[Anita Blake Collection] - Strange Candy (5 page)

“No.” Still only a whisper. She needed to shout, to scream. “No.” Then she remembered the gun.

His hands ripped away her damp panties. He lowered his hips, eyes distant.

The gun clicked on the empty chamber. Adria pulled the trigger again. The gun fired through the robe pocket. The shot seemed to explode, so loud. His body jerked, eyes staring at her, seeing her for the first time. She pulled the trigger again. He jerked and then slumped over her.

The song ended abruptly, jarring. Adria's breath came in ragged gasps. She tried to push him off her, but couldn't. He was too heavy. She panicked, beating at his arms and chest. His blood flowed warm onto her skin. She took a deep breath that quavered, and let it out. “I'm all right. I'm all right.” She began to crawl out from under him, his body dragging along her skin as she wiggled free. She was crying now, sobbing. She began screaming, low tiny screams. The screams frightened her because she couldn't stop them.

She crawled free of him and clawed through the sand until she was free of the water. She sat in the dry sand, letting it cake the wet robe. She held the gun in her hand, loosely.

A wave washed over him, and his hand waved limp, moved by the water. An image of Rachel flashed through her mind. She put a shaking hand against her mouth to stop the awful whimpering screams.

His hand clenched. Adria stopped breathing for a moment. He raised his head. She felt his mind reach out for her. It was like the slow drag of the sea when you're tired and it would be better, easier to rest, to let the water take you down. He got to his feet.

Adria raised the gun two-handed. Blood flowed from two wounds in his stomach, but he never hesitated; the sea did not acknowledge death. Blood blossomed in his chest. He staggered, but kept coming. Adria fired, watching the bullets explode into his chest, ears ringing with the noise. He fell to his knees and then slid to one side, slowly so slowly.

He lay on his side in the dry sand, staring at her. His dark eyes were patient as the sea, nothing in them that she could read, or understand. He didn't seem to be able to move. His chest was a bloody mess. He lay only an arm's length from her. She watched his life pour out into the sand. He blinked. Adria pointed the gun at those eyes and squeezed the trigger.
The gun bounced in her hands. A neat red hole appeared in his forehead, blood leaking into his eyes. His eyes stared sightless, the light gone out of them.

Adria did not check his pulse to make sure he was dead. She backed off, the empty gun still in her hand and began running for home. She looked back once from the top of the rocks. The body lay pale and dark, shadow patched. Nothing moved.

Adria ran.

She heard police sirens a long way off. The strobe lights flickered outside her windows, colored shadows against the curtains. The police found blood on the sand but no body.

“The Beach Rapist” did not strike again. Was he really dead? Or had he just started hiding the bodies, letting the ocean take the evidence away? Adria couldn't sleep with the sea whispering outside her window anymore.

She sold the house for a nice price, even with the murders. Beachfront property was dear. Adria moved inland, far from the sea. But there are nights when the rustle of leaves outside her window becomes the rushing of the sea. And there is an echo in her head, a hiss of distant music.

Adria is looking for some place out of state. Some place where the sea does not touch the land for hundreds of miles on any side. Surely, there she will be safe.

I
WAS
dreaming of sea monsters when the phone rang. I dragged the phone under the sheets with me and said, “'Lo.”

“Did I wake you, Mike?”

Why does everyone ask that when the answer is obviously yes? And why do we lie automatically? “No, no, what's up, Jordan?”

“It's your damn lake monster. He broke through the barricade again.”

I groaned. “What's he doing?”

“Chasing speedboats, what else?”

“We'll be right there.”

“Make it quick, Mike. The skiers are about to wet their pants.”

I hung up the phone and sat up, pushing back the covers. Susan was still deeply asleep. Her shining black hair lay in a fan across the pillow. Her face was an almost perfect triangle. The firm jaw was the only hint a person had that this pretty, delicate-seeming woman was one of the toughest people I'd ever met. She was a fanatical champion of lost causes. Right now, it was lake monsters, and our monster was loose.

I touched her tanned shoulder gently. “Come on, wife, duty calls.”

She muttered something unintelligible, which meant she wasn't awake at all. She's the only person I know who hates morning more than I do.

“Come on, Susan, Irving broke out of his barricade and is terrorizing the tourists.”

She turned over, blinking at me. “He won't hurt them,” she said thickly.

“No, but they don't know that.”

She laughed, a rich, dark sound like good wine. “Do you think they'd believe he was a vegetarian?”

“Not with all those teeth,” I said. “Come on, we gotta go herd Irving back inside and repair the barricade.”

“You know,” Susan said, “Irving used to be almost exclusively nocturnal, but lately he's active at all hours. I wonder why?”

I shrugged and ran a comb through my hair. “Unknown,” I said.

