“Okay, that’s it. I mean, absolutely, it. Next time, Giles gets cleanup duty.”
Joyce looked up in surprise as her daughter came storming through the front door. Her hair was plastered to her head, and a strange bluish goo coated her arms and torso.
“Oh dear.” Joyce struggled not to laugh. She supposed that she should be concerned, but the fact that Buffy was clearly unharmed . . . The laughter burst free. “Oh dear. Oh, oh dear.”
“Thanks, Mom.”
Joyce fought herself back to calmness. “Dare I ask what all . . . that, is?”
“Goon.”
“Goon?”
“Goon,” Buffy confirmed. “Big, blue, ugly.”
“Exploding?”
“Exploding. Giles tells me to stake it, so I stake it, and—” she made a gesture to indicate her slimed state.
Joyce took one look at her daughter’s disgruntled expression and burst into laughter again.
“Mom!” Buffy said indignantly.
“Go on upstairs, wash that stuff off you. A long hot bath, and you’ll feel better.”
Buffy shuddered, a long, drawn-out quake that stopped Joyce’s laughter dead. “Think I’ll pass on the bath, actually. Hey, it’s okay, honest. Just tired, that’s all. Long patrol. Night, Mom.”
“Night, sweetie,” Joyce said, and fought back a sigh. Some people had daughters who were obsessed with boys, or rock music, or weird cults. She had a daughter who came home at 1 A.M. covered with exploded blue goon.
Shaking her head, Joyce went back to the late movie on TV.
* * *
Dr. Lee stared at the display on his computer screen, one finger tapping against his lips. The swirls of blue and green and black tangled in endless swirls and circles, a display of technological mastery over the earth’s currents.
Or at least the illusion of mastery, he thought dourly.
He pushed away from his desk with a sigh. The land masses of the planet were mapped and regulated, spotted from orbit and lined with human footprints. The secrets it held were merely undiscovered for now, the hidden knowledge within human reach.
But over three-fourths of the earth was covered with water. Now there, there were secrets worthy of discovery. The ocean flowed endlessly, utterly unconcerned with what occurred on the planet’s land masses. It was an alien world, full of sharp noises and dark silences, and for all humanity’s vaunted claims, it was still untamed, still relatively unplundered.
It was merciless, and cruel, to those who did not belong to its depths.
Lee reached out to turn off the display, then paused, his fingers resting on the screen.
“So cruel,” he repeated softly.
* * *
Something stirred, far below the surface of the deep waters off the California coast, under the patterns of the never-resting currents. Something that stretched long arms and legs, then flexed clawed hands and sped upward, heading unerringly toward some distant goal. It broke the surface, gasping as its lungs switched to breathing air, then glanced quickly about. In the dim light of moon on water, it looked . . . almost human.
Then the creature saw a quick splash as a fish broke the surface. The being lunged forward, and clawed hands closed on the fish. It bit down—
Then spat in disgust. Poisoned! Inedible—tainted with the foulness which had ruined their other feeding places as well.
Enough, it thought bitterly. Too much. For too long.
The creature dove again, forcing out the air, gills taking in the blessedly clean water below.
“Come,” the being called in the silent language of the sea, too high-pitched for human ears to follow. “At-tend.”
Others swam up to it, their shapes, like its own, vaguely human. But no human ever had hair like flowing green seaweed. No human ever had faintly scaled gray-green skin.
And no human ever bore a mouth filled with sharp, shark-like fangs.
“Brothers,” the first one called to its kin. “There is new prey to be had.”
“Shipwreck?” another asked hungrily. “Bodies floating, salt and sweet?”
“There are no ships,” a third snapped, fangs biting down on empty air in frustration. “This is a poor hunting domain! We have tasted fish, only fish, for far too long—and now even the fish are tainted! This is no way for hunters to live!”
The others in the pack nodded agreement. Merrows, the dark kin to mermaids, fed mostly on flesh and blood—fish and seal, mainly, human flesh and blood when they could get it. Ever since humanity had sailed the seas, merrows had harrowed their ships, causing wrecks, and dragging unwary sailors overboard to feed on them.
But ships were made of metals now, and were harder to capsize. Men listened with machines, not their ears, and were more difficult to lure. None in this school had ever tasted human flesh.
“We live as I say it!” the first merrow spat. “Unless you would challenge for the leadership?”
There was an uneasy moment of first and third merrow circling each other . . . then the third merrow backed off, hanging submissively limp in the water. The first merrow gave what might have been a smile or a snarl. “There is an easier way to hunt. A more pleasant way to hunt.”
They were listening now, avid.
“Haven’t you seen them there at the shore, almost in the waves? Daring to enter our domain on their wave-gliders, their small craft that could not stop a pup— playing in the surf as though we did not exist!”
The other merrows stirred uneasily. “What? What? Hunt near land? Hunt on land?”
“Just that,” the first merrow told them, and waited till the anxious swirlings about had stopped.
“We have never hunted on land!” came a protest.
