Sea Fever (10 page)

to scream then, but his hands closed hard and bruising around her neck,

and it was too late.

Nick, she thought. Nick.

Too late.

Jericho’s fingers pressed. Her vision grayed. She slammed her foot

into his instep, tried to bring up her knee, clawed at his hands, his wrists.

He grunted, his fingers slackening. She lashed out with hands and feet.

He snarled and grabbed at her chest.

Burning. She smelled burning. Spots spangled the darkness behind

her eyes. Something stung the back of her neck. Jericho roared and threw

her into the wall. Her head thumped once, and then his forearm pressed,

an iron bar against her throat. Smoke filled her head, cut off her air.

Air. She raked his arm. She needed . . .

More sparks swam in the roaring dark, and then blackness

swallowed everything.

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* * *

Nick woke in front of the TV. His legs were cold. His cheek pressed

against the carpet. Chuck Norris was gone, replaced on the flickering

screen by some guy with a bunch of cars behind him, promising the best

deal in town.

Nick sat up slowly, rubbing his face. It felt late. His mom never let

him stay up this late. Where was his mom?

His mouth tasted funny. He stumbled to his feet and into the

bathroom, took a pee, drank some water from the plastic cup.

In the living room, he flopped down on the couch and thumbed the

remote. Nothing was on. Just grown-ups, sitting and smiling, selling

things. It must be really late. He squinted at the little blue numbers above

the TV. 3:37.

Nick got a funny feeling in his stomach. Had his mom just gone to

bed and left him lying on the floor? Without a blanket?

He got to his feet, more slowly this time, and shuffled to her

bedroom door. She slept with it cracked. So she could hear him, she said,

if he woke in the night.

“Mom?” he whispered.

No answer.

So he said it louder. “Mom.”

And again, “Mom.”

He pushed the door open. The covers on her bed were flat and

smooth. She wasn’t in it. Wasn’t there.

“Mom?” Real loud, this time, which was stupid, she must be in the

restaurant, she couldn’t hear him.

Nick didn’t like to go downstairs at night, didn’t want to go out on

the landing in the dark and the cold, down the iron stairs to the alley. The

kitchen was really big and dark, all corners and shadows, and the

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windows out front didn’t have any curtains, so anybody walking by could

see in.

But his mom should be upstairs by now.

He was mad at her because she wasn’t, and now he had to go

downstairs, past the Dumpster, in the dark.

What if something bad happened? What if she fell and couldn’t get

up, like the old lady in the commercial, and he had to call for help, call

Nonna or 9-1-1. Nick didn’t like to think about that, didn’t want to think

anything could happen to his mother. But she should be here.

He was shaking a little as he unlocked the door, as he crept out on

the landing. He wasn’t afraid. He was cold. He stood on the landing a

minute, getting up his nerve to go down the stairs, when a shadow slunk

from the deeper shadows around the Dumpster.

Nick’s toes curled on the rough, cold metal. Oh, jeez. Oh, shit. A rat.

Nick hated rats.

But then the shadow crossed into the moonlight of the graveled

parking strip, and he recognized the bushy tail, the golden eyes. Hercules.

So . . . okay. Nick drew a deep breath and ran down the steps to the

cracked concrete, hopping from one foot to the other as he fumbled with

the handle, as he yanked on the door. All the lights were on. Good. That

was good.

“Hey, Mom!”

The kitchen was empty.

His heart pounded in his chest, making it hard to breathe. “Mom?

Mom?”

But she wasn’t there.

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Seven

CALEB STILL HAD NIGHTMARES.

From Iraq, and from seven weeks ago, when he’d tangled with a

demon. The Army shrink said the dreams would get better over time. In

the meantime, he wrote Caleb a prescription.

Caleb never filled it. He swallowed enough pills to handle the pain

of his shattered leg; he wasn’t taking more to deal with nightmares. Now

when he woke, heart pounding, brain searing, drenched with sweat, he

reached for Maggie.

But it wasn’t a dream that woke him this time.

He rolled away from his wife and fumbled for the phone. “Hunter,”

he said, keeping his voice low.

Margred was already stirring, her warm, rounded body shifting

under the covers, her hand finding the small of his back as he swung his

legs out of bed.

Antonia’s voice pierced the fog of sleep. Caleb listened grimly, a

bad feeling in his gut.

“I’ll be right over. Take him upstairs.” He sat up straighter. “No,

don’t touch anything.”

“What is it?” Margred asked as he crossed to the dresser.

“Regina Barone.” Caleb tugged on a shirt. “She didn’t come home

last night.”

“She— But—” Margred’s eyes widened. “What happened?”

Caleb sat on the edge of the bed to tie his shoes. “That’s what I’m

going to find out.”

* * *

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More than an hour after his phone had rung in the dark, Caleb still

didn’t know if he’d been called to a crime scene.

Nothing in his initial walk-through suggested Regina was the victim

of violence. No mark of forced entry, no sign of a struggle, no ominous

note to suggest suicide or kidnapping. No vandalism, no robbery. The

previous day’s receipts were neatly totaled, the bank deposit bag in plain

sight beside the untouched register. Everything was clean, everything—except for a mop lying flat in the work aisle— in its place. That was the

good news.

The bad news was that Regina was simply gone. Vanished. And

until the state’s evidence team arrived to process the scene, Caleb had

almost nothing to go on.

He stood in the middle of the missing woman’s living room, a

shabby space brightened by the red blanket over the back of the couch,

the bits of green and gold sea glass hanging in the windows. The sun was

just beginning to rim the edges with light.

