Fathomless (35 page)

Daniel tossed the oyster shell. “I'm both, right? Why do I have to pick one?”

“It'd be amazing if you didn't have to,” Sean said. “I mean, if you could be human on land and Deep One in the water.”

Voice of reason, Eddy said, “Right, but it doesn't look like you can just switch back and forth.”

And that ended the conversation. Daniel found another shell to pick at, and Eddy rescanned the horizon. On the cutter, seal-like, Abel gave himself a good scratch all over, finishing with a scrub of his back on the flybridge railing. Going from skin to scales had to be an itchy business. It was one point against the Change, but Sean didn't mention it. The air between Daniel and Eddy was thick with their tension. It had the muscle to pull them together, or to shove them apart—no way he was blowing the equilibrium with dumb cracks.

“When I was doing the talking for Elspeth,” Daniel finally went on.

Eddy's binoculars came down, but it was Sean who responded. “That was wild, right?”

“When she was
thinking
to me about Eddy, there were some things I didn't say out loud.”

“Because she was cussing me out?” Eddy said.

“More like cussing me. She thought I should have learned from my mother how dangerous it was to love a human.”

Stumbling over rocks would have made Sean's attempt to give them space too obvious, so he stayed put. He did commandeer the binoculars, though, which gave him an excuse to turn his back and study the coastline. Boat lights twinkled far off. Farther still, he made out the beacon of the Orange Point lighthouse, revolving like a restless Cyclops below the Witches' Burial Ground.

“Did Elspeth sense what I was feeling?” Eddy said.

“Yes, and she said you were a bigger fool than my father. At least he didn't know what my mother was when he fell in love with her. But you know what I am, and you still love me.”

Sean braced himself for the sound of face-sucking, but it didn't come. He glanced over his shoulder. A whole person's worth of space continued to separate Eddy and Daniel, and they weren't even holding hands across it. Was he totally dense, or hadn't they just admitted they were crazy about each other?

It turned out to be a good thing they didn't get demonstrative—from his lookout, Abel called, “Coming up!” He meant the Deep One who'd surfaced right where Sean had imagined one would, midway between the patrol boat and Devil Reef. It swam to the cutter and climbed aboard, tall and broad backed, dorsal fin ringed and studded with more gold than even Elspeth had rocked: Old Man Marsh back from his mission. Daniel stood up and waved, but Marsh went into the cabin without responding. Had he scored such a complete failure with his daughter that he couldn't face Daniel?

Or was he getting out of the way of the Deep One who surfaced farther out, a crested head in black silhouette against the ripples it had created. This Deep One swam to the edge of the reef tidal pools. While it bobbed there, Eddy shifted to Sean's boulder, a tight fit that pressed them shoulder to shoulder, hip to hip; in the killer silence, he heard the rapid beat of her heart, unless it was his own heartbeat he heard, within his ears, inescapable.

Eerily lithe, the Deep One emerged from the water and crouched among the undisturbed seals. Slim waisted, breasted, a she, with fewer piercings than Marsh or Elspeth and only one gold wrist cuff. On the plus side, she didn't have a big bite scar on her dorsal fin. If that
was
a plus.

Daniel started down the side of the reef, nearly slipping.

The Deep One waved him back. She climbed the algae-slick rocks like they were a staircase, reaching the spine of the reef a few yards north of Daniel. There she crouched again.

There, one sleepwalker's step at a time, Daniel joined her, and crouched, and let Aster enfold his partly webbed hands with her fully webbed ones.

And that was how they stayed, gazes locked. The great thing about telepathy, they could say whatever they wanted, whatever had piled up over half Daniel's life, without worrying Sean and Eddy would overhear them. Even so, Sean yielded to Eddy's elbow pokes and scrounged around on the boulder until they'd both put their backs to Daniel and his mother. Like you'd expect out on the water, in the middle of even an August night, it was cool enough for Sean to wish they'd brought the space blanket from the Montauk's locker. There was no going for it now. They could only wait, hunched together, too aware of the soundless conversation behind them to attempt one themselves.

