Page 19

Thirteen

Huck

Ted and I scrambled trying to catch up with Stella, who had disappeared behind a curtain of water.

In the darkness behind the falls, the beam of light from Stella’s headlamp scanned the ground and the craggy rock wall, which glistened with moisture.

Stella was still at the center, quiet, while her fingertips glided over what looked like moss.

I drew up beside her, heart pounding. “What is it? Do you think something’s here?” I asked, my voice low.

She traced the lines of rock.

“It fits,” she said. “That line of text was the constant storm within the slice of earth, like a canyon. It fits.” Several meters away from us, Ted had started sweeping an area with his metal detector.

Stella was still for a moment, tuning everything out.

I did the same: mentally washed away the roar of the falls, the uncertainty, until all I saw was her.

She turned to me. “You asked me if I have a good feeling. I do. But it’s more than that…

It’s hard to explain. There’s something special in the sensation of the rock beneath my hands, the spongy moss, like a faint vibration in my knuckles.

I know it sounds bizarre. It just feels like all the clues in the poem and nature are all coming together to lead us here. ”

“Instinct,” I said. In the past few days, I’d learned that Stella goes almost entirely off of instinct.

I got that. It was like when I started writing a story.

I might have had an idea or a character or even just a question, but more than anything, I had a feeling that if I followed that thread, whatever it was, pulled at it just a bit, somehow things would fall into place. Like I just knew where to go.

“Yeah. Something like that.”

The moss must’ve been anchored in some organic matter. She tightened her fingers around it and yanked.

“Stella,” Ted said. “What are you doing? You can’t just pull out plants.”

Stella didn’t respond. She was engrossed in rooting around in what seemed to be a hole of some kind in the rock that’d been filled with dirt.

“I think she feels something,” I said.

She scooped out handfuls of dirt, littering the ground with the loose earth. “Help me,” she said. Ted and I both stepped in and followed suit, using our hands like shovels to empty the contents.

“What is it?” Ted asked. “What do you feel?”

She shook her head. “I don’t know. Might be nothing, but there’s space here.” She reached deeper. Stella was small and could almost fit her whole upper body in the empty pit. She rose on her tiptoes.

“I can’t reach far enough.”

I got the message and nodded at Ted. Together we lifted her a bit higher.

“That’s good,” she said. “Something’s here. It’s not rock and I don’t think it’s more soil. It’s solid, but there’s a give to it. I’m not sure but…”

My heartbeat thrummed faster in my ears. Is this it? Is this fucking it?

“Do you have something, Stella?” Ted asked, all traces of sleep and irritation gone from his voice.

She didn’t answer. Her body twisted and writhed in my hands as she struggled to reach deeper. I lifted her higher, supporting her as she struggled to reach whatever she’d found.

“Stella,” Ted said. “Talk. What is it?”

“I’m not sure. It’s kind of rough. I don’t think it’s organic. I’m trying to get a grip on it,” she said. “It’s stuck.”

I pushed my arm in next to hers until I found her hand. I settled mine over hers, just as I had last night before we fell asleep, and locked her grip in place. Together we wrestled the object free and lowered it to the ground.

“Careful,” Ted warned as we set it down.

The three of us stood in stunned silence for several seconds, staring.

Illuminated by our headlamps was a rudimentary box, roughly two feet by one-and-a-half feet.

The wood was rotten, crumbling in some places, with a metal latch in the center of one side that must’ve been what Stella described earlier.

The hardware was rusted and nearly unrecognizable, but still, it looked exactly like what an ancient Viking would hide their treasure in.

There was a certain electricity coursing through the group.

We were all breathing fast. Awestruck, too nervous to speak, like if we admitted what we were thinking, it wouldn’t be real. It couldn’t be. Could it?

Finally, Ted broke the silence. “Holy shit, guys! Is this what I think it is?”

We fell to our knees and lifted the lid together, gingerly.

Stella had taught me well over the last couple of days, so I wasn’t surprised by the reverence her careful movements revealed.

She and Ted weren’t here to destroy history.

Stella’s goal was to find lost things and preserve the past. And now that was my goal too.

This chest had probably been locked at some point, but over the ages, moisture had compromised the structure enough that even without a key, the lock gave way and we were able to open it easily.

The beam of Stella’s headlamp hit the contents and the glimmer inside told us everything we needed to know.

What Stella had been dreaming of had finally happened.

I’d been desperate to be a part of the adventure since the moment I met her, and now it was all coming to fruition.

I honestly couldn’t believe my luck. The only thing better than your own dreams coming true is witnessing someone you care deeply about experience their own.

