In the Dark of Dreams

by Marjorie M. Liu

  He frowned and left her.

  The moment he was gone, she went to Maurice’s dresser and scrabbled around until she found a sheathed blade in his underwear drawer. She dropped it in the waterproof pack, along with a bottle of ibuprofen and a container of matches. On an afterthought, she included a small signal mirror.

  Shouts echoed down the hall. She froze, heart pounding, and tried to listen to what they were saying. She caught a few words—no, you don’t understand—but then everything switched over into a tangled mess of clicks and snarls. Wood crashed. She jumped, frightened—then took one step down the hall, afraid not to look. If Les had gotten free . . .

  She heard Perrin’s voice. He sounded calm, unhurt.

  “Don’t tell me why,” he said. “Doesn’t matter anymore. But you won’t hurt her again.”

  “Would never,” Les said, his voice ragged, pained. “Not Jenny.”

  She flinched again, hearing her name—then twitched one more time as she listened to another crash, a meaty thud, a long groan. She tried to move, but her feet were frozen.

  “Not Jenny?” Perrin echoed, and the quiet fury in his voice stunned her. “You kept her tied up for two days. She had a fever. You tried to drown her. And I saw her shorts. If you touched her—”

  Jenny started and touched her waist. Her shorts were buttoned. She hadn’t done that. Had Perrin fastened them while she lay unconscious?

  She couldn’t listen anymore. Couldn’t think about it. Finally, her feet moved, and she wrenched herself around. Fleeing down the hall, another headache brewing at the base of her skull.

  Near the engine room, she dropped to her knees and pulled up a loose flap of carpet, revealing a small panel that slid open with one gentle push.

  The Russian SPP–1M was inside. Along with a box of bullets that had been torn open. She stared, thinking hard, and picked up the weapon. Checked the ammo.

  Four shots had been fired. The same number that had pierced that woman’s body.

  “What is that?” Perrin asked, behind her.

  Jenny flinched, startled. “You’re so quiet.”

  “Sorry.” He crouched, pointing. “Tell me.”

  She thought of the conversation she had overheard, the rage in his voice as he had accused Les of hurting her.

  “Your knuckles are bleeding again,” she said.

  His face revealed nothing, nothing but cold and shadows, and a quiet menace that should have terrified her.

  But she crouched there, holding his gaze—bold, unflinching—and felt no fear. She tried, she looked for it, she told herself to be uneasy—because that was smart, anyone should be uneasy of him—but her stomach didn’t hurt, and she wasn’t afraid.

  Just tired. Head hurting. Feeling used.

  I will never trust anyone ever again, she told herself, thinking of Les.

  Except for Maurice, she added.

  And this man, an insidious little voice whispered. Trust him.

  “My knuckles,” he said, slightly hoarse, “had to make a point.”

  She made a small sound. “Does that happen often?”

  He looked down, but not quick enough to hide the shame that flickered in his eyes. She also looked away and held up a bullet. Her hand shook.

  “This is ammunition for an underwater gun. I found . . . similar wounds . . . on the woman.”

  She tamped down the desire to explain modern weaponry. He seemed to know more than enough about humans already.

  Perrin took the bullet from her. “This is what killed her?”

  “It wounded her. I think it took her several days to die.” There was no good way to say that, but he needed the truth. She tried to gentle her voice.

  His jaw tightened. He still refused to look at her. If he did, Jenny suspected there would be grief in his eyes.

  Maybe he loved that dead woman. Maybe he had someone else. Children, even. She didn’t know how it worked amongst his kind or what his life was like.

  Just violent. Bitter. That much was written all over him.

  “Why would Les try to kill her? He did, didn’t he?”

  Perrin rubbed the back of his neck. “Later. Too much story.”

  “No. I’ve worked with him for years. I thought we were friends. I never guessed. And if he . . . if he used me—”

  “Were you close?” he interrupted sharply.

  “Don’t ask it like that.”

