by L.J. Hayward
Chapter 1
The great white shark attacked, massive jaws wide. The tuna jerked out of its reach and the jagged teeth snapped shut on water only. Momentum carried the large shark into the floating cage, rocking it violently. Its rough skin grated against steel as the fish rolled away, tail thrashing clear of the water as it strived to dive back into the depths. As the caudal fin slapped down, a great fountain of water splashed over the rack hanging from the back of the ship.
A raucous cheer went up from the people gathered on the rack. They laughed and pointed to the still rocking cage, and called up to their fellows on the deck above, teasing them for being so far away from such a spectacular sight. One of the divers in the cage rose to the top and stuck a hand up through the gap. The signal he gave was a delighted thumbs up, eliciting another round of cheers.
Tom Ellis, on the deck, waved back and hoisted in the rope he dangled over the side of the ship. The tuna head secured to the end came out of the water, tattered from the attempts of the sharks to snatch it. The guests encouraged him to hurl it back out, eager for another close encounter.
Amaya leaned on the railing beside Tom, a tray of toasted snacks balanced on one hand. “You’d think they’d get tired of it after a while,” she mused, watching the excited people on the rack. “Especially after having their feet dunked in fifteen degree water over and over.”
To illustrate her point, the ship rocked up and down. The rack, positioned so its base sat on the water surface, dipped knee deep into the chilly southern Indian Ocean. Like a horde of drunken revellers at a bucks party, the rack population cheered even this.
Tom laughed. “If they ever got tired of it, we’d be out of jobs, Amaya. Did you ever think of it that way?”
“Well, there is that,” she conceded.
Tossing the tuna head back out into the water, Tom scanned the ocean for the telltale shadow of an approaching shark. The people not lucky enough to be on the rack or in the dive cages gathered at the railing around Amaya and Tom, staring intently. Tom’s job wasn’t to feed the sharks, but to lure them in to thrill the people on the ship. If a shark approached, he had to ensure it didn’t actually get the tuna.
“And you have to admit, even after all the time you’ve been on the ship, you’re still fascinated by the sharks.” Tom glanced at her, expression slyly knowing.
She picked up a toastie and shoved it in his mouth. “I’m here to cook, nothing more. Watch the water. You lose another bait and Nick’ll have your head on a rope, bobbing in the water.”
He crunched on the toastie and contemptuously jerked the rope. The tuna head shot backwards through the water. The shark prowling by twisted lightning fast and lunged after it. Snout and teeth surging out of the water drew happy gasps from most people and cameras clicked madly.
“Show off,” Amaya said and moved away.
She spent a while taking the tray of snacks around the guests on the ship. To a person they were hyped up. Today was a record day. Eighteen individual great whites and it was barely lunch time. And the beasts were particularly playful. Both of the surface cages had been put out and every diver was desperate to get in and experience the great predators in their element.
Finishing with the guests, Amaya made the rounds of the crew. Some were fishing off the bow, though it didn’t seem to be going so well. Amaya asked them to try for ocean whiting and promised to make lemon and herb crumbs if they succeeded. She left them with a zeal in their eyes for whiting. More were mid-decks operating the crane on the bottom cage, including Nick.
Dr Nick Carson, one of the leading authorities on great white sharks in the world. When he wasn’t on the international lecture circuit, he was most often found at the Neptune Islands, cataloguing tagged sharks, tagging new ones and doing his best to dispel the ‘vicious killer’ myths around the beasts. It helped immensely that he was young, handsome and charming. But none of those traits were why Amaya was with him.
For her it was something different, something deeper.
And, yeah, it was just an added bonus that he had a cute arse.
Amaya slid in beside him, her hand trailing over that arse lingeringly.
“Hey, babe.” He leaned over the side of the ship, peering into the water. Dark hair flopped over his forehead and into his blue eyes. Amaya’s fingers itched with the need to brush it out of his way. He would just shake his head and back it would go.
