Revel (31 page)

“There’s a sugar maple out in the yard there.” Sean gazed out the window in front of his desk, his expression trancelike. “It’s always really pretty in the fall. It doesn’t get cold enough for us to have a lot of color on the trees here, but that one
turns red. I think I see a couple of leaves changed already.” He rubbed at the corners of the carved box in front of him with the pads of his thumbs. “How are you doing, Delia?” He glanced at me, his eyes roving. He bounced his legs, tapping his feet on the floor.

I didn’t answer.

“Oh, great,” he said, looking away. “You know.”

“Why, Sean?”

He pinched the inner corners of his eyes and rubbed at them. “I was chosen by lottery, but I agreed to it. And I was chosen long before you came to Trespass.”

“And you never told me.” It was hard to keep the hurt out of my voice.

Sean slid the wooden box closer to him on the desk, circling it with his arms. The wood was shiny and dark, as if it was old and had been handled a lot. The box was carved with symbols. The largest of these was a dagger, circled by coiling vines.

Just like the tattoo on Sean’s arm.

“I didn’t tell you because I promised myself there wasn’t going to be anything between us. There couldn’t be. And I didn’t want things to get all weird.” He glanced at me. “Too late for that, I guess,” he added with a hint of the gentle humor that was
him
.

“Listen to me. You have to stop.”

He shook his head doggedly. “No one can stop the transformation once it’s begun.”

“The hell you can’t,” I said in a shaking voice. “Who’s doing this to you? Who do we have to talk to? That creepy mayor? The Council? We’ll just stop it.”

“Nobody’s doing it to me, Delia.” Sean’s laugh was dry. “It’s the trapweed. You start eating the trapweed and you start changing. It’s part of me now. I couldn’t stop even if I wanted to.”

“Just slow down,” I begged him. I grasped his arm and felt the thick biceps bunch and recoil against me. “I need to understand what’s going on. We can figure this out and fix it.”

He pulled away from me. “No.”

“Are you saying you don’t want to?” I said, searching Sean’s face. Was it my imagination or had that changed too? It didn’t seem so boyish. His skin was deeply tanned and his blond hair didn’t look as thick as it had.

Sean sighed. “I’m saying …” He threw up his hands. “Hell, I don’t know
what
I’m saying. This is my life. This is what it is. I can’t change it suddenly, just because you decided to come. This is what I’m supposed to do. Protect this island. And the people I love.”

“By turning yourself into a monster.”

“Nobody here calls us that”—his eyes were hard and flat as he looked at me—“except you.”

“It’s just a drug.” I paced away from him, looking at the disarray in his room. Dirty clothes and half-eaten food littered the floor. “They get you hooked and then they own you. You’re a slave.”

Sean’s face hardened and his eyes glinted up at me from his slouched position. “You don’t understand,” he said. “You don’t know what it’s like to grow up here. It’s not the soft life you’ve had. People out there in your so-called real world? They live like sheep, doing the same old jobs, earning money to buy more stuff. It’s different here. There’s actual danger here, do you understand?” His voice kept rising as he spoke, and he stood up, pushing the chair away with a jerking motion that nearly toppled it over. I stepped back quickly. “We have to fight to protect what’s ours. Haven’t you heard? The Icers are coming. Some people even say
you’re
bringing them here, Delia.” He gave me a calculating look. “That true?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Sean. Have you lost your mind?”

“Maybe,” said Sean. “But they’re coming. They want this island and they want to kill everyone on it. A war’s coming, and I’m going to fight.”

Sean’s eyes were hard, defiant. The pupils were hugely dilated, the black almost obscuring any color at all. He was breathing hard, his chest expanding and filling his shirt like it would tear the fabric with the next breath. He looked savage, and excited.

“You sound almost happy about it,” I said.

“Yeah. Clarity makes me happy. I was confused for a while. About you, about how I felt. Now everything is simple. It’s better this way. I’m a soldier, Delia. And you’re going to need the Glaukos for this fight. You’re going to need
me
.”

Sean’s eyes blazed and I thought I saw a flicker of yellow in the brown. For the first time I was truly frightened. I didn’t know who this was. But it wasn’t Sean.

Maybe he saw the fear in my eyes. He blinked, swallowed and shook his head as if trying to clear it. He looked down at the box and placed a hand over the top. Was it possible that his hands had grown larger? His fingers draped over the edge as he clutched it.

“See, when I take this,” he said in a low voice, “I feel like everything is going to be okay. I feel like I can do anything.”

The pain in his voice made my heart break. Somewhere inside there was the guy who was so kind and gentle. The guy who took care of everyone else. But he was drowning. And I felt like there was nothing I could do about it.

I took a deep breath. “Everything is going to be okay.” I stepped closer and touched his arm gently. Beneath my fingers the overtaxed muscles twitched and pulsed spasmodically. “And you can
do
this.”

I reached for the dark box and tried to pull it away from him.

As if he’d anticipated the movement, his arm shot up. He snatched the box from my hands and pushed me.