Unknown
, a good word for lake monsters. Nobody knew much about them, and now they were endangered, nearly extinct. Two lake monsters had died in the last fifteen years, both killed by pollution. To make the tragedy worse, both monsters had been pregnant. The babies had been fully formed, but the pollution had gotten them, too. Lake monsters need nearly pristine conditions, and as man spreads out, pristine gets pretty rare.

The question that no one could answer was, how had the two dead females gotten pregnant? Sexual reproduction is a little hard without a mate. There are wonderful theories about secret tunnels connecting the lakes, but no one had found any tunnels. Another idea was that male lake monsters look so different from females that they had been classed as some sort of fish or…something. But Irving, and two other monsters, had male genitalia. Irving didn't look anything like a fish.

Susan had come here three years ago to study Irving, the lake monster. I was a forest ranger with a master's degree in cryptozoology, a nice degree if you work in the Enchanted Forest National Park. I was assigned to help Dr. Susan Greco, noted cryptozoologist, look into a possible
breeding program for our lake monster. A female lake monster in New England was being studied as well. The idea was to transport her to Irving, maybe. There was always the chance that the two monsters would fight and kill each other. No one had ever seen two monsters together.

Three years later, married to each other for almost two years, and we still didn't know a damn thing about the sex life of the greater lake monster. Whether there was such a thing as a lesser lake monster was a matter of great debate. Were the two small monsters in other states just younger greater lake monsters, or were they a separate species? How long did lake monsters live? We could reach up and rub Irving between the eye ridges, and we still didn't know how old he was.

Twenty minutes later we were bouncing across the lake in a small boat. The sky was milky blue with cumulus clouds like white cotton candy. The water was the usual mirror brightness, reflecting the straight cones of pines, and the distant rise of mountains. Two boats passed us at full throttle; the passengers waved and yelled. I caught one word: “Monster!”

Jordan guided our boat. He was one of the junior rangers. He looked like his name: blond, handsome in a California surf-boy kind of way. Susan said he was cute. If Jordan hadn't been such a hardworking nice guy, I could have disliked him. Jordan drove the boat so Susan and I could slip into diving gear. If you've ever tried to get into a wet suit while riding full tilt in a small boat,
slip
is not quite the word—
struggle
maybe. When I was encased in latex from ankle to neck, I took a quick peek through binoculars at our lake monster.

Irving looks like a cross between a Chinese dragon, an eel, and an oil slick. His head is the most dragonlike, with slender horns and rubbery spikes bristling around very square jaws. Most of his thirty-foot length is all slick and slightly flattened; eel, not land snake. His fringelike dorsal fin extends nearly the length of his body. Overall, his color is black, but he glistens in sunlight like an oil slick; rings of color flash and melt along his skin. The rainbow only shows up at close range, though. Most people aren't much interested in how pretty he is when they're that close.

Irving's head was keeping pace with the last water-skier. It was a man in a bright orange ski vest. Though through my binoculars his tanned face looked bloodless. Irving's mouth was half open, exposing a dazzling display of teeth. The boat was going full out, motor screaming. The skier was riding the white foam of the wake like his life depended on it.

The faster the boat went, the faster Irving swam, but quiet, no foaming wake for the lake monster. He could glide at incredible speeds nearly silent and waveless. The only reason we saw so much of Irving was because he liked people. He wanted to be seen. Most lake monsters gave a new definition to the word
shy
.

The skier fell into the water. He bobbed to the surface, trapped in his life vest. I could see him screaming and waving his arms.

The lake monster blew bubbles at him, then stretched his neck up ten feet and gave a great honking sound. It's his version of human laughter.

If Irving had been human, he'd have been your obnoxious Uncle Ned—the one who makes really bad jokes, wears loud plaid, and slips you twenty dollars when your parents aren't looking. Irving had a good heart, but his sense of humor was a little sadistic.

Susan waved and called, “Irving!”

His great head swiveled and looked at our boat. He gave a loud snort and dived under the water. The skier started to paddle frantically for his boat.

Irving surfaced about five feet from us. Jordan cut the motor and let us drift while the monster moved up alongside. I struggled with my diving gear while Susan coaxed Irving. He finally let her rub the bristles on his chin and then snorted into her wet suit, splashing her with water and making a happy
humph
sound. She laughed and rubbed his eye ridges.

Jordan started the boat again, and we began moving slowly toward the barricade and Irving's part of the lake. Our walkie-talkies squawked to life. Someone was calling me. Jordan took it because I was still fastening air tanks into place. It was hard to hear anything over the whine of boat and happy monster noises.

“It's Priscilla. She and Roy are at an abandoned campsite. A whole troop of Girl Scouts plus two of their leaders are missing.”

“How long have they been missing?”

“Unsure.”

“Damn. Any signs of a struggle?”

Jordan asked, then shook his head. “Looks like they just walked away.”

