Hydra (5 page)

Ed hops into the boat, which lurches from his weight, sloshing in a less than reassuring manner. He extends one gnarled hand up to me. “Come aboard?”

I glance back the way we came. Along the shore the water seemed clear, with rounded rocks protruding up from the surface, and submerged rocks still visible through the water amongst them. But here, where the water is only slightly deeper, I look down into darkness, a kind of blackness that could hide anything, darker than the halls of Nattertinny Castle at night.

“The water is dark. I can’t see the bottom,” I inform Ed while I clutch my camera close to my body, not taking his proffered hand, not moving any closer to the boat.

“Aye,” he acknowledges. “’Tis the peat content. Loch’s thick with it. Can’t see more than five feet down. Black as night down there, ‘tis.”

His words are not reassuring, but something about his matter-of-fact tone and the transparency of his admission remind me of what Malcolm said the previous evening—that Ed is one of the safest guys a person could venture onto the Loch with.

Ignoring the dark, bottomless water, my eyes fixed on Ed’s face, I take his waiting hand and step into the boat.

The tiny vessel lurches, rocking unsteadily, and I hold tight to Ed’s hand, my eyes pinched shut.

“Ye goin’ to be all right, then?”

“Yes. Fine.” I chirp, forcing my eyes open. I paste a tight smile to my lips and give him an impatient look, as though he should get on with casting off. Like I’m not the one holding us up.

“I’m goin’ to need me hand then.”

Only then do I notice I’ve got his poor bent fingers in a death grip.

I release them, realizing after all human contact is lost how much difference his support had made in my state of mind.

Ed reaches for the rope that moors us to the wharf. The boat lurches with his movement.

I grab his arm, which is the nearest thing to me. Okay, it’s more like his shoulder that I’ve grabbed with both hands—one handful of bicep, one handful of deltoid, possibly trapezius. I don’t know. I just know I can’t let go.

He looks at me, concern showing clearly on his face in spite of the beard that covers its lower half.

Not wishing to acknowledge my fear or draw attention to the possibility that my viselike grasp of his shoulder is anything out of the ordinary, I flash him a reassuring smile. “Hi.”

“Hi there, aye.” His Scottish brogue is smooth. “I need to untie the boat.”

“Okay.” I don’t let go of his shoulder. I can’t.

“Gonna need the use of me arms, then.”

“Of course.” I nod as though I understand completely. For a second, I start to relax my hold.

Ed moves, perhaps as much as an inch or two, in the direction of the moorings.

The dinghy lurches.

I grip his shoulder harder.

“Wren?” Ed says patiently.

“Yes?”

“Last evenin’, I coulda sworn I watched ye leap out the car right in front of a chargin’ bull. And I thought to myself then, ‘this is a woman who’s not afeared of anythin’.’”

“Charging bulls are not as scary as boats.”

He eyes me patiently. I appreciate that he doesn’t bicker, or dissect the logic of my position.

“I can take ye back to the castle.” He straightens slightly.

“No! Oh, no, I’ll be okay. I’ll be fine.” I ease my grip slowly, transitioning to letting go. “I really want to go out on the lake.”

“No, ye don’t.”

“But I do. I need to. I have to find out if the monster is real.”

“Is it the monster yer afeared of?”

“Not the monster.” I’m looking in his eyes now, dusky green eyes with a hint of blue, and I’m trying to sort out what it is, exactly, that I am afraid of. “Not the boat, and not the lake. Just the water—the deep water. I’m afraid of the parts of the lake that are too deep to see, and what might be down there that could grab my legs and try to pull me under.”

“The monster wouldn’t do that.”

“It wouldn’t?”

“There’s been nearly a hundred recorded sightin’s, and never a one in which anyone was ever attacked or even approached. Most of the time, the monster was either oblivious to being observed, or tryin’ to get away from the people.”

“He’s more scared of us than we are of him?”

Something like empathy fills Ed’s features. “Aye.”

Slowly, carefully, I open my fingers, releasing his shoulder from my grip, though my palms are still touching his shirt, and he’s still turned, facing me, his eyes locked with mine. It’s the eye contact that’s keeping me from looking at the lake and freaking out again.

