Siren. Part 11

Stas.h.i.+ng the magazines back in the trunk, he decided to take a walk and a smoke break to wake up. Ralph's shop-Under Your Hood-was just off the beach, and Terry often took short jaunts to the water and back just to get away from his a.s.shole boss. A quick cigarette and a few breaths of the sea air always brought his urge to scream "take this job and shove it" under control. The beach had saved him from losing a steady paycheck many times.

Terry lit up and walked the sandy path from the back parking lot of the car shop over the weedy no-man's-land beyond. The path rose and the sound of the surf grew louder, and then Terry was over the dune, and trudging down to the hard-packed sand of the beach. The ember of his smoke burned exceptionally bright tonight; the clouds had rolled in and promised a midnight storm; the normally brilliant sky loomed ominous and closed. One cloud bank glowed slightly, the light of the moon behind it, but aside from that and a few lights off the sh.o.r.e from seaside homes, the night was black as tar.

Somewhere nearby, Terry heard music, and wondered if kids were camped out on the beach, sneaking booze or toking up. He grinned, remembering the many times he'd come down here with friends back in high school. He began to walk toward the faraway sound, thinking that he'd give the delinquent kids a scare before heading back to work. Nothing more frightening than an adult stumbling across a teen party when you're a teen. He grinned and blew a cloud of smoke across the beach. This could be fun.

The music seemed to be coming from near the point, though he didn't recognize the tune. It seemed strangely quiet and stark for party music, though Terry had to admit, very pretty. All of his frustrations with Ralph faded the closer he got to the sound. h.e.l.l, maybe instead of scaring off the kids, he'd sit with them and have a drink. f.u.c.k it if he ended up fired tomorrow...he was tired of this place and this job anyway. Maybe it was time to drift on.

He slowed as he reached the curve of the beach that ultimately led out onto the rocky wall that was the finger of the point and looked around harder. He didn't seem to be any closer to the source of the music, and he still hadn't seen the lights of a campfire or flash or anything. Where the h.e.l.l were these kids? Out on the rocks? Usually when teens partied on the beach, they lit a small fire to stay warm, and on a night like this, to see one another. Unless it was a couple-in which case, perhaps they didn't want to be seen. Terry grinned at that. Maybe this was even better than he thought-maybe he'd catch some seventeen-year-old skin doing the nasty! He almost laughed out loud when he imagined the squeals his appearance would bring when he caught that little glimpse of heaven.

He slowly did a 360-degree turn in place, peering hard at the sand, trying to find some faintly moving shadows that he somehow hadn't picked up on yet. He started to turn quicker once his vision reached the ocean, a.s.suming that the music wasn't coming from out in the water...but then he stopped.

What was that flash out in the dark water? It looked white, but not like a whitecap. Terry squinted and stepped closer. d.a.m.n if it wasn't a chick out in the water! Skinny-dipping by the look of it. He could see her legs kicking out above the water, and when her body moved up and out of the waves, he could see nothing but creamy skin. No suit.

Nice.

He couldn't see anyone swimming near her, and the beach appeared empty. Still, the faint but seductive music seemed to come from nearby. It was all around him, and he closed his eyes, trying to identify which direction it came from. Instead, in the dark s.p.a.ce behind his eyelids, it seemed to amplify and grow, sparking pinpoints of light and swirls of ambient fog that lit his brain like a psychedelic drug.

"d.a.m.n, that s.h.i.+t's intense," he murmured, and opened his eyes.

There was a naked woman standing five feet away from him. Her pale skin dripped with the ocean, and dark hair hung in wet, knotted curls across her neck and down her chest. Despite the gloom of the sky, her eyes reflected a s.h.i.+mmering light. They sparked tiny motes of fire while staring hard at him, unblinking.

Terry's gaze slid from her face to her b.r.e.a.s.t.s though, because it was hard to ignore a pair like that. They looked firm as fruit, and his throat salivated at the thought. G.o.d he wanted to bite into her. Look at those t.i.ts! He could suck those...and look at that tummy-flat, tight...mmm. Terry imagined his tongue licking the salty water from her belly b.u.t.ton and then dipping its way lower to lave between her thighs...

