And then a geyser erupted at the bow.
Fennrys was flung forward and cracked his head against the rigid bench seat, splitting the skin above his eyebrow. Blood poured from the wound, and his face went slack as he lost consciousness. Mason caught a fleeting glimpse of a seaweed-draped nymph riding on the back of an enormous, fish-tailed, snow-white bull in the instant before she lost her footing on the slick, wet floor of the boat. The oar flew from her hand and disappeared over the side into the black water. And then Mason followed it, toppling over the side of the boat to vanish beneath the waves with barely a cry for help.
For some strange reason, her last thought as she sank into darkness was of Cal—of his smile … and his laughter. And his sea-green eyes.
XVIII
The sound of waves washing the shore, lulling him with a constant, steady rhythm—like the beating of a giant heart—gave way to the insistent beeping of a heart monitor. He listened to it for a very long time before he realized that it was beeping in time with his heartbeat. There was cool, dry air on his face where before there had been the chill caress of water. Through closed eyes he could sense light where only moments before—or so it had seemed—there had been deep, profound darkness. He heard the sounds of gasping and realized it was his own parched throat that had made the noise. His lungs were uncomfortably dry. Arid. He was drowning in the way a fish drowns, and he felt his hands reaching, grasping at the nothingness in front of his face as if he could swim back into the watery embrace where he had felt so at home. So at peace …
“Easy …”
Calum Aristarchos felt a hand on his arm.
“Easy, son.”
Strong, gentle fingers circled his wrist. Cal tried to open his eyes, but it was as if all the moisture had been sucked out of them. His eyelids felt stuck together and it was hard, painful to try to pry them open. When he finally managed the feat, everything was blurry and wavering. It seemed to take a long time for his vision to clear enough for him to be able to tell that he was lying in a bed in a room with greenish-white walls. Pale curtains billowed slightly in the breeze that came through a window, and stiff, starched sheets rubbed his skin like sandpaper as he moved weakly. Looking up, Cal saw a bag with a clear liquid hanging from a hook beside his bed. It flowed through a tube and into a needle stuck in the back of his hand.
Cal swallowed painfully. He was so thirsty.
Remembering the voice that had spoken to him, Cal turned his head away from the IV and saw that on the other side of his bed, there was a man. A stranger. At first Cal thought he must have been sitting on a very low stool, but then he caught the gleam of chrome-rimmed wheels and saw that the man was, in fact, in a wheelchair. There was a plaid blanket tucked tightly around his legs and feet.
Cal shifted his gaze to the man’s face and felt a strange sense that he’d seen him somewhere before. The stranger’s face, above a neatly trimmed beard, was deeply tanned and his hair, pulled back into a short ponytail at the nape of his neck, was thick and wavy, a shade of rich chestnut brown shot through with highlights. His eyes were green. Sea green.
The same color as Cal’s eyes.
“How are you feeling?” the man asked, his voice a pleasing baritone.
“Where am I?”
“Hospital.” The man shrugged one heavily muscled shoulder. “It’s actually a specialty care facility on Roosevelt Island. They don’t usually take in emergency patients, but seeing as how you washed up half-dead and mostly drowned pretty much right on their doorstep, they didn’t really have much choice but to give you a bed. When I got here, I convinced them not to transfer you to a facility in Manhattan.”
“And how did you do that?” Cal asked warily.
“Money talks.” The man grinned. His teeth were almost blindingly white in his tanned face. “You know that.”
Of course he knew that. Cal’s family was one of the wealthiest in New York. “So you know who I am, then,” he said.
The man nodded.
Cal gritted his teeth. “And who are you?”
There was a glint of wry amusement in the man’s eyes. “You mean to tell me your mother didn’t keep my picture on the mantel? I’m wounded.”
“You’re …” Cal had, of course, known in an instant. He knew it now, with bone-deep certainty.
