The woman’s hair had been cleared from her face, which was turned slightly to the side. Under the bright light, her skin was waxy, ghost white, and covered in a thin rime of salt and frost. Her eyes were closed. Just looking at her, it was hard to imagine anything more than a dead human woman. No magic. No impossibilities.
You could tell yourself she isn’t a mermaid, that this isn’t the closest you’ve come to one in almost sixteen years.
She could do that. She could pretend that the firsthand accounts of the fishermen and the scale she had found meant nothing. She could pretend that this woman’s coloring and bone structure did not resemble the most treasured memory of her childhood. She could lie to herself, like some people already thought she did—and live the safe, comfortable, illusion of a normal life. As much as her family allowed her.
No one forces you to take their money or use their resources. You stay within their reach because you need them.
Needed them because she could do some good with that long A Priori reach. Use all those connections and power to make a positive difference.
And search for mysteries. One mystery, in particular.
“I wish I knew your name,” Jenny murmured to the dead woman—and thought again about that boy from so many years ago. He might as well have been Peter Pan: always a boy to her, forever young. She hoped he was still alive, somewhere. That the man who had dragged him back into the sea hadn’t killed him.
Is that what happened to you? Jenny wondered at the woman. Your kind hurt each other the same way humans do?
She unzipped the bag even farther, and pulled the edges apart. Little of the woman’s body had been left untouched, but down, to the left of her stomach, she noticed something odd. Puncture wounds, one of them half-hidden by the deep cuts that had exposed her hipbone.
Jenny pulled the overhead light close and unfolded the massive magnifying glass attached to the stem. There were four puncture marks, perfectly round and small. Like she had been shot with tiny arrows. Or darts. Three of them had gone straight through.
Deep inside the fourth, a metallic gleam.
Jenny went looking for latex gloves and forceps. Bending close, holding her breath against her headache, she managed to get a grip on the lodged object, and pulled it slowly out.
Took forever. The object was almost one and a half inches long, with a smooth bottleneck case at the base and the main body tapering into a semisharp point that resembled the end of a knitting needle. Not much wider than one, either. A serial number had been etched into the side.
“Shit,” she muttered. Her first thought was the fishermen, but this was a high-quality piece of ammunition, distinct enough that she recognized it almost immediately. These bullets were made for only one type of gun—an SPP–1M underwater pistol, which was still used by the Russian Navy Special Forces. It was a relatively easy weapon to handle, very effective underwater. They had two such guns on board. Last time she had checked, a person could buy them online.
Someone had fired on this woman. Someone—presumably human—had gotten close enough to shoot her in the stomach.
And then what? Slice her up, Freddy Krueger style?
Not the fishermen. None of them had carried a gun like that, and she was pretty damn sure one of them would have been showing it off, given the reception on the beach.
No. This gun had been fired in the water, close, controlled shots, by someone who knew what they were doing.
The throbbing at the back of her head grew worse, more terrible than the spike of any migraine. Jenny briefly closed her eyes, nauseous.
You need a doctor. This isn’t normal.
No shit. None of this was normal. Jenny needed to find Maurice, show him these bullets. If humans had been involved with the death of a nonhuman. . .
It would have taken more than luck to kill this woman.
Jenny dropped the bullet onto a metal tray and put away the forceps. When she began to zip up the body bag, she noticed something else odd. A thumbprint along the edge of the dead woman’s jaw.
It was incredibly faint. Less a print than a disturbance in the fine sheen of salt and frost that covered her skin. Jenny only noticed because of the way the light fell upon her face. Someone had touched her in the hours since she had been brought on board.
Les, she thought instantly. Not Maurice. He might have access to the cold locker, but the old man had not been near the lab today. He had spent the afternoon fishing and babysitting Ismail. Les was the one she had seen coming out of the cold locker.
Les had touched the body.
It wasn’t a crime, and it shouldn’t have bothered Jenny. But it did. She attempted to arrange her hand as Les might have, trying to understand what he had been doing. It wasn’t a simple touch—like some kid poking a dead bird to see if it moved. The angle was wrong for that. It was as though he had been trying to turn her head.
Jenny began to do just that—and heard a scratching sound behind her. She flinched, heart in her throat, and whirled around.
It was Maurice, peering at her through the glass in the locker door. Brow furrowed, eyes narrow with concern. A moment later she heard a beep, and the lock opened.
“I was looking for you,” he said, walking in and shutting the door behind him. “When you weren’t in your room, I got worried.”
“Worried.”
“I had a bad dream,” Maurice said vaguely, but Jenny straightened, giving him a questioning look. He made a disgusted sound and waved his hand through the air. “No, I don’t know what it meant. Made no sense. Just . . . water. And you, drowning.”
“Not a premonition, then.”
“Didn’t say that.” He gave her a hard look. “I’ve had an uneasy sense of things for days now, sweet pea. Got worse today after you came back from that long dive of yours.”
Jenny tried to smile, but both the headache and the dead woman conspired against her. She swallowed hard, and muttered, “I found something that won’t make you feel better. Look what I pulled out of the woman.”
