Part 1 (2/2)
And it was hard to breathe again. She tried to tug her hand free, but his grip tightened. He looked down, and so did she. His skin was white-not like snow, but white as the perfect marble statues that sat on wooden pedestals in her grandfather's library. A white stone that seemed to glow in sunlight. Much like the boy seemed to glow, perfect and unblemished.
The girl had always been fair and freckled compared to her tanned, rambunctious cousins, but against the boy she was a dark peach pink, rich with color. He reached out with his other hand and touched a loose strand of her red hair, which had come loose from her braids and was blowing in the wind toward his face. He held it-and suddenly brave, she reached out to touch his hair. He tensed, then relaxed-flas.h.i.+ng her another tentative smile.
She loved that smile. She loved it with a fierceness that startled her. Never mind the impossibility of the moment-and him. His smile, shy and warm, was perfectly human-and better than human. The towel slipped down between them. The girl hardly noticed. She could not look away from his face. Memorizing every line. This was magic, she thought. This was what it meant to like a boy. To really like a boy and have her heart in her throat, and her head faint, and her skin rebelling with goose pimples. She understood now.
The boy made several clicking sounds, wincing as he reached down to pick up the towel and press it against his wound. The bleeding had slowed, but it still looked painful. The girl thought about the first-aid kit that was in the kitchen, but she was afraid to leave the boy. He might not be here when she got back. Or someone else could find him. She couldn't let that happen.
”You need help,” she said despondently. ”I don't know what to do.”
He frowned, staring into her eyes, and uttered those clicking sounds again. Words, she realized. But nothing she could possibly understand.
”Help,” she said, and pointed to his chest. ”Ouch.”
”Ouch,” mouthed the boy, grazing his fingers across her brow, then trailing down, her thick red braid sliding against his palm. Her scalp tingled. Everything tingled. The tip of his tail twitched against the sand. She touched his hip, lightly. His scales were surprisingly soft. The boy s.h.i.+ed away and made a strange gasping sound. She felt instantly terrible for touching him, until she saw his smile and warm eyes-a darker blue now, like the sky.
Laughter. That was laughter she had heard.
”Ticklish,” she said, awed and delighted. ”You're . . . ticklish.”
He gave her a puzzled look, still smiling.
Until, quite suddenly, he froze. His smile lost its warmth. Color drained out of his eyes. He turned stiffly, staring at the sea. The girl tried to follow his gaze, but the sun had risen, and it was bright. She shaded her eyes.
A man emerged from the water. Rose from the waves like some story of Poseidon that she had read in school. His hair was long and silver, braided partially into thin, tangled rows. At first, she could only see him from the waist up, but as he came closer, she saw that he had legs. He was also very naked.
The boy drew in a sharp breath and shoved the girl back, away from the sea and himself. She stared at him, and the fear in his eyes. .h.i.t her like a fist. Sharp clicking sounds tumbled from his throat. When she did not run, he grabbed a fistful of sand and flung it at her. Tears filled his eyes. Desperation.
The girl stared helplessly and looked at the man, who was striding free of the water. His gaze was thunderous when he stared at her, but she could not tell if it was anger or actual hate that made his jaw so tight and his eyes so black.
The boy screamed at her, and the piercing wail of his voice shook her to the core. She stumbled back a step, and her heel hit a driftwood branch, long and crooked, small enough for her hands. She picked it up without thinking and ran at the man. She swung the branch like a baseball bat and smashed him on the arm.
It was like hitting a brick wall. The impact jarred her to the bone and hurt her hands. The branch broke against him.
For a moment, both the boy and the man stared at her in astonishment. And then, much to her horror, the man laughed. Not like the boy-not in broken gasps-but full-bodied human, male laughter. A cold sound. Nothing gentle or warm about it.
He picked up a piece of the branch and hefted it carefully, staring into her eyes. The girl knew he would hit her with it, but her feet refused to move. Rooted in one spot, frozen. The boy howled again and lunged across the sand. He sank his teeth into the man's calf.
The man jerked wildly, breaking eye contact. The girl staggered, able to move again-and this time she did not hesitate or fight. She turned and ran.
