Chapter Eleven #2
“Fine by me,” Alderic said, tossing another bundle of twigs down beside the fire he’d built while Lyssa set up the garish new tent he had insisted on buying.
She was glad to have the stupid thing now, no matter how much she had argued against it in the shop.
Her own poorly patched tent was pitiful in comparison, the fabric so threadbare that the wind rippling through the grasses would have chilled her to the bone by morning.
It would be nice to sleep in something that actually kept her warm, for a change, even if it was an obnoxious shade of yellow and absolutely covered in painted daisies.
“Well, look at you,” Lyssa said, putting her hands on her hips and surveying the merrily crackling fire, the collapsible camp stools arranged around it just so.
Alderic had even put an eiderdown cushion down for Brandy between the stools, and the idea that he had thought of her dog while he was overspending on camping supplies warmed her heart more than she cared to admit. “You’re quite the homemaker.”
The corner of his lips tugged into a smile. “There’s nothing that says we have to be miserable just because we’re spending the night on a cold cliffside.”
“Remind me to thank Ragnhild for forcing me to bring you along,” she said, and his small smile flashed brighter for a brief instant before he sobered again.
“Shall we?”
She nodded. “Brandy, you wait here.”
The bullmastiff refused to be left behind, though, and followed her and Alderic through the long grass and down the steps carved into the cliffside that led from the estate to the equally decrepit dock jutting out over the lake.
A single rowboat thudded against the weathered pylons, and the splintered prow of another had beached on the rocky shore.
“Boating,” Lyssa said smugly, laughing when Alderic gave her that pinched look over his shoulder.
From this vantage, the shadowy silhouettes of the pines on the other side of the lake looked like sentinels guarding the black mass of mountains beyond them.
Lyssa had never been afraid of the dark—she was the one who killed the things that crept in the shadows, after all—but this place felt haunted in a way she didn’t like, and she was glad for the bright glow of Alderic’s expensive lantern.
She picked her way carefully over the rotting boards of the dock. Behind her, Brandy whined, hesitating on the threshold where the stone steps ended and the dock began, too afraid to walk across the creaking wood to follow her.
“I told you to wait at the camp,” she scolded him before joining Alderic, who was peering down at the black water like he was thinking of jumping in.
Lyssa studied him for a moment, wondering what memories had resulted in the sharp line of his mouth, the furrow in his brow.
Maybe it was the shared grief that bound them together, or the fact that he was unlike any of the other rich patrons she had worked for, but she found that she wanted to know more about …
what was it he had said to her, back in Sunnyside?
The circumstances that led to your formation.
He was as much of a curiosity to her as she was to him.
It was a rare feeling, the urge to know more about someone, and its presence unsettled her.
“It’s a little cold for a swim,” she said finally, when it seemed like he was lost enough in his own thoughts that he might need help getting out.
He flinched, as if he had forgotten she was there. “Good thing I’m not here to swim, then.”
“Good thing.” She took the lantern from him, setting it at her feet, and handed him Ragnhild’s canteen. It was made out of cured leather stitched with strange symbols in red thread, the cork attached to the neck by a braided cord of thick black hair.
Alderic turned the container over in his hands. “What do these mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “Spells of some kind or another. It’s the only one Rags will let me use for this sort of stuff. The water won’t retain its potency, otherwise.”
“Do I have to do anything special while I fill it?”
“Yeah, you have to howl at the moon in order to activate the spells.”
He wrinkled his nose. “Really?”
“No.” She laughed at the look on his face. “You would have done it though, wouldn’t you?”
Alderic rolled his eyes and uncorked the canteen. “You’re not half as amusing as you think you are.”
“But I am somewhat amusing?”
“Don’t let it go to your head.”
As he crouched to collect the water, the surface of the lake rippled violently.
The loose boards of the dock bucked beneath Lyssa’s feet, water surging up through the gaps between them.
The lantern skittered over the edge with a splash, plummeting them into semi-darkness, and she lunged forward to grab the back of Alderic’s coat before he fell in, too.
