Water to Burn

by Katharine Kerr

  All at once I was furious, not frightened. How dare this thing threaten my family! I held up the rosary and reminded myself that the cross had been carved from wood grown in the Holy Land. The fiend, if that’s what it was, made a snarling sound. Because I couldn’t think of anything else to do, I began to recite the Paternoster. I felt warmth beat back the cold.

  “Et libera nos a malo, amen,” I finished up. “You—you—” I thrust the cross in its direction. “Go to your room!”

  I heard a whimper, a very high soft bubbling noise. The fiend ran. I felt the stirring of the air. The ozone smell vanished with it. Ari had gotten to his feet. When I glanced his way, I saw he was holding the gun, but loosely, pointing it at the floor.

  “What was that?” Ari whispered.

  “I have no idea, but it was something evil. I’m an O’Brien. I can always tell.”

  “I couldn’t see anything.”

  “Neither could I, but I know what I felt.”

  “I’m not arguing with you, merely remarking. You chased it off, whatever it was.”

  During all of this excitement, Nola had never moved or made the slightest sound. I put the rosary into my skirt pocket, where I could reach it quickly if need be, and sat down next to her on the bed. I picked up her hand again and rubbed some warmth into it.

  “Nola,” I whispered. “You’re safe now. You can wake up.”

  She never moved or spoke, but on the monitor her heartbeats grew stronger and quicker, just for a moment, before they returned to their slow, steady rhythm. I took the change for a good sign.

  The big gun arrived about twenty minutes later, Father Keith, that is, wearing his friar’s robes. We left Ari to watch over Nola and went out in the hall, so I could tell him about the fiend. He listened silently, making the sign of the cross now and then.

  “Keep the rosary with you,” he said when I’d finished. “I doubt if the fiend will follow you home, but let’s not take chances.”

  “Key, you do think it was a fiend, then?”

  “I think it was something evil, or a thing with evil intent at that moment, but I can’t put a name to it. Fiend will do.”

  “All right,” I said. “How long can you stay with Nola?”

  “As long as I need to. I made arrangements. You go home, Leeni. Ari and I can keep watch here.”

  By the time I’d driven home, I felt exhausted, but I did eat dinner. Sophie had made the boys leave me some chicken. While I ate, Sophie sat at the table, her thin little hands clasped tight, her eyes full of tears for Nola’s sake. Michael kept pacing back and forth by the phone. Brian leaned against the counter and watched Michael pace. Jim hovered around, nattering. Even though I knew they were simply worried, it got on my nerves so badly that I went to bed just to get away from all of them.

  And of course, I dreamed about Nola, a very odd dream, even for me, not that I can remember all of it, but I know it had something to do with water and that little gold pin from Israel that Ari gave her, the olive branch with the rustling leaves. When I woke up, just at dawn, I was very tired, and my legs ached, just as if I’d walked a long way.

  CHAPTER 15

  IN THE MOMENT EVERYTHING SEEMED PERFECTLY LOGICAL. Belial the Chaos master had trapped me in a small enclosed space and left me to starve to death. The glass walls of my cage allowed me to look out and see that water surrounded me, a glass-green ocean lit dimly from above by the sun, or so I assumed. Once the sun set, I’d die in darkness. I began to shiver, though not just from the cold. Telling myself that the world turned dark for everyone when they were dying didn’t help at all.

  I regretted never seeing my family again, but most of all I regretted losing Ari. As I thought about him, remembering the touch of his hand along my face, it occurred to me that I could at least try to escape. I turned around a couple of times to look the glass cage over. The walls went straight up, so far up that I lost sight of them. When I touched one, it felt as slick as I expected, impossible to climb since I wasn’t a gecko. I was the only thing inside it, not a stone to throw, nothing.

  I saw something moving outside the glass walls. Three female forms floated, waving languid hands, slender, pale green women with pale blue hair that drifted like kelp in the slow tide—Nereids, water nymphs, daughters of Poseidon. They reached out slender hands and knocked on the glass wall.

  For one short moment I panicked. If the glass broke, I’d drown, but better to drown in sunlight and their company, I decided, than to die in the dark alone. A Nereid with deep-set brown eyes, a slender face, and a sharp little chin sketched out the same motion I used for Chaos wards, then pointed at me. The others nodded their heads and smiled, urging me on.

