by J. R. Rain
I’m fond of you as well, sweetie.
Licinia’s tone makes me smile even wider as I stop by the campers. Oh yeah, they’re campers. The backpacks and all the North Face gear gives them away. Though I think grandpa owns stock in L.L. Bean. “Hi. Sorry to bother you. I’m doing a follow up on that man who washed ashore earlier today?”
“That was a sight, yanno.” The youngest man shakes his head while failing to whistle. “You with the news? I’m Chet. This is my dad, Joe, and my brother, Clayton.”
“Alex Silver. No, I’m not a reporter. I’m a private investigator looking into the disappearance of a family on the same boat.”
Joe’s pre-existing grumpiness over whatever machine refused to sell him a day pass for the park worsens. He shuffles off toward the wheelchair while mumbling about rent-a-cops.
“Poor bastard was almost dead.” Clayton offers his hand. “Don’t mind pop. He doesn’t get along well with technology. You know how old people are.”
I fidget at my smartphone through the material of the watertight bag tucked under my left arm. “Oh yeah, anyone older than sixty is allergic to tech.” I do miss horse-drawn carriages, but I suppose it’s better off for the animals that cars happened. “Did you see or hear anything?”
“Dude crawled straight out of the ocean.” Clayton, the older brother, pulls out his phone and swipes it unlocked. “We were wandering the beach up north this morning, and this guy in a bright yellow jacket washed up on shore like a hunk of wood.” He holds up his phone, with a picture of a guy in a life vest sprawled on the beach, a small crowd gathered around him. The image is grainy, and the man’s head is turned away.
“He’s still alive?” I ask.
“Yeah.” Chet scratches behind his right ear. “He came around as soon as people started shouting for help. One of the other campers said he was a doctor. The guy who washed up yelled somethin’ about a freak wave.”
The mother, evidently more interested in our conversation than arguing with her teenage daughter, pipes in, “Park staff had a helicopter come in to take him to the hospital. I overheard one of them talking about it later. The man told them his boat capsized in the middle of the night. Said if he hadn’t been up to piss, he’d have gone down with it. Everyone else had been below decks asleep.”
“Boat went down so fast, he couldn’t get the life raft out of its holder. Only had a vest because it floated off the ship after it sank.” Clayton bows his head and mutters, “What an awful way to go.”
Hmm. That doesn’t add up. Could their boat have lacked that EPIRB thing…? Or is something darker going on?
“Maybe they didn’t feel anything?” asks the woman. “Drowning in their sleep like that?”
I cringe at the word ‘drowning,’ and my voice is quiet, mournful. “It’s not possible to drown in your sleep, not without being drugged. Ice-cold seawater doesn’t get along well with sleep. They’d have been awake for their last minute or two.” Damn. I’m too late. I fight back the urge to scream curses.
All four of them shiver. The girl gives me a ‘wow, cool’ stare. Great. Another death-obsessed teen.
Alex…
Licinia’s worry hits me in the chest along with a strong pull to the water.
I suppose I should at least offer the Stricklands closure. If the boat went down with them trapped inside, the bodies ought to be there. It hasn’t been long enough for much to snack on them yet, or for the Coast Guard to have found them.
“Thanks, I―” A freak wave? Something about that doesn’t feel right. Licinia’s push gets more insistent. “Need to go check on something.”
“Nice meeting you.” Clayton nods to me before wandering over to the grumpy old man.
Chet puts an arm around the woman and they walk over to where the boy is once again pushing his grandmother closer to the rest of the family.
I run south, heading as fast as possible into the forest. Compared to swimming, hoofing it feels like I’m standing still. A few minutes later, a secluded spot of woods near the coast offers the perfect place to stash my stuff. For some reason, even though I suspect I’m going to find three bodies, I can’t shake the need to hurry. After stripping and packing everything in the watertight bag, I shift my hands. Claws, webbing, and supernatural strength make digging a triviality. With my possessions safely buried―I will be pissed if someone takes my phone―I dash down the coast and leap into the water.
