Edie Spence [04] Deadshifted Page 21

  Asher’s eyes narrowed. “Why does he want you—not me?”

  I didn’t want to tell him, but he deserved to know. “Because his own daughter died. When we were alone together earlier, before the gunmen, he asked if I was really pregnant, and then said he wanted a child for a child.”

  Asher’s expression became emotionless and flat. “That is the exact opposite of everything you needed to say to get me to go help them. We’re going.”

  “You know what he’s capable of! How can you just leave them behind?”

  “Look around you. Thousands of people have already died here. Who cares about a few more?” He grabbed my arm. “I’m getting you off this boat.”

  It truly didn’t matter to him. And maybe he was right, but what kind of life with him would I have if I had to live with the knowledge that for me to be happy, we’d just let people die?

  Wasn’t that kind of thinking what had gotten us here in the first place? I pulled back from him.

  “The Shadows made you pick this trip. Because they knew they could use us to figure out what was going on—and to punish us for disobeying them. They say some of this is your fault.” Asher looked stunned. I moved closer to him and took his hand back. “We’re different. I love you with all my heart, but I’m not like you. I can’t just leave them behind without at least trying first.”

  Rory had been creeping backward, wisely trying to give us space. But then the Maraschino swung and he rocked back as the ship did. I saw him reach out for the marble of the spa’s registration table, and watched his fingers slip off the cold stone.

  He fell to the ground and slid like he was on a slip-and-slide, down the hall, to the other door where Asher’d been waiting for me. It swung open as he hit it and he flew out, just barely catching the doorjamb in time. Behind him was open black.

  “Don’t leave me!” he howled, holding on to the doorway.

  I started up—and so did Asher. I caught his shoulder. “I thought you didn’t care about adding a few more deaths to the pile.”

  For a heart-wrenching second I thought he might actually do it, just to prove his point, even if it broke me. And then he shrugged my hand away and anger crossed his face. “God-fucking-dammit, Edie.”

  Missing two fingers didn’t hurt his agility. He lowered himself through the tumbled wreckage of the spa and reached out for Rory. Rory grabbed hold, and Asher pulled him up, until he could put him down again safely inside.

  “Watch out, I won’t come for you again,” he warned, and Rory nodded wildly.

  My stomach reeled watching them climb back up, using the fixtures bolted to the spa’s walls for support. I wanted to pretend it was because I was worried about them, or what we still had left to do, or the fact that this entire fucking boat was dropping into the sea, but I couldn’t. Asher was too busy concentrating on handholds to see me. I ducked behind the counter and pressed a hand to my stomach, hard. “Stay in,” I commanded my stomach contents quietly. I could have sworn I felt an answering thrill to my demand. I knew it was way too early to feel anything from the baby, but I added, “Please be the baby. Don’t be a killer worm.”

  Asher pulled himself even with me. “Other than storm in to our deaths, do we have a plan?”

  I smiled at him and tried to be encouraging. “We’ll think of something. We always do.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  If the spa’s display table for all their tonics and brochures hadn’t been bolted into the wall, we might not have made it out of the room. But we were able to use it like a ladder, until we reached the door at the top of the store. Rory was shaken by nearly being lost, whatever spell Asher’s competence had had on him broken. The second we emerged from the door he started apologizing.

  “I don’t know what you two are, but I’m not like you.” For a second I felt boldly proud—until his next words. “I need to get off this ship.”

  “Out of the mouths of babes,” Asher said, giving me a look.

  I wanted to encourage Rory to come with us, but I couldn’t in good faith. The deck was getting worse. If he didn’t go he might not make it back to where the life rafts were stowed.

  “See those canisters?” Asher said, pointing to what looked like oil drums attached to the Maraschino’s railings at small intervals. “If all else fails, grab one of those and go overboard. They’ll inflate if you pull the string out from the end.”

  “How do you know?” Rory asked him, like I’d learned how to stop myself from asking long ago.

