Waking Storms (2 page)

That bewildered her, again. “Certainly nothing I couldn’t handle without help from the FBI!” She gaped at them. “Don’t you have more important things to worry about than an outburst from a fifteen-year-old boy?”

“In this case, ma’am, we think it might be important.”

“A tenth grader didn’t
care
for T. S. Eliot. Send in the feds!” Her voice was heavy with sarcasm. The agents were glowering at her.

“Just describe the incident. Ma’am.” The politeness was slipping now.

“Well ... It was only that we were reading ‘Prufrock’ in class. We reached the closing stanzas, about the mermaids. And Dorian Hurst became very upset, for some reason. He jumped out of his seat and started yelling. But he’s generally been a very good student since he enrolled here.”

The two men were obviously trying to keep their faces smooth and vacant, but something excited and a little disturbing started to show in the quick pointed looks passing between them.

“And what did Dorian say?” It was the smaller man speaking now. He had hanging jowls and a high, almost girlish voice. Mrs. Muggeridge thought it contrasted unpleasantly with his blocky gray face.

“He said that if Prufrock had
really
heard the mermaids singing, he wouldn’t have lived to talk about it.” An eager twitch passed through the shoulders of the taller agent. He leaned in on her, and his blue eyes were as brittle as hunks of ice. But why on earth did he care? “It was a peculiar detail to quarrel with, but Dorian seemed very passionate about it. He accused Eliot of pretending we don’t have to die.”

“I thought you said the name was Prufrock?” It was the shorter agent squeaking again. Mrs. Muggeridge looked at him with fresh outrage.

“T. S. Eliot is the poet who
wrote
‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’! How can you be so ig—” Mrs. Muggeridge stifled a number of extremely rude endings to the sentence.

“Did he say anything else?” The tall man sounded bored.

“That was all I
let
him say. He was being disruptive, so I asked him to step out of class.” The shorter man’s upper lip suddenly jerked up in sneer, as if Mrs. Muggeridge had just confessed to doing something extremely stupid. It was all too much for her. “Now, would you
please
explain why all of this is important?”

“We don’t discuss ongoing investigations, ma’am.” The tall agent turned abruptly toward the door, rapping a pen against his mouth.

“Do you know anything about Dorian’s family?” The short agent twittered the question in a shrill, malicious tone. His eyebrows arched suggestively. The tall one swung back around, shooting what was obviously meant to be a quelling glance at his partner, but the little man only grinned.

“His family? No, I don’t. I think someone mentioned that he doesn’t live with his biological parents, but that isn’t so uncommon.”

“They’re dead, is why. Sister, too. They all died in June.” He seemed to enjoy the look of shock on Mrs. Muggeridge’s face. “Drowned.”

Mrs. Muggeridge felt her mouth fall into an O of dismay as the tall agent jerked his partner’s arm and towed him from the room. She stumbled a few steps to the sofa and flopped down, leaning her head on her hands. “Oh, that poor boy!” She gasped the words out loud. “Oh, no
wonder
he was so upset!”

It still didn’t explain why they were so interested, though. Not unless they thought Dorian was hiding something.

***

His father’s second cousin once removed Lindy and her husband, Elias, had made it clear that they didn’t want to keep Dorian permanently. They were too old and tired to cope with a teenager. It was just their bad luck that they happened to live right in the town where he’d literally washed up and that his parents had included their phone number on some form they’d filled out. The result was that Dorian had been left with them more or less by default. They reminded him occasionally that this was just a temporary arrangement until something
better
could be worked out, but since nobody else was exactly clamoring to take over as his guardian, he had the impression that he’d probably be stuck with them for a while. They acted skittish around him, mincing and whispering in a way that made him queasy and impatient. The only good thing he could say for them was that they’d at least followed the psychologist’s advice to keep quiet about his connection to the sinking of the
Dear Melissa.
No one in his school knew he’d been on the ship, not even the principal, and he liked it that way. If everyone had kept asking him questions about it, he was pretty sure he would have gone insane.