“What was that?” Lyssa said, peering at the black water.
Brandy was barking wildly, but she couldn’t see a damned thing without the lantern.
“Brandy, hush! It was just a gust of wind, or something.” When he didn’t stop, she whirled around to glare at him—and was horrified to find him tensing the way he did every time he was about to jump into the river in the Witch’s Wood, eager and nervous all at once. “No! Stay there!”
He looked over at her and whined, obviously torn between obeying her and going after whatever it was he wanted in the lake.
Lyssa’s scalp prickled at the look in the bullmastiff’s eyes. She had trained Brandy to flush out faeries in the wild, so that she could kill them, and he always had that same look when he had scented something with magic in its blood.
“Al! Get away from the water!”
“What? Why?” He was reaching out with the canteen, trying to collect the lake water without falling in.
Before she could shout at him to please, please just listen to her for once without arguing or asking questions, Brandy screeched, and Lyssa whirled around in time to see a pair of pale, webbed hands drag him into the water.
Alderic tossed the canteen aside and dove into the lake before Lyssa’s brain had even registered what had happened.
A split second later she moved to dive in after him, but her feet jerked out from under her and she slammed down painfully onto her stomach.
At first she thought she had gone through one of the rotten boards, but then she started to slide backward.
“What the fuck?” She scrabbled at the dock with her fingers, trying to keep from being dragged into the water. Something had her foot in an iron grip, and it hissed as she struggled.
Lyssa shouted obscenities and lashed out wildly with her other foot until she finally managed to kick whatever was holding her; it shrieked, relaxing its grip just enough for her to wrench free.
She flipped over onto her back, unsheathed her pistol, and fired somewhere between the luminous eyes and glistening teeth looming over her legs.
The head snapped back, and the creature let out a gurgle before it slid off the side of the dock and splashed back into the water.
Another one was already climbing up one of the pylons with slick gray arms, its eel-like tail whipping back and forth as it struggled to heft its weight out of the water.
Mermaids.
Lyssa shot the slimy bitch in the head. It plummeted from the pylon and sank like a stone.
Something else burst from the surface on the other side of the dock and Lyssa almost fired at it, too, until she realized that it was Alderic.
He had Brandy draped over his shoulder like a sack of grain, but she couldn’t see much else.
She holstered her pistol and grabbed the bullmastiff’s collar, dragging him up onto the dock.
Brandy whimpered as she quickly looked him over, trying to assess whether it was safe to move him back to camp. There were gashes all along his flank, three of them deep enough to need stitches.
Lyssa gritted her teeth against the sob that threatened to rip from her throat. “You’re going to be okay,” she told him, stroking his ear.
Alderic grunted with the effort of hauling himself out of the water, and rolled onto his back on the dock. He was breathing hard, and he had lost his cravat—his long hair was wrapped around his throat like a sodden scarf instead—but otherwise he looked unharmed.
“We have to get out of here,” Lyssa said, her voice tight with the effort of holding back her emotions.
“Get the canteen.” Beyond the dock, more mermaids had poked their heads up from the water.
They watched Lyssa and Alderic with eyes that seemed to glow in the moonlight, their tangled hair pooling around them on the surface.
It wouldn’t be long until they swarmed, and Lyssa only had so many bullets on her.
“Come here, baby,” she said to Brandy, lifting him into her arms. He yelped in pain, and the sound was like a knife in Lyssa’s heart.
“Shhh, it’s okay,” she told him, cradling the back of his head and adjusting her hold on him as gently as she could.
“It’s going to be all right. We just have to get you back to camp and then I’ll patch you up. ”
She staggered to her feet, and together she and Alderic climbed the stone steps carved into the cliffside, Alderic keeping one hand at Lyssa’s back so that she didn’t topple over beneath Brandy’s awkward weight.
The moon had silvered the lake enough for her to see the mermaids, but the stairs were shrouded in darkness.
She had to feel for each step with the toe of her boot before committing her weight to it, and their progress was so slow that she feared her arms would give out long before they reached the top.
