by Cat Adams
A pretty chestnut-haired woman with a scattering of freckles similar to Mick’s was sitting at a table with two young girls. They all stared at Adriana with undisclosed awe. Mick pushed back his chair and stood up. He walked toward us with hand out. “Ms. Graves. It’s a pleasure to see you again. A surprise, but a pleasure.”
I held out my hand to shake his. “It’s a surprise to me as well. This trip was sort of sudden. But let me introduce the people with me.” I thought I knew what Adriana was up to and hoped I wouldn’t get it backward. “Back by the door are my friend Laka and her daughter, Okalani.” It wasn’t quite accurate, but what else could I say except friend ?
Mick took the two extra steps and shook their hands, playing the good host. I was betting in normal circumstances his wife would have, too. But she couldn’t take her eyes off my cousin.
I touched Bruno’s sleeve. “This is Bruno DeLuca. He’s been a friend of mine for years and is a very talented mage.”
Bruno offered his hand, keeping absolutely silent, and Mick shook it. I touched my own chest. “Of course, I’m Celia Graves. I met Mick Murphy at the Will signing of my best friend, Vicki Cooper.”
Now his wife’s eyes turned to me. “Oh!” Her shock turned to a friendly smile. “Finally we meet, Ms. Graves. I’m Molly Murphy.” She motioned at a redheaded girl of about twelve with pigtails. “This is our daughter Beverly and this little scamp”—she reached across and affectionately ruffled the blonde curls of the younger child—“is Julie.”
“Mom—” Beverly had the look that screamed, Please don’t embarrass me! I’ve worn it many times myself, so I took a moment to smile directly at her.
“Whoa,” she said with a suddenly shocked expression. “You really do have fangs!”
Mick turned and gave her a furious look. “Beverly! That is quite enough.”
“It’s okay. Really. I know it’s a curiosity.” I stepped away and held out a hand toward Adriana, who was starting to get a little antsy. “And this glorious vision is my cousin. May I present Adriana, crown princess of the Pacific siren clan, prime minister of the Isle of Serenity, and future queen of Rusland.” I was hoping I got all that right. I hadn’t a freaking clue what her full title was, but at least what I’d said was all true and hopefully sounded impressive enough. I’d seen the prime minister part on a document in her mother’s office. It made sense, I suppose. The queen couldn’t do everything.
The blonde girl stood and walked forward as though hypnotized until her father caught her by the hand to stop her from actually touching Adriana. “Are you really a princess?” Julie’s voice was a bare whisper.
Adriana gave her a smile that was both kind and loving—just the sort of expression you want to see on a queen on her throne. She must practice to have it down that well. She touched the girl’s hair. “Yes, child. And I believe there’s a chance you are as well.”
Whoa. Come again? I bent forward until I caught Adriana’s eye. “Excuse me?”
Instead of answering me or responding to the shocked looks on the faces of father and daughter, Adriana turned to the old man in the corner, who’d stopped looking frightened but was, instead, staring at the interaction with interest. “Would you care to explain, Mr. Fulbright? There’s a reason you offered your land to the Murphy family, isn’t there? My siren blood can feel yours … and the children’s.”
There was silence all around the restaurant because … well, frankly, she’d managed to stun us all. Fulbright narrowed his eyes and let out a harrumphing sound. When he spoke it was with such a thick southern accent that I could barely make out the words: “So, you’ve found me out, heve you? A royal of the blood, come to finally look for us? Well, y’all are a thousand years too late and I ain’t hepping you. Go tell your mother I said the earth could just eat ya up. You and your bloodsucking cousin, too.”
Adriana’s eyes narrowed dangerously and so did the old man’s. Thin skin all around. Sheesh.
“Okay, hold it. Everybody’s talking in circles here and I’m getting lost.” Adriana opened her mouth to shush me, but I wasn’t going to shut up. I didn’t care that the situation needed to be handled “just right.” I wanted explanations and we didn’t have time for a song and dance.
