He gripped her by the hair and rolled, slamming her head again and again against the deck, as drops of crimson fell across her face like molten wax. She mewled and moaned, her eyes rolling back to show their whites as he slammed her against the ground. From somewhere she found the strength to gouge at his face again with her nails, drawing a new thread of blood across his cheek. The ship seemed to lift and plummet with the force of their fight, but neither even noticed anymore.
Buckley pulled out of the reach of her fingernails and she used the moment to kick him away from her. Scuttling like a crab she moved toward the exit of the hold, but Buckley didn"t let her go. He staggered up and leaped over her, grabbing the black iron handle of the hold"s door and pulling it shut with a heavy thud. Then he pressed his back against it as she crawled toward him, eyes alight with hate.
"You"re not leaving here," he said simply.
"Neither are you," she hissed. She leaped, but Buckley was already in motion and her body barely touched his as he launched to the right. She grunted and struck the door, holding on to the wall for support. Her belly and thighs glistened with blood from the knife wound, and Buckley saw that his own shirt was stained forever with the blood of her life.
Or maybe it was his own. His neck and eye pulsed with pain and he could feel the hot stickiness of his own blood running down his ribs. "d.a.m.nitall," he gasped.
Buckley pushed himself off the deck, using the ship"s own yaw to help him as gravity momentarily shifted. He staggered backward until he collided with a stack of crates, and screamed out as the shock of impact stirred the exposed nerves of his eyeball. He could barely hold his head up straight but Ligeia was not giving up the fight, and neither could he. He would not be bested by a woman. Would NOT.
To his left, he saw one of the stacks of liquor crates that had shifted and spilled to the deck, shattering bottles of precious cargo. Inwardly he cursed at the loss, but then the reflection of the broken bottles from the light of his abandoned lamp caught his eye. He had an idea.
A smile lit his gored face. Ligeia held her gut with one hand, but the determination to kill was obvious in her eyes as she staggered toward him. Just before she reached him, Buckley lunged for the deck and came up with the neck of a broken bottle in his hand. Not slowing at all, he stabbed at her with all his waning might.
The jagged shards caught her in the right breast, encircling and ruining what just yesterday had been his favorite oral toy. The gla.s.s tore into her soft, milky flesh and blood sprayed Buckley as he twisted his hand. Lige-ia"s scream was deafening, but it didn"t slow Buckley, who wrenched out the makeshift knife. One glittering brown shard remained lodged in her chest. He stabbed at her again, but this time her arm blocked him, and the gla.s.s ripped open a gash across her biceps before slipping out into the open air beyond.
The force of his stab unbalanced him, and Buckley fell into Ligeia"s arms for the last time. She did not embrace him as she once had. Instead her teeth sunk deep into his shoulder and then gored their way up his neck. She ripped at his flesh with hunger, anger and desperation. Buckley could feel her strength waning; but he was on the brink of exhaustion himself. He shoved her away, and they both fell from each other to the deck, unbalanced. Around them the ship lifted and dipped with a force that would have turned Buckley white twenty-four hours before. But now, he barely noticed. All that mattered was the final duel between him and Ligeia. He no longer played to win. He only played to make sure that he wasn"t the only one to lose. And as he stared at Ligeia gasping and panting on the floor, blood coating her naked belly, his eyes lit on the one thing that might absolutely seal her fate. But the gambit would seal his own as well. As Buckley held a hand to his neck to stem the flow of his own blood, he found he no longer cared. His one overriding thought was simple.
Ligeia must die.
Chapter Forty-Four.
Bill kicked at the woman with his right leg, trying to hold her off and gain enough separation to pull the speargun from its "holster." She"d come at him out of nowhere, a nude flash of unbridled femininity with a mouth of teeth that were definitely not being shown simply to smile. She came at him with full intent to kill and eat, not necessarily in that order.
Now she circled him like a shark, waiting for him to make the wrong move.
"Un-f.u.c.kin"-believable," he whispered. "He"s really been bonin" a Siren. Or a really p.i.s.sy mermaid with a great voice."
One thing he knew she wasn"t, was human. She hung just out of his reach in the dark, slow current of the ocean, black hair rippling gently in the water behind her, eyes slitted to vengeful threats. Her b.r.e.a.s.t.s were bare, depending from her taut frame like an invitation, nipples already pointed and pink, waiting. And below the smooth white skin of her belly, he saw the smooth white skin of...
He stopped his admiration of her s.e.x when his eyes saw the rest of her. Her thighs changed from the alluring milky skin of a woman to silver-blue scales that glinted like metal at the touch of his headlamp"s glow. He whistled in his face mask.
She lunged at him then, and Bill gasped and fumbled for the speargun. He didn"t risk firing the gun with no chance to aim, but simply jabbed it at her. Ligeia dodged him easily and disappeared into the dark pa.s.sageway from which she"d come.