“Hungry?” she asked.
“Nah.”
She handed him a toastie anyway and he ate it, then reached for another one.
“Problem?” she asked, looking over the side of the ship.
“Nah.”
The water was a deep blue in the shade of the ship. Amaya could just make out the shape of the bottom cage and the quick flitting fish around it.
“Then what’s so interesting down there?”
“Dunno. Just have a feeling, I guess. Like something bad is coming.” With visible effort he lifted his gaze to her face and smiled sheepishly. “Probably just hunger.”
Giving in, Amaya fixed his hair. “Probably. Hot dogs for lunch today. How many do you want?”
“Are they proper hot dogs? Or just saveloys rolled up in bread?”
“I’ll never live that down, will I?”
“Nope. Anyone would think you’d never seen a real hot dog before. And you being a chef and all.”
Amaya offered him the last toastie. He took it and she batted him over the head with the empty tray. He caught her around the waist and kissed her hard.
Dropping the tray, Amaya wrapped her arms around him and surrendered to the kiss. Heat threaded through her body from the lips down, coiling deep in her abdomen. He pushed her against the side of the ship, bent her back over the railing.
“For Christ’s sake, get a cabin,” Saul muttered.
Laughing, Nick released Amaya. She wobbled a bit, and it wasn’t from the rocking of the ship.
Saul Baker, the ship’s engineer, scowled at them good naturedly.
“I’d better go get lunch started.” Amaya picked up her tray and scurried away before Nick could catch her again.
“Two,” Nick called out after her.
She scrambled up the steps to the upper deck and into the door leading down to the galley. In her cramped kitchen, she hurriedly prepared lunch for the guests and crew. Graeme helped her dispense the hot dogs while they were warm, a caddy of sauces hung around his neck.
When everyone was happily munching down, Amaya escaped to the mizzen deck with a cup of tea and a book. Leaning against the mizzen mast, Amaya surveyed the ship. She was the Renata Rose, a 1920s schooner out of Holland, her original masts still standing proud even though she’d had an engine installed in the forties. Refitted many times, she was as hardy as any modern built ship, but with an old world charm that drew many a person wishing to experience something unique. For some, the draw was in the sharks the Rose chased across the southern ocean. For others it was the sharks and the ship, passing over the other tour operations utilising pristine, sleek motor cruisers.
For Amaya, it was Nick. His passion was great white sharks and he’d turned that passion into a business by opening up his research to the public. Of course, he charged them an arm and leg—hopefully not literally (so he said in his ship safety speech)—for the pleasure of helping him catalogue the shark population around the Neptune Islands off the coast of South Australia. And Nick was Amaya’s passion. She’d follow him anywhere.
Under the warming sun of a southern, late spring day and to the ragged chorus of overjoyed shark enthusiasts, Amaya drifted into a shallow trance. It was a relaxed state where her body was able to recharge and the constraints on her thoughts eased.
Her awareness spilled outward, a dam overrunning its banks. The minds on the ship chatted at her with wild insistence. Excited, overwhelmed thoughts crowded in around her. She pushed past them. If she wanted to hear what the guests had to say, she would have sat on the deck with them and listened with mundane ear
s. Instead she quested a bit further and dipped down into the water.
Instincts were clearer to read than thoughts. They were simple and direct. The sharks were nothing but instinct. They swam and they looked for food, they swam and they looked for a mate. When they found either, they did what was necessary, then swam on. To do so, they had eight sensory methods. Not five, or if you wanted to stretch it, six. Eight. With that much information coming in, Amaya could understand why there was no time for pesky things like conscious thought.
Life was so much easier when instinct ruled.
She drifted with the circling sharks, filtering all the complex information of their senses into her own, trying to numb her mind to the screaming demands of human existence. She wanted to float, to be swayed by the currents, to answer to the call of hunger and lust only if she wanted to, not because someone else deemed it normal.
