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  “You know it,” I said, grabbing her hand. Mardi squeezed my fingers tightly and flashed me a look of determination, then pressed the accelerator all the way to the floor.

  6

  MY HUMPS

  Mardi-Overbrook-Journal.docx

  I squealed into the lot by the dock at a good sixty miles an hour and fishtailed into a parking space. It was a move I couldn’t have pulled off in a hundred years if I’d actually been trying to do it, but the truth is I was so distracted by all the thoughts running through my head that I wasn’t really paying attention. Fortunately I have what we like to call “witch’s insurance,” which is to say: Troy had only let me have a car on the condition that he be allowed to put a safety shield on it, which made it almost impossible for me to get into an accident.

  I glanced over at Molly, who was gripping the edges of her seat.

  “Sorry ’bout that, Moll,” I said with a big smile.

  “This is why I ride in limos with professional drivers,” Molly said, slowly relaxing in her seat. She folded the visor down, checked her hair in the mirror—it was perfect as usual, thanks to the hex, of course—then climbed out of the car. We walked across the parking lot toward the pier where the seaplanes docked.

  “It’s just past five,” I said, glancing at my watch. “Dad called around four-thirty, so he should be here any minute.”

  We scanned the sky to the west, and sure enough, within a few seconds, a tiny speck appeared. It grew rapidly larger, taking on the familiar shape of the seaplane from Manhattan, with its fat yellow pontoons hanging below the wings like a pair of bananas.

  “Also?” Molly said. “Can we talk about how Dad always takes the seaplane when he makes us take a car or the train?”

  “I know, totally unfair,” I agreed. “Although I’d go crazy out here without my car. I don’t know how you can stand it.”

  “I manage to get around just fine,” Molly said. “Besides, North Hampton is about half the size of Central Park. You can get around on a bicycle.”

  I couldn’t help but laugh.

  “What? I totally rode Ingrid’s bike all over town last summer!” Molly protested. “But thank Odin we’re goddesses and don’t have to work out. Spandex and headbands don’t appeal to me at all.” She paused for a moment. Then: “Speaking of working up a sweat . . .”

  I knew just what she was talking about, but I pretended not to. When it was clear I wasn’t going to say anything, she prompted, “You’ve been living in Fair Haven for almost two weeks now. Have you and Trent . . . ?”

  I sighed heavily.

  “What?” Molly said, turning away from the plane, which was only a mile or two away. “Really? You haven’t slept with him? Interesting . . . ”

  “I mean, I really like him, you know, especially since the end of last summer, after we figured out Trent was the real Trystan Gardiner, and Tris was just—”

  “Do NOT remind me,” Molly cut me off. “The fact that I made out with that troll is enough to make me heave—even if he did look like a member of One Direction when we were doing the making out.”

  “Trent doesn’t look like a member of One Direction! He’s much more Bastille or MGMT, hello.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a snob.” Molly laughed. “Looking like Harry Styles isn’t exactly the worst thing in the world.”

  “Okay, first of all, if he looks like anyone from 1D, it’s Louis. And second, I’m not a snob. I just don’t listen to exactly the same thing as every other seventeen-year-old girl in the world!”

  “Sure. Like MGMT or Bastille are so radical. Like no one’s ever heard of them except Mardi Overbrook and six other super-cool people.”

  I opened my mouth to protest but thought better of it. This was hardly the time or place to get into a stupid sister fight—not when our dad was about sixty seconds away from landing and explaining the origin of, well, us. But more important, I knew that Molly wasn’t actually upset about whether Trent looked more like a boy bander or an indie rocker. What upset her was that she’d been duped by an evil dude who came close to stealing our Rhinegold and driving a permanent wedge between us. Ever since we’d managed to chase off Alberich, Molly had been extremely touchy on the subject of boys. In fact, she had deliberately not gone out on a date in one whole year. For the average teenage girl, that’s like the Siberia of romance. No, it’s worse than that. It’s the North Korea of romance. But for a girl like my twin sister, who (if I do say so myself) is not only gorgeous but rich, smart, and, oh yeah, a goddess, it must be even worse. Seriously, I don’t think a day goes by that Molly isn’t hit on by some moonstruck Romeo, but she’s turned down every single one of them since she discovered that the last boy she’d said yes to was actually a dark elf, and practically a troll. And not an Internet one at that. Like, a real troll.

