Life Guards in the Hamptons (40 page)

Someone cautiously mentioned that the last time the rogue wave appeared the professor and his fancy curse could not subdue it.

I held the old man’s trembling hand. “That is true, but remember he vanquished it decades ago. This time he does not have to recall the exact words. We have them on tape. And Dr. Harmon will not be facing the demon on his own.” I felt his hand squeeze mine. It almost killed me to say it, but I did. “I’ll be there.”

“And I.” Matt came in then and stood behind my chair.

“No, you cannot confront N’fwend. You are not … not one of us.”

I never saw him so angry, so hurt at the same time. I looked at my hand in the professor’s while he cursed. “Bullshit. You made me one of you.”

“But we don’t know what effect the serpent will have on you. You could fall under its spell.”

“More bullshit. I faced Vanderman, didn’t I? I looked straight into the bastard’s eyes to gauge his moves, and didn’t get sucked into his vortex. And you need me. How many others here can see the serpent in the water? You don’t know. But how many can see the parrot?”

Hands raised, and a few voices muttered they’d seen the big bird.

“Yeah, but how many of you saw its fish tail? How many of you counted the extra fins on the big dolphins or realized the creatures are pink? Who saw your dead whale fly away in flames last month?”

“The bird has a fish tail?”

“Pink?”

“Flames?”

“That’s right. It’s you and me and the professor, Willow Tate. That’s your A Team. Everyone else is the backup squad, the home team advantage, the cheerleaders and the loyal fans. So what kind of crap are you pulling?”

The professor squeezed my hand again. “She’s trying to protect you, lad, that’s all.”

Matt looked at the chief, then at Rick and Kelvin. They all nodded. So did I. It was true. I’d have nightmares forever seeing Vanderman’s gun pointed at Matt. Put him in the path of a killer wave? Not if I could help it. “I can’t bear the idea of you in so much danger. And … and the animals need you.”

“But I need
you,
Willy. If you face the monster, I go with you. Danger, disaster, disease, whatever. We’re a pair. Got that?”

His cheering squad clapped. I thought I heard Grandma Eve say, “And about time, too.”

Uncle Henry wanted to know if that was a proposal they all heard. “Sure sounded like ‘till death do us part’ to me.”

Matt dragged me away from the others and kissed me, long and hard and full of promise. “When I propose, it’ll be in private, and I’ll have a ring, and go down on one knee if you want. I’ll promise your father I am solvent, and promise your mother to give her grandchildren or die trying. And I’ll slay as many dragons as you need, by your side.”

He brushed a tear from my cheek. “After we take care of this one.”

How romantic was that? I gulped and said okay. How lame was that?

Matt smiled and led me back to the council, whose members pretended the whole scene never happened.

“So let’s hear the plan again,” the chief demanded.

That was easy. We stand on the deck of a sinking ship in the middle of a hurricane and tell some dire monster to go away, in a language we don’t understand. We all try to project my cartoon of the loathsome beast shrinking to the size of a pea, wave our beads, and don’t look in its eyes. Oh, yeah, with an eighty-year-old gentleman scholar leading the chant and a mastermind mesmerist as hostage.

“Works for me.”

“And me.”

And everyone in the big room, except Vanderman. Lou’s agents pulled him forward and took the gag out of
his mouth. He spit on the floor. “Why the hell should I help you?”

Everyone looked to me. I looked at Matt. Together we faced the skeezy scumbag. “Because that man over there, the one who looks like a hit man for Al Capone? That’s what he is. What he does. He cleans up scum like you to make the world a safer place for psychics like us, who make the world a better place for everyone else. And the council here? They don’t believe the constitution applies to them. You used your talent for really, really selfish reasons. So you’re going to lose that power, one way or another. If you help us, you might save your life.”

Matt took over. “If you don’t cooperate, we can just tie you out on the prow of the ship, like a goat to bait a man-eating tiger. Your friend capsizes the ship, you go down first. If you’re already dead, maybe we can add your power to ours to subdue the kraken. It won’t matter to us.”

