Then I turn my attention toward home. “Chloe,” I mindspeak. “Chloe, we’re on the way to you.”
I wait for an answer. When none comes, I call out again, “Chloe! Derek and I are close to home. Wake up, baby. Answer me.”
“Peter? What? Where are you?”
“Not far from Bimini.”
“My God, you’re almost here! I don’t understand. What about the poison? Why are you saying we? Is that Pelk female with you?”
“No, she isn’t,” I mindspeak, explaining about Mowdar’s plans and Derek’s and my departure from the srrynn.
“Oh, Peter, the poison,” Chloe says. “We still have no idea how to make an antidote for it. Claudia’s been struggling through your father’s log books, but she hasn’t found a thing yet.”
“I have his journal with me, and we have enough temporary antidote to take the both of us through another week.”
“You’ll have to be careful coming in. I did what we discussed. I killed a boater and made him disappear the night I got back. The media and police were crazed the next day. I killed another two the next night and they went ballistic. Jordan Davidson’s paper had a headline that said, HAS PETER DELASANGRE RETURNED?”
I growl into the air and mindspeak, “Now that I am returning maybe we’ll be able to make that little asshole regret all his headlines.”
“Peter, we have more important problems than that.”
“He is another problem we have to resolve,” I mindspeak.
Derek flies a little too close, almost bumping me. “Sorry, old man,” he mindspeaks.
Shaking my head at the irritating creature, I flex my wings and readjust my position. But then I take a long look at my brother-in-law, realize how I might be able to use him, and smile. “And, Chloe,” I mindspeak, “I may have just thought of a way to take care of our Mr. Davidson.”
“Good for you, Peter. First you have to find a way home. There are patrol boats all over the bay and up and down the coast, and helicopter patrols constantly.”
“Any of them as far out as Fowey Rocks?” I mindspeak.
“I don’t think so. All the ones on the outside are mostly hugging the shore. Remember, all the disappearances have been in the bay.”
“Good, then I want you to call Claudia right now.” I tell Chloe what I need her to do so we can bring the journal safely to the island.
“And then what?” she mindspeaks. “Couldn’t you have found a way to warn me and still stay on Andros until we figured out how to make the antidote?”
“No. Mowdar and his men will be near our island in three days at the latest. They’ll probably attack a day or two after that. I couldn’t wait for you to come back into mindspeaking range to warn you, and I had no way to sneak out. Mowdar posted guards. Even if Lorrel kept her silence, someone would have noticed. If I did get out, they’d never have allowed me to live if I returned. Not that they could have anyway—remember, Malka’s dead.”
“I wish you hadn’t killed her,” Chloe mindspeaks. “I know you wanted to come and help me fight Mowdar. But without any antidote, I’ll lose you no matter how well we do against them.”
Frowning into the dark, I mindspeak, “You would never sit still if you knew I was in danger. In my place I doubt you would have done any differently. If we survive the Pelks’ attack and if we don’t figure out an antidote sometime in the next week, at least I’ll die knowing you and the kids are okay.”
“Somehow that doesn’t comfort me,” Chloe mindspeaks.
“How do you think I feel?” Derek mindspeaks. “Nothing about this whole bloody affair comforts me one whit!”
Derek thinks every ship we pass makes for a good opportunity. I reject more than a dozen boats before we see a oil tanker riding low in the water, its cargo most probably destined for the oil tanks at Fort Lauderdale’s Port Everglades. The dark form of a solitary crew member making his way toward the rear of the ship catches my attention.
I wonder whether he’s out for a late-night inspection or just taking a restless walk around the deck. No matter. He looks tall and thick-framed—a perfect meal for two beings as hungry as we. I point him out to Derek.
We circle over the ship, watching the big man until he stops at the stern and stares out at the sea, his hands on the ship’s rail. “I’ll take him,” Derek mindspeaks.
