The Seadragon's Daughter

by Alan F. Troop

  He looks at a notepad and says, “Did you know Maria Santos?”

  “Not really. She waited on my table once. She gave me her phone number.”

  “No, Peter, you don’t have to volunteer about the phone number. Just answer the questions.” He clears his throat. “Are you in the habit of dining alone.”

  “I was when I was single.”

  “Maria told friends she gave you her phone number.”

  “She did.”

  “Did you call her?”

  “No. I threw her number away.”

  “Wasn’t she attractive enough for you?”

  “She was very attractive, but I wasn’t interested.”

  “Did waitresses often give you their numbers?”

  “Some did, but I didn’t call them either. I’m a rich man. It’s hard to trust strangers’ motives.”

  “Good,” Ian says. “What did you do that evening?”

  “I went home, read and went to bed.”

  “Can anyone verify that?”

  “No.”

  “Did you own a Chris-Craft speedboat or one that looked like it?”

  “Never. I owned a Grady White, the same as I do now.”

  “And you never met Maria Santos anywhere at any time other than at dinner that night?”

  “Never.”

  “You do realize she disappeared only a few weeks after the night she waited on you?”

  “Yes,” I say.

  “Did you have anything to do with that disappearance?”

  “No.”

  The questions churn up memories of her unfortunate death. It takes all my self-control not to sigh. When Tindall insists we review the questions again and again I begin to glare at him.

  Finally, just before I’m about to lash out at him, he says, “We’re doing this for practice. So you can be prepared. I’m on your side, Peter. Remember, I really am.”

  But still we go over the same ground for hours more. By the time I get back to the boat the late-afternoon sky has turned gloomy, dark clouds scudding by overhead. I no longer have any great desire to spend time fighting the wind and waves. Ian’s practice deposition has battered me enough.

  I toy with the thought of staying on land for the night, taking a room at the Grand Bay or the Ritz. But then I remember Max. The last thing I want is to leave the poor dog waiting all night on the dock.

  This time the dolphin shows itself just after I reach the last marker in the channel. I smile at it and then turn my attention to steering through the waves. When I look for it again, I see no sign of it.

  The sky darkens even more as I cross the bay. Drawing near my island, I glance behind me, see the few final rays of light slowly sinking away and put on my running lights. While I can see perfectly well in light like this, I certainly don’t want some dim-eyed fool to run into me.

  A girl or small woman jumps up on the sandbar by the entrance to the channel and begins to wave, her left hand open, something, maybe a thin stick, clasped in her right fist. I squint but I’m still too far away to make out just what it is or to see her features or expression. While I hear no shouting, from the way she waves her arms, I assume she needs help.

  I look around. Seeing no sign of any other boats, I slow my motors and steer toward her. She keeps waving, beckoning me forward until I’m near to running aground. At that close distance, even in the dusk, I can make out some of her features, her long hair and small breasts—the fact that she’s naked.

  Before I can shout out to her, she dives into the water, cutting it so cleanly that she leaves barely a ripple, and starts swimming toward the boat. Yanking the wheel so the Grady White turns sideways to the wind, I throw the Yamahas into neutral.

  Waves immediately begin to batter the boat’s windward side and push it southward. I shrug. If the girl swims as well as it appears she can, I calculate that it will take her only a few moments to reach me.

  Making my way to the windward hull, I hope she knows enough to approach from this direction. If she swims up on the leeward side, the waves will drive the boat over her.

  A large breaker slaps the Grady White, pours water into the cockpit. A second wave follows, spraying salt foam everywhere, stinging my eyes, blinding me for an instant. And then a small hand, still holding a stick, reaches above the coaming of the boat.

  Somehow the girl manages to take hold of the boat’s side without losing the stick. She raises her thin left arm and reaches up for help. I rush forward, putting out my right hand, close enough now to see the flat shape of her stick, how it tapers to a sharp point on one end. “Why don’t you just drop that damned thing?” I say. “It’s only in the way.”