  “I read a lot of books. Hurry up. Good luck.”

  Rory nodded. “You too.” And then he scrambled off as the deck neared forty-five degrees, and another wave hit the Maraschino’s side.

  “We probably don’t have much time,” Asher said.

  My hand found his injured one. “I know.”

  * * *

  Together, we walked over the face of what had been the outer wall of the spa, up to the nice restaurant where we’d eaten a fancy dinner with Liz and Nathaniel just two nights before.

  Arriving there like this in this set of circumstances somehow felt more right than the other night when I’d been all nicely dressed. This made more sense—the chaos, the mess, the nearness to death. Of course the last seven months of peace were just a dream; I’d been a fool to ever think they weren’t. I didn’t know if I didn’t deserve happiness, although it sure as hell seemed like someone thought I didn’t, or if chaos was in me from the way I was raised. But everything being messed up felt strangely right somehow. Probably because messed up could have been my middle name.

  “I’m not going to let him kill you, Edie. We’ll do what we have to do, and get lucky if we can, but you can’t ask that.”

  “I’m not. I’m asking you to give us a chance to save the others.” I nodded at him, and leaned in for a fast kiss. “I promise.”

  We reached the restaurant door, hung skew by either violence or the current gravity, and carefully crept in.

  * * *

  Nathaniel was there, leaning against a column near the front door. He looked the same as when I’d seen him last, except now he had an orange life jacket on. Two of his gunmen stood to either side.

  Jorge, Marius, and Kate were strung up from the exposed beams in the ceiling, trussed like flies caught in a spider’s web. They were gagged, but not so much that they couldn’t talk around them. Jorge gasped to see us arrive, Marius’s soldier’s training kept him quiet, and Kate quietly moaned to herself, not in recognition. None of them looked well, but I was no shining example of health right now myself.

  Nathaniel leaned forward but didn’t take a step. With the unstable deck, he wasn’t completely in control. “I knew you weren’t dead, even if my men weren’t always careful.” He gave Asher a nod. “And look, you managed to rescue your man.”

  “What do you want?” Asher stood in front of me, blocking me with his body.

  “Like I already told her. Revenge.”

  “I didn’t kill your daughter. The Consortium did.”

  Nathaniel’s eyes widened and then he laughed, cold and long. “Oh. Of course you would assume that. You couldn’t possibly know.” He pushed himself forward off the column and took a step nearer us, without blocking his hired guns. “The Consortium didn’t come out to punish me themselves. They told my employers to ‘clean things up.’ Do you know what they did?” he asked us.

  I shook my head, mute. Asher didn’t move.

  “They didn’t kill her. They took her from me. They’ve had her, all this time. You ruined a decade of research and made monsters kidnap my only child.”

  Things fell into place. That was why Nathaniel was willing to sacrifice thousands of people to get the Leviathan on his side. He thought his daughter was still alive.

  What wouldn’t a parent do to try to rescue their own child?

  “When I found out you were on board, with your lovely, stupid, pregnant wife—it was almost too good to be true. I couldn’t believe my luck—and that’s when I knew my plan
would work. You being here, me getting this chance—it’s fate. The Leviathan is already on its way.” He took a gun from one of his employees. Kate started to moan louder, and from deep in the restaurant there was the sound of a rush of water, as though a dam had burst, and a shallow wave swept in across the back of the floor.

  Nathaniel pointed the gun at us, and Asher moved to stand in front of me. “You know I could have killed you already, but I didn’t. Don’t get me wrong, I do want you dead—but more than that, I want to take something of yours. Your woman and your child. I’ll take them away from here and make you wonder every waking moment of your days if they’re still alive, or if I’ve killed them. If they cursed you when they died. Maybe I’ll even raise up your child as my own. You can spend the rest of your life imagining him calling me Father.”

  Despite saying he didn’t want to kill us, he pointed the gun straight at Asher’s head—and then twisted it up, to aim it at Kate. “Your woman will come over here or I’ll shoot them.”