I stepped away from them all to address the old man: “Look, I’m just a poor California bodyguard who discovered about a month ago I had siren blood.” I lifted my upper lip to show him the full fang view. “I got attacked by a vampire but didn’t die. After that, I discovered that my blood wasn’t only siren with a touch of vampire, but it’s also royal.” I held up my hands like a revival preacher, but my words were sarcastic: “Woo! Lucky me! But guess what? I don’t care . Whatever old score you feel you need to settle with the whole of the siren race, Mr. Fulbright, isn’t my fight. I only want to find out how to stop a demonic rift from eating up my hometown and the people I love. Because if we can’t close it, eventually it’ll be your hometown and the people you love that will disappear. My cousin believes you can help us. The only question is whether you will. ”
Fulbright stared at me for a long time and then stood slowly. He was hunched by arthritis and leaned heavily on a plain wood cane. There was nothing fancy about him, from his faded jeans and beat-up boots to his stained straw hat. “Mr. Murphy, I believe you and I should discuss this matter … away from the wimmin folk.”
Wimmin folk ? Excuse me? Maybe my face gave away my anger, because I felt Bruno’s hand on my arm. He squeezed like he used to when his mother would talk past me like I didn’t exist. It asked me to please let him handle it. He put the straps of the duffel bag in my hand. I narrowed my eyes and let him have the full force of my outrage. He shrugged.
Fulbright walked out the door and Mick followed after releasing his daughter’s hand. Bruno was the last and closed the door after him.
Molly’s eyes went to the floor and Beverly’s expression was outraged. Poor Julie bolted back to her mother, crawled into her lap, and buried her small face against her mother’s chest. I was betting Julie was picking up either thoughts or emotions from the “men folk” and didn’t much like them. Mick had said she had all the talent in the family.
I gave the others in the room a Pollyanna smile. Brilliant but empty. “Well, that went well.” I snorted. Molly offered a shy smile. Then I touched Adriana’s arm. “Was this the part of your vision where we got killed? Does he come back in here with a shotgun and mow down us wimmin folk ?”
One corner of Adriana’s mouth curved up. “Actually, this is the scenario that went well. In the other scenario, I spoke first and he ran out of the restaurant screaming in fear and we never found the cave. I was hoping he’d manage to offend you. You can be quite … forceful when angered.”
“Gee. Thanks.” My smile was more a baring of teeth. Then I turned to the outraged redheaded girl who was stabbing her sandwich with a fork like she wished it was a certain elderly gentleman. She looked humiliated and hurt. “Beverly, I know you’ll still have to live here after we’re gone and will have to deal with people like him every day. You’ll be forced to ignore it for now to keep the peace. But please know most of the rest of the world takes offense at what that man just did. It’s not okay for people to treat you like you’re a second-class citizen just because of your gender.”
Laka finally spoke up from near the window, and there was fury and pride in her beautiful face with its strong African influence: “Or your race.”
“Or your … disability.” Adriana’s voice was as strong as I’d ever heard it. “Let no person tell you you cannot do something. You are siren. And you are human. Be proud of both.”
Molly was shaking her head. “I’ve done our whole family tree—right back to the Magna Carta. I’m sorry, ladies, but we don’t have any siren blood in our family. I know it. Both of our families came from Ireland and England.”
That didn’t matter. Blood spoke to blood, and our words had sunk home with Beverly. Her face was intense, thoughtful, and just a little bit offended by Fulbr
ight’s words and her mother’s response. I didn’t want to get involved in a battle between mother and daughter, so I nodded, grabbed a chair, and sat down. “Atlantis was supposedly due south of England before it was destroyed.”
It took a moment to sink in, but when it did Molly’s face turned stark white. “But why has nobody ever known until now? Surely someone would have said something, put a clue in the records.”
A door jingled and Bruno stepped in the door, speaking as he walked toward us. “Because it came down the paternal line, just like Celia’s.”
Mick followed right on Bruno’s heels. “You said it yourself just a few weeks ago, Mol—how the girls were such a blessing because there’d never been a single girl born on my side of the family that didn’t die in infancy, for as far back as you could find.”