  “So,” I said, figuring I only had to keep the conversation going for another minute or two before Dad’s plane landed, “did you hear that Sal’s son is coming to stay on the East End for the summer?”

  Sal McLaughlin owned the North Inn, the übercool dive bar/celebrity hot spot where Freya tended bar.

  “I might’ve heard something about that,” Molly said in a casual kind of way.

  “His name’s Rocco,” I continued. “Freya told me Sal’s ex-wife was Italian, as in Italian-from-Italy. I figured there couldn’t be too many Rocco McLaughlins out there, so I looked him up online.”

  “And?” Molly said, still trying to sound like she wasn’t interested, but I could tell her curiosity was piqued.

  I held up my phone, where I’d already pulled up Rocco’s picture, after first swiping past about two hundred more IMs and alerts about Janet Steele. Seriously, if this kept up, I was going to have to get a new number. A new name even.

  “He goes by Rocky,” I said. “He just finished his freshman year at Dartmouth.”

  “Smarty-pants, huh,” Molly said, taking a quick glance at my phone. A moment later, however, her eyes strayed back, and this time they stayed. “Huh,” she said again, but this time with a totally different inflection.

  Based on his looks, Rocky McLaughlin had inherited long inky-black locks and a smooth olive complexion from his Italian mother. From his Irish dad, he’d gotten a pair of piercing pale blue eyes and thin but wide and very pink lips. He had a lean, angular face with high cheekbones and a strong chin with a pronounced dimple. I quickly swiped to the next one, which showed him in just a pair of board shorts, so Molly could see his perfect chest and rippling abs.

  “Huh,” Molly repeated, except this time she didn’t try to hide the fact that she was intrigued. “Well, he doesn’t suck to look at, does he?”

  “Not. At. All.” I had a boyfriend, but there was no harm in looking, was there?

  Molly glanced at my phone one more time. “We might have to return to this subject later,” she said in her faux-aloof voice. She nodded toward the sky. “Dad’s plane is landing. We’d better focus.”

  “Right,” I said, tucking my phone into my pocket. We were at the shore end of the dock, and we started walking out toward the water.

  “Looks like a pretty empty flight,” Molly said.

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “Just Dad and the flight attendant and—oh, my gods!”

  A dark shape appeared in the water just under Dad’s plane, which was only a few feet above the surface of the Sound. It must’ve been twice as big as a city bus, and as Molly and I watched, horrified, it rose up out of the water like a submarine, torrents of water streaming off its curved shell.

  “Is that a . . . whale?” Molly screamed.

  I was pretty sure it was a whale—a humpback whale—but before I could answer, the tip of one of the pontoons on the bottom of Dad’s plane caught on its massive steel-gray back. If there was any doubt that the whale’s appearance wasn’t a coincidence, it disappeared when the leviathan lifted its massive tail out of the wa
ter and used it to slap the plane out of the air. The plane slammed propeller-first into the whale’s back, then rolled nose over tail, collapsing like a crushed can as it went. As it neared the front of the plane, the whale rolled to its side, and a collosal pectoral fin came out of the water, smashing the plane—and its occupants—in a dozen different directions.

  I was about to scream, but I was distracted by a large smooth mound near the front of the whale, a brownish-gray circle with a darker circle inside it. It was only when it blinked that I realized it was the whale’s eye. The whale rolled completely over and the eye was gone, but even so, I couldn’t shake the thought that the eye had been staring at me. The pectoral fin, which must’ve been a dozen feet long, slapped the surface of the bay, sending a plume of water up into the air.