When they finally made it back to camp after what felt like an eternity, Alderic spread a blanket out beside the fire and Lyssa laid Brandy down gently on top of it.
The bullmastiff whimpered, and she pressed a kiss to the salt-and-pepper fur of his muzzle, letting him lick feebly at her cheek in return before she got to work.
“It’ll be easier if you hold him while I do this,” she told Alderic after she had fetched her med kit from her pack in the tent.
“Whatever you need. Just tell me what to do.”
She sterilized her needle, knife, and scissors in the fire before wiping them down with her tiny bottle of clear liquor and a clean rag.
Alderic sat on the blanket and held Brandy the way Lyssa instructed him to, while she dabbed at the bullmastiff’s flank with a gauze pad soaked in the alcohol.
He snarled and snapped at the sting, but Lyssa kept her eyes on her work, wiping the wounds carefully to lessen the chance of infection.
“He didn’t seem to like that,” Alderic commented.
“He never does, the big baby.”
Brandy’s wounds weren’t fatal, and he had definitely suffered worse during his unnatural lifespan, but he wasn’t a puppy anymore. The mortal world was hard enough on his body as it was, these days, and injuries like this …
Lyssa cursed herself for bringing him, for risking his life because she was too weak to leave him home. He should be safe at the cottage with Ragnhild, chewing his bone, not lying here bloodied and in pain between a mermaid-infested lake and whatever the fuck was in that forest.
No. You have to focus. She shoved the guilt aside for now. Tried not to let it cloud her head.
Brandy remained still throughout the ordeal—he had been patched up before and knew what was expected of him—but he couldn’t help his whimpers of pain.
Lyssa made soothing sounds while she worked, a murmured mantra of it’s fine you’re fine it’s going to be okay, and all the while Alderic held the dog’s head, stroking his ears gently and muttering his own words of comfort.
When she was finished, she mixed a paste from a few of the herbs she kept in her med kit, then slathered the mixture on Brandy’s wounds.
“Don’t lick it,” she commanded him when he raised his head to sniff at the stuff. He gave a heavy sigh and laid his head back down.
Alderic sat back, drawing his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms around them.
He was still completely drenched from diving into the lake, and his teeth chattered as she cleaned her tools and put them back in her med kit.
When she ducked into the tent to grab her pack, she brought a blanket back out with her, too, and dropped it in Alderic’s lap. “Here. Before you freeze to death.”
His eyes widened as though she had given him a gift of immeasurable value.
“Thank you,” he said as he wrapped the blanket around himself.
“I don’t know where those things came from,” he added, his tone defensive, as if he thought she might blame him for the foul infestation that had taken hold here.
“I swam in that lake all the time as a child.”
“I told you, something must have moved in since the last time you were here.”
“But how would they have gotten here?”
“The veil between our world and theirs is thinner, in some places. This might be one of those places.” She unbuckled her belt and her pistol in its holster, stowing them in her pack.
Checked her knives and slipped a few extras into her boots.
Fury was rising swiftly within her, now that her fear for Brandy had ebbed.
When she was filled to bursting with it, she would need to release it the only way she knew how.
“Did they attack you, when you entered the water?”
Alderic shook his head. “They didn’t touch me.
Kept their distance, in fact. Like they were afraid of me.
” A strange expression flitted over his face—guilt, maybe, that Brandy had gotten hurt and he hadn’t.
She didn’t have time to think about it, though.
Nor did she have time to wonder why the mermaids would have been afraid of Alderic and not of her.
Her anger was reaching its peak, and she needed to be down at the dock when it did.
“Stay here with Brandy,” she told him. “Make sure he doesn’t try to get up and follow me. Tie his paws together if you have to. And under no circumstances are you to go down to the lake while I’m gone. Do you understand me?”
“Why? What are you going to do?” Alderic said, half rising, but the expression on Lyssa’s face must have made him reconsider, because he sank back down.
“I’m going to do what I do best.”