As much as I don’t want to see what’s waiting for me inside that boat, I can’t wait to get there.
y body cuts the water with ease. Normal humans have difficulty finding things on the bottom of the ocean because it’s dark and blurry. Not to me. Ever since my change, the ocean is alive with swirling streamers of light. My eyes pick up a vaporous luminescence that flows through everything. Dracula once told me it’s the energy of the Creator, or God if someone wants to go that far.
Yes, Dracula. Vlad Tepes, whatever you want to call him. If someone had told me that vampires, werewolves, and mermaids existed when I was twenty-four or younger, I’d have laughed at them… and probably backed slowly away.
Maybe when I was a little girl, I’d have found the stories fascinating.
I think I ran into him in 1944. Dates have never really been a strong point for me. Worse given my extended lifespan. As a mortal, my mind was always going off into elaborate places like science, philosophy, medicine… I didn’t have time for trivialities like birthdays or appointments. Speaking of which, I’m supposed to attend a gathering in three weeks. There’s eight or nine of us (us being mermaids/men) living in the ocean around the Pacific Northwest. A few times a year, they like to meet. It’s somewhere between a high-society wine party and a bunch of territorial hunters laying out the boundaries of their prowling grounds.
Anyway, Dracula claimed to be the oldest vampire in existence, the very first in fact. I suppose I should be grateful for two things.
One, when I met him, I was not an appetizing mortal girl with a warm blood supply.
Two, he owed me for saving his life. Or lack thereof.
All right, perhaps I’m overstating that a little bit. Vampires are hard to kill. Harder than even my kind, though silver in the heart is a problem for both of us.
He’d decided to check out the ‘new world,’ as he called it, and booked passage on a ship to cross the Atlantic. Unfortunately, the Germans either mistook the passenger liner for a military ship, didn’t care, or assumed the Allies used the boat for military purposes. Considering it had been leaving Europe, it couldn’t have been bringing supplies in, so I’ll stick with ‘didn’t care.’
I found him walking along the sea floor, fancy silk shirt open to expose his chest, long, black hair trailing in the current. He looked like something straight out of a romance painting, even at the bottom of the ocean. And wow, was he angry. Come to think of it, there may have been a submarine lying on the ground behind him with a Dracula-shaped hole in the hull.
He saw me, and his expression went from anger to curiosity.
That’s the moment I learned vampires have telepathy, too; additionally, I would learn most other supernatural creatures cannot communicate with each other via telepathy. But not merfolk. We do so easily, with everyone, natural or supernatural; how else could we talk underwater? My telepathy can reach into the minds of all creatures. Turned out mermaid telepathy is special… and powerful. We don’t have the physiology to make dolphin clicks or whalesong. I imagine our Dark Masters prefer human speech.
We do.
To make a long story short, I played seahorse for him. Or gave him a piggyback ride, if that’s a better analogy. There’s nothing quite like swimming thousands of miles with the mouth of the world’s oldest vampire inches away from my neck. I don’t think anything will ever make me ‘nervous’ again. Except maybe a roomful of silver swords. Fortunately, being a vampire, he had the physical toughness to withstand my going full speed.
Much to my surprise, he turned out to be quite the gentleman. T
he three of us (Licinia hopped in) had a pleasant telepathic chat for a mostly-nonstop swim to the United States. He was tickled to have been let into the mind of a fellow immortal. Mostly, he seemed surprised at my relationship with Licinia and didn’t speak at all of his Dark Master.
Some questions are best left unasked.
Right.
I shift my attention to the sea floor in the here and now, scanning back and forth for any new wrecks. If I had the time, I’d have looked up Troy’s boat so I at least knew the general shape and size, but that unrelenting sense of urgency had dragged me under the waves too fast.
If they all drowned, then why do I feel like I’m running out of time?
Pouring on speed, I dive to match the contour of the ground, searching back and forth for a bright white spot. Those mid-sized boats are almost all white, and if it’s only been down since Sunday night, it won’t have collected any growth yet.
Sunday night.
Hours.
Shit.
Someone’s still alive in that boat… trapped on the ocean floor. My mind fills with a vision of little Hannah, clinging to a pocket of air inside the hull of an upside-down cabin cruiser. Maybe all three of them. No, fate isn’t that generous.
