Authors: Ros Baxter
My heart leaped with joy. Is the Goddess telling me I should trust Carragheen?
But I squashed it, shivering inside with guilt about Doug. “You don’t understand, the toll this is taking. And not just on me.”
She frowned a little, then her brow cleared with understanding. “Ah yes, the land-man. Fear not, Rania. He will recover, with your help. And his part in this is not over yet. We will need the help of more than one land-dweller before we end this.”
“He’s going to be okay?”
She smiled cryptically. “You will see to it.”
I was so strung out I was ready to snap. “Is there nothing else you can tell me?”
She stopped for a moment, considering the request. “There are some long buried secrets. The magic one, the one you call Mrs Tripe. You tried to find out about the secrets from her. Perhaps now is the time for you to know them. Talk to your mother. Knowledge is strength.”
And then she was gone, and there was only a small puddle where her shimmering vanilla warmth had stood seconds before.
Oh, crap.
Dirtwater
I decided as soon as Ran left that this was the end of Mom’s secrets. I mean, if the goddess mother could trust me with what she knew, surely my mother could as well.
Somehow it’s all linked up. Mom and her past. Imd. All that was happening now.
I just couldn’t work out how.
I looked at myself in the rearview mirror trying to decide if I looked any different now I was officially important. One of The Three.
Why me? How could the dolphins have known about me, all those millennia ago?
How could they have foreseen me? How could they even have known I would be born?
And how could they possibly think I could stop the bloodtide, whatever that was?
I looked into my own eyes in the mirror and thought again about how different I was from other Aegirans. Why would it be an outsider who could deliver them?
And if destiny picked me, who were the others? One I knew, one would come to me…
I thought about all the people I knew who were maybe having visions. Cleedaline? Maybe, thinking back on the incident with the rip in The Eye, Lecanora? Maybe Carragheen, (although Rick had insisted he wasn’t one of The Three)?
Did visions make you one of The Three? Did you need to have visions to be a paid-up member? I banged my head against the steering wheel.
Ouch. This wasn’t getting me anywhere.
I fired up Ariel and sped down to the Council Chambers, where a sheepish looking Chip, Mom’s assistant, was helping her with some papers while Aldus waited outside her office. As well as being Sheriff, Aldus is a member of the Dirtwater Leadership Council, and Mom was planning to meet with him to tie up loose ends before we split back to Aegira.
But I’d forgotten, and hadn’t planned on running into Aldus.
“Well hello there,” he greeted me toothily. “Thought you might’ve stopped by before this.” He hitched his trousers self-importantly, and went back to scratching Benito’s ears. “We’re gonna have fun together, boy, aren’t we? While Mommy’s away.”
“Sorry Aldus,” I shrugged sheepishly. “I had some things I really had to do. Was planning to stop by after.”
He looked contrite for getting on my case and I realized Mom had already done a job on him. Ran bless you, Mom. “Sorry, Rania, I wasn’t tryin’ ta bust y’ chops.” He lowered his voice. “Your Mom told me about your Aunt. Terrible, terrible. Of course you must take some time off. We’ll be fine here.”
“But what about Clee…” I almost slipped up and corrected myself before Aldus could register the gaffe. “Blondie. What about Blondie? Any leads?”
“None,” Aldus said defiantly, shaking his head in perplexity, like a man who’s searched high and low and turned up nothing. “But don’t worry, sweetheart, we’ll keep working on it.”
“Great,” I agreed half-heartedly. I was saved from having to provide further details about an ailing Aunt by Chip listening to his earpiece and motioning for me to go to Mom.
“Sorry Aldus,” he mouthed. “Ladies first.”
“Sure thing,” Aldus agreed good-naturedly, and helped himself from a plate of brownies.
I burst into Mom’s office, a woman on a mission, and she could smell determination on me the moment I was inside. “What is it, darling?”
She sounded sweet, but looked cagey, like she could sense the storm about to break.
“I need to know, Mom,” I started. “I need to know what happened to you. Who happened to you. And what brought you to Dirtwater. I think it matters.”
“Has something happened?” Mom seemed tense.
