As we were closing in on the GPS coordinates Mama Samm had radioed from the Spindrift, the radio crackled to life again. It had been over an hour since the big juju woman's last call and I was getting worried but this didn't bring any relief.
"Cséjthe," Gordon's voice crackled over the speaker, "do you hear me?"
I started to reach for the microphone then thought the better of it. I signaled the other boat not to respond.
"I know you're listening," he continued. "You'll keep this channel open to hear from your friends. That's okay. I just wanted to leave a message with you. If you don't want to talk, that's fine. I get the last word this time."
"Turn off the radio," Volpea said.
I shook my head. "I'm not afraid of him. And he's right; I need to keep this frequency open in case Mama Samm calls back."
"I ought to apologize for lying to you about your woman," he continued. "I never should have said she was dead when I knew she was alive. That was wrong."
Volpea put her hand on my arm. "I'll take the wheel and monitor the radio. Go sit down in the back."
"Why?"
"Because I know him. You don't need the distraction right now."
"So I promise you nothing but the truth from now on," Gordon continued in the cheery bright tones of a car salesman. "It isn't important that she lives for now. Now is a temporary condition. Are you paying attention? Because here's where the truth part comes in . . ."
"Go sit down," she ordered.
"No!" I shouted, knowing what was coming next. I'd heard it before.
"I promise you," Gordon said in his most earnest voice, "that very soon now we will find your woman. Hunt her and her misbegotten whelp down. And then we will kill them both. That's my promise, that's the truth I owe you, man to man. And then we will come for you on our terms."
"You should have killed him when you had the chance," she said.
"I know."
"Thank about that, hombre, every night before you fall asleep. And every morning before you get up. I know there have been others who have threatened you with the same things. But I am different. My demesne is under ninety feet of water. I got nothing to lose. You think about that. Until I see you again."
After a while I said: "I've been operating without an enforcer for too long."
"You've got one now."
"Thanks."
She shrugged. "Thank me when that tail licker is dead."
The sun was an orange smear on the horizon when we arrived at the GPS coordinates, deep in the Gulf of Mexico.
The first clue to Mama Samm's position was a giant oil platform, canting at a nineteen-degree angle. Several hundred feet of massive orange support pillars thrust up out of the ocean on the east side. The west end of the platform, however, was tipping down into the water like a high-tech chute with a busy assortment of cranes, towers, buildings, and sub floors frozen in mid-slide.
I had never seen the Spindrift; I only knew that it was an oceanographic research vessel and off-campus classroom for the University of Louisiana. According to Volpea, Irena had gotten permission from her professor to bring my family on board at the last minute when the students and crew evacuated back up the Mississippi River. They should have been headed north when the storm hit. Now they were a hundred and fifty miles to the south and well out to sea, piled up against a sagging oil platform. According to the last radio transmission, more than an hour earlier, the Spindrift was a hundred-and-fifteen footer with a twenty-eight-foot beam. We were looking for a research vessel with a dual-decked front half and an enclosed pilothouse, and a low-draft access deck on the back end. Additional superstructure on the stern and starboard side for launching small submersibles and raising heavy samples should have made the ship easy to spot.
Under normal conditions.
There was nothing normal about the events unfolding in the aftermath of Laveau's storm. Certainly not the profusion of boats that were piled like so much flotsam and jetsam against the downward slice of the drilling platform. It was as if some mysterious force, like a giant magnet, had drawn every boat still afloat within a hundred mile radius. There were over fifty immediately visible and half of them were riding low in the water, crushed between larger hulls, or overturned and tilted bow or stern downward. It was a cacophony of wreckage ranging from a seven-story cruise ship to a scattering of fishing boats and oceangoing tugs, with a couple of Coast Guard cutters and a dozen sailboats tossed into the pileup.
