Waking Storms (11 page)

“And to answer your question, yes, that’s the west coast of Africa. Let’s look at a map of shipwrecks in Alaska now.” Ellison clicked a button. “Keep in mind that the Bering Sea is notoriously dangerous. Terrible storms. There’s a high incidence of wrecks there in any case.” A new map came up, and as Ellison had suggested red dots were loosely scattered across it. But in two places they were thicker. One was at the bottom of the image, well south of the Aleutians. There were definitely more dots down there but not really
so
many. But up near where Dorian was living, around Kuskokwim Bay and a bit farther north, red dots swarmed angrily: so many that whole patches of shore were blotted out. And one of those dots covered Emily’s body.

“Why don’t people just stay away, then?” Dorian could hear that his voice was getting harsher.

“They do now. There’s been an official warning to avoid that section of the coast since early July. The number of sinkings around there escalated so abruptly that people were simply caught off-guard at first.”

“But then...” Dorian stopped himself.

“
But then it doesn’t matter?
Is that what you were going to say?”

“No!”

“Dorian, I know I said we’d take it easy on questions today. But this person, or this entity, that might have saved you from drowning”

“That’s not even real—”

“This unreal entity, in that case.” Ellison paused. “Have you seen it again?”

7

The Queen

It served her right for trusting a human, even once. Even after the big deal he’d made about wanting to see her again, even after that bewilderingly tender good-night kiss, Dorian hadn’t shown up the next evening. Luce had swum back and forth for over an hour between the beach and the cliffs where he’d sung before she finally accepted that he wasn’t going to come.

A few hours after he’d given her his parka she’d even fought down her aversion to going near human towns, just to bring the rowboat back. She’d towed the boat as far as the village’s main dock—it had taken her a while to find both oars, but to her surprise the boat’s hull was undamaged—and tied it to a straggling rope. Incredible as it seemed to her now in the cold blue light of a new day, she’d actually been worried that Dorian might get in trouble for stealing it. He must have seen what she’d done for him, Luce thought, but even so he didn’t care enough to keep his word to her.

There was only one explanation for his absence that seemed at all likely to her. It must be that he enjoyed playing with her emotions. Maybe this was his way of getting revenge. And to make matters worse Dana was going to show up sometime, and Luce would have to show her Dorian’s jacket and rattle off a whole series of lies straight in her old friend’s face. Luce had never felt so stupid before, so demeaned. Obviously Dana had been right. Obviously Dorian was treacherous and cold-hearted, and the smart thing would have been to drown him without caring at all. Luce couldn’t remember the last time she’d been in such a foul mood. The day seemed mockingly bright and beautiful, with an azure sky and satiny breezes, with water that thrummed to the distant, booming calls of whales, their pitch so deep that it made her scales vibrate.

She hadn’t been working enough on her singing, Luce decided. She’d let herself get distracted by some human boy instead. She couldn’t do anything about Dorian or about the fact that she’d acted like an idiot. But she could at least develop the one power that was absolutely hers.

She swam out into deeper waters. Even when she had practiced singing recently, Luce thought with disgust, she’d just been playing pretty little games, sculpting blobs of water in midair, making tiny pirouetting fountains and arches. Clearly it was time to get back to using the full force of her voice. Time to remind the waves who their queen
really
was...

The waves were rough and high, the currents so strong that she had to flick and dance her way between them, slicing back with her tail each time the water grasped at her. Did the sea really think it could push her around like that? Luce dove down and gathered her voice into a long, driving note, slamming it right back into the face of one especially fierce current. Her voice fused with the water. It became a creature of living sound. Luce held the current where it was for a moment, then her unwavering pitch pulsed higher, shoving the immense pressure of the flow back on itself. She blasted the note until it was almost a scream, and for an instant the water in front of her surged in crisscrossing directions. Just above her head Luce saw the surface of the sea starting to bulge in a glassy dome, a swelling tumor of sound. A few porpoises approached, stared at Luce and the misshapen water forced up by her high, pounding outcry, and then rushed off in fright. Luce didn’t care. The swell made by the two battling currents rose higher, and Luce was lifted inside it. For a few moments she hovered in tremulous space, gazing down through water like a huge curving window onto an unsettled sea.