She was singing.

In the midst of Terry's unapologetic s.e.xual perusal of the woman, it occurred to him belatedly that the music he'd been hearing for the past few minutes was not coming from a boom box secreted somewhere in the sand. It was coming from this woman, here, five steps away.

Okay, three.

One.

Her hands slipped up his arms from elbow to shoulder, and all the time her lips kept gently moving, her voice a trilling, gentle ma.s.sage. Her song slipped into the clouds and then slid back down, a warm and potent melody of loss and love, pain and need. He could feel himself respond to the song, as much as to her skin, and he put his arms around her, drawing her wet body to him without thought.

In seconds his lips were locked to hers, and without knowing her name, Terry ran his hands down the cool, slippery skin of her waist and across the enticing swell of her a.s.s. He slid a finger between her cheeks, and was poking the swollen folds of her s.e.x from behind before he'd even ended their first kiss.

This was moving fast, he thought, too excited and surprised by his luck to question why a naked woman would walk out of the ocean and throw herself into his arms and then, without a word, unb.u.t.ton his s.h.i.+rt and start to work on his belt.

He helped her with the latter, eager to get to the business at hand, because this was likely to be the best business he ever got in hand. This chick was f.u.c.kin' magazine-spread material. He flashed back to the skin mags he'd been looking at a couple hours ago and thought, Nah, they got nothing on this b.i.t.c.h! He had a moment of panic when he wondered, after all of his exertion in the car, if he'd be able to perform now that the real deal was right here.

But then she sprung him from beneath his jeans into the night air, and s.h.i.+fted her legs to let him press against her, impaling herself on him as she sucked his tongue into her mouth, and his worries dissolved like desert clouds.

She moved over him with an aggression he wasn't used to; most of the girls he'd been with were happy to let him do all the pus.h.i.+ng and shoving, so it was strangely exciting for a woman to be pus.h.i.+ng and grappling him to the sand. And she did. She forced him with her hands on his shoulders first to his knees, weaving her fingers into his hair and pressing his head to her groin, and after he'd satisfied her immediate musky need there with wet laps of his tongue, she'd straddled him atop the cold sand, and her teeth sparkled white against the night as she threw back her head and opened her mouth to moan her appreciation at his movements beneath her.

"d.a.m.n, baby, you are amazing," Terry said, as his moment came.

The woman said nothing, only s.h.i.+fted her hips against his and increased her rhythm, again tilting back her head to stare up at the cloud-covered sky. This time, instead of moaning, she began to sing again, and as Terry felt his nerves electrify and pulse with an amazingly intense o.r.g.a.s.m, his ears suddenly turned to jelly as well; her song made his body want to melt. The blur of clouds and dark and sand turned into a landscape so faint and indistinct with her song that Terry couldn't even move his hand to hold her as she began to fall toward him.

Her mouth brushed across his with a wet kiss, but then continued on to nuzzle his ear, and finally his neck. All the while she sang a whispery song of sated seduction and he felt paralyzed by its melody. Her hands slipped up his arms and gripped him as she pushed her b.r.e.a.s.t.s to his chest, pressing into him so hard that he really, for a moment, felt they were one.

And then the pain began.

The kiss at his neck, so warm and blissful after the big O suddenly turned hot, in a slap-at-your-neck-to-stop-the-mosquito kind of way, except that Terry didn't feel like he could move his hand to do the swatting, both because she was holding it and because her song was almost holding him in a weird trance. But then the heat grew to excruciating pain, and he opened his mouth to cry out. He had only just begun to scream when her lips fastened down on his, and he tasted the iron of his own blood in his mouth. His eyes opened, and he saw her suddenly in a new light.

Her eyes weren't brown with a strange sparkle to them. They were yellow, somehow reptilian. Like fish eyes. Her nose no longer looked patrician, but hawklike pointy, and her arms weren't flawlessly creamy, but blotched; a melange of intricate streaks of dark pink scars and brown discolorations amid the white. And as he struggled to break her violent kiss and peered lower, suddenly drinking her in for seemingly the first time, he saw that her hips didn't curve seductively quite as he remembered at his first glance. They slimmed down from her waist and tapered into something silvery blue and geometrically shadowed. Something that was not two legs, but a solid tail of s.h.i.+mmering alienness, a heavy tail pinned between his legs. The beautiful woman who had pushed him to the sand was not beautiful at all; in fact, she wasn't really a woman. Her a.s.s ended in fish scales.