We circled the wreckage slowly and finally spotted the Spindrift near the detritus of smaller craft. Maneuvering carefully, we threaded our way between the bobbing, upside-down keels of small fishing boats and a knifelike sailboat that drifted like a curious shark. We passed into the shadow of the great ocean liner that reared upward like a steel mountain range, blotting out the setting sun and throwing us into premature gloom. Zotz and I turned on the boats' searchlights at the same time.
The Spindrift's hull was painted black in contrast to its white cabin structures and pilothouse. The low-slung back access was so low to the water the ship seemed nonexistent in the gloom and I ran the Bat Out of Hell into the side, miscalculating the distance at the last minute. Hey, never said I was a sailor—just wanted a house on the water. At the other end of the state. At least it was easy to step over the gunwales and onto the big boat's lower deck.
I pulled a flashlight out of my ops vest and my Glock 20 out of my shoulder rig. Everyone was geared up now, armed, equipped and Volpea had even dressed for the occasion, making due with some of Lupé's spare clothes I had tucked away in a box in the spare closet.
Yep, I was in for some definite punishment when I saw Lupé again.
Volpea actually had the most experience as an enforcer for the former demesne of New Orleans so she took point as we worked our way around the boat, checking hatches, compartments, and large storage lockers and bins.
There were several labs—wet and dry, an engine room, quarters for the crew with ten berths, quarters for the students with twelve berths—or maybe it was a male/female division thing. Everything was in disarray, though whether that was from the storm or from something more sinister I couldn't immediately say.
We worked our way up to the pilothouse and then back down the port side of the vessel. No sign of Mama Samm.
"She said somebody took the others," Zotz said. "Maybe they came back and took her, too."
Volpea held her hand up. "Everyone be quiet," she murmured. "I need to listen."
We stood there in a silent semicircle as the red blush outlining the dark silhouette of the ocean liner turned to a bruised purple. Volpea stood on tiptoes with closed eyes and, after a bit, began to breathe deeply, taking long draughts through her nose.
"I could do this more easily if I transformed," she murmured.
"We only brought the one change of clothes along," I muttered.
"Would my nakedness disturb you so, knowing what I am?" she asked me with a quiet smile.
I shook my head. "It's a question of punishment."
She looked at me for elaboration.
I didn't give any and she went back to sniffing the air. "You smell . . . different," she said with her eyes closed.
I coughed. "Different cologne. You—um—like it?"
A little shrug, her eyes remained closed. "It's okay." She sniffed some more. Then, finally, she crept around to a hatch set in the deck amidships and pointed. Setanta and Zotz hunkered down and grasped the handle and latches. I planted my feet, aimed the flashlight with my left, the Glock with my right, and nodded. The hatch squeaked back and up and I filled its dark hole with light.
Something moved and a pole shot out of the hold, jabbing up at me like a rigid cobra. Volpea grabbed it as it went by and yanked upward, catching an arm with her other hand and, in a moment, we had a young black woman out and secured. I flashed the light around but the remainder of the hold appeared to be empty.
"Bang stick," Volpea observed, laying the pole aside. "Divers use them to drive overly aggressive sharks away." She was holding our captive effortlessly with one finely muscled arm about the girl's chest and shoulders.
Some of the fright was already fading from her eyes as she seemed to realize that we meant her no harm. She was probably one of Irena's fellow-student crewmembers. Tall and slender, she was maybe twenty, no more than twenty-two. She wore baggy culottes that looked like they belonged to a larger roommate and a man's denim work shirt tied beneath her breasts to reveal chocolate abs that looked like sculpted mahogany.
"It's all right, miss," I said, moving the light so that it wouldn't blind her and shining it up on me, instead. "We're not going to hurt you. We're here to help."
She gasped. "Oh thank the gods, you finally made it!" Volpea released her and the girl rushed over to me and threw her arms around me. "I couldn't be sure it was you, Mister Chris! They came back once and I had to abandon the radio."
"Holy crap!" Zotz was saying.
