by Jenn Bennett
Oh.
“It’s probably fine,” I said. “The captain did mention he was having router issues.”
Kar Yee inspected her nails. “Sure, put your faith in the bigoted white man in charge. That always works out.”
The boat slowed again, then came to a stop. Seconds later, we heard uneven footfalls coming down the steps outside the cabin. The door swung open and Captain Christie and his million-dollar smile shuffled inside.
“My apologies, folks. We’re going to have to take a roundabout way to the reef. Might take an extra half hour or more. There’s a second storm cropping up south of us, and I can’t handle two. The first one’s already draining me.”
“How come you didn’t know about the second storm before now?” Jupe asked. “I thought sailors got storm warnings from the Coast Guard, or something.”
“We do. Only state-of-the-art equipment onboard the Baba Yaga. But Mother Nature is tetchy over water. Anyway, it’s nothing to worry about. Just don’t want to get trapped in the middle of two storms, little man.”
Jupe’s restraint was threadbare. I was pretty sure he was one more “little man” away from losing his shit.
“As long as we’re safe,” Lon said. “I don’t want to take chances with my family. I’d rather go back.”
“Rest assured, I’ve been piloting boats for thirty years. Never had an accident.”
“How’d you hurt your leg, then?” Jupe asked, his tone utterly accusatory.
“Shark got me.” The captain lifted knee-length shorts to reveal a crescent-shaped scar resembling a bite mark that stretched across his lower thigh.
“No way—really?”
The captain bellowed a laugh. “Nah, just messin’ with ya. No sharks in this area.”
“Yes there are. Great whites. I’ve seen one with my dad.” He turned to Lon. “Right?”
Lon nodded.
“Sharks don’t like storms, so you’re fine,” the captain said. “Everyone enjoying themselves so far? Sorry the Wi-Fi’s down. I’ll have it up again shortly, along with the satellite TV signal. Poker chips and cards in that cabinet there, if you’d like to play.”
“Who’s driving the boat?” Jupe asked.
“Got it idling, don’t you worry.”
“What if we drift into the cliffs?”
The captain’s smile dimmed; he wasn’t the only one losing his patience. “Do you see the shore?” the man said, pointing to the windows, where there was nothing but ocean and storm clouds. “We’re going away from the shore, not toward it, little man.”
That did it.
Lon recognized Jupe’s intentions a second before I did and loudly warned his son, “Don’t you dare!”
But it was too late.
Jupe had gritted his teeth and was already blurting out something that was more a general expression of frustration than a command: “Shut up and sit down, you . . .” Jupe paused, searching for words in the middle of using his knack, finally selecting what was in all probability the least offensive of the putdowns he was juggling. “Brainless idiot.”
A dazed look spread over the captain’s face. His mouth slackened. Shoulders went limp. Halo grew smaller. A moment later, he sank to the floor and sat.
The cabin was silent as we watched him, waiting to see what would happen. After a few seconds, I walked over to the man and waved my hand in his face. “Captain Christie? Can you hear me?”
No response. He just stared ahead with glazed-over eyes.
Lon squatted next to me and, in turns, shook the man’s shoulders and called out his name. When it was clear the captain wasn’t coming around, Lon muttered, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”
Jupe made a small noise, just as surprised as the rest of us. “Uh-oh.”
“Godammit,” Lon complained. “What the hell have you done to him?”
“Crap. I don’t know. He can’t literally be brainless . . . can he?”
“You’d better sure as shit hope not. What did I tell you about using your knack?” Jupe gritted his teeth in embarrassment as Lon plowed on, not waiting for an answer. “I told you to ask permission and never use it on strangers.”
“He’s not a stranger. And I’m sorry, but he was being—”
“This is not a joke,” Lon barked. “You can’t go around using it without thinking.”
“Okay, okay,” Jupe said, scratching the side of his neck. “I’ll fix it. Give me a second.”
“Yes, you damn well will.”
