Siren (28 page)

Sarah was gone.

Bill was recovering at home from his neck wounds. Hell, Darren had even given him a couple weeks off from the dock until he’d gotten strong enough so that he wasn’t inadvertently moaning every time he took a step and his stitches shifted. The police had bought into his story of being the victim of a shark attack as he discovered the body of Evan’s recently ravaged wife and swam it to shore.

Evan knew better. He folded a turquoise shirt and a tear slipped down his face as he thought of the time Sarah had filled out that shirt and pressed herself against him through its thin fabric at a movie, and asked if he wanted to cop a feel.

At the time, in a public theater, he’d laughed her off, embarrassed.

Now he wished he hadn’t.

But wishes don’t rescind reality. And the reality was, Sarah was gone.

Evan slipped the last of her clothing into a cardboard box, and drew a piece of packing tape over the gap to close it. Sealing the last of her life in a box.

“I miss you,” he whispered at the cardboard. As the tears started, he dropped the tape gun, and left their bedroom for a while. When he returned, it was with a determination
that only death can engender. One by one, he carried eight boxes of Sarah’s things to the garage, and stacked them there in a pile, ready to be taken away. After he was done, he went back in the house, turned off most of the lights, and then slipped out the back door. He didn’t bother to lock it when it closed. Somehow, he didn’t think it would matter.

Across town, Vicky Blanchard awoke with a start. Images of fish and swarming birds and a nude, shadowy woman swam in the fading light of the dream memory—a kaleidoscope of the bizarre. In the center of it all had been Evan, naked and dripping with the ocean, walking down an endless beach.

Shaking away the nonsensical vision, Vicky rolled over and closed her eyes again. She’d been especially worried about him and how he was dealing with the loss of Sarah, though he’d seemed to be holding up well at their last session. “He’s going to be fine,” she told herself again and again, as she slipped back into an uneasy sleep.

Evan walked barefoot down the beach. The black of the horizon was a ghost in his vision that bled on forever. He looked away, and stared instead at the point where the ocean met the sand. The point where infinity touched now.

“Everything I loved is gone,” Evan whispered to himself. “But here I am. Still. Why
me
?”

He walked in silence for a few minutes, and the cold dampness of the sand on his feet was as bracing as it was soothing. Here, at the lip of dusk and dawn, he could let his real emotions out. There was nobody here to see him break.

And it was in that moment, as he approached the point,
that he finally realized what his true emotions of the past month had been. And where he was headed. Really.

He loved Sarah, he had. But…he had loved Ligeia too. A Siren. A deadly killer.

Evan stopped at the spot where he had first met the darkly mysterious nude woman from the bay, and looked out over the cold black water.

Where was she now? Had he really killed her? Was she dead, in the casket of an old ship, thanks to his own vengeance? Could someone like her even
be
murdered by someone like him?

He had never been a man of violence, but stabbing her through had felt right at the time, and when he thought of Josh and Sarah, his eyes filled with angry tears at what she’d stolen from him.

Yet, despite all that, his body responded at the very thought of her…he’d done nothing but dream of her these past few nights.

When he remembered the nights beneath the moon, his hips moving with hers, he couldn’t refute the love he’d felt for the strange woman who’d approached him every night clad only in her own skin. For the woman who had sung to him in tones that only a deaf-mute could ignore. Who had made him feel like a real man when she’d dragged him down to the beach and ultimately beneath the salty blanket of the waves. A
man
after a decade of hibernation.

He thought of her lips on his, and of Josh at twelve, skipping stones across the bay, and of him and Sarah in San Francisco, rediscovering what had made them
them
after so long. He thought of these three disparate things and desperately wanted them all back.

“Just this one last time,” he whispered.

The ocean replied with a rush and a slow roar.

A tear slid down his cheek as he looked out at the edge of Gull’s Point and remembered the time that he had first met Ligeia there, embarrassed at her nakedness, or so it seemed, when she dove back beneath the waves.

“Come back to me,” he wished.

From somewhere beyond the point, at the place where the black sky met the darkest shadow of rock, a sound began to keen. A sound that spoke of wanting and need and desperation and hunger and desire. Maybe it was the answer to his song. Or the answer to his wish.

It sank and swam and rose and died. And resurrected again with a ray of unquenchable hope. Forever was now.

Evan began to walk toward the sound, oblivious to the water at his calves.

On the edge of the point, something vaguely human twisted toward the bay, and dove with a flash of silver scales and naked cream into the whitecaps nearby.

Abruptly, the sound of ethereal music stopped, but Evan did not.

“I’m coming,” he said to the dark. “One last time.”

And despite the fear that had driven him and defined him through all of his life, moments later, his head dipped beneath the waves and his eyes opened wide beneath the sea as he swam without fear to meet his destiny.

His lust.

His bittersweet, deadly love.

His Siren.

Memory, inspiration and imagination. Those are the three keys of a novel, and
Siren
was inspired by memories of mesmerizing music and my many visits to various beachfronts along the coast of California. The words formed far from the coast however, during my weekly writing nights in 2009 at Rizzo’s in Naperville, IL. Thanks to Erika and the rest of the gang there for always keeping my glass at least half full! Thanks also to Cocteau Twins, whose otherwordly, ethereal music provided the perfect backdrop for many hours of this novel’s writing when I worked at home.

There are far more people to acknowledge for their support than I possibly can here, but thanks to my family, Geri and Shaun, for allowing me to don my “fiction” hat and disappear for hours and days into my other world. Thanks to Don D’Auria and everyone at Leisure for indulging my dark dreams. Thanks also to Roy Robbins, Dave Barnett, Shane Ryan Staley and Mateusz Bandurski for putting together beautiful limited editions and translated versions of my work.

Thanks to my first readers, Rhonda Wilson, Paul Legerski, Martel Sardina and Bill Gagliani, for fixing so many of my fact and grammar gaffes; to Lon Czarnecki and John Borowski for porting my visions to the web and film; and P. S. Gifford, Bill Breedlove, Dave Benton, Erik Smith, Peter D. Schwotzer, Nate Kenyon, Edward Lee, Jonathan Maberry, Bryan Smith, Kresby, WIL Keiper, Brian Yount, Paul Mannering, Sheila Halterman, Deb Kuhn, Peg Phillips, the Mallecs and the Rentfros for encouragement and support and for always being there.

THE 13TH

SACRIFICE

COVENANT