"It's me," the girl was saying in that voice that was just so wrong now. "Don't you recognize me? I'm Sammathea D'Arbonne!"
"Mama Samm?" I said.
She snuggled in a little closer. "Hey, you smell nice . . ."
"Holy crap!" I said.
Our ancient ancestors worshipped power and they worshipped the goddess. Archeologists have turned up hundreds, maybe thousands of ancient little clay and oolitic limestone figurines from prehistoric sites. The most famous of these is called the "Venus of Willendorf," others are called "Venus figurines." These small statuettes of idealized, obese female figures have long been thought to be fertility totems, used in worship and the casting of sympathetic magic. The idea was the fertility of the "mother goddess" could be bestowed upon the women of the tribe but also that fecundity could be transferred to the crops or the flocks or whatever the tribe sought to have in abundance, as well.
That was the theory.
Of the paleontologists, that is.
Apparently, there are practitioners of power who store their—I don't know, this isn't my field—mojo? in such a way as to "bulk up" over time. You've seen how body builders increase muscle size as they grow in strength. And fat cells propagate to store potential energy for the body when calories aren't burned in sufficient quantities to equalize food consumed. Apparently there is a way in which people of power store their mojo for those times in which it may be needed. A skeletal Marie Laveau had exhausted her stores and had to utilize a resurrected Rasputin to act as her proxy when she summoned the storm. Mama Samm, in opposing both Laveau and Rasputin and dispersing the storm out into the gulf had used up just about everything she had. All of that potential power that she had accumulated over the long years was expended in a single day.
And not just what was stored in bulk form.
The woman was far older than the girl we found in the hatch appeared to be. In loosing that much power she had unraveled knowledge and wisdom, matters concerned with years of experience and study. She'd lost two-thirds of her body mass and more than half her age in the process.
Mama Samm D'Arbonne was a twenty-two-year-old young woman with no mojo left, so to speak, and only her wits to protect her now.
So I handed her my Glock and explained the basics as we prepared to go after the others.
"There was a huge tidal reverse after the tsunamis and the quakes," she explained as we picked our way across a network of broken masts, spars, carefully laid ladders, gangplanks, strung ropes and nets that had been rigged to form precarious catwalks linking the flotilla of captive vessels.
Although the footing looked treacherous, I figured if the Deep Ones had rigged them to support press gangs carrying struggling captives, they'd more than support us in a pinch.
"We did what we could to ferry survivors, food, and potable water back and forth between the safer points of refuge," she continued. "We were running low on fuel and had taken on as many passengers as we could, especially those most in need of medical attention. The plan was to make a run north until we could find where the Mississippi met dry land again. It was thought that would be our best bet for medical facilities near the water."
As I helped her over a tangle of sailcloth and shattered wood I had my hands on her fluted waist and she steadied herself by grasping my bicep. "Have you been working out?" she chirped. She leaned in. "What are you wearing? Aftershave?"
"So what happened next?" I asked, releasing her a little early and causing her to stumble a bit.
"Oh yeah. That's when the Coast Guard cutter showed up," she said, "minus the Coast Guard. Those things that you've tangled with underwater, the Deep Ones? Well, they're not born that way. They start off looking human—reasonably human, anyway. Over the years they change into something that looks like it always came from the sea. In this instance the crew had been replaced by these creatures that still looked human from a ways off. But up close . . ." She shuddered like any twenty-two-year-old girl might and I wondered how much of Mama Samm had been lost along with her power.
"They forcibly escorted us out here and took what was left of our fuel and departed. That was yesterday. We tried radioing for help but the captain suspected—suspects—that someone or something is jamming communications. He took a complement of the more experienced crew to investigate. That was last night. This morning the Deep Ones came for us.
"We saw them coming from a distance. There was a big argument but we decided to hide as best we could rather than all be taken together. I guess I hid the best," she said in a small voice.
