by Jenn Bennett
“Mermaid,” Jupe said in a voice filled with equal parts terror and certainty. “I told you. Foxglove, she barks at something in the ocean.”
“We might be sixty miles or more away from our house, Jupe,” Lon said, but I could hear doubt in his voice. After all, La Sirena translated to exactly that: mermaid. Maybe there was some truth behind the town’s name. Thing was, even though I’d seen a couple of Æthyrics running around loose, they couldn’t stay here for any substantial length of time. They needed an earthly host to survive. That’s how Earthbounds came into existence: demons stuffed into human bodies through a now-lost arcane spell.
But that thing outside was definitely not sporting a human body, and the ward on this boat wasn’t freshly painted. The Heka that had charged it before the strike was dull. Barely visible. The captain must’ve had all this magical work erected a while back—maybe years—I explained to the group.
Lon raked his fingers through damp hair, pulling it back from his forehead. “What kind of Æthyric being could stay alive outside a human body for years?”
A raspy voice answered at the back of the cabin, “A Rusalka. Is she here?”
We all pivoted toward the bunk. Captain Christie was feeling the wound on his head as he looked up at us with bloodshot eyes.
“You’re awake! Oh my God!” Jupe said, then lowered his voice. “Wait—are you okay? Do you know where you are?”
“My head is killing me, I know that. I’m a little fuzzy on the rest.”
“I’m so, so sorry,” Jupe said, almost close to tears.
But if Christie knew what the kid was blubbering about, he didn’t show it. He only pushed himself up to his elbows and said, “What’s going on?”
“Take it easy,” Lon cautioned. “You probably have a concussion.”
Well, at least he wasn’t doomed to a life as a mute dullard. Jupe’s knack wasn’t permanent. Lesson learned the hard way.
I gave the old coot the lowdown. “Lightning struck the boat. Bridge is fried. Likewise the controls down the hall.”
“Oh, God! My poor girl,” he moaned.
“Yeah, well, there’s more. The lightning took down your ward. We’re in the middle of a nasty storm—same one that threw you around and knocked you out. Lon shot a few flares, but who knows if anyone saw them. And now there’s a creature onboard, so I recharged the cloaking spell on this room. Your turn.”
“You’re a magician?”
“It’s your lucky day.”
“I knew that halo of yours was strange,” he muttered.
“Not as strange as what’s in your kitchen.”
He groaned and sat up in the bed. “I first encountered her about ten years ago. She lives in Diablo Reef—where I was taking you. She used to live off the coast of an island between Russia and Japan called Shumshu. The guy who sold me this boat lured her over here in the nineties. She’s . . . uh, intense.”
We all stared at him as he pointed toward the bite mark on his leg.
“She’s Æthyric,” I said.
He nodded.
“Rusalka is a mythological Russian water spirit,” Lon argued. “A nymph.”
She damn sure didn’t look like a nymph to me. Nymph sounded cute, sexy even. Not something you’d call a three-headed monster.
“That’s just what the people who found her called her,” the captain said. “She’s more like a water demon. A kind of mermaid.”
“I knew it!” Jupe whispered hotly, his body vibrating with excitement.
“How is she living on earth?” I asked.
“She’s not exactly alive, per se.” The captain winced. “She’s sort of dead.”
“Mermaid ghost?” Jupe said, seeming to increase in height a couple of inches as he prepared himself to be proven right and thus the winner of every argument he’d had with his father.
“More like a zombie. She used to be an Æthyric demon. According to her, some magician summoned her at the moment she was dying, and because of that she somehow got reanimated here. She says it happened three hundred years ago.”
“Zombie mermaid,” Jupe mouthed to me.
“Hold on,” Kar Yee said, eyes narrowed on Christie. “If I choose to believe all this crap, and the only reason I might is because I saw something climb up the window—”
The captain moaned and covered his eyes.
“And if you’ve warded the boat against this mermaid, and she’s bit you, then I’m going to assume she’s dangerous.”