The memory that hit Sean in the absence of other distractions was old but unfaded.
He and Eddy sit next to each other on the bottom step of her front porch, seven and seven years old. Her mother, Rachel, sits on the top step and stares at the cell phone she's laid on her unopened book. It rings once in a while, but she doesn't pick it up. Sean doesn't ask which caller will be important enough to make her answer. Since early morning, when Uncle Gus and Aunt Celeste left him with the Rosenbaums, he hasn't asked a single question. He's eaten waffles and blueberries. He's helped Eddy draw a dragon on the sidewalk. They would still be working on it except they made the outline so big—spanning five squares of pavement—that they've run out of chalk for filling it in. Anyhow, they're kind of beat. Eddy leans against him, scuffing blue chalk from the dragon's wing into her bare soles. Normally Rachel would get on her for making a mess, but Rachel's like Sean today, mainly just waiting. Because Dad has been at the hospice place all night. Because that's where Uncle Gus and Aunt Celeste have gone, and Grandpa Stewie and Uncle Joe. Sean hasn't been there since Mom went to sleep and stayed asleep, breathing funny. That's okay. The next time they all come back from the hospice place, Mom will come with them.

And he really had believed Mom would die and then get better, good as new. Seven was too old to believe in shit like that. Seven knew what dying was. It was never coming back, and never coming back was the worst thing, the black hole horror.

Or was the worst thing having a chance to live, to stay, and turning it down?

“Sean?” Eddy whispered.

Of course, just when a huge chunk of pain had lodged in his throat. He coughed it out.

“You okay?”

“Getting a freaking cold, maybe.”

“Tell me about it.” And Eddy really was shivering.

He put an arm around her and chafed her opposite shoulder. Her narrow bare feet smeared with blue chalk. All those years back, saying nothing (being a kid, not knowing what to say), she'd also waited. “Daniel will be all right.”

“What if he decides to go with Aster? I mean, he can't this second. But he could give up the treatments. He could go stay with his grandfather while he Changes.”

“His dad won't let him.”

“He's eighteen. Legally, he can do what he wants.”

“He hasn't wanted to go against his dad before.”

“Before, he didn't know he had somebody else to go
to
. Soon as he found out about his grandfather—” She shut up. She sniffed.

Sean smelled it, too, the fresh brine and the faint fish and an elusive sweetness. Pulling apart, they stood and turned. Daniel had remained where he'd crouched, while Aster had slipped around him and approached their boulder. Sean was glad now they'd had the run-in with Elspeth's gang—it had gotten them over the shock that came from the sheer strangeness of a Deep One. Up close, as long as they weren't attacking you, Deep Ones were cool. They were their own species, not just a sharking away of humanity. Sean would even bet that, with the scattering of emerald green and turquoise in her scales and the extra height of her dorsal fin, Aster Marsh was a Deep One babe.

The thin rings of iris that surrounded her huge pupils were the same blue as Old Man Marsh's, and Tom's, and Daniel's. The Marsh blue. Sean worked not to blink while Aster appraised him. She then appraised Eddy for so long, he started getting nervous by proxy. Unnecessary: Eddy didn't falter. She didn't even flinch when Aster touched her cheek with one clawed and webbed hand.

Returning to Daniel, Aster touched both his cheeks and pressed her forehead to his. His arms rose as if to hug her. They dropped back to his sides. Brow connection unbroken, he started shaking his head. Sean's empty stomach rolled. Aster had to want Daniel to choose her and the Change. Maybe she was thinking to him how much his father and the Order sucked to put him through Geldman's treatments. How much Eddy and Sean sucked, compared to the friends he could have in Y'ha-nthlei. How selfish they were trying to hold on to him. Stuff like that, and you couldn't even blame her. She was his mother. She couldn't let go.

She'd let go before.

The Change had forced her to.

But his own mom hadn't saved herself through the Communion. She had let go instead.

But she must have been too sick to understand what Orne was offering her, and Dad, and Sean, everyone who loved her. There hadn't been time for Mom to get used to the idea of immortality. You couldn't throw that in someone's face all of a sudden without them thinking you were crazy, without them running scared—

“Sean,” Eddy said.

He'd closed his eyes. Opening them, he saw that Aster had climbed back down to the tidal pools. Daniel was sliding after her. Seals humped away with indignant barks as he blundered through their cordon.

