Diary of a Radical Mermaid (23 page)

The screeching, drawling, sarcastic voice skittered along the inside of my skull like fingernails on a chalk board. I pulled the bus off onto the road’s sandy shoulder, cut the engine, and clutched my head. “Juna Lee,” I said aloud. “I’d know that caterwaul anywhere.”

Please, someone, a kinder voice hummed. We need assistance. Send a boat. We have a wounded man aboard.

I dropped my hands. Tula.

The girls gathered around my driver’s seat. “Jordan is bleeding,” Venus moaned. “I can feel him hurting.”

I pivoted in the seat and stared at them miserably. They gazed back the same way. Stella nodded. “It’s true, Aunt Molly. Jordan’s hurt.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t go back —“

Isis frowned. “Then we’re just running away? And they need us! Just like Uncle Rhymer needs us! Would Hyacinth just run away? No!”

“Hyacinth isn’t in charge, here. It’s out of the question. I’m sorry. It wouldn’t be safe to go back—”

Pain ripped across my right shoulder. I bent over, gasping. The girls huddled around me, patting me with anxious hands. “Molly! Molly!” Heathcliff, perched atop the headrest of my plush seat, meowed worriedly.

I raised a trembling hand to the arm of my white sundress, convinced there should be blood and gashes — but all I felt was undamaged cotton and skin. “I don’t know what just happened to me.”

“Uncle Rhymer’s been hurt,” Stella said. “Our father just injured him. You love Uncle Rhymer, so you felt it as if you’d been hurt yourself. Aunt Molly, you have no choice. You’re meant to go help Rhymer. He’s your mate. Mers don’t just love, Aunt Molly. They breathe together.”

Oh, Rhymer. Shaking, I forced myself to face forward, then put my hands on the wheel. “I promised him. We have to keep moving. He’s doing his job, and I have to do mine—”

The girls shrieked as I clutched the wheel and bent over it again. Pain flashed across my back, just below my shoulder blades. The girls stroked my hair. “Molly,” Stella cried, “Uncle Rhymer’s going to die if we don’t try to help him!”

“I have to protect you girls—”

Stella knelt beside me. “Do you think our father won’t find us, no matter what? If he kills Uncle Rhymer, then there’ll be no one to stop him at all! And Molly, maybe we can talk to him. Maybe he doesn’t want to hurt us! Our mother loved him. She couldn’t be so wrong. If you don’t let us try to meet him, he’ll keep hunting for us until he finds us. In all your books, Hyacinth has faith that her parents want her to find them on the other side of the abyss. You believe our father may not be an evil person. Give us the chance to have faith, too!”

I groaned. The pain faded away — for the moment, at least. I pushed a button on the dash. The bus’s door folded back with a hydraulic whoosh. I slung the holster of Rhymer’s pistol around one shoulder then grabbed my cane. “Out of my way, please.” The girls stepped away. I went down the bus’s deep steps and stumbled onto the sandy roadside in the dark. We were a few miles east of Bellemeade, on a deserted stretch of bay road lined with pine woodland and small marinas. Bellemeade Bay lapped at the pilings of ramshackle docks where a dozen small fishing boats were tied.

The girls crept down beside me. “We can help you steal a boat,” Isis whispered. “We know how to start an engine by just thinking about it.”

“And how to stop one,” Stella said quietly. “Aunt Molly, please don’t be mad, but you can’t keep driving. We’ve . . . we’ve told this bus not to crank again.”

“Don’t crank, bus,” Venus said to the bus for emphasis.

I turned slowly and stared at them. They looked apologetic but stubborn. Rhymer, forgive me, but I can’t bear to desert you, and neither can they. “I want your solemn vows, your most sacred promises,” I said, “that when we get near Echo Marsh, you’ll stay in the boat and let me go on, alone, to find Rhymer and your father. Promise.”

They nodded and crossed their hearts with webbed fingers.

* * * *

I dripped blood, but so did Orion. Not as much as me but still, I’d wounded him. He’d slashed my shoulder and then my back; I’d sliced a ten-inch stripe across his hairless, silver chest. When I cut him, he didn’t even flinch.

“Where are my daughters?” he said, as we circled each other. That was his chant. “Where are my daughters?”

“You can’t find them because they don’t want you to find them. Leave them be.”

“Where are my daughters?”

“Not where you’ll ever find them, as long as I live and breathe.”

“Where are my daughters?”

“Safe and alive, which is more than I can say for their mother, thanks to you.”

