“And where will you begin?” The queen-goddess’s deep red braid floated behind her, its color a counterpoint to the almost teal of her fin. She was beautiful, and she knew it.
She also knew she was far too good to speak to me, as a general rule. This might be the longest conversation we had ever had without Poseidon mediating.
What is going on?
Was this about my planned stop at the Temple? Was she trying to figure out my plans and stop them? Or to help me in the fight against the Titans?
Are you planning to help or hinder me, O bitch-queen-goddess of mine?
Her question was good, though. After I topped off my magical stores, where would I start?
“Athens,” I said before I had even consciously developed the plan. “Skyla stopped an incursion there. They almost broke through the containment walls. If it’s a weak spot, I should work to shore it up.”
“You’re leaving Atlantis, then?” Her nostrils flared in a sneer, reflecting her well-known disdain of all mer-folk who chose to leave her domain.
“I am,” I said shortly.
Her shoulders twitched in the tiniest slump of relief.
Wait. What was that?
Amphitrite preferred to keep all the Sirens under her direct control.
She wants me gone, to keep me away from something here in Atlantis.
Why could that be?
As far as I knew, Amphitrite’s life revolved around Poseidon and the Temple.
If Amphitrite had any secrets I didn’t already know, I would be surprised. Still, whatever was going on here bore watching.
Later. When I had more time.
Content that I wouldn’t get too close to whatever it was she was hiding, Amphitrite said a perfunctory goodbye, and moved gracefully toward the quarters she shared with the king. Her fin and braid swished through the water in counterpoint to one another and watched her retreat until the guards opened the doors for her, just in time to make sure she didn’t have to break the rhythm of her motion in order to swim through regally.
She never looked back at me.
Yeah. I definitely need to keep an eye on that.
I didn’t particularly like carrying everyone’s heaviest secrets.
But more than that, I hated it when other mer held secrets I didn’t know.
On the surface, the humans have some saying about curiosity killing a feline. Something like that, anyway. As a general rule, I’m a proponent of anything that destroys the terrifying beasts—they’re all razor claws and teeth and a horrifying affinity for fish-based food.
But not when the curiosity was mine.
Throughout the ages, I have heard whispers of my curse—usually, those comments refer to the spell I put on Odysseus’s men.
I know better.
My actual curse is curiosity.
Or rather, the knowledge that so often comes of indulging that curiosity.
Because I cannot help but follow the connections among the mer, tracing the lies they tell and tracking the truths they hide, I know much more than I should.
I know that the mer-folk are not particularly special in this world. We are simply a particular evolutionary branch of the shifters that inhabit the entire globe. There are, of course, other shifters whose forms have taken on mythological status, but we are among the few who have chosen to actually believe in the myths about ourselves.
That’s not all I know, however.
I also know that we are not actually of this world.
None of the shifters are.
Like the Titans before us, we came to this Earth through a tear in reality.
And like them, we could be sent back, imprisoned, sentenced to an eternity of banishment from this paradise.
There was little I wouldn’t do to keep that from happening.
I guess I’m going to the surface.
Zale
Nothing here called to me.
Pausing in the lighted entryway of the Hotel Poseidon in Piraeus, the port city that forms the southwest edge of Athens, Greece, I stared out at the dark streets. I hadn’t been able to work out which direction would draw a sleepless tourist suffering from insomnia and guilt.
Six weeks earlier, Detective Adam Clayton disappeared from this city. He checked into the first hotel on his itinerary, stayed there for several days, checked into a second hotel, then went out for a walk one night, and never returned.
It took this long to get my department to approve the funds for me to fly to Europe to try to track him down. The Athens police had been of little help, though their initial detective work gave me something to go on, at least. I was sure even that much help was in deference to my own Greek name—Zale Stavros. I hated to tell them that I had almost changed it when I turned eighteen and that only my mother’s incessant weeping for two full weeks after I had informed her of my intent to Americanize my name had stayed my hand when it came time to sign the paperwork.
At any rate, I hadn’t planned to find myself on this side of the ocean separating my parents from those traditions they both adored and had left. But here I was, sifting through weeks-old clues in an attempt to solve a case the local law enforcement had given up on.
The Greek detectives had already sorted through all of Clay’s belongings and logged it in as evidence, of a sort. I spent the first afternoon of my arrival going back through everything, trying to piece together the puzzle of his absence in my own room at the Hotel Poseidon. I had stared for hours at the contents of his suitcase, released to me out of professional courtesy only.
Our lieutenant said Clay lost it and took off, maybe killed himself.
I didn’t believe that. He wouldn’t commit suicide; he’s not the type. We’ve worked suicide cases together, and I’ve heard him discuss how selfish it is.
He might go AWOL, sure, but he’s no idiot. He wouldn’t leave everything behind, including his passport.
