Then the first wave hit. Not the Maraschino—but me. My stomach cramped, the muscles there turning into a knot. I groaned involuntarily.
“Edie?” Asher asked. Marius and Jorge were already down another floor.
“Sorry. The heights,” I lied. My hands went white on the pipe I held as I tried to transfer the pain. My stomach released and I prayed the worst was over while I finished my shimmy—but no. My abdominal muscles had only relented to get a new hold. This time I managed not to groan, but it was harder.
We were almost there. We were so close. And all of my heroism didn’t matter. I was losing the baby. Or myself, to a worm.
I threw myself down the pipe, almost spinning on it—if my wet clothing hadn’t stuck I might have fallen off and onto the balcony below. But I didn’t—I charged, in between seismic bursts of abdominal pain. Asher knew something was wrong. He came down nearly as fast as I did, and we found ourselves together much closer to the water’s edge, on the wide promenade of the third floor.
Marius was taking control. “I can operate the davits. You all just push on it so that it starts to slide down the outside of the boat.”
Another wave of pain hit. I grit my teeth, trying to bite back a scream.
Oh, God, was this how Kate had felt?
Asher grabbed me. “What’s wrong?” he whispered.
“My stomach—I think—” I didn’t want to say it aloud. His expression went dark.
Jorge was throwing his back into getting the life raft free from gravity. “A little help here?”
Asher looked at me. “We still have to get off the ship,” I said, my voice flat. He stepped away from me reluctantly as I tried to hide another wave of pain. I sank slowly to my knees as he pushed against the lifeboat with his back, eyes on me.
This wasn’t fair. I was still alive after all this time. I didn’t want to be filling up with worms, or losing this child. It wasn’t fair.
Asher and Jorge weren’t enough—Marius eyed me warily from the davit controls.
“I’ll show you how to do it, so I can help lift.”
I nodded, practically crawling over to him, and using the control panel itself to pull myself up. The joysticks were like playing one of those claw-and-grab games. “I can do it. Go.”
As the davits pulled from above the three of them managed to get the life raft over the lip of the boat. From there it was a straight drop down the hull into the water. Marius came back to oversee lowering it, letting the ropes down slowly, the metal of the life raft grating against the metal of the Maraschino’s side. I sank down, my back against the control panel, curled into a ball.
Jorge was looking over the railing’s edge, oblivious to anything other than the life raft’s progress. “It’s in the sea! You’ve done it!”
All that was left was to somehow get aboard.
A fresh wave hit, and this time I had to scream. Asher rushed to my side to cradle me.
“Oh, no. No no no,” Jorge said, looking back, as he realized what was happening.
Marius started shaking his head and backing away. “She’s not getting in my boat.”
Asher’s grip on me tightened. “We have a greater chance of survival if we’re all in the same boat.”
“She’s infected—”
“You all probably are!”
Marius drew himself up to his full height—the same as Asher, and wider in the shoulders. “She’s not getting in my boat,” he repeated.
“She risked her life to save you!”
“I’m sorry for your loss, I truly am—but if she’s like Kate was, she’s already as good as dead.”
At this, Asher erupted from my side and went for Marius, swinging.
“Don’t!” I said, but neither of them heard me, and maybe I hadn’t said it as loud as I’d thought. It felt as if I were getting rabbit-punched in the lower abdomen, over and over again. What the hell was happening inside me?
Marius and Asher couldn’t circle each other at the ship’s angle, but both of them watched for openings, like people who’d beat the shit out of other people before.
“Stop it—” I pleaded. Jorge knelt by my side, ignoring the other men.
“Are you okay?”
It hurt so bad it was hard to talk. I just nodded while grimacing, holding my stomach, rocking back and forth.
“It’s going to be okay,” Jorge said, and even though I knew he was lying, it was still nice to hear. I nodded again, and he squeezed my shoulders, until the most recent wave of cramps were done.
“I think it’s the baby. I’m losing it,” I whispered.