He’d been asked way too many questions already, by a parade of out-of-towners flown in to investigate the ship’s crash. Therapists and cops, insurance agents, and even someone who claimed to be from the FBI. What had happened? Had he noticed anything unusual? And, of course, how on earth had he swum twelve miles alone in less than an hour? Some of them seemed to doubt that he’d been on the ship at all, though his name was right there on the passenger manifest.

He gave the same answers to all of them: he didn’t remember anything. He’d been standing on the deck, and everything had gone black. He’d come to on the shore.

It had turned into a kind of game. They asked the same questions; he gave the same answers. Like some kind of nightmare merry-go-round: I
don’t remember, I don’t remember, I don’t remember.

He wasn’t about to tell them that he’d been rescued by a killer mermaid.

His reserve wasn’t only because they wouldn’t believe him or that they might even throw him into an asylum for hopeless lunatics, though those were definitely factors.

It was all just too
private:
the mermaid girl’s painfully beautiful face, the searing amazement of those voices, the squeezing closeness of death. He wouldn’t have described it even to his best friend, much less to a bunch of pushy, self-important strangers.

For all he knew, he might be the only person on earth who had heard the mermaids singing and lived. The memory was
his.
It was all he had to make up for the loss of his family. The darkhaired mermaid’s song burned his sleep, twined through all his waking thoughts.

***

Over dinner Lindy asked him at least five times if he was enjoying his macaroni and cheese mixed with hamburger meat; every time she asked in precisely the same simpering, anxious voice. Pink scalp winked through the wisps of her fuzzy, apricot blond hair, and her pale eyes looked permanently frightened inside their red rims. She made Dorian think of a sick, senile rabbit.

“It’s delicious,” Dorian replied automatically. He kept looking over at the window, where early twilight glowed between red checkered curtains. The kitchen was prim, secure, and always extremely clean. A painted wooden bear in a chef’s hat and apron stood on the counter, forever frying a wooden egg. A game show host jabbered on the TV about how fabulous that evening’s prizes were. How long would it be before he could get away? “I’m going to go study at a friend’s house. Okay?”

Lindy and Elias both nodded so cautiously that it was like he’d just confessed to suicidal impulses and they were terrified of saying something that would push him over the edge. Not that suicide seemed like the worst idea ever sometimes.

Dorian scraped and washed his plate. It was important to keep going through the motions. Convince them that he hadn’t been driven totally crazy by the trauma. It was bad enough that he screamed in his sleep sometimes. They were probably already afraid that he was going to come after them with an ax.

He had to find the mermaid who’d saved him. Not to prove to himself that she hadn’t been some kind of hallucination—he knew what he’d seen. But she owed him an explanation at least. After all, what kind of reason could she have had for murdering so many people? Absolute evil? If that was it, though, why make an exception for him, singing or no? He didn’t deserve to be alive when his parents and Emily were dead.

He needed to talk to her, needed it urgently, and he told himself that it didn’t matter why. He just had to hear what she would say. But how was he supposed to find a mermaid? Steal a rowboat and go paddle around in the open sea like an idiot? He’d been brooding over the problem for weeks, and tonight he thought he might have found an answer. It was worth a try at least.

It was only the middle of September, but it was already cold enough that he pulled on a parka and hat before stepping out into the wild dusk, where the wind reeked with the weedy, fishy breath of the harbor. The smell always brought back the sickening taste of mingled bile and salt water horribly flecked with the sweetness of the previous night’s chocolate cake that he’d disgorged that day on the shore. His stomach lurched a little from the memory, but he did his best to ignore it.

The small tan house stood on a narrow street that ran straight down to the tiny harbor. The hill was steep enough that the sidewalk was a staircase with broad cement steps. He could see the black masts of a few sailboats crisscrossing like chopsticks in front of the electric blue sky while farther up clouds sagged in a violet jumble. He walked between glowing windows, heading for the sea. It was obvious he’d have to walk for a mile or two, past the beach north of town where she’d left him, then up onto the low, ragged cliffs where a path wound through stands of half-dead spruce. The farther the better, really. She wouldn’t want to come too close to a town.

