by R. J. Blain
I stretched out my legs in the surf. One of the smaller tiger sharks surged out of the water and flopped near my feet, drawing my gaze to my shoes. My sneakers had seen better days and it amazed me that I hadn’t lost them in the ocean.
The shark toyed with the laces, and the babies joined the hunt. I had no idea how they managed it, but they stole my shoe. I gaped at my bare foot, astonished it seemed intact. Wiggling my toes captured the attention of the babies, and they swarmed me, brushing against me. One of them gave me a nip but didn’t break the skin.
Despite the throbbing pain in my arm, I laughed at the beige and black sharks.
One of the babies nestled against my stomach and emboldened by the fact its mother hadn’t eaten me yet, I stroked its tiny back. Warmth spread from my fingertips and up my arm. I had no idea how I knew, but the baby’s name was Hunting Still Waters, and she liked me.
I blamed the fever for my hallucinations.
Sharks loved shoes. They robbed me of mine, and after they bored of playing with them, they turned their attention to my watch, which no longer worked. The babies, especially Hunting Still Waters, enjoyed gnawing on the band right up until their sharp little teeth chewed through the leather.
Several of the adolescents fought for it before one of them snatched it and swam off with it. The others gave chase and vanished beneath the waves.
Despite the fact it no longer functioned, its loss bothered me. Dad had given me the watch for my sixteenth birthday. I only took it off when I showered, and my wrist felt naked without it. The effort of sitting up sapped my strength, and I swayed in the steady rhythm of the surf.
The ocean wore away at the blood and sand caking my arm, and the sharks brushing against me opened the gunshot wounds. When I bled, the baby sharks swarmed me, poking me with their snouts. It hurt so much I choked on a scream, jerking away from them.
Hunting Still Waters bit me in rebuke, and I plunged into a dark, painless void.
I woke to a shark ramming me in the gut, and I submerged long enough to inhale a lungful of salty water. Coughing and spluttering, I flailed. A rogue wave bowled me over, rolling me towards the safety of the beach. I scrambled out of the water, choking and gasping for air. My teeth chattered, and my skin had wrinkled from exposure.
I made the mistake of looking at my left arm.
Red lines streaked from the bleeding wounds, and tiny holes marked where the infantile sharks had gnawed on me. I made it to where the shore and sea met, panting from exertion. Several of the sharks pursued me to the water’s edge, and I got the sense they wanted to make sure I stayed out of the water. I yanked my bare feet out of the surf beyond the reach of their teeth. Dorsal fins circled in the deeper waters for several more minutes before disappearing.
Hunting Still Waters remained, and she played where the sea met the shore, staying close. Several times, she beached herself in her effort to keep near me. Somehow, I found the strength to scoop her up and return her to the water.
She liked it when I held my right hand in the water so she could nuzzle my palm.
While I had welcomed the ocean’s chill before, I shook from the cold. I knew I needed to get warm and away from the water, but the thought of putting in so much effort was enough to tire me, so I stayed.
At least I wasn’t alone.
At first, I thought I hallucinated the shape on the horizon, but as it drew closer, I recognized the swarm of sharks surrounding a ship. Unlike my kidnappers’ boat, they didn’t seem interested in capsizing the vessel, although I doubted they could even if they wanted to.
Hunting Still Waters darted for the safety of deeper waters and her mother, and as one, the sharks submerged, leaving me to stare at the vessel. It was white with a large red, vertical stripe marking its bow. It wasn’t until an auxiliary boat reached shore that I realized the ship belonged to the US Coast Guard. The middle-aged man who splashed into the surf and hurried to me gaped as though unable to believe his eyes.
I understood the feeling. Dad had drilled a lot of things into me as a child and giving the proper authorities my name topped the list. “I’m Dustin Walker. I live in Las Vegas, Nevada.”
The Coast Guard would be able to figure everything out. There weren’t too many others with my name. With one call to Vegas’s police, the Coast Guard would be able to get a positive identification on me. I regarded the smaller boat with a scowl.
