I’m not really able to write at this time, trapped on a boat with a shapeshifting murderer, you know, but let’s pretend. I don’t dare call out psychically to Jordan or anyone else, because He Who Must Be Obeyed will dice my brains with his sonic Ginsu knife if I do. But worse, I can feel Jordan calling out to me — feel it, but not really catch what he’s saying. It’s as if Orion has dropped a wall around me. I can’t get out, and no one else can get in. I just feel muffled vibes. It’s driving me crazy. Let’s talk about something else.
“Juna Lee, stay out of the sewer,” my mother used to say when I was a child.Not that it did any good. A decorative iron grate covered the opening to a storm drain in the courtyard garden at our historic Charleston villa. One day, when a workman had pried the grate off, I wrapped a silk sheet around myself (always protect your pearl-embroidered playsuit from sewage) and hopped into the open hole. After a thrilling half-hour water ride through a pitch-black brick tunnel that had been dug by slaves when “Charles Town” was still a dot on England’s map of the Colonies, I floated to the surface of Charleston Bay, near the rocky hummock crowned by the preserved battlements of Fort Sumter. The first shots of the Civil War had been fired there. Heedless of historic sacraments, I crawled onto a low wall, dried myself in the sun, and took a nap. Unfortunately, a fishing boat full of Landers spotted me, and everyone on board freaked out. A child. A poor helpless child. Oh, please. But at least I made the local newspaper.
First Grader Continues Poinfax Tradition, the headline said drolly. Charlestonians (who sport a high percentage of Mers — glamorous, elitist, and old money, the historic city is such a perfect Mer habitat) anyway, Charlestonians are nothing if not blasé when it comes to Mer antics. I wasn’t the first Poinfax heir to do a nonchalant slalom down a city sewer tunnel.
But if Mama had her way, I’d have been the last. “Augustus,” she said to Dad, waving an herbal cigarette with a hand jeweled in onyx to match her evening gown and his tuxedo (they were always on their way to some coordinated gala or other), “Augustus, I know you have fond memories of that storm drain from your own childhood, but I suggest we lock the grate permanently, or else next time our little princess may get flushed all the way to Bermuda.”
“No, she’ll be fine. She’s a dollop of caviar off the old cracker,” Dad said proudly, meaning I was a chip off the old block. Besides, Mama and Dad were never seriously concerned about my safety in the world. Like most Mer parents, they understood that even the riskiest Mer child is far more savvy than your average Lander ankle biter. Mers aren’t like Landers, who go lily-livered at the thought of dark, mysterious places far below terra firma. We have our sonar, so we can see in the dark underwater, or least feel shapes in the dark. We don’t mind the cold, we don’t mind the damp, and we don’t mind being submerged in murky water for long periods of time, though I didn’t much like sharing the drain’s subterranean waterslide with rat carcasses and clumps of garbage.
By the way, Mama and Dad are currently moored somewhere along the fabulous coast of New Zealand. They’ve lived aboard one of their yachts for years, floating here and yon, welcoming various nomadic Mers aboard, dabbling in extramarital affairs, gambling at highstakes card games, partying with the famous and infamous. I get psychic hellos from them occasionally, and postcards. Hey, I never said they were good role models.
Strange, but decades later, trapped in the cabin of a yacht with Orion at the helm, I thought of that storm drain. Storm drains and mom and dad and vaginas. Birth canals, to be precise. If Orion killed me, I’d never birth a child. My never-born would never get to jump down the Poinfax storm drain. You just know any child of mine and Jordan’s wouldn’t have been able to resist a challenge like that.
I teared up, thinking about mine and Jordan’s child never being born, never popping up near Fort Sumter speckled with mud and bits of old candy wrappers.
Charley/Orion stepped into the cabin, gave me yet another chilly, assessing stare, then locked the cabin door behind him. The small yacht purred along the open waters of the Atlantic headed north. Sunshine silhouetted the faux Charley’s hulking shoulders. If I forced myself I could halfway believe my sweet lummox of a cousin was really there, until I looked into his eyes. When Orion gazed at me, I felt like a small sea anemone pinned underneath a scientist’s microscope. “You think bizarre thoughts,” Orion said now. “I don’t enjoy keeping track of them.”
