The silence unnerved Nita more than the prospect of a talk on the facts of life ever could have. “Mom,” she said, “if I were gonna do something like that, I’d talk to you about it first.” She blushed as she said it. She was embarrassed even to be talking about this to anybody, and she would have been embarrassed to talk to her mom about it too. Nevertheless, what she’d said was the truth. “Look, Mom, you know me, I’m chicken. I always run and ask for advice before I do anything.”
“Even about this?”
“Especially about this!”
“Then what are you doing?” her mother said, sounding just plain curious now. And there was another sound in her voice — wistfulness. She was feeling left out of something. “Sometimes you say to me ‘playing,’ but I don’t know what kids mean any more when they say that. When I was little, it was hopscotch, or Chinese jumprope, or games in the dirt with plastic animals. Now when I ask Dairine what she’s doing, and she says ‘playing,’ I go in and find she’s doing quadratic equations… or using my hot-curlers on the neighbor’s red setter. I don’t know what to expect.”
Nita shrugged. “Kit and I swim a lot,” she said.
“Where you won’t get in trouble, I hope,” her mother said.
“Yeah,” Nita said, grateful that her mother hadn’t said anything about lifeguards or public beaches. This is a real pain, she thought. I have to talk to Tom and Carl about this. What do they do with their families?… But her mother was waiting for more explanation. She struggled to find some. “We talk, we look at stuff. We explore…”
Nita shook her head, then, for it was hopeless. There was no explaining even the parts of her relationship with Kit that her mother could understand. “He’s just my friend,” Nita said finally. It was a horrible understatement, but she was getting hot with embarrassment at even having to think about this kind of thing. “Mom, we’re okay, really.”
“I suppose you are,” her mom said. “Though I can’t shake the feeling that there are things going on you’re not telling me about. Nita, I trust you… but I still worry.”
Nita just nodded. “Can I go out now, Mom?”
“Sure. Just be back by the time it gets dark,” she said, and Nita sighed and headed for the door. But there was no feeling of release, no sense of anything having been really settled, as there usually was when a family problem had been hashed out to everyone’s satisfaction. Nita knew her mother was going to be watching her. It griped her.
There’s no reason for it! she thought guiltily as she went down to the beach, running so she wouldn’t be late for meeting Kit. But there was reason for it, she knew; and the guilt settled quietly into place inside her, where not all the sea water in the world would wash it out.
She found Kit far down the beach, standing on the end of the jetty with a rippling, near-invisible glitter clutched in one hand: the whalesark. “You’re late,” he said, scowling, as Nita climbed the jetty. “S’reee’s waiting—“ Then the scowl fell off his face when he saw her expression. “You okay?”
“Yeah. But my mom’s getting suspicious. And we have to be back by dark or it’ll get worse.”
Kit said something under his breath in Spanish.
“Ay!” Nita said back, a precise imitation of what either of Kit’s folks would have said if they’d heard him. He laughed.
“It’s okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”
“We’d better leave our suits here,” Kit said. Nita agreed, turning her back and starting to peel out of hers. Kit made his way down the rocks and into the water as she put her bathing suit under the rock with his. Then she started down the other side of the jetty.
Nita found that the whale-body came much more easily to her than it had the day before. She towed Kit out into deeper water, where he wrapped the whalesark around him and made his own change; his too came more quickly and with less struggle, though the shock of displaced water, like an undersea explosion, was no less. S’reee came to meet them then, and they greeted her and followed her off eastward, passing Shinnecock Inlet.
“Some answers to Aroooon’s Calling have already come back,” she said. “Kit, it looks like we may not need you to sing after all. But I would hope you’d attend the Song anyway.”
“I wouldn’t miss it,” he sang cheerfully. “Somebody has to be around to keep Neets from screwing up, after all…”
Nita made a humpback’s snort of indignation. But she also wondered about the nervousness in S’reee’s song. “Where’s Hotshot this morning?”
“Out calling the rest of his people for patrol around the Gates. Besides, I’m not sure he’s… well, suited for what we’re doing today…”
“S’reee,” Kit said, picking up the tremor in her song, “what’s the problem? It’s just another wizard we’re going to see—“
“Oh, no,” she said. “The Pale One’s no wizard. He’ll be singing one of the Twelve, all right — but the only one who has no magic.”
“Then what’s the problem? Even a shark is no match for three wizards—“
“Kit,” S’reee said, “that’s easy for you to say. You’re a sperm, and it’s true enough that the average shark’s no threat to one of your kind. But this is no average shark we’re going to see. This shark would be a good candidate to really be the Pale Slayer, the original Master-Shark, instead of just playing him. And there are some kinds of strength that even wizardry has trouble matching.” Her song grew quieter. “We’re getting close. If you have any plans to stay living for a while more, watch what you say when the Pale One starts talking. And for the Sea’s sake, if you’re upset about anything, don’t show it!”
They swam on toward Montauk Point, the long spit of land that was the southeastern tip of Long Island. The bottom began to change from the yellow, fairly smooth sand of the South Shore, littered with fish havens and abandoned oyster beds and deep undergrowth, to a bottom of darker shades dun, brown, almost black — rocky and badly broken, scattered with old wrecks. The sea around them grew noisy, changing from the usual soft background hiss of quiet water to a rushing, liquid roar that grew in intensity until Nita couldn’t hear herself think, let alone sing. Seeing in the water was difficult. The surface was whitecapped, the middle waters were murky with dissolved air, and the hazy sunlight diffused in the sea until everything seemed to glow a pallid gray white, with no shadows anywhere.
“Mind your swimming,” S’reee said, again in that subdued voice. “The rocks are sharp around here; you don’t want to start bleeding.”
They surfaced once for breath near Montauk Point, so that Nita got a glimpse of its tall octagonal lighthouse, the little tender’s house nearby, and a group of tourists milling about on the cliff that slanted sharply down to the sea. Nita blew, just once, but spectacularly, and grinned to herself at the sight of the tourists pointing and shouting at each other and taking pictures of her. She cruised the surface for a good long moment to let them get some good shots, then submerged again and caught up with Kit and S’reee.
The murkiness of the water made it hard to find her way except by singing brief notes, waiting for the return of the sound, and judging the bottom by it. S’reee was doing so, but her notes were so short that she seemed to be grudging them.
What’s the matter with her? Nita thought. You can’t get a decent sounding off such short notes— And indeed, she almost hit a rock herself as she was thinking that, and saved herself from it only by a quick lithe twist that left her aching afterward. The roaring of the water over the Shoals kept on flowing, interfering with the rebound of the song-notes, whiting them out. S’reee was bearing north around the point now and slowing to the slowest of modes. Kit, to keep from overswimming her, was barely drifting, and keeping well above the bottom. Nita glanced up at him, a great dark shape against the greater brightness of the surface water — and saw his whole body thrash once hard, in a gesture of terrible shock. “Nita!”
She looked ahead and saw what he saw. The milky water ahead of them had a great cloud of blood hanging and swirling in it, with small bright shapes flashing in and out of the cloud in mindless confusion. Nita let out one small squeak of fear, then forced herself to be quiet. The sound came back, though, and told her that inside that roiling red darkness, something was cruising by in a wide curve — something nearly Kit’s size. She backfinned to hover in the water, glancing up at Kit.
He drifted downward to her, singing no note of his own. She could understand why. Tumbling weightlessly out of the blood-cloud, trailing streaks of watery red, were the slashed and broken bodies of a school of smallfin
