Blueisland (Watermagic Series, #4) (2 page)

Holy
crap! A flash of light. Did I see what I thought I saw? Could it be? I rubbed my eyes with one hand as I looked out at the ocean.

I
seemed to perceive something glowing beneath the dark waters. It looked like sparkly lights jetted through the waves and across the surface. Did someone lace my vodka with something? My body tensed as my breath quickened. Was there some sort of submarine shining lights up at us?

But t
he lights appeared to grow more prominent and grander like fireworks shooting out from the depths. My adrenaline rushed fast now. What the hell could that be?

Suddenly, to my utter shock, a
guy about my age maybe a little older swam up through the spray. I felt my heart pounding hard against my chest. I could hardly breathe.

My mind
raced with so many thoughts, but I swear he looked like the same guy from my dreams. It couldn’t be. He appeared to be about nineteen or twenty. His skin was an enticing shimmer. I tried to gain focus. In the light, his eyes looked fiercer and bluer than mine—more stunning like that of a tropical sky. It looked like his hair was long and dark with a masculine array of jewels woven into his locks.

But he didn’t seem like a nice guy. H
e looked downright mean with scratch marks on his stunning face. I wasn’t sure but I thought I saw a tribal design tattoo on his shoulder kind of like the one I had on mine. He bit down hard on his lip and closed his eyes as his body shuddered briefly while exhaling. The only time I had seen an expression like that was in a movie that I shouldn’t have been watching. He swung his head of long hair up and to the side sending a spray of water out that glistened in the light.

Suddenly, h
e peered up at me for a moment and snarled. I shook my head in astonishment. My body shivered. I couldn’t believe my eyes. What was this? It wasn’t possible for a guy to swim so far out into the ocean. Did he swim out of a submarine somehow? I don’t think that was possible. Or was it? No, no, no. Crap. Was his boat anchored nearby and I just hadn’t seen it in the dark sea? Maybe he dove in for a short swim before returning to his vessel. What an odd thing to do.

What were the lights?
And then, as I was trying to figure it out, suddenly, some hands shot out of the lit water below him and grabbed onto his body. It happened so fast. Long nails dug into his neck causing his forehead to frown. At once, a girl surfaced and kissed along his neck. He brushed her off. The girl was utterly gorgeous with long ass hair too. Then to make matters even weirder, suddenly a whole bunch of feminine hands shot out of the water at once and pulled the stunning couple under.

What the hell? I was shaking. This didn’t make sense.
I kept looking out, waiting for them to resurface, but they did not. A group of people had just drowned them. This was crazy. It couldn’t be happening. Was I going insane? My heart tightened so tight just like the evening when the police officer told me my mother was dead.

Who swims at night out in the middle of the ocean? It is dangerous to swim up so close t
o a yacht. What if the captain started it up again? The propellers could shred them to pieces. What kind of reckless teenagers would take such risks? And who would swim after them?

T
his guy wasn’t even normal looking and neither was she. Hello! He was gorgeous, the epitome of my ultimate fantasy, anyone’s ultimate fantasy—the vision of a pirate-ess out at sea too long perhaps. Yet, we had only been on the ocean for a few hours. And he looked so much like the guy from my dreams. Some kind of demented serendipity perhaps? And now he was dead.

A s
trange feeling swept over me. How could my reoccurring dreams actually be real? I felt like I knew this guy. During those whims, we swam together to a far off island, hung out in his secret tree house in the jungle, and messed around in a cave behind the waterfalls.

The engine to the yacht started back up.
The other kids were back from looking on the other side of the yacht for the whales now, talking amongst themselves below me. I couldn’t reason away what I had seen. I wasn’t prone to hallucinations. Sure I was buzzing, but that never made me this loony before. There was no way I imagined that. I wasn’t that creative.

Crap!
Suddenly, the yacht rocked in a jolting start and I lost my grip in the thrust. At once, I flew backwards. Oh God! Girlish screams sounded from below. I was upside down now with my legs wrapped around the pole above me as my heart slammed against my ribcage.

I hadn’t expected that. Adrenaline rushed through my body
again. That felt good, like I was alive.
Now or never
, I thought. With that, I drew in a quick breath and tried to inch my legs down the pole, but the position was awkward. Damn! A bead of sweat rolled off my forehead. Just do it, I told myself.

So
at once, I just let go and threw myself upwards. Somehow, I managed to grab the pole as I fell and I slid down fast. My thoughts were spinning in my mind, but to my surprise, I landed upright on the deck, relatively unscathed.

Everybody
down below in their prom dresses and tuxes rushed over to me. It was like a sequin, satin nightmare. What a pathetic scene of teeny boppers. It was like I was on the set of
Beverly Hills
90210
.

“Put this back on your head,”
Emily insisted as she set the crown atop my windblown hair. She probably didn’t even notice that my face was as white as a ghost. I was disappointed that the rush of danger was leaving my body. I hated that dead feeling that weighed down upon me.

“You should be more careful,
” she complained, cracking her knuckles. “And whoever saw a queen without any makeup on.” She pulled some lipstick out of her sequined purse and ran it over my lips before I grabbed her hand and threw it off. I glared at her much too intensely.

Rolling her eyes
, she turned away. She wasn’t afraid of me even though she should have been. “You are out of control,” she huffed as she repositioned the homecoming king’s, Logan Townsend’s, crown on his head now like she was in charge of both of us.

Logan
Townsend, with his brown short curls and swamp green eyes was an arrogant snob. It didn’t matter that his nose was crooked because all the girls wanted him anyway and nobody cared that he flunked two grades. Maybe that was because he was acting on a soap opera in Los Angeles and that made it okay—whatever!

