“Oh God,” Nita moaned. “S’reee, let’s put our tails into it! Even if we were getting home right now, we’d have some explaining to do. And the later this goes, the worse it’s going to get…”
She turned and swam in the direction where her sharpening whale-senses told her home was. It was going to be bad enough, having to climb out of this splendid, strong, graceful body and put her own back on again. But Dairine would be waiting to give her the Spanish Inquisition when she got home. And her mother and father were going to give her more of those strange looks. Worse… there’d be questions asked because of how late they were: she knew it. Her folks might even call Kit’s family if they got worried enough. And Kit’s dad, who was terminally protective of his son, might make Kit come home. That thought was worst of all.
When they got back to the beach house, it was lucky for them that Nita’s father was too tired from his fishing—which had been very successful—to make much noise about their lateness. Her mother was cleaning fish in the kitchen, too annoyed at the smelly work to much care about anything else. And as for Dairine, she was buried so deep in a paperback copy of the latest “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” novel that all she did when Nita passed her room was glance up, then dive straight back into her reading. Even so, there was no feeling of relief when Nita shut the door to her room and got under the covers; just an uneasy sense of something incomplete, something that was going to come up again later… and not in a way she’d like.
“Wizardry...” she muttered sourly, and fell asleep.
Ed’s Song
“Neets,” her mother said from where she stood at the sink, her back turned. “Got a few minutes?”
Nita looked up from her breakfast. “What’s up?”
Her mother was silent for a second, as if wondering how to broach whatever she had on her mind. “You and Kit’ve been out a lot lately,” she said at last. “Dad and I hardly ever seem to see you.”
“I thought Dad said it’d be fun to have Dairine and me out of his hair for a while, this vacation,” said Nita.
“Out of his hair, yes. Not out of his life. We worry about you two when you’re out so much.”
“Mom, we’re fine.”
“Well, I wonder… What exactly are you two doing out there all day?”
Oh, no. This can’t be going where I think it’s going. Please don’t let it be going there. “Oh, Mom! Seriously, nothing!”
Her mother looked at her and put up one eyebrow in an excellent imitation of Mr. Spock from Star Trek.
Nita blushed. It was one of those family jokes that you wish would go away, and never does; when Nita had been little and had said “Nothing!” she had usually been getting into incredible trouble. “Mom,” Nita said, “sometimes when I say ‘nothing,’ it’s really just nothing. We hang out, that’s all. We… do stuff.”
“What kind of stuff?”
Oh no, she is going there. This is awful, what do I say— “Mom, what does it matter? Just stuff!”
“It matters,” her mother said, “if it’s adult kinds of stuff… instead of kid stuff.”
Nita didn’t say a word. There was no question that what she and Kit were doing were adult sorts of things. Sure, not the kind she means, but I can’t say no to that, it wouldn’t be true—
Her mother took in Nita’s silence, waiting for her daughter to break it. Nita declined, becoming much more interested in her corn flakes than they deserved, especially when they were heading for soggy.
“I won’t beat around the bush with you, Neets,” her mom said at last. “Are you and Kit getting… physically involved?”
Nita’s relief at being asked something she could answer honestly was intense, and she channeled as much embarrassment and outrage into the response as she possibly could. “Mom! You mean sex? God, no!”
“Well,” her mother said slowly, “that takes a load off my mind.” A silence fell after the words, and through it Nita was almost sure she could hear her mother thinking, if it’s true…
The silence unnerved Nita more than the prospect of a talk on the facts of life ever could have. “Mom,” she said, “if I were gonna do something like that, I’d talk to you about it first.” She was still blushing, embarrassed to be discussing this with anybody. Nevertheless, what she’d said was the truth. “Seriously. You know me, I’m chicken. I always run and ask for advice before I do anything.”
“Even about this?”
“Especially about this!”
