Master of the Deep (8 page)

“Do you think you’ll be able to figure anything out?” he asked as Spencer swiped an identification card on a lanyard, unlocking a sturdy door.

“Let’s hope so. I talked to Darius about an hour ago, and he says the situation with the contaminant is still stable.”

“You didn’t mention me, I hope.”

“Of course not. But he surely knew I flew down from Boston this morning. It would be strange if I didn’t contact him at all. Why are you so paranoid about him?”

Koenraad shook his head. “Just a feeling. He’s got his own agenda, and it wouldn’t be unlike him to hide information if he thinks it will help his cause du jour. What do you think is going on with the water?”

“Give me a chance to look at it first. I’m a scientist, not a magician, and pollutants aren’t my specialty.”

“You think it’s a pollutant?”

“Darius seems to. Realistically, what else could it be?” Spencer placed the box of samples at the end of a lab bench. The lab was empty; most employees had been given the day off because of a safety inspection. Of course there was no such inspection. Even though each employee had been thoroughly vetted during the hiring process, Koenraad had asked that the workers in the lab be reduced to a minimum for this visit.

Spencer had understood immediately and had promised to handle it.

“Since you’re here, perhaps you could donate another blood sample,” Spencer said.

“What happened to the one I gave you the last time?”

“We just want to double-check some things,” Spencer said. “Have you gotten saliva samples from your parents and Victoria?”

Koenraad shook his head, and Spencer sighed. “You want this to progress as quickly as possible—”

“I’m not asking for full DNA testing of everyone related to Brady,” Koenraad said. “It’s a well-known disease. I don’t care about identifying the faulty gene. I just want a cure. After he’s fixed, then you can save everyone else.”
 

“There’s enough resources to do both.”
 

“Then put twice the effort into curing Brady.”

Spencer opened the box, and Koenraad was again grateful that his friend knew him so well. Koenraad
wanted
to get every bit of material that BioAmbition needed, but he couldn’t risk bringing attention to the project.
 

Money could buy a lot of things, but when the people you were hiding things from were also rich and powerful, money wasn’t enough.

“Start with that one,” Koenraad said, indicating the samples from the beach where they’d found Wardell’s cowboy boot. Victoria had nearly fainted there when she’d gone into the surf, and the
sick
had been strong. If any of the samples would yield something, he’d put his money on that one.
 

“I don’t have everything we need for the analysis.” Spencer grabbed a tall stool and sat. “Tomorrow I’ll have to take some of this to a friend who manages a chemistry lab in Colombia. Is that ok?”

Koenraad nodded. It would have to be. He pulled up a tall stool of his own and lowered his weight onto it.
 

“Tell me about your new girlfriend,” Spencer said as he put several drops of the water into small tubes. “It’s new?”

“Yes. Though the way things are going, it might be over already.”

Curious blue eyes swung briefly his way. “Why’s that?”

“Shifters. Humans. Messiness.”

Spencer swiveled to fully face Koenraad. “You told her?”
 

“It came up. It wasn’t something I planned.” Unease unfurled inside him as he remembered that afternoon two days earlier. There had been a small window of opportunity… He could have convinced her that she’d passed out, dreamed the whole thing. But he’d wanted her to know.
 

Because he was lonely. Because she was the first new person in his life in an eternity. And because she didn’t know a damned thing about what had happened with Brady. He was tired of the sympathetic looks from humans, who didn’t know the reason for the boy’s disappearance, and he wagered that a good portion of shifters didn’t care. Many had lost relatives the way he’d lost Brady.

Judging by how other shifters acted, numbness, it seemed, was the best coping strategy.

Now he had to wonder if he’d subconsciously orchestrated his forced revelation by bringing Monroe to the crater. He’d known it was risky to take her underwater, but he’d done it anyway. And even after he’d had to give her air, he could have returned to the surface, but instead he’d pulled her deeper into his world.

“She seemed to handle the shark thing pretty well, but it’s the… non-human attributes that are getting to her.”

A smile played at the edges of Spencer’s lips. “I find that females rather enjoy those attributes.”

