Seaborne (12 page)
Authors: Katherine Irons
Tags: #Romance, #Paranormal, #Fantasy, #Chick-Lit, #Mythology
A sound in the doorway drew their attention. Caddoc turned to see a serving girl, clutching an ivory comb, her eyes wide with fear.
“Come in, Mgoc,” his mother said. “I’ve been waiting for you to do my hair.”
Caddoc studied the wench. She was a naiad-mermaid cross, neither one nor the other. As often happened, her flat face was more fish than humanoid and her tail was more decorative than practical. And as usual in such cases, Mgoc was not the brightest whale in the pod. Such creatures were timid and made relatively good servants, if the master didn’t expect too much initiative. Taking one into service was considered an act of charity as they were considered outcasts by both naiad and mer folk. Abandoned at birth, most went the way of all chum, quickly eaten by scavengers. This one was plump, so she’d obviously been eating well, at his mother’s expense.
“Were you eavesdropping on me?” his mother asked the girl.
“No, Lady.”
Her speech was slurred, and came out more “Nah, Iddee.” If Caddoc remembered correctly, the cross couldn’t pronounce “Halimeda.” Something about their lack of a proper tongue.
“You heard nothing we said?”
The monster shook her head.
“Good. Come here and comb out my hair.”
Hesitantly, still terrified, the cross hurried to obey. His mother signaled Caddoc to wait while the maid attended to her toilet.
It took the better part of an hourglass for the cross to finish and his mother to dismiss her. “Wait in the garden,” she ordered. “And speak to no one. Your garbled voice gives me a headache.”
“Yes, Lady.”
“My father, the king, hates me,” Caddoc said, the instant the girl left the room. “He’d never name me his heir over Orion or Alex.”
His mother smiled. “Leave that to me. Now go. Don’t let me see your face again until you bring me his severed head.” She grasped his arms and pulled him to her. “When you wear Poseidon’s crown, I’ll give you Morwena to be your concubine.”
“My own half-sister?”
“You think I haven’t seen the way you look at her?”
“Look, yes. I’m flesh, not stone, but to take her to my bed …”
“Don’t be so particular. She pleases you, doesn’t she?”
“Yes, but—”
“Then that is all that should concern you. Didn’t I just tell you that you may not be the king’s get at all? I can think of two or three who are more likely your sire.”
“I’ve no objection to killing Morgan,” he said. “He’s earned his death many times over. But I don’t know where he is. It may take some time to locate him.”
“Then you’re wasting time standing here, aren’t you?”
“What will you do with his head?”
She grasped his shoulders and kissed him full on the mouth. When she drew back, it was all he could do not to gag. “I’ll make a feast of his brains for my pets,” she said. “Who knows, it might even lend them some bit of immortality.”
With a sour liquid rising in his throat, he started to leave her apartments.
“One more thing, Caddoc,” she called after him.
“Yes, Mother?” He gritted his teeth. “What is it?”
“Make certain your blade is sharp enough. Take the head off that creature in the garden, as you go out.”
His mouth gaped.
“You heard me. We can’t have her sharing our little secret with the help, can we?”
“But if I kill her in your … How will I dispose of her body without anyone seeing?”
His mother sighed and stroked the nearest octopod, a large red one. “Bring it back in here, if you must. My darlings haven’t fed yet today, have you, my sweets?”
Again, Claire waited for Morgan to return. The afternoon passed and then the evening. She had lain awake far into the night, unable to read, unable to concentrate on any of her DVDs or television. As hard as she tried, she couldn’t remember what had happened after he’d come to her bedroom. Sometime after two, she finally drifted into a fitful sleep. She’d hoped to dream of the ocean again, but she knew nothing until Mrs. Godwin came with her coffee in the morning.
Jane arrived promptly. The woman was pleasant, quick, and professional. Since this wasn’t a day for the physical therapist, Jane helped Claire to exercise her legs and massaged her neck, assisting her into the wheelchair-friendly shower. Afterwards, she gathered Claire’s hair products and laid out clothing for the day.
Claire liked the nurse enough to ask if she’d be interested in becoming Wrangle’s replacement. Unfortunately, Jane had a full schedule and had come this week because her regular patient was having surgery.
Later, a thick manila envelope arrived from Kelly’s agency. Eager to open it out of Mrs. Godwin’s curious gaze, Claire took it into the east parlor, closed the door, and tore open the package. Quickly, she scanned the folder, but was disappointed to find little about her parents’ history that she didn’t already know: birth dates, immediate family, high school, and college. Both were only children, and both had attended university at opposite ends of the country: Richard at Stanford, Elaine at Colgate. They’d met two years later at Harvard, marrying just as her father graduated from law school.