“Sorry. I can’t keep my mind out of the sewer.” Pause. Silence. His eyes narrowed. I sighed. “I know you don’t have a sense of humor, but that was a joke.”
Charley/Orion, who wore nothing but loose khaki shorts over the illusion of Charley’s muscle-bound body, dropped to his heels in front of me. Orion’s black eyes bored a laser path through my brain. “I don’t intend to kill you unless you make it necessary.”
“I’ll try my best not to.” Like any Southern belle trained in the old rituals of chitchat, I chose the encouraging moment to initiate a polite conversation. “So, tell me, Orion, aren’t you and I cousins? Doesn’t our family tree go back to the same Old One? Hmmm? Melasine? Assuming you believe in fairytales. Mermaids with finned tails, and all that.”
His eyes flickered. “Fairytales? Melasine and the other Old Ones are no fairytales.” He paused. “Melasine is my mother.”
I stared at him. Imagine that someone tells you, straight-faced, that his mother is oh, let’s say, Cleopatra? Or maybe Mrs. Santa Claus. What’s the polite response? “How very interesting,” I finally managed. “Legend has it that she inhabits the waters of the deepest southern hemisphere.”
“Legend has it.”
“Your father?”
“Ztecahotezumta, a king of the Aztecs around the time of Cortez.”
Well, that was original. “You’re what, then, hmmm, 500 years old?”
“Something like that.”
“Does Melasine have very many children like you?”
“Not many Swimmers like me, no. I’m a throwback.”
Thank god, I thought, then gasped when I realized he’d heard, of course.
“I couldn’t agree more,” he said. “Thank god there aren’t many like me. I wouldn’t wish this existence on any other Mers.”
“What do you mean?”
“Caught between worlds. An oddity even among Mers. Outliving Landers and Mers both. Always alone. The Old Ones have a need for isolation that makes them content to spend entire centuries alone in the deepest oceans of the world. Swimmers aren’t that lucky. We want to belong. But we can’t.”
“Obviously, you can’t resist trying. How many children do you have?”
“Only three, living.”
“What do you mean —”
“The others died of old age. As did their mothers.”
“Except for Tara McEvers, obviously,” I blurted. “Did you love her? Did you know she was going to bomb a UniWorld research ship and you didn’t try to stop her? And what do you intend to do to the daughters she left you?”
I had gone a step too far. A black swarm of warning clouded my mind. Orion’s voiceless hum beat against my skull like a million angry bees. I’d never heard anything so ominous before. I hiccupped and scooted back in my seat.
“You don’t want to hear the truth,” Orion said softly. “You want to play at interrogation.”
“Oh? Show yourself,” I demanded in a small voice, because, like I’ve said, I can’t resist jumping down dangerous holes. “Show your real self. I’m not playing a game. I can take it. I’ve seen Donald Trump’s hair up close. I’ve got a strong stomach.”
“How kind of you.”
“My mother used to keep me in line by warning that a Swimmer would get me if I swam too far from home. She said Swimmers have horns and claws. Just a fairytale, right?”
He extended a plain, stubby-fingered, Charley-like hand, holding it up to the light as if reality could illuminate him for me. I stared as the illusion fell away. “Oh. My. God.”
“No horns,” he said. “Only c
laws.”
* * * *
The moon was waning, the sky over the Atlantic filled with stars. Rhymer and I shared guard duty in the window seat of an alcove just off the girls’ suite at Sainte’s Point. He’d bolted all the mansion’s outer doors, and we were fortressed on the second floor; the girls slept in the next room, or pretended to. I sat in the window seat’s deep cushions with my legs drawn up and my back fitted to Rhymer’s torso. He draped his arms around my shoulders. One of his long legs dangled off the landward side of the broad window seat; the other was angled beside me. I leaned against it, as if it was a bulwark to keep the sea of the world at bay. We both wore soft, loose clothes, made for efficiency and comfort and unfettered for battle, if need be — me in a long shift, him in baggy trousers and an old white T-shirt. Heathcliff lay at my bare feet, sleeping the sleep of the young and confident, a whiskered smile on his face. In the midst of fear, I still felt that miracle. All the miracles of hope in the midst of darkness.