  I couldn’t throw a Chaos ward through glass. I knew that, but the Nereids kept knocking on the surface and making ward-tossing motions with their hands. It occurred to me to wonder if the glass were really there. When I threw the ward, the glass walls shattered and disappeared. Although the water flowed in and covered me, I could still breathe. The Nereids clustered around, smiling, bobbing their heads in approval. One appeared to be talking, but I could hear nothing.

  That’s when I realized I was in a coma. The problem redefined itself. Rather than “escaping from Belial’s clutches” it became “waking up.” My last strike on that vicious bastard must have wounded him enough to drive him away before he could finish me off. If he recovered before me, he’d be back. I could be sure of that. I needed to get out of my own mind in time to fend him off.

  The Nereids swam away. They headed straight up for maybe ten yards, then paused, treading water, and beckoned to me. I felt exhausted, stripped of all my Qi, but I tried to swim after them. Every stroke through the warm water cost me Qi, or so I felt at first. The water weighed down upon me like stones, piled up to the roof of sky. The Nereids circled around me, concerned, holding out their hands.

  “I need Qi,” I said.

  “Water to burn,” they said in chorus.

  I felt like a fool. Of course—Qi pulsed in the water, the ocean, the very ocean that I’d started seeing as an enemy, back in the real world as well as here, trapped in my own mind. I should have realized, because of Fog Face if nothing else, that the ocean was what it was, neither friend nor enemy, but what you made of it. I drew upon it, called it into myself, and felt the Qi pour into my body. I could swim.

  We spiraled up, around and around, on and on, until at last I broke the surface and floated, head and shoulders out of the water. Even though I knew I was only trapped in a dreamlike state, still I breathed deeply, blessing the air. The Nereids called out in some language that I took to be Greek, then dove down again and disappeared.

  Ahead lay an island, a dark mass on the horizon. As I swam toward it, the shape of the land began to look familiar, similar to the shape of Mount Tam in Marin County. The line against the sky traced out a woman’s head, sloped down into a neck, then rose again into her breasts and the rest of her torso. It occurred to me that the island was my own body, waiting for me to come home. Just as I crested a wave for a clear view, with a splash a presence rose up out of the water between me and the safety of the land.

  Belial bubbled and splashed. I saw nothing, but I knew he was there from the sounds. I smelled ozone, like you smell after a lightning strike, and the water turned icy cold around me as Belial sucked up all the Qi. I had no weapons. I had to use my hands to stay afloat as I tried to tread water in a choppy sea. He bubbled again and reached out invisible tentacles. In his proper element as I was, I could intuit that he had tentacles, not hands. Once he touched me, he’d drain the Qi from my body, and I’d die. I could neither move nor fight. He came closer, reached out—then stopped, paralyzed. He shrieked, a high-pitched discharge of bubbles, and disappeared. I started swimming again, as fast as I could.

  I reached the island and staggered out onto a rocky beach edged by a cliff, much like Pacifica, except this cliff was as slick and smooth as the glass walls of my former cage. As I walked along the beach, I wondered ho
w I was going to reach the interior of the island itself.

  The beach led me around a rocky point to a stretch of soft sand, littered with twisted branches from dead trees. I saw a fire burning, the flames all blue from the salt in the driftwood. Someone crouched on the far side. I hesitated, afraid that the Chaos master was waiting for me, but the figure stood up: an old woman, as bent and gnarled as the dead trees on the sand. As I walked up, I saw that she was holding a branch made of gold, with leaves of metal foil that creaked and rustled. Crepitabat brattea, I thought. The Sybil held up the golden bough, although this bough was an olive branch with gold leaves rather than the mistletoe of the legends.

  “There you are, dear,” she said. “Let’s go back now.”

  She set off walking along the beach, and I followed. Slowly, the sky turned dark. A moon rose. Since I could see the moonlight glinting off the golden bough, I never lost sight of the old woman. We left the beach and traveled through a field of tall sea grass. We walked for miles until at last we came to a pair of elevator doors. The Sybil handed me the golden bough.