"Evan, come out, come out, wherever you are..." Bill said into the microphone. "Your fishy friend just asked me to dinner. Problem is, I"m the main course."
Static filled the headset for a moment and then Evan"s voice crackled in, for just a moment. "Workin" on it," Bill heard. "Hang on!"
Two arms slid up and around his side from behind, and a hand grabbed hold of his wrist holding the speargun. Bill struggled to turn, but she was strong. He couldn"t free his arm, couldn"t even move it. His only salvation turned out to be his oxygen tank. It barred her from chomping down on his neck, unless she released her hold on his arms. To solidify that difficulty, Bill pushed his legs backward and then brought his feet together. Effectively, he now held her TO him, preventing her from doing any fancy acrobatics to get around his air.
And then she spoke to him.
"You shouldn"t have come," she said. Her voice was liquid sweet. Beauty with a razor-blade smile.
Bill opened his mouth to answer, and then realized that she couldn"t have spoken to him...they were underwater.
"How..." he began, and then faltered.
"My voice is within you," she answered his unvoiced question. "I only need to touch you once to know you enough to talk. Of course, if we were above, I wouldn"t have to know you at all. I could simply use the air and sing. That always makes them try to know me."
"Why did you kill Sarah?" he asked.
From his headphones, Evan"s voice crackled. "What are you talking about, Bill? I didn"t kill Sarah, Ligeia did..."
"I know," Bill answered. "I was talking to her. Anytime you want to join us..."
Ligeia whispered coolly in his head. "She was in my way. Just as you are. I don"t like things to come between me and my husband."
"Husband?" Bill choked. "Evan"s been married to Sarah for years."
"Exactly," she answered. "That"s why we had a little talk last night when she came home. She wasn"t very receptive to sharing Evan. Neither, I have to admit, was I. With her...or you."
"With me?" Bill struggled to turn to see the face of the woman speaking silently to him, but his effort was cut short by one critical problem.
His mouth suddenly filled with water, not air.
And as he coughed out the cold brine, Ligeia let him go. He pushed away from her as soon as her grip relaxed, and that"s when he saw the true evil in her eyes. They almost glowed red in the amber beam of the low-beam flashlight.
But her eyes weren"t the focus of Bill"s panicked feeling. No. The focus was in her hands. A thin black piece of corrugated plastic tubing.
The tubing that fed him his air. In his head, he could hear Ligeia laughing, cold and reptilian cruel.
Bill started to scream, but the intake of water put a quick end to that.
Chapter Forty-Five.
June 12, 1887, 2:17 A.M.
The lamp remained where he had left it. Its light shed shadows over the dangling corpses of his crew...h.e.l.l, of his friends...above.
Buckley decided that he would reach that lamp if it was the last thing he did. Okay, second to last. There was one thing he had to do after he reached it.
He crawled past Ligeia, feeling the strength wane with every movement. He could barely see with his remaining eye, the pain was so bad. It crashed over him in waves of cold, hot and nausea. But it drove him too. He was sinking, that was clear. But he would not go alone. Behind him, he heard Ligeia struggling to move too...but he kept his eye on the goal and forced one hand in front of the other across the deck.
When he put one hand on the lantern, Buckley turned to see where Ligeia had crawled to. At first, he didn"t see her, but then his eye was drawn to his first mate"s corpse and the shadows surrounding it. Ligeia was there, hands gripping the dead man"s calves. When Buckley saw her head between the man"s legs, he scowled in disgust. What kind of foul creature could take pleasure in a dead man, a man she herself had killed...
But then she turned to look at him, lips and chin awash in blood. When she smiled, her teeth were shockingly white in the gloom, and then she turned back to Travers"s thigh. Buckley could see her mouth bite down on the man"s flesh, and her head twisted and pulled with obvious relish at Travers"s leg until a slab of still-red meat came back for her effort.
Ligeia smiled again and swallowed.
"I needed my strength back," she explained.
Buckley shook his head. "You"re a desecration!" He spit a wad of blood-seamed saliva to the deck at her feet. "You"ve killed them, can"t you leave them to eternity in peace?"
"I killed them for food," Ligeia said. "And after this day, I am going to need a lot of it. But every bite helps."
She pointed at the ragged wounds in her ruined breast and with the palm of her hand wiped away the trails of fresh blood there. The wound had begun to close already; no fresh blood was flowing.
At the same time, Buckley noticed that her belly had ceased to flow. "You"ve stopped bleeding?"
Ligeia laughed and stepped away from the body, and toward the captain once more. "I"m immortal, you foolish man. Do you think I would go through eternity bleeding from now on? You hurt me, yes, but now it"s time to heal. You, on the other hand..."