On a beach a few miles away from this hotel—the first one Clay had inhabited, not the second—a group of college-age tourists had found a pile of ripped clothing, shredded, really, with a wallet still in the half-torn pocket of his jeans, along with a broken seashell.
The kids had claimed the wallet was empty of money. Though I wasn’t sure I believed that story, the Greek investigators took that as a sign that Clay had left on his own, grabbing the cash and abandoning his identity.
I knew better.
If Clay was dead, someone else had done him in.
I had no idea why the broken seashell had been tucked into my partner’s pocket. Part of me wanted to dismiss it as an anomaly, but I had learned a long time ago never to ignore a potential clue.
Every cop instinct I had screamed at me that Clay had come to some bad end, but I had no proof beyond a pile of belongings that should have gone with him.
The map on my smartphone showed several routes from the hotel to the beach where Clay’s clothes had been found. This long after the fact, I doubted I would learn much from tracing his exact route, had I even been able to figure out what it had been. It might help me determine something about his state of mind, however.
Somehow, the most direct, easiest route didn’t quite feel right. The beach hadn’t been in his notes, hadn’t been written down in his small, blue notebook on the list of places he’d planned to visit.
No, this felt like an impromptu destination, not a predetermined one.
The least direct route, then. One that wound through some of the neighborhoods along tiny, meandering streets. I could follow one of the more obvious routes on my way back.
Maybe it would give me some insight into what had happened.
I stepped out into the night.
Three hours later, the darkened streets hadn’t given me the flash of intuition I had hoped for.
They had, however, given me more time to mull over the seemingly endless possibilities surrounding Clay’s disappearance.
I had half-expected to be contacted by the Charalobos family. Clay had come to Athens on some
sort of quest for forgiveness, or understanding, or something like that, after taking out one of their family members. The shoot had been good, but it bothered Clay more than it probably should have. The department psychologist thought the idea to visit Greece had some merit.
The Charaloboses were high-ranking in the Greek version of the mob back in the States, but the Athens police suggested the family wasn’t terribly important here.
Entirely possible, of course, but for all I knew, they had a grip on the cops here. My parents, both lovers of their country of birth despite having left it long before I was born, would have said that the prominent Greek families definitely controlled the police.
All I knew for certain was that I had nothing more to go on. Just a knowledge of my partner and a vague sense of unease that tugged at me almost continually, demanding I keep looking.
The sooner I solve this, the sooner I can get out of here.
Out of this entire country full of women like my mother and men like my father, a whole culture of people so very like the community in the Greek Orthodox church I had stopped attending at the same time I failed to change my name.
If these Greek women passing by me knew they story, they, too, might place their hands on my shoulders to pin me in place and shed strategic tears to coerce me to do their bidding.
I shuddered.
Nope.
No matter how lovely the sun-drenched city of Athens might be, I would be glad to get shut of the place and head back home to Dallas—another sun-drenched place, but a little less full of wailing Greek women.
I can’t leave until I learn what happened to Clay.
I was sure of it, all the way down into my bones.
I might be here forever.
Athens is beautiful. I saw why my parents spoke of Greece in tones of longing. They owned one of the best Greek restaurants in Dallas, always earning top ratings in the Zagat guide. But no matter how good their food was, they bemoaned its lack of authenticity.
“The food is only as good as the ingredients,” my father would often complain, waving his hands in the air for emphasis. “We cannot get true Greek yogurt in Texas.”
Mama would nod in sad agreement.
I knew what they meant, now. The food of my childhood was a pale imitation of what I found on every street-corner bistro in Athens.
And despite having spent my teen years avoiding all things Greek, I found myself fascinated by the history surrounding me throughout the city—not to mention looming over me in the form of the Parthenon, high on its rocky cliff.
Unfortunately, amazing food and overwhelming historical artifacts were about the only things I had discovered in Athens.
Clay was nowhere to be found. I had sorted through his belongings countless times, traced his steps and quizzed shopkeepers and restaurant owners and the kinds of street urchins who so often slipped by unnoticed, but noticing everything.
Two nights in a row, I found myself on the strange beach where Clay had disappeared, where his wallet and clothing had been found. Out in front of me, a hump of rock rose from the water, slick with ocean spray and glinting in the moonlight. Behind me, traffic whizzed by on a small (at least by Texas standards) highway.
There was nothing special about this beach. It wasn’t particularly appealing. For that matter, I wasn’t certain it was a public beach.
It had offered no insights.
The closest I had come to a clue was tracking down a taxi driver who had driven an American man meeting Clay’s description and a woman from the Royal Athenian Hotel to the beach.
“The woman was odd,” the taxi driver told me in Greek. “Small and thin, and her eyes were strange.” He glanced around as if worried that the other drivers in the stand, chain-smoking as they waited for their next fare, might overhear him.
“What about her eyes?” I prompted when he seemed unwilling to continue.
“They glowed.”
“You mean the light reflected off them?” For probably the second time in my life, I was thankful my parents had been adamant that I learn Greek—and even more glad that I’d been in Athens for two weeks already, brushing up on my Greek vocabulary.