  Saying nothing, she grabs my right hand with her left. I gasp at her viselike grip and shift my stance, my weight on my rear leg in anticipation of lifting most of her weight. But when I yank her up it’s like lifting air. The lack of resistance throws my balance off and I gasp and stumble backward as the small woman flies out of the water, her shape beginning to shift, her face contorting, her jaws opening, showing off her growing fangs.

  She falls with me, reaching for my throat with her teeth. I try to shove her away but she growls and thrusts her stick forward, burying its pointed end in my midriff. A hot pain burns into me and I howl. Adrenaline jolts through me. Shifting my shape too, I open my mouth, my jaws expanding, my teeth still growing as I lock my mouth on hers.

  I land on my back on the cockpit floor, the girl on top of me, her jaws opening and trying to close, my teeth blocking hers, both of us bleeding, the smell of our blood mixing with the damp ocean air around us. Unsure what type of creature has attacked me, I continue to change shape, my clothes ripping apart as I grow, the other creature writhing, pushing her stick deeper into me, trying to find any advantage.

  When I reach my full size, the creature suddenly stops struggling, opens its jaws and goes limp. Standing, I shove it away and watch it fall to the deck in front of me. My eyes locked on it, I extend my right claw, ready to rip into it should it even twitch. Grasping her stick with my left claw, I yank it out of my body and throw it forward, out of the her reach.

  Blood gushes from the wound. Stifling a groan, I concentrate on stopping its flow. Once it diminishes, I turn my mind to healing that wound before I begin to heal all the puncture wounds the creature’s bites have inflicted on me, my claw still ready, my eyes still focused on the creature lying before me.

  Far smaller than I, its scales a dull black-gray, it gazes back with emerald-green eyes and mindspeaks, “Hello, cousin.”

  14

  Another wave slams into the side of the boat, forcing it still further southward. I look up, drop my mouth open when I see how far we’ve been driven from my island. Glaring at the small creature now lying on the cockpit floor in front of me, my heart still pounding from the attack, I flex my sore jaws and consider tearing it to pieces.

  Surely it wouldn’t take any great effort. It looks something like one of my kind, but the pitiful thing barely measures half my size. Its wings look so small that I wonder if they’re deformed. Even its scales appear deficient—too smooth and too close to the body to provide proper armament.

  “Why shouldn’t I kill you?” I mindspeak.

  “I am no threat to you,” she mindspeaks.

  “No threat? You attacked me!”

  She dismisses my words with a slight motion of her right claw. “Only to confirm what you were.”

  “What about all the other boats? Did you attack them too?”

  The creature nods.

  “Are there others of you?”

  “Not here.”

  The boat shudders as yet another wave collides with it. If I don’t do something soon I know it will be driven onto rocks or pushed aground or, even worse, noticed by a patrol boat. After all the centuries of my family protecting its identity, I’m not about to let some puny creature cause us to be discovered.

  “We have to get underway again,” I mindspeak. “I need to change into my human f
orm. You too. But stay where you are. If you attack me again, you’ll die. Quickly. Understand?”

  The creature nods and I turn away from it, shifting to my human form as I rush to the boat’s wheel. Throwing the throttles forward, I grab the wheel and yank it over, steering away from the waves. The boat wallows for a few seconds, then accelerates into a sharp turn, going up on its side for a moment, straightening and shooting south.

  We strike something underneath us, a shudder running through the boat, the port Yamaha, pitching forward, its motor howling. Yelling, “Shit! Shit! Shit!” I kill its throttle, hoping we’ve just sheared a prop, that the drive shaft isn’t bent.

  The boat slows but continues forward, the starboard Yamaha still howling at full speed. I cut back on its throttle a little, so as not to put too much strain on the one remaining motor, and try to turn the wheel to the right, to circle back to the north. With one motor now deadweight, I find I have to tug on it, hard, to have any effect.

  Still the Grady White turns, slower than I’d like, starting a long loop that will take us northward, back to my island’s channel. The boat slices through a wave, and a blast of salt spray showers me, coating my naked flesh. Instantly chilled by the wind, I shiver and turn, glancing at the tattered remnants of my clothes on the cockpit floor and the girl in her human form, naked, sitting cross-legged near them, smiling as she returns my stare.

