by Lauren Esker
It wasn't something she could entirely control, that wild urge to escape the invasion of her body, her soul. Lucia had done more than merely stabilize Dragon's Tears when she made it into a street drug; she'd managed to make the whole experience pleasant. This was nothing of the sort. Lucia's drug in its pure, unadulterated form tore through Jen's veins like fire, and turned her mind inside out. Dying might have been less terrible.
She never quite lost consciousness, even if it might have been a mercy. Slowly, she came back to herself, shaking. Marius was holding her against his chest, humming something low, a tune she didn't recognize. It sounded like a lullaby. Lucia was nowhere to be seen.
"Where," she murmured. Her voice came out cracked and broken. She must have been screaming. "Where's Lucia?"
The humming cut off, and Marius straightened a little. "She went to find Lucky."
"Lucky!" Jen struggled to sit up. A tearing pain went through her chest and she collapsed back against him.
"Don't move. She said you need to stay down for a while. And drink as much water as you can." The rim of a bottle pressed against her lips.
She took a few swallows because it was that or drown, before she managed to get a hand up—her arms seemed to weigh a thousand pounds—to push it away. "Lucky," she croaked.
Marius sighed. "If you lie there without moving until you drink two bottles of water, then I'll see about helping you up and we'll go find him, okay? Otherwise, I'm making you stay here if I have to sit on you."
"Asshole," she muttered.
He held the bottle for her until it was drained, one sip at a time. For the next one, she was able to sit up and hold it herself. Marius was sitting against the wall, with Jen in his lap, her back against his chest. Someone had put a blanket over her.
They seemed to be the only two people in the room. Neither Roxy nor her surviving bodyguard were anywhere to be seen. For that matter, someone had done something with the dead man's body, though the floor was badly stained with dark swaths of blood.
Jen had a bad feeling some of it was her own.
But the lights were back on, and the movement of the ship, though rough, was noticeably less wild. The engines had come back online. Rain lashed into the room through the shattered remains of the balcony doors with each roll of the deck; runnels of bloody water trickled onto the balcony, to be scrubbed away by the storm.
"What happened?" Jen demanded, between painful swallows. Her chest still ached terribly. She couldn't seem to take a deep breath.
"You haven't been out for long. How much do you remember?"
Her mind offered up a nightmare series of images she couldn't blink away. "Angel got me with his claws, and Lucky attacked him. They both—" She turned to look at the destroyed seaward-facing glass panels, the twisted remains of the sliding doors' frame. "They fell."
Marius gripped her arm, holding her down before she could do more than tense to get up. "Lucia's gone after them. Don't do anything rash."
"I drank my water. You said you'd help." Even knowing it was petty, she threw the plastic bottle across the room. On the next tilt of the deck, it rolled through the broken doors and vanished as the wind caught it, off to join its many brethren in the Pacific gyre.
Dammit, now she felt guilty about that too.
"If you're well enough to have a temper tantrum, I suppose you're well enough to walk." Marius got to his knees stiffly and put an arm around her. It took three tries for both of them to get to their feet.
"Oh," Jen said, discovering all over again that she was naked. "Maybe I should put on something first."
"Your room's across the hall."
"Handy," she conceded. They stumbled to the door like height-mismatched participants in a three-legged race, stopping only when Marius dragged them to a halt.
"And with the power back on," he reminded her, "we can't get into it without your key card."
"Which Roxy had."
They both looked around the room at the mess. Everything in sight was broken, trampled, and mixed together.
"Right," Jen announced. "Raiding Roxy's wardrobe it is then, if we can find anything that's not covered with blood and rainwater. Say, the bruises on your neck are almost gone."
"Yes, let's hear it for magical healing dragon drugs," Marius sighed. "Except for the headache, exhaustion, seasickness, and having been clawed again, not to mention the anticipation of withdrawal symptoms I suspect I'm headed for, I feel better already."