"Thank God you did," I reassured her as she led us across a net-surfaced walkway that belonged in some nightmare boot camp. "If you hadn't still been there to cover the radio we never would have found you and there'd be no chance for a rescue!"
It was true but guilt rarely acknowledges logic.
"Did you see where they took them from here?"
She pointed. "Up there."
A steel chain ladder hung from a ragged torch-cut hole in the side of the ocean liner.
One typically associates movement into the Devil's domain as a downward motion, i.e., a "descent" into Hell . . .
We climbed the ladder and ascended into Hell.
The disco ball was the first clue. It reflected the red emergency lighting throughout the dance club on the other side of the cut-out bulkhead like a thousand fingers of flame. The effect was almost jolly until I noticed the ceiling streamers were dripping on the Lucite-paneled disco floor. What kinds of streamers were ropelike and lumpy, anyhow?
Volpea snarled, hair starting to bristle up across her face. Zotz growled and suddenly the tall Asian fellow who'd been with us since Gordon's visit this afternoon was an 800-pound bat-thing, all teeth and talons and barely bridled power. Since his clothing was all part and parcel of the appearance he generated for each transformation, the equipment in his ops vest tumbled to the floor as it disappeared with the rest of his former glamour. I took a step back and nearly tripped over Suki's cat form as she had come tumbling out with everything else. Daintily, she padded over to a puddle of viscous liquid that was pooling under one of the grisly decorations and began lapping at it.
"Blood," Samm moaned (I couldn't hardly think of this slip of a girl as "Mama" Samm right now). "Can't you smell it?" she asked me.
"Well? Yeah. Now."
"Not just in here," Setanta said, stepping around the puddles without actually looking down. "You can smell it in the ventilation shafts."
"Crap," I said. "Let's move out!"
"Come, Mrs. Bigglesworth," Zotz called.
Suki merrowed and obediently fell into line.
We pushed through into a dining room. It was in use. The Deep Ones may have had uses for knives but they weren't fork and spoon guys. Never mind the good china, paper plates would have been wasted on them. Likewise napkins. The tablecloths had soaked up a good bit of the gore but the carpeting was still squishy with the overflow. There were maybe thirty or more chowing down on—well, the emergency lighting made everything look red so maybe speculation should be left to those who had the time and stomach for such luxuries.
Volpea was tearing through the remnants of her clothing, looking like some kind of hairy, red, hell beast that walked erect but shouldn't. Her face pinched down and forward as her ears went black and pointed and moved up on her skull. Her hands became blackened paws with sharpened nails and her mouth filled with needle-sharp teeth. As the last of her clothing tore away I could see her tail grow plump and fat and the fur around her cheeks, chin, and down her chest and belly flushed out white.
Volpea was a fox! A werefox!
Zotz was all Tyrannosaurus bat and charging in just ahead of the fox-woman.
But Setanta was Setanta no longer. He was Cuchulainn, Celtic berserker of song and legend. His golden-red hair was standing on end and seeming to give off sparks as he rushed ahead of the other two. The archangel's sword raised over his head came down and around decapitating four of the finny freaks at once. I glanced at Samm and Liban to be sure they were all right before wading in on my own. The former was pointing my Glock everywhere, the latter had the Mossberg leveled but otherwise wasn't tracking any targets. Maybe she'd shoot if something came close. In the meantime all of the targets were across the room and moving in short, violent arcs. I left the Smith & Wesson in its harness and flexed my increasingly prickly hands as I jogged toward the melee.
It was over pretty quickly.
Even better, it was over pretty quietly. No shots were fired. There was still a chance for some element of surprise.
Zotz refused to change so he had to stoop like Quasimodo to get through most of the passageways. Volpea held her fox form but remained humanoid enough to walk erect and retain a semblance of speech. And Cuch—well, I remember some buddies coming back from the Middle East that you always tried to talk out of that third beer at the bar—they had that same look in their eyes and you knew things were going to get broken in short order.
Liban looked stronger, now, though she still held the shotgun like it was an alien object. Which I guess it was.