“Hold on. Let’s think about this carefully,” I said, stepping between the two of them. “You didn’t ‘make’ him brainless, Jupe. You must’ve just tricked his mind into believing that he’s, well—”
“Dumb,” Kar Yee said. “You turned him into an imbecile. But let’s be honest—it wasn’t a very far trip.”
I shot Kar Yee a not-helping look. “What’s done is done. Let’s just get him back to normal.”
After a few minutes of heated debate, we settled on the best way to counter the captain’s condition, and Jupe geared up for another try. “Captain Christie, you will forget my last command and return to your normal state.”
Nothing.
He tried again. “Captain Christie, you are not a brainless idiot. You can speak and function as you did when you walked down here.”
Nope.
“Captain Christie, you want to talk and stand up and you aren’t a brainless idiot.”
He tried three more times, variations on the same message, but nothing registered. The captain just stared blankly across the room, unmoving.
“Oh, God,” Jupe moaned.
“Maybe you need to cool down and try again in a few minutes,” I said, squeezing his shoulder for encouragement. “Let’s all just stay calm and wait it out. Everything’s going to be fine.”
But as we waited, staring at the mute captain like he was a pot of water heating to boil, the light inside the salon began to dim. After a couple of minutes, a steady rain stippled the cabin windows and pattered against the hull.
Not good.
And if anyone had any doubts about what was transpiring outside, Kar Yee vocalized our fears. “Guess the captain’s cloudbusting knack is offline, too.”
With nothing metaphysical pushing back the storms, the clear skies circling the boat began worsening, and fast. Wind roared against the windows as the water roughened. My stomach lurched as the full brunt of the storm hit the boat.
“Try it again, Jupe,” Lon encouraged after several minutes.
Still nothing. I glanced at Lon and wondered if he was thinking the same thing that I was, that this was perhaps the limitation on Jupe’s persuasive knack: maybe there were no takesies-backsies. And if that was true, then we’d have to wait it out and hope like hell its duration wasn’t permanent.
More time passed. I glanced out darkened windows. Nothing but dusky gray and a torrent of rain pummeling the glass, until a flash of lightning zigzagged across the sky. A clap of thunder quickly followed.
“That was close,” Jupe said nervously. “How far away is the storm, Dad?”
“Five seconds equals a mile. Start counting from the next bolt.”
When lightning struck again, Jupe began counting out loud, “One-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, three-Mississippi, four—”
Thunder startled all of us.
“Jesus!” Jupe said. “It’s less than a mile away. Maybe I should try my knack again on the captain.”
But before Lon could answer, the boat tilted back and forth like a rocking horse, then pitched to the right. I tumbled off the sofa. Lon snagged me around the hips, saving me before I fell on the floor. The boat pitched wildly in the opposite direction. We shouted in unison as our cooler slid off a table and crashed into the cabin wall. Jumping up to rescue the spilled contents, Jupe momentarily lost his balance and sloppily righted himself.
But someone else wasn’t able to do the same. The captain lurched like an emotionless rag doll as his body swayed violently toward the corner of a side table near his
temple. And when the boat settled, his eyes remained closed, and he didn’t get back up.
Blood bloomed from a wound on his head.
Lon crouched over the captain’s body, checking the wound.
“Oh, God,” Jupe whispered. “Is he alive?”
He had to be: I could still see the man’s halo, though it had shrunk considerably.
“Unconscious, but he’s got a pulse,” Lon confirmed. After the boat rocked again, he said, “No other injuries I can see.”
I hastily stripped the orange bandana off the man’s head—nearly bald up there, just as I suspected—and pressed it against the wound to stanch the blood. It was bleeding like crazy. “Hey, Captain Christie, wake up,” I shouted into the man’s face, hoping that the bump on his head might’ve cancelled out the effects of Jupe’s knack. No such luck. “Should we slap him? Shake him?”
“If he’s got a concussion . . .”
I shook him a little anyway. He didn’t respond.
“Oh, God,” Jupe moaned. “This is all my fault. What if he doesn’t wake up—what if he dies? Is it getting worse?”