***
At first Lucky thought the churning of the water around them was due to their struggle. The truth dawned on him slowly, penetrating the haze clouding his mind: the engines were back on, and he and Angel, distracted by their fight, had been caught up in the undertow of the massive propellers. They were being pulled into them.
Probability, he thought, was what fluid dynamics was all about. The ebb and flow of currents: nothing but probability in action.
He had time for one last, desperate stab of regret, and then he made his choice and pushed with all his strength, with everything he had left in him ... and unlocked his jaws, with effort, from Angel's leg.
Currents, driven by Lucky's will, caught them and tore them apart, flinging Lucky away from the turbines' lethal pull—and Angel straight into them. Angel's teeth ripped through one of Lucky's flukes and then they were too far apart to reach each other. Only then did Angel realize what was happening. He thrashed, his sea-dragon fins spreading and expanding like sails, fighting the current with everything in his powerful body.
But he was in Lucky's element now. They swam in a sea that was made up of possibility, the position of each water molecule dependent upon a thousand forces acting on it—forces that Lucky could, for one brief and glorious instant, push in any way he wanted.
I'm sorry, Angel. I wish it hadn't come to this.
Aching inside and out, he pushed and fell away from his cousin into the cold blackness of the Pacific, even as the roiling waters above him were suddenly and oh so briefly tinted red.
Lucky sank, his gills fluttering weakly.
He'd told Jen that using his powers couldn't hurt him. In the normal course of events, that was true. He couldn't push probability to the point that he gave himself brain damage or passed out—at least, he didn't think so. But he could exhaust himself. And right now, between the fight and the amount of energy he'd just expended, he couldn't find the strength to swim ... or even to want to.
Was there even anything to go back to? He'd seen Angel stab Jen through the chest. If she survived, she was a federal agent and he was a crook—not just that, but a crook who, for the first time in his entire criminal career, had just deliberately killed someone.
What kind of future could they possibly have? He was alone; he'd always been alone. His family had left him. He couldn't keep friends or lovers, not with the secret he was hiding.
The dark was so complete that he was no longer sure if his eyes were open or closed. Hypoxia made him lightheaded and giddy; he wasn't moving enough to keep the water flowing properly through his gills. Cold and pressure bore down on him. Being able to breathe underwater wouldn't make him proof against drowning; it would only let him live long enough to feel himself being crushed.
He didn't want to die ... but he was having a hard time finding a good reason to muster up the dregs of his energy and start swimming again, either.
His cousin was dead, by Lucky's own hand. His beloved little sister, perhaps the last surviving member of his kind, had turned out to be a person he didn't know, and someone he wasn't sure if he wanted to know.
How many people had Angel killed? What about Lucia? How much death and misery had his people been responsible for, over the years?
Maybe we should be gone from the world. Maybe that's justice.
He sank ...
But it had been nice to see Lucia again, if only for a little while. Good to know she was all right. She hadn't grown up into the person he'd thought she'd be, but she was strong and tough and doing well
in life, and he was glad for that.
And he was glad, so glad, for those few short days he'd had with Jen. He wasn't sure if he could still influence anything happening on the ship, but with whatever vestiges of strength he had to give, he sent good luck her way. She was tough, too. She would make it. She had to.
Though, if he died down here, he'd never know whether she lived or not.
Sinking ...
He remembered standing back to back with Marius, partners against a greater enemy than each other. Remembered Onyeka, in spite of her distrust, braving sliding crates and battling dragons to help him in the cargo hold. And Roxy, a terrifying ally but an ally nonetheless, accepting his draconic nature and treating him no differently because of it.
Lucia, smiling: It's good to see you again.
Damn it ...
He opened his jaws, forcing them apart; even that was hard. The muscles felt rubbery. He gulped water, forcing it across his gills. It was so cold down here that the cold itself hurt him, and the pressure at this depth compressed his ribs and organs painfully.