  Asher flung his arm out to block me. “They’re already going to die.”

  “Are they? Can you be absolutely sure?”

  The water lapped higher behind him, making some of the fallen tables float. I pressed against Asher’s arm.

  “I was doing what I had to do to survive. What was your excuse? You could have been anything! You could have worked for anyone!”

  Nathaniel’s lips lifted up in a cruel smile. “So could you.” He shot the ceiling in front of Kate, and both Asher and I jumped.

  The faucet sound got louder, and some distant part of the structure groaned, as if he’d wounded the Maraschino itself. Kate began to scream around the gag. I thought she was reacting to Nathaniel pointing the gun at her, but I realized she was shouting a word. “Water! Water water water!” rising in volume each time.

  “You come here, or I’ll shoot her,” Nathaniel said, addressing me, and then bringing the barrel of the gun down. “Or I’ll shoot both of you and be done with it.”

  I stepped around Asher’s arm with finality.

  “Edie, don’t you dare,” he said as Nathaniel returned the gun to point at him.

  Kate kept screaming, and water kept rushing in, and it seemed like I didn’t have a choice. All I could do was walk slowly toward Nathaniel and block Asher from his gun—when Kate got torn in two.

  She shrieked as she came unglued at the seam of her belly, like a doll torn between two dogs. Dark things rolled out of her, dripping down. Worms, cascading out, slithery and black, born one after another.

  The previously unflappable gunmen startled at this. They were human, and the sight of a human unraveling and worms shedding out was beyond the pale; even Nathaniel was stunned. Jorge tried swimming away from her in midair, while Marius was impassive; he’d already seen worse in the Dolphin. The still-armed gunmen stepped back into Marius’s kicking range, and he gave me a look with his eyes: Whatever you’re going to do, do it now!

  There was only one thing left that I could do. Nathaniel wanted me? Well, he could come and find me then—I intentionally slipped and fell, sliding for the far side of the room.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  “No!” Nathaniel and Asher shouted behind me in unison, and I heard the sounds of a fight break out. I had time to register the heat of the friction burn the carpeting gave me as I crossed the entire room on my ass, slid into the water at its bottom, and was blasted with salty cold.

  I was lucky not to be impaled on an upturned chair. If the water’d been any shallower, or if my ass had been sliding down tile—I splashed around without thinking about it, sputtering up. My feet found purchase on things that were already sunk in the room and I bobbed.

  I was a poor swimmer but an excellent floater, courtesy of my God-given body fat. What I wasn’t counting on was the cold. All the heat was leaving my body—I could feel the tables and chairs submerged below me and even stand on them for now, but for how long?

  There was a splash beside me as someone slid down in the dark. I bit back a yelp of surprise and ducked, so that only my eyes were above the waterline.

  The sound of struggling up above continued. The emergency lighting would have shown me Nathaniel’s life jacket, so whoever had followed me down had to have been one of his guards.

  Something moved beside me in the water, waving like a snake—one of the worms that had emerged from Kate. In the seawater it was a patchy sickly green, like a glow stick left in a dirty gutter outside an all-ages club.

  Every sphincter in my body clenched, but the awful thing slid on by. It had other places to be, and that was frightening too. It was one thing to be in a room that was filling with water; it would be another to be forced to swim out of here and into the open sea where a monster was rising up.

  I heard a gurgle of air escaping from beside me, too near. I’d backed away from the worm without thinking, and gone nearer whoever else had fallen down. But he hadn’t come down here on his own—blood was billowing out from his face in a slow wave. Marius must have kicked him and broken his nose, and in falling he hadn’t been as lucky as me. The wind had been knocked out of him, or he’d been kicked senseless, and his face was underneath the rising tide.

  Living in Port Cavell I’d heard too many stories about sailors climbing onto other sailors’ backs to survive to want to be near one waking up. Whoever this man was, he’d watched Kate die, and he’d been willing to sacrifice me—not to mention all the other people who’d already died because of the machine gun that was pulling him below now.