Samm was looking calmer and a little more like Cuch. She kept twitching the Glock around and it made me a little more nervous to have her behind me. Finally I put her in front of me where I could keep a better eye on her and shake the odd sensation that someone was staring at my ass all of the time.
We pressed on.
For the next little while we encountered our amphibious adversaries individually and in twos and threes so there was no real resistance to speak of. On the other hand, time was slipping away and we seemed to be wandering in a three-dimensional maze.
Liban pulled me aside during a three-minute rest break in one of the ship's storerooms.
"I heard the werewolf's threat on the radio earlier," she said.
"It's an old song."
"Where can you go that they won't eventually track you down?"
I shrugged. "It's finally become clear to me that the only way my family is ever going to be safe is for me to be a bigger monster than the ones who hunt us."
She nodded. "Perhaps. Or you could send your son somewhere safe, somewhere out of their reach."
I stared at her. "Are we back to this again?"
"It wouldn't be for Fand. I don't—" There was a catch in her voice. "I don't even know if she's still alive. Opening a faerie door, well, there should have been enough help on the other side to send that monster straight to Hell and tend my sister's wounds in short order. That we have not heard . . ." Liban looked away. "If I take your son into the realm of the Fey, none can follow. He will be safe. He will know peace and be raised as a prince."
"Back up a little, Liban. You said none can follow. Does that include family visits from his mom and me?"
She shook her head. "If he is allowed entry, he must be adopted as one of us. He severs mortal ties. You cannot follow after, even for a visit."
I nodded. "Well, I can tell you right now his mother isn't going to go for it. And I'm even less crazy about the terms. So thanks but no—"
Samm suddenly appeared by my side. "Where did you go? One minute you were behind me, the next minute?"
"Um, look," I said, "we should probably talk about my nanites. Dr. Mooncloud made an interesting discovery recently—"
"About your pheromones?" Samm interrupted. "Yeah, she told me about that." She fished around in her shirt pocket and pulled out a generic squeeze bottle of nasal spray. "Good thing she gave me the antidote."
"Um," I said, "I thought the antidote she was working on was still experimental."
"Hmph." She tucked it back into her shirt pocket. "Seems to be working just fine for me." She smiled and slapped me on the butt as Cuch and Zotz joined us.
"Maybe there's a way to question one of them," Cuchulainn was suggesting.
"Those that have fully transformed," Samm answered, suddenly all business, "no longer speak in human tongues."
"What about the mermaid, here?" Zotz asked. "Maybe she parlay-voos sea-monster speak."
Liban shook her head. "My sister and I are only recently arrived to your shores. These creatures are beyond our ken and none have seen the like neither round Manx nor anywhere across the sea."
"That's good to know," Samm said. "They have not spread so far, yet."
I stopped walking. "Maybe I can have a little chat with these freaks . . ."
Zotz looked at me and grinned. "Why didn't we think of this sooner?"
I knew why. I was too tired to think. I'd had very little sleep and the little I'd had hadn't been restful. We left the storeroom, worked our way down a corridor of staterooms, then up a staircase and out onto the Lido deck. The stars were out.
The monsters weren't.
Neither was Doc, Gopher, Julie, or Isaac the bartender.
"There's never a monster around when you need one," Volpea growled.
I didn't know her well enough to run an irony check, yet.
The bat-demon had a suggestion: "Maybe if we make a lot of noise they'll come running."
"I need a little calm and quiet to work this," I told him. "I can't concentrate with lots of screaming and body parts flying through the air—even if they're not ours."
We went back down below via another stairway and found a theater. And a couple of fishfolk down on the floor behind the back row trying to make the two-backed barracuda.
Zotz grabbed one, Cuchulainn the other and yanked. The young-sturgeons-in-love made a sound like Velcro as they were pulled apart. The one in Zotz's grasp went limp. Cuchulainn smacked the other lightly but there was more than enough blood as a result. I did what I always do when entering another's consciousness through the portal of blood.
