Blood Work (48 page)

“And you have
to admit, even after all the time you’ve been on the ship, you’re
still fascinated by the sharks.” Tom glanced at her, expression
slyly knowing.

She picked up
a toastie and shoved it in his mouth. “I’m here to cook, nothing
more. Watch the water. You lose another bait and Nick’ll have
your
head on a rope, bobbing in the water.”

He crunched on
the toastie and contemptuously jerked the rope. The tuna head shot
backwards through the water. The shark prowling by twisted
lightning fast and lunged after it. Snout and teeth surging out of
the water drew happy gasps from most people and cameras clicked
madly.

“Show off,”
Amaya said and moved away.

She spent a
while taking the tray of snacks around the guests on the ship. To a
person they were hyped up. Today was a record day. Eighteen
individual great whites and it was barely lunch time. And the
beasts were particularly playful. Both of the surface cages had
been put out and every diver was desperate to get in and experience
the great predators in their element.

Finishing with
the guests, Amaya made the rounds of the crew. Some were fishing
off the bow, though it didn’t seem to be going so well. Amaya asked
them to try for ocean whiting and promised to make lemon and herb
crumbs if they succeeded. She left them with a zeal in their eyes
for whiting. More were mid-decks operating the crane on the bottom
cage, including Nick.

Dr Nick
Carson, one of the leading authorities on great white sharks in the
world. When he wasn’t on the international lecture circuit, he was
most often found at the Neptune Islands, cataloguing tagged sharks,
tagging new ones and doing his best to dispel the ‘vicious killer’
myths around the beasts. It helped immensely that he was young,
handsome and charming. But none of those traits were why Amaya was
with him.

For her it was
something different, something deeper.

And, yeah, it
was just an added bonus that he had a cute arse.

Amaya slid in
beside him, her hand trailing over that arse lingeringly.

“Hey, babe.”
He leaned over the side of the ship, peering into the water. Dark
hair flopped over his forehead and into his blue eyes. Amaya’s
fingers itched with the need to brush it out of his way. He would
just shake his head and back it would go.

“Hungry?” she
asked.

“Nah.”

She handed him
a toastie anyway and he ate it, then reached for another one.

“Problem?” she
asked, looking over the side of the ship.

“Nah.”

The water was
a deep blue in the shade of the ship. Amaya could just make out the
shape of the bottom cage and the quick flitting fish around it.

“Then what’s
so interesting down there?”

“Dunno. Just
have a feeling, I guess. Like something bad is coming.” With
visible effort he lifted his gaze to her face and smiled
sheepishly. “Probably just hunger.”

Giving in,
Amaya fixed his hair. “Probably. Hot dogs for lunch today. How many
do you want?”

“Are they
proper hot dogs? Or just saveloys rolled up in bread?”

“I’ll never
live that down, will I?”

“Nope. Anyone
would think you’d never seen a real hot dog before. And you being a
chef and all.”

Amaya offered
him the last toastie. He took it and she batted him over the head
with the empty tray. He caught her around the waist and kissed her
hard.

Dropping the
tray, Amaya wrapped her arms around him and surrendered to the
kiss. Heat threaded through her body from the lips down, coiling
deep in her abdomen. He pushed her against the side of the ship,
bent her back over the railing.

“For Christ’s
sake, get a cabin,” Saul muttered.

Laughing, Nick
released Amaya. She wobbled a bit, and it wasn’t from the rocking
of the ship.

Saul Baker,
the ship’s engineer, scowled at them good naturedly.

“I’d better go
get lunch started.” Amaya picked up her tray and scurried away
before Nick could catch her again.

“Two,” Nick
called out after her.

She scrambled
up the steps to the upper deck and into the door leading down to
the galley. In her cramped kitchen, she hurriedly prepared lunch
for the guests and crew. Graeme helped her dispense the hot dogs
while they were warm, a caddy of sauces hung around his neck.