I followed his troubled gaze down to the blood staining the bandana. “He’ll be okay, Jupe. Promise. It looks worse than it is.” Surely.
Thunder rumbled through my bones. Too close. Way too close. The boat swayed, taking my stomach with it. The captain’s body almost rolled away. Lon and I fell over him. I grabbed his legs, and Lon, his shoulders.
“I hate to point out the obvious, but we’re on a boat with no captain in the middle of a storm.”
“Two storms,” Lon pointed out.
“What should we do?” Kar Yee asked, looking at Lon, then me. “Magick?”
It wasn’t night, so my Moonchild ability was out. “I don’t know any spells that will”—I waved my free hand above the captain’s coma-like face—“bring him back to consciousness.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m not a demon. I don’t have a healing knack. And even if I did, he might still be under the influence of Jupe’s suggestion.”
“Oh, God,” Jupe murmured, his face tight with worry. “What have I done? I’m so sorry, Dad.”
“I know you are, I know,” Lon said softly. “But we can’t turn back time, so let’s just concentrate on what we can do, okay?”
“Okay.”
My eyes met Lon’s across the portly captain’s prone body. “Can you pilot a boat?”
“If you count a rusty bass boat with an outboard motor. Kar Yee?”
“Me?” Her tone was somewhere between indignation and disbelief.
My ears translated this as one big hell no. In the years I’d known her, she mostly viewed transportation as something done by other people at her request: call taxi, ride in taxi, pay taxi. She’d only bought her first car a year ago—if she could get away with riding around in a gilded litter carried by four underpaid shirtless men, she would.
“One of us better figure out how,” I said.
“Steering in a straight line on a sunny day is one thing,” Lon said. “Piloting through squalls and rough water takes skill. I think we’re going to have to call for help.”
Jupe whipped out his cell. “No signal. Hotlegs is offline, remember?”
“We can use the VHF radio to call the Coast Guard,” Lon said.
I handed Kar Yee the bloodied bandana. “You and Jupe stay here with the captain. Make sure he doesn’t roll around or anything.”
Lon and I trekked upstairs to the salon. I opened the door to the deck and was punched in the face with rain. We were in the middle of a raging storm, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. The sky was the color of a newly paved parking lot. A fierce wind blew across the deck, sending a wall of briny spray over the railings as it battered the grizzly bear design on the red-and-white California state flag hanging above the parlor. The boat seesawed, caught in an army of angry waves attacking the stern. I gripped the doorframe to stop myself from sliding.
“I’ll go alone,” Lon shouted over the wind and rain, trying to pull me back into the salon.
I pictured him falling overboard and shook my head. “Come on, before it gets worse.”
We clung to the outside of the cabin and clattered up metal stairs. Lightning streaked across the bow of the boat as we cleared the top step, illuminating the surface of the ocean, a million peaks of rippling waves. The thunder that followed—not more than a second or two behind—was so loud, I hunched over, as if shielding myself from dynamite. But what scared me more than the brewing typhoon was Lon’s face. This was clearly the last place he thought we should be with all this lightning.
But neither one of us was willing to sit around belowdecks, waiting for the captain to die while the yacht crashed into the rocky shoreline.
A canvas Bimini canopy on metal poles, which looked about as strong as an awning over a restaurant patio, covered the bridge where Captain Christie had been steering the boat. It kept the storm off our heads, but not off our clothes: fierce winds blew torrents of rain beneath it.
An outdoor lounge area sat at the back of the bridge, complete with built-in chaise longues, a dining table, and a really nice gas grill set into a granite countertop. “Jesus, he’s living large up here,” I muttered to myself.
“Don’t touch anything metal,” Lon shouted.
“College-educated adult,” I reminded him. “Not your teenage son.”
He feigned deafness, gesturing to his ear while surveying the bridge. But my attention shifted to my feet, which were now standing on a circular design in the center of the bridge. About the size of a car tire and painted in tinted shellac, the wheel-like pattern resembled a stylized compass. And to the undiscerning eye, that’s all it was—because the sheen of the shellac did a great job hiding the glow of Heka.
