Chapter 12

Chapter

Twelve

Two cases in one night, that was the only reason Reid and his team were recalled from liberty. Annoying, but it came with emergency-responder territory.

"I see it," Perez said over the radio. "Kruetz, get ready to be lowered on deck."

For the last fifteen minutes, they'd flown a grid with a spotlight on the water, looking for Gale's Promise , another one of Nautic's boats. The captain's distress call had given them an approximate location, but for the last few hours, that line of communication had been dead.

Either something had happened to their radios, or the crew was gone.

Seeing it now, Reid suspected the latter. The boat should've been lit up like a sports field for nighttime visibility, but the boat was completely dark save for a few dim auxiliary lights. Unpiloted and unmoored, Gale's Promise drifted aimlessly, the waves gently rocking it from side to side.

Clipping in, Reid clapped Hatcher on the upper arm, his crewmate unusually quiet. "I'll be okay. She won't hurt me."

He firmly believed that now.

"Yeah, but what about her friends?"

A reasonable concern, but if Nireed could fend off her kin during a feeding frenzy when he was a stranger, she could do the same now when he was not. It was a lot of faith to put in a person he barely knew, but Reid prided himself on having strong instincts, and right now his were telling him he could trust her.

"She might not be down there," Hatcher warned.

"They're just protecting their own. And I'm going to prove it."

"Man, I sure hope you're right."

The helicopter hovered over the purse seiner, its spotlight illuminating the boat as Reid was lowered onto it. It was too quiet, too still. Even amid power failure, there should've been more activity on deck—the crew attempting maintenance, shooting distress flares into the sky, anything. But there was none of that. Only cables and ropes knocking against metal in the helicopter's downdraft.

When Reid's feet hit the deck, he unclipped, head on a swivel as he made his way to the pilothouse. Loud as the Jayhawk was, he didn't need to call out and announce his presence, the boat crew should be able to hear it, but he did so anyway.

No one called back.

A veritable ghost ship.

As he reached for the pilothouse door, his foot skidded on something slick, and his heart lurched in that uncertain moment between thinking his ass might hit the deck and catching himself. Boat decks were supposed to be covered in anti-slip tape. He shouldn't have…

Blood, it was blood.

And a lot of it too. But not just that, the deck beneath his feet was littered with bullet holes. Unless the crew had lost their minds and started shooting each other, this blood belonged to a mermaid, not a fisherman.

Dread laced around his spine in a wicked vise grip.

Nireed .

Flashes of memory consumed him. Her wicked smile and biting tongue. The feeling of her body crammed next to his, hiding in Nautic's warehouse. Her stunning aim. The way she danced.

The fiery determination in which she demanded his help and fought for her people every single day.

Fear froze him, but the desperate need to find Nireed thawed his limbs. He whisked open the door, not missing the blood smeared on both sides. The sticky mass of it. If she was here, if she'd been shot, she'd either be fighting for her life or…

Dead.

God no, please no.

The bodies of two fishermen lay on the floor, their entrails spilling from gaping gut wounds, and he clapped a hand over his nose and mouth, trying not to hurl at the sight and sewer stench of perforated offal. Given their location, this was probably the captain and the helmsman. Each held a weapon in their hands—one a gun, the other a knife. Little good they did either of them.

Reid searched the remainder of the room in a half-blind panic.

Radio static, then Perez's voice filled his ears. "Kruetz, talk to us."

"Two deceased fishermen in the pilothouse," he answered, brain and body on autopilot. "Going to check the rest of the boat."

"Negative." This was Hatcher. "Get back on deck. We gotta get you out of there."

"There might be survivors."

"A fat load of good that'll do anybody if you're dead!"

Reid ignored his crewmate and finished checking the pilothouse. No mermaids. But that didn't ease the fear-fueled adrenaline pumping through his veins. When he didn't find any more bodies in the pilothouse, he continued his search outside.

There was another dead fisherman, this one tucked behind a deck box, which he'd missed during his initial pass. He turned away quickly, feeling queasy. Most of the guy's head was missing, ripped away at the jaw, and he didn't need to see that in any close detail. The gun still clenched in the corpse's hand had him thinking the man ducked behind here for cover while shooting at the mermaid storming the pilothouse.

"Found a third on deck," he said into the radio, sounding calmer than he felt.

"Let us know if you find the rest of the crew." Just Perez this time.

"Roger that. Heading below."