  “You said cousin?” I say.

  She shrugs as if she doesn’t understand. “Can’t you hear me?” I mindspeak.

  “I can hear but I don’t understand very well. At home, we only mindspeak.”

  “But you said you were my cousin?” I mindspeak.

  “Yes,” she mindspeaks. “I am.”

  I doubt I’ve ever seen a paler woman. Her ghost-white body glistens from the salt spray, seems almost luminescent in the gloom. Wet, long black hair hugs her scalp, hangs halfway down her back, a few stray wisps plastered to her front, tracing dark lines from her long, thin neck over the gentle curves of breasts too small and too firm to sag. One strand curls around a crinkled, light pink nub of a nipple made tight by the cold.

  I shake my head. She may be of my people, but even in her natural form I could hardly see any resemblance to my family. Her human form seems even more distant. While her round face and almond-shaped emerald-green eyes give her an exotic, strangely oriental look—one that would attract me if I were single—almost everything about her seems streamlined.

  Her ears lie flat against her skull. Her nose barely protrudes, her nostrils showing as hardly more than fleshy slits. When she opens her mouth or smiles, her pale lips grow full and inviting. But they flatten into raised lines when her mouth closes. Except for the hair on her head, her body’s hairless—no eyebrows, no eyelashes, no pubic hair. Only the mature curves of her body assure me she’s not a prepubescent girl.

  That such a thin, little thing, a few inches less than five feet tall, would dare attack someone my size amazes me. But then I need only remember the strong grasp of her hand and the pain she inflicted on me. She may look young and delicate, but I’ve already seen her true nature.

  “We both need clothes,” I mindspeak. “We can’t have a patrol boat find us like this. There are sweatshirts and sweatpants stowed with the foul weather gear in the locker below.” I point to the hatch leading into the boat’s cabin. “My wife’s will be large on you, but it’s better than nothing.”

  She returns, Chloe’s sweatshirt hanging on her, the neck large enough to show part of her collarbone, the sleeves rolled up so many times they look like large rings of cloth wrapped around her arms. Chloe’s sweatpants fit even worse, and the girl has to keep tugging them up with one hand as she hands me my clothes with the other.

  “I do not see how you can stand wearing these,” she mindspeaks as I step into my sweatpants and pull them up. I throw on the sweatshirt and sigh at the warmth that envelops me.

  “Weren’t you cold?” I mindspeak.

  She shrugs. “Nothing that diving under the water would not have fixed.”

  Another wave tries to knock the Grady White off course, and I tug the wheel over a few inches, push the throttle forward just a touch until I hear the Yamaha’s pitch increase. “Under the water?” I mindspeak. “Don’t you think it’s time to tell me what’s going on here? What makes you think you’re my cousin?”

  “Not a first cousin.” The girls smiles, sits on the seat by my side, where Chloe usually sits. “My father named me Lorrel. You are Peter DelaSangre, the son of Don Henri, are you not?”

  I look ahead toward the dark shadow of Caya DelaSangre, the island Don Henri bequeathed to me. “What do you know about my father?” I mindspeak.

  “Apparently more than you do.” Lorrel lets out a trill of laughter.

  Frowning, I glare at her. “If you know about the DelaSangres, then you know we’re not a family to be toyed with,” I mindspeak. “Don Henri would have killed you for that attack.”

  “Obviously his son would not,” she mindspeaks. “Do not be so sure you cannot be defeated. We both come from strong stock.”

  “But not the same stock,” I mindspeak. We come up to the entrance to my channel and I tug the wheel over, steer toward the island. The waves fight me, and it takes all my concentration to keep the boat in the channel, away from the rocks. With only one engine left, I’m keenly aware of the need to keep it running. I’ve little desire to leave the boat unmanned and adrift.

  “The same stock,” Lorrel mindspeaks. “Did you not find my great grandmother’s ring?”

