I started to think they’d gone away. Given me to the skull. And while it hardly seemed possible for me to get any more scared, that idea did the trick.
Then I spotted Daddy’s oxygen tank covered in cobwebs in a shadowy corner.
It didn’t make sense. The tank belonged years in the future. But the terrified kid I’d become didn’t think about that. He just took the tank as a signpost to point the way to his father. He staggered into the room where it stood and on through the doorway in the far wall.
There were more doorways after that, until I wondered if I’d gotten lost, or maybe never really seen the tank at all. Then, at the far end of the darkest room yet, I spotted two murky grown-up figures, one woman and one man.
They didn’t see me. They couldn’t have, because they turned and headed for a different doorway. I somehow knew that if they went through, I’d lose them forever.
I tried to call to them. Even through they were now just a few feet away, they still couldn’t hear my strangled little cry.
I ran toward them, but they only got farther away, like the room was getting longer. The skull’s teeth clicked louder as it narrowed the gap between us.
I dredged up the energy for one last burst of speed. I sprinted until I smacked right into my father’s legs and threw my arms around them. And was sure I’d done what I needed to do to make everything all right.
Fingers tousled my sweaty hair. But they were rougher than they’d ever been before, so rough that it almost hurt. Surprised, I looked up, and that was when I finally managed to get off a real scream.
Because Daddy and Mommy weren’t Daddy and Mommy anymore. They were the skull, too, and their fleshless, glowing faces leered down at me.
I tried to break away, but I was too slow. They grabbed me, shoved me to the floor, and bent over me. The first skull floated down to join them. Then they all opened their jaws wide and started biting me. They ripped away chunks and strips of me and gobbled them up.
It went on and on, while I shrieked and thrashed, straining uselessly to break free. I didn’t have to strain anymore to hold Shadow back. He was gone now, along with any flashes of understanding that what was happening wasn’t real. The nightmare had finally crushed all that out of me.
Then, suddenly, the pain and all the rest of it stopped. I was soaring over Ybor again. Timon was maybe ten feet away. I couldn’t see him clearly. The tears in my eyes blurred everything.
“Now do you understand?” he asked. “Now will you mind your manners and behave?”
“Yes.” I gasped.
It would be nice to think I was just bullshitting him to make the torture stop. That, even at that moment, I hadn’t really broken. But I’m not sure it’s true. At best, it was probably half-and-half.
“Good,” he said, and I felt pathetically grateful. “But let’s make absolutely sure.”
Then I was back on the floor in the dark, with strong hands holding me down. The thing that had been my mommy sank her teeth into my cheek.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Eventually the skulls stopped chewing on me, and Timon turned me loose to sleep normally. The dreams I had on my own probably weren’t any treat, either, not after what he’d put me through. But I didn’t remember any of them when I woke up.
The air smelled of piss, and my pajama pants—red silk this morning—and tangled sheets were cold and wet. Shame made me glad I was alone. That A’marie wasn’t there to see.
Then I realized that wasn’t exactly true. Yes, it would have been embarrassing. But I still missed waking up to her and wished she was there to tell me everything was all right.
Feeling shaky and dazed, like my head was full of static, I stripped the bedding off the mattress, the pajamas off me, and rinsed everything in the tub. The Tuxedo Team would still know I’d had some kind of accident, but maybe they wouldn’t be able to tell it had involved my bladder.
Then I showered, shaved, dressed, and found breakfast on a cart outside the door. I managed two bites of a Greek omelet, and then I had to run back into the john and puke.
But after that, I started feeling better. Or maybe I just got mad. Either way, it bucked me up enough to get me going.
I still had the phone one of Leticia or Gimble’s flunkies had left for me. Raul hadn’t bothered to take it. I flipped it open and dialed Vic’s number.
She answered on the second ring. “Hello.”
“It’s me,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure everything’s okay.”
“It is,” she said. “I’m back at work. I hoped that would help, and I think it is.”