“I’m sure that’s what it is,” he kindly agreed. Because miscarrying was slightly less awful than being burst apart by worms.
Asher and Marius had gotten a few blows in on each other, but the tilting of the boat was making it hard. It was one of those fights that’d degrade into a wrestling match given the chance, and it wouldn’t stop until someone got hurt. “We’ll take another boat,” I said, but only Jorge could hear me. More cramps hit me, like a physical blow. This was worse than when I’d been stabbed—and Asher’d saved me then, too. I whimpered, and Asher looked toward me, and then Marius—
“Look out!” I hissed.
Marius swung, connected, and followed through, his entire body leaning into his punch. It connected on Asher’s jaw with a loud smack and sent him reeling uphill, to fall back on the empty deck. Marius came forward to kick Asher, but Asher recovered, faster than a normal human would. My man was still a little supernatural, after all. He lunged for Marius’s outswept leg, grabbed it, and twisted, hauling Marius over himself and down.
Impossibly quick, Asher was up again, on top of Marius like a cat. Marius was facing down on the deck, and Asher was on his back, Marius’s head between his hands. He started bashing it against the deck’s wood.
“No!” I protested, a fresh wave of cramps turning it into a howl. Jorge turned his face into me so he wouldn’t see. I was left gasping as the wave passed, I hurt so badly I was dizzy, it made it hard to see or think—
“Stop! Everyone stop!” A new voice broke over the awful sound of their fighting. “I have a knife!”
There was a lull in the haze of pain. I blinked furiously, and things came into focus.
“Get off him!” someone commanded.
Rory. His voice broke as he shouted, and I could see him brandishing his weapon, the same knife he’d used to help me cut Asher free.
Asher paused, weighing his options. “Why are you still here, boy?” Marius tried to shake Asher off again, and I was relieved: It meant that Marius wasn’t dead yet.
Rory laughed harshly, at himself, and then pointed at Asher with his knife. “I was too scared to go alone. I should have been too scared to go with you!” He pointed again with the knife, this time, off to the left. “Take that raft—it’s one of those canister rafts you told me about. It’s yours. But let him live. He’s a good man. I don’t know what the fuck you are, but he’s a good man.”
Asher released his hold on Marius, and the prone man groaned. “Take care, sweetheart,” Jorge said, letting go of me and rounding Asher for Marius’s side.
Marius’s nose was broken, and he was stunned—he’d need help to get into the raft for sure, and who knew what kind of other concussion damage Asher’s violence had done—but he was able to stumble to a kneel. Rory gave his knife a warning shake in our direction, and then went to help Marius up.
No way in hell we’d be welcome on their boat.
“Get out of here. All of you,” Asher warned, like we were leaving them instead of the other way around. Jorge helped Rory pull Marius up to the side, and then they were over, down the Maraschino’s hull to the lifeboat.
CHAPTER FORTY
Asher’s face was bloody, his jaw swelling where Marius’s fist had hit. “It’s just us now. You and me.”
I nodded. Talking hurt. Everything hurt.
“I’m so sorry, Edie. I should have listened to you. We should have never
gone on this trip.”
“S’okay,” I gasped out to stop him from blaming himself. We were past that. “S’go.”
“After all this you still want to spend time on a boat with me?” Asher said, his damaged face framed by the rising sun. The Shadows may have used us both, but they couldn’t change what we had together. I knew I loved him. White hot and pure. Strange, no strange, monster, and man.
I gasped as a new wave of cramps hit, tearing through the muscles of my abdomen like they were on fire. “You’re my only,” I whispered. I knew it didn’t make sense. I knew he’d know what I meant.
He pulled me to him and held me tight as I tried not to scream and wound up sobbing helplessly in pain and fear.
“Stay here, okay?” He set me down carefully. The sound of the ocean was higher now. He went over to the canister Rory’d left and pulled the cord.
There was a hiss, and I was worried the ocean had finally won its long war against the Maraschino, but it was the sound of pressurized air inflating the life raft instead.
