Still, there was no grief for Jak. He couldn’t grieve for his friend until he was able to accept that Krysty was no longer going to be at his side, in his bed, in his mind. She’d been swept away, vanished before he even had a chance to look upon her beauty and hold the image in his brain for a last time.
And even though his conscious mind wouldn’t accept her death, the second brain knew. The primordial part of every human psyche that stretched back to the dawn of mankind had taken in the full measure of the facts, digested them and accepted the only logical outcome.
Krysty Wroth was dead.
And as he slumped in his own nook of the raft, his lone eye shining bright with unshed tears, Ryan leaned the blind side of his face against the wet plastic and dealt in his own manner with yet another bad hand dealt to him. Dean was right. He wasn’t the kind of man who could just accept defeat without a fight to the death.
Ryan Cawdor dealt with the pain by wanting revenge.
.
AFTER LONG HOURS of misery, the sun fell and night stepped back into place. There was talk and debate, and ultimately no solution to the problem. In the relative cool of the darkness, everyone fell into restless sleep, and this time, minus the rain and the heat, actually got some needed rest during their second night spent in the raft.
Everyone succumbed except for Ryan, who saw something that made him feel as though he were experiencing a nightmare. The only difference between this one and the numerous others he’d endured while having his molecules scrambled during the transitional phase of matter transfer was that he was wideawake.
He’d been staring at the water when a series of splashes appeared unexpectedly at the edge of the raft. Fearing the worse, Ryan peered intently at the glassy surface while putting his right hand on the butt of his SIG-Sauer. If some sort of mutated killer shark or radioactive electric eel or giant crab monster he didn’t like decided to show itself, he had no problem with blowing it away.
He wanted to kill something. The placid personality he’d been inhabiting since the boat had gone down was smothering him. He had to rid himself of the grief and anguish soon before it fed upon his own soul and swallowed him up, drowning him just as effectively as the sea had fed upon Jak and Krysty.
However, he wasn’t expecting a human head to raise itself up from the inky black liquid.
The back of the head was all he saw. Lank hair from the head was long and blond and in a mass of tangled curls that all dripped water. Ryan held his breath and waited for long seconds, until the head turned to a profile view that was human and not human.
The being spotted Ryan, then spun completely around for a face-to-face look. As they met each other’s gaze, Ryan sensed no fear in the intent of his aquatic visitor, only curiosity. Ryan felt the same way. He’d never seen anything quite like the humanoid paddling patiently in the water next to him.
The face was primarily a pair of eyes, oval orbs of milky white tinged slightly with a coating of lemon yellow. Blue veins were running like a predark road map through the milk, and the pupils were saucer shaped. Below the twin ovals was a pair of vertical slits in a slight protrusion that might have been a nose, and a half-moon mouth with the corners turned downward. The lips on the mouth were pencil thin and dark purple, and the skin of the face was peeling in several places, as if the creature had been caught outside unprotected and suffered a slight sunburn. The new skin under the peeled-away epidermis looked shiny and wet, not dry.
Ryan decided that he knew what he was looking at—some kind of water mutie.
“Help?” the mutie asked in a slow, dragging voice.
A question? Ryan couldn’t be sure. He couldn’t be sure of anything anymore.
“Sure,” he said. “Help.”
Then, without a sound, the face was gone, and Ryan was left gazing at himself in the black mirror of the ocean’s surface.