She found it. She…found treasure. Ted whooped, cantering in circles, dropping back down to dig his hands into the coins.

I was strangely overcome that I got to be a part of this.

That vicious voice I knew so well told me I didn’t belong here.

I tried to ignore it, told myself that even though she would’ve figured out the location without me, she’d given me the chance to help by showing me that poem in the bar and we’d worked it out together.

It happened. I deserved to be a part of this. Maybe.

Stella walked back to the spot where she’d first touched treasure with just her fingertips in a dark hollow. I approached her as she tucked her hands back into the space. Maybe if I wrapped my arms around her, I could erase the bad thoughts. I wanted to kiss her so badly that my hands shook.

“What are you doing?” I kept my voice at a whisper.

“Lift me up again,” she said. She unzipped her jacket and dropped it to the ground, instantly taking me back to that silk camisole she’d been wearing last night.

How she’d felt against my hands, in my arms. How desperately I wanted to feel her again.

It’s not about that right now , I reminded myself while I tried not to notice how good her shampoo smelled.

We’re discovering history. My heart rate picked up again, but I complied wordlessly, reaching my hands around the sides of her waist, hoisting her up into the opening in the wall.

She dragged herself deeper, and I shifted my hands instinctively to her thighs.

I willed myself to keep it together. The excitement of the discovery and the feel of her body against my palms again created a potent mix of desire and adrenaline that surged through my arteries.

I could barely hear Ted’s triumphant shouts over the cacophony of my own body, my heartbeat thrumming like a bass drum, my pants growing taut as I went hard.

“I—I got it,” she said.

I tightened my grip and pulled her back toward me, out of the pitch black she was in, lowering her down until her feet touched solid ground.

She turned to me slowly. I had to kiss her.

It was the only thing I could think of. What we’d done, what we’d found, the object she was holding in her hands…

these things barely registered. Those whisper-chapped lips.

My heart’s trampoline routine in my chest. She was incredible. Beautiful.

Singular.

I wanted her to be mine, right here under the waterfall. “Stella,” I rasped.

“Unbelievable!” Ted shouted, lifting a silver necklace glittering with jewels so that it caught in the moonlight. “Do you know how old this is?”

Stella turned to glance at him for an instant. When she faced me again, that perfect mouth of hers was curled into a smile. It took every ounce of control I had not to press my lips to hers. “Don’t you want to see what all that effort was for?” she asked.

I was already looking at it. At her. A brave man would tell her that , the voice said. A man like Clark Casablanca .

I know , I thought. I’ve got it. It had been drilled into me over the years. I wasn’t brave. I wasn’t anything of importance. I was a failure.

I broke eye contact first. Together we lowered to a crouch across from one other, staring down at the object she’d extracted from the wall.

It was long, slender, bound in tattered cloth.

The cold had made our fingers clumsy and we fumbled with the bindings for a few moments before we were able to free the ties.

Then we carefully unwrapped the fabric and stared.

It wasn’t much to look at in its current form, but beneath the patina of time and elements was what must’ve been a magnificent silver axe back in its day.

Stella used the cloth to gently brush some detritus away from its surface and held it up.

“Teddy!” she called. “Look!”

“Holy shit!” Ted yelled back. “It’s like Iceland’s version of Excalibur! All hail King Stella!”

She looked at us both. Ted and then me. “This is it,” she said. “We really found it!”

I pulled out my phone and snapped a picture of her holding the axe in the air triumphantly. The falls had soaked her skin and hair so that she glistened in the light of Ted’s headlamp.

“I wish Zoe and Gus were here,” Stella said. “They wouldn’t believe it. We did it,” she said. “We really did it.”

Ted pulled her into a tight embrace and kissed the top of her head.

“ You did it,” he told her. “You. You’re the one who wouldn’t let any of us quit, who led us here.

” There was something intimate about the moment, a certain quality to the placement of his hands, the tone of his voice, the way he spoke to her, their matching Piece of Eight necklaces…

It made me want to look away and sent envy coursing hot through my veins.

I turned my attention to a small pebble on the ground that I pushed with the toe of my boot.

I wanted to crumple these thoughts on a page and throw them in the garbage, like the other false starts I’d had these past months toiling on my next book.

“Are you writing this?” Stella asked, snapping me out of my daze. She did a little victory dance.

I shook my head, fixing my gaze on her. I wanted nothing more than to sweep her up in my arms. To do more than kiss the top of her head and whisper, You did it . And I hated myself a little for that.

I shoved my hands into the pockets of my jacket. “You’re something, Stella. Really something.”

“That’s King Stella to you.”