I judge him to be about fifty, old but hardened as iron. His face has a well-earned strength to it, but the hard night has clearly taken its toll on him. His eyes are drawn and they twitch restlessly, the skin around them waxy and slack. His clothes are rumpled and one sleeve is torn, and even his priest’s collar looks loose and stained, but as far as I could see he’s uninjured.
Apart from that he looks exactly like the picture Madeline had provided, apart from the small wooden amulet he’s wearing on a hemp strand around his throat. I’m too far away to make out particulars, but from my point of view it looks like fairy workmanship. Without studying it I can’t tell exactly how it’s working, but I’m certain that the amulet is what’s keeping him hidden from view. Nobody could work hiding magic like the Fey. As nonchalantly as I can, I sit on a concrete and wood bench about twenty feet away from him and pretend to watch the rolling sea while I plan my next move.
I’ve found Bruce, but I’m not quite sure how to approach him. As nervous as he looks I don’t think the bold approach would work. I also can’t just leave him sitting here, exposed to the world. Magic or no magic, it’s a minor miracle that he hasn’t been spotted by anyone sinister yet.
Miracle. I look closer, taking in the slouched posture, the patchy five o’clock shadow, the sagging shoulders. He doesn’t look the way I figure a man who’s carrying a weapon created by God Himself in his pocket should, even if he’s a former priest. Then again, I’ve never carried a weapon like that myself. Maybe this is what every man who ever carried a holy relic looked like.
I turn and stretch in my seat, looking around me as I do. As far as I can tell there’s nobody else looking our way, though if I sit still long enough the out-of-towners would start to wonder why. I make a show of taking a long pull from my water, get up, and find a seat one table away from Bruce. I take out my phone, noting that I have six more voice mails, pretend to dial and hold it to my ear to cover my conversation.
“Do you know who I am?” I say as quietly as I can over the ambient din of the thumping dance beats of the club next door. He winces at the verbal contact but doesn’t react physically.
“You’re Ian DeLong,” he says softly. “I was hoping you’d be the one who’d find me.”
“That’s why you’re out here in the open,” I say.
“Nobody else could see through this,” he says, twirling the amulet in his fingertips. He sags forward, clearly exhausted. “You’ve been looking for me, that much I know. But I have to ask: who sent you?”
“Madeline hired me to find the Cleave. Do you still have it?”
He pats his thigh. “There was no place to leave it,” he says. “I’d feel safer if someone left a gallon of Ebola lying open on a street corner than leaving the Cleave unattended.”
“I’m a little bit surprised nobody else has found you yet. I’m told that thing is like a signal flare in your pocket.”
He reaches into the pocket and tugs out a tiny strip of black silk. “This cloth was wrapped around it in its cradle. It’s Linear’s design. It doesn’t have the same effect as the box did, but it muffles its energies. Combine that with my amulet and I had pretty decent camouflage.”
I’m letting my eyes roam as he talks, and it doesn’t take too long to see what I’ve been afraid to see. Two clean-cut middle-aged men in white slacks and matching golf shirts are leaning up against a coin-powered telescope, looking almost in our direction. They seem uninterested, but their gazes never wander from us. Well, from me, I guess. “Bruce, I think we should get going.”
“The sooner, the better,” he agrees enthusiastically. “But what about all them?”
I widen my gaze. While we’ve been whispering more people have gathered outside the sandwich shack. Two thirty-ish women in stern business suits. A handful of young punks with shaved heads and silver posts through their noses. The old ladies with their canes. No sign of the dog, though.
More importantly, no sign of the local powers, like Gault and his wolves or Moira and her witches. “They’re all small groups,” I observe. “No reinforcements, and they’re not cooperating with each other. They all want their prize, and they don’t want to share.”
“Is that a good thing or bad?”
“It means they aren’t going to work together. They’ll fight each other as easily as us, and that’s one in our column. Plus, they can’t be everywhere at once,” I take a moment to assess our situation. It’s certainly past the awkward stage, but as of yet I don’t think there are any insurmountable problems. I let it cook for a moment. “They can’t see you, right?”
