by J. R. Rain
When I catch sight of a keel cutting the water ahead of me, I veer to the left, chasing it. After a few minutes, the engine noise cuts out. Men and women shout in the distance. They’ve seen the raft. I slow down, but keep tugging Hannah toward them.
“Raft!” yells a man.
A woman shouts something unintelligible followed by, “Is that a kid?”
“Gary, get out here!” yells another woman.
“Mom, calm down,” says a teen-sounding boy.
Their voices carry tones of concern and alarm, enough to reassure me.
When the nose of the raft bumps the boat, I duck under the fiberglass hull and keep holding the rope so Hannah doesn’t drift off.
“Wow, did you see that thing?” asks a new male voice. “Damn raft was coming at us like a speedboat.”
“There’s no engine on it, Pop,” says the boy. “Maybe a dolphin brought her?”
“Hey sweetie,” shouts the woman. “You’re gonna be okay.”
Ten seconds pass.
“The girl’s unconscious,” yells ‘Mom.’ “Gary, do something!”
“I got it, Mom.”
Clonks and thumps in the boat above me precede foot indentations in the thin rubber bottom of the raft. From the size, I assume the teen boy has climbed down. Rubber squeaks against fiberglass amid the soft lapping of water at the hull. The boy grunts and Hannah’s impression on the raft bottom disappears. They’ve got her now. Still, I hesitate at simply leaving.
I release the rope and glide straight down before anyone notices me or my hair. They want to give credit to a dolphin? That’s fine. I don’t need praise; I need this kid to survive. After gliding off to a distance where I can observe without being seen, I peek up enough to get my eyes above the surface.
A boy of about sixteen, standing in the raft, hands Hannah up to two men, both fiftyish, who pull her on board. They pass her to a pair of women behind them, one also fiftyish, the other late thirties. The boy scampers back up onto the boat with ease.
While the older woman cradles Hannah, the younger one runs to get a bottle of water and brings it into the huddle before they all go with Hannah below deck. I swallow a lump as she vanishes from sight.
What’s wrong with me? She’s not mine. I don’t have any children. I… can’t. Not even with a merman. Part of that not-quite-alive, not-quite-dead thing. Children weren’t exactly at the forefront of my thoughts during my rush into marriage at eighteen. I’d met Albert when he’d been on a brief leave at the end of his Army training. November 1917. We had a little more than a week together before he shipped off to Europe, but no babies came of it.
I trace my claws over my abdomen, wondering what it might feel like to create life, to have something growing inside me, expanding, a tiny heart beating in my womb. I’ll never know.
It is simultaneously the most wonderful and most horrible thing.
Hurts that much?
Perhaps not so much nowadays, but when I had mine…
I bet.
It goes beyond any physical pain. Once you hold them for the first time, a bond like nothing you could ever imagine comes over you. You spend the rest of your life terrified that at any moment, something bad will happen to them.
And you’ll do anything to protect them.
Even study the blackest magic.
icinia had told me the story. Her eldest son, Caeso, a week shy of eighteen, had been killed by men who’d taken her two oldest daughters, Paulla and Mettia. They’d been sixteen and fifteen at the time, one born in January, the other December of the same year, 9 A.D. To get them back, and avenge Caeso, she’d started down a dark and terrible path.
Images and emotions flood my mind, leaving me curled up beneath the waves. I share Licinia’s sorrow and rage as she held Caeso on the floor of their tiny home, watching him die in her arms. A mother’s anguish cripples me until her thoughts shift forward three months to her finding the girls alive but enslaved. Whatever power had infused her at the time had made her unrecognizable to them, and her daughters had screamed at the sight of her, covered in the blood of the savages.
The Legion would’ve pursued the marauders; any crime against a Citizen resulted in harsh punishment, but nothing as big as the Legion moved with speed. If she’d trusted the law to settle her affairs, they would’ve more than likely been avenging the murder of three of her children instead of saving two. Also, Licinia wanted the kidnappers to suffer pain swords could not inflict.