“What did you tell everybody about the black eye and bruises?”
She lowered her voice. “The same story we told in the clinic. I was in an accident, and the air bag didn’t deploy. I’ve had at least dozen kids ask me if I’m going to sue somebody. How depressing is that?”
“They see lawyer commercials every time they turn on the TV.”
“How are you? Are you still, well, with them?”
“Yes. And I’m okay. But I could use a favor. Nothing that will pull you back into the middle of it. Just advice. Education majors have to take a bunch of Psych classes, right?”
“Yes.”
“What did they teach you about dreams?”
It only took her a couple minutes to tell me what she remembered, but it seemed like enough to point me in the right direction. Then she got off the phone to lecture some poor kid who’d been sent to the office—I winced because I knew what he was in for—and I headed out to find A’marie.
Once again, the other servants took a passive-aggressive stab at keeping me away from her. But I scowled and persisted until I tracked her down. She was dusting a room on the ninth floor.
“Is anybody even staying up here?” I asked.
“No,” she said. “But anytime Timon uses the hotel, he likes for it to get a thorough cleaning.”
“He would,” I said. “Look, something happened. Timon pushed me too hard, and I guess it changed my outlook. Jammed my brain into gear, maybe. Anyway, I have an idea. Or two, depending on how you look at it.” I told her what they were.
She shook her head. It tossed her curls around, covering and then revealing the stubby horn on the left. “He’ll never go for the first one, and the second one’s stupid.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. The way things have been lately, it’s hard for me to tell.”
“If you really want to help, I gave you a plan. It’s simple, and it will work. You just have to throw the game.”
“I can’t.”
She looked like she wanted to stamp her hoof. “Why not?”
“For one thing, like I already told you, there’s no guarantee that it would really make things any better.”
“And I told you, we’re willing to take our chances.”
“Yeah, but… look, it’s just the way I am.”
“You have to do better than that. Or else how do I even know this isn’t some kind of trick? Maybe Timon’s way of flushing out the subjects who hate him the most.”
That stung. “Do you really think I’d do something like that?”
“No,” she said, “and if it was just you and me, I’d trust you. But it’s not. You want me to help convince my friends to trust you. So you’re going to have to make me understand.”
I sighed. “Okay. I get it. It’s just that I’m no good at talking about this kind of shit.” I flopped down on the bed, and she pulled up a chair and sat across from me. “You have to let me work my way into it. When I was a kid, it was almost like there were two of me. There was good me, who wanted to make good grades, stay out of trouble, and make my dad proud. And there was wild me, who just wanted to party, play poker, shoot pool, and street race.”
“I think lots of people feel something like that.”
“I guess. But wild me was pretty strong. Strong enough that for a long time, it was anybody’s guess which guy I’d grow up to be.”
I took a breath. “But Dad kept
working on me. He kept telling me about responsibility, the self-respect he said you only get from making a contribution, and things like that. Then I got together with Vic, and even though the wild me kind of turned her on, she really wanted the good me, too.”
“So you decided that was who you were going to be.”
“Yeah. After years of blowing off school, my grades were nothing special. Definitely not good enough for a scholarship, and, even if I’d been willing to take it from him, Dad didn’t have any money. So the big plan was for me to go into the Army. It would make a man out of me, and get me money for college.”
“From the way you’re talking about it,” she said, “this was before 9/11.”
“Yes, and after it, I was suddenly a real soldier, fighting in a real war in Afghanistan. And at first, that was okay, too. Scary as hell, but okay. I’m an American. I was pissed off. Before we finally got him, I wanted to catch bin Laden as much as anybody.”
A’marie nodded. Like always, it bounced her curls around. “What changed it for you?”
“No one thing. A bunch of things piled one on top of the other. We let bin Laden slip away and hide. I shot some real terrorists, or close enough, but I’m pretty sure I also shot some guys who never even heard of the World Trade Center. They never even heard of skyscrapers. And I found out I don’t like shooting anybody.”