In no mood for levity, Koenraad aimed a lethal glare at his friend. “Dolphin shifters aren’t like humans, and you know it.” He paused as he suddenly remembered that Spencer had dated Hera, one of the dolphins Darius had sent to investigate Wardell’s disappearance and who was now in an inexplicable coma.

Spencer must have remembered, too, because his smile faded, then disappeared completely. “I was the first shark Hera had been with. Actually, many of my exes had never been with a shark before.”

“But they knew.”

“Eh… not always. You remember Gillie?”

“I didn’t really know her, but everyone knew about you two.” Koenraad and Spencer hadn’t become close until their final year of school, but it was common knowledge that Spencer had pulled off a coup by dating Gillie, one of the dolphin shifters. She was an adorable and playful slip of a girl, and even though Koenraad had always preferred full-figured women, he’d definitely seen the appeal. Gillie and Spencer had been like royalty until they broke up.

“Let’s just say that our first time was memorable, and not in a good way. I scared her half to death. Hell, I scared myself. The sex-ed materials for non-mammalian shifters are woefully inadequate.”

“Hm.” It was all Koenraad could come up with. He found the banter pleasantly distracting, but he didn’t have much to add. He wasn’t feeling light and nostalgic at the moment.

“You’re unimpressed, but I do have a point. If bumbling teenage virgins can work it out, I’m sure two intelligent, sexually experienced adults will get through it.”

“When you’re younger, you don’t have set ideas of how things work. What were you? Fifteen?”

“Sixteen. We waited a long time.”

Koenraad shrugged. “Sixteen, then. If you don’t know how things should go, if everything is new, then nothing is weird. That’s one of the theories behind fetishes, you know. That whatever’s in the air when you have your first sexual experiences, that’s what you fixate on.”

Spencer was smiling again, and Koenraad didn’t hide his frustration when he shook his head. “You lost me. I give up,” Koenraad said.

“Actually, you just proved my point. You’re overcomplicating this. If you act normal, she’ll accept it as normal much faster.”

“Exactly how did I prove your point?”

Spencer ignored the question. “If you act like you’ve got monsters in your pants, of course she’s going to be unnerved. She has no frame of reference.”

“That’s almost exactly what I said,” Koenraad murmured. Of course, he’d been thinking about explaining Brady, then.
 

A beeping noise sounded, and Spencer transferred his little tubes to a tray. He smeared three drops of water, now dyed red, onto a glass slide.
 

“What are you doing, exactly?”

“I suspect we’re dealing with either a bacteria or a virus. If it’s bacteria, I hope to see what an overnight culture yields, though it’s a bit of a shot in the dark. It’s anybody’s guess what kind of medium it needs, and ocean water will naturally have quite a bit of other things in it.”

“And if it’s a virus?”

“Then you’d better find religion.” Spencer grinned. “I’m going to test some of it on a willing subject.”

“Spencer—”

“Relax. I’m not going to drink it or bathe in it. This stuff only causes reactions in shifters, right? So we need to see what it does to shifter cells.”

Koenraad gave his friend a dubious look. “You’re the science genius here, but…”

“I’m just doing some preliminary stuff for now. Maybe we’ll get lucky. The heavy-duty work won’t happen until tomorrow.” Spencer made a sound like he was trying to clear his throat, and Koenraad crossed his arms.
 

He knew what that sound meant. A lecture was coming his way. What put him on the defensive was that Spencer was invariably correct.
 

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s good to see you happy again.”

“And?”

Spencer shook his head. “What makes you think there’s an
and
? You’ve been unhappy for so long. Things are obviously better since you started the company. That brought you hope. But hope and happiness aren’t interchangeable.”

It was slick the way Spencer slowly wove in what he wanted to say. Koenraad held his tongue. He knew from long experience that if he just waited, it would all be over soon.

“You probably think it’s the woman, but I don’t think so,” Spencer said.

There it was… though Koenraad had no idea where Spencer was going with this line of thought. “What do you mean?”

“You have to walk before you can run.”

“Any other clichés?”
 

