“Of course,” Oliver said, as though there were no other possible outcome. “She was too dangerous to keep captive, that was apparent from the first. And a dead mermaid would be nearly as valuable as a live one.”
I’d asked myself what Papa would have done, faced with a woman from the sea. And now I had the awful answer. He’d responded not with awe, with love, but with greed and fear.
“Martinez tried to stop them,” Oliver went on. “He screamed that it would bring ruin on the ship. Captain Parkhurst had him put in irons for insubordination.”
“He should have remembered the ballad,” I said through numb lips. I have a wife in Salem town, / But tonight a widow she will be.
“He wasn’t to blame, and neither was my father,” Oliver snapped. I opened eyes I didn’t remember closing and found him glaring at me. “What they caught in the net was worse than an animal. A monster, with monstrous kin. As soon as Martinez was out of irons, he tried to break into the crate where the ketoi’s body was packed in ice. There was a struggle; he slipped on the ice and struck his head. He died a few days later. They found the stone amongst his belongings, and Father took it when the captain wasn’t interested. They sewed Martinez’s body into a bit of sailcloth and threw him in the ocean. But as it was sinking, one of the other men swore he saw hands reaching up to drag it down into the depths.”
I took a deep breath. Martinez had probably been a hybrid, then. Did he know the ketoi in the net, or had she inhabited a different city than the one from which he sprang?
Two deaths, now, aboard the Bedlam. Did the ketoi believe the ship had come to destroy them?
“After that, everything went wrong,” Oliver said. As if everything hadn’t already gone awry. “No fish, no whales, nothing but the endless sea. Father wrote it was as if the very creatures of the ocean hid from them. The ship sprang leaks it shouldn’t have, and sometimes moved slowly, as if something dragged on the hull from beneath. The men began to mutter among themselves, certain some bad luck had befallen them. Even Father began to feel it. It was as though some ill fortune stalked them across the waves. Which of course it did.”
Cold crept up my spine. How frightening must it have been, to be so alone on the vast ocean, certain they were being hunted.
“Men began to vanish,” Oliver went on remorselessly. “Snatched off the deck in the hours of darkness, with no trace of them remaining. Father and Captain Parkhurst did their best to keep the men from mutiny. But they were half-crazed with fear, and some of them took a whaleboat at gunpoint. The captain had no choice but to let them go. The ketoi swarmed the boat within sight of the ship and dragged every soul into the sea.”
“Oh no,” I whispered.
“The diary ends there. Or almost there. There’s a single entry more, undated, that merely says God help us all.” Oliver shook his head slowly. “You can imagine what went through my mind when I read that. I wanted to tell you—to tell everyone—that our fathers hadn’t died from some act of God or nature. They were murdered by fiends from the very depths of hell. But if I had tried, everyone would have thought Father mad, his journal either the ravings of a lunatic or some sort of forgery on my part.”
Oliver leaned forward, intent on me. “So now you know the truth. These creatures have your father’s blood on their hands. And you understand why, for the good of humanity, we must wipe their filthy kind from our globe.”
Chapter 8
I sat very still, painfully aware of my heartbeat. I’d always believed Papa a victim of the sea—of chance. A rogue wave, or a storm, or a crushing floe of ice drifting down from the pole had wrecked the Bedlam. There was no one to blame beyond providence or ill fortune.
But that hadn’t been the case at all. He’d died in terror, probably in pain, not at the hand of blind chance but at that of the ketoi. By creatures that looked like Persephone.
I heard again the crack of the bullet, saw the bright splash of Persephone’s blood on the sidewalk.
“I understand this is a shock to you,” Oliver said, and his voice surprised me with its gentleness. “It was to me as well. At first, I wondered if it could even be true. Or if Father’s diary merely chronicled his own descent into madness.” He swallowed thickly. “I regret ever doubting him, but at the time I had to be sure. So I left New Bedford and sought the truth. It took some time, but I did find it in the end. I came across men and women who knew things beyond the normal realms of human existence. Who showed me how to call upon a power most don’t imagine even exists.”
He spoke a word I’d heard from Persephone’s lips, and the candle on the table burst into flame.