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But I didn't want to stay apart. Or go back to the cold, evil bitch I'd become.
I considered all the ways I could make my marriage work while my burning, screaming muscles stroked away at the endless ocean. Nothing solved itself, but I hadn't really expected it to. Eventually, the effort whited out my problems more efficiently than anything else could have. They weren't gone, they were just. . . under the surface.
The sun went down. It was a beautiful sight, unbounded by the rules of land - nothing but waves and sea, and an endless bowl of sky. I had to stop more and more frequently and just let myself float. My body hurt so much I cried involuntary, hiccuping tears. Every deliberate movement felt as if my nerves had grown cutting edges and were slicing themselves right out of my skin. My skin felt rubbery and ice-cold, except for my back, which just felt like it wasn't there at all.
Keep going.
I tried, but my efforts came slower, my rests more frequent. I just couldn't keep moving.
My energy reserves were gone, and although the world was rich in it all around me, I couldn't tap it like a Djinn could.
I'm going to die out here. Except that I couldn't die, not without breaking the tie to David.
Not without setting him on a path of destruction that would annihilate everything.
The stars came out in thick white veils of light, and I floated on my back in the bobbing waves, too tired to keep moving at any cost.
I slept for a while. I floated.
I think I went a little insane, as the endless, isolated hours passed. Then I swam again, and then I slept.
Eventually, I dreamed I heard a ship's horn.
My ride's here,I thought. It was crazy, but somehow it all made sense, the way dreams sometimes do when you're stuck in the middle - life was an ocean, death was a ship to take me away to lands unknown. I'd bought the ticket, right? So why not take the ride?
I heard the blast of noise again, mournful and musical at the same time.
A spotlight appeared out of nowhere and hit the water, so bright I yelled and covered my eyes.
"We've caught ourselves a mermaid," someone said, from behind the blaze of light. "Fish her out. Let's see what we've landed. "
I didn't realize how much of the sea I'd swallowed until I was out of the ocean. I promptly fell to my hands and knees and vomited up enough foamy water to fill a goldfish bowl or two. I rolled onto my side, and continued hacking up frothing mouthfuls. My lungs were on fire from the inside, and my throat felt like I'd gargled with Clorox.
My head throbbed like thunder. My skin felt rubbery and soft, and I was incredibly dizzy.
"Huh," somebody said, and I threw up clots of white foam on a pair of sturdy-looking black paramilitary boots. "She don't look like much, Josue. " The hot searchlight was still beaming down on me from a stubby upper deck. In comparison to the majestic cruise ship, this looked like a stunted dwarf - a working ship, some kind of smallish freighter. Not very well kept. The metal deck around me was spotted with rust, there were careless piles of rope and haphazardly stacked boxes, and the men standing over me didn't look like the shipshape type, either. There were four of them, all in filthy, grease-stained T-shirts, cargo-type pants or shorts, and nonskid work boots.
And they all carried knives and guns. Two of them had their firearms shoved casually into waistbands; the other two had what looked like automatic machine pistols slung on bandoliers across their chests.
I was pretty sure those weren't standard issue for guys on board most cargo ships.
I coughed some more. I tried to sit up. I was, instead, yanked all the way to my feet, where I wavered and nearly went down again. Gravity seemed like a very strange concept to me, after all that time in the water.
I tried my voice, which came out as rusty as the ship I was standing on. "Thanks for the rescue. "
One of them laughed. He was the one who'd declared me alive, I thought, a big, muscular guy the color of mahogany. He looked like he could bite a metal bar and spit bullets. As rescuers went, not exactly comforting.
But I couldn't help but be relieved that the whole survival thing had been taken out of my hands.
"Hola,"the big guy - apparently, Josue - said, and aimed his machine pistol somewhere in the direction of a number of my more important internal organs. "Is your name Joanne Baldwin?"
I frankly stared at him. "What?"