  “Through there,” was all she said.

  I punched the button beside the doors. They opened onto an elevator with rusty iron walls. When I walked in, carrying the bough, the doors began to close.

  “Thank you!” I called out.

  She smiled. The doors closed, and we started up.

  A jolt, a shaking—I was awake, lying in a hospital bed in a pale green room with monitor feeds stuck to various portions of my anatomy and an IV needle in the back of my left hand. Through the window, I could just see the gray sky of dawn. To my left, Ari lay asleep on the floor beside the bed. To the right, Father Keith—he’d pulled a padded chair up backward to the bed, then knelt on it, leaning on the back, to pray. His head rested on his clasped hands. I assumed he was asleep until he began to murmur the Latin words of a prayer to St. Paul of the Shipwreck.

  My throat felt as dry as sand, and my voice rasped, but I managed to say a few words. “That’s appropriate.”

  Father Keith’s head jerked up, and he grinned at me.

  “I figured you were too tough to kill,” he said. “Thanks be to God that I was right.”

  “I had help. I don’t know from what god.”

  “Don’t worry about theology now.” Father Keith got off the chair and muttered something under his breath when he straightened his spine. “I’m getting old. How did that happen?” He reached for the cord with the button that called the nurse, then hesitated and let it dangle. “Ari! Wake up! Someone’s here to see you.”

  Ari sat up with a grunt, then scrambled to his feet. He glanced around and finally saw me, smiling at him. He did something I never expected: he wept, just two thin trails of tears but tears nonetheless. Father Keith muttered something about finding the men’s room and trotted out. Ari leaned over the bed and laid a gentle hand along my face. The tears had stopped, and he smiled. For a long time we smiled at each other like a pair of idiots. I knew then that I was truly back in the physical world, not in some wishful dream state my mind had created, because Ari really needed a shower.

  “Well,” he said eventually. “You gave me a bit of a scare, there.”

  “Yeah?” I said. “I was terrified, myself.”

  He laughed, leaned over farther, and kissed me. He might have been smelly and stubbled, but I’ve never enjoyed a kiss more. He gave me a second one, every bit as good.

  “Could you pour me some water?” I said. “I can see a pitcher on that tray thing.”

  When Ari handed me the full glass, my fingers were so weak that I nearly dropped it. He caught it and helped me drink. I gulped water and washed the taste of salt out of my mouth.

  “How long have I been out?” I said.

  “Just overnight.” He put the glass back on the tray, then paused to glance out the door. “What happened?”

  “I was in a coma. Fighting that sleazoid Belial drained every bit of Qi I had. Well, almost all. All and I would have been dead.”

  Ari winced and glanced away, then wiped his face on his filthy sleeve.

  “You saved my life,” I said. “Again.”

  “Keeping you safe is the job I was given.”

  “Just your job, huh?”

  “Don’t be stupid.” He leaned over and kissed me on the forehead. “I just never know what to say in these situations.”

  “Well, I’ll say thank you, and you don’t have to answer that.”

  “I might add that you saved mine. I don’t know what Caleb did to me, but if you’d not stopped him, he might have actually figured out how to use that gun.”

  I smiled and took another kiss.

  “Which reminds me,” I said. “What about Caleb? Did you—” I had trouble saying it outright. “Uh, is he dead?”

  “No. He fired one shot at me and missed so badly that I realized he knew nothing about guns. He was holding the sodding pistol in one hand. The recoil jerked him off-balance.” Ari’s voice dripped contempt. “He scrambled back into the car when I fired. I was only aiming for the tires, to disable it so we could make an arrest.” He shook his head, baffled. “I assume he did something to my mind, and that you made him stop. Just before I fired, I mean.”

  “Yeah, that’s it, more or less.”

  “I felt like I’d been drinking all day.” His voice shook with sheer indignation. “I missed the tires. I got one shot into his rear door and bounced a third one off the trunk when he drove back onto the road.”

  He’d missed his target for the first time in twenty years, I figured. “So he got away?”

  “Unless the Pacifica police have him, yes.”

  “Don’t be too hard on yourself.” I leaned back against the pillows. “Most people would have stayed ensorcelled for hours. You snapped right out of it when I broke up the web of Qi. I’m not surprised you missed. I am surprised that you could stand up.”

