Waking Storms (33 page)

He wasn’t even looking at her anymore. His gaze drifted somewhere over her head, and his mouth tightened with annoyance.

“Oh, that’s not right,” Andrew Korchak complained vaguely to the air. “That’s just going too far!”

The floating voices seemed agitated. They sounded as if they were engaged in a passionate conversation, whispering urgent confidences into one another’s invisible, shapeless ears. And Luce was more certain than ever that the voices were gathered around her father, circling him like a swarm of bees. And though she couldn’t have explained why, she also had the distinct impression that the voices were suddenly
aware
of her, and that they hadn’t been before. Cold ran through her body like a sickness and she struggled to regain control of herself. She had to say
something.

“Dad?” Luce finally managed, but the word cracked in her throat. Her father stayed where he was, dully striped by the shadow of the birch tree. He didn’t so much as glance at her.

“I told you,” he snapped at the air, waving one calloused hand in disgust. “That’ll be
enough.”

He spun on his heel—the movement was much more energetic than the weary shambling Luce had noticed before—and stalked back up the hill.

Luce gazed after him, torn by shock and grief and, as a few wisps of muttering air grazed against her face, by an icy panic that squeezed up inside her and crawled like fingers over her heart. Garbled whispers began to leak into her ears and dance under her skull. She could feel a kind of frothing breath glide across her tongue and explore her throat. Luce gasped, horrified at the awareness that there was no way she could fight this shapeless invasion of her body. For the first time Luce began to sense a few distinct phrases in the muttering flow that echoed through her head.
“Battery’s going,”
Luce thought she heard, and
“getting too small for her.”
Then,
“If I didn’t love you so damned much...”
Somehow it was worse to know what they were saying, and a long, unwilled shriek unraveled through the air.

Only in the abrupt silence that followed did Luce understand that she was the one who’d screamed. There was a kind of lull as the strands of wind gradually vacated her head. She could feel them go, hissing out of her nostrils and cascading over her lower lip. Tears flooded her cheeks. Her heart was beating so fast that it felt like one sustained, rolling roar in her chest. More than anything she wanted to dive, to slash away from this haunted, hideous place and never return. But as long as her father was trapped here that was the one thing she couldn’t even consider doing...

The muttering winds backed off a little, and Luce could hear them hissing again as if they were debating something. And Luce’s terror began to yield to rage. Whatever these airy presences were they had control of her father, and they’d torn his mind apart until it seemed that he couldn’t even recognize his own
daughter
anymore. She could hear a cluster of voices just above the steeply sloping beach and feel a subtle flickering motion in the air as they approached her again. Luce sat up straight, low waves curling around her waist, and faced in the voices’ direction. It was hard to glare at them when they were invisible, but she did her best. They stopped in front of her, moaning and sighing, and Luce got the distinct impression that they were making an unaccustomed effort.

“Child of Proteus,”
one crackled, old-sounding voice breathed distinctly, and a fingertip of oily wind stroked along Luce’s closed lips.
“We have no need of you.”

A sensation like freezing gusts of static swept through Luce’s skin, and at the same time outrage flared inside her. What did she care what these uncanny voices needed?

“We have the man. We have the memory. We have the man,”
the voice pursued. Its speech was halting and ragged, as if forming these words was an act of strenuous labor.
“He has lost much. We do not need you here.”
Now the voice sounded very determined; its tone was that of someone entirely convinced that everything was settled and that no further argument was possible. Luce considered the best way to respond, but she could already hear the airy babble sailing away from her. The ash-colored grass at the top of the beach churned in one abrupt swirl as it passed. The voices were almost at the edge of the forest. They were heading the same way her father had gone.

“Wait,” Luce called after them. Her voice still sounded strange, broken and peculiarly empty. “What
are
you?”

There was no response. The empty gray sky rolled over the island’s snowy peak, and the sickly trees groaned and fidgeted in the wind. They bent as if they were trying to scratch themselves and couldn’t quite reach the spot that itched so terribly. Everything was gray and ash and dull, sad green apart from a few blots of golden lichen growing on the boulders. Still, Luce realized, the day was a little brighter than it had been recently, and it seemed to be lasting longer as well. The night’s door was starting to swing slowly open again.