“It will come for you.” I was certain of that; my father’s omen of a danger named Stu held proof enough for me. “It’ll come for your power. For your conjoined, twisted minds. Your job is to keep it still and close so we can lay the geas on it.”

Professor Harmon adjusted his glasses. “I do not know that we truly need the dastard’s cooperation. It might be enough for the great wyrm to sense him near and hesitate in its path of destruction. I calculate we require five minutes to cast our own counter magic. And if that doesn’t work, we can always throw the bloody sodding blighter to the sharks. Or to our friend Lou.”

F
IRST WE HAD TO WAIT OUT THE HURRICANE.

Holy shit, I was on a damaged boat in a freaking hurricane!

Before I could work up a full-scale panic attack—or beg to be taken back to shore—more people came into the lounge area. They all wanted to shake the professor’s hand, and mine, and Matt’s, to wish us luck, to tell us how confident they were we’d succeed, to promise their wholehearted and superpower-minded support.

All through the battering storm people stepped forward. They wore yellow slickers, orange life vests, and determined looks. They were here to save their homes, their friends, their unique talents. And they all counted on me to lead them.

On us. The professor held my hand. I knew we were both terrified, but we never let the people, our friends, see our fear. Matt didn’t leave my side, which helped a lot.

I showed them the screen Russ had rigged to project my drawing, of the sea monster dwindling to almost nothing, to a tiny egg. I handed out crayon-colored origami evil eye beads from the school kids when we ran out of glass ones. I ate some dry crackers, which was all anyone let me have, knowing my weakness in waves and water.

Someone put on music to drown out the sound of the
storm and the ship’s moans. I felt vibrations under my feet, and a few times had to grab onto Matt to keep my balance, but the ship held. The anchors held. Or the dolphins held the whole thing together. And then, hours later, it was over.

The wind died to a breeze, the rain stopped, and off to the west we could see a tinge of red where the sun sank into the horizon. Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Whoopee.

“It’s time.”

This was the center of the storm, the moment of truth, maybe the end of the world.

A handful of us led the way out onto the open deck of the ship. As we walked, people behind us cheered.

“We’re with you, Matt.”

“You can do it, Professor.”

“Good job so far, Willy. Now get rid of the thing.”

Grandma Eve kissed my cheek and told me to be careful. “I love you.” I imagined I heard my mother’s voice echoing hers, and my father’s, and Susan’s, and hundreds more. I stood tall and took my white-knuckled place at the railing, between Matt and Dr. Harmon.

We watched the water race from the shore, like someone pulling a blanket off a bed. The ship settled lower, with a grinding noise as the hull touched bottom, but it stayed upright. Lower and lower the tide roared out, leaving every boat still in the harbor sitting in sand or mud, exposing fish and rocks and ribs of sunken wrecks.

The bay’s water had to be going somewhere. We all knew it. We all held our breaths. And then, off in the distance, N’fwend rose.

I heard the gasps behind me, felt the fear as people saw a wave like no other wave in their experience. It rose and rose from the sucked-out sea, into a skyscraper, into a mountain, into a tornado that reached from the bottom of the bay to the first night stars. It roared, it screamed, it bore down on us.

People started crying. They saw the wave, the surge, the tsunami. The professor and I saw the dripping fangs, the maelstrom eyes, the pulsing venom, the thunderous
hatred. We both shook in reaction. Vanderman saw it all, too, once Lou pulled the blindfold off.

“You cannot stop it.”

“We have to.”

Vanderman would have leaped over the side of the ship if he weren’t handcuffed between Lou and one of his men.

Matt saw the monster, too. He saw it, knew it, felt the terror of it, and stood firm. “Come on, you bastard, we’re ready for you. Show us what you’ve got.”

My rock, my oak tree, my lover—taunting a dragon? “What, are you insane?”