“In one of Lilith’s books,” I said, “I looked up the name Orion. Its roots are in Greek mythology, of course. Orion was a son of Neptune. He was killed unfairly by an enemy. In sympathy, a goddess placed him in the stars.”
“Our Orion is no mere constellation,” Rhymer grunted. “And no victim of circumstances, I’ll warrant.”
“Tell me about UniWorld,” I whispered.
Rhymer’s arms tensed around me. “Lots of speculation. Wild rumor. There’s something evil there, but even I’m not sure what. My sister believed it was no’ about the greed for oil, at least no’ all. She believed it was about the destruction of Landers, the restoration of pure-blooded Mers as the grand poohbahs of the world, about legacies and prophecies and such. When this is settled, I’ll be looking into UniWorld. Finding out more.”
“Your sister died when the sophisticated explosives she was planting on the UniWorld research ship went off too soon?”
“Aye. Their security goons chased her with boats and divers. She dropped the package. The remote malfunctioned. She was killed by the concussion underwater.”
“You don’t doubt that’s what really happened?”
“I’ve confirmed it with sources.”
“Then Orion didn’t—"
“Kill her? No. But he abandoned her. She did it for him. He led her into a life of conspiracy theories. He’s responsible.”
“But you agree with her view that UniWorld is probably corrupt and sinister?”
He laughed grimly. “Since their bastards tried to shoot me when I went to claim her body, aye. But other than that, I only know that my sister did no’ die by UniWorld’s hands. They were trying to take her alive. No, I blame Orion for getting her killed. For getting her into the situation in the first place.”
We were quiet for a long time, watching the ocean beyond the treetops that fronted the island. I threaded my fingers through his and leaned my head back into the crook of his neck. I worried that he would not give Orion any chance at all. But I also worried that Orion would not give him a chance, either. “You’re named after Rhymer Thomas, the Scottish poet.”
He chuckled. “Aye. My parents hoped for a thoughtful, sensitive son, but were stuck with me instead. So they made do and gave me a poet’s name.”
“No. They knew you’d follow your heart.”
“Don’t tell anyone. You’ll harm my reputation.”
“Would it be so bad if someone suspected you of tenderness?”
“Indeed. The world needs two kinds of people: the kindhearted to create poetry and the coldhearted to defend them.”
“No law says you can’t be both.”
He raised a hand and looked out at the ocean, listening. “I’m feeling the low song of Jordan and Tula. Somewhere in the Gulf. Jordan says he heard a whisper from Juna Lee. Just a word or two. Something about storm drains and claws.”
“As long as we know where Jordan and Tula are. That they’re safe.”
“Aye. As long as we hear them, they’re safe. The Araizas are helping them search for Juna Lee. But Orion hides. He can hide from all of them. They look on the water, they see naught but a shrimper. Or a sailboat. Not the small yacht carrying him and Juna Lee.”
“I’m trying to imagine Juna Lee facing down a . . . a monster. I feel sorry for the monster. I never thought I’d feel sorry for her. But she was the one who forced me to come here. I have to give her credit for that.”
“She’s unhurt, I can feel it. And she’s a fighter. Speaking of which.” He reached beneath a pillow, then withdrew an automatic pistol. “This is for you.” He pressed it into my astonished hands. “Do no’ be afraid. ’Tis not loaded yet. Tomorrow I’ll show you how to fire it.”
I carefully set the lethal gun aside. “That will be the least of the test.”
“Could you shoot Orion if you had to?”
“If I thought he intended to hurt you or the girls, yes.”
“Don’t go giving him even that much room for doubt.”
“Shoot first and ask questions later? How Wild West.”
“Hesitating gets people killed, Moll.”
“Such as the girl you loved when you were young and hopeful?”
He turned me to face him. “Such as the girl I love now.”
* * * *
The next day, not long after noon, Jordan and Tula disappeared. Psychically, that is. The low, steady hum of their presence, which kept Rhymer and me assured that they were safe and progressing in their search for Orion, snapped as if someone had slashed a phone line.