Then, on the edges of her perceptions, came something big. It was primal, pure instinct, but its weight warped everything around it. Amaya had a moment only to touch it, to recognise it, before a bright, sharp lance of pain pulled her back onto the ship and into her body.
Stunned, she looked at her hand, where she’d felt the pain. Nothing there.
Nick.
She was on her feet and clattering down the stairs from the mizzen deck without thought. Rushing back toward mid-deck brought her right to Nick and Saul, coming in the other direction. Saul had a hand under Nick’s arm, supporting him. Nick was bare-chested, holding the thick wad of his rolled up shirt to his right hand. His face was pale.
“What happened?” Amaya took Nick from Saul.
“It’s just a cut,” Nick muttered.
“It’s nearly a severed hand.” Saul opened the door to the stern companionway.
Grimacing, Nick said, “I guess this is the bad thing I sensed.”
“Let’s hope so,” Amaya said.
In Amaya and Nick’s cabin, Amaya unwound the blood soaked shirt while Nick tried not to show any pain. There was a deep slash right across the middle of his palm. The flap of skin between thumb and first finger was cut right through. When Amaya mopped away the blood, there were glints of white bone for a second before red welled once more.
“How did it happen?” Amaya asked Saul.
“We were pulling up the bottom cage when a line snapped. Took him right across the hand.”
The lines were all steel wire an inch thick. It was a wonder Nick hadn’t lost fingers, let alone his whole hand.
“Did the cage get up okay?”
“Yeah. Everything’s fine, except for Captain Courageous there.”
“Put a bandaid on and I’ll be fine.” Nick’s voice was stretched around the pain and sounded brittle.
“It’ll need stitches,” Amaya said. “I’ll get Tom.” Tom doubled as their medic.
“Stay and keep up the show for the guests,” Nick said, trying for stern and getting barely to firm.
“I hardly think anyone’s going to care if they can’t –”
“Amaya. It’s a record day. Keep them entertained and keep watching the tags. I can’t let this opportunity to mark as many sharks as possible slip by. Please?”
It was the please that did it. He didn’t have to ask, but that he did meant something to her.
Leaving Nick with Saul, Amaya went and told Tom what had happened. He immediately handed over the bait rope and went to tend Nick. Amaya wasn’t fond of teasing the sharks, but if Nick wanted it, then she would give it.
Amaya climbed down the ladder to the rack.
“Where’s Tom going?” Angelique, one of the American guests, asked. She was blond and bubbly, used the word ‘awesome’ far too much and had a big crush on Tom.
“To help Nick,” Amaya said, moving to a corner of the rack. Though space on the rack was a highly coveted thing, they gave her room happily enough. Whosoever holds the tuna-rope is as God. “There was a small accident. Just a cut hand,” she added hastily when the guests got that OMG!-man-overboard! look.
To a chorus of understanding ‘aahs’, Amaya stepped up onto the lower rung of the railing around the rack. Bracing her knees against the upper rung, she hauled in the tuna head. Like Pavlov’s dogs, the guests focused on the water at the signal of the tuna-rope.
The men in the crew preferred to stand on the deck and be up high to look for the sharks. Amaya liked to be on the rack. Closer to the water meant she didn’t have to look for the sharks, she could just feel them.
Easing into a near trance, Amaya let her senses fly into the water once more. Tuna-rope ready, she felt a shark approach and tossed the bait. The shark crashed out of the water and down on the bait, but she pulled it away in time. The guests oohed with appreciation and Amaya repeated it.
She’d been at it for about fifteen minutes, chatting with two tourists from South Africa, when she felt it.
It was that thick, primitive force she’d touched on the mizzen deck. It wasn’t a shark, it wasn’t a predator of the ocean at all. It was a dark, questing power created by grief and rage—two powerful emotions that weren’t about to be denied.