“Clichés exist for a reason. I’m thrilled to have you back among the living, but I think it’d be a mistake to give the credit to this woman. This is time’s balm, doing what it does best. You make it about her, when… I mean,
if
things go bad, it could set you back months. Baby steps.”

“We’re hardly about to elope. She’s a tourist, here for a week,” Koenraad said. “And I don’t agree that I’m so changed.”

Spencer shrugged, but Koenraad wasn’t fooled. Spencer never gave up; he merely changed tactics. “I’m worried because it sounds like you might have come on too strong.”

“Five seconds ago you were telling me to just reveal myself.”

“Only because you’ve already started. She knows part of the story but not all of it. At this point, dragging things out isn’t wise. But if you had come in here today, happy like this, and if you’d asked if I thought you should tell her, I’d have done everything in my power to talk you out of it. It’s too fast.”

“But it’s done. She knows.”

“No one appreciates unsolicited advice, but we’re friends, and it’s my job to tell you when I think you’re heading for a disaster. If you can’t find a way to fix this, it’s not your fault. It was just too soon. Don’t let it tear you apart.”

“I’m not a child,” Koenraad said. “I’m not going to lose my mind over a woman I’ve only known for a few days.” But he couldn’t muster up any significant amount of indignation; Spencer had a point. “So we’re clear, I had to reveal myself to save her life. It wasn’t like I downed a case of vodka and then decided it would be fun.”

Spencer held his gaze steadily. “You sure about that?”

“You weren’t there.”

Spencer shrugged again. For a man who backed down from confrontation, he sure managed to do a lot of damage nonetheless.
 

“You mind if I take a look through the microscope?” Koenraad asked. “Because it’s not like you’re doing it.”

With a sigh, Spencer turned and bent over the eyepiece. “Congratulations,” he said. “It looks like water.”

Chapter 8

Monroe left the ice cream shop with the most expensive waffle cone of her life. Of course, she had no idea what the exchange rate was. For all she knew, it might have only cost fifty cents.
 

She also wasn’t completely sure what flavor she’d ordered. Cherry, she’d thought, but she’d gotten four scoops of something white.
 

Apparently her high school Spanish, in which she’d gotten perfect test scores, had rusted during the last few years.

She contemplated the three-story, rectangular building that housed the lab. It was lovely, with plenty of windows and lots of trees on the grounds, and the lobby was bright and spacious, but she could see nice buildings in New York. She wanted to explore. Koenraad had said they’d be here for an hour. As long as she was back in forty minutes, there shouldn’t be a problem.
 

Across the street was a park that looked promising. She strolled through it, crunching on the assorted sugary toppings of her treat and trying not to get drips of melting ice cream all over her dress.

The park was smaller than she’d realized, taking less than a minute to cross. She stood on the far side and tried to decide where to go next. There weren’t many people around, but the area felt safe. The ocean was this direction, she thought. Even though they’d driven for some time after docking, she’d sometimes caught glimpses of water.

A few minutes later, she was walking down a short wooden boardwalk. Underneath her feet, the wood felt stable even if it didn’t look it. That was probably good, as she hadn’t seen another person for several minutes. She took a seat on a bench in the shape of a bird with outstretched wings and looked out at the water.

Living in New York had given her a sense of
big
, but after being on a speeding boat for hours and seeing nothing but water, she was starting to get a sense of
enormous
.

The ocean was enormous. And terrifying. The waves in the open ocean were choppier than she’d expected, and while Koenraad was obviously a competent navigator, she’d had no idea which direction they were heading.

Hell, even a shark was nothing compared to the vastness of the ocean.

A slow smile tugged at her lips. Of course she would think that. But here she was, surrounded by air, and she didn’t think of it as overwhelming or dangerous even though winds could be brutal.

Come to think of it, huge waves were caused by air. The water itself? Blameless. Thinking about it like that… maybe
air
was the more dangerous environment. And the ocean was full of fish that would surely agree.

“Crazy,” she said, laughing aloud. It’d be interesting to see what Koenraad thought of her conclusion.

She finished her ice cream and cleaned off her fingers with the napkins. Thank goodness she had some wet wipes in her bag, and she made use of them, then took out her camera and began taking photos.