"Yes or no, mermaid. Joanne Baldwin?" He had an interesting accent to his English - thick, not quite Spanish, more lyrical and unpredictable. Close cousins, though. Portuguese, maybe. "If you're not, I throw you back. I don't have room for pets. "
"In that case I'm definitely Joanne. " I swallowed another cough. "Somebody told you to look for me. Who?"
"Why? Enemies would have left you sucking water, eh? Must have been friends. " He had a point. I couldn't imagine these guys doing anything without a profit motive, and I hadn't pissed off anyone bad enough to make them spend a lot of money to kill me. Easy enough to just let me drown.
Wait. . . that meant it was someone who'd known I would be in the water.
"You didn't come all the way out here to find me," I said. Josue raised his eyebrows and smiled, not in a comforting sort of way.
"Came for the salvage on the ship that went down," he said. "Stayed for the profits. You're worth a lot of money, mermaid. "
"Alive, I guess. "
He shrugged. "Apparently. "
This ship was far from an honest sort of vessel. They'd picked up the maritime distress calls from the Grand Paradise - I assumed the captain had sent them - and of course the lifeboats would have transponders on them, probably sending out automated rescue calls.
And in these waters, that would draw two kinds of vessels: well-meaning Good Samaritans, and the kind of ship I'd just been fished onto.
In other words, pirates. And somebody had co-opted them to search specifically for me.
"Look!" said one of the crew, stationed at the railing. He called for light, and the beam burned out into the water, turning it from black to a muddy, sullen blue. At first I didn't see what he was looking at, and then I caught a glimpse of bobbing wood. A few bits of debris from the ship had followed the same currents I'd used. There was plenty of small, buoyant wreckage still around, though the debris cloud had long since dissipated and spread itself out over dozens of miles of open water. Not much of a grave for such an enormous vessel.
"Everybody get off?" the pirate captain asked me, and shoved me with the barrel of his gun when I delayed my answer. "Everybody in those little boats, yes?"
"You bet," I said. "Everybody's been rescued. Well, everybody but me, obviously. " He seemed disappointed. I guessed he'd been hoping to fish out some rich Americans he could ransom back at a significant profit. I didn't blame him; I didn't look like a rich payday, regardless of what his patron had told him.
"How come you didn't end up on a rescue boat, mermaid? You not fresh enough?" A couple of his crewmates offered helpful commentary about how yummy I looked.
Charming. I was starting to feel like today's catch, still wiggling on the line.
I took a deep breath. That was a mistake; it resulted in more lung-wrenching coughing, and I spat up some more foam and mucus. "Let's just say I missed my boat," I said.
"What makes a woman stay behind when a boat is sinking?" he asked. It was a rhetorical question; he was showing off for his crew. "You have a kid on the ship?"
"No. "
"Money, then. " He flashed me a vulpine grin. "Always money. "
"Speaking of money, who hired you to find me?"
The laughter died out on the man's face, and left it watchful and dangerous. "Don't think I want to tell you that," he said. "Not yet. "
"Why?" I was starting to believe I'd been better off with the sharks.
"Americans, they're always talking about money. I give you money if you let me go. My family has money. I got importan
t friends who will pay you. That sort of thing. They think they can buy their way out of anything. " He gazed at me for a long, cold few seconds. "You don't offer nothing. That makes me nervous. "
"Maybe I'm poor. "
He snorted. "Even the poor offer. You don't even try to make a deal. "
"Maybe I'm crazy. "
He showed me teeth. "Maybe. Maybe you just think we won't hurt you 'cause you're so pretty. "
"No," I said, and held his gaze. "I'm sure you'd try like hell to hurt me, for any reason or none at all. I'm sure you've slit throats and raped and tortured if you felt like it. Probably just yesterday. "
That woke a lot of murmuring among the rest of the crew. I heard the slap of boots - more men arriving from other parts of the ship, drawn by the tinfoil smell of trouble in the air.
"Huh," the captain said. "So what you got to stop me if I want to do the same to you?"
