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  The room was filled with the gentle noise of her snoring. Evan lay down next to her, but every time he closed his eyes he saw the face of Ligeia.

  It was a long night.

  Chapter Eleven

  June 4, 1887

  Private “Three Hands” Nelson was not a happy seaman. His back was scabbed and sore. It hurt to move and he had to stifle a moan every time he bent over. The captain had made an example of him yesterday. Yes, sir, he certainly had. Well, Nelson didn’t cotton to such things sitting down. He was going to get even. The private wasn’t called “Three Hands” for nothing. On land, they said Jack Nelson could be shaking your hand while patting your shoulder…while at the same time slipping the green out of your wallet. A life on the streets of the Tenderloin District in San Francisco made a lad industrious. Or dead.

  The captain had found a bottle of ’shine in Nelson’s possession, and an open crate in the storeroom. Buckley had offered the private the chance to come clean, but Nelson had refused to explain and so the captain had taken him to the whipping post. The truth was, he had nicked the bottle from Taffy—Nelson would never have been so stupid as to pry open a crate of cargo and leave it visibly tampered with that way. And he wouldn’t have taken the bottle if he’d realized how stupid Taff’d been. But he had his pride. Nelson didn’t admit to stealing the bottle in the first place, but wouldn’t say where he’d gotten it. And so, Captain Buckley had tied him to the deck for a daylong whippin’. Regular sadist, their captain was.

  Thing was, now “Three Hands” had a score to settle. If he was gonna be punished for something he didn’t do, then he was going to do something like what he was punished for. And that’s what he was about now. Nelson slipped through the lower decks without a sound. That was extra difficult with his back hurting the way it was, but Nelson was strong. The crew was all topside. He knelt before the door and tried the knob. Locked, as he knew it would be. He slipped out the pin from his back pocket and slipped it in the keyhole.

  A locked door had nothing on Jack “Three Hands” Nelson. He smiled as he felt the latch click over. The door eased open and Jack took one fast look behind him. Satisfied that he remained unseen, Nelson slipped inside the captain’s quarters and pulled the door shut. If the captain wanted to take something out of him, he’d take something out of the captain. He knew the ol’ bugger kept the best ’shine locked away for himself. Could smell it on his breath at dinner every night. Well, ol’ “Three Hands” would just help himself to a bit, and keep it hidden away beneath a loose board he’d found near Taffy’s billet. Rough justice, indeed, if ’twere found!

  The captain’s cabin stank of fish and something else, something sweetly rotten. Jesus, Nelson thought. For a militant asshole, the captain lived like a slob.

  Captain Buckley’s quarters weren’t huge, but the space was a damn sight better than the cluster of bunks that the men shared just down the walkway. On an old boat designed to move cargo, there was no place for fancy crew quarters. The captain and first mate got doors in front of the closets their bunks were housed in, and that was it.

  Nelson waited for his eyes to adjust to the dark. There was a porthole on the other side of the room, but it was curtained over. Odd, to leave the room in darkness for the day. He stayed in a crouch and moved across the room. It hurt to be on all fours, but he was less likely to knock something over this way.

  The smell was stronger as he approached the captain’s bunk—did the old sadist sleep with the damn fish, as well as net them? Nelson’s hand brushed up against something on the floor. He squinted in the dark but couldn’t make out what it was, though it felt cool and damp. He yanked his hand back. Maybe it was fish guts.

  Something moved in the dark, and Nelson’s heart stopped. Someone was here! He leaned toward the bunk, trying to see…anything.

  The shadow moved again, and the whites of two glimmering eyes reflected back at him in the dark. Nelson could just make out the body now. The wrists were tied with a rope knotted to the fore of the bed, and as he followed the outline of the shadowy form down, he could see that the feet were tied apart—one to each corner of the bunk. Satisfied that there was no danger from this quarter, the private leaned in to stare into the woman’s eyes. She made a whimper deep in her throat as he drew closer, but she didn’t speak.

  “What’s your name, girl?” Jack whispered. Again she only grunted softly.

  “You bastard,” Jack quietly cursed the captain as he saw the reason for her silence. “Stay quiet,” he warned, and reached his hand behind her head to release the gag.