It wasn't the same.
Not by a long shot.
I had once placed my mind inside the consciousness of a wolf by using a chakra point. That had been different on both counts. All of the other times I had found an individual's blood to be the gateway.
But I had dealt with creatures much like myself under those circumstances: humans, lycanthropes, the undead.
This was very different.
The blood was different.
And the mind was very different.
It wasn't like being in a space or an area or even a box or container. It was like being in a sponge. And I was being absorbed into a thousand little cells and spaces, fragmenting, dissolving.
Thoughts that were not my own chittered and giggled inside my own mind. Normally I would push the other's consciousness into a position of obeisance and see what I could learn while I was in control of the new flesh. But this thing was unfamiliar, slippery. Its mind was as alien a maze as the dimly lit, gore-strewn decks of the passenger cruise ship we were practically lost in.
I had to get out before I was totally absorbed! Lost in some coral-faceted brain of a fish thing that was inhuman and soulless.
I tried to turn and saw the others looking at me as if through a fishbowl. My former flesh was in a heap on the theater floor, my head cradled in Liban's lap. Samm seemed to be overly solicitous as well.
I turned the other way. Out through that door! Down a secondary staircase! Through the plaza and the room of cages. Into the temple! Must reach the temple! Warn—!
A twisting wrench and I was staring up into the sea green eyes of Liban.
"I can take over for a while if you get uncomfortable," Samm's voice murmured somewhere near my ear.
"Fine!" I said, jerking up and hitting the sea goddess' chin with the top of my head as I struggled to sit up. "I'm fine! I'm going to get up now!"
And I did get up. And I fell back down. And I tried to throw up again as I crouched on my hands and knees on the squishy carpet.
I really had to start eating solid food again or the next time my stomach might actually turn inside out and crawl back out through my esophagus.
The "plaza" was actually a gymnasium.
Of course what would Charlie the Tuna know about gyms or weights or speed bags or stationary bikes? Just a big, airy room with a wood floor, lined by mirrored walls. Half of those mirrors were smashed and most were marked with splats of blood, as well. Dead moist things had been dragged across the floor into the next room, so we took a moment to check weapons and reset our formation.
Something awful lay beyond the next door or two. I could feel it like a sick certainty. The way the olfactory enhanced had smelled the blood through the ventilation shafts. And there was something in the Deep One's mind. Something without language, something beyond imagery—but something that I could feel through his emotions. Something too hideous to grasp but too terrible to not sense.
Everything that I had glimpsed in the creature's mind was heavily filtered . . .
Plaza . . . room of cages . . . temple . . .
And something else. A great dark presence beyond.
>Father . . . <
>Mother . . . <
What?
What could be more terrible than the inhuman slaughter that we'd been practically wading through for the past hour?
Except the deaths of the people I actually knew and loved?
Thinking . . . thinking didn't help. Feeling didn't help. Doing . . . only doing would matter now and maybe not even that.
"End of the world, boys and girls," I announced. "I'm going first." And I kicked the door open.
It was the room of many cages. A locker room with steel mesh lockers for the gymnasium. It was where the passengers would keep a towel and a change of clothes while they worked out.
It was where the Deep Ones kept their human chattel until they were hungry. Bodies were crammed into the narrow spaces, bruised, bloody, and battered but still alive.
No order was given. Nothing was said. Everyone just fanned out and began breaking open the lockers. Some of the occupants tumbled out dead—heart attacks or strokes brought on by fear, most likely. Others were unconscious or nearly catatonic. Even the most responsive were too dazed or too hurt to move right away so there was no mass exodus. Just a few ripples of panic.
One prisoner was different in every way, however.
The creature squirming about inside the narrow cage was all teeth and claws and hair and only half human. Samm tried to calm her before anyone opened the locker door.
