Siren.

Chapter Thirty-Nine.

June 11, 1887, 12:59 A.M.

The crew"s quarters were empty. A blanket hung down from Cauldry"s cot, and Buckley"s militant side made a note to talk to the crewman about cleanliness. A man"s bed bespoke his mind. Disorderly linens defined a poor companion for a life-and-death mission; they spoke of a man not paying attention to the details. As far as the captain was concerned, every day on the ocean was a life-and-death endeavor. If you weren"t paying attention, the hooks of the deep would catch you unawares.

Captain Buckley moved slowly through the center of the ship, knowing that Ligeia could be waiting in every shadow. A part of him loved her, but none of him trusted her. He knew what she could do to a man. He"d watched her jaws in action, and afterward, had had to dispose of the bodies of men who were much stronger than he himself. If they could not resist her unbound hunger, could he hope to?

He might not succ.u.mb to her song as the others did, but still, the woman possessed a power, a violence, that he feared.

Buckley stepped on planks that creaked with his weight, as well as the tossing of the ship. His heart screamed at him to move faster, to get back to the wheel above. But his spine insisted on creeping through the guts of his ship like a thief; he wanted to surprise her, not be surprised by her.

The dark shadows of the crates of liquor flickered like black ghosts against the wooden walls of the hold, and Buckley stepped inside the crowded room, holding a lantern high. The light would give him away here, he knew. But he would not enter the otherwise black hold without it.

He stood at the entry, watching the orange glow slip back and forth across the wooden slats of the crates. Buckley watched for any movement at the side of the rows of cargo, and his shoulders started, twice, when the shadows themselves seemed to shift. But he quickly saw that those shifts were only tricks played by the light.

Ligeia was not here. Or, if she were, she was still and silent somewhere in the back of the hold. He knew he would have to walk through the room, peering at every crevice to a.s.sure himself that she weren"t secreted within. But despite his initial belief that she had gone from this place, if she had ever been in the hold at all, his feet were reluctant to step any farther forward.

Something cool dripped down his cheek, and Buckley absently wiped it away. He held the lamp out and tried to tease its light around the corner of the stack of crates nearest him, diminishing the shadow inch by inch.

She did not appear in the disrobed dark.

Something dripped again against his forehead, and this time, he wiped it away and looked up. The storm might be bad, but it shouldn"t have opened a breach in the upper deck.

That"s when he saw the b.l.o.o.d.y toes.

Buckley gasped as he took in the hairy legs of his first mate, hanging just a foot above his head. The thick black hair of the man"s calves was covered in streams of rich red blood, which ran in rivulets around the curve of his ankles and down the foot to his toes. As Buckley looked up, he saw that the blood stemmed from ragged gashes in the man"s belly and neck; his naked torso had been much violated before being strung up by the wrists from a beam on the ceiling.

But the first mate wasn"t the only one. Next to him, strung up from the rafter were the naked bodies of Jensen and Cauldry. Their heads all lolled at their chests, tongues protruding from angry mouths, congealed blood coating the thick hair of their chests in a sheen of death. How had he walked into the room without seeing their corpses hanging there?

"d.a.m.nitall," Buckley hissed. He lifted his hand and saw that it was smeared in the blood of his crew. He wiped it violently against his pants and stepped away from the men, a chill running up his spine.

"d.a.m.nitall," he said again. Anger bloomed in his heart. Buckley was not a man with a big heart. Some said he wasn"t a man with a heart at all. But he valued strong men who were loyal and worked hard. These were good men. And they had perished because of his weakness. Because of his need for the dangerous woman who had shared his cabin these past weeks.

"d.a.m.nitall," he whispered, and this time the exclamation brought tears from the corner of his eyes. The rocks wept. "I will kill you, Ligeia," he whispered. And with that, he began to quicken his pace, moving around the crates of liquor with the intent to surprise a deadly killer who lurked somewhere behind them. His fear at what surprising her would mean had fled. He didn"t fear for his life any longer.

No matter how good she had made his nights feel over the past few days and weeks, now he only wanted one thing.