“Then what are you doing?” her mother said, sounding just plain curious now. And there was another sound in her voice—wistfulness. She was feeling left out of something. “When I was young, ‘nothing’ just meant reading, or playing. Chinese jump rope, or games in the dirt with plastic animals. Now when I ask Dairine what she’s doing, and she says ‘nothing,’ I go in and find she’s taking apart your dad’s desktop computer, or reprogramming his smartphone into a TV remote. I don’t know what to expect.”
Nita shrugged. “Kit and I swim a lot…” Which is true.
“Where you won’t get in trouble, I hope,” her mother said.
“Yeah,” Nita said, grateful that her mother hadn’t said anything about lifeguards or public beaches. This is a real pain, she thought. I have to talk to Tom and Carl about this. What do they do with their families? But her mother was waiting for a more detailed explanation. “We talk, we look at stuff. We explore...”
Nita shook her head, then, for it was hopeless. There was no explaining even the parts of her relationship with Kit that her mother could understand. “He’s just my friend,” Nita said finally. It was a horrible understatement, but the more she had to try to explain this, the hotter with embarrassment she got. “Mom, we’re okay, really.”
“I suppose you are,” her mom said. “Though I can’t shake the feeling that there are things going on you’re not telling me about. Nita, I trust you… but I still worry.”
Nita just nodded. “Can I go out now, Mom?”
“Sure. Just be back by the time it gets dark,” she said.
Nita sighed and headed for the door. But there was no feeling of release, no sense of anything having been really settled, as there usually was when a family problem had been hashed out to everyone’s satisfaction. Nita knew her mother was going to be watching her, and it got under her skin.
There’s no reason for it! she thought as she went down to the beach, running so she wouldn’t be late for meeting Kit. But there was reason for it, she knew; and guilt settled quietly into place inside her, where not all the seawater in the world would wash it out.
***
She found Kit far down the beach, standing on the end of the nearby fishing jetty with a rippling, near-invisible glitter clutched in one hand: the whalesark. “You’re late,” he said, scowling, as Nita climbed the jetty. “S’reee’s waiting—” Then the scowl fell off his face when he saw her expression. “You okay?”
“Yeah. But my mom’s getting suspicious. And we have to be back by dark or it’ll get worse.”
Kit said something under his breath in Spanish.
“Ay!” Nita said back, a precise imitation of what either of Kit’s folks would have said if they’d heard him. He laughed.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“We’d better leave our suits here,” Kit said. Nita agreed, turning her back and starting to peel out of hers. Kit made his way down the rocks and into the water as she put her bathing suit under the rock with his. Then she started down the other side of the jetty.
Nita found that the whale-body came much more easily to her than it had the day before. She towed Kit out into deeper water, where he wrapped the whalesark around him and made his own change. His too came more quickly and with less struggle, though the shock of displaced water, like an undersea explosion, was no less. S’reee came to meet them then, and they greeted her and followed her off eastward, passing Shinnecock Inlet.
“Some answers to Aroooon’s Calling have already come ba
ck,” she said. “Kit, it looks like we may not need you to sing after all. But I would hope you’d attend the Song anyway.”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” he sang cheerfully. “Somebody has to be around to keep Neets from screwing up, after all...”
Nita made a humpback’s snort of indignation. But she also wondered about the nervousness in S’reee’s song. “Where’s Hotshot this morning?”
“Out calling the rest of his people for patrol around the Gates. Besides, I’m not sure he’s, well, all that suited for what we’re doing today...”
“S’reee,” Kit said, picking up the tremor in her song, “what’s the problem? It’s just another wizard we’re going to see—”
“Oh, no,” she said. “The Pale One’s no wizard. He’ll be singing one of the Twelve, all right—but the only one who has no magic.”
“Then what’s the problem? Even a shark is no match for three wizards—”
“Kit,” S’reee said, “that’s easy for you to say. You’re a sperm, and it’s true enough that the average shark’s no threat to one of your kind. But the one we’re going to see is no average shark. This shark would be a good candidate to really be the Pale Slayer, the original Master-Shark, instead of just playing him. And that aside, there are some kinds of strength that even wizardry has trouble matching.” Her song grew quieter. “We’re getting close. If you have any plans to stay living a while more, watch what you say when the Pale One starts talking. And for the Sea’s sake, if you’re upset about anything, don’t show it!”