Staring at the rear windows of the ship’s bridge, I see no sign of anyone else. Typically ships like this travel on autopilot when they’re at sea. I’m relatively sure if the helmsman hasn’t dozed off, he’s most likely busying himself with instruments or staring forward into the night. I shrug. It’s an acceptable risk.
As much as I’d like to take the kill, I mindspeak, “Go ahead.”
Derek folds his wings and plummets away from me. He spreads them open again at a hundred feet and shoots toward the tanker, adjusting his position so he crosses the boat from the starboard side, just a few feet over the stern rail. The man seems to sense nothing until Derek seizes his shoulders with his rear claws and jerks him into the air, carrying him away in an instant.
Derek has already killed the man and gorged on his entire right thigh by the time he rejoins me. He passes the carcass to me as soon as he arrives. After weeks of Pelk food, just the smell of fresh human blood is enough to send me into a feeding frenzy. I bite a huge hunk from the body, swallowing and taking another bite before I pass it back to Derek.
He does the same, and we share the carcass, passing it back and forth, gorging as we fly until little more than the man’s skeleton remains. Derek drops that into the sea, and we turn toward the Gulf Stream and the glow of Miami’s lights beyond the dark horizon.
By the time I see the Fowey Rocks lighthouse beacon, the sky behind us has started to show the first gray tinges of dawn. Derek and I both drop down, skimming just above the ocean’s surface to minimize the risk of being seen.
“You heard Chloe’s warning. There are patrol boats everywhere closer to shore. They’re pretty intent on catching someone,” I mindspeak. “We’re going to have to swim the rest of the way—as soon as we get closer to the lighthouse.”
“Terrific. You and your wife certainly know how to welcome a guest, don’t you?”
I ignore my brother-in-law and concentrate on watching for boat lights. When I spot running lights approaching the lighthouse, I mindspeak, “Here,” and pass the woven seaweed bag to Derek. “It’s going to be tricky, but I need you to give the bag back to me after I get into the water. You have to be careful. We can’t get it wet.”
Derek shrugs. “Whatever you say, old man.”
Dropping into the water and sinking below the surface, I immediately concentrate on what Lorrel taught me, changing shape, my body streamlining, growing fins and fluke until I’m ready to surface as a full-sized dolphin male. Flying close by, Derek pays no attention to me until I whistle, rise halfway out of the water and mindspeak, “Here, Derek. Bring it to me here.”
He flys by too high and too fast on his first approach. “Damn it. It’s your fault. For a second I thought you were a Pelk. You should have told me you were going to shift to being a dolphin. And you accused me of going native with them. I never changed into any damned fish.”
“Dolphins aren’t fish,” I mindspeak, then talk him through the next approach, grabbing the bag’s loop handles with my mouth and flipping the bag back so it rests on my head, out of the water. Balancing the bag there, I swim toward the Fowey Rocks lighthouse and the boat drifting near it, waiting for me to arrive.
Derek splashes into the water five yards behind me and follows underwater, mindspeaking, “If she brought a boat, she could have brought clothes and she could damned well have brought us in. I don’t see why we have to swim in the bloody water all the way to your island like we’re the Pelk, when we just risked everything by leaving the loathsome creatures and their fishy ways.”
The sun has risen above the horizon and turned the sky bright by the time I near Fowey Rocks. Claudia puts down her fishing rod
and throws her boat’s motors into neutral as soon as she sees me approaching from her port side. Shaking her head, muttering, “A dolphin. I have to have the most peculiar job on earth,” she leans over the side and takes the bag from my mouth. I tolerate a few pats on my head from her before I sink into the water and dive away.
The water erupts with the growls of her engines revving up and speeding away, and I turn toward shore and begin swimming as fast as I can. Behind me Derek mindspeaks, “Damn it. Slow down, old man. You know I can’t swim as fast as you can in that form.”
Tempted as I am to leave him behind, I don’t trust that he’ll hug the bottom on his approach to the island. I slow down, wait for him to catch up, and then speed up as much as he can tolerate.