“Your father. That’s right, Calum.” His gaze flicked away for a moment, and one hand clenched tightly for a brief instant on the rim of the chair’s wheel. But when he looked back at Cal, his gaze was calm. “Don’t worry. I don’t expect you to call me ‘Dad.’ My name is Douglas—”
“I know your name. You’re Douglas Muir.”
He shrugged, unfazed by Cal’s less-than-welcoming tone. “I wasn’t sure you would. It wouldn’t have surprised me if Daria had banned the speaking of it in her house.”
Cal’s glance strayed, once again, to the blanket that was tucked tight across his father’s lap. “She never said you were … uh.”
“She doesn’t know.” Douglas waved a hand dismissively. “It happened after I left. Boating accident. One of the hazards of my … lifestyle.”
“You sail?”
He laughed, a low, mellow sound. “That’s how I got here. My sloop is moored at a jetty just south of the hospital grounds. I came as soon as I could. As soon as I got word.”
Cal frowned. There was something very weird about this situation. It was all a bit surreal, and he wasn’t entirely certain that he wasn’t just experiencing some kind of side effect of pain medication. “No offense,” he said, “but why did the hospital call you?”
“Hospital administration didn’t call me. They don’t yet know who you are.” He wheeled to the end of the bed, plucked Cal’s chart from the hook where it hung on a clipboard, and tossed it onto the bed beside him, where it landed with a thump.
Cal fumbled to pick it up with prickly-numb fingers and looked at it, his frown deepening. In the space for his name, it actually said “John Doe.” In the notes section, it made reference to the scars on his face—almost fully healed—and to the injuries to his head—inconclusive as to extent, but indicative of recent trauma. Also, the chart noted the fact that Cal’s lungs had been full of water when he was found, and the nurse who’d accidentally stumbled across him had had to revive him using mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and CPR.
His father wheeled back to the head of the bed. “They were pretty sure you were a goner when they first found you and—”
“What the hell do you mean they don’t know who I am?” Cal interrupted. He was more than a little afraid now and starting to get angry. “If that’s the case, then how did you find out I was here?”
“The girls told me.”
“What girls?”
His father’s green eyes glittered. “The Nereids. Daughters of the sea god Nereus. Lovely things. I believe you’ve made their acquaintance recently?”
Cal felt as if a sudden frost was spreading icy fingers throughout his chest.
Nereids …
His thoughts turned to the recent nights when he’d been home on his mother’s estate on Long Island Sound. Nights spent down by the water, watching silently as dozens of beautiful girls cavorted in the waves, swimming and diving, riding on the backs of beasts that were half bull or horse or lion at the front end, half fish with scaly, silvery tails at the back. Cal remembered the feelings of longing to join them … the dangerous, scintillating temptation that he’d only narrowly avoided, and sometimes wished he hadn’t.
The strange, dreamlike visitations had started just after he’d been injured in the attack on the school—a nightmarish encounter with monsters in a storm that had left Cal injured, his face disfigured by scars. He’d spent most of his daylight hours since trying to convince himself that the water nymphs were a product of his imagination. Some kind of coping mechanism to deal with the stress of his injuries.
And with Mason Starling’s subsequent rejection of him. Because of those injuries.
You still trying to convince
yourself that’s what’s really going on with her?
No. Not really. But it was easier to think that she was repulsed by his disfigurement, rather than to consider that maybe she just didn’t feel the same way about him as he felt about her. That maybe she felt that way about someone else … The sudden gut-punch sensation Cal experienced every time he’d even thought such a thing was almost overwhelming. It was the main reason that when the Nereids had called to Cal a second time, he’d gone to them.
Not joined them—his instincts had told him that he would be forever lost if he went so far as to swim with the beguiling creatures—but rather, he’d hovered about on the fringes of the nightly gatherings. As an observer, he could forget for a time the desperate stirrings of deep longing he harbored for Mason. He could distract himself with other desires. In the beginning, it had worked. But the more he went down to the water, the more the water girls implored him with their seductive songs to stay, to join them… . He soon found himself torn between two equally fruitless yearnings. One of them devastating to his heart, the other … a danger to his very life.
