Grit & Shadows Boxed Set: Urban Fantasy and Horror Collection: Volumes 1 - 3

by J. D. Brink

  Slowly, he raised his hand and unfurled his fingers. A tiny wooden box, two cubic inches, rested on his palm. He dropped the daisies to the floor and used his other hand to slide open the lid. Inside, nestled among a packing of shredded paper, was a ring. A scarab of tarnished turquoise, hastily polished as best he could, clasped to a circlet of pure gold.

  “Ah,” she said. “My ring. After all these long years of slumber, you’ve found it for me.”

  James nodded wordlessly. It seemed to him that he’d wanted to say quite a bit more about the ring when he’d come in, but those thought were all lost now. His tongue lay idle and nothing came to mind. He was lost within himself. And soon, he somehow knew, everything else would be lost, too.

  “I’ll be happy to reclaim it. But, my dear…” Her cold, clammy hand with its bright red fingernails caressed his cheek. “Why don’t you kneel for me?”

  The chill of her touch shuddered through his entire body, settling like frost in his joints and in his heart. James lowered himself silently, planting his left knee on the floor—right on top of the bouquet of daisies—and held the ancient scarab in its box aloft.

  “Thank you, my love,” she purred, staring down on him. “With this ring, I claim you, and this world, as my own.”

  Part Three

  Kiss of the Maiden

  Kiss of the Maiden

  The day ended on bad omens.

  We had been out at sea for almost three weeks. Not a long time, but long enough to wake up either excited by the prospect of another good day, or tired as hell of the tight quarters and the bristly faces you shared it with.

  This day also happened to be Spanner’s anniversary day. Another bad sign. For him, at least. Maybe a fortunately one for the rest of us men, as Spanner took that bite of bad luck for us and saved us the misery of it.

  Anyway, the sun was beginning to set in the tail end of its long journey, turning the sky orange and reflecting the vision of its great eye off the deep blue of the Winedark Sea.

  Now imagine, cast out on those gently rocking waves among all that color, a stark white kingfisher. A steam-powered fishing vessel with its metal arms, net leads, and hook lines all spidered out like a drunken puppeteer staggering around on the stage.

  This was our boat, The Captain’s Daughter. A leaky bucket that stank of fish and body odor even after being moored and empty for a week at port, but it was our second home.

  Six small, white pod boats were scattered around it, bobbing around on the waves. The pod boats were for sharker teams, each made up of five men who were both the bravest and the dumbest to ever sit upon the sea, putting nothing but a little, oar-powered wooden cup and a simple but dangerous harpoon between themselves and the most perfect predators in the galaxy.

  Trident’s Fury outweighs all the other Outer Worlds in three things: salty, fathomless seas; orange-scaled, solar-fin tuna; and sharks big enough to bite you in half.

  Some say we also have a fourth resource in abundance: stubborn, seafaring bastards who don’t know when to quit or how to follow orders.

  We export tons of tuna, minerals, and other sea foods to orbital habs and dead planets two sectors away. Most off-worlders, though, don’t know about the sharks. And get along just fine without knowing the stubborn bastards who fight them.

  Sharker teams are most important at dawn and dusk. When the sun is coming and going, that’s when the solar-fins come up to fishing depth. That’s when our fishermen crews will haul in the big payloads on lines and in nets.

  But dusk and dawn are also when the sharks come prowling, and they like eating sailors almost as much as tuna.

  Maiden sharks, the females of the species, are big enough to knock over a pod boat and bite off hunks of men as they spill into the sea.

  Leviathans, the males, have been rumored to chew the bottom out of a kingfisher. Few sailors have seen a leviathan and lived to tell about it. Many a last word has come across the short-wave, offering prayers to forgotten gods and final vows to wives and children, the broadcasters and their ships never to be heard from again. To be standing next to the short-wave when such a death rattle comes across the static is considered bad luck.

  Sailors are a superstitious lot by nature.

  So, as I was saying, bad omens...