There was a moment for her to think, ‘Oh no, not again’, and then it drove deep into her guts, digging in like a barbed hook. Gasping in pain, Amaya lost her balance and tipped forward. The ocean full of sharks rushed up to catch her.
Chapter 2
Six months ago, I took down one of the biggest, meanest supernatural beasties in the world. They’re called Primals and they’re the great-grandparents of the vampire race. Think mega-vampires that go out in sunlight and swap bodies the way we swap undies. Scary, huh? There’s seven of them, including the one I decapitated. She didn’t die. They’re so immortal nothing will ever get rid of them. I suspect if the Earth blew up, they’d still be there, floating amongst the debris, bickering about who got sucked into the black hole first. They’re that powerful. And I did for one of them in about as total a way as anyone could.
With such a big credential stuffed down the front of my pants, I was sure to be in hot demand to dispense more supernatural arse kicking. Like a lawyer who wins the un-winable case. Or the doctor who performs the one in a million operation. Or the mechanic who works out what that clunking noise in the back of your car is. Near god-like.
So why was I head down, arse up, stuffed to my shoulders in some dusty, cobweb filled hole reaching around blindly for something the size of a rat?
“Have you got it yet?”
Mrs Arnold’s voice came to my ears very muffled. As it had to travel through thick shag pile carpet laid down in the seventies, on top of linoleum, which in turn sat on top of a layer of newspaper from the Mesozoic era, it’s not surprising that what I heard was ‘Ham moo moet?’ Luckily, I have ESP. Extra sensory presumption. It means I have this unbelievable talent for guessing and occasionally, I get it right.
“Not yet,” I replied and didn’t bother wondering if she understood. In truth, I was trying pretty hard not to breathe. The crawl space under Mrs Arnold’s living room had not been crawled through by anything larger than a stunted mouse for a very long time.
There was about half a foot of dust upon which time’s tidal ebb had left a mess of detritus. Said stunted mouse had died a while back and his skeleton curled in the corner by my head. There were rusted nails; scraps of newspaper; a dried out spider husk that might have very well been the thing that killed the mouse (either scaring it to death or by sitting on it); a coiled length of barbed wire that seemed too new to have been lost before the laying down of the geological strata of floor coverings, and things I couldn’t—or didn’t want to—recognise.
My shoulders ached from having my arms stretched over my head and from being jammed in a hole Mrs Arnold wouldn’t let me expand because ‘this house is heritage listed, young man, have some respect for your cultural foundations’. There were twinges in my neck that were probably the start of muscle spasms. My right foot had gone to sleep, thanks to being squashed between the wall and China cabinet (which I was not a
llowed to touch either, ‘Wedgwood, young man!’). And my freakin’ torch decided at that moment to die.
Between me, the floorboards, the corner foundation of the house and the ground, there wasn’t a lot of space left to shake the bastard thing, but shake I did. Hey, it always worked in the movies. And sure enough, a hard shake brought the light back on. Pity that it took a smack against my head to work. And then the bloody thing was pointed right in my eyes when it came on.
“Argh.” My startled cry blew up a cloud of dust into my face, which I promptly sucked in.
“Did you find it?” Mrs Arnold asked through my ESP.
There aren’t letters to express the true cadence of my response, so we’ll leave it up to imagination. However Mrs Arnold’s imagination dealt with it, her entire response was something about getting a real pest man to come get rid of her problem. Ignoring her, I scanned the torch around the dark crawl space.
The beam fell onto a big lump that was even more out of place than the barbed wire—or not, depending on what you expected to find in crawl spaces, which in turn probably depended on the type of movies you watched. I have a t-shirt that says ‘Attention ladies: I watched “The Notebook”’. (Okay, I haven’t—watched the movie that is—but I do have the shirt.) I’m firmly in the ‘fully expect to find ghastly things in the crawl space’ camp, but I don’t admit that on first dates.