But I can hope.
ased on where Troy washed up, I have a decent idea of the most likely spot of sea floor where a boat would’ve settled. A man in a lifejacket in this part of the sea―even in June―wouldn’t have lasted long before succumbing to hypothermia, fatigue, or both. Marrowstone Island is reasonably close to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the path out to the Pacific Ocean. It’s highly unlikely that they would’ve been heading that far out on a weekend run, but the currents would suck a floater out to sea.
And the freak wave thing is still bugging me. Not without a storm, not here. Maybe near Polyarny, Russia. There’s a creature living in the Kola Bay big enough to trigger waves like that if it scratched its butt, but that’s there. And yeah, that thing in the waters off Polyarny, it might’ve been spotted by humans once. I think that’s where the whole C’thulu mythos came from. I hadn’t even realized I’d been swimming over a creature until it moved. Fortunately, it had ignored me much the way a person might ignore a passing ladybug.
So, current pulling toward the Pacific, guy without a life raft makes it to shore alive. The boat can’t be far off the coast. I wind up doing a serpentine pattern, edging closer to Marrowstone as that inexplicable urgency had pulled me a bit fast and straight. On my third sweep, I catch sight of a white smear in the distance, and the telltale shape of a decent-sized cabin cruiser lying almost upright.
Gotcha. I pull around to face it and thrash my tail for a jolt of speed.
Alex. Wait. Go north, surface. Hurry!
What? The boat’s right there.
I sense her pressing for more control. I trust her, so I don’t resist.
The ocean blurs. She’s not taking over my body, but my thoughts. My vision rockets upward, breaks the surface, and travels with such speed, I have no sense of place. A speck of yellow appears in the distance. Like a bullet, we fly toward it. The speck expands into an inflatable raft, bobbing in the waves, bending as it crests each peak. A bundle of cloth huddles at the back.
Licinia’s motherly panic becomes mine. A tiny hand protrudes from tangle of blanket. The wind teases at a lock of blonde hair. Hannah, barely conscious, is drifting out into the Pacific Ocean. She’s got no oars, and no water to drink.
Shit!
My vision slams back into my skull; for an instant, the ocean is dark. I don’t wait for my eyes to adjust, and launch myself forward. Licinia’s divination didn’t give me much of a clue which way to go, but from where I am, I can pretty much guess. Swimming with the current gives me even more speed. I’ve got to be well past a hundred miles an hour. This is why I don’t bother with a bikini top; it would tear clean off at full speed.
I hit the surface a bit too fast, at an angle a bit too sharp, and wind up catching air like a lovesick flying fish. I don’t see anything yellow, so after I crash back into the water, I keep going northwest. Boat engine noise is everywhere, but faint. I don’t think anyone saw me, at least I hope not―for the sake of their livers. Sailors tend to react to stuff like me with vodka. Except for the ‘seen it all’ types who ‘always knew’ mermaids were real. They’d offer a solemn nod, but speak nothing of it.
Minutes pass as I race along two feet beneath the surface. I’m probably leaving a vee that’ll appear on satellite cameras. Maybe the US Navy is going to head out here looking for ‘the Russian submarine.’ One of them came to visit a few months ago by the way. Slipped in, loitered for about a week, and drifted out. I may have given them some nightmares. Claws scraping on the hull of a sub sound like ghosts. Add to that, my telepathic ‘voice’ groaning. What can I say? I’m still a patriot.
Every so often, I pop my head up and scan the surface for yellow. I wind up following gut feelings more than anything my eyes tell me. Licinia’s veritably perched on my shoulders like the critter in Henry Fuseli’s painting The Nightmare. My trajectory brings me closer to the outlet to the Pacific, feeding my worry.
Finally, I catch a glimpse of bright yellow against the dull blue-grey of the froth. Sure enough, we’re about a mile south of Fort Ebey State Park, pissing distance from the official Pacific Ocean. Surface-skimming cuts down my speed, but I’m still far more than a match for a drifting inflatable dinghy.
