Fathom (10 page)

“Not you.” She squeezed his arm. “You were smarter than that.”

“If I weren’t, I would never have survived as long as I did. How are you feeling?” he asked, suddenly shifting the subject. “It’s a change at first, I know. Even though you spent your whole life before on the land, it’s as if you never stood before, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I never thought feeling dry would feel so odd.”

“We can sit here as long as you like.”

“No, we can’t. Mother said—”

“I know what she said.” José stopped her. “And obviously, we’ll do as she wishes—but there’s time. She won’t miss us for days, if she misses us at all.”

“She’ll miss us. We belong to her,” Bernice added.

There was something chilly underlying the words. They sounded perfunctory and strange. She was not altogether insincere, but she was thinking about the things she said, and if she meant them.

“We owe her,” José corrected her.

“She’ll notice if we’re not back—that’s all I mean.”

“My love, this is only a reintroduction; it isn’t a mission. There’s no need to rush or push. We have all the time in the world. More than that, even.”

Bernice shook her head. “That’s not what
she
said.”

“It’s what she meant.”

“You talk for her now, when she’s not here?”

“No.” He fondled her hand some more. “I know my boundaries. I know the rules, and she wants me to teach you. And I will. But I will undertake your instruction on terms of my own. So long as I succeed, she’ll hold no grudge against me.”

“I’d rather have a mission. I don’t want you to lead me around like a little kid, I want to get
started.
”

“There’s nothing to start. She’s still gathering information from below; and when she knows what she needs from us, she’ll send us up here to get it. This is time for
you.
”

Her eyes narrowed, but she smiled. “For us?”

“If you like. The festival carries on, there is plenty to drink, and you and I will live forever if our mistress sees fit to keep us. There’s plenty to celebrate.”

Behind them, the tide rushed and retreated, creeping onshore and splashing brine and spray against the low stone wall where
they sat. The moon was rising by slow, smooth degrees, and lights were burning brightly in the restaurants and bars along the strip.

Bernice rose to her feet, steadier. Her eyes were glittering and cruel, and it was almost more than José could bear, so much did he admire her.

“We’ll need some money,” she said.

“We have some money,” he told her.

“I want more. And I’ll take it, because that’s what pirates do, isn’t it?”

He grinned at her, aroused by her aggression as much as the sleek lines of her body shifting beneath the snug fabric of a dress that stopped at her knees. “And you’re a pirate now, is that it?”

“Would you keep any other company?”

“I might, but not for long—and I’ve known the very best of the very worst. Do you think you can impress me?”

“Do you think I can’t?”

He knew that he’d dared her, and he was pleased to see her take the bait. She called herself his siren, and it was truer than she knew.

Out in the water, a number of boats bobbed on the swells. Lanterns were strung Chinese-style along their prows, and between the craft hung anchors that dropped into sandbars. Seabirds prowled the sky and peered downward, hunting leftovers.

“Which one is the Mystic Krewe’s ship, the main one?” she asked José.

He nodded his head at the largest and most brightly lit craft. It was painted to look old, bright, and vicious. The effect was less violent than toylike. “That’s it. The
Gasparilla,
if ever a more awful name was assigned to a vessel.”

“It’s
your
name.”

“No. You only think it sounds that way. If you knew any Spanish, you’d hear it for the insult it is.”

She shrugged. “They don’t mean it like that.”

“It doesn’t matter how they mean it.”

Bernice glared out over the inky water and squinted into the whitely dotted lanterns. She wanted to surprise him, and she did—but only a little. He could have predicted that she’d jump up and run, but the leap and the splash took him off guard in a way that charmed him.

With a stumble and a hop, she lunged into the surf. She swept her arms like she was making a snow angel, and drew her body under until she was scarcely more than a fish-gray streak just below the surface.

He watched her briefly, for a flickering jerk of a second. Then he followed her over the low stone wall and into water that was as black as the sky.