"Irena? Baby? It's Samm. Mama Samm D'Arbonne. Remember? I brought help. There's friends here but you gots to calm down before we lets you out. Can you do that, baby? Put the beast back inside for a little while?"
The creature that looked like some kind of animé juxtaposition of cat and teenaged girl turned and twisted in her confinement but eventually quieted under Samm's quiet reassurances. Cuchulainn pulled off his bloody shirt so that Irena would have something to wear. We turned our backs as Samm set her free and helped her cover up. Sure, there was an element of chivalry involved but we had a perimeter to watch and I was starting to hear strange sounds beyond the next door.
"Irena?" I heard Samm say. "Where is Miss Lupé? Do you know where Miss Deirdre is? What happened to the rest of the crew?"
"I don't know," she said with an awkward mixture of fear and anger. "I tried to change and they piled on top of me. We got separated. I haven't seen them since."
The fact that Irena was alive was a good sign. The fact that the others weren't with her and she didn't know anything wasn't helpful. It wasn't unhelpful. Standing around doing nothing was.
I started to move in toward the next set of doors and most of the others, Mrs. Bigglesworth included, moved with me.
"Shouldn't somebody stay here with the rest of the hostages?" Samm asked. Some had already wandered off, looking to escape on their own, but there were still a goodly number sitting around looking dazed.
"And do what?" Zotz wanted to know. "I thought we discussed this."
We had discussed this very thing.
Back on the Spindrift.
And, before that, on the New Moon.
Any time the question of leaving someone behind comes up—for their own protection, to look after someone else, to perform some extra task—the Tao of the Creature Feature is invoked. To wit: under no circumstances does the group ever, ever split up or allow anyone to go off alone or remain behind! Those are the people who die first. And, as the group gets smaller, everyone starts dying off more frequently. So sayeth the Tao of the Creature Feature. And we had all agreed twice now to stay together, no matter what.
"He's right," I told Samm. "If we're flanked by multiples you can't save them or yourself anyway."
"Yeah, Little Mama," Zotz continued, "the only way that suggestion could be any worse would be to stay behind to have sex!"
He cackled and she gave me a quick, awkward look.
"Here we go," I said.
Of course it was a temple.
Never mind the swimming pool, no other chamber on the ship had tiled walls and ceiling as well as the floor.
There was an adjacent steam room and it was flooding the pool area with enough water vapor to give the illusion of an undersea grotto.
The pool was lined with mer-people. Deep Ones knelt around the edge three deep and took communion at the water's edge. Cupping their hands they reached down in and drew forth its steaming contents to sip from their palms or lick from their fingers. Some were marking themselves with it, making symbols on their chests and sigils upon their foreheads.
And finally, I could make my mind say what "it" was, for the swimming pool was not filled with water but with human blood. A great soup bowl of blood, viscera, and even fresh bodies as, one by one, the human cattle were being laid out on the diving board and being butchered.
A Deep One stood at the diving board wearing a robe and a jeweled tiara, shaped almost like a religious miter. He chanted a strange and unintelligible incantation—something with a lot of nonsense syllables and then something that sounded like "Vater Dagon!" Then "Mutar Hydra!"
The congregation chanted: "Ia, ia!"
And drank from the pool as a golden dagger, its hilt encrusted with gems, flashed down and sliced open another sacrifice. The victim was pushed from the diving platform and another was brought forward, the next in a long line of struggling, shrieking captives that stretched across the diving area and through a side door, into another storage room.
It seemed like we stood there, frozen, for an eternity, overwhelmed by this spectacle of wanton cruelty, this glimpse of the new world order. But only one life had been taken since we entered the room. We had only witnessed the fall of the blade once.
Time, however, continued to unspool.
The next sacrifice was already on the "altar."
Zotz and Cuchulainn and Volpea were already charging the line of hostages. I stood back and let them. The Frogs on the other side of the pool had noticed us and were getting to their feet and I wanted no part of them. Yet.
The golden blade came back up.