“Where were they camped?”

“Near Starlight Ridge.”

“What genius let them camp that far up?”

“You know how it is, Mike, they pick their own campsite.”

“But it's June,” I said.

Jordan just frowned at me, but Susan let out a slow whistle.

“What?” asked Jordan.

“No all-female groups are allowed to camp above Bluebell Glade between May thirteenth and June thirtieth.”

“But…” Then the light dawned. “Oh, shit.”

I nodded. “Satyr rutting season. Have them check Satyr Glade. And find out who the hell OK'd the campsite.”

Susan said softly, “Somebody's going to get sued over this one.”

All I could do was nod. I wasn't usually in charge of anything but the monster. Unfortunately, our chief ranger was on the injured list for at least three weeks. I was acting chief ranger at the height of the tourist season.

The barricade stretched across the most narrow part of the lake, from pine-covered shore to rocky outcrop. It was a deluxe steel net, enough give and no sharp edges so Irving wouldn't be able to break it. The barricade had been the single most expensive item of the Lake Monster Breeding Program.

The net stretched smooth and unbroken, which meant the damage had to be below the water line. Irving had learned that if he damaged the visible part of the net, we'd discover his escape sooner, but underwater we wouldn't notice the breakout until we spotted him.

The water was cold even in June, not uncomfortable but cool, and it closed around me on all sides. Air may be all around you on land, but it doesn't have the invasive push of water. Water lets you know it's there. On a good day the visibility is twenty feet. Today wasn't a good day.

A swirl of water and Irving coiled through the silver trail of my air bubbles, the thickness of his body looped against my back. I brushed a hand down his side as he eased past me. I expected monsters to feel like dolphins, rubbery and somehow unreal, or snakes with their dry, soft brush of scales, but monsters feel like…monsters. Slick, wet but soft like pressed velvet. And underneath it all, even when you can't see most of him, just a glimpse of shining, black coils, there is the feeling of immense power. Even if you can't see him, you know he's big. You know he could flatten you if he wanted to, but Irving is like some of the great whales. He seems to know he's big and that you're small. He's careful around us.

The lake monster swam in and out of the wavering sunlight that pierced the water. Susan and I stayed within touching distance of each other. At twenty-five feet, we lost all light. Only my grip on the net let me know which way was up. I've been in caves where it was so dark you could touch your own eyeball and not see your finger. It was like that down here except the water gave the darkness weight and movement as if it were something alive. The water swirled, and something large rubbed against me. It had to be Irving, but my breathing seemed very loud. Even, deep breaths, that's it. I'm not afraid of water, and I'm not afraid of the dark, but combine the two and I am not a happy camper.

I switched on my flashlight and Susan followed suit. Her beam flashed into my eyes and I gave her the OK sign. She returned it, and we continued down into the blackness. I had to let my flashlight swing on the little loop around my wrist so I could use both hands to hold the net and feel for looseness. The light swung bizarrely, a slow-motion liquid dance of light and darkness.

The net wobbled under my hands, loose. I waved my light at Susan, and she swam over to me. Together we found the hole that Irving had
pushed under the net, tearing out two mooring lines. He was thirty feet long, but he had a snake's ability to squeeze through the darnedest holes. I would have bet a month's pay he couldn't have slipped through the opening. After we fixed one, we'd make sure there were no others, but usually it was just one. Irving is a lazy monster and doesn't do more work than he has to.

First, of course, we had to get Irving back through that little hole.

Susan swam through the hole, raising a cloud of silt that floated like a brownish fog in the flashlight's beam. Now even with the light I couldn't see anything. But Irving's smooth bulk eased past my leg. Nothing else in the lake could displace water like our monster. He stopped and I put a hand on his side. I still couldn't see, or feel his tail end. With a convulsive wriggle, Irving began to back out of the hole. It stopped almost as soon as it began, and I knew Susan was bribing him with some of the fish we'd brought. The way to a lake monster's heart is through his stomach.

Two hours later, the barricade was temporarily secure. We were making our last dive and had stopped at fifteen feet for our decompression stop. If you go up too fast, the air in your lungs doesn't have time to adjust to the pressure as you swim toward the surface. Swim directly up with no decompression stop, and you'll get “the bends”—decompression sickness. The nitrogen in your blood will bubble like soda pop, causing, among other things, unconsciousness and death. That is the worst case, of course. Susan says I dwell too much on the things that can go wrong when you dive. I prefer to think of it as being cautious.

Irving butted me gently in the ribs, blowing bubbles at me. It's hard to laugh with a regulator in your mouth, but Irving will make you do it. Sunlight hovered in the water at this depth, making the monster's coils shimmer. He wrapped us both in his velvet muscled body, not tight, but to let us know he had us. Then he was gone swimming away into dimness.