She handed him the plastic bag, and the old man held it beneath the light, staring hard at the bullet. He said nothing for a long time.
“SPP–1M,” he finally muttered.
“Four shots to the left of her stomach.”
“She was murdered, then.” Maurice drew in a ragged breath. “The fishermen—”
“Makes no sense. You’ll agree if you think about it.”
He went quiet again, but after several minutes—during which time Jenny leaned against the cold wall, trying not to pass out from her headache—he nodded slowly. “Theories?”
Jenny forced her jaw to relax. “There’s a reason why these creatures are considered myth. They’re impossible to find. So what would it take to get close enough to shoot one? Let alone cut one up?”
“The Consortium is the only group I know of that hunts nonhumans. But they usually want their targets alive.” Maurice fingered the bullet through the plastic bag. “I need to check our guns.”
The same thought had crossed her mind. “Les was in here earlier. Unless you’ve got a thing for corpses now, I think he was handling the body.” She felt dirty saying the words, like she was a kid tattling tales.
Maurice gazed down at the woman’s face. His hand, again, traced the sign of the cross over his chest. “That doesn’t sit well with you.”
“No. I don’t know why. I trust him.”
“As much as you trust anyone.” Maurice smiled humorlessly. “He told me you rejected him. Again.”
Jenny blew out her breath. “Les needs to keep his mouth shut.”
“Won’t argue with that.” The old man flashed her a crooked, far more genuine, smile—though it faded quickly. “He was in my dream, too.”
“Yeah?” Jenny closed her eyes, bowing her head to rub her neck.
She felt something warm and slippery. When she drew back her hand, there was blood on her fingers.
She swayed. Maurice hissed between his teeth, and spun her around.
“Fuck,” he said.
“W-what?” Jenny asked, dazed.
“There’s blood running down your neck. I can’t see . . .” His fingers pushed roughly into her hair at the base of her skull. And froze.
“Oh, my God,” he whispered.
“Maurice,” she rasped, and then winced as the pain suddenly changed—feeling more like teeth digging into her skull rather than some vague vascular ache.
“There’s something attached to you,” he said, and dragged her toward the door. In moments he had her out in the lab. Drawers began sliding open before he even approached the workstation, and a tweezers and scalpel floated upward, jerkily—as though caught on invisible fishing lines. Maurice snatched them out of the air, muttering to himself.
“Uh, no,” Jenny said, pointing to the blade.
“You didn’t see what I just did.”
“Then give me a mirror.” When he didn’t move fast enough, Jenny blew past him out of the lab, racing down the hall toward her cabin. She slammed into her bathroom, nearly yanking the drawer entirely out of the cabinet as she pawed through Band-Aids, lotions, tampons—down to the bottom, where she kept the makeup she sometimes wore when she went ashore. She snapped open a compact and twisted around, trying to make out the back of her head reflected in the larger wall mirror.
Hard, at first. Her hair was thick, tangled. All she could see was blood, trickling down her neck. But then Maurice loomed over her, and reached around to part her hair in the back. His hands were rough, trembling, and his breath smelled like beer.
She saw the color green, first—and thought it must be her imagination. Not just any green, but a pale sea-green turquoise that reminded her of the clear waters in some island lagoon. She reached around, fumbling, and touched the thing. It was the size of her thumbnail, flat, hard as shell—smooth, even slick—and hot to the touch.
Jenny swayed and took a deep breath. “It looks . . . it looks like an echinoderm. A sand dollar. It has . . . it has a similar rigid external skeleton.”
“Looks like it’s sucking your blood,” Maurice muttered, and turned her around. “Makes it a parasite to me.”
Jenny normally resisted classifying anything without a detailed analysis, but in this case she was willing to make an exception—of the oh-shit variety. She could really feel its teeth now—digging deeper into her.
“When I was in the water . . . I thought something touched the back of my neck. I told myself it was my imagination. I didn’t feel a bite, or anything. Just . . . a headache. I’ve had a headache ever since.”
Maurice didn’t say a word. He tilted the back of her head toward the light. He did not need to tell her to hold still.
He tried the tweezers first. Jenny felt him trying to angle them under the organism, but she could tell without looking that there was no space between the edges and her flesh.
“You’re going to have to cut it out,” she snapped, knuckles white as she gripped the edge of the counter. But all he did was mutter angrily, forcing her head down. She felt the moment he finally managed to pierce her skin and get a grip on the thing—but the pain that hit her seconds later felt like an explosion consuming the entire length of her spine. She seized, breath stolen, unable to scream, her vision wiped out in a cloud of white light.
When Jenny could finally see again, the world was twisted, upside down. Wrong angles.
She was on the floor, her cheek pressed to the tile. Maurice crouched beside her, holding something soft against the back of her neck. There was a ringing sound in her ears, and her entire spine—and skull—throbbed in time with her heartbeat.
She exhaled slowly. Wiggled her toes and fingers. Swallowed, and opened and closed her eyes. Not paralyzed, then. But it felt as though she should be.
“Maurice,” she breathed.
