Bernice was right behind her. She hit the sand with a quick grumble and then recovered, only to sink under her next steps. Her tall shoes dug into the sand and tried to bury themselves.
Nia kept running, knowing it would take precious seconds for Bernice to figure out that she ought to take her shoes off, and then perhaps a couple more to unfasten the skinny buckles and cast the things aside.
An endless strip of beach sprawled before them, and a small beacon of light gleamed weakly at the island’s tip where the lighthouse was perched. Nia thought that there must be a keeper there, and surely a backwoods yokel who worked alone all night would have a gun.
The distance between the girls widened as Bernice cursed and hobbled; but she finally forced her shoes away, and once her feet were free, the gap began to close.
Nia prayed that her head start would be enough.
Sand flew up behind her as she charged down the strip, and her legs burned with exhaustion. The light in the distance wasn’t growing close as fast as she thought it should, and God, she was tired. She tried not to pant so hard; it made her side cramp and her throat catch.
But Bernice was almost on top of her again, breathless and tireless, too, so Nia jammed her feet into the sand, crunching down into shells and seaweed, crab claws and shrimp tails, in a gritty plume. A thin wave trickled over her path. Mere yards away, a larger wave rumbled and rushed after the first.
The tide was coming in. With a burst of inspiration that fueled a second wind, Nia wondered if Bernice could swim.
She turned and ran into the oncoming waves, knowing the water would slow them both. But if she could go deep enough, if she could make it into the surf where the waves were higher than both their heads, she could get out of Bernice’s reach long enough to think—maybe even long enough to swim to the lighthouse. It couldn’t be more than a mile, since the island wasn’t much longer than that, and she could always tread water while she caught her breath.
Black and warm, the Gulf foamed around her ankles and sucked at her toes.
Bernice splashed in after her.
Nia trudged ahead, plowing through water that was up to her knees, then her thighs. Her dress soaked and sagged around her, slowing her some, but she’d expected that. She dived headfirst into the next oncoming wave and pulled herself under the water with arms that were not quite as weary as her legs.
I’ve made it, she thought, swimming out to sea, kicking for all she was worth. But the tide was against her, and she was only a few strokes into her flight when Bernice’s hand wrapped around Nia’s foot.
She panicked and floundered, sputtering as she tried to stand and breathe. Bernice’s grip slipped, and she dropped the knife in order to hold her cousin with both hands, drawing the other girl toward her like a fish on a line.
Nia flipped over and kicked with her free leg, pounding Bernice in the jaw with a resounding crack and sending her sprawling. She let go of Nia’s leg, leaving long red scrapes where her fingernails had clutched at her, and although the wounds must have stung in the salt water, Nia did not feel them. She threw herself back into the water and swam like mad against the incoming current, trying not to think about her bloody leg.
Something big and solid rushed by underwater, bumping against her side.
Terror shot up her spine. Besides her freshly scratched leg, her clothes reeked of Antonio’s blood, and the Gulf abounded with sharks.
Oh God, she prayed. Let it be a dolphin.
She couldn’t hear Bernice behind her anymore. Only the sound of her own feverish splashing filled her ears. She glanced over her shoulder, causing her eyes to sting with the sticky-sharp heat of the ocean. She still couldn’t locate Bernice, so she quit swimming and stood up. When the waves rolled past and around her, they came to her collarbone.
Her cousin bobbed a few feet away, eyes closed and mouth shakily agape. Water lapped at her face and she winced, but her eyelids didn’t flutter or open. She coughed and sucked in salt water, but did not seem to awaken. Her head slid under the next wave and bubbles popped to the surface as she started to sink.
That thick, strange form pushed past Nia again.
A moment later, Bernice’s body bobbed as if it had been bumped, too. She did not respond, but drooped even farther below the surface.
“Shit,” Nia swore like one of her grandmother’s farmhands. “Shit!”
Making damn sure she didn’t see the knife, Nia grabbed Bernice’s collar. She hauled her cousin along behind her, walking backwards so she didn’t have to take her eyes off the injured girl. Her face was still underwater, but Nia figured that it could stay that way until she could get them both onto the sand.
The mysterious thing collided against them again, and Nia frantically tried to believe it was a dolphin. Anything else would have attacked already, or that’s what she told herself as she tried to get a better hold on Bernice.
Desperate, she grabbed Bernice’s hair and lifted her head up. Her eyes were half-open, but Nia saw nothing there except for the whites, and in the darkness she was so drained of color that she seemed to glow. Water dribbled from her nose and mouth.
“Come on,” Nia said through gritted teeth. Her fear of the thing in the water had tipped until it was greater than her fear of Bernice, so she shook her cousin and tried to bring her back around. Anything, anyone—she’d talk to anyone right now; she just couldn’t be alone with it, out there in the water. “Bernice?”
Nia wrapped an arm around the other girl’s chest and pulled her as far above the water as she could, but Bernice was deadweight, and it was all she could do to merely tow her. By the time they reached a waist-deep tide, Nia was almost completely exhausted.