Caleb rubbed his face with his hand. It was going to be a long day.

Antonia scowled. “I’m not taking that boy anywhere. I just got him

down fifteen minutes ago.”

“I doubt he’s sleeping,” Caleb said.

He had spoken to Nick only briefly before going downstairs to rope

off the perimeter, stretching yellow crime scene tape across the sidewalk

in front and around the parking strip out back. And wouldn’t that give the

early morning fishermen something to talk about.

The boy had been crying but clear. He remembered the apartment

door had been locked and the kitchen door unlocked but closed. No, he

hadn’t seen his mother since dinnertime. After the movie. Seven? His big

eyes sought Caleb’s for confirmation. Reassurance. “She’s okay, isn’t

she?” he’d asked. “You’ll find her.”

Caleb didn’t have the answer the boy wanted. “That’s my job,” he’d

said gently.

Antonia’s mouth set in a stubborn line. “Boy’s better off in his own

bed.”

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“He would be,” Caleb agreed. “If I didn’t have to process the

apartment.”

“Why? You heard Nick. She never came home last night.”

“We think she never came home. That doesn’t mean we can’t learn

something from her things.”

“What things?”

He owed her an explanation. If not as Regina’s mother, then as his

boss the mayor. “Address book. Cell phone records. Credit card

statements. If we have a record of who she knows—”

“Christ Jesus, Cal, we know everybody she knows. And we know

who did this. That homeless guy, Jericho something. You need to go after

him.”

“I will,” Caleb promised. “As soon as I leave here. Right now I need

you to take Nick back to your place and wait.”

“Who’s going to open the restaurant?”

“Nobody. You’re closed until I can release the scene.”

Antonia’s hard mouth trembled. “You think she’s dead.”

“I’m not assuming anything at this point,” Caleb said evenly. Kinder

to keep what he hoped, what he feared, to himself. “Maybe she took a

walk. Visited a friend. But I’ve got to process the scene while the

potential for evidence is still there.”

He didn’t tell her that anything he found was unlikely to narrow the

field of suspects. There wasn’t a soul on the island who didn’t eat at

Antonia’s, whose prints or presence couldn’t be explained away.

“And what am I supposed to do? Besides go crazy?”

“Make me a list. Anybody she talked to, girlfriends maybe, anybody

who might have called her up in the middle of the night—”

“Regina wouldn’t leave Nicky.”

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That’s what Caleb figured, too. “Can you think of anything else that

might explain her disappearing for a couple hours? Drugs, alcohol,

anything like that?”

Antonia made a visible effort to pull herself together. “She drank in

high school. Same as you and everybody else. I don’t know what she did

in Boston. But if she got up to anything now, I’d have heard.”

Caleb nodded. On the island, you started working young and

drinking young. But if you had a problem, your neighbors talked about it.

Caleb knew. He’d grown up the son of a drunk.

“What about men? Boyfriends?”

“She won’t have anything to do with the island boys.”

“That could cause hard feelings. She complain about anybody

hanging around, giving her a hard time?”

Antonia crossed her arms. “You mean, besides your brother? Why

don’t you ask him where she is?”

Their gazes locked.

“I’ll talk to him,” Caleb said grimly.

If he could find him.

Caleb didn’t think his brother would hurt a woman. Not physically,

at least. But the fate of one human female wasn’t likely to concern him

too much either.

Margred claimed Dylan was really here on some kind of fact-finding

mission for the selkie prince.

Fine. If there were demons on World’s End, Caleb hoped the

merfolk were prepared to deal with them. Because in any selkie-demon

skirmish, humans were bound to lose.

Caleb couldn’t ignore the possibility that Dylan’s presence and

Regina’s disappearance were connected somehow. But neither could he

let speculation drive his investigation. People did shitty things to each

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other all the time. They might blame the devil, but it was mostly human

nature.

Caleb was damned if he knew why a demon would target a twenty-nine-year-old restaurant cook.

Dylan could tell him.

Too bad his brother was never around when Caleb needed him.

* * *

Dylan plunged into the wet, salty womb of the sea, felt the water

stroke his thick fur pelt and surround him like a lover. Here he was alive

in every strand and cell.

Here he was free.

He swam through the great green darkness, the cold salt tang.

Through streamers of light and pennants of kelp, past colonies of steely

black mussels and milky moon jellies. The beat of the surge was his

pulse, the rush of the waves better than breath. He spiraled down, drifted

up. No gravity. No responsibility.

Regina’s words hooked him like a barb, ripping at his peace. “You

try being responsible for somebody besides yourself sometime, and we’ll

talk.”

He dove deeper. He was responsible, damn it. He was here, wasn’t

he? Doing his job, obeying his prince.

Dylan exhaled in a cloud of silver bubbles. Not that he could tell

Regina that.

Not that she would understand or believe him if he did. Hard-headed, sharp-tongued Regina, with her quick laugh and hair-trigger

temper, was completely human.

And he was . . .

He had been human once. The thought was another barb. Had

believed himself human. Had imagined himself part of a family.

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A memory pulled at him, strong as any current: his mother, posing

them for a picture, ten-year-old Caleb with Lucy smiling on his lap, and

Dylan, already standing a little apart. He had known even then that he

was different, that things were about to change.

He hadn’t guessed how much.

He never thought he would be the one responsible for tearing their

family apart.

He raced through water dense with light and life; broke the surface

into the sharp, bright air of morning. The sea was his refuge, the place

where he could feel and move and breathe and be. But today he could not