Then the bulge erupted. Luce went flying up on an explosive jet of foam, surrounded by airborne waves that curved like wings. She twisted in space at least thirty feet above the surface, screaming now from pure exultation, and crashed back down so hard that it knocked all the air out of her. She fell through waves where the bubbles frothed in such dense clouds that all she could see was moving streams of whiteness, letting her tail spin. Her body rolled with no sense of direction. When Luce finally surfaced again her side stung from the impact, but she was laughing too hard to sing.

She’d raised the water before, used her voice to lift curling waves or straight towers of water. But she’d never controlled such a huge volume of water as that, never made the sea leap so high. If only Catarina could have seen it, or Dorian—

Ugh. Why did she have to spoil the exhilaration she felt by thinking of him now? Luce circled wildly in the murky sea until her body lashed the waves into a ring of froth. Vaguely she noticed the island where Dorian’s cruise ship had crashed looming up on her left. Normally the sight of it would have depressed her. Normally she would have worried about slipping into her old tribe’s territory, too. But today she didn’t care about any of that.

She was gasping from swimming so crazily. Luce made herself calm down enough to drift along the surface, pulling in deep inhalations. Seabirds with bright red feet spiraled in the air above her, as free in their breathing medium as she was in her fluid one. Luce wanted to try mastering that much water again, maybe raise it in a single high wall this time, but she couldn’t do that unless she had enough breath to sing with her strongest voice.

She really was getting too close to the old cave, though. She’d thought those were seals popping up for air fifty feet away from her, but now she realized that one had a mushy baby’s face and stick-up tufts of hair. There were a few larval mermaids mixed in with the seals, then, and larvae didn’t usually swim out this far unless they were tagging along after the older girls. Maybe she should slip back down the coast a bit.

“Samantha? You see that? Is that like a rotting porpoise or something?” The voice was chirpy and cold; it would have sounded completely emotionless if it weren’t just a bit too shrill. “I’d say we should drag it out of our territory. Except then we’d have to touch it.”

Anais and Samantha bobbed up and down in the waves, both pearl-skinned and almost shining with beauty, both lacquered with mist and the dizzy pale sunlight. Luce noticed that they were keeping their distance, though, and that Samantha couldn’t hide the apprehension in her sea green eyes. It made her want to laugh. “Hi, Anais. Hey, Samantha.” Luce wondered if they’d seen the wild burst of water carrying her up into the air. She smiled to herself. There was no reason not to be polite to the two blondes, not when she could send a vertical wave slashing up beneath them anytime she felt like it. “How’s everything been going?”

As Luce had expected, her friendly tone annoyed Anais more than any display of hostility could have done. Luce could feel the hardness of her own smile as she watched Anais’s sharp blue eyes start to flicker back in the direction of the tribe’s cave. Her golden hair rayed out around her, curling gorgeously with each loft of the water.

“Let’s just go,” Samantha muttered weakly, tugging at her queen’s arm. “Why should we even talk to her?” Anais ignored her.

“Oh, wait.” Anais made a show of suddenly recalling something, rolling her eyes upward. “Isn’t this thing some kind of trashy, broken-down mermaid? I know it’s kind of hard to believe, Samantha. But don’t you remember there was a mermaid with dark, ratty hair like that? We threw her out of the tribe. Remember?”

Luce felt a little ill, like there was something clammy and thick in her stomach. But what really surprised her was how little Anais’s words upset her. Mostly they seemed funny, in a disgusting kind of way. There she was, the perfect blond pseudo-queen, the heartless usurper, pretending that insults could change what they both knew perfectly well: the best singer was the rightful ruler. And while Anais might be very good, she wasn’t even close to equaling Luce. Catarina had said so before she’d vanished, and suddenly Luce found that she believed it absolutely.

“Threw her out?” Of course that wasn’t really what had happened, but still Samantha was being pretty slow on the uptake. She was clearly too nervous to think straight. “Anais, please! Let’s just get out of here before she tries something.”