Elaine had been born when her mother was forty-five, and her father nearly sixty. Her parents had passed away of natural causes while she was in grad school. Richard’s father had died when he was four, but his mother Sophia had lived until Claire was twenty. It has been Sophia, her nana, who’d left her Seaborne.
She flipped through the pages until she came to copies of several newspaper articles. Most concerned Richard’s rise to partner in his prestigious firm, but one photograph was a picture of her father accepting a gold medal at a swim meet. An accompanying article proclaimed numerous breast-stroke records that Richard had set during his college career.
There had to be a mistake. This had to be some other Richard Bishop. But when she looked closely, she realized there was no mistake. She clearly recognized a younger version of her father, grinning and proudly displaying his medal. Richard had obviously lied to her about his fear of the water. But why would he do such a thing?
Confused, she picked up the phone and called him. “Why would you lie to me?” she asked when he picked up. “You told me you were terrified of the water, that you never learned to swim and in reality, you swam competitively in college?”
There was a moment of silence on the other end of the line. “Claire, darling. You must have misunderstood me. What I said was that I used to be on a team, but after I was caught in an undertow and nearly drowned off Seaborne’s beach, I gave up swimming. I was my mother’s only child. She was terrified that something would happen to me, and honestly, it scared me.”
“That’s not the way I remember it,” Claire said. “You never let me swim in the ocean. You distinctly told me you had a fear of the ocean as a kid.”
He cleared his throat. “You’re making too much of this, pumpkin.”
“I just want a straight answer.”
“Don’t get yourself upset. You know that … since the accident … your memory plays tricks on you.”
“So that’s your answer. I’m crazy.” She slid the photo and the articles back inside and closed the folder.
“I didn’t say that.” His voice hardened. “I don’t like this attitude, Claire. I’m coming up to Seaborne this weekend. We need to have a heart-to-heart talk.”
“All right,” she agreed, wrestling with a sea of emotions. She wasn’t crazy. She wasn’t wrong about this. But why would Richard lie to her? He was right. She had been mistaken about other things. Her memory wasn’t good. Maybe she wasn’t remembering correctly. She exhaled, feeling defeated for some reason, but still not ready to totally give in to the idea that she was mistaken on this subject. “That’s probably what we need. To talk.”
Because if you lied to me about not being able to swim,
she thought,
what else have you lied to me about?
Because if you lied to me about not being able to swim,
she thought,
what else have you lied to me about?
CHAPTER 12
N
eck pain kept Claire from sleep. Twice, she slid open the drawer in her nightstand, tempted to take the medication that her physicians and nurses urged her to use. And twice, she closed the drawer without weakening. So much of her life was out of her control. After two years, it was difficult to tell what the accident had done to her and how much of her mental confusion was the result of overmedicating.
eck pain kept Claire from sleep. Twice, she slid open the drawer in her nightstand, tempted to take the medication that her physicians and nurses urged her to use. And twice, she closed the drawer without weakening. So much of her life was out of her control. After two years, it was difficult to tell what the accident had done to her and how much of her mental confusion was the result of overmedicating.
The days before and after the accident remained a black void. She’d been spending the July weekend with friends on Cape Cod. She and Willa had been with Willa’s fiancé, Max, on his Hobie Cat when Jeremy Smith had hit them at a speed nearing sixty knots with his high performance boat.
Claire didn’t know if any of them had ever seen Smith’s speedboat before it hit them. Max claimed he’d seen it, but there was so much television and newspaper coverage that it was difficult to tell what was firsthand and what was hype. In seconds, the Hobie Cat was shattered fiberglass, rope, and tattered sail. Willa died instantly. It was Max, who’d been thrown clear with a dislocated shoulder, a broken wrist, and facial lacerations, who’d saved her from drowning at great risk to his own life. Smith’s motorboat continued on, fleeing the scene, and later colliding with another sailboat and killing the lone occupant.
Smith, the son of a presidential candidate and heir to his grandfather’s billions, had a record of alcohol and drug abuse, driving under the influence, and felony manslaughter, both by automobile and watercraft. He’d pleaded guilty, and—due to his family’s influence and a lenient judge—was committed to a luxury rehab for six months, followed by a period of community service. His father’s lawyers had settled quietly out of court with the survivors, and Richard had seen to it that she received lifetime medical expenses, as well as her cash award.
Max was discharged from the hospital the day that he and Willa were scheduled to be married. He dropped out of his doctorate program at Yale, began drinking heavily, and when Claire last heard from him, he was backpacking through Nepal and India. Everyone told Claire how fortunate she was to have survived, but she wondered if Willa hadn’t been the lucky one.