Terry started to gasp "what the f.u.c.k" but the woman had already broken their kiss and bent to his throat again.

This time, when she lifted her face back up, there was a string of skin-or severed vein-hanging from her mouth, and her cheeks were spattered with tiny red pinp.r.i.c.ks from the spray of Terry's blood. His cry had ended in a gurgle, and now, as the pain overwhelmed him, he stared at her through a fog, watching his blood drip from her wide, thin lips to run down the slope of her b.r.e.a.s.t.s to stain her nipples. He struggled to speak, to ask why, to beg mercy, something...but all that came out was a thin whisper; a faint rasp of sound. Terry tried to lift an arm, but it wouldn't move. He tried a leg-maybe he could unseat her. But again, nothing happened.

She opened her eyes wider and stared down into his, her mouth opening and revealing a row of sharp lower teeth painted in blood. "Mmmmm-ooo-oooooh," she sang, leaning down to whisper her melody straight into his right ear.

Terry couldn't fathom how, or why, but with that song, all the shrieking pain that pulsed through him seemed to slip away, and all he wanted was for this amazing woman to lie down on top of him and be part of him.

But she wasn't thinking quite the same way. Instead she leaned down and kissed the side of his neck that she hadn't already torn out. And...she tore out THAT side. When she rose above Terry again, her cheeks expanded, chewing on the rich flesh of his neck, Terry only saw her with a flicker of consciousness. He saw the piece of b.l.o.o.d.y skin hanging from her mouth like crimson tissue paper. He flashed back to the image from the skin mags earlier, of a woman tied in a chair with a ball gag in her mouth and raw red welts covering her chest. SHE LOVES THE PAIN, the caption had read.

Terry didn't love the pain. But it didn't matter. Ligeia bent down to chew on the flesh of his neck and shoulder again. And Terry didn't stay conscious long enough to complain.

Chapter Twenty-Five.

"So how was the honeymoon reunion weekend?" Bill asked as soon as Evan walked into the office on Monday morning.

"Gee, didja miss me that much?" Evan laughed, setting down his things on the desk. "Maybe I could turn on my computer and put my lunch in the fridge before we play twenty questions?"

"Okay, but hurry up," Bill said. "Nosy-bodies around here want to know."

"You mean, you want to know."

"Not me. Maggie wanted me to get the dirt."

Across the room, Maggie's head peered out from behind her computer monitor. "Try another one, Lug Nuts," she laughed. "You're the only nosy-body around here."

Evan walked down the short hall to stow his lunch in the fridge, then returned to finally punch his computer on with one finger and sat back in his chair with a sigh. "It was great," he said to Bill. "You know how much we love San Francisco, and the weather was perfect. We spent the first day down by the wharf-even did the wax museum, which we haven't done in like fifteen years. And then on Sat.u.r.day, we hung out in Golden Gate Park all afternoon. Yesterday, we drove up to Muir Woods and messed around on the redwood walking trails for a few hours. We got back around nine last night. It was hard to get up this morning, but...I'm really glad we went."

"Sounds like a nice weekend," Candice offered, looking up from her computer to put in her two cents. "You two deserve it."

"See-there was another nosy-body." Bill grinned. Candice bounced a crumpled piece of paper off the back of his head.

Bill stood up and picked up the paper ball, launching it back from whence it came. He caught her in the temple, and the ball bounced off her computer screen and into her lap. "Delinquent," she grumbled.

"You started it," he pointed out, before coming over to kneel privately at the edge of Evan's desk.

"So...how was it?" he asked more quietly. "Is Sarah...?"

"She's good," Evan acknowledged. "She had a really great time, and we talked a lot. Way more than we have in the past six months combined probably. I think we made some real progress."

Bill raised an eyebrow. "Do tell."

"This weekend we're going to start packing Josh's room."

"You've been saying that for months."