  The first was a fire in the sky. Sailors of old would have thought it a falling star, one of the key points they navigate by slain by a sky god and thrown to the depths. We’re a backward people, we Tridents, sticking to steam power and hard work while the rest of the galaxy has thinking machines to do much of their dirty work. But we do know a space ship cutting the atmosphere when we see it.

  The thing was, this time, it wasn’t one of ours. Even from several kilometers below, it looked unfamiliar; not blocky and bulky like your standard cargo hauler, but sleek and dangerous, like a maiden shark in the darkening sky.

  “Weird looking, ain’t it?” Spanner asked. Spanner, the year-marked I mentioned earlier, was one of our pod’s oarsmen and a friend.

  “Bad sign,” said Thom, our lead spear. And not my friend.

  A lead spear is in charge of the sharker pod. They usually come into that position either by being the best and most experienced sharker in the boat, or by being in good with the captain of the kingfisher.

  Thom was not our best.

  The second bad omen came about twenty minutes later when our stowaway gulls began to circle.

  Spanner nudged me with his elbow. “Lookie there, Revis,” he said in his funny little voice. “Looks like we might get some action after all.”

  I had my harpoon across my lap and my chin in one hand, just staring out at the glittering reflection of sun on the moving water. The breeze was picking up, making our small boat rock a bit more. After the day’s heat, the waves were rocking me to sleep.

  Might as well sleep on a run like this one, I figured. In three weeks, we’d only been hit by sharks twice, and the last had been a week earlier. The underway had been slow for us sharkers, which I supposed was a good thing. But it made for a long, drawn-out trip.

  Things were about to get a lot more interesting, though.

  I blinked a couple times, shielded my eyes, and looked up at the sky. The gulls were gathering in the air, gliding up and down on uneven currents. Watching the water.

  Like I said, we sailors are a superstitious lot. When a kingfisher leaves port, more often than not, a small flock of sea gulls will stow away on the rigging and short-wave antennas. Having a flock of passengers crowding the upper limits is considered good luck, as long as they stay there. Oh, they feed, but generally on the scraps tossed on the deck. If they wander, it’s in looking for the scraps of the dead, they say. Poised to scavenge flesh and soul from the sea.

  Kingfishers are huge vessels. They’re built to carry a large crew of sailors, fishermen, gutters, packers, and sharkers out for weeks at a time on the endless blue oceans. Crowded, you see. So everything has its place, packed away nice and neat. The sharker pods themselves are rigged up on a ship’s sides. Once in a while, some gulls will even make their temporary homes on the stowed pod boats. This is considered good luck for the crew of harpooners who ride that pod for work every day. It’s said that the crew of that little boat will not lose a man on the whole trip. They’re protected, some say.

  Our boat, by the way, did not have any such winged riders.

  And now, the birds were leaving their lucky nests and taking to the sky, circling around the supper table, as it were, and waiting to be served.

  They saw what we hadn’t yet: a shark in the water.

  The birds were giving us a signal and we all started to perk up.

  Now it’s pay attention or maybe get eaten.

  As I said, each of the six pod boats had five sharkers aboard. It was our job to fight off the predators that would come during the massive harvesting operations of a kingfisher. Solar-fin tuna and makails and sailbacks wrestling with nets and lines or bleeding from gaff wounds. Sometimes schools of them at a
time. That tends to draw attention.

  On Trident’s Fury, fish are life. And the sharks are death.

  If you’re lucky, you’ll only get a stray maiden. She might only be as big as a pod boat, and maybe she won’t ram you over and dump your crew into the water for an as-you-please legs and arms buffet.

  But if there’s a leviathan in the area, a sharker is as good as dead.

  The male sharks are twice the size of the females and usually swim with a harem of maidens. If spotters on the kingfisher’s bridge see a cluster of giant shadows under the waves, they’ll signal with three long blasts of the steam horn.

  When that happens, the pods all scramble back aboard their kingfisher, a net or two is cut free to keep the sharks occupied, and the ship gets the hell home. There is no pressing your luck if you come across a leviathan: the trip is over, then and there. You just hope he takes the bait and not a bite of the ship’s belly.

