“That’s not…” She probed at the Summons, trying to narrow it down a little. “…exactly the water we’re going into.”
He sat back and looked up at her, amber eyes narrowed. “What water are we going into, exactly? Ifwe were going, that is?”
“Southwest.” She straightened. “Toward the lighthouse.”
“I’ll wait here.”
“Come on. The nature hike went through the woods. We’ll take the beach and avoid an audience.” About to lift the backpack, she paused. “You want to walk or ride?”
Tail tip twitching, he shoved past her, muttering, “What part of I’ll wait here did you not understand?”
The beach consisted of two to three metres of smooth gravel, trimmed with a ridge of polished zebra mussel shells at the edge of the water. As Diana and Sam rounded a clump of sumac, they saw Ryan, a garter snake wrapped around one hand, moving quietly toward the two girls crouched at the ridge of shells.
“You think we should get involved?” Sam wondered.
Before Diana could answer, Ryan placed his foot wrong, the gravel rattled, and both girls turned. Although he no longer had surprise on his side, he waved the snake in their general direction.
“Look what I have!”
Braced for shrieking and running, Diana was surprised to see both girls advance toward Ryan.
“How dare you!” Mackenzie snapped, fists on her hips. “How would you like it if someone picked you up by the throat and flailed you at people?”
“The poor snake!” Erin added.
“I’m not hurting it,” Ryan began, but Mackenzie ran right over his protest with her opinion of the kind of people who abused animals for fun, while Erin gently took the snake from him and released it.
“In answer to your question,” Diana snickered as they started walking again, “I don’t think we’re needed.”
A little further down the beach, two even larger snakes lay tangled together in the sun on a huge slab of flat rock. The female hissed as they went by. Sam hissed back.
“Don’t be rude, Sam, it’s their beach.”
“She started it,” Sam muttered.
About half way to the lighthouse, with the teenagers out of sight behind them, Diana headed for the water.
“Is it here?”
“No, it’s farther west, but these shoals go out over half a mile in places, and I’d rather not be visible from shore for that long. I don’t want to have to maintain a misdirection when we’re wading waist deep.”
“Whenwe’re wading?” Sam sniffed disdainfully at the mussel shells. “Lift me over this, would you.”
“Actually,” she bent and picked him up, settling his weight against her chest, “why don’t I just carry you until we’re in the water.”
“Yeah, yeah.” He sighed and adjusted his position slightly. “It’s going to be cold.”
“It’s Lake Ontario, I don’t think it ever gets warm. But don’t worry, you won’t feel it.” As the water lapped against the beach gravel a centimetre from the toes of her shoes, Diana reached into the Possibilities and wrapped power around them. Then she stepped forward. “There’s a nice, wide channel here,” she said, moving carefully over the flat rock. Sam would be completely unbearable if she missed her footing and a wave knocked them down. “We can follow the rift out to deep water and…”
The bottom dropped out from under her feet.
She stopped their descent before the channel grew uncomfortably narrow. The last thing she wanted was to get her foot stuck between two rocks while under three metres of Lake Ontario with a cranky cat. Well, maybe not thelast thing she wanted– being forced to sit through a marathon viewing of Question Period ranked higher on the list, but not by much.
Thanks to the zebra mussels, the water was remarkably clear– the one benefit of an invasive species that blocked intake pipes up and down the Great Lakes. Enough light made it down from the surface that they could easily see their way.
“Of course,I could see anyway,” Sam reminded her as she let him go. He swam slowly around her, hair puffing out from his body. “Cats see much better than humans in low light levels.” A little experimentation proved he could use his tail as a rudder. “You know, when you don’t have to get wet, swimming is kind of fun. Hey! Is that a fish?”
Since the fish was moving in the right direction, and Sam didn’t have a hope of catching it, Diana merely followed along behind, half her attention on the Summons, and the other half on the cat.
“Sam, come on! This way! We’ve got to go deeper.”
“How deep?” he demanded, scattering a small school of herring.
“Right to the bottom.” She slipped one arm out of her backpack and swung it around so she could pull out her flashlight. “Come on, and stop bothering the fish.”
“Something has them freaked.”
“They probably don’t get a lot of cats down here.”
“I don’t think it’s me. Mostly, I seem to be confusing them.”
“Welcome to the club.”
“What?”
“Never mind.” The water was definitely getting darker. Jade green now and, finally, a little murky. “If it’s not you, then what?”
“Something big.”
“The sea serpent?”
He was back at her side so quickly that the impact sent her spinning slowly counter-clockwise. “Maybe.”
Diana stopped the spin before her third revolution. A Keeper spinning three times counter-clockwise near an open accident site could have unpleasant– or, at the very least unlikely – consequences.
“How can you have a sea serpent in a lake?” Sam snorted in a tone that said very clearly,I wasn’t scared, so don’t think for a moment I was.
Diana shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess because lake serpent sounds dumb.”
“What’s that?”
She turned the beam of the flashlight. A small piece of metal glinted on a narrow shelf of rock. “We should check it out.”
“Is it part of the Summons?”
“Yes… No…” She started to swim. “Maybe.” Feeling the faint tug of a current nearer the rocks, she half turned. “Stay close. I don’t want you swept away.”
He paddled a little faster and tucked up against her side. “Good. I don’t want tobe swept away.”
“We’re lucky it’s so calm today. On a rough day with high waves, there’s probably a powerful undertow through here.”
“Don’t want to be eaten by an under-toad,” Sam muttered.
“Not under-toad. Undertow.”
“You sure of that?”
Glancing down into the dark depths of the lake, Diana wasn’t, so, to be on the safe side, she stopped thinking about it. The older Keepers got unnecessarily shirty about the accidental creation of creatures from folklore. As a general rule, the creatures weren’t too happy about it either.
“It’s the clasp off a change purse.” The leather purse itself had long rotted away. “Hang on…” Slipping two fingers down into a crack in the rock, she pulled out a copper coin, too corroded to be identified further.
“You should put that back.”
A second coin. She tucked them both into the front pocket of her jeans.
“Okay, fine. Don’t listen to the cat.”
“I need them.”
“What for?”
Good question. “I don’t know yet. Come on.”
“Come on?” Sam repeated, paddling with all four feet to keep up. “You say that like I was the one who paused to do a little grave robbing.”
“First of all, that wasn’t a grave, and second,” she continued before Sam could argue, “I haven’t actually robbed anything since the coins are still here. In the water.”
“In your pocket.”
“That only counts if I take them away with me.”
“So you’ve borrowed them?”
“More or less.”
“Less,” the cat snorted.
Diana let him have the last word. It was pretty much the only way to shut him up.
By the time they reached the bottom, the only illumination came from the flashlight. The water was a greenish-yellow, small particulates drifting through the path of the beam.