“Probably not. This charm’s tough, but if someone out there’s good enough…”
“Let’s not go there. If you go straight back past the restrooms there’s a delivery door. I’ll meet you back there in five minutes.”
He looks decidedly unsure about that. “I don’t have any magic myself, Mr. DeLong,” he whispers, “and this charm is the only one I had on me when I ran. If one of them catches me…”
“Don’t panic, Bruce. You’re going to be fine. Five minutes.” I stand up and pretend to turn off my phone. I tuck it into my pocket and walk out past the out-of-towners, following the Crawl west.
A hundred feet down the boardwalk I use the reflection in a glass door to look behind me. The good news is the group outside the sandwich shack has broken up. Predictably, there is also bad news. In this case the bad news is that the lion’s share of them are following me.
If we were in the woods somewhere, or anyplace else with no humans around, I’d have no problems dealing with the group. Physically I’m a match for any of them, and the fact that I’m armed means that their numbers won’t account for as much. My options for dealing with a group of adversaries in public, however, are limited. I can’t start a fight where magic might be flung around in the middle of a crowd of regular people, and I can’t give them all the slip without leaving Bruce alone longer than I really want to.
I pause, both in step and thought, and look back out at the stone jetties that stretch out from the shore. Hmm. I may have no backup, but maybe I’m not necessarily alone.
I reverse my path, heading back down the boardwalk. The corner of the Crawl is dominated by Thibaux’s, a two-story pub with an open-air second floor bar, the best clams in the area and genuine moonshine if you know who to ask. There the boardwalk opens out a bit, making a fifty-by-fifty-foot square that faces the inlet. Great spot for nature photos. Sometimes dolphins frolic in the water there. I take the waist-high railing in stride, dropping six feet onto the stony shore and heading towards the water.
I walk out onto the jetty, paying careful attention to my footing. The rocks are enormous and not of uniform cut, with wide flat surfaces slick from the breaking surf. In the darkness any missed step would be catastrophic, so I take my time and make sure each foot is firmly placed before moving the other. It feels like it takes forever to reach the end, but eventually I’m out in what feels like the middle of the bay, looking around.
“Twine? Twine, you down there? It’s Ian.”
“Hey, Ian,” a deep, salty voice answers in a thick Cajun accent. “Careful, the rocks’re slippery.”
I follow the voice around the corner of the jetty and see a small dinghy the color of a seasick apple, lashed with a nylon cord to a spike driven deeply into the rock. The boat had probably been fire engine red when first launched, but time and exposure has taken its toll. They’ve done a number on the pilot, too.
Twine (the only name anyone in Superstition Bay has ever known him by), might once have been a strapping lad. Somewhere over the last two centuries, though, he’s… dwindled. Now he’s barely four feet tall, desperately skinny, with skin the color and texture of a medium grit sandpaper. Nobody in town remembers him ever having any hair, not even eyebrows, but the eyes, shielded beneath the bright yellow rain cap and copious folds of eyelid, are as blue as the sea in summer and twice as clear.
“How’s Charlie?” I ask.
�
�Oh, he’s fine, Ian. Fine. No more problems. I got him straightened out good.” He pats what looks like an anchor chain that was bolted to a massive spike embedded in the rock, feeding out into the murky depths. The links are huge, almost as wide across as my hand, but they float on the choppy surface for about twenty feet before dropping off into the depths.
“I haven’t heard of any sightings for a long time,” I say. “You’re doing a good job.”
“Why, thanks,” Twine replies, doffing an imaginary cap. “But it ain’t no job. It’s a pleasure. He’s real good comp’ny. You done us both a favor when you brought him up to me.”
“Well, I’m really glad to hear that. But I’m not here just to check up on you two. I need a little bit of help.”
“Never turn down the marshal’s request,” he says. “Never know when it might bite your ass.”
