Shadows of Falling Night (42 page)

Farmer smiled, a remarkably evil expression. “So we’re in a
heads I win, tails I win really big
situation here, with some
and bitch, you did it to yourself
thrown in?”

Anjali frowned thoughtfully, and then smiled herself; her smile was much more restrained, but held an equal degree of sly wickedness. For a moment they all shared the pure pleasure of doing unto someone else they truly hated.

Think of it as a bonding experience,
Harvey thought.

“Dude, that is diabolical,” Farmer said. “I think we made the right decision.”

“I do try,” Harvey said. “And the Brotherhood knows about her plague, and she don’t know that we know, so that’s taken care of ’cause we have the vaccine stockpiled. Whereas if the dinosaurs on the Council were to do their EMP thing, we would just be purely so screwed. It’s a case where
very evil, very powerful and very stupid
actually is more dangerous than
very evil, very powerful and very smart
.”

“Can you tell specifically what Adrian is trying to do?” Anjali said, bringing the conversation back to tactics.

“His Wreakings do tend to have that certain tangy barbecue flavor,” Harvey said. “Right now I’d say he’s just trying to find us and our little bundle of joy. If he starts trying to cast bane, I’ll know it’s him. Problem is, in that event we’re really going to need that help from the would-be bitch goddess of the universe.”

“Let’s hope he doesn’t find us, then,” Farmer said.

“Well, about that…So long as he knows where we’re headed he really don’t have to know exactly where we are for a while.”

“But? Oh wise one, enlighten us,” Anjali said sarcastically.

“Sailin’ straight into Batumi ain’t our only option. This gulet is a mite more flexible than your average container freighter. Those giant floatin’ shoeboxes need a lot more infrastructure.”

CHAPTER NINETEEN

The Black Sea

A
drian stood on the prow of the
Tulip
. It was rising and falling with a long, very shallow sweep; the wind was out of the north, and the gulet motored along at a conservative nine knots, foam breaking from the prow in a broad V. The wind was cold on his naked form, and the stars that shone so many and bright above were somehow even colder. The burble of the diesel was oddly reduced by the intense silence of the night, the distances drinking it down; they were well off the usual shipping lanes, and there were not even the lights of an aircraft to disturb a scene that might have seen
Argo
making home from Colchis. Moonlight glittered on the waves, making a sky-road that seemed to dare the ship to take the upward path to worlds beyond the world.

“I don’t like this idea,” Ellen said. “I particularly don’t like us splitting
up. What is this movie,
Teens Die Because They Shower And Fornicate In Scary Old House/Cabin in the Woods, Part XVII
? Is this the seagoing version where we split up and dive into the water instead of doing it in the basement with candles and monsters?”

Eric and Peter were jarred into laughter; Cheba looked at them with a mixture of incomprehension and disgust.

“Only Adrian is diving into the water,” she said. “And what is this about a movie? And we have plenty of monsters.”

Adrian shrugged, as Eric leaned close and whispered into Cheba’s ear.

“I don’t like it either,” Adrian said to Ellen. Then he smiled slightly. “In a sense, we’re not—I am still in the stateroom.”

She prodded him with a finger. “Don’t you try to soothe me, buster,” she said. “
That’s
you, and I don’t want to be married to a comatose body.”

He was nightwalking, of course, but with his aetheric body this palpable the finger felt just as it would to his physical one.

“We need the data. Harvey is concealing himself far too well, Peter’s device is working very well indeed…and I think some other force is seeking to thwart me as well.”

“
Her.
”

“Probably. But I cannot be sure.”

She sighed and stepped back. He stroked a strand of bright hair from her forehead.

Peter had an aluminum case in his hands, attached to an improvised harness of webbing. “This is ready to go,” he said, as Ellen took it from his hands. “It’s fully waterproof to two hundred feet and it’s powered for twelve hours.”

Adrian looked up at the sky. “Just put her nose into the wind if the weather turns dirty; and that can happen very quickly this time of year. There’s that sea-anchor ready if necessary.”

The slight blond man nodded. “We’re taking turns monitoring the weather channels.”

Adrian kissed his wife lightly on the lips, smiled at them all, turned, and ran out the bowsprit. A leap, the whisper of Mhabrogast through his mind, and he
twisted
…

And a dolphin clove the water. Down into the mild warmth…up again, soaring, his eyes flexing automatically to see through air as well as water, down again, threading air and water like a needle, a delirium of fluid speed, the water tasting of fuel (foul) and not-quite-salty enough and fish (
fish! fish!
). Vision was sharp, but hearing was the
world
. He hung in infinite space, and around him was a galaxy of sound-stars, the dull red booming of ship’s motors, the creaking hiss of the wooden sailing ship, the distant rumble of waves on shores, the creaking whistling surging tide of
life
down to the voices of far-distant swimmers and the song of a distant pod of his own kind.

Sound not through ears, but heard with his whole body as its instrument. Sound like the touch of feather-light fingers on every object, even the surface of the abyssal depth below.

“Adrian!”

He heard that too. Ellen’s voice was a thing of richness, a sculptured solidity of rolling form, a tower of location that was precisely
there
. There was no gap between the sound of a thing and the thing itself; they were
one
, as scent was to a wolf. He soared out of the water again in a twisting leap that was a dance of love and longing.