  I couldn’t stop shivering anymore—I couldn’t stay here much longer. I didn’t have to bend over to hide; the water was so high I was standing, and soon I’d have to swim.

  What kind of monster would you have to be to murder four thousand people? I’d been willing to throw a lot away to find Asher—how much greater destruction would I find myself capable of to save my own child? I wasn’t like Nathaniel, but—

  The man beside me gurgled again in a final-sounding way. I reached for him and unbuckled his life vest with numb fingers, slinging his limbs out of the armholes one at a time. I pushed him away when I was done. It wasn’t the same as holding him under the water with my own hands, but it was close enough. We were swimming in the same blood-colored sea.

  “Edie!” Asher called down to me. The fight above me was through.

  I took another cautious look around to make sure I didn’t see orange anywhere before I shouted out my location.

  “Edie!” Asher shouted, voice breaking with desperation.

  “I’m here! I’m fine! Come get me!”

  Movement above blocked out the lights so I couldn’t entirely see what was going on, which frightened me. It was a taste of what it would be like when the ship succumbed to the waves, and everything was dark.

  “Hurry, please!” I shouted up.

  “Hurrying!” Asher shouted back.

  * * *

  Asher managed to get Jorge and Marius down, and between the ropes that they’d been hung by and their own strength, they were able to lower a rope. I caught hold until they’d pulled me firmly up onto the damp carpeting, and then I clambered as they pulled. On my way I passed by Kate, still twitching and spewing out worm after worm to drop back into the rising sea.

  “She’s still alive—” I said with sorrow.

  “That’s not living,” Marius said, giving me a final heave up into Asher’s arms. He held me for a second, and then shook me once, hard.

  “That was reckless and dumb.”

  “Says the man who said he’d be back in a day!” I shook him off. “Besides—you needed a distraction. Where did he go?” I looked around as if talking about Nathaniel might make him emerge, like saying an evil spirit’s name.

  “When the fight broke out he dove aside.” Jorge clenched his fists. “I’d like to see him again though—without a gun.”

  Asher’s face said he had more to say to me, but that he’d wait until we were alone.

  “Let’s get out of here
and find a lifeboat—” I said.

  “If there are any left,” Marius said darkly.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  Asher held my hand like he was never letting go. “That was stupid of you.”

  “Well, you know. I’m stupid and lovely,” I said, with a snort. “You couldn’t fight him if you were busy protecting me. I took a chance.”

  “A shitty one.”

  “But it worked. Now we just need to get off this boat.”

  Outside, the storm had passed and it was almost dawn. The surface of the sea was eerily calm now in a way that I knew had horrified ancient mariners, courtesy of high school English class, as the Maraschino continued her stately descent. There were life rafts scattered around the surrounding sea, bright orange dots, but I couldn’t see anyone on board any of them—maybe as the ship sank they’d been knocked loose?

  The rest of the life rafts were still attached to the third floor, and we were up on the ninth. It wouldn’t be safe for us to go back inside the ship, we all knew that without saying it aloud, although climbing down the outside of the ship still seemed like suicide—what I hadn’t wanted to do with Claire and Hal and Emily hadn’t gotten any safer since.

  “If we follow the vertical railings—” Marius pointed to the welded pipes that went from floor to floor, providing the structure for the plastic sheets that blocked the wind.

  “Sure.” Jorge grabbed hold of the first one and shimmied down it until his feet were on the balcony of the next floor. “I hope none of you is afraid of heights,” he called back to us.

  Marius followed him. Asher and I were bringing up the rear. Asher watched me mount the pipe. “Be careful.”

  “I will.”

  By holding on to the edge of the railings above, aligning my body with the pipe, and going slowly, I could just about get my feet down to the railings of the floor below us. It was an easier reach for the taller men, but I was managing, floor after floor. The thought of getting off this boat—even if was onto a smaller one—gave me wings.