“He's going!” Though Eddy's voice stayed low, her words carried the sharp despair of a wail.

“He says he can't.”

“Well, what's that?”

It was Aster diving, then surfacing a dozen yards off and looking back at Daniel. It was Daniel teetering on the edge of the reef. It was Marsh, come back out of the cabin, and Abel on the flybridge, both watching from the railings.

Then it was Aster swimming swiftly back to the edge. Daniel hesitated. She was going to pull him in!

She pushed him backwards, so he fell onto the thick carpet of seaweed that clung to the tidal rocks. He fell unhurt, but he stayed down while she dived again and this time didn't come up.

He stayed down, arm over eyes, chest heaving.

Trying not to slip and brain themselves on the rocks, Sean and Eddy took several minutes to reach Daniel. For another quarter hour, while the seals regrouped and the cutter chugged cautiously nearer, they knelt watch and listened to him choke out grief that Aster had gone and gratitude that she'd read his heart for him.

 

24

It
was almost dawn when Sean guided the Montauk to a private pier in Innsmouth Harbor. Marsh would give it docking space until Sean or Orne came to retrieve it. The way Sean foresaw things going down in Arkham, it would probably be Orne.

Their cell phones were so packed with frantic messages from Helen and all their parents that they had to turn down Marsh's offer to crash at his house and start back without delay. Abel drove them to the Newbury marina in his kiwi Bug. They dozed through the stink, even Sean riding shotgun. In the backseat of the Civic, Eddy and Daniel fell asleep again. No invisible third person separated them now—his head lolled on her shoulder, her cheek nestled in his wild Frodo-in-Mordor hair. To keep from disturbing them, Sean blasted his obnoxiously loud
STAY AWAKE
playlist through an earbud instead of the car speakers.

Stopping for coffee twice, he did stay awake. He also made a brief call to Helen, which meant she and Marvell were waiting outside the Arkwright House when they pulled into the driveway. Another man stood, or rather shifted from foot to foot, beside Helen. His curly black hair was a close-clipped version of Daniel's, which took any surprise out of how he went into full rant mode the second Daniel emerged from the Civic. Stalking across the gravel, poking the air with a forefinger, he snapped, “This was unacceptable! You know that. Absolutely unacceptable!”

Eddy was brave enough to get out and stand next to Daniel. Sean wasn't that much in love. He stayed in the car.

“Dad,” Daniel said. “You drove from New York?”

“When Ms. Arkwright told me you were gone, what did you think I was going to do?” Glass was up in Daniel's face now and pointing at the fresh bandage Marsh had wrapped around his throat. “Tell me you didn't go into the ocean again.” Then he noticed the fresh scratches on Daniel's arms and legs. His voice rose: “And did those things
attack
you?”

Daniel answered the second question first, semi-truthfully. “Nobody
attacked
me. And I didn't go in any water. We stayed in the boat until we got to the reef.”

“Out on a reef? Are you insane?”

Helen approached Glass with bomb-squad wariness. He must have been chewing her out for hours. “We should go inside,” she said. “Have Mr. Geldman come over to look at Daniel.”

“Daniel's going inside to pack,” Glass said—to Daniel, not Helen. “We'll go over to Geldman after. That is, if you want to, Daniel. If you're not ready to throw all our work away for those things.”

Though his hands were shaking, Daniel kept his voice steady. “If I wanted to Change, I would have stayed in Innsmouth. And they're Deep Ones, not
things.
Unless you want to call them Shn'yeh—that's their right name, my grandfather told me. I met him. And I saw my mother.”

Not even Glass dared to jump into Daniel's pause. His hands were shaking, too.

“I saw my mother,” Daniel repeated. “She's not dead. You knew that, though.”

“Daniel.”

“She's alive. Changed. But she told me to come back here and stay human. She told me I'm not ready to Change. Maybe sometime. Not now.”

The way Glass bowed his head must've convinced Helen his fuse had burned out, for the moment. She moved in and got Daniel by the elbow. “Come on. We can go down to the kitchen and talk over breakfast.”

“Fine with me,” Daniel said. “As long as Eddy comes.”