So did the big Smith & Wesson in my hands.
"Ia this, motherfucker," I said, and pulled the trigger. The boom of the 50-caliber slug was deafening in the tiled room. Everyone stopped and stared at me, at their high priest.
At the fact I'd missed.
The high priest grinned, exposing teeth like a moray eel's. The chanting began anew. This time the nonsense syllables were more familiar: "Ia! Ia! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!"
The other congregants took up the chant: "Ia! Ia! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn!"
And as the words repeated over and over, a strange sort of nauseousness rose up in me. The room seemed to distort. And two shadows seemed to form in midair, one upon each side of the high priest.
"Ia!" screamed the congregation. "Dagon! Hydra!" They flung their clawed and scaly hands about, beat their breasts, tore at the own faces. "Vater! Mutar!"
The shadows seemed to coalesce, to take on forms.
And the forms were of a hideous aspect. Scaly, tentacled, lizardlike—
Samm was walking right up to the diving board, her dark diminutive form unnoticed in the midst of the religious frenzy and the posturing of us macho warrior folk.
Three sharp reports ensued as the Glock made golf-ball-sized holes in the priest's face, chest and belly. He crumpled, the shadows faded, and pandemonium erupted.
Samm was instantly swarmed by the closest Deep Ones and she went down under a pile of them. Lucky for her they were too much in each other's way to do any serious damage before I arrived and started using the magnum-sized revolver like a steel mallet on their heads. I was like a machine only joyous. Efficiently cracking skulls and laughing with the pure joy of confronting something evil without restraint, concerns for my own humanity, or concessions to political correctness.
Claws raked at me but the nanites kept ahead on the repairs and that was good as I needed to shield Samm with my body as well. Liban, Volpea, Irena, Camazotz, even Cuchulainn and I were preternatural in one way or another. But Sammathea D'Arbonne was only human, now. And after all of the times she had looked after me and mine, it was my turn to see that she came out all right on the other end.
At last, the Frogs either died or ran and the room was nearly quiet again.
I was bruised and battered and exhausted and getting that alarming little buzz that I was overdue to feed the nanos again.
Fortunately there was an abundance of blood around to keep my little nano-vampires happy for a long time.
And fortunately I was finally monster enough to not care that the blood wasn't given willingly.
It was blood. It would go to waste if I didn't use it. I wasn't the one who had taken it from the victims in the first place so there was no chain of guilt, of obligation.
I went to the pool and knelt and began to scoop up the precious fluid of life with my hand and drink, even as the fishfolk had been doing a half hour before. That produced a momentary gag reflex but the need was on me and I drank again.
Suki joined me, mimicking me by dipping a paw into the crimson goo. Then she jumped in and began to swim about.
I almost gagged again.
But, the monster thing. If I was going to save my family, I was really going to have to get on with being all that I could be—monsterwise, that is. I drank some more. Made my nanites happy.
It wasn't as potent or satisfying as Liban's or some of the more exotic hemoglobin I had sampled over the past two years but you can't go wrong with the basics. And this was a unique experience as I was getting a mixture of all different types at once, thickened up with some viscera and actual bodies that had fallen off of the board and into the pool during the ceremonies. One was floating next to where I knelt and, as I pushed it away, it rolled over and opened its eyes.
I knew those eyes!
Those ruby-red eyes that so perfectly matched her hair!
Everyone dumped in the font of blood had hair the color of gore, now, but only one person could have eyes the color of arterial blood . . .
"Deirdre!" I cried, "Oh my God! Deirdre!" I tried to pull her out but she screamed.
"Don't move me!" she whispered. "The baby! It will kill the baby!"
Suddenly Liban was next to me. And Volpea was diving into the pool.
"Deirdre," I said, "where's Lupé? Did you see where they took her?"
"Found her!" Volpea cried. More splashes as Zotz and Samm jumped in.
And then a door opened and the room started to flood with the damned Frogs!