  Through the mist, I could see things flying everywhere—pieces of the fuselage, seats, suitcases, and, worst of all, several spindly shapes that could have only been people. Before I knew it, I was running down the dock.

  “Mardi!” Molly screamed, running beside me. “What are you doing?”

  “We’ve got to save them!” I yelled back.

  “But the water’s freezing! We need to cast some kind of spell.”

  This was true. Though it was a balmy seventy-five degrees on land, the cool water of the Sound barely tipped the scales at fifty degrees. At that temperature, hypothermia could set in before we reached anyone—and while our souls are immortal, our bodies are made of pretty much the same flesh and blood as everyone else’s.

  In other words, there was a very real chance that we could die trying to save our father. But we had to do something.

  “There’s no time for magic!” I screamed even as I kicked my shoes off. “It’s Dad!”

  I guess on some level Molly felt this too. After all, she was running down the dock every bit as fast as I was, and she’d already lost her shoes. As I launched myself off the dock, I saw a flash of white out of the corner of my eye, and realized she was right behind me.

  Then the freezing water closed over me, and all thoughts of Molly or Dad or anything else vanished from my brain. The only thing I wanted to do was get out. I began kicking desperately, frantically, trying to propel myself back out of the water.

  But as soon as my head cleared the air, I saw pieces of the airplane fuselage all around me, and remembered why we were there. The water was freezing, but I told myself to ignore it. Dad was in here somewhere. I had to find him.

  Just then, Molly’s head broke the surface. Her dark hair was plastered across her face and her lips had already gone blue and quivery. There was no hiding the look of determination in her eyes.

  “I saw someone that way,” she said, pointing to her left. “And I think there’s someone over there too.” She pointed right, over my shoulder. And then, arcing to her left, she was under again.

  I twisted to the right and kicked myself under. The cold water squeezed me like a giant hand, as if it was trying to crush my bones, but I put it out of my mind, swimming as hard and fast as I could. As I went down, the pressure only grew more intense; my lungs were on fire even as my skin was turning to ice.

  And then I saw it. A hand, waving in the current.

  For one ghastly second, I thought it had been severed from its body, but then my eyes adjusted to the gloom and I saw the rest of the body dangling below it. I realized the hand wasn’t waving in the current—it was actually trying to swim. I squinted, trying to make out the face.

  It was Dad!

  I kicked harder, all thoughts of exhaustion suddenly gone. In three strokes, I was there. Dad’s fingers curled around mine in a vise grip, but even as they did, I noticed his other arm, his left, hanging limply at his side, along with both of his legs. But he was awake and even smiling, albeit grimly. With a nod of his chin, he indicated where we had to go:

  Up!

  I began frog kicking, doing my best not to hit Dad in the face. His hand clung to mine. The thought of our dad, the god of thunder, in a wheelchair was almost too much to bear.

  I told myself not to think such thoughts—not now, when we were still twenty feet below the surface of the water and my lungs were burning and my legs were aching and Dad was hanging off me like a two-hundred-pound anchor. Just kick, Mardi, I told myself. Kick. Kick. KICK!

  Suddenly, my head burst above the waves, and a second later, Dad’s broke through. For a moment, all we could do was breathe, inhaling big ragged breaths of air. Then, faintly, I heard voices.

  “There’s someone there!”

  I looked over my shoulder and saw a man on the dock pointing to me. Then a second man appeared, holding a life preserver. As he tossed it to me, I saw that it was dangling a line.

  “Catch!”

  The man’s aim was good. The preserver landed less than a foot from me, and I grabbed onto it with the hand that wasn’t holding Dad. As soon as I had it, I felt the rope tug as the two men began hauling us to shore. Only then did I turn my attention to Dad.

  “Are you okay? Dad, can you hear me?”

  His eyes had closed, but after a long moment, they fluttered open. He smiled at me weakly.

  “I saw you girls on the dock,” he said, and though his voice was faint, you could hear the mischief in it.

