Leashing the Tempest (4 page)

We had our answer seconds later, because someone saw them all right.

Or some
thing
.

That black figure I'd been trying to convince myself was good-old-fashioned paranoia? It passed over the starboard windows as it climbed to the roof above us.

J
upe cried out near my ear, then jumped behind me. “Ohmygod, ohmygod . . .”

“What the hell!?” Kar Yee shouted.

“Did you see that?” I said. “You saw it, right?”

“I saw it! What did I see?”

“Jesus, Cady,” Lon mumbled. “You were right.”

“What is it?”

Jupe latched on to the back of my shirt. “
Where
is it?”

“Everybody hush,” I said.

We all glanced up at the ceiling, trying to hear something beyond the howling winds and sheeting rain and our own labored breathing. I swayed on my feet and bumped into Jupe, who started in fright, then whispered an apology before plastering himself against my back so firmly I could feel his heart racing.

The roof creaked. Or maybe it was the boat rocking. I held my breath, eyes rotating in their sockets as I desperately searched the ceiling. Moments later, a muffled
Boom!
above the TV made us all jump.

But it was the sound that followed, the sound of feet racing across the roof that made my stomach drop.

Whatever the hell that thing was, I knew one thing: I wasn't going to stand around and wait for it to attack. I looked at Lon and spoke in a low voice. “Captain's quarters. I can charge the cloaking magick around the captain's doorframe.”

He nodded once.

“Lock the door to the deck,” I told Kar Yee as I retrieved my jacket from the jumble of loose things sliding around the rocking cabin.

Lon waved at Jupe. “Help me.”

With dueling grunts, father and son lifted the captain from behind the bar. Kar Yee and I trailed them as they carted Christie's limp body through the kitchen, down the hall to his quarters. He moaned a little when they set him on his narrow bed—a good sign. We watched him for a moment but saw no other movement. At least he wasn't in a coma.

Lon acted as my lookout while I inspected the cabin's sigils to make sure everything was hunky-dory. I found connecting points in the corners of the room, the floor, and the ceiling. It was nice work; whoever the captain had hired knew what they were doing. And it wouldn't take much to recharge it.

I searched an inner pocket of my jacket and found a couple of magical supplies I usually carried just in case. One of them was a portable caduceus, a carved magician's stave with a thick core of graphite. I used a much bigger one in the bar, but miniatures were good for smaller spells like this. I palmed the caduceus, cracked my neck, and shook out my arms.

“Be careful,” Lon said. “The lightning strike . . .”

Yeah. I was a little worried about how that had affected my energy stores, too. Heka isn't limitless. I stilled my mind and reached out for current. Didn't take long for me to hone in on a fat supply nearby—likely the yacht's batteries, from the sluggish, stale feel I got when I tugged and siphoned, but it was active enough to kindle Heka. When I felt the current catch, I took it slower, testing to make sure I wasn't going to implode or anything. I didn't, so I kept going.

Just when my cells felt like they were buzzing and I could take no more, I positioned the caduceus over a sigil on the doorframe and pushed. Bright-white Heka surged from the caduceus. One by one, like dominoes falling, the sigils lit up.

Post-magick nausea punched me in the gut, not that I had a chance to dwell on it. Lon pushed me inside the captain's quarters and hastily slid the door shut. Kar Yee's arm shot out to lock it.

And not a second too soon. A loud crash sounded from the salon.

We all stood stock-still, trying to listen over the cacophony of the storm, as four-too-many people crammed inside a space that was barely big enough for one. After a moment, another crash drew our attention. Jupe whimpered. I snagged his hand as the boat pitched. It sounded like the creature was moving around the cabin, but just when I thought it might be heading down the crew hallway, I heard glass breaking.

Then it was quiet.

“Is it gone?” Jupe finally whispered after a long moment.

I had no idea.

Kar Yee leaned closer and spoke in a low voice. “Does the spell cloak noise?”

“Mostly,” I said. “Don't yell or bang on the walls.”

But no one said anything for several minutes until Kar Yee piped up again. “Someone needs to find out if it's still there. We can't just sit in here and drift across the Pacific in a coffin for hours.”

I was closest to the door. “So I guess I'll just peek outside. . . .”

Lon pulled the flare gun out of his jacket.

“What do you expect to do with that, set the boat on fire?”

“Stay low and I'll aim high.”

I grumbled and crouched, then flipped the lock and slid the door open a few inches at a time. Nothing but darkness in the hallway. No noise but the storm and the sound of waves crashing against the hull. I stuck my head around the doorframe, craning my neck to look toward the salon. The windows filtered a dull gray light over the lounge area. I could make out shapes of the sofas and the edge of the bar. Could see the door leading out onto the deck. But I couldn't see any movement other than the occasional stray soda can, dumped from our cooler, rolling around on the floor.

It took me a few seconds to realize I was focusing my sights too far. At the end of the hallway, between the captain's quarters and the salon, a silhouette stood in the small kitchen. It had feet—or legs, at least. Arms, too. But something was . . . off. I lifted my searching gaze to its shoulders. Its face tilted to look at the ceiling.

A second face followed.

And a third.

Three heads. And all of them were sniffing the air.

All the small hairs on my neck and arms stood erect. I jerked back and slid the door shut, almost crushing Lon's flare gun in the process. Our hands collided as we rushed to flip the lock.

“What?” Jupe whispered loudly. “Is it still there?”

“In the kitchen. I think it smelled me.”

Jupe's eyes widened with alarm. “What did it look like?”

“Uh . . .” I pulled my damp shirt away from my stomach, thinking of the three heads.

“Did you see it, Dad?”

Lon blinked several times. “I don't know what I saw. It's not human. Not Earthbound. And I don't want to see it again.”

