Dead in the Water (Gemini: A Black Dog Series Book 1) (20 page)

“You were brave. So brave. You saved Harlow’s life.” I kept my tone even as I praised her. “But I have to ask you to be brave one more time. I need you to take a deep breath, focus on your magic, and lower the bubble so I can get her the help she needs. Can you do that?”

“I can t-t-try.” Her eyes shut, and the air pulsed. A tendril of Harlow’s hair fell through and tickled the sand beneath her. “Hurry. I can’t hold it much longer.”

Careful not to spook Roni with sudden movements, I shifted Harlow toward me and hooked my hands under her arms. I dragged until her heels left furrows in the sand. I checked her pulse—steady but weak—and examined the jagged edges of the wound that had fused together into an angry red chevron pattern zigzagging from her collarbone to her jawline, bisecting one of the artificial gills. With one functioning gill and the use of Roni’s air bubble, I was betting the culprit here was blood loss. Harlow must have used one of the emergency healing charms on herself.

“Here.” Roni extended the blade toward me. “It’s pretty. She might want it back.”

Our fingers brushed when I grasped the handle, and her magic tingled up my arm.
Sylph
. I should have remembered that sooner. Her magic must have allowed her to filter oxygen through the film of her protective bubble. “I’ll make sure she gets it.” I tucked the dagger into my belt. “Do you want me to help you out now? Or do you want to wait for your mom?”

Magic shimmered around her, and iridescent rainbows slid over the bubble’s hull as it solidified. “It won’t let go.” She tucked the hand clotted with kelpie flesh by her leg, out of sight. “I’ll stay.” Roni shifted positions, drawing her knees up to her chest and wrapping her free arm around them. Her forehead lowered, bracing on her kneecaps. “It’s safer in here anyway.”

A warm hand landed on my shoulder.
Graeson
. No wonder she had withdrawn from me. The sight of him naked wasn’t doing the already traumatized girl any favors.

His fingers tightened. “We have to leave.”

Car doors slammed nearby, and I made my choice. “I can’t abandon them.”

“Ellis…” A frustrated growl entered his voice.

“Graeson, I said no.” I twisted to stare up at him. “You should go before they catch you.”

His scarred hands lifted a damp lock of my hair. “May I?”

Really? He wanted to smell me at a time like this? Was it some kind of shifter-style farewell? “Suuurrre,” I drew out the word.

Faster than a blink, he willed his index finger to lengthen, its claw to elongate, and he sliced through the clump above his fist, leaving him with a six-inch hank of my hair. The control it had taken for such a precise shift must have been incredible. I smoothed a hand down the cut length.

“Be careful.” He clutched his prize, color high in his cheeks, and my stomach fluttered. “See you soon.”

Before I found the correct response to getting an impromptu haircut via a warg claw, he was gone. Not a single golden eye winked in the darkness. The pack had fled.

Worrying the shorn ends between my fingers, I sank down next to Harlow, wincing when the sharp edges of her dagger’s handle dug into my side. Shifting to one hip, I withdrew the blade and set it beside her in case she craved the security of a weapon when she roused. She remained still where I laid her, and I pressed two fingers to the underside of her blemished jaw. A weak pulse fluttered under her skin, comforting me. I rubbed her arm and made promises I knew I couldn’t keep under my breath.

The conclave would be here soon. They could arrange for a transfusion and a burst of magic to boost her recovery. I had to believe they would make it in time.

“Step away from the body and put your hands in the air.”

I did as the masculine voice instructed. “I’m Agent Camille Ellis with the Earthen Conclave.” I yelled loud enough to be heard from his position. “This is Harlow Bevans. She’s a consultant.” I linked my fingers in the air over my head. “She’s lost a lot of blood. She needs medical attention.”

“Medics,” the same man boomed. “You’ve got patients waiting.”

Two men carrying a stretcher between them crested the rise and jogged toward me. They shuffled me aside and set to work on Harlow with steady hands and low conversation that comforted me. Each anticipated the other’s need, and they worked in tandem to examine her.

A lean man emerged from the trailhead, trundled down to me, grasped my elbow and hauled me in the direction where he first appeared. His eyes were wide set and green, his skin dark. Magic zipped through me at his touch.
Bean sidhe
. Unsettling choice for a search-and-rescue squad volunteer. I hoped the presence of a death portent meant he’d drawn the short straw, not that he carried a message.