On the one hand, he was disappointed. This was supposed to be walking time, feet-on-earth time. Mother wanted her new child to remember what it’s like to move with the land beneath her, because enough time had passed that Bernice was close to forgetting. The mind remembers, but when the body’s been cradled long enough, it loses the sensation of standing upright and lifting itself forward.

On the other hand, it was a joy to watch her swim. Neither mermaid nor dolphin, not fish or ray, she tore through the water as if she were a shark freed quickly from a net. There was terror and power there, in the tight, squeezing kicks that started at her hips and the fierce tearing of her arms, shredding the sparkling wave tops into frothy nothing.

The water was warm to him; it was bathwater and brine: tepid and tasting of sea rot.

For one shattered second, he remembered falling into it before, and feeling rust and iron, and the weight of a chain around his neck. It was almost too much, the fear and the eyes that watched
him underwater, and the grasp that took him by the throat, by the waist, and by the pelvis to pull him deeper, down into the arms of a creature strange and strong beyond time, beyond belief.

He shook the reminiscence away and swam after her, the siren skimming faster than a skipped stone toward a ship with a name he would never have chosen himself.

When he got closer, he could see it more clearly, and it was brushed with carnival colors too bright to be masculine and too pretty to intimidate. This was a party craft, made to shuttle rich people from event to event, from extravaganza to private soiree.

He saw the corruption of his name painted clearly on the side in a script like a woman would write.

Bernice reached the craft’s edge first. She grasped a decorative net and twisted it in her hands; she pulled herself out of the water, and the moonlight broke itself against her back.

She took his breath away, even though he could see through her glamour now, when she was wet and illuminated. Under the glorious cover of the soaked dress, her skin was translucent and tinted with the runny blue and green in which she had marinated all this time. Her limbs were too slick to be human. Her hands were too finned for gloves, and her hair tangled into seaweed locks like the island Africans used to wear.

The once-woman climbed up the ship’s side and slipped onto the deck.

The once-pirate came, too, up and over. He stood up straight beside her. Some leftover habit, some fragment of a survivalist tick made him reach to his chest. But there were no guns slung there to grab, no triggers to squeeze. No one-or two-shot pistols strung together like fireworks.

His fingers grazed his shirt and found nothing. He did not notice the gesture; he could not even remember what he reached for in the first place.

But Bernice was already moving. He would watch her move, then, on planks if that was as close as he could bring her to solid ground. He was pleased to note that here, too, she crashed like a shark.

There was a woman hanging over the rail. She was throwing up, or thinking about it.

Bernice grabbed the woman’s ankle and threw it into the air, and the woman went over the side with a splash that no one noticed except for a man in an expensive suit. He was stunned, and slow with liquor. Bernice seized him, and he looked confused.

She shoved him down, throat-first, across the rail the woman had unwillingly vaulted a moment before. She clutched the back of his neck and held it like a handle, using it to beat his head into the wood again, and again, and once more before he coughed blood and gave up his struggles.

The blood delighted her.

She stood back and gave the man a kick that sent him through the side rail, splintering it. A second kick finished the job, and the suited man splashed into the ocean, but did not try to swim.

He sank, and Gaspar thought bitterly that Arahab had better leave her new visitor alone.

Charged, svelte, and eager, Bernice followed a drifting tune through a set of double doors that led into the ship’s interior.

Someone with terrible timing opened the left door right as Bernice reached it. Her hand was on his throat before he could remove his grip from the lever. She pulled him into the open night and opened her mouth, which stretched to reveal lines of teeth in needlepoint rows.

The man was wearing a costume; he had a black patch over one eye, so he was spared the full view of her bite when it came at his face. Regardless, he squealed and screamed when her teeth punctured his cheek.

She slashed again with her mouth. She wielded it like a scissoring set of daggers, cutting through the soft dips in his neck and scraping against the bones inside it. The connection made a dragging crunch, but it sounded to Gaspar like the clinking of wineglasses.

Inside the boat’s belly, the music was still jingling forth in bells and violins.

Bernice followed the music, and José followed her.