He lunged. I stabbed at him with the sword, nicking his side. He danced back, yet he had such broad reach with his long arms that, quick as a whip, he swatted me. The blow caught me alongside the head. The tips of his claws sliced like razor blades, and the force of the strike knocked me off my feet. I landed at the water’s edge, rolled, got my footing in the muck, and sprang upright. A neat recovery, except for the roar of pain in my face, the ringing in my ears, and the way my lungs grabbed for air.

Orion could have charged at that moment and won, but he stood back, flicking the tension from his webbed hands, observing me with what seemed to be casual loathing. “Where are my daughters?”

“You might as well change your question. There’ll be no answer from me.”

He made a guttural sound, something like a laugh. “I’ll rip it out of you eventually.”

He lunged again.

Another round.

* * * *

“Someone heard us!” Tula sang out.

I touched Jordan’s sweaty forehead. “It’s about time.”

We rushed to the rail as a fast little cruiser approached. It was just a black blob in the night, except for the running lights. Suddenly, someone turned a searchlight on us. Tula and I shaded our eyes from the blinding glare. “Turn that down!” I yelled. “I’m getting a sunburn!”

“Mi dios, I see you haven’t learned any gratitude.” The voice was female, Spanish-tinged, and sardonic. “And here I was, worried that Orion would be wearing your skin by now.” The deck lights came on. Instantly I recognized the tall, dark and voluptuous woman standing on the bow with the attitude of a smirking dogcatcher.

Aphrodite Araiza.

Mounds of braided black hair swung to her waist. She looked tough in booty-hugging black leggings, which she had topped with a booby-cradling red tank top. She held a deadly looking rifle in her hands. Stroking the gunstock, she looked me up and down — I was sweaty and speckled with Jordan’s blood — then feigned disappointment, as if she’d like to take a potshot, but I wasn’t worth the trouble. Her cruiser slid next to our anchored yacht.

“Juna Lee, you look the worse for wear. Isn’t it time you shed your skin for the summer?”

“Oh, spare me,” I snarled at her. “You should be embarrassed. No self-respecting kidnapper lets the Creature from the Black Lagoon steal the kidnappee. But I have to admit, Orion does do a good impersonation of you. His ass is smaller than yours, though.”

“Juna Lee!” Charley — the real one — bounded down the steps from the pilot house, grinning.

“Charley!”

“I told your parents I’d find you!”

“No thanks to Queen Latifah here.”

Aphrodite curled one hand near the rifle’s trigger. “Listen, you anorexic puta—”

“We have to help Rhymer,” Jordan said weakly.

He pushed himself up from the deck, swaying a little. I grabbed him and slid an arm around his back. “You’re right, Jordan. I’m sorry.” He leaned heavily on me. I patted his cheek apologetically, then glared at Aphrodite. “No more bickering,” I ordered. “Jordan’s hurt, and we have to follow Orion pronto, okay? Throw us a line. We’ll pull you close and climb aboard.”

“Jordan!” Charley exclaimed. “I’ll carry you, buddy!” He headed for the cruiser’s railing, posing to dive in.

“Don’t do that!” I yelled. “Orion left us the main homeboy from his entourage.” I pointed down between the boats. Charley gaped as a huge dorsal fin pierced the surface. An enormous marine body swirled beneath the dark water.

Aphrodite clasped her big-boobed heart. “What a beauty! Oh, mi querido, mi amor, come here!” She set her rifle aside and leaned over the bow rail. To my astonishment, she began talking baby talk — in Spanish — to the shark. Even creepier, I could feel him listening. After about a minute of her Latin goo-goo-ga-ga he uttered a soft sonic hum, like a purring cat.

And then he swam away.

“Amazing,” Tula whispered to me. “She’s a shark soother. I’ve never met one before. Did you see that? How the shark responded to her?”

“One shark to another,” I muttered, as I helped Jordan move toward the rail. “He was just showing her some professional courtesy.”

Molly to the Rescue
Chapter
23

Use the force, Molly Skywalker. Or maybe it’s Molly Oceanwalker? Either way, I felt like a bumbling, apprentice Jedi as I steered a stolen speedboat across the starlit Atlantic. I estimated our position at a few miles off the coast, somewhere west of Bellemeade. The girls stood close beside me, their long dark hair whipping in the wind, their arms twined around me and each other. “Turn a little bit that way,” Stella directed, pointing. “Slow down to a wee crawl now. Quick!”

I reversed the engine and brought the boat to a slow pace. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing, Aunt Molly. But there are two small whales off the bow, only about twenty meters long, just yearlings. They’re calling hello to us. Hear them?”