A miserable thought occurred to Luce: she’d blamed Catarina for murdering her father. Even worse, Miriam had committed suicide in the belief that the mermaids were responsible for making Luce an orphan. And now Luce knew that wasn’t true at all.

Her father was still alive, and dark, delicate, vulnerable Miriam—Miriam who’d cared for Luce and tried to be friends with her—had died for nothing.

***

Each day the sun flung itself a bit higher above the horizon. Each day the patch of brightness where the sun burned behind endless clouds hovered for a little longer before dusky blue swallowed the sea again. Luce circled the island restlessly, always looking for her father. But it was soon clear that he was looking out for her as well. Whenever Luce glimpsed him on a distant beach he’d be scanning the waves, and the instant he caught sight of her he’d hunch his shoulders angrily and stomp off into the woods. It was impossible for Luce to guess how much he understood about the girl in the water, but two things were obvious: he was determined to avoid her, and he’d figured out that she couldn’t follow him inland. Luce got the impression that he came to the beach now only to get fish and then left as quickly as he could.

Even the voices didn’t pay any more attention to her, though she sometimes heard them jostling and sighing in the trees or tumbling like a cluster of argumentative molecules along the beaches. Usually the noise of their chattering meant that her father was somewhere nearby, and Luce would dart along searching for him. If she saw his bundled shape through the snow-laced trees she’d call out to him. Each time he’d act as if he hadn’t heard her, and each time her hope would crack again. It wasn’t that her heart broke, exactly; Luce clung stubbornly to the idea that eventually she’d get her father back to the mainland, even if she had no idea how she’d manage it. But every time he ignored her call it was as if a fresh hairline fracture ran through her, a fine trace of pain, until her chest seemed to be webbed through and through by thin, cutting wires. And these moments of grief were all that relieved the tedium of her days.

Luce spent her time daydreaming, mulling over memories of her childhood with her father, of more recent times with Dorian and Nausicaa, Dana and Catarina. She couldn’t even soothe her frustration by singing. There was no way she could be sure her father wouldn’t hear her, and he was already a broken man, spirit-needled, ridden by the gasp and twitter of bodiless voices. Even a healthy human could easily go completely insane at the onslaught of mermaid song. Dorian could withstand it as long as Luce was careful, but he was exceptional. Luce couldn’t bear to think of what her song might do to her father in his damaged condition.

The days slowly brightened, and the approach of spring struck Luce as inexplicably threatening. But the waves were still dotted by pack ice, though not nearly as much of it as there had been back in her home territory, and the wind was still bitterly cold. Storms rolled through now and then, though in the comfort of the island’s sheltering coves Luce didn’t mind them at all. Spring might be coming but it was still far away, and Luce told herself that she’d definitely rescue her father in time to keep her promise to Dorian and be home as soon as the ice broke up. It might be late January now, or maybe it was already February. She had at least another month.

And if she had to be a little late, well, Dorian would wait for her. “Wouldn’t he?

***

One day Luce woke to a dab of sunlight playing on her face and looked up to see a rip in the clouds and behind it a patch of sweet, pale, porcelain blue, utterly different from the murky dusk blue she’d lived in for months now. She stretched luxuriantly for a minute. For all her dread of the coming spring, that bolt of sunlight and clear sky sent exhilaration coursing through her body. She thought of swimming far out—far enough that there was no chance her father would hear her—and letting her pent-up song shimmer up to meet the pale sun. She was in her favorite little cove, its small beach tucked between two tongues of rock. Luce rolled onto her stomach and looked at the wet stones gleaming in the unexpected sunlight. The golden shine was interrupted by the shadows of a few birch trees high above her and by another lumpier shadow that Luce couldn’t identify. Possibly it was the shade thrown by a small boulder with a few ferns swaying on its crest, though now that she thought of it, she didn’t remember any boulders up there.

