Leashing the Tempest
Page 14

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 e. t look 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?”
“Not that I know of. If she’s got tf shet a weakness, I’ve never discovered it. And I’ve been dealing with her for almost twenty years. Best thing you can do is hide.”
Screw that. I wasn’t sitting around in this tiny room waiting for someone to spot us. God only knew where we were, and the last thing the captain had told us before Jupe messed with his mind was that nothing was on the radar for miles.