Mr Wibbles, a prize winning Burmese cat of remarkable proportions, was pretty much reduced to mince meat. If you liked your mince to have fur and bones. I don’t and I’m guessing most folk don’t, but apparently imps do.
The creature crouched amongst the bloody remains, cheeks bulging with, judging from the scraps it had yet to eat, liver. It was, from pointed head to barbed tail, about a foot long, humanoid in shape and covered in greyish-red, wrinkly skin. About the biggest feature on it, apart from the tail, was its nose, which jutted out from its face like Pinocchio at a sports-scandal press conference. It had a pair of stubby wings on its back.
So far, the imp hadn’t noticed me. It just kept stuffing its face, humming to itself. Imps were even more totally self-absorbed than your average paparazzi-baiting tween starlet. It was hard to get their attention, and really, why would you want it? They were foot long garbage disposal machines with less intelligence than a brain-dead chicken. Still, they didn’t mix with human civilization too well. When their natural food source ran short, they took to scavenging. However, you didn’t find them head first in your knocked over garbage bin. Rather, you often caught fleeting glimpses of them while they were carting off your Chihuahua, or dragging your prize winning Burmese through a hole in the floorboards.
Imps. Small demons but they make up for it in ‘eww’ factor.
In the hand not holding the torch, I had a tiny tape player. I’d gotten a very strange look from the guy in the electronics shop when I’d rushed in and demanded one. He’d tried to sell me an MP3 player with speakers, and couldn’t understand why I thought that would be just a tad clunky. When I’d rushed next door to the music shop, they’d looked at me even more strangely when I asked for a cassette to play in my hard won tape player. Luckily, there are some people who still buy tapes, but probably owing to the personality type that would refuse to move into the digital age, the selection of tapes was thin.
I hit the play button.
I’m a big fan of music in general, and an ever bigger fan of good music in particular. And, as in everything in life, each to his own, right? Still, whoever had decided the world loved Irish folk songs enough to keep releasing them should never have sold the rights to whoever decided pan pipes were really cool.
Haunting, breathy strains of ‘Danny Boy’ echoed in the crawl space. It was all at once a totally absurd and eerie sensation—like elevator music piped into your head after your brains have oozed out of your ears. Whatever I thought of it, it worked.
Like a meerkat on look out, the imp sat up on its haunches and peered about. It saw me and tilted its head. Strings of livery flesh hung from its mouth, blood and gore splattered across its body. Slowly, it crept down from the mound of its meal and inched toward me. It came in hesitant bursts, rushing forward, stopping to look around for danger, then forward again, panicking and darting back.
Music was the one thing guaranteed to hold an imp’s attention, other than its stomach, of course. The little demon scuttled forward, tail swishing, head cocked to locate the source of the music. It didn’t notice me putting down the torch. Heck, it probably didn’t even realise I was there at all.
As soon as it got close enough, I made a grab for it. The imp realised too late and couldn’t evade me. I caught it around its scrawny neck and it squealed. The high pitched, eardrum-bursting cry drowned out the music. My teeth resonated in my head on a frequency set to crystal-shattering. The creature’s claws raked at my hand, its itty bitty teeth tried to dig in. Imps are stronger than their size would have you believe, and they’re fanatically ferocious, but the most they can down are your average household pets. It had no chance against me. Besides, I was wearing thick welding gloves.
Wriggling backwards, I hauled my upper body and imp out of the hole. We came out in a burst of dust and cobwebs and fingernails-down-the-chalkboard wails. Mrs Arnold gave her own little scream, back peddled quickly, hit her floral-patterned recliner and sat down so hard the footrest popped out and shot her legs into the air. Eyeballs full of grit protected her from any impropriety on my part.
Working blind, I groped about for the cat carrier I’d brought along. I found it and shoved the imp in and jerked my hand out a second before slamming the door and securing it. The demon cried some more, then stopped. A moment later, the sounds of eating emerged from the dark corner of the carrier.