  He could see her a little better now as he pulled the restraint from her mouth. She stretched her jaw and ran a tongue over her lips to moisten them, and probably to take the taste of the gag away. Her eyes were wide and slanted just enough to look exotic. Mediterranean? Eastern? He wasn’t sure. Her nose was thin and delicate, and her lips—now wetted—pouted thick and wide above a narrow chin. Jack ran a finger from her neck across the pit of her arm to cup one soft breast in his palm. Absently, he thumbed her nipple and it grew hard beneath his rough touch.

  “So our captain has his own private plaything, does he now?” Jack murmured. He reached to the head of the bed and worked her wrists free of the rope. “And he likes to tie up more than just his crew. Hmmm. I wouldn’t have given the old man credit.”

  The woman sighed as her arms were released and drew them to her chest in a pointless attempt to cover herself. One of her hands covered Jack’s, and she stared at him with wide, questioning eyes.

  “I’m not gonna hurt ya,” Jack promised. His mind was racing now, trying to think of how he could work this situation to its best advantage. “I can help,” he finally said. “Not much I can do while we’re at sea, but once we’re ashore…”

  Her hand moved up his arm. He nodded. “Mmmm hmm. You understand.” He ran a calloused hand over the velvet-soft flesh of her left breast, and then traced the faint down of her flesh to the place where the hair should have mounded, a tantalizing hidden gate to her sex. But when his hand met her crotch, he found it smooth. With one finger he traced the soft folds of her cleft and whistled softly. “Our captain keeps you bare in every way, eh? Does he shave you himself?” Nelson laughed softly and continued his private explorations, slipping a hand beneath her ass and cupping the cheeks before pulling back to hold her womanly “virtue” like a guard.

  The woman sat up and cupped his face with her hands. Jack moved to embrace her, but she gently pushed him back, and began to work the buttons of his shirt. He grinned, and let her undress him, groaning a little when the shirt pulled at the scabs on his back.

  He stood and undid his belt, relieving himself of the pants in a moment. Then he was sitting naked on the bed with her, and she ran her hands across his shoulders. He winced, and she looked confused. Her fingers moved lightly over his wounds and she raised a dark eyebrow, but still, said nothing.

  That was all right with Jack; he had a momentary touch of panic as he realized what would happen if the captain walked into his private quarters right now.

  But the woman drew him down in a kiss, and he quickly forgot his fear. He’d never been with a woman like this; so small, but so voluptuous at the same time. He sucked on her lips and then trailed his tongue down her neck and shoulders before boldly moving still lower, to chew gently on her nipples like soft fruit. Her hands were all over him, drawing him up and on top and at last in. He gasped at the warmth of her. As he bucked and moaned, the woman moved to meet him, but her eyes never left his. Wide and limpid, she stared unblinking at Jack as he moved quickly atop her to orgasm, and then collapsed against her, head on her breast.

  Her hands stroked his hair and in a whispery voice, she began to sing.

  “Shhhh,” Jack urged, reaching up to put a finger on her lips. But she held his hand at bay, and then the melody captured him. It was light as air, yet thick as honey. Amber notes so pure they pulled him in. Lured him to a place that swam with light and lust, liquor and love. Jack
Nelson had never felt so happy in his entire life. His flesh burned with pleasure while the faces in his mind shifted; he was suckling at his mother’s breast, drinking from the delta of a snow-white whore; guzzling from the finest, rarest booze ever refined. It burned so sweetly as it slid down his throat, opening up his chest with heaven fire.

  The song had stopped. That’s probably why Nelson surfaced from the musical spell in time to understand. The fire wasn’t in his mind. His throat burned. He opened his mouth but gagged on something rich and iron. Blood spilled out across the woman’s chest, dripping like gory wax down her ribs.

  “Wha-di-ya…?” he gurgled as he slapped a hand to his neck and felt the hot flow and ragged flesh of his neck. He blinked and saw his blood on her mouth. She was grinning, and her fingernails dug into his back, dragging him back down for the fatal bite. She’d torn out his throat with her teeth!