  “Dad, a whale came up underneath your plane! That was what crashed it. A whale. That—I mean, that has to be magic, right? Was someone trying to kill you?”

  Dad’s eyes closed again but not before I could see a flicker of recognition in them.

  “Who would try to kill you, Dad? Why?”

  “Later,” Dad replied, without opening his eyes. But then they sprang open. “Molly!” he exclaimed. “Where’s your sister?”

  My head whipped back and forth as I scanned the dark water, but all I saw were pieces of the plane’s fuselage scattered over the rippling waves like abandoned beach toys. No matter where I looked, there was no sign of Molly.

  7

  DIVER DOWN

  From the Diary of Molly Overbrook

  As the water closed over my head, I kicked in the opposite direction from Mardi toward the dark shape I’d glimpsed a moment ago. I prayed it was Dad. I prayed he was okay.

  Did Mardi tell you about the whale’s eye? We talked about it later—how we were sure it was staring at us. There’s something especially creepy about an eye the size of your head staring you down. You get the feeling that it’s looking right into your brain, reading your thoughts, daring you to do something stupid, like jump in the water and try to save your dad. If it had been anyone else, I don’t think I would’ve had the guts. But it was Dad. We had to do it.

  It seemed to take forever before I saw the dark shape I’d seen before: it was falling quickly. I thought bodies were supposed to float? Something about the air in the lungs and the stomach? But then, as I got closer, I saw why it was falling so fast: some kind of cable had coiled around one of the legs, and hanging off the opposite end was the twisted metal framework of a chair.

  It wasn’t Dad. It was a young woman, only five or six years older than me. Probably the flight attendant, judging from the plain button-down shirt and khakis she was wearing. Her eyes were closed and she wasn’t moving, but she couldn’t have been in the water for even a minute.

  There’s still time, I told myself. I can save her.

  I kicked over to her and grabbed at the cable. It was stiff and heavy, and no matter how much I pulled and twisted, I couldn’t get it to unwind from her leg, and all the while I felt it pulling us even farther from the surface.

  Damn it! I screamed mentally. Let go!

  But the cable refused to budge, and so, steeling myself, I grabbed the woman and pulled her to my chest and began kicking for the surface. I could feel the chair hanging off her leg, pulling me down, and for a while, it didn’t seem like we were moving. But then momentum finally built, and we began to inch toward the
surface. I swam harder and pushed through the water with my free hand.

  I looked down at the woman’s face. Her eyes were closed but her mouth was gently open, and her loose jaw waved slightly in the current. Hold on, I willed her. We’re almost there.

  But that wasn’t really true. The surface was still ten feet away, but the chair was so heavy and my legs so tired that we were hardly moving at all. It took every ounce of resolve not to let her go and drag myself to the surface. I kicked, and kicked, and kicked—

  —and suddenly I broke through the surface. A strange gasping screaming sound burst from my lungs as I tried to catch my breath. The flight attendant’s head sagged backward in the water, and I had to hold it up to keep her from slipping under again. Then I realized it wasn’t just her head. It was her whole body. It was both of us, being dragged back down by the weight of that chair.

  I tried to kick with my legs, but there was nothing left. They barely moved in the water below me. I was slipping under too. In desperation, I started flailing around with my free arm. My hand smacked against something, and I grabbed it and hung on for dear life. Whatever it was, it floated, and it was enough to keep me and the flight attendant above water. I figured it had to be part of the plane.

  In fact, I soon realized it was a big part. Like, half the fuselage. We’d actually come up inside it, I saw now. It tented over us like a giant eggshell.

  At first, I was relieved because its buoyancy was holding us up. But very quickly I realized that it was also shielding us from the shore, whichever way it was, and whatever searchers might’ve joined Mardi and me. I would have to dive under and pull the flight attendant along with me if I wanted someone to find us. And I knew, just knew, I didn’t have the strength for that.

  “Help!” I yelled, my voice echoing back at me off the warped shell of the plane. “Help! We’re over here!”