She surprised me by reaching over and squeezing my hand. “That’s a good thing.”
“Maybe not always. Not when they’re shooting at you. But anyway. I also saw our own side do some… Abu Ghraib stuff. Then the US invaded Iraq, and all of a sudden it felt like nobody back home even cared about what my buddies and I were doing anymore.”
“And it all disillusioned you.”
I shrugged. “Maybe. I wasn’t a general or a political expert. I tried to believe that if I could just see the big picture, everything would make sense. And, I just concentrated on staying alive until I could go home.”
“But more bad things happened when you did?”
“Yeah.” My mouth twisted. “I found out Dad had cancer. He’d worked the same place for fifteen years, but the insurance plan was screwing him over. He hadn’t gotten things he needed.”
“I’m so sorry.”
“If I’d known, I could have gotten out early and maybe done something. But he didn’t tell me. He never liked asking anybody for help, and he didn’t want to mess up the big plan. He made sure Vic didn’t know how bad things really were, and twisted her arm so she wouldn’t tell me he was sick, either.”
I realized my eyes were wet—it was a bad morning for leakage—and, angry with myself, knuckled the tears away. “Long story short, I only had a couple more months with him before he died. And after that, I just couldn’t get motivated to follow through on the big plan. It didn’t make sense to me anymore. Why do all that work when I could place a bet or play a game and come away thousands of dollars ahead?”
“The wild you was back in charge.”
“Yes. Or maybe by then it was I-don’t-give-a-shit me. Anyway, it wasn’t anybody Vic wanted to spend the rest of her life with.” I sighed. “Is this making any sense at all?”
A’marie frowned and thought about it. “It is, but I don’t know what it has to do with what’s happening here and now.”
I waved my hand like I thought I could pull the right words out of the air. “It’s like… look, it’s too late to be the person Dad and Vic wanted. It’s not in me, and they’re gone anyway. But the person I know how to be isn’t completely worthless. I never cheated or hustled anybody, and there are damn few pros who can say that. I pay my debts. Even if I hadn’t met Timon, I still would have paid Rhonda somehow. When I make a deal with a backer or whoever, I keep it. And I have to hold the line on all of that, or I’m really not anybody.”
A’marie sighed. “You’re saying you have principles. And this stupid plan you came up with already bends them as far as you’re willing to go.”
“Something like that.”
“Okay, then. We’ll try it your way. What all do you need?”
I told her. As I expected, some of it, like a laptop with Internet access and a replacement gun—just in case—was no big deal. The rest was trickier, but she came back a couple hours later and told me she had it taken care of.
That meant it was time for another sneak to the Miata. I hopped out of my physical body for a second to look around the alley. As far as I could tell, nobody was watching the door or the car. So we dashed out, jumped in, and drove away.
It was another nice day, and the top was down. The sunshine and the wind in my hair took away more of the frazzled, jumpy feeling left over from everything that had happened the day and night before. Or maybe I just felt better because doing feels better than waiting.
A’marie parked near one of the shrimp docks on McKay Bay. As I stowed my new Glock 27 under my seat, I said, “Too bad we don’t know the spell to call him like Timon did. Although I guess that wouldn’t be very smart in the daylight.”
“This may not be very smart anyway,” A’marie answered. “Murk isn’t known for being friendly.”
“Well,” I said, “at least he isn’t all that big.”
The way she looked at me told me I’d said something retarded.
“When he came up out of the water,” she said, “he was only small because otherwise, some human might have spotted him even in the dark. He’s a kraken.”
“What’s that?”
“Except for when he decides to shrink, something really, really big.”
“I’m kind of sorry to hear that. But this still doesn’t seem any dumber than a lot of the other things I’ve done.”
She laughed. “You’ve got me there.” She reached inside her tuxedo jacket and brought an orange plastic prescription bottle with a Walgreens label.