They swam on toward Montauk Point, the long spit of land that was the southeastern tip of Long Island. The bottom began to change from the yellow, fairly smooth sand off the South Shore, littered with fish havens and abandoned oyster beds and deep undergrowth, to a bottom of darker shades—grey, brown, almost black—rocky and badly broken, scattered with old wrecks. The sea around them grew noisy, changing from the usual soft background hiss of quiet water to a rushing, liquid roar that grew in intensity until Nita couldn’t hear herself think, let alone sing. Seeing in the water was difficult. The surface was whitecapped, the middle waters were murky with dissolved air, and the hazy sunlight diffused in the sea until everything seemed to glow a pallid gray white, with no shadows anywhere.
“Mind your swimming,” S’reee said, again in that subdued voice. “The rocks are sharp around here; you really don’t want to start bleeding.”
They surfaced once for breath near Montauk Point, so that Nita got a glimpse of its tall octagonal lighthouse, the little tender’s house nearby, and a group of tourists milling about on the cliff that slanted sharply down to the sea. Nita blew, just once, but spectacularly, and grinned to herself at the sight of the tourists pointing and shouting at each other and taking pictures of her. She cruised the surface for a few moments to let them get some good shots, then submerged again and caught up with Kit and S’reee.
The murkiness of the water made it hard to find the way except by singing brief notes, waiting for the return of the sound, and judging the bottom by it. S’reee was doing so, but her notes were so short that she seemed to be grudging them.
What’s the matter with her? Nita thought. You can’t get a decent sounding off such short notes! And indeed she almost hit a rock herself as she was thinking that, and saved herself from it only by a quick lithe twist that left her aching afterward. The roaring of the water over the Shoals kept on growing, interfering with the rebound of the song-notes, whiting them out.
S’reee was bearing north around the point now and slowing to the slowest of speeds. Kit, to keep from overswimming her, was barely drifting, and keeping well above the bottom. Nita glanced up at him, a great dark shape against the greater brightness of the surface water—and saw his whole body thrash once hard, in a gesture of terrible shock. “Nita!”
She looked ahead and saw what he saw. The milky water ahead of them had a great cloud of blood hanging and swirling in it, with small bright shapes flashing in and out of the cloud in mindless confusion. Nita let out one small squeak of fear, then forced herself to be quiet. The sound came back, though, and told her that inside that roiling red darkness, something was cruising by in a wide curve—something nearly Kit’s size. Shocked, Nita backfinned to hover in the water, glancing up at Kit.
He drifted downward to her, singing no note of his own. She could understand why. Tumbling weightlessly out of the blood-cloud, trailing streaks of watery red, were the slashed and broken bodies of a school of smallfin tuna—heads, tails, pieces too mangled to name or bear close examination. Some of these drifted slowly to the bottom, where the scavengers—salt-water catfish and crabs and other such—ate them hurriedly, as if not wanting to linger and face whatever hunted above.
Nita didn’t want to attract its attention either, but she also really wanted Kit’s reassurance. This place to which S’reee had brought them was unquestionably the location of a shark’s feeding frenzy, in which the hunter will devour not only its prey, but anything else that gets in the way, uncontrollably, mindlessly, until sated. And inside the cloud of blood, which the current over the shoals was taking away, for the first time something visibly moved toward them, a shadow in the deeper, bloodier shadow, now easing out into the light.
Impossible, was Nita’s first reaction as the circling shape was revealed. It broke out of its circling, its tail sweeping behind it with slow lazy power, and began to soar slowly toward her and Kit and S’reee. Sonar had warned her the size of what was coming, but Nita was still astonished. No way, no fish can be that big, not possibly—!