Claire had never considered herself a quitter. She’d fought through the months of rehabilitation, learning to speak, to feed herself, to brush her teeth. She endured long nights when pain consumed her, until she was nothing but a hollow shell, and even opening her eyes seemed too difficult to achieve. But she’d never felt pain below her waist. The crash had made graham cracker crumbs of her lower spine. Like Humpty Dumpty, the orthopedic surgeons had put her back together again, but she had no sensation below her waist.
Her shoulders hurt a lot, especially when it rained, as did the places in her arms and hands where the bones had been fragmented and were wired, pinned, and plated back together. She suffered no pain in her head, not even where some brain matter had been shaken to pudding and had to be removed. Mostly, it was the fiery throbbing in her neck that made sweat bead on her forehead and kept her from sleeping more than a few hours at a time.
But the pain medication left her mind fuzzy. Claire didn’t like that. It was bad enough that she had permanent brain damage; she didn’t intend to stifle what wits she had left by numbing herself with pills. She’d rather deal with the pain—at least it gave her something to fight.
Until Morgan had appeared in her dreams and given her hope …
So much of her life that had been full was empty. Grass grew in the paddocks where she’d kept her beloved horses, and her Australian cattle dog, Jinx, no longer woke her with excited barks. Her father had found a good home on a farm in Vermont for Jinx, a few months after the accident, but she still missed the way he’d paw at her face to get her out of bed in the morning.
Before her life had changed, she’d loved to run, and she’d often risen at dawn so that she could get her exercise in before she began her day’s activities. When she wasn’t riding, she rode mountain bikes, played handball, and tennis. Once, she and four friends had hired a guide and spent a week climbing in the Alps. Being cooped up inside four walls made her restless and now, short of wheelchair basketball, there was little she could do in the way of sport.
A large part of the income from her invested fortune she’d directed to children’s charities and others that provided homes for neglected horses. Although she was glad to help, it did little to comfort her on lonely nights. She wanted to feel like a woman again, to be held by a man who cared for her.
And for a little while, Morgan had made her feel that way again. Morgan, her mystery man, the guy no one else saw … the guy who appeared and disappeared without a trace. Maybe he was just a figment of her desperate imagination, but it didn’t matter. He filled the emptiness in her soul.
Lying there, staring at the ceiling was maddening. She wiggled up to a sitting position and used the remote to switch on the TV. A late-night local news station was rerunning footage she’d seen earlier in the day about a female college student who’d drowned.
“This is the second accidental drowning in the area this week,” the reporter said as the camera panned a deserted beach. “Tuesday morning, a surfer was apparently struck by his own board. Local resident, Tyler Clement, age twenty-two …”
Claire winced. She didn’t want to think about the senseless deaths of two young people. She flicked the channel, surfing through old sit-coms, sales pitches, and a diet program that would change your life. She didn’t watch much television, so she hadn’t bothered purchasing a satellite package. Now she regretted that decision. Unable to find anything worth watching, she hit the power button.
“Where are you, Morgan?” she called into the shadowy bedroom. “I need you. Please come back to me. Please …”
Justin hated Central Park in the daytime, always crawling with screaming children, crazy bike riders, and barking dogs that did their nasty business wherever they pleased. He hated it worse by night. Who but a lunatic or a junkie would walk there alone after dark? The police didn’t like to go in there after the sun went down, and they usually traveled in pairs and carried heavy artillery. But when dealing with Carlos, it had to be Central Park. Justin thought it must fulfill some made-guy fantasy of Carlos’s.
Carlos Reyes was a former patient with connections to the underbelly of the city. He was rumored to have a lengthy juvenile record, as well as the conviction for the murder and mutilation of an associate when he was seventeen that had sent him into the state mental health hospital for nine years.
Whatever he’d done, and for a patient, Carlos was remarkably closemouthed about his past, he’d gained considerable success in the prostitution and weapons trade since his reentry into the free world. Carlos didn’t traffic in drugs, or at least he’d always insisted that he hadn’t. A particularly interesting sexual deviation had brought him to Justin’s practice, and both had profited from the lengthy therapy sessions.
Justin considered Carlos to be more trustworthy than most. The man had never disappointed him, and he’d remained discreet. But Justin wasn’t pleased to meet him in such an isolated area, especially when he was carrying so much cash. He would have preferred the subway at rush hour. Nuclear weapons could be bought and sold there, and if they didn’t detonate, no one would be the wiser.