He wanted Ligeia dead.

Chapter Forty.

The ocean was black. It surrounded him like a heavy leaden cape, threatening to close in. To smother him. Crush the breath from his feeble lungs until there wasn"t a hint of gasp left in his chest. It crept close and then darted away, a stealth a.s.sa.s.sin who, despite his quiet threat, was clearly visible everywhere. And creeping closer.

Evan blinked back his fear of the black with a thick throat. In his ears, Bill tried to offer rea.s.surance.

"You"re doing great, man. We"re under. You"re breathing good. All we have to do is swim a little ways down, out to the edge of the point. You can do this."

Evan didn"t think he could do this. The panic had returned in a big, bad way. His breath began to come in short, sharp gasps as he thought of where he was. In the water. Beneath the water. Covered by the water. Crushed by the...

"Evan, calm down, man. Slow the breathing. You"re going to hyperventilate. Move your arms. Follow me."

Evan closed his eyes for a moment, blotting out the claustrophobia of the dark water. When he reopened them, he trained the faint light of his headlamp on Bill"s feet, and redoubled the kicking of his flippers. He knew his friend was right. He had to focus on the task at hand and not let the fear own him.

But...

The water.

Was.

Everywhere.

Pressing against him.

Trying to find its way into his mouth.

Trying to smother him.

To kill him.

"Evan-f.u.c.king follow me," Bill"s voice yelled suddenly in his ear. "Think of Sarah!"

The thick suffocation that surrounded his body parted, a little, at the light he played upon it, and Evan focused on the kick of Bill"s flippers just a few feet ahead of him. "Follow," he whispered in his mask. "Follow."

"Yes," Bill"s voice echoed in his ears. "Just follow. Your suit will protect you from the water. From the Siren...that"s another story. I need you for that, Evan. I don"t know what I"m dealing with here, and you do. You know her. You have to help me."

Evan heard the slight admission of fear in his friend"s voice and realized, despite all of his p.r.o.nunciations of "Siren" before, that his friend had never really believed in the existence of Ligeia. What he"d thought Evan had been doing, he didn"t know. Why he had kept insisting that this liaison was one with an immortal, he didn"t know. Maybe Bill had simply been trying to give him an "out" for the expression of l.u.s.t that Bill knew Evan had needed.

Or maybe he just liked to bulls.h.i.t, a.s.suming he"d never have to face the consequence.

Either way, they were here now, fifty feet below the ocean"s waves, swimming toward the woman who Evan knew was more than a woman. She looked enough like a human woman to pa.s.s a cursory glance. But he knew that she was more than that.

This woman could breathe beneath the waves and kill men with a song.

This woman was deadly.

And they were swimming toward the very center of her power. An old shipwreck rotted with one hundred years of neglect on the bottom of the bay.

"There it is," Bill said quietly. "This is the ship I saw the last time I was down here. Is this where she took you?"

Evan trained the yellow glow of his headlamp on the green-coated hull of an old shipwreck slowly emerging from the shadows before them. The boat was buried half in the muck of the bay, but Evan recognized it instantly as the place he had escaped from this morning.

"That"s it," he acknowledged. "That"s where Ligeia lives. That"s where Sarah is."

The admission gave him a new energy, and suddenly the feeling of claustrophobia receded as in its place, the anger grew.

She was there. Just ahead. It seemed like a long time since he"d been here last, and at the same time, just a little while before. Evan fingered the tube of the speargun at his side and a slow grin lit his face.

"You"re going to die, b.i.t.c.h," he whispered, forgetting that Bill heard his every word.

"Thatta boy," Bill answered, and kicked harder in the dark to descend toward the gaping black hole that their headlights defined in the ship"s hull. "Let"s go get her."

Evan followed Bill"s legs down toward the ocean floor, but when they neared the rotted hull of the old ship, Evan slowed, and then broke away from Bill"s lead.

"Wait a minute," he said, and kicked his feet and pushed out his palms, pushing himself close to the bottom. He looked out at the hole in the ship and tried to imagine the trajectory of his escape this morning.