  “Did he . . . did he hurt you?” His tone wasn’t any gentler, but his voice roughened, and broke. She knew what he meant, though—and that question was almost worse. Jenny could still feel Les’s hands on her, unbuttoning her shorts. She settled back on her heels, staring at him. Staring, until he finally had the good sense to look down at the bullet in his hand.

  “No,” she said.

  He put down the bullet, very carefully. With equal care and silence, he opened up his other hand. The scale lay on his palm, on top of the pouch. It glimmered like a pearl from white to silver, to pale ice blue.

  “This was mine,” he said quietly.

  Jenny held out her hand. Perrin stared at the scale; and then, gently, gave it to her.

  “Thank you,” she whispered, finding that it hurt to look at him. She tucked the scale back into the pouch, which she placed into the waist pack. She stood, awkwardly. Perrin rose, too, watching her. Jenny could barely meet his gaze.

  “You look feverish again,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “I’m ready to go.”

  He placed his palm against her brow, but his hand trailed down to her cheek and stayed there. Made it hard to breathe. His eyes were so cold, but there was something else there, too. Hunger. Regret.

  “No secondary doors,” she whispered, trying to stay in control. “Have to go on deck if you’re planning on taking us into the water. We’ll be exposed. They all have weapons.”

  Perrin removed his hand. “We’ll move fast.”

  He had left the air tank at the end of the hall. Jenny checked the regulator to make certain it was mounted properly, and slowly opened the valve to check for air. She examined the pressure gauge, too. Quick, throat tight. Perrin helped her slide on the harness, and she tried not to stagger under the weight of the tank. She hated feeling so weak. He handed her a mask. “Let me do all the work. Just hang on.”

  Perrin hooked his fingers beneath the waist of his swim trunks and began to pull them down. Jenny tensed—he hesitated—and for the first time since encountering him, he seemed embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “I can’t shift—”

  “Yes, I know,” she said quickly, then added, “I have some experience with shape-shifters.”

  Perrin tilted his head, but Jenny didn’t want to answer the question in his eyes. She waved her hand at him, heat crawling into her cheeks. “Go, strip.”

  His mouth twitched. “Now I feel awkward.”

  Jenny stared at the ceiling, listening to cloth rustle. “You weren’t earlier.”

  “I didn’t have time to think about it.” His face appeared in her line of vision. She couldn’t look away from him, not even when he tugged the pack around her waist. She heard the seal suck open, listened as he pushed the shorts inside. He didn’t look away from her, either. Not once.

  Jenny stepped back, needing room to breathe. Rattled. Even when he finally dropped his gaze and turned from her to face the outer door, she suffered a jolt.

  His every little move made her heart feel heavy and strange, as though she had awakened never knowing another living creature, except him. Every gesture new. Every breath. Those eyes, and the way he looked at her.

  As though she was just as new to him.

  They made their way down the narrow corridor, and up a short set of stairs to the main salon and the outer door that led to the
aft deck. Her fingers trailed against the walls. Her home, another home she was running from.

  Perrin reached the door first and peered through the window. Jenny joined him. One of the boats had stopped circling and drifted in plain view. Men watched The Calypso Star, guns at the ready. Some watched the sky. Gulls winged overhead, hundreds of them. An eerie sight. Unexpected.

  Not so unexpected was the man who stood on deck.

  The mercenary. Alone, a gun held in his right hand, his eyes dark and narrowed as he stared at the door. He wasn’t tall, but he was whipcord lean, and looked fast. Jenny went very still on the inside when she saw him. Still and afraid.

  “Hello,” he called out, his surprisingly elegant voice carrying through the steel door and tinted bulletproof glass. “I know you’re there, Ms. Jameson. I can practically feel you breathing.”

  He turned in a slow circle, his gaze falling on the dead dolphin. “This doesn’t have to hurt.”

  Jenny whispered, “We’ll need a gun, after all.”

  “Fastest draw in the West?” Perrin rested his large hand on her back. “Wait.”