“Here, Adrian!”

He remembered being a man; that was easier in this form than in many, simply because there was so much more brain to work with. The problem was that he didn’t remember it in the same
way,
while the Shadowspawn consciousness curled at the base of the brainstem struggled to
assert itself. After a moment it did, and he rose out of the water, dancing on his tail with more than half the sleek torpedo-shaped body in the air, rolling an eye at her and grinning. She leant down on the ladder that had been thrust over the side, and extended the harness.

He hated the thought of it interfering with the flow of the water over his skin, but it was necessary. She slipped it over his head and cinched it around his trunk behind the forefins with a single movement, and he nuzzled at her. She had no scent—disconcerting to his memories, for most forms had better noses than men or even Shadowspawn—but the very sound of her heart outlined her form. He felt an overwhelming impulse to passionately bite the saucy flauntingness of her beautiful dorsal fin, which caused a momentary mental stutter, starting with the fact that he still knew at some level that she didn’t have one. The dolphin part of his consciousness then decided it didn’t care…

A hand smoothed his head; he whistled and dove.

Ellen stared out over the ocean and took another bite of the burrito without bothering to taste it. She supposed it was a burrito; there were various things including meat inside something like either a tortilla or a pita. She needed fuel if she was going to worry effectively.

“Thanks, Cheba,” she said. “I should take a turn at that. So should Peter—he’s not busy with the engines.”

“I cook better than you do,” Cheba pointed out, and handed her a cup of strong coffee to go with it. “None of the men can cook, except the
jefe
, and he does not have time even when he is not turning into something strange or fighting or doing the things he does.”

“Peter can cook.”

“He can cook things I do not like, they’re all…what’s the word, food with no real taste, too smooth…”

“Bland.”

“
Sí
, bland. I need to have something to do, anyway.”

Ellen’s mouth turned up wryly. She hadn’t had time to get
really
worried yet; Adrian had only been gone for an hour or so…

“But I don’t like the look of that at
all
,” she said suddenly.

A fin had just broken the surface for an instant, creamy off-white in the moonlight, with a little curl of foam to either side. Then it turned and bored towards the
Tulip
, the fin vanishing and nothing but a huge pale streak showing through the water, fading as it went deeper. She went to the rail and looked over. Then the whole ship lurched and shook, as if it had brushed over a rock…though she knew that there was nothing below but very deep water and the seabed. She dropped the half-eaten wrap and the coffee cup overboard with a yell as she pitched forward and the rail struck her across the waist and she started to topple. Cheba grabbed her by the back of her jacket’s belt and heaved backward, enough for her to stagger back to equilibrium.

“Thanks!” she said fervently. “Whatever that is I
sure
don’t want to go swimming with it!”

Eric came boiling out of the hatchway. “What the hell was that?”

“I don’t know,” she said.

Peter came out of the deckhouse as she pointed to the other side of the vessel; the little ship had an effective autopilot. The fin showed again, and he leveled his binoculars.

“That is a big shark,” Cheba said. “A very big shark. There are sharks like that off Veracruz—one of my mother’s cousins saw them there and there was a picture in the newspaper of one that ate some
touristas
.”

“Uh, guys, are those things supposed to live around here?” Ellen asked.

“Fuck if I know,” Eric said. “That’s a big-ass shark, right? As in
Jaws
?”

“It’s a Great White,” Peter said. He let the binoculars hang on their strap, and his fingers danced across his tablet doing some impromptu research. “Ah…no, they don’t have them in the Black Sea. Not more than a few miles away from the Bosporus, at least.”

They all looked at each other. The children came out, sleepy in their pajamas, and the three adults made simultaneous preventative grabs as they headed for the rail.

“Hello,
Maman
!” Leon called, and he and his sister waved.

“
Mierda
,” Eric said.

“That’s Mom,” Leila said cheerfully. Her small, still slightly chubby face went abstracted for a moment. “She’s feeling…well, she’s a fish, she’s really funny when she’s a fish. It’s
Maman
, but not, you know? She said you have to be always careful with her when she’s a big fish.”

“Big fish just bite without thinking about it,” Leon amplified, reciting his safety lesson. Then he snapped his teeth together: “Chomp! Chomp!”

Peter began whistling a tune; after a moment Ellen recognized it as “Farewell, Ye Ladies of Spain.”

“Stop that!” she said.

“Okay,” he said equably and shifted to the theme from
Jaws
.

“Dammit, I know I started it, Peter, but my husband is in the water with that thing!”

“Except for this boat,
we’re
in the water with it,” he said soberly.

Eric smiled, or at least showed his teeth. “Or vice versa,” he said, and disappeared as the fin circled, easily keeping pace with the ship.

The half burrito lay heavily on Ellen’s stomach. A few minutes later
Eric emerged again, taking something wrapped in a length of plastic out of a sack of the same improvised-looking devices.

“Cousin of mine used to go midnight fishing for rainbow trout this way in Lake Bonito, over by Alamogordo,” he said. “That is one honking big fish, but the principle’s the same. I made up these on general principles ’cause we were on the water.”

He did something to the package, a jerking motion, shouted:
“¡Oye, tu! ¡Puta! ¿Qué es tu pinche problema?”
and threw it with a hard snapping motion that showed he’d played baseball once.