Black Swan Rising (30 page)

Sssstay out of my waterwayssss!
she hissed.
You don’t belong here.

“Don’t I?” Dee asked, fanning his long fingers out. “I’ve had this little pied-à-terre—or should I say pied-à-mer—for over fifty years and you’ve never noticed me here. Maybe it’s you who don’t belong here, Melusine. Isn’t it a little too . . . salty for your taste?”

The fog that was Melusine condensed into a long-winged
serpent coiled in the air above Dee’s head, its long tongue flicking out from between sharp fangs, its jaws snapping inches from Dee’s face. He regarded her with his cool amber eyes and flicked the ash of his cigar into an ashtray on a table beside his chair. Drawn by the motion, I looked down and caught a gleam of silver. Lying beside the ashtray was the silver box. Dee smiled and rested his hand on top of the box.

“Is this what you’ve come for Garet James? Did you want another look inside?” His fingers caressed the lid of the box, coaxing the engraved lines into motion. They writhed like a nest of snakes awakened. I felt myself drifting closer, following the path of each line . . . if I could just follow one of them to its conclusion, I would know . . .

I snapped back. Know what?

“You would gain dominion over the elements and know the secret of everlasting life,” he said. “And, what might be more important, you’d know how to escape that everlasting life. That’s what your boyfriend wants to know. Do you think he’s helping you for your pretty face alone? He wants the box too. It’s the only way he can be mortal again . . . although I can’t imagine why he’d want that. He’s counting on you to lead him to the box. Why don’t you call him now and see how fast he comes . . . oh, I forgot. You can’t very well do your little fire trick in your current state. Why don’t you materialize?”

Don’t lisssten to him!
Melusine sputtered around me.

I hadn’t realized that I
could
materialize on my own. As soon as he put the idea in my head, I felt my cells growing heavier and I longed for the solidity of flesh.

“I always find the watery element so very cold and damp.” Dee shammed a convulsive shudder. “Wouldn’t you like to sit by the fire and have a glass of brandy?”

Now that he mentioned it, I
was
cold. And empty. So empty.

“You and I have much to talk over, Garet James. You have nothing to fear from me. After all, I could have told my shadows to shoot you when I sent them to your house.”

You shot my father!

“No, dear.” Dee clucked his tongue and shook his head like a kindly uncle correcting a favorite niece. “Your father shot himself. A regrettable accident. How was I to know he was afraid of dybbuks?”

“You sent the manticore to kill me—it killed Edgar Tobert!”

“Did I? Whose word do you have for that? The vampire’s? Convenient that the manticore’s bite allowed him to drink your blood, wasn’t it?”

I shook my head—or at least I shook the molecules that had once made up my head. “Will saved me . . .” I stopped, recalling Will’s mouth on my throat, how he’d almost made me one of his last night . . . but then I’d asked for that, begged him to make me like him—

“Of course you asked him to make you a vampire. Once he’s contaminated your blood, you long for more. He’s gotten you hooked.”

He’s trying to trick you into materializing so he can destroy you,
Melusine sang in my ear.
Don’t forget what he did to the ssssylphs.

“Oh yes, the sylphs. That I freely confess to, but it was self-defense. Have you ever met a sylph, dear? Nasty creatures, like those nasty creatures you saw lurking in the shadows with Oberon and Puck. Why do you think they call Oberon the Prince of Shadows? He’s using you just like the vampire is using you—to get the box for himself and gain control over the human race. Do you think Oberon’s creatures
like
being relegated
to the shadows? Do you think our watery friend here enjoys living in the sewers? They ruled the world once and they’d like to once more. How much room for humans will there be once they do?”

Is that true?
I asked Melusine.

She didn’t answer. Instead I saw an image of a man in royal robes, a crown upon his head, his features contorted in disgust. He stood in a hall soaked in blood and gore.
This is all your fault,
he cried.
It is your foul blood that runs in his veins.