“I’ll get you into it up here, and then I’ll get it over the edge, and then we’ll get away,” Asher explained, as if saying the words would make doing it easier.
The raft inflated quickly, and Asher hoisted it over the side. It took him longer to get me into it—I tried to help, honestly, but I hurt so badly, all I could do was curl up into a ball while he hefted me up and rolled me in. I landed inside it and it bottomed out, meant to support people in water, not above it, and I worried we’d catch on some puncturing piece of metal that the more solid lifeboat had scratched off the hull on its way down.
I was trying to arch my back enough to prevent this, and Asher was outside, hauling us down to the waterline, when our progress was interrupted by the sound of a wet thump and a voice that couldn’t be denied.
“Monster of men, I command you to answer me!”
The dragging sensation outside stopped.
“Monster of men!”
“I have a name,” Asher told someone.
“Get down here! Now!”
Even I felt the urge to answer her—and I knew who we were speaking to. I lifted my head weakly out of the raft. Claire was there, beached on the diminishing remnants of the Maraschino’s hull like a Renaissance painting come to life. She was as long as a twelve-person dinner table, most of her tail, and looked nothing like the frail elderly woman Hal had loved. Her hair was the color of kelp, from dark brown to translucent yellow, and her tail was covered in variegated scales, ending in an extravagant fin—but the top part of her was human-ish. Her fingers ended in talon-like claws, all the better to spear fish with I assumed, and something about the color and shape of her skin made me feel it would be rubbery to touch.
“Make this work,” she said, her monstrous voice an imperious command. She had far too many teeth.
Asher took in whatever she’d shared with him—I couldn’t see what it was. “This ship is already lost.”
“It’s not for this ship. It’s for that one,” she explained, and then her voice changed again in pitch, becoming one of command. “Make it work. Now.”
“Stop that,” Asher said, kneeling down. “I’ll do it if you can fix her.”
I saw Claire’s head wave back and forth. “I can’t. It’s not just your child living inside her now.”
Asher stopped whatever he was doing. I saw his shoulders go still. “Heal her,” he begged.
“Would that it were that easy,” she said snappishly. Then perhaps remembering her years as a human, “It is beyond me. I’m sorry.”
I concentrated on pulling myself up so I could see what Asher was working on. Claire had brought him something that looked like putty that I recognized. The packages of C-4 we’d left downstairs, the ones that Hal had stopped from exploding. Claire must have swum below to retrieve them, presumably in through the gaping hole that the ones that had exploded had left.
I hadn’t known that Asher had had a demolitions expert inside him, but I shouldn’t have been surprised.
“I have no idea how you’re going to light all this,” Asher said as he worked.
“I overturned lifeboats until one of them gave a flare gun to me.”
Asher paused at this, possibly, like me, imagining those lifeboats carrying people she spilled into the water, then shook his head and kept working.
“Emily?” I asked quietly, knowing she would hear.
“She’s none of your business now,” Claire said. Her dark eyes were sad, looking at me. “She’s safe,” she amended, more kindly.
Asher continued to work as the sound of the water came closer. “You only brought me five minutes of fuse. Once you light this—” he warned her.
“I’m built to swim,” she cut in.
“And you know where to use it?”
She laughed bitterly, an awful sound. “Hal was a torpedoman.”
Asher nodded and gave his finished work to Claire. She took it in one taloned hand and held it to her breast like a child as she used her free arm and tail to propel herself back into the sea. I let myself relax back into the raft as Asher appeared overhead.
“Ready?”
“Yeah.” I had my two fists punching in over my stomach, unsuccessfully trying to keep it from knots. Another wave hit, hurt so bad I could puke, and then left me. I could see the fear on Asher’s face looking down. Claire had told us both the truth. They were worms. I was going to die.
The pill I’d palmed had already melted in my pocket.
“Where’s she going?” I whispered when I could. Anything to stop him from looking down at me like that.
