Deadshifted (Edie Spence 4)

Asher openly gawked. “I know a lot of languages, lady, but I’ve never heard one like that before. ”

Claire smiled down at him. “You’re not the only one with secrets. ”

“Am I the only one without a superpower here?” Rory said.

I gave him a sympathetic look as the elevator door began closing. “Nope. ”

CHAPTER THIRTY

It didn’t take any time at all to rise up a floor, and we deposited ourselves in one of the large rooms facing out to sea and barricaded the door. We’d have warning if anyone entered, but we’d also be trapped inside.

I wasn’t surprised to see an unfamiliar dead body in the bathroom. Emily’d found it first, but Rory’d gotten a hand over her mouth to muffle her scream in time.

A man was in his very nice and separate-from-the-bathtub shower. He was slumped in a corner of it, all his clothes on, eyes staring open, jaw dropped wide.

“Shhhhhhhhh,” Claire told the girl, but without any weird accent this time.

“It’s like this?” Asher asked me.

“All over the ship. That, or people have gone insane and jumped overboard. You don’t even know half of what it’s like. ” I stepped back out of the room, and they followed me. “We have to pool resources, and quickly. All our cards on the table. For real. ” And to encourage full disclosure—“I’m a human. I’ve got a master key to all the staterooms. ” I looked over to Rory, standing at my right.

Rory crossed his arms, knife still in hand. “I’m Rory. I’m a human. I’m keeping this. ” He waggled the knife.

Claire went next. “I’m a siren. I met Hal a long time ago. I can convince people to do what I want them to do, if they’re near enough and willing to listen. My voice travels better underwater. ”

Rory’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve fought sirens in video games before. You all are never good. ”

Claire looked affronted. “I hope then that we are at least hard to kill. ”

“Depends on the difficulty setting. ”

“Oh, I can be very diffi—” Claire began.

“I’m just a man who loves a siren,” Hal interrupted both of them, and Claire looked chagrined.

Emily knew it was her turn after Hal. “I have a radio. ” She held it up for us to see. Hal must have given it to her. I gave her an encouraging smile, and then looked to Asher, who shrugged.

“I’m a shapeshifter. And I’ve never met one of you before. ” He bowed to Claire.

“And I’ve never met one of you,” she said, somewhat regally from her perch.

“You only think you haven’t,” he said, with a puckish grin.

Now was not the time for my boyfriend to charm people. “What happened to you? Did you find anything out? And what the f—” I started to curse, saw Emily, and bit it back in time. “What was going on in that room?”

I saw the muscles in Asher’s jaw clench as he realized that whatever he wanted to tell me, he’d have to share with everyone at once. He inhaled deeply before he began. “I went downstairs to talk to Liz, like I told you—looking like Nathaniel,” he explained for the others, who hadn’t been there. “She was feverish, babbling things. About sea monsters—which I’d feel silly about sharing, except for present company,” he said, with a nod to Claire. “But eventually I figured out she wasn’t Nathaniel’s wife and Thomas wasn’t their child, just hers. He had a rare genetic disorder that Nathaniel promised her a cure for, after they came on this cruise with him. ”

Maybe that was why she’d been running for pills the other night. “Then what?”

“I was concentrating so much on her that Nathaniel caught me there, looking like him. After that he knew what I was. He said if I went with him, he’d explain everything. ”

“And just like that, you followed him?” I said, my voice rising. I wasn’t the only one whom peaceful months had made soft.

“I needed to know what was going on, Edie. I thought I could stop him,” he said, sounding hurt. “And I was right—he is behind all of this. ”

“So what is he doing here with everyone on the boat?” Claire asked.

Asher inhaled deeply again, to buy himself time to think. “His prior research … fell through. And the people he’d been working for killed his daughter to punish him. ”

I took me a moment, then I filled in between the lines. Way to not mention vampires or blood substitutes, honey—and that was what Nathaniel’d meant when he threatened a child for a child. I put a protective hand over my stomach. I’d need to find a way to tell Asher about that, privately.

“So this is his revenge,” I said. Asher looked surprised, then nodded.