She flew across the sand, certain at any moment a rock would slam into her head-or that strong arms would crush her to death. She ran mindlessly, terrified, and did not stop until she reached the top of the dirt path, well off the beach. She turned, breathless, and saw the man hauling the boy into the sea. He held him by the tail, and the boy was dragging his fingers in the sand, struggling wildly, trying to catch himself and hold on to something, anything.
All the while, he stared up the hill at the girl.
She stared back, horrified and grieving. Too far away to help. Not strong enough to fight the man hauling him into the water. She wanted to call out to the boy, but her throat choked on the words, and all she could do was dig her clenched fists into her stomach and hold his gaze until he and the man disappeared into the sea.
The girl stood for a long time, watching. Not once did they reappear.
Finally, feeling faint, she made her way back down the trail to the sand and the driftwood log. She was scared to be there. The beach suddenly felt very big, and she was hot, sweating. Her knees were weak all over again, but she couldn't bring herself to sit. She saw large footprints in the sand. Human. As human as the imprint of the boy's tail was not.
Something small glinted where he had lain beside her. She bent, and found a single scale. Larger than her thumbnail, and the color of white pearl, with iridescent hints of silver. The girl held the scale very carefully, then, with reverence, slipped it into her pocket.
She gathered her things and walked slowly to the house on the hill. She hid the bloodstained towel, and threw it out the first chance she got. Not once did she breathe a word of what she had seen though her grandfather gave her a piercing look over dinner when he asked how her day had been.
The girl returned to that spot every morning, all that summer. She did the same, the following year-and every year after that. Until, one day, she told herself that the boy was never coming back. Not there.
But she kept looking.
Chapter One.
It is a truth universally acknowledged, thought Jenny, that a single girl in search of mysteries must occasionally be in want of a big d.a.m.n knife.
Or a gun. But Maurice was in charge of those.
”You should have stayed on the boat,” muttered the old man, wiping sweat from his brow. ”Jesus, sweet pea.”
Jenny flashed him a tense smile. Maurice was a grizzled sailor, probably in his eighties, though it was hard to remember that sometimes. Sun brown, covered in fading tattoos, and a bear in a fight. He was her grandfather's best friend and had taught her everything she knew about surviving on the sea-which had very little to do with handling a boat.
Boats are easy, Maurice liked to say. And the sea doesn't care. It's the people you meet out there who're the monsters.
All kinds of monsters. Jenny jammed a stick of chewing gum in her mouth, needing something to take the edge off the nauseating flutters in her stomach. She never got seasick, except for times like this. Too much pressure. She chewed hard, fixing her gaze onsh.o.r.e, where ten men waited for them-armed with machetes, fis.h.i.+ng spears, and one AK47. Simple fishermen, she had been told, but they looked ready for war.
And given the remote section of Malaysian beach they were standing on, no one would be around to stop them if it was blood they were really after.
”You sure about this?” Maurice asked the third person with them-Ismail Osman, a slender brown-skinned man with narrow features and huge black-framed gla.s.ses that kept sliding down the greasy bridge of his nose. He was an employee of A Priori, a white-collar scout for the Singaporean arm of the company's bioresearch department. Jenny had been corresponding with him for only a week-which made her miss his predecessor even more; a goofy man obsessed with Star Trek, Star Wars, and the possibility of dinosaurs still living in the deep rain forests of the Congo.
He, though, had retired-and Ismail had gotten a promotion. Go-getter. No sense of humor. She wished he hadn't insisted on being here for the recovery operation. Not that she blamed him. Nor was it his fault that she trusted no one but Maurice to do this right.
Right being a relative term. In more ways than one.
”These people are not p.r.o.ne to exaggeration,” Ismail insisted, pus.h.i.+ng his gla.s.ses up his nose, then wiping his hands, rather fussily, on his pants. ”And despite appearances, I a.s.sure you that . . . that they're all quite civilized. Poverty, you know-”
”No one's saying they're bad people,” Maurice interrupted. ”But they're f.u.c.kin' armed to the teeth.”
Ismail gave the old man a disdainful look-not the first of the morning, either. The A Priori scout might not judge Malay fishermen by appearances, but he had not been so gracious with Jenny or her two-man crew.
”What you see on that beach is mere precaution,” he said, very slowly, enunciating each word as though Maurice might not understand him otherwise. ”If the . . . the thing . . . is stolen before they can receive payment-”
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