Asher didn’t say anything. He just put his hand out toward me, palm up. It said everything he wouldn’t. Please. Just come with me.
Hal went on, in ignorance, or just plain old ignoring Asher. “I’ve got a plan. We’ll split into two groups. You two and the boy go upstairs, get up to where the intercom is, and see if you can figure out how to warn people to evacuate in all the languages you can think of. Tell them all to get to the lifeboat deck—and see if you can tell anyone on land what’s going on out here. Claire, Emily, and I will go downstairs. We’ll figure out a way to stop the ones down there from blowing up the boat.”
At this, the expression on Asher’s face changed to one of complete disbelief—an expression I felt mirrored on my own. An old man, a woman who couldn’t walk, and a little girl were going to take on armed men?
“I’ll go with you,” I blurted out.
“No way in hell,” Asher said. He looked from the door to me, his opinion clear. Screw everyone else but the two of us—we could make it if we left right now. I knew he was right, but I wasn’t going to go without them—and I was too big for Asher to pick up and carry. “You’ll figure out a way?” Asher went on, mocking Hal, his voice incredulous.
As much as I loved him, that was the fundamental difference between him and me. He could displace his guilt, push it away so that it was something reckoned with later or even never, his work with Nathaniel case in point. Whereas with me—I could never manage to feel guilty later for something I could feel guilty about right now. There was a helpless man with a broken leg watching other men put explosives on our boat. There were Marius, and Kate, and Jorge.
I swallowed and looked away from Asher. I loved him with all my heart, but that didn’t mean that sometimes he still wasn’t wrong. I looked over to Hal. “I’m in.”
“Okay. We should get going then.” Hal bent over so that Claire could clamber up onto his back.
Asher blocked me. “This is a bad plan and you know it. I didn’t just get you back only to lose you again.”
“You won’t. You’ll know where I am the whole time,” I said with false bravado.
I watched his jaw clench and his throat swallow. “You’re the only thing in the world that matters to me. I won’t let you die.”
Hal shrugged Claire up into place. “Does that mean you’ll help?”
Asher looked to me, giving me one last chance to change my mind. When I shook my head, he shrugged helplessly. “What other choice do I have?”
“I’m sorry. I love you so much.”
Watching his face I was afraid for a second that he’d be angry with me. But he looked crestfallen instead, so deeply, deeply sad. He held out his arms and I stepped into them, if not agreed with, then forgiven. He kissed me hard, scared, like he’d never taste my lips again, and then stopped just as fast as he’d begun, his face close to mine, looking deep into my eyes, as if memorizing this new me, the one that I’d changed into since the last time we’d touched. Then he inhaled and exhaled, dropping his frustration, putting on another mood like someone else might put on a mask, becoming the suave charmer who was always in control. “I love you too,” he said, then he looked over to Rory. “You ready, boy?”
“My name’s Rory.”
“That’s a yes, then.” He walked over and flung open the dead passenger’s closet doors, and then looked back to us and started stripping. “I can’t do what I do looking like this. I need a minute.”
To watch him while he changed would have been too tempting, and maybe that’s what he wanted, me to remember what I was missing. So I turned around as the others did, and when he was done, he coughed loudly for our attention and slicked his wet hair back with his good hand. He looked rumpled and under stress, but back in control, and he picked up the radio, pointing it at me.
“Meet you on the lifeboat deck in under an hour, or when we’re both underwater, whichever comes first.” He didn’t risk another kiss, for which I found myself both hurt and grateful. “Live, or else I can’t be held responsible for what I’ll do.”
“I will,” I promised.
He jerked his head at Rory, and both of them went for the door.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
After Asher left, it was as if all the air’d gone out of the room. I’d known it would hurt, but—
“Such an interesting fellow!” Claire said, newly reperched on Hal’s back. “Ready?”
“Ready!” Emily said, eager to follow the older woman’s lead.
I tried to shake my fears away. Was that the last time I’d see Asher alive? I’d done the right thing but that, as I well knew, was frequently futile. I pressed my fingers to my mouth as though I could hold his last kiss there.
Claire coughed for my attention, and I looked up at her. “Is the siren-thing why your legs don’t work?”