"I'm pretty sure you don't want to know. " The tingle on my back that I'd felt as I was drowning had subsided, but the nerves were waking up, and I could feel the outline of the torch forming again, black and steady. I could feel the black well of power opening, ready to flood into me if I opened the door. "You guys know comic books? The Incredible Hulk? " Josue looked blank. He looked around at the others.
"Bruce Banner," one of the crew piped up. "You won't like me when I'm angry. " In any group of people, no matter how hard-assed they might appear, there's always a geek. I was just surprised that, in this company, he'd admitted it.
"It's like that, only I don't have to wait to turn green," I said. "I'm trying to help you out here, gentlemen. Don't push me, and I won't push back, and we'll all be just fine.
Somebody's paying you to keep me alive and in one piece. Let's just all get along. " The captain was no longer amused. "Shut up, bitch," he said, and shoved the barrel of his pistol under my chin. "You don't threaten me. Not on my own ship. I'm not being paid enough for that. "
I didn't reach for power. It reached for me , a black tidal wave that pounded into me like surf to shore, immense and burning.
No!I rejected it, slammed the door shut and held it closed as the power thundered on the other side. I felt small and pitiful and ridiculously weak, and I knew I was only a second from death at the hands of these men, these pirates - but my other choice was worse.
"Sure," I said. Josue hadn't noticed a thing, from the outside; he thought he was still in control, not one heartbeat away from being a red stain on the deck. "You win. " If he pushed that gun into me any deeper, we were going to be engaged. "I always do," he said. "Tell me who you are. "
"Joanne Baldwin. "
"No. Who you are. You're not afraid of me. "
"I just gave up. "
"Not because you're afraid. " Josue was way too smart. It was a little creepy. Then he took it too far by saying, "I like women best when they're afraid. They shut up more. "
"You're a real charmer, did you know that?" He flashed me his pirate smile. "All right, so you're going to put me in the hold. What then? You turn me over to whoever paid you to come get me?" I had an awful feeling I already knew who that would be, and his initials were Bad Bob Biringanine.
"Something like that," Josue agreed. "Unless you plan to make me a better offer. "
"I'll pay you twice what he's paying you," I said. I did want to get to Bad Bob. Just not as his helpless captive. Much better if I could hire myself a hard-bitten pirate crew and take the fight to him unexpectedly.
Josue slowly showed his teeth in a smile. He had two gold-plated incisors, both on the bottom, and it gave him a glam vampire look that must have been pretty effective in his line of work.
"Where you got all that money hidden, mermaid? In your panties?" He made a grab, as if he was about to make a withdrawal. I fended him off.
"No, idiot. I keep my money in a bank, like every other criminal who isn't a complete moron.
Look, I was on that ship with some of the wealthiest people on earth. I'm not just some casino rat. I know people. "
Josue looked unimpressed. "What people?"
"Cynthia Clark. The movie star?"
Pirates started naming movies with the geeky enthusiasm of film obsessives everywhere.
From the breadth of their knowledge, I figured they must have the biggest DVD collection ever somewhere belowdecks. Not that they'd ever paid for any of it, of course.
"Famous friends doesn't mean you have money. How you expect to pay me?" Captain Josue asked, and spread his hands to show how unencumbered I was by those phantom millions.
"Electronic transfer," I said. "It's how business works these days. People don't carry cash, they carry personal identification numbers and ATM cards. " He wasn't convinced. "And how does this help me? Do you see any computers on my ship?" I gave him a very slow smile. "If you take me where I want to go, I promise you, I'll fill your ship so full of dollars you won't be able to sleep without restacking bundles of cash. "
"Then give me your account number and PIN code. I'll check it out. " I raised my eyebrows. "I thought you didn't have a computer. "
"That's not what I said. " He laughed. "You give me the information and I'll verify that you're not a lying whore. That seems fair. "
"Sorry. It's all I have to bargain with. Guess you'll just have to trust me. "