The song pinged up out of the boat in a minor key that was made of metal and broken wires. He couldn’t place the tune, but it sounded wrong for a festival like this. It was more ancient than vintage, and too old-fashioned for a rich soiree.

As he ran behind Bernice he could feel the old tug of the ocean, even though the boat was a preposterous farce, covered with fittings and fashions that didn’t remotely match the era they were meant to evoke. He felt like a cat chasing a ribbon; it was mindless and happy, and purely instinctive.

He couldn’t
not
run through the narrow, wood-paneled corridors.

He couldn’t
not
smile at the trail of blood his mate wiped around the corners.

With no blunderbuss or pistols, without even a blade to hand, he chased her, knowing that between the two of them, they were a deadlier crew than any he’d ever commanded while he was alive.

She dashed around corners, all slick and ferocious, all beast and all woman. She ripped through the bodies she met and cast them aside, where they leaked themselves into husks.

Gaspar counted four more. He skipped over them and added them to his idle tally.

And then he rounded a corner and he saw her holding an oil lantern. She’d pried it off the wall, where it had hung on a hinge. In theory, the lamp would rock with the motion of the ship and
keep a steady flame; in practice, the hinge had snapped under Bernice’s fierce little fingers and she was prepared to cast the lantern to the ground—except that José grabbed her wrist and held it aloft.

She wrestled him for it out of surprise and indignation. She twisted in his grip, thrashing, while a boy on the floor cringed away from her.

The boy didn’t understand what was happening, but he recognized evil when he saw it, so he retreated fast, scuttling halfway under a desk and silently cheering José. The boy had not yet gathered that the pirate had nothing like rescue in mind.

“No,” Gaspar said to Bernice, lifting her up off the floor until her toes dangled and dragged. “No, not the lamp. No fires. We can’t sail a ship while it burns—or rather, I do not
intend
to.”

She gave one more kick, then settled down. “Can we do that? Take it out, I mean? How many people do you need to move a boat like this? Don’t you need a crew or something?”

“Between us and the ocean, I think we can take it ourselves . . . if you will help me, and do as I tell you.”

“You don’t get to order me around. Mother said so.”

“Of course I won’t order you around. You will do as you wish, and I will only tell you how best to do it. Would you like to go for a sail, or not? This is a ridiculous little ship, but it’s put together soundly. It would be a shame to destroy it.”

“You said it was an insult.”

He nodded. “It
is.
But it’s an insult that’s prettily made, and I can appreciate it as such. Come,” he urged her. “I want to take her. I want to sail her. It’s been long enough since I pulled a rope or leaned myself against a wheel; let’s take her and go.” The low waves of the Gulf lapped at the boat’s sides, slapping it gently and rocking it so barely that Bernice didn’t feel it.

“Where would we go?” she asked.

A line shaped like a smile stretched across his face. “I know somewhere,” he whispered to her. “I know a spot where I left treasure, once. It’s been many years, but I would be shocked if it was gone. Arahab erased me from their history, left me only in their lore. No one knows that my trail is real enough to seek.”

“Treasure?” Bernice repeated.

“Gold enough to bury you. Pearls enough to anchor you. I left it on an island—” He glanced up to reference the sky, then remembered that he was below the deck and could see nothing above him except for a light and a painted ceiling. “I left it nearby. Work with me without complaining, and you can have your pick from the things I stashed away.”

When she did not argue, he considered this a victory and turned to the lad on the floor.

“Who owns this boat?” he wanted to know.

The boy’s eyes widened. “The Krewe, they own it.”

“Is that why you’re dressed so? You’re a member of this crew?”

He nodded. “Ye Mystic Krewe of Gasparilla.”

Gaspar shook his head. “You look absurd. I would never have taken you onto any ship of mine.”

“This
is
a ship of yours,” the boy said hastily. “This is yours—all of it. Take it, no one will care. We’re just playing at pirates, like we do every year. But I could help you with the ship. I know how to sail her.”

“Do you, now?” Gaspar was honestly amused. “You think I need your help?”