"What are you doing?" Bill"s voice asked.

"She"s down here," Evan said, and his friend didn"t have to ask what he meant. Instead, Bill turned and trained his headlamp on the ocean floor, above where Evan swam, helping to illuminate a wider surface area.

The cold white of her dead flesh was not too hard to find, even in the wide span of the ocean. Evan had known Sarah"s body rested near the hole in the hull, and once he began looking, in seconds his spotlight had found her resting place, trailed up the cool flesh of her arm, and then the pale pink hole that showed an unnatural entry to her neck. His light found the open, frightened pale blue orbs of her dead eyes, staring up still toward the sky she would never see again.

In his ear, he heard Bill"s intake of breath upon seeing the body.

"I told you she was here," Evan said quietly.

"Let"s take care of the reason for that," Bill answered, "and then we"ll take her home."

Evan nodded, but still he pushed himself lower in the water, down to the ground. He swam inches from Sarah"s corpse, and pressed his face-masked eyes to hers. "I"m sorry," he said. It wasn"t enough, but it was all he could say.

Then he looked up at Bill, still hanging just a few feet away. Evan pointed toward the dark opening in the broken ship"s hull, and nodded his head in the dull light of his friend"s flash. "Let"s go," he agreed.

Vicky Blanchard couldn"t sleep. Maybe it was because she was afraid of having another nightmare thanks to Evan. She tossed and turned in her bed, alternately kicking the sheets aside, and then pulling them back to hide in the fetal position beneath their warmth. Something about Evan"s situation was really bothering her. She felt twitchy; and when Vicky felt that jumpy feeling in her legs and her gut, it usually meant one of two things: either she"d drank one too many cups of caffeine, or her sixth sense was warning her that something bad was about to happen.

And Vicky hadn"t had any coffee today.

Giving out one long, exasperated sigh, Vicky got back out of bed and pulled on a pair of sweatpants. She wished her head would either work in full "psychic" mode, or give it up entirely. She hated these feelings that she couldn"t do anything about until it was too late, and the reason for her unease became apparent. When they grabbed her like this, there would be no rest until the reason was revealed.

Donning a light jacket, she left the house and decided to take a walk. Perhaps the exertion would tire out her mind so that she could finally get some rest.

She headed away from town, and in a few minutes had pa.s.sed the din of The Sand Trap bar on Fifth Avenue. For a minute, she toyed with the idea of stepping inside, but she really wasn"t in the mood to be social right now, and didn"t want to run into one of her patients trying to drown their problems. There was nothing worse than playing bedside confessor to a drunk.

Vicky pa.s.sed by the bar and stepped up the path of the dunes until she suddenly could see the black sliver of the bay ahead. She shivered in the cool breeze blowing in off the water, and quickly shuffled back down the sand, kicking off her shoes once she reached the flatter, harder packed beach.

Just ahead, she thought she saw a movement down by the water, and she slowed her step. She didn"t want to surprise anyone who didn"t want to be seen. But as she approached Gull"s Point, she realized that n.o.body was there. Maybe it had been the shadows of a cloud overhead, or the scuttle of a night bird.

Vicky stopped just short of the long, rocky finger of the point, and stared down its silent length and into the gentle surf beyond.

She considered Evan"s stories of meeting a woman here, night after night. A woman who seemed to be of the water. A woman who could have pa.s.sed as the legendary Siren of Delilah. She shivered at the thought and shook her head.

No.

Vicky did not believe in folklore. The facts behind such stories had more to do with the needs of the people telling them than they did of any objective reality. She wondered if Evan"s delusion were a way for him to rationalize an infidelity, or if, and this is what she truly feared, that his fear of the water had generated some kind of suicidal fantasy that was ultimately going to end with a police report and a file photo of Evan"s corpse, facedown in the water?

She picked up a sh.e.l.l and tossed it into the bay. The breeze was picking up again, and after a few minutes she turned away from the water and began to walk back toward town.