“A lot’s happened,” I confirmed. “I was visited by the Goddess. And she thinks you need to ’fess up.”
Mom sat down swiftly, obviously a little startled by this turn of events but not about to freak out, ’cause it just wasn’t her style. “I see,” she said placidly.
“So?” I prompted her with my eyes.
And hers darted sideways. Evasion.
“Darling,” Mom sighed. “I know that the time is very close when we will need to talk. But that time is not yet. It’s hard. You see, sometimes secrets do not belong only to you. And the telling has implications for others. Not even just those who were there.”
I expelled my breath in one noisy whoosh. It was all I could do to stop myself from whining at her: But Moooom, the Goddess said you had to tell me…
Mom continued, and from her tone she seemed oblivious to how badly I needed this, except that I could see that little furrow between her eyebrows that meant she was stressed. A tiny sign, but the only one she ever gives away. “You have to trust me when I tell you that I will share about it all, very soon. But there are others who need the chance to hear it too.”
“Who?” I needed
something
.
“Someone you wouldn’t want to hurt. I’m sorry, Rania, I can’t go into it now. We’ll talk later. If I thought you needed to know immediately, I promise you that I would tell you. But even though I know it’s important, I can’t really believe that anything about it all is connected to what is happening now. It just can’t be. It’s such… ancient history.”
And that was it, end of subject. But I couldn’t resist a final shot as I flounced out. “Well, that’s not what the Goddess thinks. But what would she know?” I’m not much of a one for flouncing so it was an indicator of how pissed I was that I was doing it now. This was just so Mom, not to be swayed from what she sees as the right path, even by the voice of Ran herself. And not to even be that surprised that Ran’s been talking to me.
Ran – the Goddess herself.
You know, as a kid I often wondered what I’d have to do to shock my mother, and I guess now I know it’s darn nigh impossible. Maybe I should have told her I’m one of The Three? Except I wasn’t sure I really believed it myself.
I barely registered Aldus as I scooted out of there, my rebellious brain fixing to cause some trouble, one thought pushing through to the front of it.
The purse. The secrets were in the purse. And I was gonna open it.
By the time I got home, I’d convinced myself that it was definitely the right course.
Mrs T knew, she knew there was something in there that mattered. She said the visions would help me know when the time is right. Well, where I come from things don’t get more right than the mother of all mermaids popping up and suggesting that some secrets need to be unlocked. So this time I was going with her intuition rather than Mom’s.
As I pushed through our front door, and headed for the bathroom, where I’d stashed the bag, a little thrill of excitement was lighting up my circuitry. I’d wondered about Mom’s
secrets for so long, and I was pretty sure I was about to get some clues. I felt like I was getting ready for a date, all nervous and fluttery but with this added buzz lent by the years of mystery.
I was so pumped I didn’t even notice him when I first walked into the dark room. Or as I padded across to the bathroom, quiet as a thief. But as I reached for the door, I registered the other-wordly strains of Portishead coming from the ipod dock.
Dark, ethereal and full of portent.
I spun back, slowly.
Knowing. Somehow, knowing.
He was lying on the sofa, wet and motionless, and when my eyes settled on him, the tummy flutters that had been building ramped up about seven thousand notches.
I quietly pulled out my Glock.
“Wake up, sleeping beauty,” I said, as I pressed it into the dip between his closed eyes.
“I wasn’t sleeping,” he growled, opening indigo eyes and smiling a lazy smile at me through sinful golden lashes and the long, black chamber of the gun.
Carragheen was glistening wet and naked under the suddenly very small white towel he must have grabbed from the bathroom rail on arrival. He was brown and dark blonde, and his purple-blue gaze was pinning me to the spot. His hair was wet and curling on his neck, and towards one side of it I could just make out the blue green fish of the watch-keeper tattoo. As my gaze travelled down, I registered the tight bulge of his biceps under broad, elegant shoulders, and the narrow tapering of his waist, below which red-gold hair drew the eye towards white towel.
He looked good. Oh man, did he look good. He was like some kind of God.
“You’re okay.” His lupine face was inscrutable as indigo eyes roved insolently over me.
