“Stay where you are!” he shouted, lifting his other leg over the rail. He clung to the outside, great swells crashing over him, trying to maneuver the raft into the right position.
“Seph!” Madison was inching toward him again. “What's the matter with you?”
“Don't you see? The storm's for me,” Seph said.
Jack struggled with the tiller, trying to keep the boat from turning crosswise to the wind. “If you think this is wizardry, you're wrong! Not even a wizard can control the weather.”
“Explain this, then!” Seph would have waved his arm had he dared to let go. “I'm going to bail. Maybe you'll be all right.”
“Come on, man!” Jack said desperately. “Get back in the boat. We've done okay so far.”
“It's not just the journey, it's the destination you should worry about.” The boat was still flying west, as if pushed by an invisible engine.
The next part would be tricky. Somehow he needed to land in the raft. Turning his back to the rail, he grabbed the cord on the CO2 cartridge in his teeth and gave it a fierce yank. The raft inflated like a yellow bomb going off and Seph let go of the rail just as a body slammed into him.
He fell through space in a tangle of arms and legs. The raft smacked into the water, and Seph and his attacker smacked into the raft a moment later. Water washed over them, and the raft bobbed to the surface like a cork. Seph thrashed free, rolled over, and pushed himself into a sitting position, spitting out saltwater.
Madison lay next to him, coughing and sputtering. He slid his hands under her arms and hauled her upright, slapping her back to clear the water from her lungs. Her hair hung in tangles, her teeth were chattering, and she looked scared to death.
“Why would you do that?” he said, genuinely bewildered.
She just shook her head. He pulled her in close, trying to warm her with his body. The sailboat was nowhere to be seen. He and Madison and the raft were still flying before the wind.
Jack saw the raft momentarily, a yellow spot on the dark water, before it was swallowed up by the storm. He stood at the railing where he'd tried to grab Seph at the last minute. Ellen was kneeling, stunned, in the bottom of the boat.
The boat pitched and shuddered as the swells crashed into it. Jack lunged and seized the rudder, turning the boat into the wind, while Ellen pulled to her feet and scanned the water around them for the raft.
The storm seemed to be abating. The wind dwindled, the rain slowed and stopped. The sickening pitching of the boat receded. Ellen released her grip on the rail, regaining a little color. Jack looked to the west, where a dark curtain receded across the sullen waves. To the east, the sky was brightening.
There was no sign of Seph McCauley or Madison Moss.
Seph soon realized that what he did or did not do had absolutely no influence on the trajectory or speed of the raft. He lay back, holding tightly to the rubber handles on the sides, with Madison tucked in next to him, her head resting on his shoulder. When they hit a particularly fierce wave, water cascaded over them, but they could not be any wetter than they were already. The storm raged around them, despite the fact that Seph was cooperating in the only way he knew how.
Wherever they were going, he was sure it was bad news; although, if they were going to the Havens, they were heading in the wrong direction.
He looked down at Madison. She was lying still, eyes wide open, her left hand still gripping his life jacket. Eventually, like an animal retreating from too much stimulus, he slept.
When he awoke, it was dark and still storming, lightning harsh against his eyes, and thunder grumbling like the sound of a battle moving away from him. But it wasn't thunder or lightning that had woken him, but the grating crunch as the floor of the raft hit bottom.
Looking over the side, he saw that it had been driven up in the shallows next to a beach. It was a typical lake beach, a mixture of sand and rocks. The surface of the water surrounding the boat was littered with seaweed and debris, driven there by the storm.
He shook Madison awake. She blinked at him, then floundered a bit, trying to sit up. Gripping her wrist, he pulled her upright. “We've run aground somewhere. They probably know I'm here, but I doubt they know about you.”
Seph slid out of the raft into knee-deep water and helped Madison out after him. They waded toward shore, pushing the raft ahead of them. Seph was covered in bruises, cuts, and scrapes.
They shoved the raft high on the beach, so it was out of the water and they were satisfied it wouldn't float away. He put a large rock in its center to anchor it. It would have made a good shelter, but a bright yellow raft was just too conspicuous.
Dense forest crowded the beach on three sides. The sand was spattered with flotsam from the storm, pockmarked from the rain, empty of footprints. Seph shivered. The air was chilly, and he was soaked through. It had nearly stopped raining.
“Come on.” Seph was anxious to get off the open beach.