I can do this. I have to do this. If Ed takes me back to the castle, I’ll never convince him to bring me out on the lake again. And I can’t imagine a tour boat operator being so patient with me.

This is probably my only chance to get answers, whatever they may be.

Ed doesn’t move. “I’m goin’ to untie the boat now,” he explains smoothly, his whole body frozen in place like a statue. “I’ll reach past ye to the moorin’. Boat might rock, but I promise ye, it willna tip over. Ye be safe. Ye ken?”

I nod one slow, solitary nod. And then I watch, breathing measured breaths in and out, as Ed unties the boat.

He smiles at me once we’re loosed from the dock. “Ye can have a seat there.”

The boat has a couple of bench seats. We’re standing at the rear, near the outboard motor. There’s a seat in front of us—a plank spanning the width of the craft—and another closer to the front of the boat.

I lower myself onto the plank and swing my legs around so I’m facing the front. Only then do I realize something terrifying. If it wouldn’t involve movement to reach Ed from this position, I’d grab his arm again. Instead I squeal, “Ed?”

“Aye?”

“There’s a window in the bottom of the boat.” And there is. It’s a huge glass panel occupying most of the center section of this tiny ship, so that what almost seemed slightly safe a moment ago, is now a window into murky darkness and everything I fear.

“’Tis water-tight. Nothin’ to be afeared of.”

We sit in silence while I try to believe his words. I’m clutching the bench seat with both hands and staring down at the window to my fears. Ed’s standing above me, trying to decide if he’s crazy to take me out onto the lake, or if he should just haul my quaking self back to the castle. He doesn’t voice the question aloud, but I can feel it radiating off him as he looks at me.

“Ye want to go out on the loch?”

“Yes, please.”

“Okay.” He sits beside me on the plank and grabs an oar. “You want to row one, or you want me to row both?”

“I can row.” Surely it will be good for me to have something to do other than staring through the glass bottom of the boat at the murky water below.

With a few instructions and a bit of bumping about, we get the boat pointed out onto the lake, and put some distance between ourselves and the shore. I take long slow breaths and try not to make it obvious that I’ve pressed the side of my leg against Ed’s leg beside me. I need the human contact. It’s soothing.

It’s a cool morning, midweek, and the lake doesn’t appear to have much, if any, traffic. Certainly not in the vicinity where we are.

Loch Ness is a long, narrow lake, if you’re not familiar with it. Long, narrow, and crazy deep. It occupies a fault line, or something like that. A ripple in the earth filled with water and cold and monsters. The east and west sides are relatively close together, a pretty stable mile apart for the length of it, but the lake is well over twenty miles long, so that I can’t see either end of it any better than I can see more than black water through the window below.

Just as Ed and I are getting our rhythm down and I’m starting to think we make a fine rowing team, he announces were in a good spot and can stop rowing. The boat glides gently along the lake, which is calm and mirror-smooth, save for the dying ripples of our wake.

“Now what?” I ask after a long silence and no sign of any monsters.

Ed shrugs. “Some people fish. Some just sit and enjoy the stillness. Some might want to explain why they’re afeared of being pulled under.”

I look uneasily his way.

He raises an eyebrow, not so much in question, but in open invitation for me to share.

He’s not pressing me for answers, even though I nearly cut off the circulation to his arm with my clamped fingers earlier.

Maybe it’s the stillness of the lake or Ed’s patience, or the hope that he might take my side in spite of the fact that my own family failed to believe me. For whatever reason, I sort my thoughts, arranging the story in my head first to be sure I can tell it without giving away that I was a dragon, in full dragon form, for the duration of the events I’m about to relay.

Okay, I can do this.

“I nearly drowned last summer.”

His eyebrow, which had gone back to a relaxed position, darts up again, willing—even curious—to hear more.

“We were swimming in the Caspian Sea. I’m from Azerbaijan, which is on the western shore of the Caspian Sea, and we’ve vacationed on the Sea every summer for my whole life. My sisters and I have been going to school in the United States ever since we started high school, six years now, but we always go back to Azerbaijan in the summer.”

“You’re triplets?” Ed clarifies.