Lazily Luce began to hum a little, stretching backwards on the waves. Even as she did it, Luce was aware that she was acting in a way her old self wouldn’t have recognized. Even when she’d been furiously angry before, she’d never been deliberately cruel, never enjoyed taunting someone. Now, though, the rising anxiety in Samantha’s gaping face filled her with hard sparks of delight. She wasn’t entirely comfortable with what she was doing, but she was too excited to stop. And anyway, didn’t these two deserve whatever they got?

Luce lifted her voice a bit higher, and a tiny wave no bigger than a sparrow edged up out of the sea. Luce caressed the delicate thing with a long, soft stroke of music until the wave was glass-thin and elegantly curved, a scimitar of water glinting in the sun. Samantha goggled in tense disbelief, and Anais tried to smirk. Dreamily Luce sent her voice in a sweeping trill, and the wave spun quickly around her once before it collapsed. One of the larvae splashed closer, twittering with joy, and pawed at the air where the wave had pranced a second before. The redheaded little thing warbled eagerly, trying to beg Luce to raise another wave.

“Anais? Oh,
why
did she have to come here? What does she
want?”
Samantha was practically squeaking. Luce laughed outright, but something about Samantha’s questions also sent a rush of sadness through her heart. Wasn’t all of this showing-off basically silly? What was the point of it?

It wasn’t like she even wanted to be queen. Not of a tribe like this one, anyway.

“I was wondering that, too, Samantha. After all, she knows we said we’d kill her if she ever showed up again.” Anais was trying to stare Luce down, but it wasn’t working. Samantha kept her eyes on Luce and jerked hard on Anais’s arm. “What, Samantha? Are you worried about her stupid little singing tricks? What’s she going to do?” Now Anais’s sneer looked more genuine. “Get you
wet?”

Maybe she didn’t need a point, Luce thought. Maybe it was enough that they’d brutally attacked Catarina. Maybe it was enough that...

Suddenly Luce realized why she was playing around this way, trying to intimidate mermaids she didn’t even respect. It was all because she’d been foolish enough to believe a human’s kisses meant something. All at once Luce felt ashamed of herself, and she stared around at endless waves, the sunlight winking on all sides like a sarcastic audience.

“I’ll see you around,” Luce told them vaguely, and turned to leave.

A moment later a sharp squeal pierced the air at Luce’s back, followed by a kind of high-pitched chattering. Luce swung back around and saw that Anais had the redheaded larva gripped in both hands. Smiling straight at Luce, Anais flipped the thrashing little thing upside down and held it by its tail. She held it far enough under that, no matter how desperately the larva twisted its babyish torso, it couldn’t bring its head up into the air. The other larvae—there were three of them—clung to each other and stared, chirping out half-musical cries of alarm.

“I guess it’ll take too long to drown this thing, huh, Samantha?” Anais delivered the line with icy cheerfulness. “What does it take, like half an hour? I’ll get totally bored if I have to hold it that long.”

“Let it go,” Luce snapped. “What’s
wrong
with you, anyway?”

Of course that was exactly what Anais had been waiting for. Smiling her loveliest golden smile, she hoisted the larva slightly higher. Just high enough that a few inches of its stubby lilac fins protruded from the water, exposed to the soft breeze, the butter-colored sun. Even Samantha looked appalled. Her mouth hung open, but she didn’t say anything. The larva’s fins had started twitching.

“This way will be a lot faster, though. Hey, Samantha? How
much
of its tail has to dry out for this to work?”

The larva’s thin scream reverberated through the water. The vibrations shivered all over Luce’s fins, crawled over her like chilled fingers.

“Anais,
please
...” Samantha was whimpering. “Luce will do something crazy.” Anais just lifted the larva slightly higher. Droplets bright with sunshine flew from its writhing tail.

Luce dove. The gray-green water was shaky with the larva’s screams, but even so Luce could hear Anais’s distorted voice: “See, Samantha? Luce can’t actually do anything. All she ever does is run away.” Anais’s sky blue tail with its overlay of pink iridescence flicked in the water above Luce’s head, and Luce tensed herself. Those awful pulsating screams made it hard to concentrate. For a moment Luce couldn’t find her voice, couldn’t gather power behind it. The first note she tried came out broken, scared, and the two blond mermaids heard it. Samantha’s shrill, relieved laughter mixed with the larva’s shrieks.