It happened so fast. The slam of his hand against my shoulder felt like a sledgehammer. I flew backward, striking my head against the edge of the door. For a moment my vision went gray as my knees buckled. There was a
trickle of warmth on the back of my head. And blood on the door.

Sean’s face was a sickening gray color. “Oh my God. Delia. I didn’t—” He let out a low moan and reached out a hand to me.

I ran out the door.

CHAPTER 33
 

I
sat on the sand, watching the sun go down and fingering the smooth piece of blue glass at my throat.

“Jax, I need your help.”

Jax sat beside me, elbows resting on his bent knees and his hands clasped loosely together. His face was so still, so composed, that I couldn’t tell what he was feeling. “This thing you would ask me to do, you know that it betrays my own people. And yours.”

“I’m not asking you to do anything,” I said. “Just tell me. What happens if the Glaukos stop taking the trapweed?
Can
they stop? Can the changes be reversed?”

“It’s because of him, isn’t it?” Jax said in a low voice. “The Lander Gunn who is undergoing the transformation. Are you in love with him?”

I closed my eyes.
I’m in love with
you.
You chowderhead
. We weren’t in the water, so I thought it was safe to think it. And to use one of Gran’s favorite expressions. But my feelings for Jax, and his for me, weren’t the most important thing right now.

“I care about Sean,” I told him. “And this is wrong.”

Jax nodded. “The Glaukos will suffer if the trapweed is withheld. They’ll become violent and unmanageable. But there’s no reason to think that it would kill them.” He grimaced. “Though they may well kill each other.”

“And the changes?”

Jax broke his hands apart in a gesture of uncertainty. “I’ve never heard of them reversing. Ever.”

“That’s not very encouraging.”

“It wasn’t meant to be,” said Jax curtly. He rose. “I have to go.” Before he had walked two paces toward the water, he stopped and turned. “If this is what you believe to be right, Delia, then do it. I will defend your actions, and you. Always.” He raised a hand and touched his chest briefly.
“Kardia mou.”

He was gone before I had the chance to ask him what that meant.

I knew what I had to do and I was going to do it before anyone tried to stop me. The next day, I found Ben Deare at the docks and told him what I wanted: gasoline, and lots of it.

“Miss Delia, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

“Do you know what I am?” I asked him, searching his face.

Ben nodded. “Ayuh.”

“Then you know you don’t want to mess with me, right?”

“I’ll have you stow that fresh talk, missy,” Ben snapped. “Course, I knew from the start. Who do you think helped your poor mother get away from this accursed place? You’re a siren. A dangerous piece of work,” he said, nodding to himself. “And shouldn’t old Captain Deare know it.”

“
Captain
Deare,” I repeated. I looked at the brown wrinkled face and his keen blue eyes. And suddenly remembered those same eyes twinkling out at me from a picture in a book.

“Ben,” I said slowly, “how long have you been here on Trespass?”

“Pshaw,” said Ben. He squinted skyward as if calculating. “Let’s see. Lost track a few years back. Well …” He shrugged. “Ever since the
Dover
sank and tried to take me down with her.”

“That was in 1776,” I said. I put my head into my hands. I didn’t know how much more of this I could take. “You
told
me that you’re older than you look. I guess I was thinking years. Not centuries.”

“Ayuh,” said Ben. “Some folks say Poseidon raised that storm, but it ain’t true. ’Twas a siren witch that wrecked the
Dover
that night and took His Majesty King George’s gold down to the bottom of Casco Bay. That she-devil cursed us
for surviving and trespassing on this island. My crew is out there,” he said. “One hundred able sea-hands trapped forever in that reef. As for me, the witch cursed me to scuttle around this island like an old crab until the day the old gods return and allow me to die.”

“Then you knew I was a siren and you still wanted me to come here?” I asked.

“No. It wasn’t for me to say. The
bones
said you were meant to come here.”

“And the monster you told me about in the portents?”

“Well, I’m thinking
you’re
the monster, Miss Delia. No offense.”

“None taken,” I said weakly. “That’s what I was thinking too.”

“So now you know the lay of the land,” said Ben. He handed me the last gasoline can. “Good luck, Miss Delia.”

“Thanks, Ben.”

That night I went to the gardens and soaked every trapweed plant I could see, stepped back, struck a match, tossed it in.

At first I didn’t think it was going to catch. Then the field exploded into flames with a rushing, crackling hiss. A wall of superheated air pushed me back, and I turned away from the searing heat and covered my nose against the thick, resinous stink of the burning trapweed.

Pungent black clouds roiled away across the hillside and down toward the water.

I thought of the men out there, transformed into mindless beasts that served the First Ones like slaves. And about the curse that kept a sea captain and his men trapped here. About girls giving themselves because
it was tradition
.

I was so angry, the gasoline was probably overkill. My rage could have burned that field to ash.

The next morning, the air was bright and clear, and the plot of trapweed was a smoking tangle of scorched, dead vines when Gran came walking fast along the path to the garden. Her heavy chest was bouncing with the effort and her face was bright red. Burning the crop under the cover of darkness had allowed me to work without interference. But I figured Gran would be the first to realize what I’d done.