Brightly (Flicker #2) (11 page)

Davis fell, hitting the floor hard. Before he could stand, the man—Richard Austin, Nasser presumed—staggered to his feet and lurched toward the front door, which hung half-open. The dark energy had smashed into Nasser before he’d had a chance to shut it.

Nasser snaked one arm out and grabbed Richard’s ankle; the man tripped, without throwing his arms out to catch himself, and hit the floor with a resounding
thud.
Though his head was spinning, Nasser managed to crawl over to Richard and place one knee firmly on the man’s back, pinning his arms to the floor. Richard’s skin was cool to the touch, clammy. He was spindly and sick-looking, but he struggled with a fervor that both amazed and frightened Nasser.

“Hang on.” Davis scrambled over to them, jerking something out of his backpack: a bundle of some kind of brownish grass. He shoved the bundle underneath Richard’s nose, pressing it close—and a long moment later, Richard’s thrashing began to turn sluggish, and finally stopped.

“What did you do?” Nasser asked, hesitant to let go of Richard.

“Just put him to sleep for a while. He’ll wake up in an hour or so. Can you walk?”

He could still feel the dark energy tossing itself against him like waves against a rock, but he nodded. “Sure.”

“Then help me with him.”

Nasser slid carefully off of Richard, then stood shakily. Together, he and Davis hauled a mumbling Richard to his feet and carried him across the living room, down the hall and into a bedroom. By the time they laid Richard down on the bed, Nasser’s vision was starting to blur, and he had to lower himself into a chair by the nightstand before he fell over.

With some difficulty, Davis positioned Richard on the bed. Then he retrieved several pieces of rope from his backpack and tied Richard’s wrists to the bedposts using a complicated-looking knot. The rope was long enough that he could place his arms by his sides. Richard’s head lolled against his shoulder.

“Okay,” Davis announced finally. “I think we’re good. These knots will hold him when he wakes up. He’ll be less—” Davis gestured vaguely to Richard’s whole body. “Less
this
in the morning. We can come back and untie him then.”

“We’re just going to leave him?”

“Just for now. We have more houses to check, and we don’t have time to hang around.”

“All right.” Nasser stood slowly, waiting for the world to stop tilting before he followed Davis back into the hall. As he crossed the living room, he felt like he was underwater, his limbs heavy and slow.

It was only when he was back on the sand that Nasser could fully breathe again. He stood with his hands on his knees for a long moment, willing his head to clear. He felt sort of seasick.

The merfolk were still singing, and while he stood with his eyes closed and the sea rushing in his ears, the dark tingle of the song reminded him of the swirling eddies of energy in Richard’s house.

“What happened to you back there?” Davis asked finally.

“There’s something in that house—some kind of magic hanging over it,” Nasser said, suppressing a shudder. “It just… hit me.”

Davis’ expression darkened. “You said that these people aren’t sick. What were you talking about?”

Nasser straightened and looked over his shoulder at the house. It looked perfectly normal in the moonlight, but he knew better. “They
aren’t
sick,” he said. “They’re
cursed
.”

A strong wind was blowing off the sea at Nemo Cove, spraying mists of salt water. From where the six of them stood, at the edge of a dock jutting out over the water, the sea resembled a shifting black pit filled with voices.

Though it was a warm night, Lee kept shivering. She didn’t know if it was because of the dark expanse of water before her or because of the terrible singing that welled up from beneath the surface.

“Where are they?” Lee asked, squinting at the water. “I don’t see anything.”

“The colony’s nest is somewhere beneath this cove,” Henry said. “Probably in an underwater cave. The new merfolk have taken over the nest. They start singing down below, and then they surface. They’re around—we just can’t see them yet.”

They stood in silence for some minutes, the salty wind blowing in their faces. Every now and then, the singing swelled tremendously, loud enough to make Lee wince. Each time it did, she felt a brief, powerful urge to step off the end of the dock and into the black water. Lee dug her fingernails into the flesh of her arms, using the pain to focus herself.

“What’s that?” Jason asked, pointing across the water, where a dark smudge crouched on the horizon, just visible against the star-strewn sky. “Another island?”

“That’s Troll’s Island,” Clementine said. “We don’t go there.”

“Why not?”

She looked at him like he had two heads. “The troll.”

Jason opened his mouth, but before he could say anything, there was a splash of white water and a greenish glimmer nearby, like a diving fish.

“Did you see that?” Lee whispered.

A few yards away, something rose from beneath the black water: a pale green face, followed by a long throat and a set of narrow shoulders. More faces appeared, all of them expressionless. Merfolk.

Lee studied the nearest creature as it bobbed gently in the water. It was female, she deduced, its face both humanlike and alien. The mermaid had bright yellow eyes and slits for nostrils, as well as thin lips. Her face was framed by a dark, seaweed-like plant that seemed to be growing from her scalp. The mermaid’s skin was covered in a hypnotic pattern of dark green markings. She didn’t seem to have scales; her skin was slick, like a frog’s. Barnacles clung to her, winding across her shoulders, up her throat and along one side of her face.

At least thirty merfolk floated in the water. No two were quite the same color, nor bore the same pattern of skin markings. Some were bluish or silvery; others were reddish-brown, or a shiny black that nearly matched the moonlit water.

And they were
singing.
Staring toward the shore with huge, fishlike eyes, the merfolk sang endlessly, never seeming to pause for breath.

“Can you understand them, Filo?” Jason asked quietly.

Filo shook his head. “It’s not words, just sounds. Vocalization. Nonsense.”

“Think you could talk to them?” Henry asked.

For a moment, Filo was silent. He chewed his lip and squinted at the merfolk. “I don’t know. I don’t even know what language they speak.”

Clementine turned to him. “But you would understand what they say to you, right? I mean, you have the gift of tongues.”

