rose clamped onto that door that she wouldn’t share with Jack after the Titanic sunk.