I tugged Lon’s sleeve and pointed down. “Center of the ward.”
Lon nodded and started to look away, then halted, staring. He saw it now, too: this was no ordinary protective ward, but a very specific one. “Æthryic demon seal? He’s protecting the boat against demonic attack?”
“Apparently so.”
Lon steadied himself on the rocking deck and bent to inspect it. “Christ, this looks familiar. What class of demon is this?”
I shook my head. But this was not something I saw every day—or at all, actually. No one on this plane, human or Earthbound, should need ongoing, permanent protection from anything Æthyric. Especially not a specific class of Æthyric demon. Even my magical order’s temples didn’t have specialized protection like this.
So why the hell did Captain Christie need it?
“Later,” Lon said, pulling me away from the magick-charged seal. As he did, the boat lurched and nearly knocked us both on my ass, so I did my best to put the seal out of my mind and focus on the more pressing task at hand.
A steering wheel sat in front of a panel of instruments that couldn’t have possibly been more foreign to me. I blinked rain out of my eyes and spotted something that looked like a CB radio. Lon was already ducking down to peer at the screen, where a digital light shone.
“Channel number,” Lon shouted, squinting at the screen as he swooped dripping locks of hair back from his forehead. He fiddled with a knob and the volume increased so I heard a voice being transmitted as if through sandpaper static. Sounded like weather bulletins.
“What channel is the Coast Guard?”
“Damned if I know,” he said. “Supposed to be some emergency button . . .”
I pointed at a red button. “Like that one?”
If we weren’t about to die, he might’ve laughed. All I saw were his merrily narrowed eyes, the slight uptick of the corners of his mouth . . . a barely there smile some people might not even notice. Not me. I lived for that smile—my smile—and when I saw it, I relaxed. Just a little. Everything would be fine. This was just a crazy story Jupe could tell his Earthbound friends at school.
Raindrops crested over Lon’s high cheekbones and dipped into the deep hollows of his ch
eeks. I pressed my hand against his face—
Then the bridge exploded.
It sounded like war. Like a pipe bomb. A building being demolished.
Blinding white light obliterated my sight for an extended moment. I was floating. Lifted out of my body, passing up through the veil and crossing over to the Æthyr.
Or heaven. Hell. God only knew.
Seconds—minutes?—later, when I realized I was still on earth, I couldn’t move. The white light was gone. I felt rain driving down on my face. Could see part of the bridge, the canvas canopy . . . and the enormous smoldering hole in the middle of it.
The scent of burnt plastic and smoke revived me. I gasped for breath, willing my lungs back to life, then coughed up rainwater.
My feet felt like they were on fire. Smoke unfurled in wisps from my lowtop sneakers. I sat up and tugged one off by the heel: the rubber sole was a black, melted, stringy mess. Yelping, I tossed it away, then immediately jerked off the other shoe and both socks. Was someone yelling? Hard to tell under the storm’s cacophony. Where was—?
Lon. Thank God.
He lay on the bridge next to me, groaning like he’d been socked in the stomach. His jacket and jeans were smoking. I shouted his name and pushed myself up. My hands patted him down, making sure nothing was hurt or on fire.
His eyes flew open when I touched his face. “Oww! Fuck! Your fingers are hot.”
I snatched them away. My skin looked a little pinker than its usual dead-white bartender pallor. I sniffed. Burnt hair. “Boat got hit by lightning,” I explained.
“We’re not dead?”
Anyone else probably would be. As a magician, I had a preternatural capacity for holding more electrical current than the average human. Or demon. I frequently siphoned electricity into my body and used it to “kindle” my natural magical energy—Heka—for charging spells: electricity flowing inside walls, car batteries, generators, power plants . . .
And lightning.
Not that I was indestructible. I’m quite certain electricity could kill me, though it would likely fry my brain long before I kicked the bucket. And it sure as hell could harm Lon, and as he sat up on the bridge, I wondered just how in the world he’d survived.