Okay, fine, they were hitting near home, as my throwing arm isn’t everything it could be. But, whatever: Jane True was on the attack.
I’ve no doubt that my forcing the ocean’s favor so firmly back to us helped win the day, but I also have no doubt it was Trill’s ferocity that finally made the kappa turn tail and flee. With an almighty roar of power, the murderous little turtle shot away after sending out a fierce barrage as cover.
While the sand settled in the water around us, I turned to Trill. She raised a shaggy eyebrow, her pony features expressing a great deal of concern. I smiled, mouthed, “I’m fine. You?” as I stroked a hand down her flank. She’d totally pulled my fat out of the fire on that one… or my cellulite out of the whirlpool, whichever was more accurate.
She nodded, turning so that we could swim together the rest of the way to Rockabill and my cove. We went fast, but not so fast we couldn’t stay aware of our surroundings. For the first time in my life, I couldn’t wait to get out of the water. Sensing the pull of the Sow and her piglets, which meant we were nearly home, I suddenly craved dry land and the safety of my cove. So I ran straight out of the water and up the beach without thinking or looking, only to trip in a wet, naked heap over Anyan’s sprawled-out legs.
“Jane, what the hell?”
“Mmph,” I mumbled, my face full of sand. I was trying to say, “Sea Code,” as in, “That Code that’s obviously fucking broken.”
I felt Anyan extricate his legs from mine, but I stayed facedown in the sand. For I knew that, this way, I was (a) less likely to die of humiliation when I saw Anyan’s face and (b) only showing off my bare patootie, as opposed to a little full-frontal action, to the undoubtedly horrified barghest.
“We were attacked by a kappa,” came Trill’s oil-slick voice behind me. “Why’s Jane on the ground?”
“She doesn’t always walk so good,” the barghest muttered as I felt the towel I kept in the cove fall over my naked haunches. “Did you hurt yourself?” he asked me, his hot hand branding the ocean-cold flesh of my shoulder.
I shook my head, finally lifting my face from the beach. I was now wearing a mask of powdery white sand, but I didn’t care.
I sat up slowly, careful to pull the towel around with me to cover my nakedness. But Anyan wasn’t paying any attention anyway.
“Did you recognize him?” he was demanding of the kelpie.
“No, and I know all the water folk for miles. He was a stranger. And fierce. The way he just attacked, like that, on my territory… It disobeyed all of our laws.” I could hear the rage in Trill’s voice. To betray his own people like that, the kappa had pooped on every tradition the ocean folk held sacred.
“Can you track him?”
The pony grinned her eerie equine smile. I loved Trill, and even more after she’d just saved my ass. But gods, I hated when she smiled.
“You couldn’t stop me. I’ll find out where he goes. If whoever is behind this attack knows anything about us, however, they’ll know I’ll follow. So it could be a trap, to lure me away. Jane needs to be careful in the water. She’ll have to be watched.”
I frowned, hating the idea of having to be watched—again. In response, fine white sand fell from my crinkled-up face onto the towel, as if to remind me I was a disaster.
“Okay. We’ll keep her safe. Happy hunting.”
The pony grinned one more fierce grin before she turned tail and bolted for the water. I watched as she plunged into the ocean, wishing I could go with her.
Anyan came back to where I sat wrapped up in my towel. I hurriedly began to brush the sand from my face.
He sat down next to me and we watched my heretofore peaceful waves, which I’d thought were my second home, rush up and down the beach.
“You okay?” the big man asked eventually.
I grunted. Anyan always brought the grunter out in me.
We sat in silence as I pondered what the hell this would mean for me. I needed to swim, and not just for power. It was also my great love, my life… And now Jarl had taken even that away from me.
“It’ll be okay, Jane. We’ll make sure you can swim and recharge.”
I grunted eloquently again. To be honest, I really wanted to cry. And when I thought about the fact I wanted to cry, I felt tears well up. I snuffled noisily, trying desperately to keep back the waterworks.
“C’mon, Jane,” Anyan said, clearly not wanting to have anything to do with another Patented Jane True Emotional Breakdown, either. “Let’s get you home.”
