“It’s all right,” she wheezed. “This is supposed to happen. Or at least that’s what Darnell said.”
“And if you can’t trust your drug dealer, who can you trust?”
Still gasping, we got out of the car, then took off our shoes. I stripped down to the swim trunks she’d found for me. She got rid of her jacket, vest, tie, and shoes, but kept her shirt, pants, and socks. She couldn’t wear a bathing suit and show the world her goat legs.
Then we grabbed our goggles. The magic in the pills was supposed to let us breathe and even talk underwater, but apparently we still needed air spaces in front of our eyes to see clearly.
I had a pair of fins, too. A’marie didn’t. She’d said they wouldn’t stay on.
We crossed a strip of sand, pebbles, and saw-grass and waded into the water. I was glad it was cool, but not cold. We spat inside our goggles and rinsed them out to keep them from fogging up. I pulled on the fins. Then it was time to go under. I got that far, then froze. Because my body was pretty sure it was a bad idea to breathe water.
But A’marie was already doing it, and I didn’t want her to think I was chicken. So I forced myself to inhale.
And was glad I had. That half-suffocating, up-in-the-mountains feeling went away. Except for an oily taste in my mouth-with all the big cargo ships and fishing boats going in and out, the water wasn’t all that clean-everything was fine.
Actually, it was better than fine. It was cool. It was one of those moments that showed magic could be fun when I wasn’t scared shitless and counting on it to save my ass.
I gave A’marie a grin, and we headed for deeper water. Her swimming was mostly arm. I guessed she’d learned from experience that kicking didn’t do her much good. My fins and I took it easy so we wouldn’t leave her behind.
We swam over other Old People going about their business. A submarine made of seashells sat on the bottom of the bay. Its engine, or what passed for an engine, was idling. I could feel the magic throbbing inside the hull. Guys with the smooth gray hide of porpoises were offloading net bags of what looked like kelp and handing them off to finheads, who stowed them aboard a triangular wooden sub of their own.
But we didn’t see too many things like that, because we’d gone into the water near the patch Murk considered to be his private turf. It wasn’t long before the bay looked as empty of fish-men and such as ordinary humans imagined it to be.
The bay got deeper, and A’marie and I followed the slope downward. I wasn’t crazy about that. The crud in the water already cut visibility, and now we were losing the light from overhead. But we didn’t have much choice. If the dolphin guys and finheads had to hug the bottom to keep humans from spotting them, then obviously, a dinosaur-sized octopus had to do it, too.
Then, even though we were swimming deeper, the water got warmer.
I just thought we’d caught some kind of current. I grinned and asked A’marie if she’d peed in the pool. Talking made bubbles come out of my mouth in a way that almost tickled.
She frowned and looked all around, like you have to do if you want to see something coming underwater. “Something’s wrong,” she said.
The way she said it slapped the smartass out of me. “What?” I asked.
She pointed. “That.”
A big hammerhead shark was swimming toward us from the south. It had the flat head with the eyes on the ends, the mouth with rows and rows of pointed teeth, the fin on the back, and all the rest of the standard shark equipment. But the crazy thing was that it was also fire burning underwater. It was yellow and blue, and its shape flickered and wavered, with tongues of flame jumping up from the rest of it.
“What is it?” A’marie asked. Like all of a sudden, I was the one who was supposed to know his way around.
I did have a hunch, though. “It’s Murk’s watchdog. Something he made.” And it made sense that, if he knew how, he’d make it partly out of fire. What would seem stranger and therefore scarier to the average fish-man?
The hammerhead swam back and forth for a second, like it was giving us a chance to turn around. Then it started toward us again.
“What should we do?” asked A’marie.
“For starters, don’t let it near us.” I pictured the Thunderbird, then made an invisible wall.
The hammerhead bumped it and sent a jab of headache between my eyes. It circled from my twelve to my three, then swam forward again. I threw up a second wall to bounce it back. I wondered if I could make a bubble instead of walls, one defense to enclose A’marie and me completely. But this seemed like a bad time to start experimenting.
“So far, so good,” I said.
“Not really,” said A’marie. “You held it back, but the water’s getting really hot.”
I realized she was right. I’d just been too busy with my wall building to notice. Those lobsters that just sit in the pot while the cook gradually turns up the heat had nothing on me.
“Shit,” I said. “Maybe you should go back.”
“I will if you will.”
I made a third wall-or maybe, since it was over our heads, it was more of a roof-and the hammerhead veered off just short of running into it. Somehow, it was learning to sense where they were.
“I’ll cover your retreat,” I said, “and then I’ll get by this thing somehow. Or if I don’t, I won’t show up for poker, and you’ll still get what you wanted.”
“Great plan,” she said, “but let’s try this first.” She unbuttoned two of the lower buttons of her white shirt, reached inside, and brought out her Zamfir pipes.
It turned out she could play underwater just like we could talk. Even though I wasn’t the one she was trying to hex, the music put a twitch in my legs. The hammerhead swam in a kind of shimmying figure eight. Dancing a shark dance.
“Nice,” I said. I took hold of the back of A’marie’s cummerbund, and, finning, hauled her along. She couldn’t use her arms to swim and work the stops of the pipes at the same time.
We made it several yards. Then the hammerhead shook off the spell and shot at us again. I just got a wall thrown up in time to keep it from tearing a chunk out of me. As it turned off, I saw A’marie and me reflected in one beady little eye.
She lowered the pipes. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. It almost worked.” I struggled to come up with an idea of my own. By now, the water was hot enough that it was hard to think about anything but the burning sting.
Finally, though, I had something. “Your songs can’t control it,” I said. “It’s just too strong, or stubborn. But do you think you can sort of give it a nudge?”
She said maybe, I told her my plan, and we more or less agreed it was as half-assed as usual. Then we put it into action.
I spirit-traveled to just behind the shark. Then I willed solidness back into my hands. When I did, I winced at the heat coming off it. I reached and yanked on its tail for the second that was all that I could take.
At the same time, my physical body was floating unconscious, and instinct told me the last wall I’d made had disappeared when I moved. All the shark had to do was lunge forward to rip its two original targets to pieces.
But A’marie was piping for all she was worth. And maybe her music was what convinced Murk’s dog that the new annoyance behind it was more important than the trespassers in front. It wheeled and shot at me. I melted back into a ghost, and it plunged right through me.
It felt good to be one hundred percent ghost. The heat in the water couldn’t scald me anymore. But I couldn’t stay that way. I had to keep the hammerhead’s attention on spirit-traveler me. So I firmed up my hands and flew-if that’s the right word when you’re underwater-over the shark, thumping it down the length of its body as I went. I finished with a clapping motion that smacked both protruding eyes at once.
Then I streaked onward, and as I’d hoped, the hammerhead chased me. Every so often, I let it catch up and try to bite me, only to snap its jaws shut on nothing. I figured that would make it even madder.
And maybe it did, but it was a tricky move to pull off. An ordinary spirit traveler was invisible. Visible-but- still-not-completely-there took concentration, and the throbbing in my hands made it harder. Eventually I slipped, let myself become too real, and the shark’s teeth touched me. Somehow I