“Till now,” the first countered.
“That is not our way! We are slow, clumsy, out of water, on dry land!”
“They come to our waters, survive there. They adapt. So too will we. Quick attacks, out and back again.”
The merrow paused to lick sharp teeth with a tongue that was vaguely serpentine. “They have forgotten us, the humans. They are not wary. We shall see that they remember.”
He stopped, sinking up to his eyes below the water’s surface in a classic pre-attack pose.
“We shall see that they do not foul our hunting grounds again.”
* * *
“Ah?”
Giles winced. Ariel’s voice could take on a piercing quality when she was curious about something. “Lamp,” he explained, “er . . . lampa, not that your people would know anything about—no, that’s—”
“Ah?”
“A paperweight,” Giles finished, snatching it from her hands before the selkie could drop it. “And no, I haven’t a clue as to the proper Gaelic word.”
“Ah?”
“Chair. That’s right. To sit in. Like the other chairs you’ve asked me about.”
He stopped. Ariel, now perched on the chair in question, was looking up at him with her huge eyes, innocence and confusion there. A child, he reminded himself. Not human, but just a child.
One who was already starting to look exhausted . . . no, rather, dried out. A selkie could stay out of the sea indefinitely, if the folklore was correct, but there were limits.
Bathtub, Giles thought. Water salted, of course, to make it properly briny. A good long soak should help her.
And, hopefully, he added to himself, snatching the paperweight from her hand again just in time, tire her out as well!
* * *
“Buffy . . .”
Buffy turned on her side, snuggling deeper into the sheets. Nice dream. Much better than the usual. She could almost feel Angel’s presence with her, holding her, his hands cool and smooth . . .
“Buffy!”
His voice sounding really, really worried. Rolling onto her back, Buffy opened her eyes.
Angel was perched outside the window, tapping lightly on it to wake her.
“Oh, sorry,” she said, and got out of bed to unlock the window sash and let him in. Her mother must have gone on another crime prevention jag—like there were just so many burglars wandering around Sunnydale after dark!
The sky outside was nearing false dawn, and as the vampire climbed in through the open window, she looked at him in surprise, wondering what could have brought him out this late.
“We’ve got a problem,” he told her. “Maybe a big one. Willy passed along a rumor, more reliable than most of his, so I dropped in on a few folks, checked it out.”
“Y’know, some guys bring flowers, candy . . .” She sighed, giving up. “Okay. What rumor? Details first, then panic.”
Angel nodded, sitting on the edge of her bed. “Some of the local vampires heard that there were a lot of people down by the beach a couple of towns over early yesterday morning.”
“The rescue team,” Buffy said. “There was an oil spill. The cleanup’s still going on, I guess, the wildlife do-gooders were down there—” She broke off in sudden alarm. “I told Willow it was dangerous for her to be out there alone! All right, never mind that. How many did the vamps get?”
“None.”
Buffy stopped in the process of reaching for her clothes. “None? Then what’s the—”
“The vampires decided to check it out, looking for a snack before turning in for the day, and there were already dead bodies on the beach. Humans, four of them. Some kids who’d gone down that night to have a bonfire, or something, I guess. Or maybe some of those ‘do-gooders’ not knowing when to quit. They do now,” he added.
“Already dead?” Buffy repeated.
“Their throats were torn open, the bodies left lying on the sand.”
“Not vampires?”
“I don’t think so. We’re not real big on salt water. Any water, actually. You never know who’s been praying over it.”
Buffy looked at him suspiciously. “That was a joke?”
“Mostly.” He tried to smile, then shook his head. “Buffy, this wasn’t a vampire attack. That much, everyone’s agreed. Blood was spilled everywhere, like a wild animal attack. But that doesn’t make sense either. What kind of animal would attack and then not eat their kill?”
“Okay, thank you very much for that visual. So, what?”
“They don’t know. But the vampires I talked to—”
Buffy snorted, knowing Angel’s usual means of interrogation for his fellow demons.
“They’re nervous, Buffy. Whatever it is, they don’t like it. They said they could feel it watching them from the water, like something huge and malevolent. And these are not demons with well-developed imaginations.”
Buffy sat down on the bed next to him, staring into emptiness.
“Buffy?”
“Water,” she murmured. “Water, and death. Darn it, I told Giles that dream was prophetic!”
* * *
As soon as Angel was gone to a safer daytime hidey-hole, Buffy hit the phone, dialing the number from memory. A groggy voice answered, “Yes . . . ?”
“Giles. Me. Buffy.”
“Buffy, I—” His voice moved away from the earpiece for a moment, and, dimly, she heard him speaking, “ . . . Ariel, no! . . . into everything. Like babysitting a ferret . . .”
But then his sleepy voice sharpened, returning to her. “What’s wrong?”
“We’ve got to meet, Giles. Soonest. And we’re going to need major old book stuff.”
Hellmouth-trained reactions: He didn’t waste time asking questions. “The library,” Giles said, “one hour,” and hung up.