Molly Oceanwalker was too rattled to eavesdrop on whale conversation. “I’m distracted. Interpret for me.”

“They’re Right whales, Aunt Molly. Right whales are very polite. I’m going to ask them directions.” Stella was silent for a moment. “They say the marsh is just a wee minute away.” She pointed, again. “There. In that direction.”

“Are Right whales ever wrong?”

Isis harrumphed. “Not like tuna. Tuna are just plain, sneaky liars.” Venus tugged at my sundress and looked up at me worriedly in the pale light of the boat’s console. “Hurry, Aunt Molly. I feel . . . I feel blood in the water.”

I looked from her agonized expression to those of Stella and Isis. They nodded.

I gunned the engine and headed for the marsh at top speed.

* * * *

Orion knocked my ribs to my backbone. ’Twas how bad it hurt, anyway. I fell into the black marsh water and sank to the bottom, dazed and gulping water, then spitting it out and gulping more. Even to a Mer, a mouthful of saltwater is no treat, though our throats are better than Landers’ when it comes to shutting off our windpipes. Worse, the saltwater tasted of my own blood. I gagged. I’d have liked nothing better than to rest on the marsh bottoms a few days or so, or at least until the strangling pain eased from my left side.

Up. Get up and out of here, I ordered myself. Or else Orion will be on you like a piranha.

Gripping my sword in one fist, I kicked off and shot to the surface. Before I so much as anchored my feet in firm muck of our tiny island battleground, Orion had me by one arm. “McEvers, only a fool would swim back to the surface so quickly,” he said.

“Scared you, eh?”

He slung me about twenty paces. I landed on the hummock’s opposite end, sinking into the shoreline mud with a splash and a great mashing of marsh grasses.

I felt another rib crack. Fire spread through my right side. Well, at least I was symmetrical now.

“I’m out of patience,” Orion said. He advanced on me, his huge hands spread, his claws flexed and ready. “Tell me where to find my daughters, or I’ll rip your throat out.”

I staggered to my feet and managed a nasty, bleeding smile. He’d cracked my lower lip with an earlier fist. I swung my sword. It caught the underside of his right arm. I felt the blade connect with bone. Blood spurted. He roared but backed away, clamping a hand to the wound. I braced my legs, put both hands around the sword’s handle, and held it up in a hacking pose. Starlight glinted off the crimson-stained blade. “I’m out of patience, too,” I said, wheezing. “But I’ll give you one last chance to turn tail and swim off.”

The bastard threw back his big, silver head and smiled at the stars. Then, his eyes black, he headed for me with his teeth bared.

This time would be the end.

* * * *

Molly Martha Oceanwalker, you’re lost. I felt like a minnow trapped in the tentacles of an octopus. Swimming through Echo Marsh was like trying to find my way inside a maze of tiny veins full of black blood. I couldn’t see, and whatever underwater prowess the average Mer had — meaning their mystical sonar — eluded me. My bum leg kept veering me off-center. I bumped into mushy banks covered with submerged, rotting grass. Small fish and shrimp bumped into me. Larger fish slithered by, flicking me with their sharp tail fins. I felt naked in nothing but panties and a bra. The handgun Rhymer had given me, safely encased in a waterproof bag, was a ton of bricks strapped to my waist. I’d left the girls on the boat, bound by their vow to stay put, but I had no guarantee they’d actually do so. What if they followed me and got hurt? I’d promised Rhymer I’d take them away from danger, not bring them back. I wasn’t quite terrified, but I was desperate. And lost.

You still think of yourself as separate from the water, a soft, milky voice whispered inside my head. But, no. Be part of it. Be who you are, and you’ll find your way.

I froze. The most amazing sensation filled me. Warm and ancient, comforting and wise. An image shimmered inside my eyes, not quite clear. Who’s there? Who’s speaking?

I’m part of you. Believe in me. I’m the essence of the waters of the world. So are you.

The internal image shimmered again, then came into soft focus. In my mind’s eye, I glimpsed the portrait in Lilith’s sunroom. Melasine. A legend, an illusion, a kind of angel?

No. She was real. Out there in the deepest waters of memory and myth, she was speaking to me.

Believe in me, she whispered. Believe in the waters of the world. Believe in yourself.

I’ll try, I whispered back.

Her image faded away but left a pearl of confidence. I quieted my desperate thoughts, relaxed my squint-shut eyelids, and concentrated on a memory of Rhymer’s voice in my ear when we made love.