Bernice hacked violently. She began to breathe again with a wet gasp.
“Nia?” She choked on the name. She rotated slowly in Nia’s grip and clung to her. “Nia, I think—”
With incredible force, Bernice was torn out of Nia’s arms and back underwater.
It happened so quickly, Nia couldn’t tell which way she’d gone, but she knew without a doubt that this was no farce. A few waves away, Bernice’s hand shot up and thrashed, then disappeared.
“What’s going on?” Nia yelled, and she was starting to cry because she was too afraid to do anything else. “Where did you go?”
Her feet tapped something cold and hard. The knife? She ducked under the waves and felt for the blade, rooting around until she touched the fine silver handle. She almost had it. She’d almost pulled it to the surface when another hand latched itself on to hers.
Out of pure shock, she blinked.
She shouldn’t have seen anything at all, but she could swear there was another pair of eyes, swaying before hers in the swirling undertow. She tried to scream, but it was muffled by the water.
You can come, too, then.
She shook her head furiously and twisted her arm, but the hand that held it might have been made of steel or stone.
“No,” she burbled. “No.”
It was not Bernice. It couldn’t be.
What felt like seaweed looped around her legs, constricting and binding her as she fought. She needed air. The hand released her and she tried to swim, knowing the surf was only a few feet deep, but not knowing which way was up. The weeds grew tighter, pulling her in all directions at once, rubbing her skin raw and squeezing all the air out of everything.
Stars fizzed across her sight and she felt so light, she was sure she must be floating. She nodded her head, trying to clear it, and opened her eyes again—not feeling the burn of the salt so much as tasting it with her whole body.
The eyes were still there, evil underwater. Her fear was the only thing keeping her conscious, but even that hold was slipping.
The eyes peered closer, zooming up to her face.
“No,” she mouthed, waving the creature away. She squinted over her arm and pulled her legs up to a fetal position. “Stay away. . . .”
Never.
The world was going dark. Ni
a wondered where Bernice was.
Come join her. I can take you both. I will make you strong beyond belief.
She shook her head. No.
She tried to push the eyes away, and the feeling of lightness passed, and she was sinking.
The last she remembered, the eyes were retreating. They looked angry, and Nia wondered why. She felt so heavy. She settled to the ocean floor and thought disconnectedly about how this must be what it felt like to die.
“But who are you?” she asked the eyes before they vanished.
I’m Arahab.
Bedtime Stories of the Gods
Under the water, beneath the place where sharks circle low, their noses hovering above the sand, and below the shimmering, shifting schools of fish that move through the Gulf, there is a safe place where an old, long-abandoned being may rest and wait.
She collects other things like herself, or other things that she might fashion after herself. She holds them down and presses them against her. She makes herself mother and master, and maker, and queen.
Arahab holds the blind, water-sick young woman and coos into the still girl’s hair.
“Before you, I took another,” she says. “I plucked him from the water as I plucked you, pulling him down into this abyss where I hold you now. By that point, I’d been watching him for years.
“First I saw him as a child. He was still a boy when he reached into the river and drew the girl out. She was small and frightened; he hid her in his house and tried to make her family buy her back. The lawmen came, and the family cried out for justice. They were powerful people, powerful enough to pay a ransom—but they were also powerful enough to bring down vengeance. The little Spaniard was afraid. His plans had not been fully formed when he seized the child; for look at him, he was just a child himself.
“But he was learning. He was gathering ideas, and coming to understand the way the law of men shows mercy, or fails to.
“Since he was only a boy, the courts gave him a choice. He could go to prison, or he could go to sea. I held my breath, and I smiled when he chose the boats and the waves. I waited for him to learn.
“He sailed on the Floridablanca and learned which ropes to tug to pull the sails, how to watch the sky for a sign of the weather, and how to guide a wood-framed vessel by the stars above and by his compass.
“And he learned that a war on land will take to the waves, in time.
“His ship was overtaken. It was pounded and ruined; it was blasted with cannon and riddled with lumpy round bullets; it was overrun with uniformed men who seized whom they liked, executed whom they pleased, and took whatever moved them.
“But my little Spaniard—who was now less little, and more man—he survived the battle and fled from the government ship. He could find no honor in serving a nation whose best efforts met failure; he could not justify risking his own life to further a cause in which he did not believe. And out on the seas, between the land masses where men build their cities, there were other men like him. Other men had seen what bounty the water might bring; they, too, had learned the ways of the ropes and the sails; they, too, had buried in their hearts the ways of the stars and the horizons that stretched from world to world’s end.”
Arahab uses her terrible, ancient mind to share the scene with the water-sick woman in her arms. Her memory is perfect and infallible. Her recreation is flawless and fearsome.
The water-sick woman listens and watches.
She has no choice, but she has no desire to do otherwise. She learns and waits, and clutches her new mother. Mother means life, and strength, and air. Without her mother, without the primordial voice that rumbles and hums beneath the ocean floor, without her mother’s arms around her body, there is no breath and no being.
