Chapter 8

  The Swim team

  I cracked the double doors just enough to let the truth bleed through. The hinges gave a tired sigh of protest. Inside, the lights flickered like the twitch before a confession of guilt.

  The pool water was alive, surface bucking and churning like a pot left too long on the boil, as if a gas main had burst underneath and the whole place was cooking from the bottom up.

  The stink hit me square in the face. Sulphur. Rot. A back alley bouquet of things better left buried. It crawled up my nose and made a home there, the kind of smell that settles in your clothes and refuses to leave.

  The water had gone an unhealthy, sickly brown, the colour of old bruises and bad coffee. It looked like something had died in it and decided to linger long past its welcome.

  Along the edges of the pool, they moved.

  Alp Luachra.

  Twelve. Maybe fourteen pale shapes slipping in and out of the water, their bodies glistening and wet, shifting in ways that made my eyes itch. They clung to the tiles, crawled over the gutters, whispered to one another in wet, clicking sounds that crawled up my spine. Counting them was a bad idea, but I did it anyway. Twelve. Maybe more. Never trust the first count.

  I eased back from the door and let my head rest against the cold cinderblock wall. Closed my eyes. Breathed slow, and deep. Trying to remember a time when my life where I didn’t feel like I was in some cosmic pinball machine, ricocheting from one disaster to the next. Nothing came to mind.

  I needed more salt. A lot more. What I had wouldn’t cover it, let alone a nest. Walking in there with this supply would be suicide dressed up in a cheap three-piece suit, all shine and no substance.

  The guards, I had seen one back in the kitchen, where the hell were the guards? No bodies by the pool, which meant either they were in the roiling mess of water, or in the changing rooms.

  I pushed off the wall. My shoes squeaked against tile with every step, each echo bouncing back at me like an accusation. The air grew heavier as I went, damp and close, like the building was holding its breath.

  The showers told their own story.

  Pearl like orbs glistened in the darkness. Eggs. Thousands of them clustered thick around drains. Some were fused together by strands of translucent mucus that stretched and quivered when I passed. As if they were eager to hatch.

  The air was damp and sour, heavy with decay and chlorine fighting a losing battle.

  Then I saw the kids.

  Ten of them.

  Swim team, by the look of the jackets school colours, names stitched over the heart. They were laid out against the lockers like discarded mannequins after a clearance sale. Thin, gaunt, skin drawn tight over bone like wet paper over wire. Their hands were skeletal, fingers curled as if they’d tried to grab onto something that wasn’t there. Eyes sunken. Mouths frozen open, dislocated jaws as if in silent protests nobody had answered.

  And every one of them was covered in those pearl white eggs. Glued to skin, hair, fabric. Nested in the hollows of their throats and collarbones. A garden of the damned.

  I bent close and checked the closest ones pulse, expecting nothing, just as my fingers grazed their neck, their eyelids fluttered the barest amount.

  A pulse.

  Weak. Thready. But there.

  Hunched, in the dark, I felt something cold settle into my gut.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  The kind of feeling that doesn’t go away. The kind that tells you you’re seeing this through, because if you don’t, nobody else will.

  I reached into my bag and dipped my hand into the salt. The grains bit into my fingertips, dry and real. I started with the eggs on the boy’s, gripping each slick orb and pulling it free one by one. They came away with a wet pop, leaving smears behind. Some burst in my hand, spilling cloudy fluid that hissed when it hit the salt.

  I worked methodically. No heroics. Just patience and spite.

  One kid. Then the next. Stripping the eggs from skin and fabric. Around the drains, I poured thick lines of white, watching the nearest clusters shrivel and blacken as the salt bit into them. The air filled with a faint sizzling, like a thousand tiny sins being seared away.

  When the bag ran light, I used what was left to draw a fresh ward across the doorway back to the pool. A clean line. Unbroken. I pressed my thumb into it for good measure, sealing it with a silent promise.

  I checked the kids again. Pulses still there, weak as cheap coffee, but steady enough to fight for. I fished my phone from my pocket. Dead. Not even a flicker. The kind of dead that isn’t about battery life. Fae magic has a way of scrambling electronics.

  Figures.

  I was straightening up, already running through my next bad decision, when something cut through the dark.