But I was pretty sure the pills inside weren’t from Walgreens. They looked like blobs of green Play-Doh a kid had rolled between his fingertips. I swallowed one, and she took the other.
For a second, the pill gave me heartburn. Then it suddenly felt hard to breathe, like I was standing on top of Mt. Everest. I turned to A’marie. She was panting, too.
“It’s all right,” she wheezed. “This is supposed to happen. Or at least that’s what Darnell said.”
“And if you can’t trust your drug dealer, who can you trust?”
Still gasping, we got out of the car, then took off our shoes. I stripped down to the swim trunks she’d found for me. She got rid of her jacket, vest, tie, and shoes, but kept her shirt, pants, and socks. She couldn’t wear a bathing suit and show the world her goat legs.
Then we grabbed our goggles. The magic in the pills was supposed to let us breathe and even talk underwater, but apparently we still needed air spaces in front of our eyes to see clearly.
I had a pair of fins, too. A’marie didn’t. She’d said they wouldn’t stay on.
We crossed a strip of sand, pebbles, and saw-grass and waded into the water. I was glad it was cool, but not cold. We spat inside our goggles and rinsed them out to keep them from fogging up. I pulled on the fins. Then it was time to go under. I got that far, then froze. Because my body was pretty sure it was a bad idea to breathe water.
But A’marie was already doing it, and I didn’t want her to think I was chicken. So I forced myself to inhale.
And was glad I had. That half-suffocating, up-in-the-mountains feeling went away. Except for an oily taste in my mouth—with all the big cargo ships and fishing boats going in and out, the water wasn’t all that clean—everything was fine.
Actually, it was better than fine. It was cool. It was one of those moments that showed magic could be fun when I wasn’t scared shitless and counting on it to save my ass.
I gave A’marie a grin, and we headed for deeper water. Her swimming was mostly arm. I guessed she’d learned from experience that kicking didn’t do her much good. My fins and I took it easy so we wouldn’t leave her behind.
We swa
m over other Old People going about their business. A submarine made of seashells sat on the bottom of the bay. Its engine, or what passed for an engine, was idling. I could feel the magic throbbing inside the hull. Guys with the smooth gray hide of porpoises were offloading net bags of what looked like kelp and handing them off to finheads, who stowed them aboard a triangular wooden sub of their own.
But we didn’t see too many things like that, because we’d gone into the water near the patch Murk considered to be his private turf. It wasn’t long before the bay looked as empty of fish-men and such as ordinary humans imagined it to be.
The bay got deeper, and A’marie and I followed the slope downward. I wasn’t crazy about that. The crud in the water already cut visibility, and now we were losing the light from overhead. But we didn’t have much choice. If the dolphin guys and finheads had to hug the bottom to keep humans from spotting them, then obviously, a dinosaur-sized octopus had to do it, too.
Then, even though we were swimming deeper, the water got warmer.
I just thought we’d caught some kind of current. I grinned and asked A’marie if she’d peed in the pool. Talking made bubbles come out of my mouth in a way that almost tickled.
She frowned and looked all around, like you have to do if you want to see something coming underwater. “Something’s wrong,” she said.
The way she said it slapped the smartass out of me. “What?” I asked.
She pointed. “That.”
A big hammerhead shark was swimming toward us from the south. It had the flat head with the eyes on the ends, the mouth with rows and rows of pointed teeth, the fin on the back, and all the rest of the standard shark equipment. But the crazy thing was that it was also fire burning underwater. It was yellow and blue, and its shape flickered and wavered, with tongues of flame jumping up from the rest of it.
“What is it?” A’marie asked. Like all of a sudden, I was the one who was supposed to know his way around.
I did have a hunch, though. “It’s Murk’s watchdog. Something he made.” And it made sense that, if he knew how, he’d make it partly out of fire. What would seem stranger and therefore scarier to the average fish-man?
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