Page 21 of Broken Lines

Fuck.

4

Melody

Fear surgesin my chest as I strain, muscles coiling as the waves crash over me once twice…

But the third time, the sloshing waves soak me to the bone as a panic threatens to drag me under.

Perhaps this was a terrible idea.

All of it. Not just convincing the old man on the dock to let me rent a boat, claiming “years” of practice. Those years of practice include paddle boating in Central Park and taking a canoe out, twice, at summer camp…when I was ten.

That was ten years ago now, and I’m about as proficient a boater as Rose clinging to a piece of driftwood as the Titanic, and Jack, sinks around her.

But taking this boat out is just—pardoning the Titanic pun—the tip of the iceberg. Maybe coming here at all was a terrible idea. Crossing choppy seas from a town I’ve never been to, to an island I’ve never heard of, to try and meet with the ghost of a fallen god who doesn’t want to be found.

A fallen god who goes by the name of a blues legend and lives in what looks from here to be a haunted mansion on an inhospitable island covered in trees and jagged cliffs.

A fallen god who doesn’t speak, but who looks like he spent the last ten years drinking himself into a ditch. But a fallen God who bleeds, nevertheless.

I saw the tattoos. I looked in his steely blue eyes. And there’s zero question in my mind that “Robbie”—a hermit the whole town seem to regard affectionately as gruff but nice-enough drunk, is the very man or fallen, shattered god, I’ve been looking for.

Now, horrible idea or not, I’m on my way to do the impossible: lay eyes on and speak to Jackson Havoc for the first time in ten years.

I gasp as yet another wave slams over the edge of the tiny rowboat, soaking me through and making my teeth chatter. My hands grip the oars tighter, and I strain, wincing at the way the rough wood rips at my palms.

I shiver as the frozen fall air needles through my skin. But I keep going, glancing behind me and hoping to God I’m still aiming for the island and not to open sea. But it draws closer and closer, and the cliffs rear up like an angry dragon’s teeth to swallow me whole.

And up on top, like a black keep from some sort of fantasy TV show, is castle Havoc itself.

It might be half an hour or possibly a lifetime later that I’m a half falling out of the boat as it hits the shore. My feet soak, splashing down into shallow waves as I stagger to the rocky beach like Robinson Crusoe.

Like a shipwreck survivor barely escaping a frenzy of sharks as I claw my way up to the beach. I reach behind me, grabbing the tether rope to the rowboat and pulling it up the beach after me. My muscles whine, and the palms of my hands shred even more against the salty-wet rope, making me cry out before I finally let it go.

I drop to my knees. I heave for air, shivering as I hug my soaked leather jacket around myself against the wind. I take a shaky breath and glance around before I groan.

In my desperate, near-drowning attempt to get to shore, I completely missed thefucking dock, jutting out into the water about twenty feet away, next to a boathouse.

Not that it would have saved me from getting wet. I was already soaked before I even got halfway to the island. And with my lack of sea-worthy-ness, I’d have probably fallen out of the boat and missed the dock entirely.

I groan, shivering as I look up through the trees. A rough-hewn, slightly overgrown stone walkway that looks like it turns into stairs leads up through the trees. My eyes trace those steps as they wind up to the peak of the island…up to the Dragon’s Lair.

I take a deep breath and reach into my soaked bag. I had the foresight to put my wallet and cell phone in a Ziplock plastic bag. So even though everything I brought with me is completely drenched through, that seems to be working. Except when I pull the phone out of the plastic, my face falls.

It’s working.

…But there’s no cell service here.

Wonderful.

I groan, zipping the phone and my wallet back into the plastic and chucking them into my soaked bag. When I stand, I raise my gaze up the path into the trees.

Time to see this through to its conclusion.

I trudge off through the trees, gritting my teeth painfully at the way my soaked, salt and sand encrusted jeans bite into me at the seams. But I keep climbing. I keep walking until the pathway turns into stairs that seem to climb forever. My feet ache, made worse by my terrible choice in, now-soaked, heeled leather boots for this excursion.

I mean, I was expecting to walk up and ring a doorbell. Not cross the Atlantic Ocean and then climb a mountain, first.

---