Kelley Armstrong - The Calling

I stumbled to where he crouched beside her.

“I was sure she was breathing before,” he said. “I should have let you check. Damn it.”

Hayley lay on her back in the long grass. Her skin was tinged blue.

Daniel steered Corey away as I ripped open Hayley’s shirt and started chest compressions. He sat Corey down and told him to stay there, then returned, and took over the compressions while I breathed into her ice-cold lips.

On my third breath, I felt her chest move. On the fourth, she coughed. We got her sitting up and breathing.

“Wh-what happened?” she said, looking around. “Where’s the helicopter?”

I told her. She just sat there, nodding, like it wasn’t sinking in, but when I asked if she understood, she snapped that she wasn’t stupid, and I backed off.

I kept backing off until I found a flat place to sit. Daniel slid in behind, arms around me, letting me lean back against him. Kenjii came over and put her head on my lap and I cried then. Just cried.

When I could finally speak, I twisted to face Daniel and said, “It’s my fault Rafe’s dead.”

“No, it isn’t,” he said fiercely. “I’m the one who knocked out the pilot.”

“How? You never touched him?”

“I—I don’t know. I startled him or something.”

I shook my head. “You didn’t. I don’t know what happened, but it wasn’t your fault. I’m not talking about the crash anyway. I mean that if it wasn’t for me, Rafe wouldn’t have fallen.”

“No, Maya. He let go. I saw it. He made a choice and there was nothing you could do about that.”

“I—”

“He did the right thing. If he’d held on, you’d have fallen, and maybe me, too. I know it doesn’t make this any easier, but he did the right thing.”

“That’s not what I mean. He should never have been on that helicopter. If I’d let them wake him up, he’d have insisted on staying to find Annie.”

Daniel shook his head. “They’d have put him on that helicopter whether he wanted to go or not.”

“But he’d have been awake. He wouldn’t have fallen—”

“If he resisted getting on, they’d have sedated him, just like they did with the mayor. You know he’d have resisted. Nothing would have changed.”

When I tried to look away, he caught my chin and turned me to face him.

“Nothing,” he said.

My eyes filled with tears again. “It doesn’t seem real. The fire. The people in the forest. The helicopter crash. Mayor Tillson. Rafe.” I looked up at him again. “It can’t be real. I’m asleep. It’s a nightmare. Tell me it is.”

He hugged me so tight my ribs protested. “I wish I could.”

His voice cracked and I hugged him back, as hard as I could.

Someone cleared his throat behind us. It was Corey. He crouched and said, in a low voice, “I know this is a bad time, guys. I’m really sorry. But the girls—They’re freaked out and they need someone to tell them what to do and … that’s not me. They want one of you two. Daniel, I’ll stay here with Maya if you can talk to them.”

I wiped my sleeve over my eyes. “No. Sitting here isn’t going to help.” It just gave me a deep, dark pit to lose myself in when I really couldn’t afford to be lost.

We both got up and followed Corey.

Nicole and Hayley were huddled in the long grass, staring out at the island to the west. Vancouver Island. Our island. Shrouded in fog.

The girls were shivering. Even Sam, leaning against a tree, twisting the bar in her ear, was trembling, though she kept giving herself an abrupt shake, as if annoyed by her weakness.

I had to give myself a shake, too—a mental one—as I took stock of our surroundings.

With the fog rolling in, I couldn’t tell how big our island was. But it had looked small from the air. The ground was rocky, with patches of long grass and scrubby trees.

The sky was overcast, so dark I thought night was coming until I checked my watch and realized it wasn’t even six.

Mom had been in Victoria when the forest fire broke out. Was Dad with her now? Were they waiting for our helicopter to land? Planning what we’d have for dinner to take my mind off the forest fire?

Had Dad’s helicopter gone to Victoria? Was it only our helicopter that had been diverted or…?

“Maya?” Daniel said.

Don’t think about that. Can’t think about that . We needed to get some place warm and dry before dark.

I whispered that to Daniel. He gestured for me to walk with him.

“We’re going to scout the island,” he told the others.

No one offered to come along. No one said a word. They just nodded, their gazes as empty as I felt.

“We need to tell them everything,” Daniel whispered as we walked away. “Otherwise, they’ll want to wait for rescue. Which we know we can’t do.”

“Because we don’t know who’ll come for us. Real rescuers or fake ones.”

He nodded.

“I’ll…” I struggled to get my brain in gear, but I felt like I was still out in the water, fighting to keep my head above the surface and wishing I could just sink into peaceful oblivion. I blinked hard. “Sorry. I’ll talk to them.”

“No, I will. You just need to back me up. Can you do that?”

I nodded.

Tell them what was going on. God, that sounded so easy. But where to start?

It began less than a week ago. No, that’s not true. It began a year ago. When Serena died. My best friend. Daniel’s girlfriend.

Serena had drowned. It shouldn’t have happened, not to the captain of the school swim team, swimming in a calm lake.

Then Mina Lee came to town. She called herself a reporter, but everyone figured she was a corporate spy. We live in Salmon Creek, a town of two hundred people that was built and owned by the St. Cloud Corporation, so they could conduct drug research. Mina came to Salmon Creek pretending to be writing an article on the local teens—what it was like growing up in a tiny corporate town. She’d really wanted to talk to us—and she was especially curious about Serena’s death, and Daniel and I began to think that she suspected the medical research was responsible.

A few days later we’d found Mina Lee’s body in a cougar cache. Had she been killed by the big cats? Or died of misadventure in the woods? Or had she been murdered and dumped?

We broke into her cabin and found files on all the teens in our class. Only two were missing. Mine and Sam’s. Sam had stolen hers. When confronted she said it was because she didn’t want others knowing her parents had been murdered. But we’d started wondering if there was more to it, if she might have had something to do with those murders, something to do with Serena’s death, too.

Then there was the note Daniel had found in Mina’s cabin. Four strange words in it, including benandanti . Italian witch-hunters. We knew the word because of Mina. She’d left him a note to call her, on a library book page about benandanti.

I’d recognized other words on that list. Yee naaldlooshii . Skin-walker. A few days before, I’d been called that by an old woman who’d said that’s what my paw-print birthmark meant. That I was a skin-walker. A shape-shifting witch. Crazy, huh? Except… I was. So were Rafe and Annie, who’d come to Salmon Creek looking for the girl who’d been another subject in an experiment to resurrect the latent skin-walker genes. That girl, apparently, was me.

So all that happens, and I’m trying to figure out how to tell Daniel I’m a skin-walker when the forest fire struck. Daniel, Rafe, and I got caught in it. We’d seen a fire-and-rescue truck, and Daniel got a bad feeling—he gets them; I’ve learned to trust them. Turned out it wasn’t fire and rescue. Who was it? I don’t know, but they’d been after us, and one man knew my name and had my eyes, and I was pretty sure I knew what that meant, but I refused to process it. Too much else waiting in the queue.