He checked his watch. Quarter past three. He’d entered by the West Eighty-sixth Street entrance, where he noticed a streetlight out, and he’d given himself exactly twelve minutes to reach the grove where Carlos would be waiting. If there was one thing Carlos was precise about, it was meeting at an exact time.
Rain dripped off the trees, dampening Justin’s clothes and threatening to do mortal damage to his athletic shoes. Not that it mattered. He intended to drop them and his clothing into a trash can as soon as he could get home and change. It was a miserable night, drizzling rain with the occasional clap of thunder.
The foul weather made this exchange more difficult, but certainly cut down on the homeless riffraff that usually prowled here, feeding pigeons or trapping them. Justin didn’t care. He didn’t like pigeons any more than he did dogs or horses. He’d suffered the creatures, at least the dogs and horses, when he’d been married to Claire. Never again.
He wore black slacks, a navy tee, a black sweatshirt, and an oversize blue ball cap. The agreed-upon sum in twenty dollar bills was folded neatly, wrapped in aluminum foil, and stowed in a brown lunch bag with grease stains and the remains of yesterday’s cheese steak. Carlos had told him that he would be carrying a pizza box. The trade would be easy, Justin’s cash for an untraceable Glock.
A man on a bicycle pedaled past. Justin kept his head down. It was important that no one see him tonight. Any witness was a liability, and Justin didn’t believe in taking unnecessary chances. He hoped that his attire and purposeful stride would keep any park predators from thinking he was an easy target. Tucked into his deep sweatshirt pocket was a can of wasp spray, just in case.
The cyclist circled around and came back. “Sellin’ or buyin’?” he asked.
“Get lost.” Justin patted the spray can and the lump and the clink of metal was sufficient to send the would-be merchandiser on his merry way.
The city was a sewer. It took a real man to know how to deal with the sewer rats. He walked on, ignoring the fast approaching thunder and lightning. He didn’t deviate from his planned route, and he arrived to find Carlos waiting. He was standing in the shadow of a big tree, a lit cigarette in his hand.
“Freddie? I’ve got your lunch.” The name was Carlos’s idea and Justin felt foolish using it, but until he had what he’d come for, he had to play the game Carlos’s way.
“Do you know who’s pitching Saturday?”
Justin bit back an oath. Carlos had to recognize him. Who else would be fool enough to walk up to a total stranger in the middle of the park in a thunderstorm?
“Doctor?”
Justin sighed. “Babe Ruth.”
Carlos laughed. “Just being careful. You never know. It’s a jungle out here.” He held out his hand.
Justin passed him the lunch bag with the money. Carlos dug out the sandwich, tossed it away, and hefted the weight of the twenties.
“Always a pleasure to do business with you.” Carlos handed him the pizza box.
“Is it loaded?”
“Not much good if it isn’t. It’s good to do business with you, Doc.”
“Same here,” Justin replied. “How’s the therapy going?”
“You know, slow. Hard to change old habits.”
“The important thing is a desire on your part to try to get past this.”
“I know, I know.” He pointed to the box. “Take it out, get the feel of it in your hand. It’s a beautiful piece.”
“Not traceable.”
“Nope. I guarantee it.”
“Good.” Justin opened the box, took out the handgun, and emptied the first shot into Carlos’s midsection. Carlos cried out and grasped his gut.
The second bullet he put between the man’s eyes, and as Carlos collapsed, Justin fired a third time into the base of his skull. After the second shot, Carlos was beyond caring. Bloody business but efficient. Justin took care to stamp out Carlos’s cigarette before he walked away. Smoking was a nasty habit.
According to the evening news, an unidentified body had been discovered in Central Park, obviously the victim of a mugger, since the deceased’s wallet was missing. Justin was amused that he hadn’t thought of robbing the body, other than taking back the bag of money. A dangerous place, the park in the wee hours of the morning. Gang members, drug dealers, all sorts of undesirables. With Carlos’s record, Justin doubted the authorities would try very hard to locate his killer.
Morgan hadn’t found the pack. He could cover great distances through the water quickly when he wanted to, but Melqart’s shades were elusive and there was a lot of inhabited Maine coastline to search. If he’d come upon them, he would have destroyed as many as he could, but he knew it was wiser to wait until he had his brothers and friends to fight beside him. He was torn between his desire to rid these waters of the demons and his overpowering need to be with Claire.
The monsters had fed; Morgan didn’t need to be psychic to feel the dark energy on the tide. The schools of fish felt it, as did the turtles, and even the flocks of sea birds. The salt air thrummed with tension, and the sea creatures reflected the evil presence in their nervous behavior. The horde had taken down a human, perhaps more than one, and they would hunt and keep hunting until their lust was sated, or until their master summoned them home.
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