Why did I want to stay in the water with sharks rather than get on another boat?
The man from the Coast Guard told me his name, but it went in one ear and out the other. He pulled out a radio and talked to someone for a few minutes. A second small boat came to shore, and the Coast Guard ignored my protests at going back to sea, herding me to the small vessel rocking in the surf.
It took a little over three hours to reach port. The entire time, a member of the Coast Guard checked me over. He spared me the obvious: the gunshot wounds were infected. I lost count of the number of injections he inflicted on me before he began treating my arm. The medication numbed my arm, and the relief was so intense I sank into a drug-induced haze.
While my kidnappers had left from a marina in Malibu, the Coast Guard docked at Long Beach. An ambulance waited, and within twenty minutes, I was subjected to a full battery of tests at a nearby hospital. I endured more shots, and once everything was said and done, I had a list of prescriptions long enough that I grimaced at the thought of swallowing so many pills.
My arm was infected, but by some miracle, I dodged being hospitalized.
Instead, a nurse left me with a clipboard and a pen. Under normal circumstances, the paperwork wouldn’t have bothered me, but words blurred into one another. I ended up staring at the sheet without a single clue what to write. Without my wallet, I had no hope of filling out the insurance information.
“Dustin.” Dad’s voice jerked me back to reality. I blinked, realizing I hadn’t managed to write a single word. I looked up. Mom and Dad crowded the doorway, growling at each other as they vied for the privilege of entering the room first.
Mom stomped on Dad’s foot, bumped him aside with her hip, and swept into the room. She cupped my face in her hands and bowed her head, resting her forehead against mine. “Thank God.”
“I have no idea how to fill this out.” The medications made me whine.
Dad growled, earning a glare from Mom.
“Rob, you know better.” Mom’s voice lowered and she straightened, jabbing her finger at my father, which he dodged. “There are Normals around.”
Dad quieted, and his expression smoothed into a calm mask. “Are you okay, Dustin?”
Regarding my arm, which was wrapped in a bandage and restrained in a sling, I sighed. “It’s infected.”
“Okay.” Dad hooked a chair with his foot, dragged it close, and sat, taking the clipboard out of my hand. “We already talked to the doctor. We’re cleared to head home; Federal investigators will come to the house to question you, but they thought it wise to hold off for a few days. There are some things they need to know, but I’ll handle most of it.”
I translated that to mean the Federal investigators wanted to wait until the cranky Alpha Fenerec male calmed enough for them to approach without stirring his ire and having their heads ripped off for posing a threat to Mom or me. While I found a sense of security in Dad’s presence, until my arm healed, I doubted he’d be willing to let anyone he didn’t trust near us.
Sighing, Dad uncapped the pen and went to work filling out the forms, his handwriting neat and perfect. “How many of them were there, how many survived, and do you have any idea where I might find them?”
“There were three of them. I don’t know if they had any accomplices. After I fell into the ocean, the sharks attacked their boat and ate them. I’m not sure what happened after that. I woke up on a beach.”
“I don’t suppose you can explain that, can you?” Dad arched a brow at me, and I saw the corners of his mouth twitch in his effort to mask either a smile or a frown.
I wasn’t sure which.
“Sharks like me,” I stated, hiding my smile behind a cough at the thought of Hunting Still Waters, her overly affectionate mother, and the great white shark with a taste for boats. Maybe I was my father’s son, but I was my mother’s son, too.
Dad narrowed his eyes. “Smart of them. If they had hurt you, I would have found them, ripped their fins off, and eaten them.”
Shaking her head, Mom took the clipboard from Dad and smacked him with it. “If you don’t behave yourself, you’ll have to drive. We’ll swing by the beach and you can thank the sharks for taking care of him.”
“I’m not going to talk to the ocean like a raving lunatic, Marcy.”
“Yes, you are.”
I pinched the bridge of my nose, sighed, and wondered why I couldn’t have Normal, sane parents.