He stood and helped me to my feet. Then he took a corner of his T-shirt and used it to wipe the last of the sand off my face.
He wrapped his big hand around the nape of my neck and pulled me to where I could see my clothes piled up on the old driftwood log that decorated a corner of the cove.
“Get changed, and I’ll meet you outside. We’ll walk to your place together.”
I nodded, still feeling miserable, as he sidled through the break in the cove walls. Once he was outside, I shook out my towel, then quickly changed.
As I was lacing up my Converse, I heard Anyan muttering to himself. I froze, listening closely, unsure whether he was talking to me. Then I shook my head. He was repeating, in various sotto voce impersonations of a television presenter, a single line:
“Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water…”
I guessed that passed as humor to a barghest.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Between Iris’s abduction and not being able to have a proper swim, the following week was pure, unadulterated hell. I’d learned from the investigation in Boston that real-life detective work consisted mostly of sitting around, sorting through things you’d sorted through a thousand times before, and hoping that some new detail would pop up to catch your eye. In the meantime, you sent out feelers so that other people would sort through their stuff, looking for something, anything, new on their end. While all this paper shuffling was going on, the only thing you could do was sit and stew.
Stewing had been bad enough when the victims were merely names on files. Stewing when I knew it was Iris’s life at stake was a torture unlike any I’d ever known.
Anyan, luckily, had more feelers than a millipede. He’d called everyone, and I mean everyone, he’d ever known. He’d even borrowed Terk to send messages to beings so old and powerful they eschewed modern technology. He mustered the forces of both the Alfar power structure and the networks of halflings that stretched across the Borderlands.
Finally, however, even he had to sit down and wait like the rest of us. And I couldn’t even blow off steam with my usual, stress-reducing swims. Instead, I had to scamper about in the shallows like a child under the watchful eye of Nell or Anyan. It was humiliating. Other than that, I spent the week calling Anyan every five minutes to see if there was news about Iris; thinking around all the issues that went along with my mother’s death, including how I was going to tell my father and trying to figure out how to deal with my own, strange grief; and worrying about everything and everyone till I would physically panic and then force myself to come down from that panic… usually by lobbing badly aimed mage balls at things.
The one thing I wasn’t doing, however, was sleeping. And so, eight days after Iris was kidnapped, I stood like a zombie behind the counter of Read It and Weep. I wasn’t, yet, trying to eat people’s brains, but I did look like the walking dead. There were huge bags under my eyes from over a week spent half sleeping on our crappy couch. Between my nightmares about Iris, my lack of a good swim, and the lumpy cushions, I hadn’t had a decent night’s rest since returning to Rockabill.
Tracy was back at my house, still believing they’d been exiled from their own home due to a really difficult-to-fix gas leak. Grizzie, meanwhile, was puttering around the shop behind me, singing Lady Gaga. My tall friend was wearing pink skintight jeans that were dusted with glitter, a purple tube top, and a long-sleeved, fake-fur Bandolero jacket a slightly darker pink than the jeans. So her current sound track fit her wardrobe, really.
“You look like shit, honey,” Griz said, for the fifth time that day, as she moved me aside to dust the counter in front of me.
“Thanks. ’Preciate it.”
“It’s only true. You look like you haven’t slept since you got back. We should get you a blow-up mattress or something. Miss Carol can fill it with all her hot air, and you can finally get some shut-eye.”
I grinned. Having Miss Carol and Grizzie in the same house was like unleashing Archie Bunker on Al Bundy. I thought our walls were going to turn indigo from the blue streaks the two women swore.
“Yeah, well, I’m glad you’re all here. I’ll have lots of time to sleep soon.”
“I just wish they’d fix that gas leak… It seems like it’s taking an awfully long time.”
With a sigh, I nudged the glamour that Nell had put in place in both Grizzie’s and Tracy’s minds. Grizzie’s words trailed off, then she shook her head as if remembering something.
“I’ll go make us coffee,” she said, wearing the dazed smile of the recently glamoured.