Leashing the Tempest (Arcadia Bell #2.5)(15)

The captain moaned and covered his eyes.

“And if you’ve warded the boat against this mermaid, and she’s bit you, then I’m going to assume she’s dangerous.”

“Deadly,” he confirmed.

“Is she like a siren?” Jupe asked. “Should we be covering our ears?”

“She lost that ability when she died. But if the ward’s down, she’ll do whatever it takes to get to me. She’s tracked me down from a hundred miles away and almost killed three of my passengers before. We gotta get that ward up.” He looked at me with desperate, pleading eyes. “Can you recharge it?”

A specialized ward that big? It would be a struggle in the best of situations and take a hell of a lot more current than the batteries I’d tapped to charge the room. Would also require me to expose myself to the creature roaming the yacht for an extended amount of time.

“Absolutely not,” Lon said. “We need to call for help. Is there another VHF?”

He swung his legs over the edge of the bed. “A hand-held unit in the engine room.”

Lon looked at me. “I can make a run for it.”

“Fat chance,” the captain said. “She’s got a wicked sense of smell. She’ll be on you in seconds if she’s anywhere on this boat.”

“Maybe I can use my knack on her,” Jupe suggested.

“No,” Lon and I said together.

Jupe grimaced and scratched the back of his neck. “Just trying to help.”

“Can she be killed?” Lon asked the captain. Then added, “Again?”

“Not that I know of. If she’s got tf shet a weakness, I’ve never discovered it. And I’ve been dealing with her for almost twenty years. Best thing you can do is hide.”

Screw that. I wasn’t sitting around in this tiny room waiting for someone to spot us. God only knew where we were, and the last thing the captain had told us before Jupe messed with his mind was that nothing was on the radar for miles.

I considered our options. I had a series of sigils on my inner arm tattooed in white ink: one of them was a temporary spell that could render me nearly invisible. Might be able to use this to find the handheld VHF radio, but I wasn’t entirely sure how well it covered up scent. Wasn’t sure I wanted to find out, either.

Even if I could make it back without her attacking me, even if we could radio for help, what would happen when help came? If the captain was right, and she’d taken down his other passengers, what would she do to the rescue team? Or to us?

I wasn’t taking a chance. Not with my family and friend on the boat.

Still, there was something I could do, and it hadn’t failed me yet.

“Can you still use your weather knack?” I asked the captain.

“Yes.”

I held up a hand and shook my head. “Don’t use it quite yet.”

“Why?”

“Your mermaid is Æthyric. And that means she can be bound.”

“That’s how they transported her here from Russia,” the captain agreed.

I gave him a tight smile and reached inside my jacket pocket. “Let’s set a trap, shall we?”

It was a pain in the ass, what with the cramped space and the boat rocking and the pressure of being moments away from death at sea, but I managed to draw an Æthyric level binding triangle on the floor of the captain’s quarters with a broken stick of red ocher chalk. Everyone but the old man sat on the narrow bunk, an unhappy audience squished together like sardines.

“Okay, Christie. Ready to play bait?”

Sweat beaded on the bridge of his nose. “Not really.”

“Stand here,” I instructed, ignoring him and pointing a narrow space between the base of the triangle and the outer cabin wall.

“You sure you can trap her? She’s fast.”

“I’m sure.” I wasn’t.

Caduceus in one hand, I knelt by the side of the door on the other side of my handiwork, which amounted to a potent series of scrawled arcane symbols and words forming three sides of the trap and ready to be awakened with magick. After loosening my neck, I exhaled and wielded a pocketknife I’d borrowed from Lon. It only took a few quick gouges to scratch out an integral symbol on the doorframe that had been holding the cloaking spell together. Without it, the bright-white Heka charging the spe>

I dropped the pocketknife and unlocked the door. Slid it open. Crouched out of sight.

We were now sitting ducks.

Some kinds of magick are semi-permanent and all-inclusive, like the ward on the yacht and the cloaking spell: when activated, they can be crossed freely. As long as the cloaking spell was charged and the symbols intact, you could step in and out of the room without worrying about breaking the spell. It’s like a public park: anyone can use it.

But a binding trap is different. It’s temporary, and it has a one-way charge. As long as the charge is active, whatever is trapped inside it cannot leave; however, it can be broken from the outside. All it took was a single toe over the triangle’s border to fizzle the charge.

This meant that I had to light the charge while the demon was inside the trap. That could be tricky. If I didn’t trap the Rusalka mermaid in time, she could move right through the uncharged trap and attack the captain. I had a tiny window to charge it while she was standing inside the triangle . . . before she wised up to the situation.