“I think we’ll see.”
He disappeared again, and I felt us sliding until we hit the water with a slap. Then the edge buckled as Asher jumped in beside me ungracefully, letting cold water in.
It wasn’t until I could feel us rocking in the waves like we were in a cradle that I realized we’d escaped the Maraschino at last.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
The Maraschino died as it had lived, slowly and stately. It sank beneath the waves as though it were merely going on another trip, only this time to the bottom of the sea. There was no sucking woosh or danger of us being pulled in after it. Burbles of air escaped, like an ancient volcano burped below, and then it was gone, along with everyone else who hadn’t survived, all their deaths red on the hands of a madman.
In between waves of cramps, my curiosity outweighed my pain. I used my elbows to prop my head up on the raft’s edge so I could look around outside its canopy. The surrounding waters were full of random debris, clothing, pieces of furniture, and madly swimming worms. Now free of their human hosts they twisted around one another, copulating in the growing dawn, releasing streamers of luminescent eggs into the ocean like scattered stars. Those were what I’d seen frothing in the sink, and out of the weird woman’s mouth. Worm eggs.
Like what was growing inside me. I sank back into the raft bleakly.
It wasn’t any warmer here than it had been on the Maraschino. Jorge, Marius, and Rory had gotten into a lifeboat, but this was only an inflated half-a-foot of air and rubber between us and the sea, and a canvas canopy to protect us from the sun. We didn’t even have a paddle. Asher leaned over me and out the raft’s door, swirling his hand.
“Edie, look,” he said, and I leaned up again to see.
We were pointed at the rescue ship that I felt sure Claire was swimming toward.
I didn’t know what we were waiting for—all the explosions I’d ever seen in my life had been televised. But Asher’s hand kept us steady, and I was warm where he lay beside me and his skin touched mine.
We were too far away to hear it, but we saw it, half a second before we were sprayed with salt mist.
The bow of Nathaniel’s ship hopped up as though it had hit a speed bump beneath the waves. I got the feeling that keeping the explosion underwater made it worse—there was nowhere for all that energy to go but up. It shuddered, and where it had jumped, it broke in two.
“She keel-whipped it,” Asher said to himself, sounding like he approved. Maybe Asher had touched a torpedoman in his former life.
“Whoa,” I said, trying to bite off the end of the word so it didn’t roll into a groan.
The explosion Claire had caused created a chain reaction of combustibles within the ship. Sailors and soldiers flowed overboard like mythical lemmings, jumping into the water to escape the flames. I wondered how many more deaths would feed the Leviathan today because of her.
There was no way for them to reach their lifeboats. Only the helicopter made it off, just in time.
Asher leaned out and paddled bodily toward a field of debris. He pulled out one official orange paddle, a lucky find, and then a piece of a deck chair. It would be useless as a paddle; it wasn’t thick on either end, and I didn’t think I could help paddle, besides. Asher saw the questioning look on my face.
“In case they make it this far,” he said, and jabbed it out the raft’s opening demonstratively.
I snorted. “Don’t pop the boat.”
Soon we’d be alone. Just me, Asher, and whatever else was dying—or coming to life—inside me.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
The fleeing helicopter swooped overhead, surveying the destruction below. Lucky bastards, whoever it was inside. Asher pulled me farther inside the raft and I groaned.
“Edie, I’m so sorry—”
I shook my head. I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t blame him. Nathaniel, yes, for being crazy and evil, but not Asher, not ever him. I wouldn’t take back a moment I’d spent with him, even knowing it would all lead to this. He was the love of my life, even as I felt like it was ending. “I love you,” I said, hoping that that would say it all.
He pushed my wet hair away from my face, his hand catching in its tangles. “You don’t have to die. You’re the strongest person I know—”
Whatever he said next was drowned out by the sound of the helicopter making a second low pass. “Goddammit, they don’t have to rub it in,” Asher said.
Edie Spence [04] Deadshifted Page 22