  I’d only ever seen one leviathan. Its shadow had been as long as the kingfisher I was sharking with. Its huge dorsal fin cut the water and looked to all of us like a sail riding the wind. That giant fin knocked our little pod over like a toy in the bath tub. Lucky for me, it was going for the cache of solar-fins in the nets. I was too small to satisfy its great gullet.

  Not so for one of its maidens, though...

  “You awake there, Kynes?” Thom asked. “Look sharp, one-eye.”

  He climbed into a half-crouch, his legs braced against the waves and any surprises, nervously fingering the notches on his harpoon shaft, each marking a maiden he’d chased off in his time.

  “Oarsmen,” he ordered, “bring us closer to those gulls.”

  Spanner and Mack started rowing.

  I woke up. Tails and I readied our spears.

  Two oarsmen and three harpooners, with the lead spear calling the shots.

  Our boat and another closed on the area of interest.

  “Don’t let them beat us there,” Thom growled.

  Spanner and Mack picked up their pace, Spanner singing cadence to keep their oars in rhythm together. The song was as old as the sea and we all picked up the tune. The music burbled quietly from my lips:

  “A lovely girl, she winked with glee;

  her smile was jagged, her dinner: me.”

  My good eye scanned the waves for shadows. My blind eye began to ache and the scars on my face felt warm and itchy. It’s probably only my imagination, but they always get that way when a shark’s in the water, like they remember the maiden that nearly took off my head. I don’t hold a grudge against the old girl, though, or any shark. She was just doing what comes natural.

  Everything eats fish, after all.

  The kingfisher gave two quick horn blasts, then two more. The spotters had found a shadow, but thankfully not a leviathan or his harem. But a shark’s a shark, and they can ruin a day’s catch and any nets they decide to tear through.

  Fishermen on deck started hauling in nets and lines as fast as their tired bodies could manage.

  We neared the spot, our singing getting louder, eyes watching for shadows under the surface. The other pod boat was still several meters away.

  Something cracked and men groaned.

  I glanced back at The Captain’s Daughter.

  A pulley arm had given way and snapped. Six men were straining with all their might not to let the net full of fish fall back into the ocean.

  “Here!” Thom cried and stabbed his harpoon straight down off the bow of our boat.

  My attention jerked back to where it should have been all along: with the task at hand.

  I saw Thom’s spear bob in and back out—a miss—and felt the nudge of the beast’s back under my feet. The tail lashed at the waves, splashing me good and nearly knocking me off balance. The spray was salty on my lips, but my embarrassment more bitter to taste: I should have been paying attention, I should have had that fish.

  A sharker’s job is not to kill the beast. It’d take a lot more than five brave fools in a boat to do that. Our job is to drive them off, make it see that a meal here and now isn’t worth the abuse they’ll get for it. And the man with the last jab, the poke that finally drives her off, earns his pod a round of drinks on the captain’s coin. And a bottomless mug for himself.

  After three weeks at sea, I was mighty thirsty.

  “You see the size of that tail?” Spanner asked. “That’s a seven-meter fish! Big girl.”

  We all watched as the long shadow wove its way toward the kingfisher.

  “Row, damn it!” barked Thom.

  The oarsmen started cranking us, stern-first.

  We harpooners switched around to face the back of the boat and readied our spears again.

  Then the omens’ promise came true.

  Up on the ship’s deck was that bundle of men heave-hoeing the net full of tuna, but the load outweighed them three-fold. A collective grunt issued from the deck and the whole bundle plummeted back into the sea... followed by the lead man on the line.

  He fell headlong into the water, his sun-yellow hair disappearing beneath blue waves.

  The shark’s sail-like dorsal fin broke the surface and cut a path straight for him.

  Spanner and Mack picked up the pace. There was no more merry singing, just Spanner saying “Go, go, go, go,” into the boat’s wake and their thick arms rotating to his rhythm. We were still a hundred and fifty meters away.