  A flash of motion. Fast. Heavy.

  I caught the glint of a cudgel an inch before it introduced itself to my skull.

  The world went white.

  Then black.

  When wakefulness found me my head felt I had round the bottom of the bottle to many times the night before.

  A stern voice cut through the dark lilting with a slight southern twang from behind me where I was tied with thick rough cord to a cheap plastic bucket chair.

  A flashlight beam burned through my eyelids.

  Then a voice cut through the dark.

  Smooth. Stern. Southern.

  “I don’t know who ya are, darlin’, but whatever you done best be stoppin’ right now.”

  The accent rolled like warm molasses over barbed wire.

  I tried to focus. “I haven’t done anything. I’m…”

  Pain exploded across my shins as a baton cracked into them.

  “GAHHHH! Seriously?”

  Turning to see where the strike had come from all I saw was darkness and the blinding light of the flashlight in my eyes.

  “Listen close,” she said. “You don’t get to play confused in here. The regular guard is missing, and weird spooky shit going on around the whole school, Pool look like Satan’s hot tub. An’ I find you lurkin’ in the dark with a bag full of… what is that, salt? And I find Ten kids down, looking like they had their souls stole.”

  “We are on the same side Sweetheart, I am Detective Bartholo…”

  The baton kissed my shins again. Harder this time.

  “HUUUUUEEAAHH! By all the Dead Gods lady you need to stop!”

  “I am the one askin’ questions,” she said coolly. “An’ I sure ain’t yo sweetheart.”

  I blinked against the light, tried to angle my head. Every time I turned, the beam followed. It made me think someone had seen to many police interrogations from films.

  “Name,” she said.

  “Bartholo… Barty. Private Investigator.”

  “Uh-huh.” I heard the faint creak of leather as she shifted her weight. “Do Private Investigators usually break into places after hours?”

  “It’s more common than you would think in this line of work especially when looking into case’s.”

  “Mmm.” She replied with a sceptical hum. “So you break in. Trip the alarm.”

  “You don’t have a working alarm, you camera system is down aswell.”

  “Hmmm.” She replied with another now harsher hum. What you know about that?”

  “I was in your security office I could see the camera setup, poked around read your logs, thought you had been snatched, the things I am looking into can interfere with electronics.”

  “Then why is it I come down here, I find you kneelin’ over my swim team with a sack of white powder.”

  “It’s salt.”

  “That what y’all call it these days?”

  I looked up to the celling with a sigh. “Look, I don't want to hurt those kids, if I can I want to save them.”

  I rolled my shoulders and let the rope slip from around my wrists before leaning forward and untying my ankles.

  “Little advice, use Zip ties, unless you have experience tying people up as it is harder than people think.”

  Silence.

  That landed.

  She stepped closer. Baton ready, I could feel the shift of air. The faint scent of gun oil and peppermint gum.

  “You sayin’ they alive?”

  “Yes.”

  A pause.

  “You check?”

  “Yes.”

  Another beat. The flashlight dipped, just a fraction.

  “You touch that baton again,” I muttered, “and I’m filing a complaint.”

  She let out a short, humourless laugh. “Baby, you ain’t in no position to file nothin’.”

  The beam lowered at last, enough for me to see her silhouette.

  Tall. Solid stance. Hair pulled back tight. A physique that looked like they’d seen a weight room or two regularly. Baton in one hand, flashlight in the other. Radio clipped to her collar.

  Eyes sharp.

  Not scared, not of the Faeling and certainly not of me, she was.

  Angry, the anger of righteous fury.

  “You got about ten seconds,” she said quietly, that molasses drawl hardening into oak. “To explain why I shouldn’t assume you did this.”

  Behind her, something in the dark let out a wet, clicking hiss, as her flashlight flickered.

  Her eyes flicked toward the sound.

  Just for a second.

  “Because,” I said softly, “I wouldn’t have been trying to clear away the eggs when you found me for starter?”

  Silence settled between us.

  From the dark came the faint sound of something dragging itself across concrete.

  Her jaw tightened.

  “That,” I said, gesturing into the dark “is why I need you to listen to me.” I stood up adjusting my suit and stretching my aching legs.