“Get used to it.” Then he kissed me for luck.

All you need is love.

“NOW!” I shouted. And I started picturing the monster’s demise in my head, while I heard Grant’s voice streaming undecipherable sounds over and over again through the loudspeakers. I sensed people behind me telegraphing hate and anger and fury and begones, and my sketch of a shrinking wave.

Still it came on.

“More! Louder! Think harder! Hold hands to connect our powers!”

The loathing behind me was so strong I might have fallen but for Matt’s hands around my waist. Grant’s voice thundered. My sketch floated in the ether. “Be gone, be gone.”

The monster kept coming, not one drop of water smaller. Its swirling eyes seemed fixed on Vanderman, so Lou and his agent pushed the bastard forward. They had to hold him up, because his knees wouldn’t. “Look at it,” Lou ordered, “hypnotize it and tell it to go away.”

“It—it doesn’t listen. Its power is far stronger than mine.”

But it did still for a moment. Enough time for the professor to stand on a rung of the railing, then lift his hands out like Moses parting the Red Sea. Matt and I rushed to his sides, to hold him steady while he matched Grant’s words exactly, and with my mental images and the villagers’ emotions to go with the ages-old curse.

“Get thee hence, foul wyrm. Go back to thy beginnings and thy prison. I thus command thee.”

And N’fwend howled so loudly glass broke behind us. Then the wave started to diminish, from hundred-mile-an-hour tornado winds to a tropical storm, to a rain spout, a sea puss, a spray that might have been a whale spouting. Then it was gone and the seawater rushed back, so the
Nova Pride
floated again. We could see the dolphins righting tipped boats in the harbor, see them leaping and playing and whistling with joy.

There was jubilation on board, too, except for Vanderman. Lou and his agent were struggling, trying to hold onto something as slippery as mercury, as thin as smoke. It oozed out of their handcuffs, growing smaller and thinner, until it splatted on the deck between their feet. Lou drew out his device—which turned out to be a flashlight he focused on the circle of slime that remained.

“The bastard’s getting away.”

The professor bent down to look. “No, he’s gone back to his beginnings, a zygote. A fertilized egg.”

We all looked on in horror, wondering what to do with him. It.

“Who’d want to give birth to that?” I heard. “Could it survive in a test tube?”

I could see Lou ready to raise his foot, to stomp on it. Oey got there first. Those strong beaks opened up, a pink tongue came out and scooped up the remains of Axel Vanderman. Then a rainbow-hued fish dove off the cruise ship.

All you need is love.

And a friend in high places. I held up my hands the way the professor had, feeling overdramatic and foolish, but I called on the sea god M’ma to seal the monster’s tomb in the center of the Earth for all time. And to seal the gates, to follow the rules, to take his friends home where they belonged.

The professor cleared his throat and flapped his arms like wings.

“Oh, except we’d like Oey to stay if you do not need
her, him. We’re very fond of the bird, you know. And it loves us. Oey thinks we’re all petth.”

We heard a sizzle, smelled a burst of ozone, felt another tremor in the boat, then heard laughter rumbling across the sky instead of thunder. The lights of a million tiny flying suns shone instead of lightning, and the night, the water, the wind went still. We all stood outside, waiting for the back end of the storm.

It never came. The newscasters on radios and TV and the Internet reported the storm dropping off the Doppler radar like a plane that crashed.

Back inside the ship’s lounge there were cheers and tears of relief, excitement like New Year’s Eve, with everyone kissing and hugging and crying. They broke out the ship’s champagne and it turned into a World Series locker room celebration, with more champagne on everyone than in them. No one cared, especially not me and Matt, who found that back office and locked the door.

We had our own private celebration, telling each other how brilliant we were, how brave, how absolutely bonkers. And how we won! What a great team we made. What great love we made.

Most of the villagers had left when we returned to the lounge, leaving only the senior council to debate what to tell the world.

“Tell them we survived. That’s all they need to know.”