She didn"t finish her sentence because at that moment, the ship took another stomach-lifting plunge into an ocean trough before shooting back out, nose in the air, and then smashing down hard on the cap of a new wave.
In the hold, boxes moaned and shifted. Something smashed against the back wall and Buckley lost his footing and fell, sliding down the suddenly inclined deck along with bits of wood, gla.s.s and a pile of other debris. He moaned as his back smashed into the corner of a wooden crate, but held on to the lantern for dear life. Ligeia held on to Travers, mouth grinning wide with a horrible surety. She looked like a rookie soccer player who"d just scored the winning goal.
"You haven"t won yet, b.i.t.c.h," Buckley growled, and rolled himself off the crate to retreat into the shadows of the hold. He knew she"d follow. But before she did...
Buckley toppled a crate to the ground; as he"d bet, the fall shattered the lid, as well as a couple of bottles inside. Grabbing an unbroken one from inside the opened box, he held it by the bottom, and cracked off the top of its neck against the ship"s hull. Then he stepped past the crate to wait. He didn"t have to for long. He"d barely leaned back against the wall when she came for him.
Naked and beautiful as she"d been on their first night together, Ligeia stepped around the liquor crates and stopped. With one arm gently resting on the top of a wooden box, she leered at him, pursing her thick lips with exaggerated intent. Her belly glistened with perspiration, while her b.r.e.a.s.t.s heaved slightly, flushed as if from s.e.xual exertion. Her s.e.x also begged his attention; smooth as a schoolgirl, but achingly, swollenly mature, she lifted her leg to stretch, resting her foot on the ship"s wall so Buckley could see every inch of her with the last strength of his tortured eye.
"Will you miss me?" she asked in a dangerously false tone.
Buckley nodded, almost hypnotized by the full glamour of her flesh. She hadn"t looked so good to him in weeks. So vibrant. So lusciously fertile. So...
"I"ll spare you that," she threatened, and kicked her naked toes off the wall to walk through the gla.s.s toward him, oblivious to any pain from the splinters. Ligeia had only one purpose now, and nothing would stand in her way.
Buckley waited until she was just a yard away before he sprang. He thrust hard with the broken bottle top at her groin, connecting for just a second before she dodged out of the way. But she wasn"t fast enough; he"d cut her. The blood came fast, spilling out in seconds to coat and run down the delta of her thighs. Buckley was ashamed at the reaction the blood on her nakedness invoked in him, but it didn"t matter now. He knew that he"d be paying for all his sins soon enough.
Ligeia didn"t stop with just a feint away. She turned and attacked, hands clawed and teeth bared. Suddenly the glamour of desire was gone and her face seemed longer, meaner; her b.r.e.a.s.t.s tighter, pale. And Buckley caught the reflection of scales from her legs where the blood had not dripped.
She smashed into him full body, rolling him against the hull and to the floor. But Buckley countered with another stab from the bottle. It glanced off her arm, and she ignored it, teeth aiming straight for his neck. She pinned him there, half sitting, half fallen, with her incisors buried in his flesh. Buckley struggled to scream, but more so, he struggled to raise his arm. He could feel the rip of something in his throat, and a scalding cold constricted in his neck. Then his confused nerves dropped their hot-and-cold a.n.a.logies and just spasmed, sending an unbroken jolt of pain through his spine. Buckley slipped one arm back, and then raised it up along the wood of the hull. As Ligeia chewed on his living flesh, he brought down the arm again, smashing the half-full bottle as hard as he could against the back of her head. The force of the blow sent her teeth deeper into him, and he gagged as she broke through to his windpipe. A splash of rum trickled across his throat, burning like molten fire.
The blow stunned her, for a second, and Buckley pushed her body off him, all the while wheezing and crying b.l.o.o.d.y tears.
He pushed himself backward, crablike across the floor, and then undid the latch on the lantern he still had managed to hold on to. Ligeia raised her head, still obviously groggy from the blow, and blinked her eyes several times.
Buckley set the lantern down on the deck, and then slowly tipped it over, letting the oil spill out to mingle with the rum. There was a slight huff, and the alcohol and oil caught fire from the wick, and spread with a blue tongue across the deck.
"Good-bye, Ligeia," he said, picking up another loose bottle. Her eyes widened and she began to rise, but not before Captain James Buckley III rose to a crouch and swung, connecting the bottom of the full gla.s.s of spirits with her head. The bottle didn"t break the first time, or even the third. But on the fourth, as Ligeia lay unconscious in a pool of immortal blood, the gla.s.s did shatter, and the alcohol dripped down her beautiful skin with a golden kiss.
That"s when the fire really caught.