Once we near the island, knowing no patrol boat will see anything suspicious in a dolphin, I surface and continue forward, watching for patrol boats and helicopters. Derek complains when I make him dodge from reefs to kelp beds, avoiding stretches of sand wherever possible, but I want to take no chances that his dark mass might be spotted from above.
We encounter no helicopters along the way, slip by the two patrol boats guarding the entrance to Wayward Channel and pass by yet another patrol twenty yards outside the entrance to the channel into my island’s channel. Speeding ahead, leaving Derek to follow, I mindspeak, “Chloe! I’m home! Come down to the dock!”
I hit the harbor at full speed. Wheeling around, kicking toward the dock, shooting upward between Chloe’s and Claudia’s boats, I change into my human form as soon as I break the water. I slam down on the dock, landing on my stomach—wet, naked and embarrassed to find Chloe’s feet and Claudia’s just inches from my nose.
“This has to be the strangest job ever,” Claudia says to Chloe as I scramble to my feet. I ignore her, ignore the woven seaweed bag in her hand, ignore the nakedness of my damp body and stare at my wife, her brown face and full brown lips, her startling green eyes. I take her into my arms and hug her close to me.
She holds me tight too, both of us oblivious to Claudia’s stare, neither of us caring that how the dampness of my body soaks her clothes. I press my lips against hers and we kiss, our mouths open, our tongues as together as the rest of us, the morning sun warming our bodies.
A loud bark warns us just moments before Max runs up and launches his body at us. As massive as he is, he almost knocks us over. Both Chloe and I pet him as he woofs, repeatedly jumping up on one or the other of us, wagging his short stump of a tail furiously.
Derek surfaces alongside the dock in his human form and pulls himself out of the water. “Damn,” he says, standing up, his body as wet and naked as mine, his blond hair plastered to his scalp, dripping water down his forehead. He looks around. “Bloody, bloody damn. Doesn’t anyone have any towels?”
His eyes stop on Claudia and he nods, suddenly standing as if he were dressed in his finest. With his best bar-pickup expression he says, “Well, hello. How are you today?”
In his human form he has the look and stance of a natural athlete. Claudia eyes him over, up and down, and guffaws. “I love it!” she shrieks. “This has to be the best job ever!”
In my arms, Chloe begins to giggle too.
34
After Derek and I have dried off and dressed, we all gather together in the great room. I can’t keep my eyes—or my hands—off Chloe. I try to stay as close as possible, following her into the kitchen, helping as she prepares steaks to warm up in the microwave for breakfast, brushing against her as we pass each other. Finally, she gently pushes me away, saying, “Go sit. I’ll do the rest.”
I join Derek and Claudia at the large oak table and look around the room from window to window, taking in the views of the ocean, the bay and the islands to the north and south of us. Nothing could appear more beautiful to me. No place could feel more comfortable. The aroma of meat warming fills the room, and I sigh and sink back into my seat. No doubt attracted by the smell, Max pads into the room and lies down near my feet. “It’s so good to be home,” I say.
Derek frowns at me. “I’m sure it is, old man—for you. But you’re forgetting about that damned Pelk poison in both of us. I’m not sure I would have chosen to die in terrible pain, in a week, for the pleasure of being here.”
“We have a good chance of figuring out the antidote,” I say, sitting straight, pointing at the woven seaweed bag that Claudia’s left at the far end of the table. “My father’s journal is in there. I’m sure Claudia will find something there.”
Claudia shakes her head just a little as she says, “Wait a minute, you guys. Maybe I’ll find something. I’ve already been going through the logs. It’s tough reading that stuff. The handwriting alone could make you cry. It’s all in old-fashioned Spanish too. How would you like to read page after page of old English?”
“Not very much,” Chloe says, bringing four plates with warm, almost-raw steaks to the table. She serves Derek and me, puts a plate on the floor for Max and sits down next to me with her steak. “But Peter already found that sentence about the antidote. He can show you where he found it.”