“Yes.” I don’t go into detail. We’ve always referred to ourselves as
triplets,
and my sisters even claim my birthdate for legal purposes, so we don’t raise any eyebrows, but technically we’re not triplets the way most people think of triplets. We’re more like littermates or hatchlings from the same clutch.

Dragons lay eggs, just like any other reptile. My sisters and I were born from the same clutch of eggs, but technically Rilla was hatched the night before me, and Zilpha the day after me. Likewise, our eggs were laid over the course of a few days, too.

But I don’t tell any of this to Ed. I just nod and keep on with my story.

“We’re triplets,” I confirm. “We have an older brother and a younger brother, and we’ve always summered on the Caspian Sea. I’ve floated and fished and gone swimming there more times than I can count. I never felt unsafe and never had a problem.

“But then, last summer was a busy summer because now that we’re in college we have a lot of other things going on vying for our time, and we didn’t get much time at the lake, only a couple of days. I wanted to soak it up, you know? Spend every moment I could on the water. So the first afternoon when we got there, I went out on the lake and didn’t worry about coming in when it got dark.”

What I don’t explain to Ed was that I was fishing, in dragon form, floating on my back in a boat made of my own wings, with a basket on my belly and my tail drooping down in the water, a glowing lure to bait the fish, which I then reached down and grabbed out of the water with the claws of my bare dragon hands when they swam near.

I’ve done the same thing more times than I can count, eating fish, tossing them in my basket, being lazy and basking in the pure joy of being a dragon and virtually weightless in the water all at once. It’s a freeing feeling, one I’d always relished, until it got turned on its head and became something to fear.

“And then what?” Ed prompts me, and I realize I’ve been silent for a while.

“I’d floated pretty far from the others, I guess. I felt safe. I wasn’t worried. And then, with no warning, something grabbed my legs and pulled me under. For a second I thought maybe one of my siblings was playing a trick on me, only they’ve never done that before, and whatever it was that had me didn’t let me go or start laughing or anything. They pulled me down deeper toward the cold water, and I fought them and fought them until I thought I’d never get away. My lungs were burning. I’ve never been so terrified.”

“But you got away?”

“I scratched and clawed and got loose and made my way to the surface.” What I can’t tell Ed is that I used my talons, horns, and the spikes on my tail to fight off my assailants. Then I flew back to shore, well above the water, back to my family in a frenzy. But I do tell him the other part, the very important part. “I got back to my family and told them what happened, and my dad and brothers went out to look. But they didn’t see anything. Didn’t find anything. They went out the next two days. Nothing. No sign of anything. It was like it had never even happened.”

“But, weren’t you scratched or bleeding?”

I shake my head. Being a dragon at the moment, I was pretty impervious to spears or knives or claws. But that doesn’t even matter so much because of the nature of the attack. “It wasn’t teeth that got me, or claws or talons. It was like something grabbed hold of me with its hands.”

“Not a human?”

“How could it have been human? They pulled me down. They never rose above the water. They didn’t breathe air.”

“They? There were more than one?”

“There had to be at least two or three, maybe more.” I’m trying not to be overwhelmed by the memories, hands clutching my arms, my legs, my tail. “My brothers came up with a theory that I’d floated into a thick patch of seaweed and got tangled up and it pulled me down.”

Ed is looking at me earnestly, and I’m staring right back into his face, waiting for his verdict, for him to laugh off the attack and tell me my brothers are probably right, that I’d freaked out myself and my family all because I got in over my head with a tangle of weeds.

But he doesn’t say this.

“Did you see anything? You’re sure it wasna scuba divers?”

“I couldn’t see anything. It was getting dark out. The sun was going down—it was a glare of red across the surface of the water, mostly darkness, just enough to stun your eyes and make it more difficult to see. But I
felt
them.”

“What did they feel like?”

“They had heads. Smooth heads. And arms that were flat like paddles, but with hands at the ends. They had bodies. I kicked their bodies. No scuba tanks. No tubing or gear. If they’d had scuba gear I could have pulled out their mouthpieces and sent us all up for air.” I’ve described them now in as much detail as I gave my family, and I fully expect Ed to lecture me about the fact that nothing in the world fits that description, that I had to have misunderstood my enemy.