  “You’re only saying that to make me feel better.”

  “No, I’m not. Don’t you remember how Doyle hit the ground? And how he looked afterward?”

  He considered this. “Yes,” he said. “I do see what you mean.”

  “You’re amazing, Ari. You really are.”

  He scowled at me, then suddenly smiled. “Thank you,” he said. “I still wish I’d shot out his tires, though.”

  Father Keith trotted back in, followed by a solid-looking nurse with a wonderful mass of curly sandy-brown hair, pulled back into a pair of metal clips. The nameplate on her blue scrubs read “Enderby.” End or be, I thought. Yeah, that was the question, all right.

  “Ari?” Father Keith said. “If you’ve got a cell phone, would you call Eileen and tell her that Nola’s back with us?”

  “And go out in the hall, both of you,” Enderby said. “I’ve got to take her vitals.”

  “Where are you taking them?” Father Keith said.

  “Not very far.” Enderby’s tone of voice implied she’d heard that joke too many times. “Out!”

  The vitals turned out to be blood pressure, temperature, and other routine measurements. The nurse pronounced me fit to eat breakfast and sent in someone she called Doctor Poulis. I wondered why the doctor looked so familiar, with her deep-set brown eyes, slender face, and pointed chin, until I remembered the Nereid.

  “Were you the admitting doctor?” I asked. “In the ER when they brought me in, I mean?”

  “I was, yes. I just came back on shift and heard about the miracle.”

  “That’s me, huh?” I knew that at times an unconscious person could be aware of their surroundings, but I’d never had it happen to me. The ego’s suppressed, but the animal sees and remembers. “I’m recovering, right?”

  “I’d say so, but hypothermia can be a funny thing. How are you feeling this morning?”

  “Okay. Can I go home now?”

  “I’d rather you stayed for a few tests and some more observation. I want to order blood tests to determine your various levels, like potassium and creatinine.” She
caught my wrist and took my pulse all over again. “I’ve got to admit that you look a lot stronger than anyone should after an extreme hypothermia incident, but still, another day here would be a good idea.” She let go of my hand and smiled. “It’ll give your boyfriend a chance to go home and rest. I take it he’s the one who pulled you out of the water.”

  It took me a few moments to understand that Ari had planted a cover story. I hid the delay with a sob and a snivel. “Yeah, he was,” I said. “It was really stupid of me, getting that close to the tide line. I know rogue waves happen along there.”

  “There have certainly been a lot of them lately.” Poulis was watching the monitor above my bed. “One more thing. You need to gain weight. Not a lot, no, but you had no resistance to the cold because you’re dangerously thin.”

  I started to argue, but she stopped gazing at the monitor to fix me with a gimlet eye worthy of Aunt Eileen. “I know, I know. Everyone worries about being fat, but abnormally low body weight is just as dangerous. I’m estimating that you fall in the second or third percentile for your height/ weight ratio. That’s abnormal. Anything under the tenth percentile is dangerous, and under five it’s damned dangerous.”

  “How much should I gain? Five pounds?”

  “Twenty is more like it.”

  “That’s a whole dress size up! Maybe even two.”

  “My heart bleeds. One size at your size is nothing. Two would be about right. Do you want episodes like this to keep happening?”

  “No.”

  “Then eat like a normal person.”

  From the hallway I heard applause. Father Keith and Ari had been eavesdropping.

  “If you’re really worried about getting fat,” she went on, “join a gym. The extra food will put on muscle, not fat, that way.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll do that.”

  When Dr. Poulis marched out, Ari and Father Keith cheered her on her way.

  “Very funny,” I said. “Ha ha.”

  Not that they heard me, I suppose, since they were still out in the hall. But what if I’d been a bit heavier? I wondered. Would I have had more Qi at my disposal to fight off Belial? That interesting thought made me remember my insight about the ocean: water to burn. No wonder he’d managed to overwhelm me, if he’d been drawing upon that vast reservoir of Qi. I could draw upon that reservoir myself—but I wondered if I could ever best him, even though I knew his secret now. Man or alien, whatever he was, he had power.