“You need a hospital,” he murmured raggedly. “I thought . . . I thought it would come right off like a tick, but when I yanked I saw . . . tendrils of something . . . linking it to your body. Your reaction—”
“Still attached?” interrupted Jenny hoarsely.
“Yeah. I even tried using this old thing”—he tapped his brow—“but it’s embedded too deep. I could feel it, sweet pea. Burrowed all the way down to your spinal cord. And I think it’s still . . . growing.”
She managed to roll over enough to look into his eyes. “You’re fucking kidding me.”
Maurice’s face looked terrible, as though ten minutes had aged him ten years. He didn’t have a decade to spare. Jenny tried to sit up, and he helped, still compressing the back of her neck. He guided her hand until she touched a towel.
“Hold that,” he growled, raking her over with his bloodshot gaze. “I’m gonna get Les to sit with you, then I’m steering us for the nearest port. The office should be able to send a helicopter from Singapore for a medevac.”
Jenny wanted to protest but forced herself to stay quiet and nod. She had never seen anything like this creature. Never mind the poisons it could be pumping into her bloodstream—the fact that trying to remove it had felt rather close to killing her was enough to scare Jenny shitless.
Maurice left at a run, shouting for Les. She didn’t hear a response, and the boat wasn’t so large that voices wouldn’t travel. He kept calling for the other man, until suddenly, abruptly, he went silent. She waited, listening hard. Heard nothing else.
Jenny managed to stand, swaying as her vision briefly blurred. After several steps everything cleared. She could walk.
She left her quarters. The door to Les’s room was open, but he wasn’t there. Neither was Ismail. She pushed onward, heading for the stairs that led to the bridge. She had to pass the main deck, at the back of which was the only access point to the interior of the ship. Given their proximity to the Strait of Malacca and other known pirate territory, that door was kept locked at night. Always.
It was standing wide open.
“Maurice?” Jenny called up the stairs, but the old man didn’t answer from the bridge. Unease prickled through her. She walked through the galley and salon, stopping briefly to crouch by one of the love seats. She tossed the bloody towel to the floor and fumbled behind the chair until her fingers hit a loose panel. She removed it, one-handed. Found a pistol.
Fully loaded, ready to fire. Weapons were hidden all over the ship. It was illegal to carry firearms into the ocean territories of most countries, but random searches from customs agents had never found their caches.
Holding the gun in a solid two-handed grip, Jenny ignored the open door and made her way to the stairs leading up to the bridge. There was another door on that level that could be locked from the inside as a secondary barrier in case of an emergency. She, Maurice, and Les had run through the plan a hundred times, in about as many different variations. Control of the ship and radio had to be maintained at all costs. Even a hint of trouble—that was where they would meet.
Her head hurt like hell, but she kept her breathing steady and clicked the safety off the gun. A freighter had been hijacked a week ago, less than one hundred miles from here—crew thrown overboard and cargo stolen. The same had happened to a pleasure cruise near Indonesia, but the couple who had arranged the tour was less fortunate. Held for ransom, she’d heard. Same group of pirates, or different—it didn’t matter. Theft, kidnapping, and death had become big business, and the larger the haul, the more powerful the criminal organization behind it.
The Calypso Star was worth millions. And so were Jenny and her crew.
Opportunists, she told herself, edging up the stairs. Nothing more than that. No one knows who you are. If the ship was boarded, then it’s by men with guns and a motorboat, thinking you’re easy pickings
. No conspiracy. No betrayal. Just bad luck.
Bad luck that the outer door was open, and Maurice hadn’t answered her call. Bad luck that Les and Ismail weren’t in their cabin. Bad luck there was a parasite of unknown species attached to her neck, and a murdered mermaid in the cold locker.
Right. Jenny was fucked.
She reached the top of the stairs. All she could hear was the sound of her own breathing. Her palms were sweaty as she tightened her grip on the gun.
Go, she told herself. Go, go, go.
So she did, keeping low as she spun around the top of the stairs, searching for Maurice, Les—anyone.
All she saw was a fist driving toward her face.
Then, darkness.
She was on the beach again. Down by the big house in Maine. She could see it in the distance, a hulking gray shadow on the golden sand, embedded beside the water instead of on the hill. Waves pulsed around the porch, breaking against the eastern wall. The windows were broken and dark, and there was blood on the porch. She could see that even from where she stood, which felt miles away and too close. The blood was wet. She smelled it on the wind. Like poison.
Someone stood beside her. She could not see him, but she had a sense of his size, and he was quite tall. Tall and warm. His hand was huge, gentle, as it scooped up hers in a loose grip. She knew him before he spoke, and began to tremble, weak in the knees with relief.
“Dreams are odd,” he said quietly, in a voice so familiar she wanted to weep. “I never know what’s real. Except for what I feel. I tell myself that can’t be a lie.”
“You were always an optimist,” she whispered.
“Only with you.” His lips brushed against the top of her head, and she closed her eyes, sagging against that hard, strong shoulder.
“It’s been a long time,” she said, wondering why it mattered. This was just a dream. He was only a dream.
Such a long time since she had dreamed of him.
In the Dark of Dreams Page 6