The room was spinning for Buckley, and his breath came in wet gasps, but he forced himself to stand one more time, to push against one of the last towers of crates standing in the hold. He was weak, and his arms wouldn"t stay stiff. Finally, he simply used his whole body and threw himself at the stack. With a little help from the toss of the ship, they went over, smashing down on Lige-ia"s body, and giving the flames more fuel to burn. Buckley lay on top of the pile, spent, as the wood of the crates began to crackle.
"Get up from this, b.i.t.c.h," he mumbled, as the flames singed at the back of his hair. He tried to push himself off the wood, but his body wouldn"t respond. His heart trembled at the thought of being burned alive, but then, he was going to be no matter where he lay, wasn"t he? "At least I"ll die on top," he chortled to himself.
The flames had now spread throughout the hold, following the splashes of alcohol and then gripping onto the wood beneath. In seconds, the room became an inferno, flames licking at the feet of the corpses hung in the entry, and roasting the body of Captain Buckley as he lay still half alive, near the hull.
From beneath him, a low, keening wail erupted, and then a high, searing song.
The Siren had awakened again, and called for help. There were none left on the ship to answer. But from outside the hull, a pounding began. It began almost silently, and then grew as if an army rattled on the hull of the burning Lady Luck.
Inside the hull, the crates burned with a white-hot fire, and bottles exploded like fireworks, feeding the fury. With every pop of gla.s.s, the orange of the fire magnified, rose, and then died back, until another explosion of fresh fuel came to take its place. When the precious cargo was fully consumed, the fire continued to burn hot, now consuming the very wood of the ship"s skin itself until its ferocity met with the anxious pounding from without.
And then the hull itself imploded, and the cool, life-saving waters of the sea poured into the hold of the ruined Lady Luck, along with a host of sharks, small whales and other large fish, called by the song.
But the song of the Siren was long since extinguished, her body a blackened husk on the hold"s floor. The ship sank fast, the hold"s walls collapsing further with the inrush of waves, and as it settled to the bottom of the bay just outside of Delilah"s port, the body of Ligeia spilled out to rest in the mud of the sea"s cool bottom, one blackened hand upraised, as if in a last plea for help.
It would be one hundred years before that help came, in the form of the blood of a young woman named Ca.s.sie.
Chapter Forty-Six.
Sirens were not Boy Scouts, Evan thought, as he worried the rope off the hook in the dark closet of a cabin. Thank G.o.d.
Ligeia had essentially hung him on a hook to come back for later, but he"d quickly realized that he could loosen the knot enough to bounce it off the hook. The next step was to find a way to get the rope off his wrists, and there, she"d done a pretty good job of imprisoning.
Evan heard a gurgling scream through his tiny headphones. Bill was in trouble and needed his help, but he was literally tied up.
He looked around the cramped s.p.a.ce to see if there was any sharp edge he might wear the rope against, but couldn"t find anything. Wood and bones did not a knife make.
Bill"s voice began to sputter, as if he were swallowing water. Evan swore. He couldn"t stay here and let his friend face Ligeia alone. Though what help he could be without hands, he didn"t know. Determined to find a way to do something, he gripped the door handle with both hands and twisted. It opened to a slight swoosh of displaced water, and Evan shambled out toward where he"d last seen his friend.
The twisting shadows of two people circled each other in the dark water just ahead. He moved closer, still trying to figure a way to free his hands. In his earphones, he heard Bill choking.
"Hang on, man," he answered. "I"m right nearby. I can see you, I just have to figure out how I can help."
Evan held his wrists over a jagged piece of wood sticking out from the broken hull. He tried sawing the rope back and forth on it, but quickly realized that it would take hours to free himself that way. No real edge, no friction. He shrugged and decided to at least try to buy Bill some recovery time.
"Coming in," he announced, and dove off the floor toward the two. He kicked hard with his feet, pushing with his bound hands for steerage through the otherwise quiet water. He saw the black air tube hanging off the back of Bill"s oxygen tank, a chain of bubbles rising from it toward the surface. Evan kicked his way closer to his friend, and with both hands reached out to the tube, shoving it toward the hole it should have been connected to. In his zeal, he collided with Bill and sent the both of them sinking toward the bottom.
Bubbles still rose from the tube and Evan saw Ligeia darting through the water straight at them. He fumbled again with the tube, positioning it over where it should connect, and then pushed hard, again. This time Bill rolled away, but Evan saw that the trail of bubbles seemed to have stopped. In seconds, he heard Bill"s coughing again, and a raw whisper of "Thanks, Evan. That did it."
And then Ligeia was there in front of him.
Evan twisted himself around 180 degrees and readied his feet to kick. As she turned with a smile to look at him, he unleashed his best right foot hook, straight to her jaw.
But Ligeia didn"t go down.