Both Max and Derek dive into their food immediately, Derek cutting and eating pieces as fast as he can, Max biting and chewing chunks of his. Claudia, who’d rather go hungry than eat bloody meat, stares from one to the other as they wolf down their food and shakes her head.
“Just because I can speak and read the language,” she says, “you both think of me as Spanish. I am, but you forget that my family came here hundreds of years ago with Don Henri. I only really learned to read Spanish after I took it in college. Maybe we should get someone else to read through the stuff, someone who knows the language better than I do.”
Chloe looks at me. I shake my head. “We can’t have an outsider reading my father’s words.”
Claudia nods. “I can understand that. I read about some pretty strange things in the log books. Don’t worry—none of it bothered me. In the Gomez family we’re sort of raised to ignore anything weird about you DelaSangres. But it sure could shock anyone out of the family . . . maybe not the Tindalls, but anyone else,” she says.
I cut a large piece of meat, put it in my mouth, chew and swallow it before I say, “I’m sure you’ll find the answer somewhere in my father’s writings.”
“I certainly hope so,” Claudia says.
“Of course, old man,” Derek says, pushing his now empty plate away from him. “An antidote won’t be worth spit if we’re killed by those damned Pelks.”
“You’re a ray of sunshine today, aren’t you?” Chloe says to her brother.
He waves his hand as if to dispel her words. “Your husband got me into all of this. I had a perfectly nice nest, with three perfectly good females. Not the best food, mind you, but more than enough to eat, and nothing but sex expected from me.” Derek points at me. “He had to come, bonking the srrynn leader’s daughter, riling Mowdar up with his resistance, killing the only person who knew how to make our antidote and dragging me over here with him—where I may either die of poison or be killed fighting. And you expect me to be happy about that?”
I frown at Derek. “You would have lived that way the rest of your life?”
He nods. “I would have given it a try. It certainly beats dying.”
“No one here’s going to die!” I growl, wishing I felt as sure as my words sounded.
Once we finish breakfast, Derek leaves the table, sits in my reclining chair and falls instantly asleep. While Chloe carries the plates back to the kitchen and busies herself there, I go to the seaweed bag. Opening it, I take out my father’s journal and feel it for dampness. I let out a sigh when I find it dry.
Searching through the pages until I find the one with the word antidoto, I think about all that Derek said. I can’t fault the man for worrying. When I think about all that must happen and how little time we have to pull it off, I despair too.
I find the page and hand the book, open, to Claudia. “Read from there,” I say, pointing to the sentence at the bo
ttom of the page. Standing next to her, I watch as she reads the paragraph and the next page.
She looks up at me and says, “Nothing yet, Peter. Please stop staring. Go away.”
Chloe looks up from the sink when I come into the kitchen area. I walk over and try to hug her, but she blocks me with her hand and shakes her head. “You’re going to have to understand this is hard for me,” she says. “I am glad you’re back. I was thrilled to see you. But I’m furious too . . . and hurt.”
“But I already told you it was against my will.”
“Apparently my brother doesn’t think so. Didn’t he just say you were bonking her?”
“Chloe, I didn’t want her. . . .”
“When was the last time you had sex?”
I sigh. If I could lie to my wife, I would at this moment. But I have never wanted to have a relationship based on untruths. “Last night,” I say. “But I had to. . . .”
Chloe turns back to the sink, opens the spigot and begins washing the dishes. “You had to,” she says, her voice acid. “I’ll tell you something else you have to do. Get away from me—right now!”
Max follows me downstairs and out onto the veranda. He stays at my side as I pace from the ocean side to the stairs leading down to the dock. One minute, rage makes me want to rush back to the great room and shout to my wife how unfair she is. The next minute, sorrow overtakes me. I chose nothing that brought me to this point. I wanted nothing but the life I had with my wife and children.
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