In the end, Mom won, and after rescuing me from the hospital and filling my prescriptions, she drove us to the beach. The sun was setting over the water when we arrived, and I was glad to escape the car for a few minutes.
If I didn’t get a break from Dad cuddling with me, I was going to lose my mind. For the first twenty minutes, most of which Mom spent driving around looking for a pharmacy that could fill all of my prescriptions, I had enjoyed his attention. With Dad around, it felt like it’d take an army for anyone to get near me. I needed the sense of security, and I knew it. But after those first twenty minutes, he’d started driving me crazy.
I’d been a cop’s kid long enough to understand the consequences of trauma; some good, old-fashioned tender, loving care went a long way to restoring a sense of normality. Of course, with a Fenerec Alpha for a father and a witch for a mother, very little of my life was actually normal.
Taking what I could get had done me well so far in life, so I’d go with the flow.
The section of beach we visited had few cars in the parking lot. I got out of the car while Dad growled at Mom and Mom growled back. My attempt to slip away was aborted by my dad’s hand smacking down on the top of my head. “You’re not going anywhere without me, puppy.”
I glanced around, startled until I realized there wasn’t anyone to overhear Dad’s slip. “I didn’t want to get in the way if you two decided to start biting.”
Laughing, Mom grabbed her purse, locked the car, and herded us towards the surf. “If he starts annoying you, I’ll make him stop. I brought the spoon.”
I grimaced. The slotted spoon was almost as old as Mom, and she liked telling me how she had stolen it from my uncle the day he had introduced her to Dad. She wielded it like a weapon, smacking Dad with it whenever he got too obnoxious. The rare times my uncle came to visit, he got a turn with the spoon, too. When she dented it on their hard heads, she had it repaired. When she wasn’t beating Dad with it, it stayed in the kitchen, since Mom didn’t believe in useless items sitting around the house.
“That’s really not fair, Marcy,” Dad complained.
“Then I suggest you don’t bother our puppy with your whining. March, Rob. Don’t be jealous Dusty made some new friends with bigger teeth than yours.”
In a way, I sided with Dad on the issue. After my misadventures in the ocean, I wasn’t sure I wanted to get anywhere near the surf. At least my parents had brought me a change of clothes and a new pair of shoes. Remembering how much the sharks had liked hunting my laces, I took my socks and sneakers off and carried them.
“But sharks, Marcy?”
“Are you going to tell a great white he can’t be friends with our puppy? Remember, they’re larger and have bigger teeth.”
“She,” I blurted, then I blinked at having made the correction. How the hell did I know the great white had been a female? Yet, despite having no knowledge of how to establish a shark’s gender, I knew in the same way I understood two plus two equaled four.
“Did you look up her skirt?” Dad grumbled.
“Rob, do you want the spoon?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then shut up.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I loved my mother.
The sunset turned the ocean blood red, and the waves were calmer than when I’d been kidnapped and taken out to sea. As always, Mom stayed clear of the waterline. I set my shoes safely out of the way so they wouldn’t get wet, stepped to the surf, and stuck my toe in.
“Not so bad, is it?” Dad asked, coming up beside me. Like me, he had taken off his shoes and socks so the waves could wash over his feet. “I can’t believe you’re making me do this, Marcy.”
“The sooner you thank the sharks, the sooner we can go home.”
“They ate my prey.”
“They didn’t eat our puppy, so thank them.”
“You thank them.”
I closed my eyes, shook my head, and sat down in the surf, not caring if my jeans got soaked. The water felt good, and with so many painkillers and other drugs coursing through my system, my arm didn’t bother me very much. It didn’t take long for a curious, baby shark to join me, and while I couldn’t spot its mother in the deeper waters, I knew she was there, circling, waiting, and watching for trouble.
The little one hadn’t earned his name yet, which I found interesting. I wiggled my fingers for it to hunt, and whenever he managed to catch me, he gave me a nip.
Dad leaned towards me, huffing when he saw what I was doing. “That’s a shark, isn’t it?”