It all made sense now. I took in the scattering of pimples on Beverly’s face and the near-constant tugging at the side of her shirt like she was wearing her first bra. The girl had hit puberty. “Beverly’s gotten old enough that it made Mr. Fulbright notice. I’ll bet he saw you in a store or something and realized you had the blood.”
Adriana looked behind Mick. Her voice wasn’t quite panicked, but her concern was clear: “Where is Mr. Fulbright?”
Bruno tipped his head toward the door. “Let’s go outside and talk.” His eyes flicked past me to the children. Ah. Not for the ears of kids. I hadn’t really liked that about adults when I was a kid. But now I understood the reasoning.
Mick pointed toward the girls. “You two finish up your dinner. Your mom needs to get you back to school. We’ll have to write a late slip as it is.” He walked out of the diner and I watched through the sheer lace curtain as he sprinted across the narrow street ahead of a slow-moving semi filled with bawling cattle.
Molly lifted Julie off her lap and set her in the chair where there was a plate with a sandwich still untouched. “Go on. You heard your father. Finish up.” Molly tipped her head toward Okalani—who admittedly looked younger than her fifteen years. “Would you like something, too, while everyone talks? I have turkey and roast beef or I could make a hamburger on the grill.”
Okalani turned her face toward her mother, asking with her eyes. Yeah, it wouldn’t surprise me if she was hungry. I was constantly ravenous at her age. Laka nodded and Okalani looked back at Molly. “I’d love a hamburger if it’s not too much trouble.”
Then she moved forward into the room and offered her hand toward the other girls. “Hi, I’m Okalani.”
Beverly smiled. “That’s an awesome name. Is it Hawaiian?”
Okalani shook her head and reached for a french fry from a big plate in the center of the table. “Siren. Mom and I live on Serenity Isle.”
Bruno was holding the door for me. As I went out, I set the duffel down on the floor next to the door. I was tired of carrying it. I’d just have to remember to pick it up again before we went … wherever we were going. “Okay, so what’s up with the men folk that us little wimmen couldn’t hear?” I whispered to Bruno in an exaggerated southern accent as I walked past him, and he let out a snort that matched the twinkle in his brown eyes.
God, I missed the laughter in those eyes. I used to stare at them for hours when he didn’t know I was watching.
He put an arm around me and pulled me against him until my head was on his shoulder and we were walking down the sidewalk toward where the others were waiting. “You actually impressed Nathan Fulbright. Said you reminded him of his deceased wife. You have spunk .”
It was my turn to snort. “Yeah, but note the ‘deceased’ part. He kill her for talking out of turn?”
Bruno kissed my temple. “They were married for fifty-two years. Mick said she just died last spring.” Everybody was on a first-name basis already? Apparently there’d been a lot of male bonding out here in a really short time.
But wow. Fifty-two years. That was just impressive. My first thought was, How sweet . My second thought was, Oh, that poor woman. “So did impressing him help us or hurt?”
We’d reached Mick and Fulbright, who were now sitting in a pretty gazebo on the expansive lawn surrounding an old stone courthouse. Adriana took a seat next to Mick. “It helped us. A lot.” Bruno kept his arm tight around my shoulder. It probably looked loosely draped, but there was a tension in it that I hadn’t expected. Bruno nodded to Fulbright. “Okay, what have you already told them, Nathan?”
Nathan deferred to Bruno with a wave of a hand. “You know more about the history, so I figured I’d leave it to you.”
“Well, I lived on the East Coast my whole life, so I grew up hearing legends of the lost city of Atlantis. There was always one expedition or another taking off with some new plan or a new invention to get into the trenches where everyone swore it was. When I went to college, I first wanted to study metaphysical biology. I had a theory that the island had simply collided with a continent and evolution had taken over.”
Meaning, were the Atlanteans just plain folk who lived everywhere now or did they have a unique biology that could be traced—like sirens? Now I remembered this about Bruno’s studies, and I remembered some of our old conversations. I picked up on his idea: “There are, after all, continents with odd angles. France looks like it was slapped on as an afterthought and so do the northwestern tips of Africa and Florida. They’ve all been speculated to be the ‘lost’ island.” I made quotes in the air with my fingers. Raising my arm moved his hand, which slid down to my waist.
