Page 70 of Lair

THIRTY-FIVE

My heart lurches. Adrenaline shoots through me in a chemical cascade, bathing my brain in a fizz of dread. I brandish the mop like a baseball bat and hesitate before the door of the wheelhouse, thinking of bodies writhing in bedsheets, of a corpse dropping to a bone white deck. I open and close my hand to get the jitters out of it, and yank the sliding door wide.

No one there in the wheelhouse. Maybe I was only—

Thump. The sound is distinct and irrefutable, coming up a short set of stairs.

The hairs on the back of my neck rise. An urgency takes hold of me, a sudden certainty: Something is happening down there.

I have to move. Now.

I fast-pedal down the stairs.

A crew galley waits at the bottom, cramped and gleaming with stainless-steel surfaces. It’s also dim—the lights flicked off, the window curtains drawn to block out the glare of day, a golden haze along their edges.

It’s like stumbling upon a pit of vipers.

There’s a man down here. He’s not close. He presses himself against a far wall in the gloom, his eyes rounded in his stolid, double-chinned face, his gut hanging out of his captain’s shirt sucking in and out in a series of short, labored hitches. He’s staring at the thing crouching in the floor, its pale skin contrasting against the gleam of its sharp executive’s suit: the yacht owner. Cailee lies unconscious at its feet, a patch of blood glistening at her scalp; it must’ve just knocked her out. At my last, stuttering step, the thing lifts its head. Its eyes are deep and black and without pupils. When it hisses, a pair of fangs drip saliva like some venom-beaded serpent.

The moisture dries in my throat.

I lock eyes with the captain flattened against the wall, trying to engage him in a pleading look: What are you doing? But he only twitches his head in the negative and half falls, half slides away along the wall and is gone.

A sickening astonishment takes hold of me, an appalling urge to laugh.

By myself it is, then.

I look down to see the owner-thing’s long spindly fingers tilting back Cailee’s neck, baring the beating thread of an artery, and my blood cools.

I’m not sure how it happens—I cock back the mop and let fly with all I’ve got, whipping its head to the side. When it slowly turns back to me, an ugly gash in one brow, its opaque eyes are slits and its lips wrinkled back like an animal’s.

Shit.

Its backhanded swipe lifts me off the ground. There’s a pop in my ear, a wrenching pain in my neck, and the world blurs. Then I’m crashing over the crew table into the far banquette in a heap, as easily dismissed as a fly flicked off an arm. I hear a crunch in my spine, and there’s a dull, warning throb in my shoulder I don’t like at all. When I get my breath back, I can taste hot vomit in my mouth.

In the next room, a swaggering man’s voice is suddenly advising to not stop him from having a good time. The captain’s turned the radio on.

Cailee, I keep thinking to myself. Cailee.

I open my eyes, and this viper’s nest suddenly seems to vibrate, distorted and endlessly replicating. As I watch, the owner-thing splits in two, then comes back together. It hisses—a ferocious, territorial sibilance—and turns back to Cailee.

My blood sizzles.

I try to get up, and the room slews violently to the right and I fall back down. It’s much easier to let a dark wave of familiar thought sweep over me, lulling me into doubt. I have, as always, been cast aside. This is where I belong. I don’t deserve any better. My whole existence, after all, has been contaminated with worthlessness. Why would that change now?

The voice in the other room croons he’s gonna keep on going, there’s no stopping him, and I think, No.

I get a flash of Josh above me, pinning me down with one hand as a clenched fist connects, over and over, with my cheek.

Not again.

Jason pinning me against the nightstand, groping at his belt buckle.

No more. This will be the end of that chapter.

FUCK THAT.

I wince up, looking about, and an endless sequence of sticks collapses into a single mop. My mop. Still miraculously within arm’s reach.

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