When everyone
was happily munching down, Amaya escaped to the mizzen deck with a
cup of tea and a book. Leaning against the mizzen mast, Amaya
surveyed the ship. She was the
Renata Rose
, a 1920s schooner
out of Holland, her original masts still standing proud even though
she’d had an engine installed in the forties. Refitted many times,
she was as hardy as any modern built ship, but with an old world
charm that drew many a person wishing to experience something
unique. For some, the draw was in the sharks the
Rose
chased
across the southern ocean. For others it was the sharks and the
ship, passing over the other tour operations utilising pristine,
sleek motor cruisers.

For Amaya, it
was Nick. His passion was great white sharks and he’d turned that
passion into a business by opening up his research to the public.
Of course, he charged them an arm and leg—hopefully not literally
(so he said in his ship safety speech)—for the pleasure of helping
him catalogue the shark population around the Neptune Islands off
the coast of South Australia. And Nick was Amaya’s passion. She’d
follow him anywhere.

Under the
warming sun of a southern, late autumn day and to the ragged chorus
of overjoyed shark enthusiasts, Amaya drifted into a shallow
trance. It was a relaxed state where her body was able to recharge
and the constraints on her thoughts eased.

Her awareness
spilled outward, a dam overrunning its banks. The minds on the ship
chatted at her with wild insistence. Excited, overwhelmed thoughts
crowded in around her. She pushed past them. If she wanted to hear
what the guests had to say, she would have sat on the deck with
them and listened with mundane ears. Instead she quested a bit
further and dipped down into the water.

Instincts were
clearer to read than thoughts. They were simple and direct. The
sharks were nothing but instinct. They swam and they looked for
food, they swam and they looked for a mate. When they found either,
they did what was necessary, then swam on. To do so, they had eight
sensory methods. Not five, or if you wanted to stretch it, six.
Eight. With that much information coming in, Amaya could understand
why there was no time for pesky things like conscious thought.

Life was so
much easier when instinct ruled.

She drifted
with the circling sharks, filtering all the complex information of
their senses into her own, trying to numb her mind to the screaming
demands of human existence. She wanted to float, to be swayed by
the currents, to answer to the call of hunger and lust only if she
wanted to, not because someone else deemed it normal.

Then, on the
edges of her perceptions, came something big. It was primal, pure
instinct, but its weight warped everything around it. Amaya had a
moment only to touch it, to recognise it, before a bright, sharp
lance of pain pulled her back onto the ship and into her body.

Stunned, she
looked at her hand, where she’d felt the pain. Nothing there.

Nick.

She was on her
feet and clattering down the stairs from the mizzen deck without
thought. Rushing back toward mid-deck brought her right to Nick and
Saul, coming in the other direction. Saul had a hand under Nick’s
arm, supporting him. Nick was bare-chested, holding the thick wad
of his rolled up shirt to his right hand. His face was pale.

“What
happened?” Amaya took Nick from Saul.

“It’s just a
cut,” Nick muttered.

“It’s nearly a
severed hand.” Saul opened the door to the stern companionway.

Grimacing,
Nick said, “I guess this is the bad thing I sensed.”

“Let’s hope
so,” Amaya said.

In Amaya and
Nick’s cabin, Amaya unwound the blood soaked shirt while Nick tried
not to show any pain. There was a deep slash right across the
middle of his palm. The flap of skin between thumb and first finger
was cut right through. When Amaya mopped away the blood, there were
glints of white bone for a second before red welled once more.

“How did it
happen?” Amaya asked Saul.

“We were
pulling up the bottom cage when a line snapped. Took him right
across the hand.”

The lines were
all steel wire an inch thick. It was a wonder Nick hadn’t lost
fingers, let alone his whole hand.

“Did the cage
get up okay?”

“Yeah.
Everything’s fine, except for Captain Courageous there.”

“Put a bandaid
on and I’ll be fine.” Nick’s voice was stretched around the pain
and sounded brittle.

“It’ll need
stitches,” Amaya said. “I’ll get Tom.” Tom doubled as their
medic.

“Stay and keep
up the show for the guests,” Nick said, trying for stern and
getting barely to firm.

“I hardly
think anyone’s going to care if they can’t –”

“Amaya. It’s a
record day. Keep them entertained and keep watching the tags. I
can’t let this opportunity to mark as many sharks as possible slip
by. Please?”

It was the
please that did it. He didn’t have to ask, but that he did meant
something to her.