  Jack Nelson had lived twenty-three long years surviving the subterfuge of thugs in the back alleys of San Francisco, and he’d be damned if a woman—a woman still half shackled to a bed, damn it—was going to take him down with her teeth!

  His body felt drugged and the pain in his neck unbearable. But Jack slammed one of his arms against hers, breaking her embrace, and then pushed away from her, catching her with a blow to the chest that propelled him away and out of her reach for a split second. He pushed off the bed with his knees, and fell to the floor. From behind him, the song began again, and Jack struggled to ignore it, to not hear. He rose to a crouch, but only moved a couple feet when the languor took him, and his muscles turned to jelly.

  Jack slumped back to the wood, and felt the blood pumping away; the floor at his arm felt warm and wet. Just there, in front of his face, something else lay on the floor. Whatever he’d bumped on the way in, he realized. The end looked like a ragged butcher’s nightmare, bloody and raw and gouged up. He saw the meat had hair on the flesh, and he struggled to rise again to see more. Some last part of him wanted to understand what he’d stumbled upon before he died. He knew now that he would die here. Jack Nelson had been downed by a woman’s mouth. He laughed, almost, but blood gushed out of his throat when he did, and it turned to a long, horrible choke. The coughing woke him slightly from the woman’s spell, and he lifted his head through the song to follow the flesh of the gory lump on the deck to make out a naked knee and a hairy shin. The foot was missing its toes; there were bloody stumps left behind, just as the top of the leg’s thigh had been chopped away from whomever’s body it had once walked with.

  The song continued all around him, light and sweet, and dreams of golden fields cascaded in Jack’s mind, as hands grabbed him by the ankles and began to drag him back to the bed.

  With some fleeting remnant of his consciousness, Jack saw one more abandoned part lying near the bed, as the woman pulled him up from the floor.

  A man’s head.

  It lay on its side on the wood planks, but Jack’s last conscious thought recalled the ragged torso they’d raised with the nets yesterday. He knew that face.

  “So that’s what happened to Rogers,” he mumbled.

  And then the song ended, and her teeth were on him, and Nelson knew no more.

  Chapter Twelve

  “Here it is in black and white,” Bill said.

  Evan looked at the newspaper on his desk and raised an eyebrow. The first article to catch his eye at the top of the page read DELILAH TURNS ON THE RED LIGHT.

  “Here what is, Bill? The city council wants to change the zoning on West Avenue to allow a massage parlor? I didn’t realize you’d been waiting for this. Tired of driving to San Francisco for your five-fingered oil treatments?”

  Bill rolled his eyes. “Puh-leese. All you’ve gotta do is go up to O’Flaherty’s after midnight if you want a good feel. Guys’d be stupid to go pay for it when all they gotta do is pop for a drink.” He pointed to a smaller piece on the right corner of the page. This one read KYLIE REYNOLDS, 22, MISSING. The article was short, with a mug shot of the local girl, who hadn’t come home from a night out at The Sand Trap with her boyfriend several days ago. The boyfriend was quoted as saying he’d broken up with her that night and he hoped she hadn’t done anything stupid. Police said they’d welcome any information that would lead to finding the girl.

  “Yeah, so?” Evan shrugged. “What about it?”

  “Chalk another one up to the Siren,” Bill said.

  “You can’t be serious. Every time someone goes missing in this town, it’s the fault of some mythological harpy?”

  “A Siren is not a harpy. Get your Homer straight.”

  Evan laughed. “I didn’t realize you were so literary.”

  Bill didn’t laugh. “Look, Evan, I know it sounds ridiculous. But if you ask people around Delilah—people who’ve lived here their whole lives—they’re going to tell you they believe that something is out there near the point. Some call it a Siren; some probably say it’s a sea monster. But Siren rings true to me. There have been disappearances out there for as long as I can remember. The papers just say the currents out there are dangerous and pull people in. But there are stories from the early 1900s of rumrunners crashing into the rocks out there, and every now and then, one of the sailors would survive and get to shore. You can go look this shit up—every survivor who ever swam in from one of those wrecks talked about hearing a beautiful woman singing. And the next thing they knew, they were swimming for their lives in the waves.”