More feelings hit me and fade; tiny moments where her children smiled or expressed their love for her. Other moments pop up here and there where she succumbed to frustration and regretted ever giving birth to them after they got on her nerves. She’d had nine, a great tangle of a thousand feelings, good and bad. The youngest, a daughter named Volusa, had sensed the darkness Licinia had embraced and ran away from home at twelve. That guilt hangs like an albatross around my Dark Master’s vaporous neck to this day.
Volusa had a full life, only I was not part of it. I take comfort in that she found happiness.
I rub my arms. Comforting myself, comforting Licinia, the gesture blurs in meaning.
The boat’s engine is faint. I swim to the surface again and look. They’re heading back to Seattle at a decent clip. Good. That sense of urgency that had been hounding me ever since I saw the picture of the Strickland family is gone. A weight I notice more by its absence leaves me drifting in the water with no great desire to hurry anywhere. I wind up staring at my claws. Silica grey with rainbow striations like gasoline in water. Hard enough to scratch steel hulls, they do quite a number on weak human flesh.
It’s been decades since I’ve wanted to test them out on a man, and Troy’s looking pretty tempting.
Don’t dwell on it, Licinia. I don’t think any mother who had the option to learn what you learned to protect their children would’ve done any different. I’m sure in some way, Volusa knew you acted to protect them. I clench my hand into a fist. I would have.
Thank you for saying that.
Confident the boat I picked at random is heading back to port with Hannah safe and sound, I dive under once more. My fluke might’ve broken the surface. I’m sure if anyone caught sight of it, they’d be stumped. Neither whales nor sharks are so brightly colored. If the light hits me right, my lower half is a living rainbow, a bit like a mantis shrimp. The narrow fins along the outsides of my arms have the same chromatic shimmer with bands of darker violet, deep red, and brilliant blue.
It took me a few years to master how to selectively change parts of my body, and I don’t need to be in water to do it. A night stalker got a bit more than he bargained for in the early seventies. I decided to show him my ‘fish teeth.’ With the advent of huge cities, I wouldn’t really need the ocean for feeding if I had a taste for human flesh. All I’d need to do is wander around at night looking cute and scared. Much easier than waiting for a boatload of fisherman or pirates to come by my reef. Besides, these days, sailors are all paying more attention to their iPhones than mermaid boobs on nearby rocks.
Once the churn of that boat’s engine becomes indistinct against the background noise of the ocean, I dive deep, heading back to the place I spotted the wreck. Emotion must’ve been clouding my head, because I have to sweep back and forth for a while before I remember the location. Normally, the whole water system east of Cape Flattery is like my living room. I could navigate it in my sleep.
Minutes of searching go by, until motion draws my eye. A group of great white and a few tiger sharks are orbiting the boat. Damn. I expected to find bodies down here, but seeing the sharks proves it. I stare for a while at the orbiting predators, and sigh mentally. It’s not the sight of dead people that bothers me―Barnaby quite cured me of that―it’s having to tell the nice older couple the bad news.
Usually, sharks (and most marine life) like me. I’ve had dolphins and whales come out of nowhere to swim beside me for long stretches. Some critters are too dumb to show any sense of kinship―probably why
I prefer feasting on shellfish. Crabs and lobsters are, by and large, indifferent to me. Tuna tend to be on the dimwitted side too, so I don’t feel too guilty about making a meal of them.
Eyes closed, I reach out with my mind and touch the nimbus of energy enveloping the sharks. They all swivel toward me like a group of friendly, large dogs in a public park sensing a dog person. All eighteen of them zip over and brush against me. Our thoughts merge, and I encourage them to be on their way. They soon forget smelling blood in the area and the whole mass of them ventures off to the south. With the area clear of danger, I’m free to explore the wreck.