The shadow-shape tipped like something shifting its weight. Luce realized that what she’d taken for the shadow of ferns was cast instead by wind-stirred hair. And with the shadow’s movement came a sudden burst of breezy muttering.

Luce froze and forced herself not to look up right away. If she stared straight at him she was sure he’d bolt again. Instead she pushed herself up on her elbows and gazed into the clouds, slowly tilting her head until she could just see him out of the corner of her eye. He was crouching up on the rocky shelf to her left, no more than fifteen feet away, shapeless in his mass of furs. And he was watching her. Maybe, Luce realized with a rush of anxiety and longing, he’d been watching her for hours as she slept. Above her the whirlwind of voices gabbled and spun. Then another, stronger voice interrupted them.

“You know,” Andrew Korchak snapped irritably, “my Lucette wasn’t actually that pretty. Beautiful girl, okay, but not like
that.
And I don’t know where you got the idea she had a tail!”

So he
did
recognize her, at least in some confused way. He just didn’t believe that what he was seeing was really his daughter. Very gradually and gently Luce turned her head a little farther. Her stomach clenched so tight it felt like wadded foil, nauseous and aching. Anything she said might send him running again, but at the same time she couldn’t let the opportunity to finally speak with him slip away from her. “If you’ll talk to me,” Luce said softly, “I’ll tell you about the tail. I’ll tell you everything that’s happened to me, and then we can try to figure out how to get you out of here.” And at last she turned far enough to meet his eyes.

She knew he must have heard her—he just wasn’t that far away—but from the blank look on his face it seemed as if she hadn’t spoken or as if her words were meaningless. His eyes slipped around, always focusing just over the top of her head or just to the side of her face. He looked tired and much older than Luce remembered. Gray knots mixed with his matted brown curls, but his warm cinnamon eyes were still the same. Clouds gusted across the sun so that his face flared with golden light and then dimmed again, and for a minute he hunched there unspeaking.

“I’ve been waiting for you to knock it off,” he said at last. “Bad enough you take Luce’s voice and torture me with it all the time. I know how completely I let her down without that! But now using her face, too...” He shook his head. “It’s too mean. It’s just too damned cruel. I’m about ready to starve myself to death so I don’t have to
see
this anymore!”

Luce’s eyes burned with tears. “You
never
let me down! I won’t let you say that you did.” It was horrible to realize that her presence on the island was tormenting him this way. “Dad, I know you don’t believe it, and it
is
hard to believe that I found you like this, but it’s really,
really
me! I’m your daughter, Luce. Lucette Gray Korchak. My mother was Alyssa Gray, and you loved her so much, and she died when I was just four, and we were both there with her when it happened...”

Did he hear her this time? Something sparked deep in the vacancy of his eyes.

And, Luce realized, he wasn’t the only one that heard her. The cloud of voices was spinning faster, fizzling with agitation. Luce suddenly remembered the sound of wasps drunk on the fermented apples in autumn at a campground where they’d stayed. The windy gibbering got louder as if it wanted to drown her out, and then to her horror Luce suddenly recognized one of the voices in that tangled muttering. It was her own voice, but higher, fresher and more childish than it was now: the voice she’d had as a much younger girl. Luce listened, mesmerized and sickened, trying to catch what her voice was saying, what evil things it might be murmuring into his ears—

Andrew Korchak pitched a rock. It just missed Luce’s shoulder and splashed down in the water behind her, jarring her from the dark dreaminess that had flooded her mind. “I’m warning you!” her father snapped in exasperation. “Now, I know you need to keep me alive. How long would you have to wait to get yourself a new sucker way out here? So don’t
push
me!”

He started to stand up. Luce gaped up in desperation. Would he ever let her talk to him again? She cast around wildly for something she could say, anything that might convince him...“I’ll prove it to you! I’ll tell you something only the two of us could know about, something we both remember...”

That seemed to surprise him, and he stared straight at her for the first time. A look of furious incredulity burned in his eyes. “Now that’s a joke,” her father snarled at last. “Like there’s
anything
I remember that you don’t know about, when you’ve been feeding off my brains for the last two years!”