I felt like he was touching me, all over, and my gorgeous Glock shook a little. “Just fine.”
He expelled his breath and I realized he’d been holding it. And that he was relaxing now, even though I had a really very frightening weapon pressed against him.
And possibly my crazy eyes on.
The apartment was warm and dry, so judging by his still-wet appearance, I’d say he’d only been here a matter of moments. But his gaze was lucid, so he’d been here long enough to get through the hydroporting afterburn and pull the pieces of himself back into one spot.
Portishead wrapped silky threads around my brain as I mentally tried on different courses of action. In the background, that mermaid-like voice entreated some man to give her a reason to love him.
I had no idea why Carragheen was here, but even though I could barely see him through a hazy red film of guilt (about Doug) and rage (at his duplicities), even though I was holding my gun on him, determined to make him talk, a sheer wall of lust slammed into me.
I was going to hell.
“Rania.” He continued to ignore the gun and his voice was like a balm on the wrung-out, messed-up bruise that was my mind. He waited, that half-smile playing around full lips.
I didn’t respond because I was still too busy mentally considering and discarding possible courses of action in between trying to get a handle on the confusing beauty of the man. He watched me watching him for a moment before lazily reaching up and plucking the Glock from my grasp, dropping it to the floor like a distracting child’s toy.
And I let him.
Then he stood, filling up every available inch of my personal space. “It is good to see you,” he whispered in that Lucky Strikes and taffy voice.
Oh yeah, baby, and then some.
But I gave myself a solid talking to inside my head before I responded. Bad enough that I’d totally ruined my cop cred by letting him disarm me. I couldn’t come over all easy-to-get. I needed answers. About Zorax. About Tila, and “the second one”. He had explaining to do. I tried hard to block out the magical music and give my inner harlot a solid shake. “What are you doing here?” I was going for terse, but suspected I was just coming off strangled.
“Zorax came to see me,” he said softly. “After he saw you, in Williamstown. He wanted to know if I’d learned anything from Cleedaline before she died. About where Imogen is.”
Zorax again. Persistent.
I waved the Glock at Carragheen like I had at Zorax earlier in the day.
“Were you the one who told him Imogen was missing?”
“No.” He was searching my face, as I was his. His words were deliberate and they had the ring of truth to me. I’m an expert in lies, but the truth has a quality you can’t describe. Like I said before, you just know it when you see it. He was telling the truth.
“Did you tell him you’d been to Cleedaline?”
“No.” His words were clipped, and his body stiff, affront in every hard angle. But even cold and distant those hot eyes were still nothing like those of any merman I’d ever seen.
Portishead insinuated its way back into my brain, telling me something about how a thousand flowers could bloom. I suppressed a shiver and hoped the semi-darkness would hide the flush I could feel creeping up my chest to my face. “I hadn’t talked to him at all, until a few hours ago, when he came to me. He said he had seen you, and that you told him Cleedaline died because I visited her. He wanted to know if I learned anything from her before she died.”
Again, I believed him. “Didn’t you wonder why he went to Williamstown?”
“He told me he’d been tasked by the Triad to investigate Imogen’s death.”
I thought about Zorax with Imogen’s locket around his neck, and wondered why he drew attention to himself by going to Carragheen. Maybe his “investigative” efforts were actually some not-very-slick cover for whatever it was that he’d done with her, was doing to her.
I watched Carragheen’s face, wondering what he made of it all. “What did you tell him?”
“Nothing.” His voice was a hiss, laced with poison. “I don’t trust him.”
Clever boy.
“Well, that’s a coincidence,” I said slowly. “Because he doesn’t trust you either. And neither do I.”
Carragheen was up from the sofa now, moving towards me, and I was like a sheep, caught in the wolf’s stare. He was so close I could smell the salt on him, and see the golden hair curling on his arms, and the blue veins tracking like highways across them. The music had stopped and I could hear his breathing. I noticed it was in time with mine. Perfectly.
In, out. In, out.
Somewhere I heard the dripping of a tap and wondered which water source he had used to get here. It sounded slow, like an old record played on the wrong speed.
We were sizing each other up.