When I was a kid, I wished
Logan would ask me out just as most everyone did, but I knew that would never happen. He didn’t like skinny rag dolls. He was better off for it because after one night, I’d just grow bored. I wasn’t much for attachments. And I didn’t like the smell of his cologne.

As expected,
Logan didn’t even notice me. He was busy staring at Emily and her big tits spilling part way out of her sequined formal as was every other guy in our high school.

I tried to ignore them
as I looked over at my prom date, bony Donny Smith in his vintage tuxedo. He was nice and intelligent with his glasses and shy face. He wasn’t my type though, kind of waify like me, but taller. Yes, he was better than the brainless jock idiots that chanted my name when I was climbing the mast, but still, he could never really understand me. And he was only with me because I was his last resort.

“Raz—I was
worried about you,” Donny mumbled awkwardly, sticking his hands in his pockets and leaning more on one leg than the other.

His
hair was sandy blond and just a little frizzy. He looked good enough with his chiseled features, but I preferred the dark waves of hair and confidence of my dream guy in the vision I had seen in the sea just minutes before. Too bad he was with another girl and too bad they probably drowned. My heart clenched at the thought, not knowing what to make of it all. A sort of ugly nausea waded in my belly. And even if they were still alive and kicking, a guy like that would never be interested in a girl like me in real life.

The muscles in
Donny’s thin forearms flexed as the wind rushed over. I noticed the way he scrunched his eyes when he looked at me too long. It made me wonder if he was detecting a pimple between my eyebrows or something. I bet he wanted to pop it.

He was about to say something else when
Savannah smacked me on the back. “You scared us, girl.” She pulled her blouse down over her hips. Her dark straight hair was in disarray. “What were you doing up there?”

“I
wanted the flag.” I lifted the thing out of my pocket and cocked an eyebrow. “Did you see that in the ocean?”

B
ut before she could respond, Donny started pulling me by my belt loop, which took me by surprise. He was leading me with the crowd back into the party room. I smiled wryly at Savannah as I grabbed my backpack stocked with another bottle of vodka and followed Donny inside. From the look on Savannah’s face, I guessed she hadn’t seen anything in the ocean except maybe whales. Everybody must have missed it because they were all on the other side of the yacht looking at blubber, otherwise everybody would have been freaking out.

My classmates
took to the tables, the bar, or the dance floor. Donny and I went with some other friends to play cards at a round wooden table off to the side of the room. A lot was going on for a boat ride. And people were making too much of it, posing for pictures in their stupid evening attire. Weirdo Harry Kingerton with ginger hair and skinny legs pulled up Ashley Baker’s dress. Her face turned as red as a tomato before she swung around and slapped Harry across the cheek. And then his dopey friends pulled him away like wannabe heroes as she cursed him out. He just laughed like a horse, blowing air out of his freckled nose and snorting.

As we sat at the round table,
I noticed Donny watching preppy Albert Martinez a little too intently while he shuffled the deck of cards. That just made me wonder why he was so focused on him. Did he know that he and I went together in elementary school? That was a short, awkward relationship that never even made it to first base.

“What’s wrong?” I asked
Donny, my eyebrows drawing together.

“I don’t really like
games,” he responded while running his fingers through the frizzy sections of his hair. His nails kept getting caught in fine tangles that he ripped through. “You just lose all your money and the only way to win is to cheat.”

What?!
That’s what he was thinking? I tried not to roll my eyes, but instead forced a smile and nodded empathetically. But then I started thinking about his confession. Who the hell doesn’t like cards? And who cheats? What was he talking about? His admittance irritated me. I wanted to hang out with Savannah and try to have fun—attempt to forget my problems. I loved games of all sorts. Now I was stuck with a prom date that was as boring as hell.

“Please don’
t make me play.” He scrunched up his nose and searched my eyes.

My eyelids shot up. Was he kidding
? I wasn’t making him do anything. At first I laughed thinking he was joking, but when his eyes widened and his lips pressed shut, I realized he was serious.

Trying to keep a pokerfaced
expression on my face, I twisted a strand of my shaggy dark hair in my fingers and observed him as he tapped his fingers on the table. Even though he was kind of awkward, he was a pleasant enough guy. Give him a chance my inner voice urged. Don’t be so afraid of everyone.

I
decided not to mind if he was a little difficult and odd. I mean, I wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs. At least he wasn’t a phony like so many other kids at my school. And at least he wasn’t a monster like Jake Stevenson.

I
vaguely wondered what he was interested in. It was hard to believe now, but Donny used to be popular with the girls in middle school. In seventh grade he teased me a lot in a sort of flirtatious way, but nothing ever came of that. It probably meant nothing to him. That was probably just his way with girls at the time.

Now he wasn’t
at all as good looking and gregarious. He seemed different, not really the popular type anymore. That was a good thing, but I wasn’t sure what he was. Often I saw him sitting off by himself at school reading. I heard he was a surfer. That was probably why his hair looked so sun bleached with the frizz on the ends.

There was laughter.
I looked away from Donny at our circle of friends at the table. Savannah and the others were joking around. She cut the deck before Albert dealt the cards.

“Why don’t we lounge over on the sofa and just talk then?” I wasn’t in
a conversational mood, but I didn’t want to be ornery either.

“
That’s cool.” He looked relieved, so I was glad I’d made the suggestion even if it could lead to some awkward dialogue. “As long as I’m with you,” He coughed looking down and then back up at me with his puppy dog brown eyes.

His comment surprised me.
Was he flirting with me? I wasn’t sure how I felt about it. But, to my surprise, the more I looked at him, the more I decided he
was
still cute in a different kind of way. That was probably the alcohol tricking my senses and the awful loneliness that I felt deep in the pit of my stomach that never seemed to go away no matter how many people I was around.