He didn’t want to care how she felt about anything, but sometimes he couldn’t help wondering if she still thought about him. Maybe she’d completely forgotten him in the three months since she’d swum with him in her arms.

Then he’d remind her. He wasn’t about to let her forget what she’d done. He’d show her what a big mistake she’d made by letting one of her victims survive. Especially since that survivor was him.

2

The Voice on the Cliff

“Luce? Oh, Luce, it is you! We’ve been trying to find you for weeks!”

The dreamlike thrum of Luce’s song dropped into silence, and she glanced up in surprise at Dana’s warm smile, already very close to her own face. Dana leaned back with her elbows on the pebble beach and glanced around the small cave with its smooth, rounded ceiling. Her long tail stirred under the water, flicking up glimmers of ruby and coppery shine. Luce’s cave didn’t have any cracks that could let the sun in. The only light came through the underwater entrance set in a deep crevice between cliffs, so that a nebulous, dusky glow refracted up through the water. The dimness didn’t keep Luce and Dana from seeing each other clearly, though; they could see without difficulty in any degree of darkness. Dana was stunning even by mermaid standards, with a mouth like a heavy rose and faintly luminous brown skin. As with all mermaids, a dark, subtle shimmering hung in the air around her. Her thick black hair was parted neatly in the middle and fanned out around her shoulders in a dozen puffy twists. Unlike Luce, who was completely naked, she wore a red bikini top. But at least, Luce thought, Dana wasn’t wearing a lot of stolen human jewelry the way she’d done before.

“It’s a nice cave. I was worried you’d just, like, taken off somewhere, but then Rachel said she’d heard your song in the water, really faint. I didn’t know if I should even believe her, but some of us started looking. And here you are!” Dana’s voice was too enthusiastic, trying to cover up the awkwardness that kept growing as Luce stayed quiet. Still, she felt better about Dana than she did about the rest of them. Dana and Violet were the only ones who hadn’t participated in the assault on Catarina.

“Hi, Dana,” Luce finally yielded. She couldn’t imagine why any of them would bother looking for her, though, unless Anais had something nasty in mind. Luce kept out of their way; they should keep out of hers. “Were you trying to find me so Anais can finally kill me?” Dana jerked backwards so sharply that Luce felt the shock transmitted through the water. Hurt widened Dana’s huge brown eyes.

“Luce, that is
so
unfair! I mean, I know you must hate Jenna now, and maybe you think she’d help Anais ... do something to you ... But why would you say something that paranoid to
me?
I mean ...
I
didn’t even touch Catarina! You know I didn’t! And I
always
stood up for you!”

Luce didn’t exactly remember it that way, and she didn’t much want to be reminded of all the times when Dana had been nice to her.

“You didn’t start clawing at Catarina, but you didn’t do anything to help her either. You would have just let the tribe rip her apart right in front of you!” Luce was surprised by the savagery in her tone, the sudden racing of her heart. She hadn’t realized how angry she still felt until she’d seen Dana’s beautiful face again. Dana was shifting from hurt to aggrieved now, her lips tightening and a golden heat in her eyes. Dim bluish light wavered on her cheeks.

“Like we had a choice! Me and Violet! Like, you think if we’d gotten in their way they wouldn’t have beat the crap out of us, too, or just killed us? Luce, everyone was
wasted.
We’d all drunk like a ton of scotch that day. And Anais got them totally crazy. Jenna and everyone, they didn’t know
what
they were doing.”

“You’re trying to tell me your own sister would have helped Anais kill you?” Luce’s tone was cutting, but in her heart she had to admit that Dana had a point. The mermaids
had
been out of their minds when they’d thrown themselves on Catarina; they’d been in an alcohol-fueled frenzy, wild with hysterical cruelty. Of course, Luce’s uncle had been drunk when he’d tried to rape her, too, back when she was still human. And no mermaid would have thought that was an excuse for
him.

Dana didn’t answer at first. She suddenly looked horribly sad, gazing down at the flash of her own scales under the water. “I think Jenna might have killed me then, actually. Yeah. I do.” Dana whispered the words. It took Luce a moment to understand her, and another moment to absorb the mournful helplessness of her tone.