The boat settled more or less upright in the silt. Plowing around the bow suggests it landed nose first with some forward momentum. Debris litters the area, bottles, fishing poles, plates, as well as a first-aid kit and some small boxes. The frame of the upper bridge deck has bent forward, probably caused by the jarring stop when the boat struck the sea floor. I’m sure, based on the directional damage, and the relative mildness of it, that this boat did not suffer a freak wave.
I swim up to the tail end where fancy lettering reads The Bit Bucket. Hmm. I pat the railing. Poor boat. Not sure what that means, but it doesn’t sound like a flattering name. A bright yellow footlocker-sized box at the corner of the rear deck plays home to a small cluster of silvery fish. The words ‘Life Raft’ stenciled on the front in bold, black lettering explain why it’s empty.
Grabbing the back edge, I pull myself forward and glide over a stairway leading below decks, and continue past it to the bridge. It’s a decent-sized boat that looks too expensive for the co-owner of a small company like NexArc, but I haven’t yet dug into what Troy did before he met David. Shame that this thing is sitting on the bottom. When I meet the others, maybe I’ll try to talk some of them into helping me salvage it. Three of us ought to be able to tow this sucker back to the surface. I know a few people involved with maritime salvage who could refurbish the boat and sell it.
While the money’s nice, I’d be doing it more to de-junk my part of the ocean.
Since the bridge has nothing of interest, I duck backward a few feet and dive down the stairwell to a narrow interior hall. The instant I reach the bottom of the steps, the taste of blood in the water strengthens. I’m still not tempted. Whenever I’ve had to eat human flesh, it’s been a situation of absolute desperation (or as in the case of those two Nazis, anger plus starvation). If I get hurt by something that’s not silver, the wound heals fast, but it makes me hungry. The more severe the wound, the hungrier I get. When I charged those two Nazis, trying to stop them from machine-gunning a crowd of children and teens, I absorbed a few bullets.
Straight ahead, a lounge area with a wraparound sectional takes up the bow end of the below-deck space. Doors on the right and left lead to tiny cabins, and a hatch below me goes even further down. A strange, shimmery patch of light glides across the room up ahead. For an instant, I think I see a human figure made of sparkles, but when I blink, it’s gone.
Huh. Odd.
I glide along, hands on the wall, peering into small bedrooms on the right and left. A plush unicorn floats over the mattress on the right. For a second or five, I think about salvaging it for Hannah, but it’s been saturated with seawater. It’ll never be quite right again. I stare, trying to memorize it so I can get her a replacement. Sigh. That kid’s going to need more than a stuffed unicorn to deal with this.
Might as well get this over with.
The taste of blood intensifies the deeper into the boat I go. A woman’s bare leg sticks out into view from the right. I glide to a stop at the doorway and peer in. On the left, a blond man floats face down a few inches above the cream-colored sectional, his arms dangling. He’s wearing only boxer-briefs, stained red on the front. The woman’s face is stuck in a desperate, pained grimace. She’s partly curled up, her left knee close to her chest, right leg stretched out. Both arms are crossed defensively by her face, and slashed up.
Blankets collect like dead jellyfish around the coffee table nestled in the curve of the sectional.
Her gossamer nightie is also a bloody mess. Underwater, the thin material has become transparent. A strange tingle glides across my back along with a watched feeling as I drift into the room. I snap my head up and look side to side. No one’s here. Nothing’s moving except my fins and hair drifting in the water. Another trail of sparkles coasts past the dead woman, who I’m sure is Christina Strickland. I know it won’t do anything, but I focus my telepathic voice at her.
“Hannah’s okay. She’s going to be fine. I found her.”
She’s grateful, Licinia responds.
More like delirious, I think.
No, Alexis. I mean this woman, not the child.
I blink. This woman’s dead.
Precisely why she’s a ghost.
Wait. Ghosts are real?
No. They’re myths… like mermaids, werewolves, and vampires.
Right.
“Troy did this, didn’t he?”
She’s nodding, child.
Why can you see them and I can’t?
You did see her. The sparkles. I’ve had more practice. You’re not my first human.
You cheated? I grin.