The infant seemed game to be picked up, and I cradled him in my hands so Dad could see. “He’s a tiger shark.”
The baby showed off its tiny teeth and laughing at its audacity, I returned him to the water. Darting forward, the baby chomped on Dad’s toe before fleeing for the safety of the sea. Dad’s mouth dropped open and he blinked.
“Thank the sharks,” Mom ordered.
“It bit me!”
“If you had thanked him, he wouldn’t have bitten you.”
“That little runt bit me!”
Aware the ‘little runt’s’ mother lurked in the deeper water, I scooted a discreet distance away from Dad. “Do you know what tiger shark females do when the males of their species annoy them, Dad?”
Dad crossed his arms over his chest. “What?”
“They eat them.”
“I think he’s trying to tell you you’re annoying him, dear.” Mom reached into her purse and pulled out the long, slotted spoon. “Thank the sharks, or you get the spoon and you have to drive us home while I sit with our puppy in the backseat.”
“I’m thankful Dustin’s safe,” Dad protested, holding his hands up in surrender. “Why are you siding with the sharks?”
“Because I’m smarter than you.”
When Mom and Dad began arguing over whether or not the sharks really needed to be thanked, I groaned, rolled my eyes, and contemplated wading out into the ocean. “Will you two stop it?”
They ignored me. I slapped my hand against the surf in annoyance.
A rogue wave surged up the beach, plowed into Dad, which knocked him into Mom. They both sprawled on the sand, spluttering and spitting out water. I blinked, stared at my parents, and then gawked at the ocean.
A shark’s fin rose up from the sea, circled once, and disappeared beneath the calming waves.
While I was definitely my father’s son, I was my mother’s son, too. There was a name for people who could make strange things happen to water, and it was witch.
Two
Fishnet Stockings
What sort of idiot robbed a bank while wearing fishnet stockings over his head? Black pantyhose I could understand; the material obscured features and skin color well enough, but fishnet stockings?
I mourned for humanity. I also worried about everyone trapped in the building. How could criminals so infernally stupid get semi-automatic rifles? The robber, a middle-aged white man with wide, bloodshot eyes, waved his gun around.
It annoyed me he had enough sense to order everyone into a corner away from the windows and doors, effectively giving the police thirty-two reasons to be extra cautious.<
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When my dad found out my errand to the bank had turned into a hostage situation, he was going to flip. I’d just gotten him off my back after being kidnapped and shot over a month ago. My arm was still in a sling, thanks to my long battle with an infection. A cold sweat dampened my brow at the thought of being shot again. I’d gotten lucky once; I doubted I’d get lucky again.
“I hit the panic button,” one of the tellers whispered, her voice wavering. “The silent alarm. Help will come.”
I admired her attempt to reassure her fellow hostages. With the robber’s attention mostly on the manager he’d ordered to fetch cash, I had a chance to take a few pictures and send them to Mom.
Mom dealt with crazy better than Dad, and she’d be able to pass the images along without sending him into a frenzy. Snapping several shots and texting her about the situation took less than a minute. Moments later, my phone notified me she had seen my messages.
Wisely, she didn’t reply.
Instead of returning my phone to my pocket, I slipped it into my sock in case the dipshit bank robber developed an unfortunate case of common sense.
I had my phone halfway into place when someone else’s rang. Muttering a curse, I jammed the device into my shoe and let my jeans fall to cover the lump. The next time Dad laughed at me for not wearing shorts in Las Vegas, I’d remind him of the unconventional uses of sneakers, socks, and proper pants.
“Don’t answer!” the robber shrieked. “Phones here, now.”
His pointing with the gun worried me a lot more than the loss of the phones. Most of the hostages obeyed, sliding their devices across the polished tiles. I crossed my legs, hiding mine.
Either no one had noticed my texting Mom, or they didn’t want to give the man a reason to open fire. No one said a word.
“Your cash. Make it worth my while to let you keep breathing.” The man’s finger twitched against the trigger guard. “Bitch, where’s my money? It’s been five minutes. Hurry it up.”