"I know," Evan said. "But this time, we both mean it. We've been living in a circle-doing the same thing every day, not letting it go, not moving forward. It's killing both of us in different ways."

"So...packing Josh's room is going to change all that?"

"Well, that, and other stuff. She's going to stop going to O'Flaherty's, and I'm going to stop spending hours on the beach."

Bill looked unconvinced. "Oh really?" he said.

"I'm serious," Evan said. "We have to change how we're living, or we're going to both self-destruct."

"And you're going to give up your time on the beach..."

Evan nodded. "I'm going to take a last walk tonight."

"That could be the most dangerous walk you ever take," Bill said, and then pushed himself up from a crouch to stand. He pursed his lips, shook his head slowly, and then walked back to his desk and bent over to fish something out from underneath. He stood back up with a copy of the Daily Delilah in his hand. He opened the front page, and then turned another. Finally, he smiled, and nodded again before bringing the paper over to Evan's desk. He threw it down on the desk and pointed to the article at the top of page five.

"Another one," he said. "You might want to read this before you take your walk tonight."

The headline read: BEACH MURDER INTERRUPTED TOO LATE Evan skimmed the article beneath.

Terry Brill, thirty-four, was found early Sat.u.r.day morning on the beach near the point. Brill, an auto mechanic who worked for the Under Your Hood shop on Bay Street, was reportedly working a late s.h.i.+ft Friday night when he was last seen alive.

Police report that at approximately 12:15 A.M., Brill's body was discovered by a local man walking the beach.

"I had just gotten out of band practice, so I took a walk along the beach," David Benton told the Daily Delilah. "I saw this woman lying down on the sand ahead of me. I thought she was making out with a guy and I was going to steer clear of them. But she looked up at me all of a sudden, and I realized two things. Number one, she was completely naked, and number two, her mouth was dripping with what looked like blood. She looked like a ghoul. That's when I got kind of nervous."

Benton, who plays ba.s.s in a local hard rock band, says that when the woman saw him approaching, she stood up and fled, diving into the ocean. He said she disappeared under the water and he did not see her return to the beach. When he reached the woman's partner, he found the man dead, apparently of blood loss from multiple wounds in the shoulder and throat area.

"The sand was covered in blood," Benton said. "The guy looked like someone had chewed his throat to gristle. There wasn't much left between his head and his chest."

Police reports state that Brill's corpse appeared to have been mauled by wild dogs or wolves.

"We are looking for any evidence that would lead us to find the woman reportedly seen with the body by Mr. Benton," Police Chief William Gaglisaid. "Her connection to the deceased is unknown. At this time, Mr. Benton is not a suspect in the case."

According to Ralph Maggiano, Terry Brill was working the late s.h.i.+ft alone on Friday, finis.h.i.+ng an engine job.

"He always took his smoke breaks on the beach," Maggiano said. "I always told him those things were going to kill him one day. This is a tragedy for Terry's family, as well as for our shop," Maggiano said.

Evan looked up with a smile. "I know that Maggiano guy," he said. "Had my car fixed there last year. I can just hear the rest of this quote: 'This is a tragedy, yep. We're really sad. By the way, does anybody know where I can find me a new mechanic? We got work to do here!'"

Bill grinned, but only slightly. "I showed you that for a reason, Evan."

"Because you're obsessed with deaths on the beach?"

"No." Bill rolled his eyes. Then he whispered, "Because I'm obsessed with the concern that you are going to be another one of these deaths on the beach if you don't stop walking it at night. Capisce?"

"Look," Evan said. "You had me going before and actually had me believing for a little while that she caused a s.h.i.+pwreck! But I've been with her since then. She may be a little strange, but she's not a killer. You worry too much. And you believe in mythological creatures. These are not two qualities that serve you well together."

Bill presented him with the middle finger and stepped back to his desk. "Just trying to help, man. But...do what you're gonna do. Just don't come crying to me when you wash up all b.l.o.o.d.y on the sand tomorrow. Oh...wait a minute, that's right. Most of the victims just disappear without a trace. Good luck with that."

"If I'm washed back up on the beach, I don't imagine I'll be crying anymore. And anyway, I have no intention of disappearing," Evan said.