  “Your great grandmother’s?” I stare at her for a long moment, then finally nod.

  Lorrel grins at my reaction. “My father, Mowdar, your half-brother’s son, gave it to me and told me to bring it to you.”

  I shake my head, shake it a second time. “My mother is dead. I was her only child. My father is dead too. Before he died he told me all his other children had died long before him. I never had a half-brother. . . .”

  “Not one he told you about,” Lorrel mindspeaks, “Mowdar says you Undrae like to pretend—just because you won the Great War—that none of us exist anymore. But he says he has seen and killed Thryll himself, and he thinks if you search long enough and far enough you can find still find even a few Zal. . . .”

  Something splashes in the water near us and Lorrel turns her head toward the sound, studies the dark water for a moment and then turns back toward me. “All of Don Henri’s other Undrae children and all of his Undrae wives died just as he said. But he had another wife too, one of a different kind.”

  “What kind was that?”

  “Have you not guessed?” The girl mindspeaks. She holds up her right hand and spreads her fingers wide.

  I gape at the thin membrane that forms a web between each of her spread fingers.

  Lorrel trills another laugh and mindspeaks one word, “Pelk.”

  15

  That the people of another castryll still survive doesn’t amaze me. Chloe’s said it was possible. Even humans seem to keep finding Stone Age tribes of their kind in jungles all over the world. But my father, Don Henri DelaSangre, had few enough good words for any of the others of our own kind. I shake my head, trying to picture him taking a mate from another castryll, especially a seagoing one like the Pelk.

  “The ring proves nothing,” I mindspeak. “Anybody can make a ring.”

  “But is it not inscribed in the same script as your father’s other wives’ rings were? Who would know how to inscribe it but your father?”

  A large fish jumps, flashing silver in the night before it splashes back into the water just a few yards from the boat.

  Again Lorrel’s head swivels in the direction of the noise. This time she gulps and mindspeaks, “Would you like to eat? I can gather some fish—in only a few minutes—and meet you at the dock.”

  I shake my head.

  “Has changing not made you hungry?”

  All of our activity, the shapechanging, the fighting and the hea
ling has left my stomach so empty it aches. But I’ve little desire for fish, and less for the girl to leave my sight. “I have food at the house,” I mindspeak, saliva flooding my mouth at the mention of it. “We can eat after we dock.”

  Yet another fish jumps. Lorrel gazes at the water, and for a moment I think she’s going to dive off the boat. Instead she crosses her arms and huffs out a sigh.

  How I wish Chloe and the children were home waiting to greet me. But at the dock only Max awaits me. He begins to bark even before the Grady White enters the harbor, setting off a cacophony of barks, yelps and howls among the rest of the island’s dog pack.

  Lorrel stiffens at the sounds, stares toward the dark shore and moves a little closer to me. She relaxes only after I let out a sharp, shrill whistle and the dogs fall silent. “They’re only dogs,” I mindspeak.

  The girl nods, mindspeaks, “I do not know dogs.”

  Max barks, wags his tail at her when I pull up to the dock, but she looks away from him and stays seated until I’ve docked and tied off the boat. After I beckon for her to come off the Grady White, she stops to pick up her stick and then steps onto the dock, making sure I’m between her and the dog.

  I look at the stick and hold my hand out.

  “I told you I no longer have any reason to attack you,” she mindspeaks.

  But I keep my hand out until she hands it to me.

  The last of the sun has gone and I stop by a switch box at the bottom of the steps and throw on the outside lights. Lorrel’s large eyes widen even more as she looks around. She runs one hand over the rough coral wall of the house but says nothing as we go up the wide stone steps to the veranda.

  I stop by one of the oversize oak doors that open onto the veranda, point to it. “We can go in this way through my bedroom.”

  The girl nods, follows me as I open the door, enter and throw on the lights. Humming to herself, barely loud enough for me to hear, she surveys the room, then walks over to the bed and tests it with one hand while she pulls up on her loose sweatpants with the other. “You sleep here?” she mindspeaks.