Licinia laughs. More like remarried. It’s not cheating if it happened before you.
David’s got only one wound, in the heart.
Troy’s never killed anyone with a blade before. He rammed the knife right through the sternum like an amateur. He’s lucky it didn’t snap. Or should I say Christina is unlucky it didn’t.
Something tells me knife assassination techniques weren’t part of his computer programming courses. I nudge David’s body so he rolls over, face up, and study the wound. Troy had to have ambushed them while they slept. Hannah’s father has only one wound, straight over the heart. The attack had been forceful enough that Christina woke up, and tried to fight him off. At a guess, her screaming woke Hannah who probably stood in the hallway, paralyzed with fear while she watched him kill her mother, too.
The child had enough wits to get the life raft before Troy did.
Probably why the boat is so close to shore. He had to have planned to do this out on the Pacific.
Why didn’t he chase her down? asks Licinia. This boat could’ve outrun a raft with no one paddling.
Middle of the night? He didn’t notice the raft missing until he… opened the bilge pumps. I can’t imagine a girl her age figured out how to activate a life raft all on her own. He probably had it out and waiting. I wonder if he would’ve taken her or killed her?
If the girl hadn’t caught him in the act, he might’ve pretended to be her savior from a sinking boat. Or maybe he would’ve killed her in her sleep too.
A surge of anger makes me want to show Troy my claws. And I really need to stop making angry fists when they’re out. Ouch. Fortunately, I heal fast.
It will be more satisfying to send him to prison, child. There, his soul will wither in misery. Not to mention less trouble for you.
Yeah.
“I’ll be back,” I say, not sure if the ghosts can hear my mode of communication.
With that, I zoom down the corridor, angle up the stairwell, and launch like a torpedo into the sea.
A half-hour later, I’m sitting on the ground in the woods beside the hole I dug earlier wearing my towel and nothing else. It’s secluded enough that I don’t expect anyone to spot me, but the ‘just went for a swim’ excuse usually works. By no small miracle, I get a cellular signal, and call Detective Serrano. He answers on the third ring.
“Alex, what’s up?”
I take a breath, and give him the rundown on everything that’s happened with the Strickland case so far. “… David and Christina are still both in the wreck. If you can get out here with a boat or something, and not too many prying eyes, I can bring them up. I’m sure having their bodies in custody will help any prosecution.”
“Hmm. I can maybe sell the idea of a private diver who owes me a favor… ev
en though I’m the one who owes you. I’m not on that missing person case, nor would I get the homicide investigation… I’m with narcotics. Hang on a sec.”
“‘Kay. FYI, if the police can’t get this dick, something unexplainable by science might happen to him.”
“Hold your seahorses there a moment.” He chuckles while tapping computer keys. “Okay, that’s good. Webb’s the next one in line for a murder case. Rusty’s a decent guy. Won’t mind an assist. There’s gonna be at least him, a driver, and a patrol officer. And yours truly, of course.”
“Fine. Can you make sure the officer and driver are guys?”
He pauses. “Sexism? Really?”
“Not at all. My, umm, charms are a lot stronger on men. They only work on, how should I say this… ‘certain’ women.”
“Gotcha. All right. Where are we going?”
I check a GPS app on my phone. “The wreck’s at 48°07’19.1”N 122°39’56.9”W. I’ll pop up at the stern once you kill the engine.”
“All right. Give me like forty-five or so to get out there, and oh, don’t move the bodies yet. They might want in-situ photographs for evidence purposes. I’ll let you know.”
“See you soon.”
“Oh uhh…” He chuckles. “Since you’re technically working for us…”
The way he laughs makes me brace for an awful joke.
“Does that make you a ‘police siren?’”
By Neptune’s trident, that was awful.
I grab my face and shake my head. “I should’ve left you in that car.”
He laughs. “See you soon.”
Two people are dead, a little girl is in bad shape, and he’s making shitty jokes.
Might be a cop thing. Some of them use humor to deal with tragedy.