"I'm sure that's what Terry Brill said when he went out for a smoke break."

Chapter Twenty-Six.

Evan's stomach flip-flopped as he walked along the cold night sand. He was nervous about this conversation. Maybe more so than of any conversation he'd ever dreaded having. He'd never been good at breaking up with girls before he'd met Sarah, and this was not going to be easy. How do you tell a s.e.x G.o.ddess that you're not interested in indulging in her charms any longer?

Especially when you really were still interested.

Evan couldn't lie to himself. He wanted Ligeia as much as ever. And he certainly didn't want to give up his nightly walks by the surf-they'd been his tonic to wash away the stress of the day for years now. But...if he had any hope of saving his marriage-of saving Sarah, really-he had to stop this. He had to be true again to his wife, and he had to be there for her at night, when she was at her most vulnerable. His absence every evening had helped her climb into the bottle. Evan knew, in that sense, he'd failed her on the most critical level. He hadn't been there when she really needed him.

When they had run around in San Francisco, he'd seen his old Sarah come back. The Sarah he'd fallen in love with. And while making love to her would never compare to the strangely powerful eroticism of Ligeia, it was what he wanted. He couldn't deny the power of Ligeia, but he wanted to be with his wife every night, comfortable (some would say boring) in their bed. He wanted to hear that familiar slap of his body against hers, in a rhythm only they could devise together. He wanted to smell the sweetness of her breath as she drifted off to sleep each night, and cuddle in to the warmth of her at two A.M. when he woke from a dream.

Ligeia brought him more ecstasy than he had ever imagined possible, but Evan couldn't imagine living with her night after night. h.e.l.l, he didn't even know where she lived. He didn't know anything about her, except that she sang like an angel and screwed like a demon. Just thinking about her body touching his gave him an instant erection. d.a.m.n, he murmured to himself. How am I going to do this!

But Evan knew he had to end this, and work on breaking the negative cycle of depression he and Sarah had fallen into over the past year. Because if he didn't, he wouldn't have Sarah to wake up to anymore at two A.M.

They couldn't go on forever the way they'd been. Something bad was going to happen. h.e.l.l, less than a month ago he'd been planning to throw himself into the waves to ensure that something bad did happen to him. Something permanent.

But Ligeia had shown him that there was still hope to be had, pleasure to be derived from his life. Of course, her a.s.sumption was that he'd continue to derive that pleasure with her, but for Evan...as good as Ligeia was, he still felt allegiance to Sarah. She needed him more than she ever had, right now. And so tonight, Evan was determined to change their downward spiral. Step one was to say good-bye to the hottest girl he'd ever kissed. Step two was to walk away, never to return.

His stomach lurched again as he thought that sentence. His body wanted to feel her touch again. Breaking up was not on the program there. And how he would hold himself back when she turned up naked and beautiful, dripping with salt.w.a.ter and reeking of pure l.u.s.t...he had no idea. Nevertheless...

Evan reached the first boulders near the point and scooped a handful of stones from the high tide line. Then he sat down and flung them one by one into the water, granting the waves a smile of pleasure each time a stone managed to survive more than three skips before sinking many yards off the sh.o.r.e.

"Let me touch you now, forever," he murmured, side-arming rock after rock with a fatalistic precision. "Just this one last time..." he rasped, dragging out the last words in a melancholy prayer.

He scooped up another pile of pebbles, and rooted through them to find the stones with the flattest edges. In his mind, he heard Josh challenge him to a "skip-off." His son had carefully selected five flat, rounded stones and encouraged Evan to do the same. "Whoever gets the most skips buys the ice cream," Josh would challenge. And then they'd each throw, alternating attempts and calling out the number of skips at the end of each toss: "Three, six, four...seven!"

Age was no benefit or handicap on the stone-skipping game, and Evan won as much as Josh. Though Evan still seemed to pay for the ice cream afterward most of the time.

"You don't give me enough of an allowance," Josh would complain once they were inside the red- and white-striped Sweet Shoppe in downtown.

"Mmmm hmmm," Evan would reply. "That should teach you not to make bets you can't cover."