No, I hadn’t killed a poor defenceless animal for it to eat. It was cat food.
“Oh my, oh my,” Mrs Arnold was saying when my ears recovered.
“It’s okay, Mrs Arnold. I got it. It won’t be bothering you anymore.”
She floundered for a moment, then managed to get the footrest down and the chair swung forward so she could look at me. Her eyes were wide and her hair pretty much stood on end. One hand fluttered at her chest.
“Are you feeling okay?” I hauled myself to my feet and went to check her pulse.
She slapped my hand away hard enough to make me yelp.
“Don’t you touch me, you pervert!”
“I’m not a pervert, Mrs Arnold. Honestly.” I stepped back and held my hands up in unconditional surrender. “I just wanted to make sure you’re okay. I’m a trained paramedic.”
Feisty old eyes narrowed. “And you sideline in pest control? I shouldn’t think so.”
“Hardly pest control,” I muttered. I could show her the imp in the cage, and we could argue about it until the cows came home for a change of undies and went out again, but I had a face full of dust, an aching back and prickling foot. Arguing about whether or not demons existed probably wasn’t what someone in that position, with my history, should do with an octogenarian. For both our sakes. This once, I’d let it slide.
“Now, did you see my Mr Wibbles down there? Is he all right?”
“Ah, yes, Mr Wibbles is down there.”
“Then back you go. Bring him up.”
I cringed. “You might not want to be here for that.”
“Why ever not?” Even as she asked, she understood. “Oh. No, I think I should be here.”
My mouth was open to protest, but she cut me off.
“Now, young man, I’m eighty-two years old. I’ve been around the block a time or two and I’ve probably seen some things to make you wet your pants. Mr Wibbles stuck with me when Mr Arnold passed and through my hip replacement. The least I can do is be here for him now.”
Ten minutes later, I was back in the hole, fishing around with an old hockey stick, dragging the bits and pieces of Mr Wibbles into range of the bucket I had to put him in. I mean, I couldn’t have left the carcass down there to rot and stink out Mrs Arn
old.
I was scooping the last of Mr Wibbles into the bucket when I heard something. A little mewling sound. From the outside world, there came an answering cry from the imp.
What the…?
They poured out of the shadows of the crawl space like a red tide. Tiny, tiny little imps, screaming tiny, tiny little supersonic war-cries. I gurgled a surprised scream of my own and hurried out of the hole. They came flocking out, wings buzzing like a swarm of killer wasps. The full grown imp in the cage set to caterwauling once more. The result was a cyclone of bone-rattling sound pitched at the very upper end of the human compatibility range.
I lay flat on my back, staring in disbelief at the baby imps spinning around the room. They weren’t terribly coordinated and they flew into walls and furniture with little thumps of impact. The figurines scattered throughout the room didn’t survive so well either. There was a tinkling crescendo of shattering porcelain.
Mrs Arnold was back in her chair and copped a fair few of the baby demons in her hair. They thrashed about and got hopelessly tangled. She sat in open mouthed shock. By good luck or sheer bad aiming, none of the imps flew into her mouth. I didn’t want to have to explain to anyone that I’d had to perform the Heimlich manoeuvre in order to dislodge a demon.
Thanks to the poor directional skills of the imps, it didn’t take long for them to batter themselves into unconsciousness. The last buzzed around the ceiling for a bit longer and then in a fit of panic, flung itself at the window. It smacked the glass hard and tumbled to the sill, where it sat and swayed before toppling over.
The adult imp was still kicking up a fuss in the cage, so I gave it sharp boot and knocked the cage into the wall. The imp crashed against the hard plastic and fell, splot, face first into the dish of cat food.
Sitting up, I surveyed the damage. A hasty count later, I pulled out my receipt book and started writing.
“Right, Mrs Arnold. That’s sixty-four—” A twitter under the China cabinet caught my eye. “Sixty-five… pests. My initial estimate may have been a bit short.”
