“I…” Her lips moved, the color draining from her face. “I…that wasn’t there before.”

“It’s always there. It’s been there for the whole summer. And the summer before this one.”

“Look, I’m not lying! You can think what you want, but that sign wasn’t there! I swear it! Someone must have—”

“What?” The black eyes challenged her.

“Must have moved it,” she finished lamely. “Look, I know it sounds stupid, but—”

“You’re right. It sounds stupid.”

“The sign wasn’t there,” Kelsey snapped. “And what about that crazy old man up there who tried to chase me down the cliff? What about him spying on me, what about that? He probably took down the sign—I felt him watching me even before I went up the road!”

“What crazy old man?” Neale sighed.

“Don’t tell me I’m making him up, too,” Kelsey jerked her chin towards the lighthouse. “He was hiding up there and tried to scare me with that disgusting eye patch—”

“Oh,” Neale nodded, shrugging his shoulders. “Old Isaac. Sleeping off another hangover, probably. You should have been scared—maybe that’ll put some sense into you.”

“Don’t talk to me like that,” Kelsey said, hands clenching at her sides. “That old man could have taken down the sign, and you know it. Anyone could have taken it down.”

Neale went over to the sign and grabbed the length of chain woven neatly between the metal rails. “See this? This is to keep nosy people like you out of here. The gate stays locked all the time. Only the lifeguards have keys to it.” He pulled a ring from his pocket, separating one heavy blue key from all the others.

Kelsey stared at him, at the padlock anchoring the chain, at the empty road on the other side of the gate. “It wasn’t locked,” she mumbled. “I didn’t imagine it—”

“Okay. A mirage, right? Or you walked right through it, maybe?” For several long moments Neale stared at her, a muscle working in his jaw. “Okay,” he said at last. “Come with me.”

Kelsey shrank away as he grabbed her arm again and began dragging her back around the cliff. When they reached the overhang where the beach disappeared, Neale ducked under, leaving her no choice but to go with him. There was a brief moment of darkness as they wound through a low stone tunnel, but almost immediately they went up an incline out into the sun.

They were on a smaller beach, penned by towering cliffs on three sides, the ocean on the other. Only this beach was different from the one she had seen that morning. Kelsey stared at the jagged rocks sticking out of the water along the shore, at the spikes of stone edging her in all around, all black and coated with slime. The wind screamed around them, beating the low tide into a frenzied boil. And those awful, razor-edged rocks. As black as death.

Kelsey’s stomach tightened with some sense of imminent danger. The water was too close here—too wild—and those boats, rocking slowly on the waves beyond the first outcrop of sawtoothed rocks…those boats just heaving up and down…up and down…