It is you humans who have no room for ussss,
she said at last.

“And what wouldn’t you do to revenge the wrongs perpetrated on you and your people, Melusine?”

She flicked her long tail and hissed. She had grown more corporeal in the last few minutes, anger and bitterness weighing down her cells like an oil slick on a seagull’s wings. Melusine was right—Dee was trying to make both of us materialize by invoking our anger. I was tempted to do so on the off chance I could take the opportunity to destroy Dee. But I didn’t feel I’d been properly trained to launch such an attack yet, especially with him having some access to my immaterial thoughts, which could remove the advantage of surprise.

We should go
. I tried to make it a whisper, a mere trill of water, but Melusine was too far gone to hear anything below a torrent. Not Dee, though.

“Yes, perhaps you
should
go, my dear. Your friends need you. I believe there are eleven more voice mails on your phone from your friend Becky. I’m afraid that the argument between her and Jay has gotten rather
nasty
.” He opened the lid of the silver box. A condensation of mist appeared on the inside of the lid. Dee rubbed his hand over it and a picture emerged of Jay and Becky sitting at my kitchen table—or at least Jay was sitting,
his bony shoulders hunched up to his ears, his hair falling over his face. Becky was half in, half out of her chair, crouching on her knees as if ready to spring at Jay, her arms spinning like windmills. No sound accompanied the picture, but I could guess by the way that Jay became smaller and smaller as she shouted what kind of things Becky was saying to him.

Stop it!
I cried.
You’re doing this to them! They’ve never argued like this before. Make her stop!

“Shall I?” Dee asked with a low chuckle. “Perhaps you’re right. You know how fragile your friend is, suicidal even. Shall I make her stop?” He extended his index finger and stroked the image of Becky on the silver screen, with the same motion you’d use to control the touch screen on an iPhone. Immediately Becky sank down in her chair, her arms fell, and her face drained of color. I’d never seen her look so still.

Dee touched the screen again, just above Becky’s heart, and she opened her mouth, gasping like a fish.

No!
I rushed through the air toward Dee, my cells gaining weight as I moved. I sensed Melusine coming with me, a splatter of water against my solidifying flesh, and then I felt her emerging claws digging into my arms. We were both corporeal again by the time we reached Dee, but he wasn’t. His body dissolved as we landed in his chair . . . and then so did the chair. Where it had been was a gaping hole in the floor that sucked us in. Melusine and I were both squeezed into a pipe with barely enough room to breathe. Melusine struggled to dematerialize, but before she could, we were ejected out of the pipe into ice-cold salt water, flushed out into the East River like a bit of sewage.

I’d been underwater for so long without having to breathe that I hoped I still didn’t have to, but the pressure on my chest soon told me otherwise. I didn’t have long to get to the surface—and I couldn’t even see the surface. I tried to stroke upward, but the only direction I moved in was southwest. The tide was going out, sweeping me out to sea.

I struggled against the current fruitlessly for a few moments, but I couldn’t break free. Then I stopped. I remembered my father telling me when I was little and we took trips out to the beaches on Long Island that if I ever got caught in a riptide, not to fight it. Eventually it would bring me back to shore. But was that true in a tidal strait like the East River? And what good would it do me if I drowned before being spewed out somewhere in New Jersey? But there
was
landfall before New Jersey—Governors Island—and it wasn’t far away. If I could relax and let the current take me there, I might survive.

I concentrated on making my muscles relax, limb by limb, just as my yoga teacher instructed at the end of class for
shavasana
. . . corpse pose. The thought that I might literally be a corpse soon made it hard to relax, but I banished the image
from my mind and tried to concentrate on releasing each muscle.
Imagine you are melting into the ground,
my yoga teacher would say,
let your feet go, your calves, your thighs
. . .

Something grazed my leg.

I flinched and flipped over, frantically beating the water with my hands, dreading but needing to see what was behind me.