“Wait …” Now he remembered. It all flooded back to him in a painful wave of memory and sensation. “I heard them,” he murmured. “When I was on the bridge. On the bike. They were singing—and then screeching—in my head. It was like somebody suddenly filled my helmet with acid… .”
Cal remembered the sensation of scorching jealousy filling his thoughts. He’d been on the bridge, near to the waters where they swam. The Nereids had called to him and he had ignored them. Because of Mason. Because he and Fennrys were trying to save her.
The daughters of Nereus the sea god hadn’t taken that very well.
Cal remembered the corrosive anger in their voices—it had set his brain on fire—and he remembered shaking his head like a dog, tearing wildly with one hand at the chin strap to get the thing off his head, as if the helmet was holding the sound in. He would have done anything to make that terrible pain go away. And then, distracted by that—and by the blinding white light that had suddenly blazed up in front of him—he remembered losing control of the bike.
Then blackness …
Silence …
Cal looked over at his father, who’d gone very still.
“They didn’t mean for you to get hurt,” Douglas said quietly. “They don’t understand how fragile our humanity makes us sometimes. How vulnerable. They just wanted you to go to them—”
“They almost got me killed.” Cal glared at the older man. He took a breath. “Why didn’t I drown?”
“It’s called Amphitrite’s Kiss.” Douglas’s mouth bent in a one-sided grin. “If you were anyone else, it would have saved your life. As it is, the kiss just … awakened something already inside you. And next semester? You should really think about trying out for the swim team. You’d win every gold medal there is.”
Father and son lapsed into silence, and Douglas reached over and poured Cal a drink of water from a pitcher on the table beside the bed. Cal took a grateful sip and lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes … And there it was again.
The distant sound of roaring tidal waves.
It hadn’t been his imagination on waking. He could feel the distant pulse of the East River as it flowed around the contours of Roosevelt Island. He could sense the ebb and flow of the waters of Long Island Sound. And, farther still, he could reach out and, in his mind, touch the salt swell of the Atlantic. He knew that the nurse who’d found him hadn’t saved him. Calum may have been suffering from the effects of the head injury he’d sustained, but he hadn’t succumbed to drowning.
He couldn’t drown. Not anymore.
His eyes flew open, and he bolted up in bed. When he turned to his father, Douglas nodded, reading in Cal’s gaze that he understood. Cal could feel it in his bones. Bones in a body that wasn’t entirely human anymore.
Maybe, a voice whispered in his head, it never has been… .
“This,” his father said, “this is your mother’s worst nightmare—this newfound fate of yours. You’ll be even more like me now. More like your grandfather. And his grandfather.” He laughed mirthlessly and shook his head.
Cal just stared at him. “I really, really don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said.
Douglas sighed. “Feels a little funny to be having ‘the talk’ with you now, but I guess that can’t be helped. Your mother, while she is devoted to the gods of her ancestors in her own … exceptionally dedicated ways, does not approve of those same gods, uh, consorting with mortals. She considers human/immortal pairings to have been the essential source of all the troubles, back in the day. She didn’t know that I had Olympian blood in my veins. That my great-grandfather happened to have been a god who’d taken a shine to a mortal woman and … well, taken a shine to her. In the old stories, they talked about that kind of stuff happening all the time, but by the 1800s, it wasn’t exactly common anymore.”