If she had arrived at the point just a few minutes sooner, she might have seen Evan and Bill descending into the dark waves, beneath where her discarded seash.e.l.l sank. Vicky"s sixth sense was definitely working...but it simply hadn"t woken her to action soon enough.

Behind her, and beneath the waves, Bill and Evan silently entered a sunken ship.

Chapter Forty-One.

June 12, 1887, 1:57 A.M.

Captain Buckley felt the burn in his chest and couldn"t have sworn whether it was from his anger or his fear. His hands felt cold and brittle as he rubbed the circulation into them and stepped quietly around the boxes of the storeroom. His feet slid in something slippery on the floor. He knew without looking that it was a pool of the blood of his crew.

d.a.m.nitall. His crew. He had looked the other way at her first kill, and then her second. He had aided her as she began to eat her way through his men. But he"d never thought she"d take all of them. He"d never thought that she"d take Travers or Reg. The thought of that made him angry, but also chilled. Any woman who could take down Reg...was no woman.

Buckley moved back out of the hold and through the empty crew"s bunks. Jensen and Cauldry would never hide a fish beneath the other"s pillow here again, he thought.

He stopped at his own cabin and verified that the room remained populated only by the dead. She hadn"t slipped back in here after he"d walked past to wait. Buckley pulled the cabin door shut behind him and continued his quiet, deliberate walk forward.

The ship strained against the wind and waves, and every few steps the captain stopped and held the wall for support until the old boat steadied. He pa.s.sed the galley, and stared into the shadows at the corner of the room. She was not there. n.o.body was there. Buckley continued on down the narrow pa.s.sageway that was the spine of his ship. He knew this wood by heart; his feet had walked these planks every day at every hour, for too many years to count. But now, in this moment, his ship felt alien to him. Instead of a mother, a symbiotic protector, it felt like a killer. Something waited for him in its hidden depths. Something cruel.

He opened the door to a storage compartment and saw nothing but coils of rope there. There were precious few places belowdecks where someone could hide, and he had nearly reached the end of the options. Buckley ducked his head below a beam and stepped into the smaller hold at the front of the ship. He didn"t expect that Ligeia would be here; it was just a room that arched up from the ship"s keel to the triangular point of the longest stretch of the upper deck. It wasn"t much good for storage, so all manner of odds and ends collected here, from broken crates to fishing nets, strewn along the narrowing, claustrophobic walls like traps. Buckley stepped carefully through the mess, his lamp flickering like a ghost against the stained and blackened wood.

Something moved the wrong way in the shadows on the wall.

Buckley froze.

A bucket set just at the edge of the dark fell over and rolled down the planks to rest at the toe of his boots. The captain drew in a sharp breath, but held his ground. "Ligeia," he said quietly, in the most steely of voices. "I know what you"ve done. Come out, please."

A shadow slipped past one of the fishnets hanging from the wall at the narrowest section of the hull. Buckley saw something flash, cat"s-eye luminescent, in the dark. He edged toward where the motion had been. "Ligeia," he said. "Stop."

A shuffle just ahead. Wood sc.r.a.ping wood. And a hollow clatter as something fell from the wall to echo on the floor. Buckley took a chance and leaped forward at the noise. His stomach caught in his throat as he took the leap, praying that his fingers would connect with flesh, and not a net full of hooks.

Instead, he connected with nothing. His hands grasped empty air, and Buckley stumbled forward off balance, before one hand touched the rough-hewn planks of the hull. And then something sharp and cool slipped along the back of his neck.

Buckley drew in a sharp breath and flipped around. The glow of his lamp reflected off the rusted metal of an old hook dangling from a rolled length of fishnet propped against the wall and crooked at its top as it reached and tried to exceed the ceiling.

He grumbled in disgust and pushed past the hook back out to the pa.s.sageway. She wasn"t in the storage room. She wasn"t in the hold. Could she have decided to make a run for it, now that her meals were done here? Could she swim to sh.o.r.e from this far in the ocean? Did the distance matter to one such as her?