“No. I’m just old. Gravity’s harder on a girl when you’re on land. Water’s kinder.”
“You used to live in the sea?” Emily asked.
“Yes. I loved it there,” Claire said, leaning over to speak to the girl.
“But you loved me more,” Hal said, shifting her back.
“Well, you know. You’ve been sort of fun,” Claire said, with an obvious tease. Then she squeezed his thick shoulders tightly. “We’ll go first, and if we see anyone, I’ll try to talk them down,” she said, and Hal opened the door to lead us into the hall.
I felt uncomfortable with Hal and Claire being in the line of fire ahead of me so I put Emily behind me to at least protect her. If I stopped being brave now, I might be too smart to start again.
“So how does he know so many languages?” Claire asked, looking back at me, using a normal voice.
“Um. Shouldn’t we be listening?” I whispered.
“I am,” she said, with a toothy smile.
Seeing as she’d heard us the other night, and now I knew she was a siren—“As a shapeshifter he knows the past of everyone he touched before. When he was younger.”
“And how did a nice girl like you meet someone like him?”
Little did she know. “I worked in a hospital wing for supernatural creatures once upon a time. We treated shapeshifters, daytimers, and weres.”
“Daytimers?”
“Humans who were exposed to vampire blood.”
“Ah.” She made a thoughtful face. “We don’t have vampires under the sea. Our monsters are much bigger, and much worse.”
“How did you all meet?” Emily asked. Her parents were seemingly forgotten in all the excitement, or because of something Claire had done.
“That’s a very good question,” Claire said, smiling down at the child. “Hal was a soldier on a ship a long time ago. When it got torpedoed during the war, some of my sisters and I went to sing for it.”
Some remnants of Greek mythology jostled free in my mind, and I squinted at the older woman. “Are you singing for this one?”
“If you’re asking if all this is my fault, no. Although I am reaching the time when I need to go back.”
There was a hitch in Hal’s step when she said this—I wouldn’t have noticed if I hadn’t been walking right behind him.
“Anyhow,” she said, going on with her story, addressing Emily, “I was swimming, watching the sailors drown. There were a lot of sailors drowning in those days. Sometimes we had to fight with the sharks to get the chance to kiss them.”
“You kissed boys?” Emily asked, more disturbed about this than the sharks.
“A lot of them.” Claire looked back so I would know she was telling this story for my benefit as well. “Not every siren wants to see the world above the sea. But if you do, the only way you can get there is by kissing the air out of a man.”
I blinked. Was she saying what I thought she was saying?
“Not just any man,” Hal interrupted.
“No, only the right one. I had to kiss hundreds of sailors to find him,” she said, squeezing Hal close. “But when I did, I knew.”
“For living in the ocean your whole life, you weren’t a very good swimmer. We nearly died before we got rescued,” he said, and I could almost hear his grin.
Claire squealed. “I’d never had legs before! It was hard!”
I was having a hard time parsing their couple’s humor with presented facts. “Do you ever feel bad about all the ones that drowned?” I asked because I didn’t want to be the only one who felt bad right now.
“Not originally, no. I was like a child then. Does a child feel pain when she loses a toy, when she knows a shinier one can be gained? I was, as your kind say, shallow. Most sirens are. Not a lot of encouragement for introspection, under the sea.”
“Like Ariel!” Emily exclaimed, catching on.
“Much the same. Only with less singing.” She smiled at the girl indulgently. “You all are the first humans I’ve gotten to tell my secret to, since I shared it with Hal all those years ago. It’s nice.”
I’m glad someone here felt better about things, I thought darkly. But no matter how strangely—horribly?—it’d begun, their relationship had lasted for decades. Would Asher and I get that chance? My heart ached. I couldn’t believe I’d let him go again. I hoped I wouldn’t be made a fool for leaving his side.
We reached the freight elevator, found it empty, and Hal pushed the button for the lowest floor. Claire pressed a finger to her lips and gave Emily and me a meaningful glance as it lowered.
The doors opened onto a kill zone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
I realized we were lucky: Whatever ship the soldiers had come in on hadn’t held enough of them to man all the doors. And why would they need to anyhow, if they cleared every room as they came through it, and they were the only ones with guns on board? Passengers and crew were the proverbial fish in a barrel.