  She looked up at him. He was staring out the window at the mercenary, expression cold, hard, his gaze so level and intense she wondered if mermen could kill with a stare. Because if they could, she suspected that mercenary was about to drop dead.

  Instead, she heard a scream.

  Not human. Jenny looked up. Found that entire winged mass of seagulls crashing from the sky like one giant fist—plunging toward the speedboats. And the mercenary. He turned, eyes widening, raising his gun.

  Perrin yanked open the door and grabbed her around the waist. “Hold on.”

  There was nothing to hold except air. Perrin held her tight against him, lifting her feet off the ground as he slipped out the door and made a sharp left to the rail. She felt like a rag doll, legs swinging wildly, arms flopping. She couldn’t see anything but his chest and a glimpse of wings. She heard gunfire, men shouting.

  Perrin threw her over the rail into the sea.

  The impact stole her breath. Jenny sank, grappling for the mouthpiece. She shoved it into her mouth, reached back to start the flow of oxygen, and forced herself to take shallow breaths.

  Again, she felt a pulse in the base of her skull, terrible aching pressure—and for one desperate moment she wanted to swallow salt water.

  You breathed, she told herself, remembering the sensation of drowning without choking. You breathed.

  No. She had been delirious. Mermen might be one kind of impossible, but her developing the ability to breathe water like a fish was a whole other kind of crazy. Jenny was human—the most human person in her occasionally not-so-human family.

  Perrin plunged into the water beside her—a clean pale spike of man cutting the sea like a knife. Jenny forgot about breathing, forgot to swim, staring at the white shimmer of his skin, and the lines of his muscles as he sank through the shadows, impossibly graceful.

  He met her gaze through his mask of swirling hair, eyes glowing as though lit with blue fire, fire and hunger, and power. Skin rippled from his torso down his legs, creating its own dappled light as flecks of scales rose from his flesh, swallowing his legs and pouring through his feet. His toes lengthened, disappeared; and what unfurled was a dorsal fin that glimmered like moonlit silver. All of him glittered. Stars were buried in his skin.

  You’re beautiful, she wanted to tell him, suffering a peculiar madness, the trauma of a new obsession. My God, you’re beautiful.

  Perrin swam toward her. Jenny felt absurdly mortal beside him, and a scene from a movie flashed through her mind: Lois Lane meeting Superman for the first time, awkward and haunted with nerves. Her heart swelled, blood burning—every inch of her tingling with such sensitivity, she wondered how she had survived so many years without feeling so alive.

  He didn’t smile when he looked at her. She glimpsed the scars on his chest and shoulders, even more pronounced in the watery light; and when his hair drifted upward, she saw other old wounds against the back of his neck, as though someone had tried to skin him with a chain saw.

  Jenny felt so strange looking at those particular scars. Terrible pressure gathered at the base of her skull, and when the parasite twitched, the root of its body brushed bone. Visions of paralysis and brain damage filled her head: feeding tubes, wheelchairs, drool.

  She fought down a silent scream. No hospitals, no way to pull the parasite out. Perrin might know what to do, assuming he had seen such creatures before—but this was certainly not the time to ask.

  He dragged her arms around his neck, turning until she lay against his back. Jenny pressed her cheek to his ear, analyzing and savoring every sensation, every tickle of his hair on her face. She could not believe this was real. Not even when his tail moved against her legs, a long, pulsing stroke of muscle that knifed them through the water like a bullet.

  It didn’t feel as though they went far before Perrin pulled them to the surface, but when he spun them around to look at The Calypso Star, it was quite some distance away. The gulls had dispersed, and there were men on deck, small as ants. Jenny stared, numb, feeling as though she was watching her home burn down.

  Perrin squeezed her hand. “Listen.”

  All Jenny could hear was her heart, and the whisper of the waves against their bodies. She removed the mouthpiece and held her breath, listening.

  And heard a helicopter.

  Perrin shielded his eyes. “In the east. Coming fast.”