“Don’t call me that,” I tell him for the ten thousandth time. “You see that group of people standing by the railing by Thibaux’s?”
He peers over my shoulder. “You mean the ones lookin’ at you like you shaved their dog?”
“That’s them.”
“What about ‘em?”
“I need them out of my hair.”
“You mean permanent?”
“No, no. Not permanent. Maybe he can just spit them out on the other side of the inlet?”
He grins, showing intermittent teeth. “I do believe he’d love to do that. You gonna need to help us out in return, though.”
I turn a wary eye to him. “What do you want?”
“I want you to come out with me next new moon. Charlotte’s back around. Saw her twice just some little ways up the coast. I reckon she wanton’ to meet ol’ Charlie here. I could use another pair of hands to help arrange the meetin’.”
Suddenly I’m glad I’d went out of my way to talk to Twine. A female in these waters might be trouble for boaters. Swimmers are probably safe, if she’s not too big. “Is she as big as he is?”
Twine shrugs. “Reckon maybe a mite bigger.”
Crap. “Are the two of us alone going to be enough to catch her?”
“Don’t you worry about that one,” Twine says with a sure smile. He reaches down into the boat, pulls up a small tackle box and pats it with one hand. “I got that covered.”
“You got a deal,” I say. Twine reaches out his hand and I shake it. As I start the treacherous walk back to shore I hear him whispering happy things to the water, and he runs his hand along the chain excitedly as he did so. I can’t hear what he’s saying. I don’t want to.
A few minutes later I’m back on solid ground, walking with purpose. I march right past the waiting crowd at Thibaux’s like they aren’t even there, heading down to a small footpath that runs parallel to the inlet. As I put a little distance between myself and the din from the Crawl I could hear footsteps following me, and when I look back over my shoulder I see the group following me. I jump as if spooked by their presence, then turn and run at three-quarter speed.
After about a hundred yards, far enough to be completely removed from civilian eyes, I stop and turn back to them. They’ve roughly kept pace and now, far from the crowds, they abandon their pretenses at normalcy.
“That’s Ian DeLong?” one of the silver-studded punks asks with contempt.
“That’s him,” another one says.
“He’s the boogeyman?” a third adds.
“Don’t look like much.”
“He’s more than he looks like,” one of the old ladies says. She looks withered and frail, but even with her walker she’d kept pace with the run. She isn’t even breathing hard.
“He’d have to be,” another lady says.
One of the punks nudges one of the old ladies. “Think we should kill him?”
She thinks about it for a second. “Yes,” she says. “He doesn’t have the Cleave, and he’s too dangerous to allow to live. He could ruin everything.”
“Good enough for me,” the first punk says. He makes a lunge in my direction, the rest of the unlikely lynch mob only a second behind him.
They are all too late.
A monstrous splash rises from the inlet as something enormous smashes through the surface of the water. A snake-like shape shoots up forty feet into the night, shedding water that glitters in the moonlight like falling diamonds, then it lashes down on the group in front of me and a mouth big enough to swallow a car engulfs the lot of them in a single bite. A slitted eye the size of one of my Jeep’s tires finds me and holds me for a second, then the animal rises and smoothly coils itself back into the water.
The attack had only lasted two seconds.
My heart is pounding, my breath shortened by fear. It has been well over a year since I’d used most of a side of beef to lead Charlie a mile up the coast so Twine could capture him, and then he’d barely been half the size he is now. I’ve never actually seen a fully-grown sea serpent up close before tonight. I have no real desire to see one again. But as I watch the undulating, “V” shaped wake surging for the other side of the inlet I see Twine standing close by. He smiles knowingly at me and flips me a jaunty little salute, which I return halfheartedly.
“I’ll call you when I find Charlotte,” he calls out happily.
“Yeah,” I say with nowhere near his level of enthusiasm. “You do that.”
Still shaking a little from the adrenaline spike that comes from having a sea serpent devour (temporarily) a group of people in front of you, I head back to the Crawl to gather up Bruce. As I do I looked out across the water and I am suddenly mindful of how little I can see into its depths.