“I need to speak with Magistrate Vause.” I let him lead me away from the scene marshals were scurrying to secure. A guy with a spotlight tucked under his arm shuffled past. Another carried a flipper I assumed went to his wet suit. A woman walked with her head down as she studied a clipboard, and two more men barked orders into walkie-talkies with a fervor that would have done Graeson proud. “She can vouch for me.”

A grim expression pinched his eyes. “I’ll have someone higher on the food chain dial her up and see what she has to say.”

“Can I wait here while you contact her?” I jerked my chin toward Harlow. “I’d like to keep an eye on my friend.”

A frown marred his preternaturally smooth forehead when his gaze eased past my shoulder.

“What is it?” Heart in my throat, I whipped my head toward the lake. At first glance I didn’t register a problem. A soft-spoken marshal was engaging Roni while a man in jeans snapped pictures of the kelpie’s corpse. A woman decked out in a headlamp documented paw-print impressions as a tall man walked the dock with a phone pressed to his ear. Then my gaze honed in on the twin trenches dug by Harlow’s heels where I had dragged her through the sand. The medics were gone. Harlow was too. “Where did they take her?”

“I don’t—” He scratched behind his ear. “They must have taken another path and circled back to the ambulance.”

I was already shaking my head. The wargs had done heavy recon on the area to prepare us for all eventualities. I was familiar with all possible exits near the dock in case I needed a quick escape route. “There is no second path.” Not for a quarter of a mile in the opposite direction, and no way would two guys with a stretcher decide to forge their own trail when there was a perfectly good path right here. “I’m heading down there.”

“Wait.” A string of foreign swears followed me. “Agent Ellis.”

Shrugging off the bean sidhe’s warnings, I ran for the cluster of activity. I grabbed the first marshal I saw by his collar. “Where’s the mermaid?”

He swatted me aside with a meaty fist.
Ursine shifter
. “Lady, I don’t know what you’re quacking about.”

“There was a mermaid.” I pointed to the drag marks in the sand. “Right there.”

“Hey, Phil, did you see a mermaid?” he yelled to the guy with a flipper.

“Nope.” He waved at me with the webbed hunk of plastic. “I doubt I would have been hauled out of bed at the butt crack of dawn if they already had a mermaid on site. Wasn’t there a contractor working these things? Whatever happened to her?”

“Yes.”
I pointed at my feet. “That was her. She was right here. Ask the bean sidhe. He can tell you I’m not crazy.”

“Leonard?” the ursine called. “What’s all the noise about?”

“There was a mermaid.” A cold spark lit his eyes, and his gaze shot to the forest as if magnetized. “I saw her myself.”

“Come on, lady. Think about it.” The ursine shifter must have heard my molars grinding. “This close to water? She probably ducked into the lake to heal.”

“She’s a saltie.” Admitting Harlow was human and that’s why she wouldn’t have returned to the water to regenerate was a bad idea. Harlow was defenseless in her current state. Humans were soft, their bellies tender, and every fae here was a predator. “I’m going to search the woods.”

“Don’t wander far.” Leonard’s voice thickened like his mouth had trouble forming the words. “Stay where I can see you. If I have to bring you down, you won’t like it.”

Chills swept over me. No. I suppose I wouldn’t. I’d had enough near-death experiences for one night, thanks. I wasn’t about to pit my pitiful athletic abilities against a death-touched fae. Death always won in the end.

The sky lightened. Violet clouds faded to ones with soft pink lining. The brighter conditions made searching easier. Wargs—on two legs and four—had trampled the area. There was no hope of picking a single path as the one medics might have taken. Careful to stay in sight of Leonard, I swept the outskirts of the forest for a hint of where the trio had gone. Several yards deeper than I should have ventured, a dark blob puddled on a smattering of leaves. Casting a wary glance over my shoulder, I located the bean sidhe. His rich skin had paled, and he wet his lips as though a fierce hunger had ignited in him. Making use of his distraction, I stalked deeper into the woods. I toed the clump with my boot, and it made a squishing sound. Confident the mass wasn’t something disgusting, I bent down and pinched what I now felt was a ball of wet fabric between my fingers.

Harlow’s shorts. Not just any shorts, but the enchanted pair that sprouted scales when exposed to water. Would an injury sustained to the tail be inflicted on her legs? Had the medics removed clothing in order to treat her?