“Deadly,” he confirmed.
“Is she like a siren?” Jupe asked. “Should we be covering our ears?”
“She lost that ability when she died. But if the ward’s down, she’ll do whatever it takes to get to me. She’s tracked me down from a hundred miles away and almost killed three of my passengers before. We gotta get that ward up.” He looked at me with desperate, pleading eyes. “Can you recharge it?”
A specialized ward that big? It would be a struggle in the best of situations and take a hell of a lot more current than the batteries I’d tapped to charge the room. Would also require me to expose myself to the creature roaming the yacht for an extended amount of time.
“Absolutely not,” Lon said. “We need to call for help. Is there another VHF?”
He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. “A hand-held unit in the engine room.”
Lon looked at me. “I can make a run for it.”
“Fat chance,” the captain said. “She’s got a wicked sense of smell. She’ll be on you in seconds if she’s anywhere on this boat.”
“Maybe I can use my knack on her,” Jupe suggested.
“No,” Lon and I said together.
Jupe grimaced and scratched the back of his neck. “Just trying to help.”
“Can she be killed?” Lon asked the captain. Then added, “Again?”
“Not that I know of. If she’s got a weakness, I’ve never discovered it. And I’ve been dealing with her for almost twenty years. Best thing you can do is hide.”
Screw that. I wasn’t sitting around in this tiny room waiting for someone to spot us. God only knew where we were, and the last thing the captain had told us before Jupe messed with his mind was that nothing was on the radar for miles.
I considered our options. I had a series of sigils on my inner arm tattooed in white ink: one of them was a temporary spell that could render me nearly invisible. Might be able to use this to find the handheld VHF radio, but I wasn’t entirely sure how well it covered up scent. Wasn’t sure I wanted to find out, either.
Even if I could make it back without her attacking me, even if we could radio for help, what would happen when help came? If the captain was right, and she’d taken down his other passengers, what would she do to the rescue team? Or to us?
I wasn’t taking a chance. Not with my family and friend on the boat.
Still, there was something I could do, and it hadn’t failed me yet.
“Can you still use your weather knack?” I asked the captain.
“Yes.”
I held up a hand and shook my head. “Don’t use it quite yet.”
“Why?”
“Your mermaid is Æthyric. And that means she can be bound.”
“That’s how they transported her here from Russia,” the captain agreed.
I gave him a tight smile and reached inside my jacket pocket. “Let’s set a trap, shall we?”
It was a pain in the ass, what with the cramped space and the boat rocking and the pressure of being moments away from death at sea, but I managed to draw an Æthyric level binding triangle on the floor of the captain’s quarters with a broken stick of red ocher chalk. Everyone but the old man sat on the narrow bunk, an unhappy audience squished together like sardines.
“Okay, Christie. Ready to play bait?”
Sweat beaded on the bridge of his nose. “Not really.”
“Stand here,” I instructed, ignoring him and pointing a narrow space between the base of the triangle and the outer cabin wall.
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“You sure you can trap her? She’s fast.”
“I’m sure.” I wasn’t.
Caduceus in one hand, I knelt by the side of the door on the other side of my handiwork, which amounted to a potent series of scrawled arcane symbols and words forming three sides of the trap and ready to be awakened with magick. After loosening my neck, I exhaled and wielded a pocketknife I’d borrowed from Lon. It only took a few quick gouges to scratch out an integral symbol on the doorframe that had been holding the cloaking spell together. Without it, the bright-white Heka charging the spell fizzled, popped, and faded.
I dropped the pocketknife and unlocked the door. Slid it open. Crouched out of sight.
We were now sitting ducks.
Some kinds of magick are semi-permanent and all-inclusive, like the ward on the yacht and the cloaking spell: when activated, they can be crossed freely. As long as the cloaking spell was charged and the symbols intact, you could step in and out of the room without worrying about breaking the spell. It’s like a public park: anyone can use it.