Thirteen
I run back to the sandwich shack as fast as I can. I make better time running along the beach, but ultimately I have to climb back onto the boardwalk and squeeze my way through the throng of drunks and almost-drunks. I get back to where I left Bruce about fifteen minutes after I left him, praying the whole time that nothing else has managed to snatch him while I’ve been busy. Not everyone we’d seen lingering on the boardwalk had been there when Charlie had intervened.
I walk past the outside seats where I’d last seen him and find neither him nor any blatantly magical lurkers, Grey or outsiders. Without breaking stride I round the corner and walk up to the place I’d told Bruce I’d meet him.
Bruce is standing in the delivery door of the sandwich shack where I’d told him to, but he wasn’t alone. The two older men in white slacks and golf shirts I’d seen hanging around the boardwalk are there with him, and they aren’t treating him like a long-lost friend. One is rifling through Bruce’s pockets while the other is holding Bruce’s gaze with his own. Bruce is standing rigidly, his arms held straight out from his body, as rigid as a mouse being stared down by a cobra. I can’t tell if it’s fear or magic that’s paralyzing him.
“Hey,” I shout. The one who is staring Bruce down turns my way and in that second Bruce regains his control. Magic, then. Bruce starts shoving back at the one who is frisking him, but even as he does the man gives a shout of triumph and jumps back.
“I’ve got it!” he cries triumphantly, cradling his hand protectively against his torso.
“No!” Bruce shouts, lunging forward to grapple with the second man while I leap towards the first.
The first sees me coming and reflexively makes a quick gripping gesture with his right hand. I have just enough time to enjoy the look of surprised confusion on his face when whatever spell he’s trying to use on me fails, then I put all my weight into a right cross that drops him in a heap. I turn to help Bruce, but freeze in mid-motion.
Bruce was pinned against the concrete wall by some unseen force, hard enough to visibly compress his body from shoulder to waist. The second man, not even looking at him, is examining the gleaming object in his hands with interest.
“Interesting design,” he says. “Not entirely what I was expecting, to be honest, but interesting nonetheless.”
“Give that to me,” I demand. I reach under my shirt and draw the Spring
field, bringing it to a careful point at his forehead.
“I know who you are, Mr. DeLong,” he says, still looking at the Cleave, “and you can put your little gun away. Your bullets won’t do any more harm to me than my magic will do to you. No, I think I’ll just wait for my brother to wake up, and then we’ll leave, unless you want me to turn this man inside out. Thank you, though, for finding this for us. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but it’s a jungle out here.”
He’s turning his hands over and over as he talks. Maddeningly, I still can’t get a good look at the Cleave itself.
“Really, I don’t see what the fuss is all about,” he says as he studies his prize. “I mean, really. It doesn’t even look sharp.”
He slides the ball of his thumb over the base of the blade, then he winces. I see a single drop of blood fall to the pavement with a tiny noise. Then he falls over. Dead.
Just like that.
The moment he falls the invisible force holding Bruce against the wall vanishes and he sinks to the ground, gasping. I have a quick thought to help him but before I can move he darts forward like a snake, scoops the Cleave out of the second man’s hand and deftly wraps it in a piece of dark cloth before dropping it into his pocket.
“Are you okay?” I ask. He nods mutely. Satisfied, I kneel down to check on the second man.
He’s dead. Just plain and simple dead. You wouldn’t know it to look at him, since he doesn’t have a single mark anywhere on his body but the minute scratch on the ball of the thumb, but he’s already growing cold to the touch. The edge of the razor made the tiniest nick in the skin, but the tiniest nick apparently is enough. If someone had decapitated him he couldn’t have been more dead. I’m now absolutely sure that Jamie had been on the money about the razor.
What was called the Cleave today had once been the weapon of the Angel of Death, and it just cut the soul from this man’s body.
Swim Like Hell: A Visit to Superstition Bay Page 14