He was too exhausted to manage more than weak thrashes of his flukes. He couldn't tell which way the surface was. Some part of him insisted there ought to be a way to figure it out, but thinking was hard. He was cold and impossibly tired.
I don't want to die here.
He lashed out, driving himself forward. Fish had ... had swim bladders, didn't they? Something to keep them from sinking when their fins weren't moving? His internal structure was more mammalian than that; he was still warm-blooded despite the gills, even in this form.
Not for long, at the rate things are going ...
He might be able to make himself more pressure-resistant. Messing with his own anatomy at this depth seemed a terrible risk, though. No margin for error. And he was so tired.
And then he wasn't alone in the water. Something came out of the dark, bumping against him. He thought at first that Angel had come back to finish him off, but all he could manage was a burst of weak, ineffectual thrashing.
Then he recognized who had come. He knew her smell in the water.
Lucia.
She gripped him with her forelegs. She'd given herself a hybrid water form, with a land dragon's front legs and long nether flukes for swimming. Lucky relaxed and let her carry him. He thought about shrinking to make it easier for her, but in his present state of exhaustion, he was just as likely to turn himself human by accident, and drown.
So he lay limp in her grasp, his flukes fluttering with the ripples of their passage, until their heads broke out of the water on the cap of a rolling wave. Seawater fountained from Lucia's jaws and she took a breath so she could speak.
"I told the crew the important thing was getting the ship out of the storm, not waiting for me," she shouted over the roar of the wind. "We might not be close to it anymore. Tell me if you see its lights."
They were tossed on an impossibly rough sea, rain and spray mixing until it was hard to tell where ocean ended and air began. Was that a flash of lights in the distance, or a flicker of lightning? Lucky swept his third eyelid over his eyes, trying to clear his blurry vision, and coughed out water, sealing his gills against his sides to answer. "That way, I think."
They both dove. It was instantly calmer below the surface. Lucia gripped Lucky again, and he beat his flukes weakly to help her swim.
He wasn't sure how long it took—swimming and surfacing into that stormy hellscape, diving and swimming again—before the glimpses of light resolved into a clear view of the ship. It appeared and vanished as it, and they, rose and fell on the tossing waves.
"No way we can get in from below," Lucia shouted. "Not in this. Can you fly?"
Lucky shook his head.
"Go small, then."
He was too tired to do it any other way than by shifting human, then to his smallest version. The effort nearly made him pass out, and he draped limply in Lucia's claws as she spread newly grown wings and beat her way laboriously out of the water.
It was almost as rough a ride in the air as on the sea, but they closed on the ship rapidly. Lucia banked in a long, sweeping circle. Below them, the Memphis's running lights glowed reassuringly through curtains of rain.
Still, the storm damage was clearly visible; broken windows gaped like gaps in teeth, and part of the sphinx's headdress was missing. As Lucia descended on the broken part of the headdress, he saw that one of the front paws had twisted back on itself, its entire structure warped and bent from the force of the waves they'd been fighting through.
Lucia's claws connected with a girder. Lucky tried to relax and not struggle, though it was hard as she held him against her with one clawed foot while using the other three legs to hop from girder to girder. They fell without warning, which he realized was deliberate only when Lucia landed squishily on sodden carpet in a room half exposed to the storm's fury.
Her wings, now unneeded, collapsed into her sides. On three legs with Lucky clutched to her chest, she scurried under what was left of the ceiling, and finally, blessedly got them behind a door that shut out the rain and wind.
Lucky closed his eyes. He was vaguely aware of movement, and opened his eyes again when something warm wrapped around him. He got his head upright and found that he had, without being aware of it, ended up in a large bathroom. The fixtures were gold, the walls touched with red accents. It was sumptuous and beautiful except for the fact that everything which could fall or break loose had done so, leaving the place a mess.
He was in Lucia's lap, wrapped in a towel. She had gone human-shaped and was sitting naked in the tub, toweling off her hair.
"Don't get up yet."