Rhymer and I were on the island’s Atlantic beach at the time. At least, I was on the beach, holding the pistol Rhymer had given me. Rhymer had vanished into the ocean over a half-hour before. “I need to have a little confab with the dolphins as to what they’ve heard or sensed lately,” he’d explained before he speared the surf, wearing naught but loose black trunks and his sheathed sword.
So I was standing there, looking anxiously from the gray-green ocean to the dunes and woods that hid the mansion from my sight, wondering if the girls were keeping their promise to stay locked in their suite upstairs with Heathcliff for company, when a part of my mind, listening for Tula and Jordan, went still. That’s how it felt. Still. An engine had been turned off. The telegraph wires had been cut. Dodge City had lost the dit-dit-a-dit of the telegraph from Tombstone.
“Tula?” I said aloud, putting a hand to my head as if tapping my skull a few times would clear the line. “Jordan?”
Just beyond the surf, Rhymer popped to the surface. We traded a grim gaze. He’s got them, Rhymer whispered to me. Orion. He may have killed them.
Things Turn Nasty
Chapter 21
Jordan was bleeding all over my slinky little Anne Blegis dress. Not that I minded. The dress could be dry cleaned. Jordan couldn’t.
I looked up at Orion. Help him, please, help him.
Orion waved a hand. He’ll live. If he does as he’s told. Just like you two. He gazed quietly at me and Tula, his Charley face a blank mask for those place-of-no-return eyes. Tula knelt on the cabin’s floor beside me, speckled in Jordan’s blood, holding his head in her lap while I pressed my hands onto the ripped, bloody cloth of his white cotton shirt, low on his right side. Blood poured from two deep gashes.
The bleeding suddenly stopped. Orion shrugged. He’d granted me a small favor. Jordan took a deep breath and opened his eyes. “Sorry,” he whispered to me. “Some rescuer I am.”
I nearly cried. “Sorry? Sorry for letting a shapeshifting psycho onto your boat because he was impersonating me? Sorry for hesitating to shoot an apparition you thought might really be me? Sorry you were deceived by a deranged mutant outcast who’s so freaking ashamed of his freaking, freakish, freak appearance he still hides behind Charley’s face and won’t even show himself to us?” I glared up at Orion.
Jordan coughed. “Maybe you want to be a little more polite, since we seem to be his prisoners.”
Orion smiled coldly. “A wise man. Onward to Sainte?
??s Point.”
* * * *
The breakfast nook at Sainte’s Point was a cozy alcove of delicate white furniture, several small, original seascapes by a who’s who of famous artists, and a small, sea-nibbled statuette of a web-footed nymph being caressed by an octopus. I’d never seen anything quite like it in collected antiquities; no Greek, Roman, or other ancient Mesopotamian culture had produced such a strangely erotic ode to inter-species dating.
Women and the tentacled marine animals they love, I thought weirdly. Next on Jerry Springer.
The girls and I sat in the alcove, eating a breakfast of butter and boiled shrimp. That’s right. Butter and boiled shrimp. We each had a small porridge bowl filled with scoops of the creamiest fresh butter, and a small plate of fat, salmon-pink shrimp. A typical Mer breakfast. All my life I’d hidden my fetish for marbled steaks and lard out of the can. I hadn’t known I was just a fat-loving Mer, eating what came naturally.
I stared at the statuette again, not really seeing it, lost in thought. Worrying. Jordan and Tula remained silent. Rhymer was out on the seaward beaches, listening for them looking.
“That statue’s very ancient, you know,” Stella said. She nodded. Her face, on the cusp between childhood and teenage beauty, was pale and haunted.
I felt her trying so hard to be a role model to her sisters. “Oh? Please, tell me about it.”
“It’s from a Mer civilization that existed long before the earliest ones Landers remember. The girl in the statue was a princess of an ocean clan. She became a great queen and warrior. Long before the age of Landers.”
“How fascinating.”
“Only if you’re stupid enough to believe in fairytales,” Isis grunted. She scooped shrimp and butter into her mouth. “I like stories about Santa Claus better. At least he brings gifts.” Pause. “Unlike our own father. Who’s never even met us but is probably headed this way to murder us.”
“Isis!” Stella hissed.
“Murder us?” Venus moaned.
I drew myself up in my best former-librarian-shushing-people mode. “Eat your butter and shrimp, Isis.”