“No,” the man insisted. “Her eyes glowed in the dark. They were shining. The light was the color of the ocean.”
And you had too much ouzo with your dinner that night, my friend.
I didn’t voice the thought aloud, however.
Instead, I coaxed him to give a fuller description of the woman and began retracing Clay’s steps again, this time adding questions about his mysterious companion.
It seemed to me like a blond mountain of a man with a tendency toward sunburn would stand out in a Greek city. Athens was a tourist town, however, its inhabitants prone to evaluating visitors for their wealth—and willingness to part with it—then forgetting about them immediately thereafter.
At a sidewalk café across from the subway stop closest to the Parthenon, I found a waitress who thought she remembered the two of them, but only because there had been some sort of commotion when they arrived. Drunken tourists, she had initially assumed, but nothing had come of it.
She, too, mentioned the bright blue-green of the woman’s eyes.
And that was it.
After that, the trail went completely cold.
No one had reported a woman of that description missing.
As far as I could tell, she hadn’t rented a room in any of Clay’s hotels—neither the ones in which he had actually stayed nor the ones on his itinerary. She hadn’t taken a taxi back from the beach the night she and Clay had gone out there. No one had seen her walking away from the beach, either with or without Clay.
No one had seen her since then, period.
My time in Greece was running short, and I had nothing concrete to show for it. If I went back to Texas with what I had now, my lieutenant would assume that, if he hadn’t committed suicide, then Clay had taken off with some woman he met over here.
My gut still screamed at me that something much worse than either of those things had happened to my partner—but I couldn’t have said what, exactly, might count as “worse than” killing himself. Being held prisoner and tortured by the Charalobos family, I guess. My Athenian contact said there had been no chatter suggesting anything like that, though, and it really wasn’t the crime family’s style. For that matter, they didn’t seem terribly concerned about the police shooting of a member of the American branch of the family.
I was out of leads, and out of ideas.
For what felt like the millionth time, I had brought the case folder with all my notes about the case up to the hotel balcony to peruse while I ate breakfast—including real Greek yogurt, the kind my father would approve of, and a thick, dark, wonderful coffee that the Brits one table over were bemoaning as “too strong.”
Bright sunlight sparkled off the glass doors leading into the buffet line, and a gentle breeze riffled the pages in my file—not enough to dislodge any papers, but enough to remind me to keep a hand on them.
I flipped through the folder, hoping something would spark a new idea.
Notes from the interview with the taxi driver. The cab company’s call-out records. Maps of Athens. Business cards from everyone I knew or suspected Clay might have talked to. Plus every scrap of paper I had been able to cull from Clay’s belongings. Hotel receipts. Airport restaurant receipts. More than a few notes of his own about the Charalobos family.
“Pardon me,” one of the British women said, leaning over from her table toward me. “If you aren’t using it, could I possibly borrow the sweetener?” She gestured at the square glass container full of pink and blue and yellow packets of artificial sweeteners.
“Sure.” I preferred real sugar, anyway.
I lifted my hand away from the folder to pass the dish to her. She took it from me, and just then, a stronger wind than I had felt all morning swirled across the balcony. It lifted my folder almost off the table, and papers skittered across the table.
I slammed both arms down on top of the papers. Coffee sloshed out of my cup and onto the white tablecloth, but I didn’t care, as long as none of my notes were lost. I missed one business card, though, and it skated face-down across the table and over the edge.
“Oh, my,” said the woman, bending over and picking it up from the floor before it blew away.
The card she handed me was one I had not seen before.
A quick glance around the floor of the outdoor dining area reassured me that it was the same card I had seen blow away from me.
The card itself was simple, black with white printing, though the logo on it was ornate, like the scrollwork at the top of a Corinthian column.
It was for a hotel—or, if the card was to be believed, The Hotel. Under the words was an address on a street I didn’t recognize it. Across the bottom was a line in both Greek and English: We’re always here for our special guests.
What is this?
The card was far too discreet to be anything too usual. It was clearly designed for people who already knew what they were going for.
Quickly, I pulled up the map app on my phone and ran the address. Not far from where I was now, but in the oldest part of the city, not far from the Agora, the ancient Athenian marketplace.
No business showed up in the program.
A brothel, maybe? An upscale gentleman’s club?
Something even less savory?
Perhaps Clay had found something tying this place to the Charalobos family and gone to check it out.
Maybe his disappearance had nothing at all to do with the strange, ocean-eyed woman he’d been seen with. Or maybe she worked for the Charaloboses and was sent to bring him to them.
I shook my head to dispel the thoughts. It did no good to spin out theories before I had more solid information. My best move would be to check this place out.
How had I missed the card all this time? I’d been flipping through that folder for days on end. Where did Clay stash it, that it could stay hidden that long?
Mermaidia: A Limited Edition Anthology Page 68