  Jenny didn’t want to look, but forced herself to. The helicopter flew low to the horizon, a massive Sea Knight, capable of landing in the ocean. She refused to consider that one of her own family had sent it to rescue her. Possible, but nothing she wanted to risk her life on. Better to assume it was from the Consortium, with its links to almost every major criminal organization in the world—and, by extension, all the minor organizations, as well.

  Ismail was supposed to check in. When he didn’t, the Consortium sent hounds to go sniffing.

  “They’ll torture Les,” she couldn’t help but say. “Not the men on the boat, but those who are coming.”

  “Like they would have tortured you?”

  “Yes.”

  Perrin stared at the boat, then the helicopter, and covered her hand with his. His touch was gentle, but when he finally looked at her over his shoulder, his eyes were dead, so empty they seemed made of glass. “They won’t hurt you, Jenny. Not again.”

  “What do you mean, not again?”

  “The dark house on the beach.”

  She stared, stricken. “But that was . . . that was a dream.”

  “Yes,” he said, holding her gaze. “It was.”

  Jenny felt numb, and very small. Thrown back, thrown down, run over by feelings she couldn’t even name. Perrin squeezed her hand and pushed the mouthpiece into her hand.

  “Breathe,” he whispered.

  Chapter Eight

  Breathe, Perrin told himself.

  Easier said than done.

  The woman—Jenny—was warm against his back, and so very alive. Her arms were clasped around his neck, held in place by his hand. Strange, familiar weight. She had held him like this, long ago, in their dreams. On the beach, watching a dream sunset. Laughing in his ear as she leaned against his back.

  Reality. Fantasy. He did not know where one began and the other ended. He wasn’t even certain it mattered anymore. Just this moment. Now. Teetering on the cusp, at the end of the world.

  Perrin swam fast, keeping them close to the surface—straining to listen for dolphins. Dolphins could not be trusted. Talkers, all of them.

  And they would remember what had happened with Rik. Dolphins had long memories, passed on in blood, song. If one of them saw him, word would spread to his kind. He wasn’t ready for that.

  B
ut I wouldn’t kill one of them, he thought.

  And he would never have murdered his cousin for her kra’a.

  Poor Pelena. Sweet as starlight, best of the candidates—and utterly unprepared to be a Guardian. She had always hated being alone. Solitude frightened her. Made her feel empty, lost—as she’d told Perrin, while visiting him in the darkness of the deep. Where he spent all his time alone. Except for his very secret dreams.

  You have no heart, she would tease him. No heart, if you’re satisfied with only the company of a monster.

  And then she would tease him even more for refusing the females who were sent to him, for companionship and breeding.

  My only comfort, he could still hear her say, is the certain knowledge that I will never bear the burden of the kra’a. Because, dear cousin, by the time you die, I will be little more than a wrinkled wisp in the waves, and there will be a whole army of youngsters bursting their tails at the chance to bond with your odd little friend.

  And he’d said, I would hardly call my kra’a odd.

  That must be you, then. Punctuated with a silver laugh, and a sharp tap on his head with her fist.

  Sweet, sweet Pelena. For her to have died, alone, onshore. . .

  I should have killed A’lesander, thought Perrin.

  He almost had. Some lines he still couldn’t cross. And it was hard to forget A’lesander, the child: who had been his friend.

  Those pirates, and whoever had been in the helicopter, would have found him already. If Jenny was right, then he faced torture, experimentation, eventual death.

  I should have killed him, he thought again.

  Jenny’s arms tightened, her legs bumping against his tail. Perrin squeezed her clenched hands, holding them closer to his chest. Warmth spread through him, and a terrible pain in his heart. Pain, and determination.

  You are going to live, he told her silently. You are going to live, and nothing else matters.

  His dream woman, his dream friend, in the flesh.

  Alive. So alive.

  Would A’lesander have killed her, too? Like Pelena, who also trusted him? Lonely Pelena, who would have been intrigued by his presence, despite A’lesander’s exile? Who would have remembered only her childhood friend—and not thought about the man he had become?