But this one could. Nita didn’t dare move. With leisurely, deadly grace the huge pale form came curving toward them. Nita could see why S’reee had said that this creature was a good candidate for the title Master-Shark, even if the original had lived ten thousand years ago, when everything was bigger. The shark was nearly as long as Kit—from its blunt nose to the end of its tail’s top fin, certainly no less than ninety feet. Its eyes were that same dull, expressionless black that had horrified Nita the first few times she’d watched Jaws. But seeing those eyes on a TV that you could turn off was one thing. Having them dwell on you, calm and hungry even after a feeding frenzy, when you had nowhere to hide—that was much worse.
The pale shape glided closer. Nita felt Kit drift so close to her that his skin brushed hers, and she felt the thudding of his huge heart. In shape, the shark looked like a great white, at least as well as Nita could remember from Jaws. There, though, the resemblance ended. “Great white” sharks were actually pale blue on their upper bodies and only white below. This one was white all over, an ivory white so pale that great age might have bleached it that color. And as for size, this one could have eaten the Jaws shark for lunch, and looked capable of working Nita in, in a couple of bites, as dessert. Its terrible maw, still hung about with drifting, mangled shreds of bleeding tuna, was easily fifteen feet across. Those jaws worked gently, absently, as the white horror cruised toward the three of them.
S’reee finned forward a little. She inclined the fore half of her body toward the white one and sang, in what seemed utter, toneless calm, “Ed’Rashtekaresket, chief of the Unmastered in these waters, I greet you.”
The shark swam straight toward S’reee, those blank eyes fixed on her. The whale held her position as the Pale One glided toward her, his mouth open, his jaws working. At the last possible moment he veered to one side and began to describe a great circle around the three.
Three times he circled them, in silence. Next to Nita, Kit shuddered. The shark looked sharply at them, but still said nothing, just kept swimming until he had completed his third circle. When he spoke at last, there was no warmth in his voice, none of the skin-stroking richness Nita had grown used to in whale-voices. This voice was dry. It was interested, but passionless; and though insatiably hungry, it was not even slightly angry or vicious. The voice destroyed every idea Nita had of what a shark would sound like. Some terrible malice, she could have accepted—not this deadly equanimit
y. “Young wizard,” the voice said, cool and courteous, “well met.”
The swimmer broke free of his circling and described a swift, clean arc that brought him close enough to Nita and Kit for Nita to see the kind of rough, spiky skin that had injured S’reee so badly two nights before. The great shark almost touched Nita’s nose as he swept by.
“My people,” the Pale One said to S’reee, “tell me that they met with you two nights since. And fed well.”
“The nerve!” Kit said, none too quietly, and started to swim forward.
Aghast, Nita bumped him to one side, hard. He was so startled he held still again. “Keep your mouth shut!” she said quietly. “That thing could eat us all if it wanted to!”
“If he wanted to,” said the Pale One, glancing at Nita and fixing her, just for a moment, with one of those expressionless eyes. “Peace, young human. I’ll deal with you in a moment.”
She subsided instantly, feeling like a bird face to face with a snake.
“I am told further,” said the shark, circling S’reee lazily, “that wizardry struck my people down at their meal...”
“And then released them.”
“The story’s true, then.”
“True enough, Unmastered,” said S’reee, still not moving. “I’m no more ignorant than Ae’mhnuu was of the price paid for the reckless wastage of life. Besides, I knew I’d be talking to you today. And even if I didn’t, I’d have you to deal with at some later time. Shall we two be finished with this matter, then? We have other matters to discuss.”
“Having heard the Calling in the water last night, I believe you do,” said the Pale One, still circling S’reee with slow grace. His jaws, Nita noticed were still working. “You were wise to spare those of my Mastery. Are your wounds healed? Is your pain ended?”
“Yes to both questions, Pale One.”
“I have no further business with you, then,” said the shark. Nita felt Kit move slightly against her, an angry, balked movement. Evidently he had been expecting the shark to apologize. But the shark’s tone of voice made it plain that he didn’t think he’d done anything wrong. And bizarrely, it seemed as if S’reee agreed with him.