Possessive thing today. But that wasn’t surprising, considering yesterday.
Adriana shook her head. “No. Atlantis was most definitely part of the siren empire. Eris the Just was the queen of queens for many centuries. The location has never been a secret from our own people, and I assure you it was nowhere near the supposed locations stated in books. Atlantis was no myth; it didn’t collide, and didn’t sink. It’s not in this dimension. That’s why nobody can find it.”
Bruno nodded. “The dimensional rift is a brand-new concept I’ve never seen anywhere. But I did find evidence that more than a few Atlanteans survived the cataclysm and moved to integrate with other populations.”
Adriana didn’t look happy to admit it, but she tipped her head with a grim face. “Refugees wouldn’t have been accepted on the other siren homelands. They were all deemed to be traitors who nearly destroyed the world. They would have been killed on sight. Living among the humans was the only hope they might have to survive.”
Mick picked up the story. “Then enters a young sea captain named Henry Fulbright. He was master of his own ship at only twenty-two when he came upon an area of horrible devastation. Debris and the decaying bodies of humans and fish made a whole region of the ocean stink of death. Other ship captains warned him against entering the waters for fear of disease, but he needed to get his cargo to harbor before it spoiled. He found a raft of people floating among the dead. His crew nearly mutinied when he insisted on picking up those survivors.”
“Atlanteans?” I asked, and Mick nodded.
“Only six survived the trip back to England. He married one of the women and they settled down to have a family. The men went to work in the town and eventually became landowners with new names, borrowed from the hosts who took them in.”
“Murphy.” My voice was as positive as I felt. “And Fulbright. So you’re both descended from the original Atlanteans?”
Mick nodded. “And, if Nathan’s source can be trusted, he says my multi-great-grandfather was actually the son of Kraystal, the older daughter of Queen Eris. Although she’d sent him away to be killed upon birth, as was the custom, the nanny took the child to a family on the shore to raise as their own.”
Wow. Shades of Moses. Adriana raised her eyebrows, then nodded. “I did find evidence of some family units around the cities on Atlantis. Craftsmen with human wives, mostly, who built the palace. The carving of stone was usually left to the men before they were…” She grimaced slightly. “Discarded.” Nobody likes admitting their ancestors did
horrible things. It changes how you remember them. At least she was suitably disgusted. That spoke well of the future of Rusland, where she would rule. “But it would be quite easy to learn the truth on Serenity. We have geneticists who specialize in identifying—”
At that moment, a bright, sharp tone split the air. It was similar to the high-pitched whine of a radio weather alert. It seemed to come from everywhere at once. The other four people in the gazebo dropped to their knees almost simultaneously, with their hands on their ears and pain etched on their features. I turned when I heard glass shatter and that the window of the restaurant had fractured. I raced forward before all of the glass hit the ground and leapt onto the sidewalk just as the tone stopped.
The three girls were sitting at the same table where we’d left them. If you opened the dictionary to the phrase “the cat who ate the canary,” their pictures would be there. My hands were on my hips instantly, but I couldn’t get out a word before Molly Murphy was in the room. “What in the name of heaven is going on out here? A whole tray of glasses just out of the dishwasher shattered right in the tray.”
I fibbed just a bit: “I’m a vampire, girls. I can smell who’s got something to hide.” In a manner of speaking, that was true. Beverly certainly smelled more musky than she had when I’d left, and her pulse was racing a mile a minute under pale, sweating skin.
Molly and I both stared at them until they were literally squirming. Julie broke first: “It was Beverly. I told her not to touch it. I did, Mom.” Now she started rubbing her earlobe and I saw that there was blood dripping down her neck. “That sound really hurt my ears.”
Her mother raced forward the moment she saw the smear of red. “Oh my lord, sweetie!” I very intentionally didn’t step forward.