Dangerous Creatures(22)

“Look. What’s that?” Ridley sat up, still sucking on two sugar cubes that she had stolen from Gramma’s tea tray. In the fourteen summers she and her siblings and Lena had spent visiting their grandmother, she had never once been caught.

“You mean who?” Her big sister, Reece, asked as she tied the back of her bathing suit even more tightly than usual. Because now they could see that the dark spots were moving, or more precisely, walking.

They were two people—two dark figures following along the aquamarine shoreline of Bathsheba Beach.

“Fine. Who’s that?” Rid’s eyes narrowed. She kept sucking, but now the cubes were so small that she could barely taste the sweetness anymore.

“Lost Shorelings, probably. Why don’t you ask them yourself?” Shoreling was Gramma’s made-up word for all the curious folk who wandered up and down the sandy stretch in front of their house.

One of the black dots was headed right into the startling blue bay.

“We’re too far east for swimming. They’ll drown in the current. Someone should tell them.”

“Mortals?” Reece shrugged. “Don’t look at me.” Though the Mortal and Caster populations of the island had mixed peaceably for centuries, the fundamental code seemed to be leave well enough alone.

If you drowned, you drowned.

Que sera, sera.

“Fine.” Ridley hopped off the ancient wicker settee and started on the sandy path that snaked between beds of cliff grass down to Bathsheba Beach.

“Hat,” yelled Reece from the veranda above, but Ridley just waved her off.

The balcony that wrapped around Ravenwood Abbey, Gramma’s Barbados house, was carved of broad stone, a graceful contrast to the otherwise severe coastal cliffs beneath it. Their house had guarded the edge of the island—the bay, and Bathsheba Beach—ever since the sixteen hundreds. Ravenwood Abbey was even older than Ravenwood Plantation; like so many others, Ridley’s ancestors had stopped in Barbados on the way to the Carolinas, long ago.

Hundreds of years of nothing ever happening, thought Ridley.

That was a long, long time.

Unless you loved spending hours memorizing family ancestral charts, maps of constellations, herb and garden journals, Caster histories. And the history of the Abbey, of course, which was why Ridley knew an encyclopedia’s worth of information about Gramma’s summerhouse. Reece and Ridley and Lena had studied everything but the actual Casts themselves, which they weren’t allowed to see. Even little Ryan wasn’t spared hours in the Abbey library. “It’s like she wants us to learn about power just to make sure we’ll never have any,” Rid had complained when they first arrived this summer.

“Don’t say those things. Gramma loves us.” Reece frowned, looking worried.

But she looks that way most of the time, Ridley thought.

“How do I know that? She’s never nice to me. Sometimes I think she hates me.” It sounded strange to finally say the words out loud.

“She doesn’t hate you,” Reece said, pulling Ridley into her arms for a sisterly hug. These moments didn’t happen very often, and Rid savored it while it lasted. “I think, sometimes, Gramma is a tiny bit afraid of you.”

“Me? Why me?”

Reece just put her hand on Ridley’s cheek and looked into her eyes, as if she could see the answers to all her sister’s questions there. “I wish I knew.”

But Gramma wasn’t even here today. She had gone with Mamma to the easternmost tip of the islands to look at some ancient caves that Gramma was convinced had something to do with their family’s future.

Why would anyone spend a whole day looking at a cave? Ridley had no idea. But as she ran down the path, she tried not to think about anything but the sun and the sky and the tadpoles she had found in the pond by her room last night.

Summer was meant to be fun.

Everything else could be ignored for now.

She was going to save the Shorelings and then tell Gramma all about it at dinner. Uncle Macon, too. They’d think she was brave and kind. They’d tell Reece and Ryan to be more like her, and then give Ridley an extra piece of dessert. Ridley had it all worked out.

“You! Shorelings! Get out of the water!”

A towheaded boy pulled himself to his feet. He walked up out of the foaming surf, right toward her. A girl, younger looking, with darker hair, sat at the edge of the water, on the sand.

“What did you call me?” The boy’s eyes flashed.

Ridley sniffed. “The water’s dangerous. If you drown, my Gramma will have to call the police. And she hates the police.”

“I’m not going to drown.” The light-haired, dark-eyed boy smiled. He couldn’t have been that much older than she was. He was tan and tall, but not too tall. Not old.

Just a boy.

“You shouldn’t be out here. It’s private property,” she said.

“Nobody owns the beach or the ocean.” He crossed his arms.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m here with my sister,” he said. “We’re bored.”

“I know the feeling.”

“We’re stuck here while my grandfather is away for the day.”

Ridley nodded. “Mine, too. I mean, Gramma.”

“He’s at some stupid caves.”