“What do you mean, it's not Earthbound?” Kar Yee said. “Are you saying that it's something escaped from the Æthyr? That's impossible. . . . Right, Cady?”

A few months ago, I would've agreed, but I'd seen a lot of weird shit lately. Lon and Jupe had, too. And though I wasn't exactly forthcoming about everything when it came to Kar Yee, right now, I didn't have much of a choice.

“Look,” I told her, “there's a big ol' demonic seal on the bridge, and I don't recognize it. But the captain was trying to protect the boat against something, and it's no coincidence that that thing appeared after lightning disabled the ward.”

“Oh, shit,” Jupe moaned.

“Yeah. That's about right,” I agreed.

“What could it be?” Kar Yee said.

Lon crossed his arms over his chest. “Had to come from the water. Cady saw it come in on a wave.”

“Mermaid,” Jupe said in a voice filled with equal parts terror and certainty. “I told you. Foxglove, she barks at something in the ocean.”

“We might be sixty miles or more away from our house, Jupe,” Lon said, but I could hear doubt in his voice. After all, La Sirena translated to exactly that: mermaid. Maybe there was some truth behind the town's name. Thing was, even though I'd seen a couple of Æthyrics running around loose, they couldn't stay here for any substantial length of time. They needed an earthly host to survive. That's how Earthbounds came into existence: demons stuffed into human bodies through a now-lost arcane spell.

But that thing outside was definitely
not
sporting a human body, and the ward on this boat wasn't freshly painted. The Heka that had charged it before the strike was dull. Barely visible. The captain must've had all this magical work erected a while back—maybe years—I explained to the group.

Lon raked his fingers through damp hair, pulling it back from his forehead. “What kind of Æthyric being could stay alive outside a human body for years?”

A raspy voice answered at the back of the cabin, “A Rusalka. Is she here?”

We all pivoted toward the bunk. Captain Christie was feeling the wound on his head as he looked up at us with bloodshot eyes.

“You're awake! Oh my God!” Jupe said, then lowered his voice. “Wait—are you okay? Do you know where you are?”

“My head is killing me, I know that. I'm a little fuzzy on the rest.”

“I'm so, so sorry,” Jupe said, almost close to tears.

But if Christie knew what the kid was blubbering about, he didn't show it. He only pushed himself up to his elbows and said, “What's going on?”

“Take it easy,” Lon cautioned. “You probably have a concussion.”

Well, at least he wasn't doomed to a life as a mute dullard. Jupe's knack wasn't permanent. Lesson learned the hard way.

I gave the old coot the lowdown. “Lightning struck the boat. Bridge is fried. Likewise the controls down the hall.”

“Oh, God! My poor girl,” he moaned.

“Yeah, well, there's more. The lightning took down your ward. We're in the middle of a nasty storm—same one that threw you around and knocked you out. Lon shot a few flares, but who knows if anyone saw them. And now there's a creature onboard, so I recharged the cloaking spell on this room. Your turn.”

“You're a magician?”

“It's your lucky day.”

“I knew that halo of yours was strange,” he muttered.

“Not as strange as what's in your kitchen.”

He groaned and sat up in the bed. “I first encountered her about ten years ago. She lives in Diablo Reef—where I was taking you. She used to live off the coast of an island between Russia and Japan called Shumshu. The guy who sold me this boat lured her over here in the nineties. She's . . . uh, intense.”

We all stared at him as he pointed toward the bite mark on his leg.

“She's Æthyric,” I said.

He nodded.

“Rusalka is a mythological Russian water spirit,” Lon argued. “A nymph.”

She damn sure didn't look like a nymph to me. Nymph sounded cute, sexy even. Not something you'd call a three-headed monster.

“That's just what the people who found her called her,” the captain said. “She's more like a water demon. A kind of mermaid.”

“
I knew it!
” Jupe whispered hotly, his body vibrating with excitement.

“How is she living on earth?” I asked.

“She's not exactly alive, per se.” The captain winced. “She's sort of dead.”

“Mermaid ghost?” Jupe said, seeming to increase in height a couple of inches as he prepared himself to be proven right and thus the winner of every argument he'd had with his father.

“More like a zombie. She used to be an Æthyric demon. According to her, some magician summoned her at the moment she was dying, and because of that she somehow got reanimated here. She says it happened three hundred years ago.”

“Zombie mermaid,” Jupe mouthed to me.

“Hold on,” Kar Yee said, eyes narrowed on Christie. “If I choose to believe all this crap, and the only reason I
might
is because I saw something climb up the window—”

The captain moaned and covered his eyes.

“And if you've warded the boat against this mermaid, and she's bit you, then I'm going to assume she's dangerous.”

“Deadly,” he confirmed.

“Is she like a siren?” Jupe asked. “Should we be covering our ears?”

“She lost that ability when she died. But if the ward's down, she'll do whatever it takes to get to me. She's tracked me down from a hundred miles away and almost killed three of my passengers before. We gotta get that ward up.” He looked at me with desperate, pleading eyes. “Can you recharge it?”

A specialized ward that big? It would be a struggle in the best of situations and take a hell of a lot more current than the batteries I'd tapped to charge the room. Would also require me to expose myself to the creature roaming the yacht for an extended amount of time.

“Absolutely not,” Lon said. “We need to call for help. Is there another VHF?”

He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. “A hand-held unit in the engine room.”

Lon looked at me. “I can make a run for it.”

“Fat chance,” the captain said. “She's got a wicked sense of smell. She'll be on you in seconds if she's anywhere on this boat.”

“Maybe I can use my knack on her,” Jupe suggested.

“No,” Lon and I said together.

Jupe grimaced and scratched the back of his neck. “Just trying to help.”

“Can she be killed?” Lon asked the captain. Then added, “Again?”