Leaving Nick
with Saul, Amaya went and told Tom what had happened. He
immediately handed over the bait rope and went to tend Nick. Amaya
wasn’t fond of teasing the sharks, but if Nick wanted it, then she
would give it.

Amaya climbed
down the ladder to the rack.

“Where’s Tom
going?” Angelique, one of the American guests, asked. She was blond
and bubbly, used the word ‘awesome’ far too much and had a big
crush on Tom.

“To help
Nick,” Amaya said, moving to a corner of the rack. Though space on
the rack was a highly coveted thing, they gave her room happily
enough. Whosoever holds the tuna-rope is as God. “There was a small
accident. Just a cut hand,” she added hastily when the guests got
that OMG!-man-overboard! look.

To a chorus of
understanding ‘aahs’, Amaya stepped up onto the lower rung of the
railing around the rack. Bracing her knees against the upper rung,
she hauled in the tuna head. Like Pavlov dogs, the guests focused
on the water at the signal of the tuna-rope.

The men in the
crew preferred to stand on the deck and be up high to look for the
sharks. Amaya preferred to be on the rack. Closer to the water
meant she didn’t have to look for the sharks, she could just feel
them.

Easing into a
near trance, Amaya let her senses fly into the water once more.
Tuna-rope ready, she felt a shark approach and tossed the bait. The
shark crashed out of the water and down on the bait, but she pulled
it away in time. The guests oohed with appreciation and Amaya
repeated it.

She’d been at
it for about fifteen minutes, chatting with two tourists from South
Africa, when she felt it.

It was that
thick, primitive force she’d touched on the mizzen deck. It wasn’t
a shark, it wasn’t a predator of the ocean at all. It was a dark,
questing power created by grief and rage—two powerful emotions that
weren’t about to be denied.

There was a
moment for her to think, ‘Oh no, not again’, and then it drove deep
into her guts, digging in like a barbed hook. Gasping in pain,
Amaya lost her balance and tipped forward. The ocean full of sharks
rushed up to catch her.

Six months
ago, I took down one of the biggest, meanest supernatural beasties
in the world. They’re called Primals and they’re the
great-grandparents of the vampire race. Think mega-vampires that go
out in sunlight and swap bodies the way we swap undies. Scary, huh?
There’s seven of them, including the one I decapitated. She didn’t
die. They’re so immortal that nothing will ever get rid of them. I
suspect that if the Earth blew up, they’d still be there, floating
amongst the debris, bickering about who got sucked into the black
hole first. They’re that powerful. And I did for one of them in
about as total a way as anyone could.

With such a
big credential stuffed down the front of my pants, I was sure to be
in hot demand to dispense more supernatural arse kicking. Like a
lawyer that wins the un-winable case. Or the doctor that performs
the one in a million operation. Or the mechanic who works out what
that clunking noise in the back of your car is. Near god-like.

So why was I
head down, arse up, stuffed to my shoulders in some dusty, cobweb
filled hole reaching around blindly for something the size of a
rat?

“Have you got
it yet?”

Mrs Arnold’s
voice came to my ears very muffled. As it had to travel through
thick shag pile carpet laid down in the seventies, on top of
linoleum, which in turn sat on top of a layer of newspaper from the
Mesozoic era, it’s not surprising that what I heard was ‘Ham moo
moet?’ Luckily, I have ESP. Extra sensory presumption. It means I
have this unbelievable talent for guessing and occasionally, I get
it right.

“Not yet,” I
replied and didn’t bother wondering if she understood. In truth, I
was trying pretty hard not to breathe. The crawl space under Mrs
Arnold’s living room had not been crawled through by anything
larger than a stunted mouse for a very long time.

There was
about half a foot of dust upon which time’s tidal ebb had left a
mess of detritus. Said stunted mouse had died a while back and his
skeleton curled in the corner by my head. There were rusted nails;
scraps of newspaper; a dried out spider husk that might have very
well been the thing that killed the mouse (either scaring it to
death or by sitting on it); a coiled length of barbed wire that
seemed too new to have been lost before the laying down of the
geological strata of floor coverings, and things I couldn’t—or
didn’t want to—recognise.