Thomas grabbed Scully by the shoulders.
“You’re going to lift your foot off the bolt. I’ll help you.”
I clasped his boot, and Scully jerked back. “It hurts, you dumb bitch!”
“That’s the second time you called me that. I’m going to let it slide, since you’re in pain. Don’t say it again.”
“Why don’t we leave him like this until he gets us to the other side?” Thomas suggested.
“I doubt he sterilizes his bolt heads. Who knows what nastiness rode into his foot on that bolt and is now eating him from the inside? We’re not complete savages, Thomas.”
Scully got a wild look in his eyes and grit his teeth.
“Relax your leg and count to three,” I told him.
“One…”
I yanked his foot up. The foot came free. Scully screeched. Thomas muscled him out of the cabin and onto the deck.
“Can you drive the boat?” I asked Thomas.
“Yes. My dad had one.”
“You drive, and I’ll go watch our sharpshooter friend.”
I checked the passenger bench. The storage space under it yielded a first-aid kit that might have been older than me. I took it and walked out onto the deck. Scully had managed to pick himself up and was now leaning against the rail. His foot was bleeding, and a small puddle pooled by him on the deck.
The horse ignored him, while Cuddles gave him her “kicking” eye. If she wasn’t tied at the nose of the boat, she would’ve wandered over toward the cabin and stomped on his injured foot a few times for funsies. I’d seen her take that initiative before a few times.
The boat motor started slowly.
Scully did his best to stare a hole through my face. Sadly, his eyes lacked the lasers he required.
“You ain’t shit,” he finally spat out.
“You’re right, Simo H?yh?.” He wouldn’t recognize the name. My best friend had named a rifle after him, because he was the deadliest sniper in modern history. “I’m definitely not shit. But you might be. Also, I don’t have a hole in my foot. How about you work on that wound before your blood drips into the water?”
I tossed the first-aid kit at him. He caught it and bared his teeth at me. “Fu—”
A green tentacle as thick as my thigh shot out of the river, wrapped around Scully, and yanked him toward the water. Scully dropped the medkit and grabbed onto the railing, clinging to it for dear life.
I lunged forward, Sarrat jumping into my hand almost on its own, and slashed across the tentacle. Blue blood slicked the wound. Barely broke the skin. Damn.
Four more tentacles thrust out of the river, straight up, flinging water into the air. The tentacles slapped onto the deck, one coming straight for me. I dodged left, and it crashed half a foot from me, wrapping all the way across the boat.
I sliced at the tentacle. It was like trying to cut through a car tire. I could saw through it all day and not get anywhere.
Scully howled.
The little vessel groaned, pulled sideways. Cuddles and Thomas’ horse screamed in alarm.
I kept slicing.
Thomas’ face was a pale mask in the cabin. He was spinning the wheel, but the boat kept moving sideways.
Scully’s screech hit a hysterical note.
The boat careened, shuddering, the other side of it rising out of the water.
Screw it. I drew my blade across the back of my arm, wetting it with my blood, sealing the cut the moment after it was made, and stabbed deep into the nearest tentacle. Magic buckled inside me, and I spat the words out. “Hesaad! Harrsa ut karsaran!” Mine! That which is mine, break!
The power words tore out of me in a flash of pain and magic. My blood shot through the beast and detonated.
The river exploded. Water shot straight up like a geyser to forty feet high.
The boat landed back onto the surface, rocking.
Chunks of rubbery flesh rained down around us, hitting the deck and the mounts with wet thuds. I lunged toward the front of the boat, grabbed the two sets of reins, and held on.
I had blown my low profile out of the water, and it was now raining down all around me.
Something slimy landed on my head.
We were in the middle of the river. The nearest boat was a good third of a mile away. That should’ve been enough of a distance to mask the power word usage. Right?
They might not have felt it, but they sure as hell would’ve seen the result. Curran would be thrilled. Just thrilled. At least I could repair my cuts now. In the old days I would have had to slap a bandage on my arm and then set the damn boat on fire to keep my blood from exposing me.
The chunks still kept falling. The deck was almost completely blue now.
Usually that phrase didn’t explode its targets, even with the added punch of my blood. Usually, it just broke bones. This had never happened before. There must not have been any bones for it to break. I would have to discuss it with my aunt during our bi-weekly phone call. She taught me this phrase and didn’t mention anything about aquatic creatures bursting. Kind of a crucial detail there.
The boats that were crossing the river reversed course and sped away from us.
If I’d known the monster would explode, I would’ve used something else. It was supposed to just quietly sink.
Scully gaped at me, still clutching the railing.
“This is your fault,” I told him and pulled a long, blue clump off my head.
He cringed.
“Don’t move and don’t say anything. I mean it. Not a word.”
He nodded frantically.
Ten minutes later we disembarked. As soon as we hit the dry land, Scully limped into the cabin, pulled away, made a sharp left turn, and headed up the river as fast as his boat could go.
“You have something in your hair,” Thomas said.
I picked another clump out. It felt limp like oyster meat. I tossed it into the river, took my canteen out of Cuddles’ saddle bag, and rinsed my hair.
“Better?”
“Some.”
I rinsed it a bit more.
“Low profile, huh?” Thomas said.
“Yep. Would you rather I had let that thing pull the boat under?”
He shook his head.
I pictured Curran’s face in my head. Hi, honey, I accidentally exploded some kind of baby kraken in the Cape Fear River in broad daylight in front of a dozen witnesses. Yes, I do remember that I was the one who originally insisted on the lying low thing. Yes, I do recall that you said it would never work. No, it’s not funny…
I put the cap back onto the canteen and slid it into the saddlebag. “Let’s get to the Farm while we still have some daylight left.”
4
T he road was narrow but well maintained. Fields stretched on both sides, fluffy blueberry rows on the left and a wall of corn on the right. The sun was slowly but steadily rolling toward the horizon somewhere behind the corn.
That’s what you want, visiting the navigators just before dusk. Ugh.
In my mind’s eye, eleven red sparks burned like annoying little embers, five to the right and six to the left. Two vampire teams, each spark an undead piloted by a navigator. We couldn’t see them, but they were there, steadily working their way to us.
When my father had created the People, his purposes were complex and layered. He had wanted a network of information-gathering installations and access to a garrison armed with deadly weapons in every major city. Because vampires were expensive to obtain and maintain, he had needed these installations to generate income. He had also required a way to bring talented navigators under his control, train them, and indoctrinate them into a hierarchy with himself at the top of the pyramid. He had strove toward a monopoly on vampire ownership, while also devoting much of his considerable resources to research into undeath and its uses. The truth, which he readily admitted to me, despite his massive ego, was that even though he had originated vampirism, he didn’t fully comprehend the mechanism by which it worked.