“He found a crew and a ship of his own; he severed his ties to the land, to its laws, and to its lords. He called himself king of the coast, and in time he chose this coast. It was not an empty place, even then. Even then, there were men traveling between the ports, between the islands, between the nooks in the Gulf where other men had gathered to trade. But there was not so much competition on the west side of the peninsula, few others stalked the ships that sat low in the water, fat with gold and slaves.
“The Spaniard learned to kill, and he learned to sail with a flag of terror. His ship moved fast across the Gulf and around the rocky edges, rough with coral, where the land sticks its fingers out into this place of mine. He accumulated wealth, and captives, and ransoms. He earned esteem, and respect, and fear. He investigated the forgotten places where the fresh rivers flow into the salt; and in these places he found estuaries and wells and places where things can be hidden, and lost, and forgotten.
“I waited for him to learn some more.
“Out in the open water, he laced his guns together with knotted rope and slung them around his neck. He leaped from deck to deck, and he fired them quickly, one after another, one shot into one body, and the next, and the next. The wood that creaked underfoot was baptized with the entrails and vomit of men, and women, too. He learned that wealth and power cost blood, and he took the lesson to heart. He learned it well.
“I waited for him to learn the rest.
“Once, he chose a woman from his captives. He did not yet fathom the way a heart is won, or which hearts are worthy of winning. He chose poorly, and she resisted him. He should have cast her into the water, wrapped in chains, but he resisted killing her. The crew saw his hesitation as weakness, and they, in turn, resisted his rule.
“In desperation, and in anger, and in fright, he ran her through with his first mate’s sword. It met her at the throat, and nearly took her head. And with that sacrifice, he learned much, much more about the company he should keep. He regained control of his ship, and of his heart. He seized the next vessel and annihilated its contents, man and beast and treasure alike.
“I only had to wait a little longer, though if I counted out the years to you, you might think it an eternity. When I wait, I am patient. I have more seasons and suns behind me and before me than you’d ever dream. I have more time than any God you’ve ever prayed to.
“I waited until he had finished, almost. I waited until he’d had a long life, and a long career for a man of his kind. And I knew he was mine—I knew he was meant to join me, when his greed would not let him retire to die an old man in his bed. He tried to be wise and withdraw while the odds might let him vanish; but there was one more boat, fat and low in the water with gold or slaves. And it sailed under a flag he hated, a flag from the country that first compelled him to leave his land-life and come to my domain.
“He called his crewmen off the beach where they were sorting out their spoils, and he said to them, ‘Look, in the bay, you can see it there. It’s a beautiful ship and it is heavy in the water. One last venture, then. One last ship and its treasure, and then we can part ways. You can go to your island, Roberto; you can return to your Sanibel in Spain, Arturo. This is the last of the wealth we’ve grown between us, and now it is divided according to rank and skill. But one last ship, my men. One last ship and we will call ourselves kings and retreat to distant shores, distant homes, and distant memory. It is fair and fitting that we have been so long spared the squad or the noose.’
“And the sailors on the shore agreed with him, and they rallied beside him, running to the ship and raising the anchor, unfurling the sails. They urged their ship into the bay, and out through the water, and they drew their vessel alongside the easy victim, and they raised their flag of plunder.
“But the other ship had a secret. Its flag was a false one, and its mission was one of deceit. It had set itself against the shore to serve as bait, as a tempting lure to draw the Spaniard out.
“When the attack began, the other vessel lowered its treacherous sheet and raised its true colors. It was no merchant ship but a ship of war, a ship called the Enterprise from the New World. The other craft returned fire and the Spaniard was furious. It was a trick that he had taught them, the lure a
nd the attack, and now they used it against him.
“Overpowered, outmanned, and outgunned, he found himself alone on the deck as his men died or surrendered around him. He was no fool. He knew that they would not let him leave or live. Even if he raised his hands and let them take him, he’d only face execution at a later date. He would not allow such a thing; he was not made for public humiliation such as that.
“And down below I waited for him; I smiled and was pleased, for I had been waiting on him for years, and the moment was at hand.
“He rushed to the bow and he seized the anchor’s chain. He slung it around his neck and wrapped it around his shoulders. He faced the New World ship and he saluted its commander. And he said to him, ‘Gaspar dies by his own hand, and by no enemy.’ He turned his back to the deck and he cast himself into the water.”
“I caught him.” Arahab breathes cool bubbles into the woman’s ear. “I caught him, as I caught you.” She tightens her hold and smiles when the woman returns the embrace.
It might be heartfelt, or it might be a reflex from a dying body too long left without air.
“I swam beneath the ship, and let him fall into my arms. He struggled against the chains he chose, but he did not struggle against me. Even as the sky left his lungs, and even as his chest convulsed, and his eyes burned from the unfamiliar salt, he understood that I was there to take him, and he did not fight me.
“I brought him here, held him close, and told him great stories, as I now do for you. But you, I have more to tell—because to all the great histories of the earth, I add the story of how my son came to me, as well.
“And he, my cherished son, was a bold and wonderful thing. I gave him tasks, and he performed them. But then I gave him a quest, and he hesitated.
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