Kraken (25 page)

“Sina. I stopped in, mentioned your gr— what happened at your old house, that the cops would probably be around today. She and Parker told me what they were planning. Maybe the police can help?”

Will gripped Aiden’s wrist. “Aiden, Mr. Falconer never called the cops. He’s like me. He was one of Cyrus’s . . . toys. No-one is coming.”

“Fuck.”

A cloud of gulls circling the stern haloed Sina , crying into the rising wind. She looked at Will appraisingly. Will had the distinct impression she wasn’t impressed.

“I came here to stop Cyrus,” Sina said. “But I didn’t know if you wanted to be with him or not. You made that pretty clear yesterday, though. I’m so sorry you had to wait. We had to make sure Cyrus placed that last stone: he wouldn’t have let it out of his hands otherwise.”

“Wait, so Parker didn’t find a stone?”

“Nope.” Aiden grinned, his teeth white in the growing gloom.

“Fuck.”

“I know. Cyrus is gonna be so pissed.”

“You don’t— Fuck. You don’t understand.” Aiden didn’t realize what Cyrus was capable of.

“It was worth it,” said Sina. “This will be our last chance. Cyrus will be too strong now. Even with only one stone in place . . . well, once you leave the island, it just . . . drifts away from your mind. You don’t remember it, or what’s happened here. You can’t get help, you don’t even know why you
want
help. That’s why no development, no change. No growth. But we have a tiny breathing space. Parker’s walking him overland.”

“Does Parker understand what Cyrus is likely to do to him when he realizes it was a fool’s errand?”

Sina shook her head. “No. But that was my decision, and not yours.”

“And who the fuck are you to make that decision?” said Will.

“I’m a bit like Cyrus. But he’s too dangerous now, too obvious. We can’t go around behaving like he does. We have to change too. He risks all of us.”

“So you sacrificed Parker?”

“Yes,” said Sina. “Sometimes the price is heavy. Let’s make it worth it, all right?”

Will shook his head. “I don’t know what to do. What we
can
do.”

“We get out of here, that’s what we do,” said Aiden.

“No, I can’t go. You can, though. I won’t blame you if you leave. I can’t run off and leave the monster. There’s always a boss fight. But I don’t know . . . Godsdammit.”

The stones. It had to be the stones. The beautiful, wonderful stones, that Cyrus had set in place. They had to come back up again. Will closed his eyes. He’d lose all this. He’d lose the water. He wanted to leave, to swim, go live with the sea otters and listen to the humpbacks sing at night. And he couldn’t.

“We have to get those stones back, at least. The ones you found, Aiden. Cyrus took them. I don’t know what they do, but I know they’re important. The third stone’s at the mine. The copper mine. And do you know a place on the other side of the island, the open sea side, with a lagoon, a small one, amongst rock cliffs.”

“Sure.”

“The other one’s there, in the very bottom of the lagoon. He showed it to me. Can you get me to both places?”

“We’ve got two, maybe three hours,” said Sina. “Probably less.”

“Then, no,” said Aiden. “Opposite directions by boat.”

“You don’t need to go to both. I’ll get the one at the mine,” said Sina.

Will shook his head. “You can’t. I saw dozens of mineshafts in the cliff. You won’t be able to find it. You’ll need me.”

Sina put her hand over Will’s. “I can find it. Mine won’t be the only eyes.”

He looked up at her sharply. “Exactly how much are you like Cyrus?”

“Not exactly. He’s water. And this is his territory. I’m from . . . somewhere else.”

“And what are you?”

“Air. The sky.” The longing in her voice startled him, and he wondered if he sounded the same.

“But I can find the stone. You get the second one.”

“So you can fly?”

“Yes. You didn’t notice me all around you?”

“Excuse me?”

“The birds.” She gestured around her at the swirling, squawking mass. “They’re mine. I set them to watch Cyrus. And you, of course, once you got here. Listen, Will, about Parker. I’m so sorry. I really didn’t know about you. I needed a reason to move onto the island, once we realized Cyrus was a little . . . out of control. Parker was just a means. I’m sorry you got caught in the crossfire.”

Will waved her explanation away. He was trying hard not to think about Parker, and what Cyrus would do to him. Parker had hurt him, yes, but whatever would happen to him now, he hadn’t deserved it. And Will knew that was out of his hands. But this wasn’t. The one goal that was burning in him was that he had to stop Cyrus.

“Look, you get the second stone, in the lagoon. It’s much further away.”

Sina shook her head. ”I can get there, but I can’t get to the stone if it’s underwater.”

“What if the one at the mine is underwater, then?”

“Nope, one stone for each element. If one is underwater then the one at the mine will be either air or earth.”

“Air? How would you put a stone in air?”

“As long as it wasn’t touching earth or liquid water, it’ll be OK.”

“This doesn’t make sense. You know they’re not really different, right? It’s all made up of the same molecules.”

Sina shrugged. “Magic? Supramolecular chemistry? Quantum physics?”

Will snorted. “Quantum physics does not explain why I can breathe water.”

Aiden stared at him. “The fuck? You can breathe water?”

Will just looked at him.

“So what do we do with them once we’ve got them?” said Aiden.

“I can take them away,” said Sina.

But then Cyrus might get them back. That wasn’t good enough. “Or we destroy them.”

“I pick that one,” said Aiden.