But a binding trap is different. It’s temporary, and it has a one-way charge. As long as the charge is active, whatever is trapped inside it cannot leave; however, it can be broken from the outside. All it took was a single toe over the triangle’s border to fizzle the charge.
This meant that I had to light the charge while the demon was inside the trap. That could be tricky. If I didn’t trap the Rusalka mermaid in time, she could move right through the uncharged trap and attack the captain. I had a tiny window to charge it while she was standing inside the triangle . . . before she wised up to the situation.
It was a risk, sure, but so were our other choices. I looked up at Jupe, who would, if I failed, have to rely on Lon’s flare gun to protect him from the Rusalka. I hoped to God it wouldn’t come to that.
My hands shook. Heart hammered against my rib cage. I waited, muscles straining, as I listened for movement outside the quarters.
It didn’t take long.
I heard a clatter in the salon. The sound of flesh slapping on kitchen tile. And when a bolt of lightning briefly cast her slithering shadow along the far wall of the corridor, I held my breath and braced myself.
A pair of large, flat feet stepped through the doorway. The skin was covered in glossy, iridescent scales the color of dried seaweed. The bone structure of her legs was decidedly nonhuman: the two legs almost melded together as one when her feet were aligned.
And it only got stranger above the waist.
She had small breasts, a curvy, hourglass waist, and long arms ending in webbed fingers. And sitting on her shoulders like a mythological dragon or something out of a Lovecraft story were three slender necks bearing the three heads I’d earlier seen in silhouette.
I’d summoned a few demons with weird appendages: tails, cloven hooves, wings . . . but I’d never seen a multi-headed demon outside a medieval engraving in a musty goetic tome.
And the faces on the three heads weren’t ugly. Despite being hairless and covered in brackish scales, her faces were quite lovely. All three of them.
“Richard,” she said from each her mouths, slightly out of sync. Her voices were roughly etched with a strange vibrato. Rows of gills lining the sloping tops of her shoulders opened and closed when she talked.
“Hello, Onna,” the captain replied nervously.
“Where ever have you been?”
She stepped farther into the room as Christie crushed himself against the wall. She had one foot in the binding. I just needed her to take one more step.
“You are hurt,” one of her heads said, craning to see him better with shiny black eyes that didn’t blink.
“Uh . . . yes . . .”
She held out a hand and stepped into the middle of the triangle.
Bingo.
I reached out for current. The source I’d tapped for the cloaking spell was almost dry, but that’s why I wanted Christie’s weather knack on idle until I was finished. I concentrated and searched farther away, waiting to catch something in the storm. I found it almost immediately and tugged.
Lightning was so raw and wild. It fluctuated. Ebbed and flowed. One second I was pulling as hard as I could and getting nothing—the next I was flooded with current. My insides roiled. Skin itched. Breath stolen. Heka roared inside me, bouncing around my cells as it sucked in the electricity I was siphoning.
One of the Rusalka’s heads snapped toward me. Crud.
I wasn’t ready—I needed more Heka. The captain was supposed to distract her—we’d discussed this. He knew I needed time to charge the trap. The bastard was too caught up in his own cold sweat to help me.
“Hey!” Lon shouted, redirecting her attention.
Helpful, but not ideal. Lon could handle himself, but I didn’t want the creature’s attention shifting beyond him, where Kar Yee’s and Jupe’s faces peered from their hiding place at the foot of the bunk.
All the hairs on my body stood on end, and I felt as if I might implode. That was my saturation point.
Just as the creature hunched down and prepared to attack Lon, I touched the chalked edge of the triangle with the tip of the caduceus and pushed.
Heka flew through the wooden stave and lit up the trap like a spotlight in a Broadway show.
She tried to leap at Lon and slammed into the magical barrier.
Got her!