The late-summer woods were dark and clogged with underbrush. Water cascaded down on them from above as they fought their way through it. Seph plowed forward, squinting into the gloom on either side. He finally found a place where two trees had sagged together, forming a sort of cave that was reasonably dry and half filled with leaves. Not the best, but just then he couldn't be choosy.
“Why don't you stay here,” he said to Madison. “If you burrow down into the leaves it might be warmer.”
She swiped her hair back. “I think it's better if we stay together. I could help you.”
“If they're looking for me it's better if we split up. I'm going to try to find out where we are and what's going on, and then I'll come back for you. If I don't come by sunup, try to find a house or a police station.” Hopefully, someone other than Leicester or the alumni. It was the only plan he could come up with.
Frowning, she reached up and picked leaves from the tangle of his hair. “If you don't come back, Witch Boy, I'm coming after you.” Then she crawled back into the shadows between the great trees.
Reasoning that those hunting him would most likely target the beach where they'd landed, Seph walked east, away from the beach. An overgrown path followed the shoreline. It was easier going on the trail than through the tangle of trees and briars and poison ivy. The humid air had cleared in the wake of the storm, and it had cooled considerably. Clouds sailed east, driven by a brisk wind, and a few stars pricked the western sky. The birds were beginning their predawn chorus.
He had walked nearly a mile when he came upon a ramshackle dock and padlocked, boarded-up cottage. He judged that it would make a better shelter for a cold, wet person than a hollow between two trees. Not only that, the padlock looked flimsy. Seph stooped and pried up a stone from the walkway.
A slight sound behind him alerted him to danger. Then a nervous voice, mangling the language of magic. He turned, still in a crouch, so as to make a smaller target, and threw. The stone struck Peter Conroy in the forehead, shattering his glasses and putting an immediate end to the charm. Seph tackled him around the knees, and they rolled down the slope into the water. They wrestled in the shallows, spouting charms and counters until Seph got Peter in a headlock and held his head under water long enough to lay an immobilization charm on him. Then he gripped Peter by the shoulders and dragged him up onto the beach, not an easy task since Peter probably outweighed him by half.
Peter was agitated, wheezing, red in the face. “Inhaler!” he gasped. Seph dug in Peter's jacket pocket, found the inhaler and gave him a puff. The wheezing subsided and Peter no longer looked as if he were asphyxiating, though he still looked terrified.
“Please don't tell Dr. Leicester,” he begged. Despite the chilly air, sweat pebbled his forehead and ran down his face.
“I won't say anything if you tell me what's going on,” Seph said. “Where are we?”
“I … I … S-s-Second Sister. We're on Second Sister.”
Seph sat back on his heels. “Second Sister? Isn't that the island where the Interguild Conference is being held?”
Peter nodded miserably. “Dr. Leicester wanted us to bring you before they all got here.”
“You brought me? How'd you do that? I thought wizards can't control the weather.”
“Usually, they can't. But Dr. Leicester, he uses us, he links us, and with all of us together, he can do whatever he wants.”
“What do you mean, he links you?” Jason had used that term, but Seph wasn't sure what it meant. “You mean, like what he wanted to do to me at the chapel?”
“It's a charm. Back at school, I … I didn't even know about wizardry, and I was having these terrible nightmares, and Dr. Leicester said if I would agree to link to him, the nightmares would stop. And they did, only … he just takes over, and makes you do terrible things. It's like being p-possessed.” He swallowed hard. “I'm sorry about Trevor. At Christmas, you came to dinner, and we'd just k-killed him, and there you were, and you didn't know.”
Seph recalled the bizarre Christmas dinner, the relentless drinking. Warren Barber accusing him of being too good to join the rest of them. Martin Hall holding Barber off with his knife, tears running down his face, saying, Hasn't there been enough bloodshed already?
“Can't you leave? Or gang up on him?” Seph said.
Peter's pale eyes swam in tears. “He's linked to us. All the time, he's linked to our stones. If we try to resist, it's like he sets fire to our insides.” Tears spilled over. “I used to think the dreams were bad.”
Seph shuddered, thinking of what might have been. What could still happen. “What's Leicester planning to do? What does he want with me?”
“I don't know. But we're all out looking for you.”
Seph couldn't help looking over his shoulder, scanning the dark shoreline. “Who's here?”
“Dr. Leicester. The fourteen of us who are left. Aaron Hanlon died, you know, after … uh … after he and Warren and Bruce tried to bring you back.”