  Another pod boat was closer to home. It glided into position between the incoming maiden and her potential human meal. I didn’t especially want to see someone else jab that fish and win the prize, but better that than see a shipmate eaten.

  My blind eye twitched painfully in its socket, agitated, like it saw something bad breaking the horizon.

  The lead spear on the other pod, a lanky man named Wen, leaned on the edge of the boat with his harpoon high and ready.

  The fin closed in, but shrank as it went and finally disappeared.

  “It’s going under them,” Thom said anxiously. “Under the pod and right for the swimmer.”

  But Thom was wrong.

  There was a sudden, watery explosion right next to Wen’s craft. The monstrous maiden launched herself out of the ocean and right onto the pod!

  Wen was thrown into the sea spear-first. He was the lucky one.

  The shark landed right on top of the oarsmen, bashing one sideways and crushing the other beneath its writhing body. Her jaws slashed at one harpooner and tore a chunk from the man’s back as he made a desperate leap for the water.

  Screams filled the air and the ocean turned red.

  “What’s happening?” Mack shouted, still rowing to Spanner’s beat.

  “Don’t turn around,” Thom said. “Just keep rowing. Get us there—now, now, now!”

  The last harpooner on the boat thrust his spear into the shark’s flank, but its whipping body tore the weapon from his grip and threw him over the bow.

  More violent lashes of its long, muscular form cracked the boat itself, splitting the hull underneath it and returning the monster to the sea. The oarsman who’d been pinned beneath her vanished into the froth and fractured hull.

  The whole vicious scene took only seconds, but resulted in two potential fatalities and left three more men in the water.

  Now there were men trying to stay afloat and waiting to be finished off by the beast.

  Rescue lines were thrown down from the kingfisher’s main deck. The lost fisherman splashed toward one of them but the broken pod was too far away.

  Our boat came gliding swiftly onto the scene.

  The water was inked red. One body floated face down, spiny ribs exposed where his back meat used to be. I wondered if the maiden’s teeth had pierced his lung. The crushed oarsman was unconscious but face up and under Wen’s care, the lead spear treading water with one elbow hooked around his shipmate.

  The last two podsmen swam frantically over to us and tried to haul themselves up, nearly tipping us in the process. Spanner, Mack, and Tails helped
them aboard.

  Just as Wen was dragging his oarsman into Spanner’s reach, the water darkened beneath them.

  My body reacted so fast, I hardly knew what I was doing. Sometimes I almost do believe that my blind eye sees what’s coming half-a-second earlier.

  I lunged over the rim of our boat headlong into the water, driving my spear in both hands. The harpoon pierced the waves a finger’s width from one swimmer’s shoulder and my body crashed down on top of them both, clipping my trajectory sideways.

  My world was all bubbles and blue water for a second.

  Then a big black eye and teeth rushed up to meet me.

  I slammed against the shark’s body and was thrust back up into the sunlight, still with an iron grip on my harpoon. I knew that to let go would be my death.

  Me and the shark both banged against the side of the pod, knocking Thom off the bow and into the sea. Then we splashed back into the deep together.

  I bobbed below the surface...

  And gently rose back up for air.

  Beneath me was the lifeless corpse of the huge maiden shark, me sprawled over it and latched on for the ride of my life. My white-knuckled fist still clung to the harpoon shaft, its blade buried deep into the beast’s cartilage skull. My instinctual all-or-none dive attack had driven the spear straight into the monster’s brain and killed it instantly.

  It took a few seconds to realize that the shark was dead, though. I floated there on top of it and watched her life’s blood crimson cloud the water between us, then playfully patted the beast’s flank.

  “Everything eats fish,” I told her with ragged breaths. “But I have the harpoon today.”

  “Thank the Lady of the Nine Seas for that,” Thom panted, treading the red and blue next to me.

  On Trident’s Fury, we have a saying.

  The first part is, “Everything eats fish.”

  It means everything does what it does. If you understand a creature’s nature, or that of the sea or a typhoon, then you won’t be surprised when it comes back and bites you on the ass.