Cal knew that he’d probably gone a bit pale. “You mean you’re—we’re—”
“Demigods? More like … semi-gods. Not exactly half-divine, but still. Even in minuscule amounts, god blood has a pretty potent kick to it. If your mother had suspected before we’d gotten married that I had it running through my veins, you wouldn’t be here right now. But she didn’t know. Hell, I didn’t even know until I was in my twenties, and by then it was too late.” Douglas shrugged. “I was already in love with Daria, and I wasn’t about to let a little thing like the occasional manifestation of gills come between us. Of course, your mother figured it out eventually. When your sister, Meredith, was born, Daria suspected something was different about her, even though no one else did. She was just a perfect little baby. But when you arrived, it was fairly obvious. You were a child of Poseidon right down to the bright green eyes and webbed fingers and toes.”
Cal glanced at his hands … which were perfectly normal.
He raised an eyebrow at his father.
Douglas nodded. “Plastic surgery when you were two. I’m surprised she waited that long, but there wasn’t a doctor she could find that would do the procedure when you were any younger. The membranes were very fine. Didn’t take much to remove them. And our breed heal better than the average human, so of course, there wasn’t any scarring.”
Cal snorted. “I call BS on that. Look at my face.” He couldn’t quite manage to keep the acid from his voice.
“Something … other do that?” his father asked quietly, leaning forward in his chair. “Something supernatural?”
Cal nodded reluctantly.
“Thought so. But I’m betting the gash you came in with on the other side of your head—the one from the bridge accident—is probably pretty much gone already.”
Cal raised a hand to the opposite side of his forehead from where the draugr’s claw marks still seamed his flesh. There was a bandage there, taped to the skin just under his hairline. He peeled the whole bandage off and looked at it. The underside had a fairly large bloodstain on it, but when Douglas held a small mirror out for him to take a look, all Cal saw was a faint pinkness to the skin. Like a fading strip of sunburn. His gaze slid once again to his father’s blanket-wrapped legs.
“So.” He nodded. “Fishing accident, huh?”
“Big-game fish. Really big. Titanic, you might say.”
“A … Titan?”
“One of ’em, yeah.” Douglas shifted in the chair. “A lesser one, but still …”
“I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. I had to do something useful with my life after your mother cut me out of hers. And yours. Meri, at least, still sends the occasional letter… .” He shrugged and waved a hand at his blanketed legs. “That’s how this happened, actually. I was doing her a favor.”
“And the rest of the time you just, what? Sail up and down the East River, waiting for your errant offspring to drop from bridges?” Cal tried to lighten his tone, but even to his own ears the words were laced with bitterness and bewilderment.
Douglas
, to his credit, seemed prepared to shrug off his son’s not-so-veiled hostility. “No,” he said with a smile. “As a matter of fact, I was diving off the coast of Antigua when the Nereids caught up with me.”
“Antig …” Cal felt his jaw drop open. “How long have I been here?”
“About seventy-two hours.”
Cal shook his head, his patience wearing thin. “You just said your boat was docked here. There’s no way you could get here from Antigua in under three days.”
“You mean there’s no way I could get from there to here in under three hours,” his father corrected him. “Because that’s how fast I had to move to get here in time to square things with the hospital administration.”
“Hours … ?”
“You’d be surprised how fast a boat can move with fair winds, calm seas, and the help of a dozen sea goddesses motivated by guilty consciences.” Douglas’s green stare was sharp, unblinking. “Let me ask you something, son. What were you doing on that bridge in the middle of the night? Right before it blew up?”
“I was helping a friend—wait …” Cal went silent as his father’s words registered, and an ice-cold hand of fear lay its palm across his chest. He tried to keep the tremor from his voice as he asked, “Right before the bridge did what?”
“I guess that part of the night’s festivities occurred after you fell.” Douglas’s mouth hardened into a straight line. “Somebody saw fit to blow the hell out of the Hell Gate.”
Mason …
Fear spread across his chest and punched straight through Cal’s rib cage to encircle his heart. What if something had happened to her? Cal wasn’t sure he could live with himself if Mason had been hurt. He still felt the sharp sting of knowing that a large part of the reason she’d even been on that train, crossing that bridge in the first place, was because of him.
Because you were such an ass to her.
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