  “Sounds like they were drinking too much on the job.”

  Bill shook his head in disgust. “You believe in God, Evan? Heaven and hell, all that shit?”

  Evan nodded.

  “So. You believe in a great invisible tooth fairy in the sky, and horned demons running around a land of brimstone and lava where the dead burn in agony ’til the end of time? And you probably believe in a purgatory, where the souls go who weren’t quite bad enough to warrant demons repetitively sticking pitchforks in their eyes to sweat out their sins until they can get to the secret land of harps and honey. Is that right?”

  Evan grimaced. “I wouldn’t exactly describe heaven and hell like that.”

  “Read your Milton. And Revelations is a hoot too.”

  “Did you take one of those online courses in English literature this week, or what?”

  “Just think about it,” Bill said, ignoring the dig. “You believe in all this invisible shit that nobody has ever seen, but you can’t believe in a real flesh-and-blood creature that has been written about for hundreds of years here on earth that people have reported seeing over and over again?”

  Bill turned back to his desk and shook his head. “We don’t know it all yet, man. And we never will. There are secret things still on this earth. Be careful.”

  “Be careful.”

  Bill’s words echoed in Evan’s head as he walked the beach after dark that night. He hadn’t told Bill about his tryst with Ligeia. He had intended to; he needed to talk to somebody about it. But after their conversation about the missing girl, it just hadn’t seemed like the right time.

  So tonight his heart remained a mess of guilt and lust. He had toyed with the idea of not going out, but…walking the beach was what he did. And he did want to see her again. He pledged to himself that he would not let his guard down again though. He needed to talk to her. To find out more about who she was, and to apologize for last night. Because he had made love to her under false pretense. He was married; he couldn’t say “happily,” because the past year had been the worst one of his life. But not because of his wife. He loved her and did not want anyone else. Even if Ligeia had given him the best sex of his life, bar none.

  But he was married. Not available.

  Tonight the waves were quiet, the whitecaps few. A chill wind blew in from the northwest, and he shivered. A gull called out once somewhere nearby, lonely in the dark. Evan shoved his hands in his pockets and stared at the white glints of moon reflecting off the wet pools disappearing into the dark sand ahead. Night crabs scut
tled out of his path and along the waterline like furtive spiders, darting to snatch pieces of seaweed or fish and then disappearing down holes in the sand. The beach was quiet at night, but never empty.

  Evan bent to pick up a miniature conch shell, speckled pink and brown and horned with some impressive spikes on its thicker end. Even after all these years, he never tired of bringing home interesting shells; Sarah had glass jars throughout the house filled with his finds. He slipped it in his pants pocket.

  He walked near the point now, and slowed his pace, stopping before he reached the finger of dark rock. He bent to retrieve a small, flat stone and skipped it across the quiet ocean. One, two, three, four…five………six times! A smile creased his lips—Josh would have been proud. They used to compete on how many skips they could get out of a stone.

  The memory cascaded into myriad snapshots of their times at the beach. Playing Frisbee, skipping rocks, falling together in the sand laughing, sitting out by a campfire, late, Evan strumming on the guitar…

  Unconsciously, he began to sing another of their favorite songs, from the band Industrial Disease. “Let me touch you now, forever, just this one last time…” But he couldn’t complete the lyric. His throat closed. He teared up every time he sang that song anymore.

  Somewhere else, as if in answer to his aborted song, a melody picked up. But the melancholy of Evan’s tune transformed to light in its mirror. The voice moved high in the sky, almost like a wordless birdsong. And then it swam deep, a contralto cresting just above the waves with a sweetness that made Evan’s knees tremble. He wanted to slip to the sand and lose himself in the perfect sound. Whoever this woman was, Ligeia had the most amazing voice he had ever heard. Why she wasted it out here on nobody, he couldn’t fathom. Unless she simply came out here to practice? With a range so wide and a depth so beautiful, Evan couldn’t imagine that she didn’t sing professionally. Though he didn’t know of any famous opera stars or the like living in Delilah. And he’d never heard of a singing star named Ligeia.