Lucky was more than happy to oblige. He was starting to notice pain again, and there wasn't a part of him that didn't hurt. His mouth tasted like salt and he was desperately thirsty.
"How did you find me?" he croaked.
"I smelled you out." Lucia touched her nose. "Followed the blood trail in the water."
He seemed to be bleeding on her towel. She was, in part, using the towel to keep pressure on the many lacerations Angel had inflicted on him.
"Jen?" he asked.
"She's okay. Sleeping it off right now, I think."
"She's sleeping off being stabbed in the chest?"
"Don't forget who you're talking to."
"You healed her." His voice broke in relief.
"If only I could heal you," she sighed. "Ah well. We are how we are."
She finished drying her hair and transferred him, leaving him wrapped in the towel, to the bottom of the tub.
"Where are you going?"
"To pick up a few things. Stay here."
He thought about disobeying her, shifting and going to look for Jen, but couldn't muster the energy to move. Instead he curled up with his tail over his nose. She'd said Jen was all right, and for now he was willing to go with that.
Lucia was back in a few minutes, dressed in a gold silk robe and carrying a bundle of items in her arms. "Shift back. This'd be easier if I could look at you."
He did so, sprawling out of the bathtub with his legs over the side. Lucia wrapped him in a blanket and gave him a bottle of water. He was nauseated enough that, despite his thirst, he could only manage small sips.
Lucia, sitting on the edge of the bathtub, examined his numerous bruises and gashes, disinfecting the worst of them. She braced a foot against the base of the sink to keep from being knocked off as the ship rolled.
"Where are we?" Lucky asked between sips of water. "Is this your private quarters?"
"What's left of them. I suppose the ship's been hurricane-tested and found wanting." She stuffed the used antiseptic wipes into a small trash bag. "I need to go. My ship needs me. Will you be all right?"
She'd chosen to help him rather than tending the ship. He was caught off guard by how much it touched him, although it was perhaps more a testament to her faith in her crew; he had no doubt she'd have been in the middle of things if it was mission-critica
l. "I'm not dying. I want to see Jen."
"Shift small and I'll carry you."
It took more effort than usual to get back to his tiny lizard shape. Lucia picked him up, and he tensed at first before he managed to relax in her hands. He closed his eyes and even the rocking of the unstable world was easier to deal with. Things moved around him, and he opened his eyes when Lucia tucked him into a nest made of a scarf at the bottom of one of her handbags.
"Tell me of Angel," she said quietly. "Is he dead?"
Lucky nodded.
"I'm sorry it had to be you."
He was too tired and hurt to deal with it right now. Instead he closed his eyes and curled up among the folds of the scarf.
He must have slept, because the next thing he knew a pair of hands were lifting him, and he knew her before he even opened his eyes. "Oh, Lucky," Jen breathed, cradling him.
She was alive. She was all right. He twined his tail around her wrist. "Where are we?" he asked in the small voice that was all he could manage from this tiny shape.
"Well, now we're in our room. I carried you back here. Lucia said it's all right to get some sleep now. The crew has the ship in hand and we're through the worst of the storm."
Lucky flicked out his tongue, tasting the salt of her skin. There was a bitter undertaste to it. "How are you?"
"I'll be okay," she said, although there was a slight catch in her voice. "Let's just sleep. I'm bushed. Lie with me."
She laid him out on something soft, and he mustered the strength to shift. The world made more sense through a human set of eyes, from a human-sized vantage point; he'd spent too much time human, perhaps, to be entirely comfortable the other way. They were in the bedroom in near-darkness, lit only by light shining in from the living room. All the lamps were broken, the bedcovers tangled in a snarled mess on the floor.
Sitting on the edge of the bed, Jen leaned over to pick up a pillow from the floor and dusted it off. She moved slowly and stiffly, but not like someone who was badly hurt. She was naked, and he could smell blood on her, but couldn't see her well enough to tell how injured she actually was.