An eerie, out-of-tune keening echoed through the cabin as she looked down and realized what had happened. But I was too busy feeling sick to boast more than a fleeting bit of triumph. My stomach dropped and knotted in pain, bringing tears to my eyes. I balled up like a cooked shrimp outside the trap, half certain that I’d seriously injured myself. Maybe the lightning strike on the bridge had done more damage to me than I’d originally thought.
Lon’s voice rumbled near my ear. “Breathe.”
As his warm hand rested on my back, I forced myself to calm down and follow his instruction. Breathing was good. Breathing was normal. My muscles eventually slacked. Insides unknotted. I stretched out of my I’m-going-to-die position and rolled over to face the demon. Roaring like a caged tiger, she railed against the barrier in a whirlwind of impossibly fast kicks and punches, gills rapidly opening and closing, teeth gnashing.
“You tricked me,” the Rusalka said to Christie in her triple voice.
“I’m sorry,” he said, still flattened against the wall as if he didn’t trust the trap.
All three heads lunged toward him as she pointed a webbed finger at his face. “We have a pact. You hid from me. You tricked me.”
“Now, Onna . . . I, uh . . .”
I slanted a glance at the captain as Lon helped me to my feet. “What is she talking about?”
Onna’s heads rotated toward me. “Who are you?”
“I’m the one who trapped you. You are bound by me so you must answer me honestly.” A simplified version of a standard magical contract that magicians had been using for hundreds of years.
“Are you Richard’s lover?” Onna asked.
“What? God, no.”
“She’s just a passenger,” the captain said.
Onna’s left head rotated toward me. “But she’s a mage.”
“And something else,” the middle one added, her eyes narrowing suspiciously.
The third head joined the other two, and they spoke in unison again. “If I am bound by rules, then so are you, mage. This Earthbound man has entered into a pact with me that he dishonored. I demand you release me from this prison and allow me vengeance.”
I glanced at Christie. “What is she talking about? You didn’t say anything about a pact.”
“Yes, well, I’m not sure it was exactly a pact, per se. It was more like a gentleman’s agreement—”
“Lies!” Onna’s three heads shouted. “I gave you my body to consummate our agreement.”
Several of us groaned at the same time.
“Captain Christie!” I prompted.
He looked at me, wiped
his sweaty forehead with the sleeve of his shirt, then looked to Lon. “Come on. Think about it—three mouths. How could I resist?”
“Gross,” Jupe murmured from the bunk.
Great. Now he’d be asking about that later.
“Did you make an agreement with her in exchange for sex?” I asked the captain.
“My body was not the bargain,” the demon said. “It was the seal. The bargain was that I would teach him ancient secrets about dark magicks.”
Some Æthyric demons had magical knowledge: it was the main reason magicians summoned them, to learn new tricks. “What kind of magick?”
One head swiveled in my direction. “Magick to control the weather.”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” Kar Yee mumbled.
“You aren’t really a cloudbuster?” I asked. “That’s not your natural knack?”
The captain offered me a sheepish smile. “I don’t have a knack. She taught me a simple trick, that’s all. And it doesn’t work like I thought it would—it only keeps clouds away. I can’t change the temperature or make it rain.”
“It keeps storm clouds away,” Lon corrected, looking out the small, round window over the bunk, where a sliver of blue sky was beginning to clear around the yacht. “That’s a pretty fucking handy knack for a sailor to have.”
“I did not trick him,” the demon said. “I taught him everything I knew.”
“In exchange for what?” I asked.
Onna tucked all three chins close to her necks and stared down at the captain with a look of defiance. “That he would be my husband.”
O-o-ohh. Now the whole pact-sealed-with-consummation made more sense.
Kar Yee, the pragmatist, asked the most pertinent, nonsexual question we all were thinking: “He can’t live underwater—how was he supposed to be your husband?”
“Our agreement was that he would visit me once a fortnight,” the first head explained.
“He only upheld the bargain for one year,” the second added.
“He promised me a lifetime,” said the third.
“I was young and reckless,” the captain argued.
“You were thirty and eight years,” Onna said in unison.