"Be careful. If you prove Hatcher right, I'll have to come down there myself and start punching mermaids."

If he wasn't so goddamn terrified for Nireed's well-being, he might've laughed.

He found the stairs and began his descent.

The first thing he noticed was the stench. The bowels of the boat reeked of fish, something coppery, and worse. The second was the pitch-black darkness. Not even the auxiliary lights still worked down here. Reid briefly nudged aside his headset, but the only thing he could hear was the muffled sound of waves lapping against the hull outside. Not the engine. Not even the refrigerated fish hold.

Flicking on his headlamp, Reid discovered where the rest of the crew had gone and stifled another heave, bile burning the back of his throat.

They were…all over the place, body parts strewn along the hall, blood splattered, and viscera smeared.

But still no mermaids.

Maybe they'd gotten off the boat. Injured, but alive.

Shaky relief whooshed out of him for one glorious moment, until something caught his eye—a severed, booted foot propping open the fish hold door.

Something Nireed said came to him in a rush, something that made his blood run cold.

"The fishermen are hunting us, you know. There's a whole fleet of them. Don't know what they do with our bodies once they've killed us."

He wove around the gore, avoiding it wherever he could, but where he couldn't, he didn't think too deeply about whatever squished beneath his neoprene booties. Reid yanked open the fish hold door and kicked aside the severed foot, a wall of cold air slamming into him. When he looked down…

Horror and anguish hit him like a tidal wave, a silent scream clawing up his throat before shock killed it on his tongue.

Mermaids. Two of them.

He tripped over a dismembered fisherman to get to the one with silver scales, collapsing to his knees beside her and gathering her up into his arms. After several shaky, panicked swipes, he freed her face of the stiff, frozen hair plastered to it.

"Kruetz, what's going on? You're breathing hard."

"It's not her," he croaked, dizzy with mind-numbing relief. Oh, thank God, it's not you, Starfish.

And neither was the mermaid next to her. The deep burgundy scales tipped him off right away in the seconds it had taken him to assess the scene.

The mermaid in his arms was stone cold and rigid, sightless eyes a milky white. Her body was badly broken and bruised, but that was not what killed her. There was a bullet hole in the dead center of her forehead.

She'd been dead awhile. Days, not hours.

This happened before the attack, not during.

And given her other extensive injuries, either the fishermen had beaten her before they killed her, or she'd gotten them when they hauled her from the water. Trapped inside a purse seine net with other sea creatures, that massive crush of bodies, the sheer weight, easily could've killed her. But she'd held on, only to be done in by a bullet to the head.

"Kruetz, who's not her? Give me an update."

"There are two frozen mermaids in the fish hold, each with a gunshot wound to the head. Forensics will have to confirm it, but I'm certain they were dead well before the attack began. Still need to check the galley and the living quarters, but I feel confident the crew's all dead." And he'd seen more to them than he'd ever cared to.

"Hatcher will lower a camera down to you. Get as many photographs as you can and collect anything that looks too important to lose if bad weather hits the area."

Reid dimly registered the instruction. "I gotta find her." Make sure she wasn't bleeding out on this goddamned boat.

"Great, just great. He's worried about his flesh-eating gal pal."

"She's not my…"

"Yeah, whatever man. I'll believe it when you get your ass back up here."

"Hatcher! You're not helping. Just get him that camera and let him search."

Gently, Reid laid the mermaid on the freezer hold floor. He tried folding her arms across her middle, some quiet gesture of respect, but rigor mortis had set in, or maybe it was deep freeze. In either case, he wasn't going to fight it.

As he clambered to his feet, he saw that one of the two severed hands in the room still gripped something. A peculiar looking gun. Its sleek, rounded design looked more like something out of a sci-fi movie than something a fisherman would carry.

Without touching it, he crouched down to get a closer look. No magazine. No slide or sight either. A trigger, but no guard. Then he followed the oddly rounded barrel down to its muzzle.

Dual sensations hit his limbs in waves. First numbing cold, then prickling heat.

"Perez." He swallowed past the lump forming in his throat. "I found something."

"Keep talking to me. What did you find?"

"It wasn't bullets that killed them."

"What do you mean?"

"I just found a cattle gun."

All along, Nireed had been telling the truth. Not only were her people being murdered, Nautic's fishermen were slaughtering them like animals.

Turning away from the evidence, Reid finally lost the contents of his stomach.