Page 112 of Haunting the Deep

I grab Mollie by the shoulders. “Can I trust you?”

Mollie looks like I just kicked her. “How could ya ask me that? Ya know me better than most.”

“That’s the thing. I don’t.”

Mollie’s eyes widen. “You do, Miss Samantha. I have been workin’ with yer family fer a long time.”

“No, you haven’t.”

She gasps. “I don’t know what’s got ya all fired up, but I think we should go see yer aunt. Ya don’t sound well.”

I look her square in the eye. “I just need to know if I can trust you.”

“A course ya can!” she practically yells.

I assess her. “Good. Because I need your help. You know this ship better than I do. You know the back passages.”

Mollie narrows her eyes suspiciously. “Miss, I do know the back passages. But I am not takin’ ya anywhere until ya start tellin’ me how yer in danger.” She puts her hands on her hips.

“Matt…Alexander Jessup is trying to kill me.”

She opens her mouth and closes it again. For a few seconds she’s quiet.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

Mollie presses her lips together. “I’m not sayin’ that. I’m just sayin’ that it sounds a little odd, is all.”

How can I possibly explain this to her with no time? Or convince her of who she really is? It breaks my heart that she doesn’t even remember the fiancé she died trying to be with. I push my fingers into my temples. “You say we’ve known each other for a long time, right?”

She nods.

“Have I ever lied to you or sounded an alarm for no reason?”

Her eyebrows push together. “Well…no.”

“Good. Then you have no reason to mistrust me now,” I say. “Just give me a minute to think, Mollie. And then I promise I’ll try to explain.”

She crosses her arms. “I suppose a minute couldn’t hurt.”

I rub my forehead.Think, Sam. What are you missing here?Matt said that he couldn’t die before he passed the spell off to someone else. Does that mean if he does die, the spell falls apart? I bite my lip. No, I’m hardly going to murder the person trying to murder me. And the chance of the Descendants or Elijah figuring out how to wake me up is pretty slim if they haven’t done it by now. There’s always the hope that they figure out who he is, but he wasn’t even on our radar.

I pace. Okay, what else did Matt say? He got angry at me a few times. The first was when I said theTitanicsank. Actually,allthe times he got mad at me, I was talking about the ship sinking or about the past. What if he wasn’t getting angry that I was questioning the realness of his spell? I mean, he knows it’s a spell. What if he was actually worried that my words couldaffectthe spell?

I stop pacing.He said “What did you do?” after he felt the cold air. He told me to stop saying what I was saying or I would go headfirst into the ocean.I look up at Mollie. “Did you notice the temperature drop in the past hour?”

“I did. Why?”

“Has it ever been cold on this ship before, any other day you can remember?”

She considers my question. “A little cooler in the evenings, but never cold. The weather is consistently pleasant.”

“What if the cold air isn’t random?”

“Pardon?”

“What if I changed something?”

“I’m not followin’.”