“I don’t know if it’s from viruses, bacteria, protozoans, or what—but he infected Thomas first. And then Thomas ran around the whole ship touching things. ”

Including Asher and me. “No wonder the doctor couldn’t figure it out. ” I wondered what was happening to poor Dr. Haddad right now. “But what does he gain by killing everyone off?”

“He’s trying to raise something from the bottom of the ocean—which apparently requires a vast human sacrifice to awaken. ”

“And he just told you all of that? Like in a villain monologue?” Rory said.

Asher continued to play coy. “We’d worked together in the past. I’ve been putting together two plus two. ”

And so had Nathaniel. Who now knew what Asher was—and what Asher’s confession to the Consortium had cost him.

“I don’t know what it is that he’s raising. He wouldn’t say. But he threw my fingers overboard after he cut them off, ‘so that it would know my blood. ’ He wouldn’t tell me what ‘it’ was. And at that point, I wasn’t really in a position to ask. ”

“Whatever it is, the Shadows, those things we met in the morgue”—I looked to Rory to clue him in—“are afraid of it. ”

There was a moment of silence between Asher and me, as we considered what could worry the Shadows.

“It doesn’t get much bigger than the Leviathan,” Claire said at last. At seeing our faces, Claire barked a sharp laugh.

Rory made a face. “That’s mythology. ”

“Like me?” Claire said. “Another character in a video game?”

“Actually, yes. ” He walked across the room and squatted down, putting his head in his hands.

I stirred my hand in the air for her attention. “Leviathan, as in the monster from the book of Job?” My mother would be so proud of me getting to use my Sunday school education now. Asher snorted, and even Hal glanced nervously at his wife.

“Oh, don’t look so surprised, the lot of you. Every great religion has a story of a serpent that lives in the sea. It was the most convenient frightening thing in olden times. ” She looked at Hal in particular and gave him an indulgent smile. “You believe in me, don’t you? If you do, then some of the rest has to follow. ”

He nodded, and she went on. “I don’t know what all those insane markings on his maps were about. But I do know what mass human sacrifice looks like. It’s not the first time I’ve seen someone try. I haunted shipwrecks professionally—there’s a difference when people jump overboard on their own, versus falling over with slit throats, dead before they can drown. You’ve only heard of the Mary Celeste, or the Resolven, but there’ve been a hundred boats emptied of people and wrecked too, by one loon or another trying to wake the Leviathan, trying to use carnage to lure it up. I’ll give this Nathaniel-man that at least—he’s got scale. ”

“But what is it?” I pressed. “A great snake? A dragon?”

“No. The sea holds a lot of life, but eventually everything—from whales to plankton—dies and drifts down. The Leviathan comprises what all of that becomes, death after death, compressed over eons. It gained a slow kind of life, but it’s not alive—it’s like it’s the residue of a memory of what life could be. ” She bit her lips in thought before speaking again. “You have to remember that most t

hings in the ocean don’t live like you or me—the only thing they are is hungry. ”

“Have you seen it?” asked Hal, rapt at Claire telling a story that was apparently new to him.

“I never went down that far. It’s not safe, and the pressure—” She shook her head. “But I know when it’s there. You’d feel it too. When you’re out in the sea—whenever you’re past seeing the ground, where blue stretches beneath you into black, and you’re scared of whatever it holds, just like you’re scared of the dark. It’s that. It’s the liquid darkness, somewhere below. ”

Which sounded like a fair description of the Shadows—or their older, more frightening cousins—to me. I looked to Asher and could tell he was thinking the same thing.

“Then isn’t it always below? Everywhere? All the time?” Rory asked, tone logical and a touch snide.

“Yes. Sleeping. For now. Why someone would try to wake it up to deal with their problems, I don’t know. ”

My lips twisted to one side. If I were trying to get revenge on vampires for killing my daughter, I knew I might try to get something worse than the Shadows on my side, too. It was the only way a human would have a chance.

Asher slashed his hand through the air. “That’s that, then. We need to get off this boat. ”

“What about the worms?” Rory asked.

“Worms?” Claire asked.

“I saw them. With my own eyes. ” Rory said, daring me to refute him. I couldn’t, not after what I’d seen inside Raluca.

“I saw them too. ” I touched my stomach, just in case.

“It doesn’t matter, we still need to go—” Asher went on.

“It matters to me!” Rory protested. “I need to know if they’re inside me!”