The craft is big enough for eight adults, but only holds one small bundle, curled up and shivering at the back right corner.
I slow enough not to capsize it on impact, and drift into its side. Careful to shift my hands human so I don’t shred the rubber/plastic material, I grab the edge and pull up, leaving waist-down out of sight. It’s enough to reach in and give the blanket bundle a shake.
“Hannah?”
A delirious child’s moan rewards me.
“Hannah!”
The blue blanket shifts, and a too-pale face peers out at me. Residue of some kind has crusted at both corners of her mouth and her eyes are red-ringed. My heart melts; the poor girl looks like a zombie.
“Am I dead? Are you an angel?” rasps the child, her voice a weak thing with barely a trace of tone.
“No, sweetie. You’re not dead.” I pull myself into the boat a little closer and take her hand. She’s still warm, sort of. That’s good, but then again, after I’ve been in the ocean this long, everything feels warm. “You’re going to be okay.”
She closes her eyes. The second I expect she’s passed out, she opens them again―a lethargic blink. This kid needs water now. “The bad man killed them.”
“You’re going to be fine, Hannah. Hold on a little while more, okay? You’re so brave.”
The girl blinks again, still slow but closer to normal. Beautiful blue eyes lock with mine. Her mouth hangs open in abject wonder for a second before she tilts her head in confusion. “Where are your seashells?”
Huh? I freeze, caught off guard. “What? My seashells?”
Hannah points at my breasts. “Your seashells fell off.”
I look down at myself, and… a bit of my tail visible over the side. Crap. Screw it. Who’s going to believe a delirious child claiming to see a mermaid? All I can do is grin. “Yes, they did. I had to swim so fast to find you that they fell off.”
She snuggles tighter in the blanket, and giggles. Her mirth doesn’t last long. Seconds later, she lunges at me and grabs on, bursting into feeble tears. Her voice is so raspy and hoarse, my heart races. “Help me. Please. I don’t wanna die too.”
“Shh.” I pat her back. She’s wearing Disney Frozen pajamas, sadly ironic. At least it’s June. It’s chilly, but not deadly cold. “Hold on, okay? I need you to hold on tight.”
She squeezes me harder.
“No, sweetie. To the boat. I can’t take you in the water, you’ll get too cold.”
“Okay.”
Hannah relaxes, but doesn’t let go. I guide her to the front end, which
slides about half of my tail into the raft. Damn slippery scales.
She stares at me and makes an ooh sound. “You’re pretty!”
Mermaids are considerably less ‘cute’ than most people think. Fortunately, I don’t have to change my mouth/teeth until I need to use them. They’re somewhere between shark and icepick. Lobsters hate ’em. I grab the blanket from the back of the raft and wrap it around her tight, making sure to cover her bare feet. Even with it, she keeps shivering.
“The bad man hurt them. He wanted to hurt me, but I stole the boat,” whispers Hannah.
I pat her back. “What happened?”
She rests her head on the side of the raft and mutters, “the bad man hurt them.”
Whatever clarity she had is fading fast. I don’t have time to interrogate an eight-year-old.
“Hannah.” I squeeze her hands onto the rope. “It’s important that you hold on and don’t let go.”
She moans, but it sounds like an acknowledgment.
I slip back into the water and dart around to the nose, where a convenient length of cord offers a handhold. If I try to race to shore, the odds that I hit a wave and bounce the girl straight out of the raft become a veritable certainty. She’s already borderline hypothermic. Get her wet and game over. Shit. I duck my head underwater and listen.
Engines. Cigarette boats to the right. That same supertanker is still chugging away, but he’s well out in the Pacific by now. My senses tune in on a growling gurgle, not too deep and not too high-pitched―probably another cabin cruiser. Sounds like they’re within a mile. Perfect. I hate the idea of abandoning her to unknown people, but this kid doesn’t have the luxury of time. Me trying to take her to civilized shore would be too dangerous. If I brought her to Marrowstone, it would take too long to find help. They’d have to call for a helicopter to bring her to a hospital on the mainland. Driving would take too long. Troy got lucky―or hadn’t been in the water as long as he claimed.