Leashing the Tempest (Arcadia Bell #2.5)(16)

It was a risk, sure, but so were our other choices. I looked up at Jupe, who would, if I failed, have to rely on Lon’s flare gun to protect him from the Rusalka. I hoped to God it wouldn’t come to that.

My hands shook. Heart hammered against my rib cage. I waited, muscles straining, as I listened for movement outside the quarters.

It didn’t take long.

I heard a clatter in the salon. The sound of flesh slapping on kitchen tile. And when a bolt of lightning briefly cast her slithering shadow along the far wall of the corridor, I held my breath and braced myself.

A pair of large, flat feet stepped through the doorway. The skin was covered in glossy, iridescent scales the color of dried seaweed. The bone structure of her legs was decidedly nonhuman: the two legs almost melded together as one when her feet were aligned.

And it only got stranger above the waist.

She had small breasts, a curvy, hourglass waist, and long arms ending in webbed fingers. And sitting on her shoulders like a mythological dragon or something out of a Lovecraft story were three slender necks bearing the three heads I’d earlier seen in silhouette.

I’d summoned a few demons with weird appendages: tails, cloven hooves, wings . . . but I’d never seen a multi-headed demon outside a medieval engraving in a musty goetic tome.

And the faces on the three heads weren’t ugly. Despite being hairless and covered in brackish scales, her faces were quite lovely. All three of them.

“Richard,” she said from each her mouths, slightly out of sync. Her voices were roughly etched with a strange vibrato. Rows of gills lining the sloping tops of her shoulders opened and closed when she talked.

“Hello, Onna,” the captain replied nervously.

“Where ever have you been?”

She stepped feflhe steparther into the room as Christie crushed himself against the wall. She had one foot in the binding. I just needed her to take one more step.

“You are hurt,” one of her heads said, craning to see him better with shiny black eyes that didn’t blink.

“Uh . . . yes . . .”

She held out a hand and stepped into the middle of the triangle.

Bingo.

I reached out for current. The source I’d tapped for the cloaking spell was almost dry, but that’s why I wanted Christie’s weather knack on idle until I was finished. I concentrated and searched farther away, waiting to catch something in the storm. I found it almost immediately and tugged.

Lightning was so raw and wild. It fluctuated. Ebbed and flowed. One second I was pulling as hard as I could and getting nothing—the next I was flooded with current. My insides roiled. Skin itched. Breath stolen. Heka roared inside me, bouncing around my cells as it sucked in the electricity I was siphoning.

One of the Rusalka’s heads snapped toward me. Crud.

I wasn’t ready—I needed more Heka. The captain was supposed to distract her—we’d discussed this. He knew I needed time to charge the trap. The bastard was too caught up in his own cold sweat to help me.

“Hey!” Lon shouted, redirecting her attention.

Helpful, but not ideal. Lon could handle himself, but I didn’t want the creature’s attention shifting beyond him, where Kar Yee’s and Jupe’s faces peered from their hiding place at the foot of the bunk.

All the hairs on my body stood on end, and I felt as if I might implode. That was my saturation point.

Just as the creature hunched down and prepared to attack Lon, I touched the chalked edge of the triangle with the tip of the caduceus and pushed.

Heka flew through the wooden stave and lit up the trap like a spotlight in a Broadway show.

She tried to leap at Lon and slammed into the magical barrier.

Got her!

An eerie, out-of-tune keening echoed through the cabin as she looked down and realized what had happened. But I was too busy feeling sick to boast more than a fleeting bit of triumph. My stomach dropped and knotted in pain, bringing tears to my eyes. I balled up like a cooked shrimp outside the trap, half certain that I’d seriously injured myself. Maybe the lightning strike on the bridge had done more damage to me than I’d originally thought.

Lon’s voice rumbled near my ear. “Breathe.”

As his warm hand rested on my back, I forced myself to calm down and follow his instruction. Breathing was good. Breathing was normal. My muscles eventually slacked. Insides unknotted. I stretched out of my I’m-going-to-die position and rolled over to face the demon. Roaring like a caged tiger, she railed against the barrier in a whirlwind of impossibly fast kicks and punches, gills rapidly opening and closing, teeth gnashing.

“You tricked me,” the Rusalka said to Christie in her triple voice.

“I’m sorry,” he said, still flattened against the wall as if he didn’t trust the trap.

All three heads lunged toward him as she pointed a webbed finger at his face. “We have a pact. You hid from me. You tricked me.”

“Now, Onna . . . I, uh . . .”

I slanted a glance at the captain as Lon helped me to my feet. “What is she talking about?”

Onna’s heads rotated toward me. “Who are you?”

“I’m the one who trapped you. You are bound by me so you must answer me honestly.” A simplified version of a standard magical contract that magicians had been using for hundreds of years.

“Are you Richard’s lover?” Onna asked.