Will thought. “We could melt them. The melting point of obsidian is pretty damn close to that of copper. The smelter would take care of them. They’d become a puddle of glass. Would that stop them working?”

“Yes,” said Sina. “But we need to find the third stone. The one that was never moved, that’s kept his partial hold over the island. It could be anywhere. We can’t just home in on them, like radar.”

“Oh,” said Will. “I can. Kinda.” He thought. “I know exactly where it is. Trees. Three big, white, dead trees, in the middle of the forest.” The place where he felt that peaceful happy tingling for the first time, before he’d ever seen Cyrus. Before things started to hurt.

“I know them,” said Aiden.

“But we need someone to get coal for the furnace, and start it going before we get there.”

Aiden picked up the radio handset and waved it at him. “A doctor. Always by the radio: always on call. Lou will help us. And coal’s no problem, there’s a whole lot at the store. Good stuff. Anthracite. Mr. Falconer always orders plenty in case it’s a hard winter, but it was mild this year.”

“Do it,” said Will.

“Get the second one,” said Sina. “I’ll get the third. Even if we can only take out two, that will help. He’s slowly been losing control for years now with only one stone in place. I’ll meet you at the trees. Get going. Don’t stop.”

It seemed to Will to take hours to circle the coast and head for the back of the island. With every jolt of the boat against the waves Will imagined Cyrus taking another step closer to finding out Parker had lied. The salt air and the spray on his skin were soon joined by the pleasurable tingle across his nape. Will felt himself sagging and growing peaceful, but when he remembered he had to retrieve the stone the pleasure was replaced with violent unease.

The waves were increasing in size, whipping Aiden’s little boat from side to side as he wrestled with the wheel, a hundred yards out from the rocks.

“Don’t bother anchoring. Just keep her steady. I’ll be back soon.”

“Wait.” Aiden reached into a locker and pulled out a webbing weight belt, and a large block-like torch. “Waterproof.” Aiden shook the belt. “And this might help you get down to the bottom. Humans are a lot more buoyant than . . . anything from the sea.”

Will shucked his pants and slipped the belt around his waist, fastening the torch to it with a carabina clip.

“What if you stop being able to breathe?”

Will glanced up at him.

“When Sina takes the other stone? When you take this one. Will you stop being . . . whatever you are now? You could drown.”

Will shrugged. There was no point answering; there was nothing he could do about it. If he couldn’t bring the stone back up Cyrus would win anyway. He would much rather be taken by the ocean.

Will pulled off his clothes while the lemon-yellow tang of fear filled his gullet, colored with red hunger and a silver thread of single-minded desire. “Hey,” he said. “A kiss for luck?”

Will shivered as Aiden stepped closer, folding him against his warm body. There was no arousal from either of them, only a joint purpose, to share this one moment.

“I thought you didn’t believe in luck,” murmured Aiden.

“I thought you said I should give it a try.”

Their lips met, touching lightly, then Will pressed in harder and Aiden yielded to him, his tongue letting Will’s in beside it. Will licked Aiden’s palate, tasting and teasing. As he withdrew Aiden followed, pushing against Will’s cold lips as Will slowly moved his hips away, wishing there was any other answer than lowering himself into the steel gray water where teeth and hunger lurked. Aiden’s hands lingered on his arms, and Will jumped over the side into the darkness, while he could still muster the courage.

The cold and the tension sucked the strength from his lungs. He could see nothing, not even the thick swaying kelp stalks he could feel against his thighs. He had to raise his head out of the water to orient himself. The dead trees on the rocky beach offered a glimmering sliver of a beacon against the island. The last light reflected off fresh scars in the cliffs, but the water was already black.

He ducked his head under the water, lengthening his body in long strokes, aiming for the shore and the lagoon. The first solid blow against his body made him think that Aiden had lost control of the boat and run into him by accident. He turned his head to shout, only to see Aiden a good thirty feet away, the runabout pointed out to sea.

The next blow was to his thigh this time. It was exactly as if someone had struck him with a baseball bat: not exactly pain, rather an aching numbness. He put his hand down to his leg, and his fingers slipped inside his skin, to find an open flap of flesh. Now the pain started, radiating out from his leg until it filled his body like a vessel.

With fingertips dulled by cold he forced himself to gently probe the site of the pain. He found three deep wounds. He’d been bitten. These were teeth marks, and it was out there, circling now, perhaps, and coming back for more. He could see nothing, sense nothing . . . Oh, fuck, the hunger, the wanting . . . those weren’t his, they belonged to a fucking shark, and it was right here. He couldn’t use his leg properly, could hardly stay above the water. Will struggled towards the shore.

The third strike, to his hip, happened before he could even brace himself. He felt the teeth crunch down into his pelvis, the grinding pain something akin to Cyrus’s worst pleasures. The bone cracked, and Will screamed as the edges grated against each other. His fingers touched the shark this time, the skin rough enough to scrape the top layer of flesh from his arm as it shook him like a rag doll.

He reached down and jammed his thumb in the eye he could reach, as hard as he could. Oh, thank fuck, it released him, giving him a glancing blow with its solid tail as it swam past. The jarring blow against the broken bone brought him to the edge of consciousness. The pain was a solid red mass, blinding him, and making every conscious thought run off the rails of sanity. And yet threading through it Will could still feel the hunger, sense the shark circling, ready to return. To finish. He gasped in half water, half air, striking out desperately for shore against the fresh burst of pain.