A pale silvery shape loomed out of the murk.

Shark
. The word slammed through my nervous system, every primeval fear of the deep awakened. But then as the shape drifted closer, I made out arms and legs and a dead-white face.

A corpse, I thought, before noticing the gills and claws. It was Melusine. I had thought she had evaporated again, but the salt water must have stunned her and rendered her unconscious. Or dead. There was probably nothing I could do for her . . .

But I had to try. In the time our molecules had intertwined I’d gained a fondness for the strange creature. Despite her outward show of bitterness—her brittle, chitinous shell—she still mourned for the man who had betrayed her and the children she had been forced to abandon. For centuries she’d haunted the Château of Lusignan just for a glimpse of her children’s children, even if they shrieked in fear when they saw her, until she fled to a new country. I couldn’t just let her die here in the polluted murk of the East River when she’d been born of the purest springs.

And she was dying. I could feel it. More than that, she was dissolving. Her pearl-bright skin was sloughing off in the current leaving a trail of phosphorescent dust behind her like the tail of a comet. As she floated by me, her eyes wide-open and staring sightlessly, I grabbed her arm. Her skin dented and slipped greasily under my fingers. I was afraid her arm would
come off in my hand, but it didn’t. I pulled her closer to me, so I could throw my right arm over her head to secure her in a lifesaving hold. Her body felt light, like a shell that’s been abandoned by its molluscan inhabitant. I tried not to think of that as the current bore us on, but images of snails crawling out of bony eye sockets and eels nibbling on drowned flesh plagued me. At least the phosphorescence that surrounded Melusine acted like a giant flashlight. I could make out rocks ahead of us, and above them, lit up by Melusine’s phosphorescence, discarded water bottles and driftwood bobbing on the surface. If I could catch hold of one of the rocks, perhaps I could climb out of the water.

I hadn’t figured on how much holding Melusine would hamper me. I had only one hand to reach out with—a clumsy left hand. I grasped at the rocks . . . and came away with handfuls of green mush.

Let her go,
a voice inside my head told me.
She’s gone anyhow.

But I held on, maybe only because I was afraid of being alone here in the dark. At last the current drove me up against a jutting rock. It scraped my left hip, but I was able to loop my left arm over its jagged edge, and from there to start the climb up. I still couldn’t see any light above me. I began to think that the blackness all around me was a much deeper abyss than the bottom of the East River. Perhaps I was dead already.

Still I climbed, dragging the limp, empty hull of Melusine with me like a snail dragging its shell on its back. I lost track of how long or how far. I think I must have blacked out for a little while. When I came to, I was still surrounded by blackness, but it was the blackness of night and the cold was the chill of December wind on naked skin. I was lying on a rock slab next
to a smear of pale silver gelatinous flesh—like a shucked oyster. Bile rose in my throat and I turned to vomit salt water over the other side of the rock. Everything came up. I retched until my throat burned and my stomach felt as if it had been turned inside out . . . I pictured it looking a little like the pile of goo by my side . . . which made me wretch some more. I couldn’t look at it again. I started crawling onto the next rock . . .

Marguerite
. . .
don’t leave me
. . .

The voice came from behind me, but also from inside my head. It came from the puddle of ooze that had once been Melusine. She was still alive, but she wouldn’t be for long. I couldn’t bear to look again at that mess and know there was still a consciousness inside it. I crawled another few inches . . .

Marguerite
. . .
my sister
. . .

Sister?

It was just a figure of speech, I told myself. But even as I crept farther away I knew different. An image bloomed in my head. A girl in a forest glade crouched beside a pool, looking at her reflection in the clear water . . . only it wasn’t a reflection, it was another girl looking up from the water, her face identical to the one above her save for the color of her hair.

I turned around. The pale flesh quivered on the rock. Something glittered in its folds. I leaned closer and saw to my horror that it was her eyes. Green eyes that fastened on to mine.