“Sure, I’d understand them,” he acknowledged. “But that won’t make much difference if we can’t communicate.”

“Try anyway,” Henry urged. “Please.”

Filo seemed to shift a little under Henry’s gaze. When he spoke, he didn’t quite look at Henry. “I can give it a go.”

He crouched at the end of the dock and peered at the nearest mermaid. Her scales were pale blue, gleaming in the moonlight. Filo called out to her, something in Old Faerie that Lee didn’t catch over the music and the rushing of the sea.

The mermaid’s face turned toward him. She actually stopped singing for a moment—and then she spoke. Her voice was high and thin, like a trickle of water.

“I don’t think she understands me,” Filo said, never taking his eyes off the mermaid. “And I don’t recognize her language.”

“But it’s Old Faerie, isn’t it?” Clementine asked with a frown.

He sighed. “Old Faerie is an umbrella term that encompasses all faerie languages. All tongues spoken by faeries are considered dialects of one language. The dialects are probably all derived from a single language—whatever the fey originally spoke in Otherworld—but in this world, they’ve branched off. The dialects can be vastly different.”

“Which one do you know?”

“The one I normally speak, the one Neman and Morgan spoke, was a common dialect, probably the closest to the original language. It’s spoken pretty much everywhere, with little variation. But
this
dialect sounds more regional. I’ve never heard it before.”

Clementine frowned. “Try again.”

“It won’t help. I need to study the language first.”

“Try again,” she pressed.

Frowning, Filo turned back to the mermaid, who was still watching him, curious. He spoke again, slowly and clearly. The mermaid replied in her watery language, swimming closer to the dock. Lee glimpsed the mermaid’s tail and the edge of one pearly fin.

“Anything?” Clementine asked.

“Shut up,” Filo snapped, and though she looked offended, Clementine remained silent.

Filo spoke again, and Lee noticed a slight change in his speech—his accent, she thought, was a little different. Perhaps he was trying out different dialects of Old Faerie to see if she would understand any of them. When he stopped, the mermaid replied, her words like splashes.

After a while, Filo looked back at them. “She doesn’t understand me. Like I said, it’s a regional dialect. It could be specific to these islands.”

“So what does that mean?” Clementine asked. In the water, the mermaid was speaking to several others. One by one, a cluster of merfolk turned their eyes toward Filo, and their singing trailed off.

“It means I can’t talk to them yet. I
told
you, I need to study their language.”

A handful of merfolk were drifting closer to the dock, chattering and staring at Filo.

“Uh, Filo—” Lee started.

“How long will that take?” Clementine interrupted.

“There’s no way to tell,” Filo said.

“Then what good are you?”

Alice glared. “Don’t talk to him like that. He’s trying to help you.”

Beside Lee, Jason had also noticed the approaching merfolk. “Guys, you might want to step away from the edge,” he said, reaching for Filo’s shoulder.

“What? Why?” Filo asked, glancing back at Jason.

Lee pointed. The merfolk floated in a semicircle around the end of the dock.

Before Filo could move away, one mermaid leaped up onto the dock, seizing Filo’s leg in her bony hand. Filo tried to jerk from her grasp, but she didn’t budge. One of the mermen near the dock pulled her back into the water by her tail—and she dragged Filo in with her.

Most of the houses along the beach were not occupied, and those that were didn’t open their doors to Davis and Nasser. For the most part, Davis simply banged on the front door, asking how things were going, and someone called back to him from the depths of the house to tell him that the knots were holding, or the faerie-struck person was locked in a room. Then Davis yelled that he’d be back in the morning and started toward the next house, Nasser behind him.

Every affected house overflowed with curse magic. If he squinted, Nasser could almost see it: a dark, shifting mist, wisps of it curling out from underneath front doors. Occasionally, Davis entered a house to check on someone, but Nasser remained on the sand, never climbing onto the porches. Drawing that close to any of the houses made him feel too sick to see straight.

With the magic-dissolving sea at his back and a row of houses he couldn’t bear to enter before him, he felt weak and useless.

Davis emerged from another house, the screen door swinging shut behind him.

“How are they?” Nasser asked as they started up the beach.

“As well as can be expected,” Davis replied. “I gave Janice another sleeping potion for Len, enough to last a couple days.” He shook his head. “I can’t do anything for them but give them medicine to help them sleep. Maybe I’m making them more comfortable, but I’m not helping. Not really.”

“I guess that’s what we’re here for,” Nasser said. “To help you help them.”

“Yeah,” Davis said, his gaze fixed on his shoes. “I guess so.”

Nasser took another step, and his body went numb. His legs went slack, and he crumpled onto the sand, but he barely felt the impact. He couldn’t breathe; he felt as if he were submerged in water, drowning.

Davis knelt above him, calling his name, but Nasser could barely hear him over the sound of water and singing. He was aware of his body jerking and twitching, but he could do nothing to stop it. His muscles wouldn’t cooperate. His vision swam out of focus.

Then he blacked out.

Filo hit the water before he had time to draw a breath. The shock of cold nearly made him gasp, but he managed to clamp down on the instinct. Salt water stung his eyes as his vision tried to penetrate the murky water.

Filo kicked his free leg as hard as he could. His foot connected with the mermaid’s head, and for a moment, her grip eased. Frantic, Filo swung his arms and kicked his legs as hard as he could, trying to propel himself upward.

When he broke the surface, Filo sucked in a gasping breath. He floundered, feeling himself start to sink. He caught a glimpse of the dock before something seized the back of his shirt and pulled him back under.

His eyes adjusted more quickly now, and when he turned his head, he could see the mermaid more clearly. Still struggling, Filo grabbed at the mermaid’s slender arm, but her grip was like iron. The mermaid swished her powerful tail, propelling them forward.