My faith in the medics’ competence plummeted. They had discarded a high magic article of clothing at a crime scene. Tossed aside like rubbish when they should have ended up in an evidence locker at the local marshal’s office, she would be pissed when she came to without them and her personal effects bag turned up empty. The shorts held sentimental value as well as being critical to her wellbeing as long as she continued her mermaid charade.

Hairs rose along my nape, stinging as they lifted one by one. Magic, cold and eternal, swirled around my ankles and tickled up my legs. I swiped at a tickling sensation on my cheeks, and my fingers came away bloody. A bone-deep wail of grief saturated the night, shaking leaves from the trees and turning my breath to fog.

The bean sidhe sang with all his soul.

Death prowled the woods with me tonight.

Wiping my fingers on my pants, I ventured farther from the chilling melody of Leonard’s song. A glimmer of white caught my eye, and I made my way toward it. The closer I came, the louder the bean sidhe’s music hammered at my skull. I stumbled and caught myself against a tree. When my brain translated what I was seeing, my knees buckled and hit the damp earth. The stretcher rested inches away from my ankle, its canvas center torn to shreds. The medics, what was left of them, were scattered in chunks of glistening meat in a six-foot radius.

The speck of white that had caught my eye was Harlow’s shell-handled dagger, and it was no longer pristine. The grooves were stained pink, the hilt imprinted with a smudged handprint a size smaller than mine, and the blade glistened crimson.

“Harlow,”
I cried out, voice ragged, her shorts squelching in my grip. “
Harlow.
”

The static thrum of white noise answered me. My ears ached, and my throat itched where thin rivulets of blood dried and cracked.

A fly buzzed my nose, and I swatted it aside. Fingers shaking, I reached out and touched a fractured elbow.
Dola
. This medic had been one of the Slavic spirits who embodied human fate. I wondered if he had foreseen this end. Numbed by the shock, I sent my magic probing, and there it was, as I had known deep in my bones it would be. That now-familiar sheen of energy that coated everything Charybdis touched with his magic permeated the corpse.

The ounce of relief I experienced at the kelpie’s death evaporated. Separating the Charybdis persona from the kelpie had been a struggle as I battled doubts over what manner of creature or creatures had pitted themselves against us. Kneeling here, I resonated all the certainty I previously lacked.

This was incontrovertible proof. Charybdis was a separate entity, and he was still very much alive.

I stood and skirted the dead medics, walked into the underbrush and called out to Harlow. Charybdis, being a creature of Faerie, would have understood the bean sidhe’s wail and fled. My cries failed to illicit a response from Harlow, but it summoned the others, who, after restraining me with a Word, resumed the search.

Jaw flexing with the force of keeping my mouth shut, I stood there like a model prisoner. Arguing would slow down the hunt, and my pride wasn’t worth so much that I couldn’t model steel bracelets for a few minutes until the paranoia of finding me standing alone by yet another corpse, two in fact, died down.

The kelpie was the first strike and these two the second and third. As far as they were concerned, until Vause verified my credentials, I was out.

Harlow’s disappearance had failed to sway the marshals—the prejudice against mermaids ran deeper than I ever imagined in the waterfront towns where Charybdis had chosen to strike—but two of their own had been slaughtered, and that lit a fire under them.

“That Ellis?” A squat man with a rolling gait snuffled in my direction. “Magistrate Vause is asking for her.”

“I would take the call,” I said, wiggling my fingers, “but I’m tied up at the moment.”

“Lady, she wants a face-to-face.” He snorted loudly through his nose with an open mouth. “I’ve got orders to escort you to the safe house in Falco.”

“We can handle things here,” Leonard assured me as he approached. “You’ve done your job. Now let us do ours.” A sparkle made his eyes dance, and his cheeks were flush. Death looked good on him. “We’ll locate the one responsible.”

“Find the mermaid.” I made it an order. “She’s a victim here too.”

Good old Leo sighed his counter-Word and unbound my hands. “I’ll be in touch.”

I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Under the watchful eye of my new escort, I made my way down to the original crime scene, which still buzzed with activity as marshals attempted to coax Roni from her bubble. After the bean sidhe’s performance, I could have told them that shield between her and the rest of the fae world wasn’t going anywhere.