Water Nymph Read online

  Water Nymph

  Edmund Hughes

  This digital book is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. It may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this title with another person, please purchase an additional copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  All rights reserved. This is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. All other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or persons is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2018 by Edmund Hughes

  Kindle Edition

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I want to acknowledge all the people who have supported my work, either through advice, reviews, editing, or proofreading. And of course, my fantastic cover artist, Cherry-gig,

  Contents

  Water Nymph

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  CHAPTER 1

  Doubt can make a man do strange things. Jack stood with his back to the moon in the middle of the Lestaron Cemetery, staring at his father’s grave. Filled with doubt.

  It was a clear night, with a tapestry of bright, beautiful stars overhead. He really wished he was in a more appropriate mood to appreciate it.

  He’d waited outside the cemetery until the groundskeeper had left for the night, and then for an hour or so longer. It made no sense to ask permission for what he was about to do. Jack knew what the answer would have been, and it made more sense to act first and apologize later, given that he was going to do it anyway.

  He took a few steps back from his father’s grave, his eyes glancing across the lettering on the front that read “James Farmoore.” The man he’d once called his dad was buried six feet below him. Or at least he was supposed to be.

  Volandar, the now deceased leader of the Jade Circle, had told him that his father was still alive. He’d even offered to tell Jack where he was, which seemed like an impossible promise for someone lying about such a thing to make.

  That alone wouldn’t have been enough. Volandar had had his own motivations, and it was possible that he could have been trying to manipulate Jack for the sake of securing him and Mira as allies.

  Except Jack’s own memories didn’t contradict the theory.

  His father had supposedly died in the same car accident that killed his mother, but Jack had been unable to remember the crash up until recently. And what he did remember of it placed his father nowhere near the scene, alive or dead.

  Jack hadn’t bothered to bring a shovel with him. It would have looked infinitely more suspicious if he had, and of course, for someone like him, there was no need. He took a slow breath, appreciating the depth of blood essence reserves inside of him. He had Ryoko to thank for that, along with her easy willingness to let him feed off her to his heart’s content.

  He exhaled slowly, casting Spectral Hand and manifesting six tendrils out of his shoulder blades as he did. The ethereal arms appeared as a cross between the limbs of an octopus and swirling shadows and smoke, with a distinct, crimson hue underlying their form. It was blood magic, an ancient form of spellcraft performed only by Aquinian vampires, or blood mages.

  Jack’s skill with blood magic was still significantly heightened beyond his normal limitations. It was due to a ritual his former broodmother, Mira, had performed with him in an attempt to prepare him for a duel that would have otherwise ended in his death.

  He could now manifest up to seven Spectral Hand tendrils at a time, hold Shadow Form for longer than he’d normally be able to, and even use Shadow Levitation, a spell which he’d only mastered through seeing it in one of Mira’s residual memories.

  Jack brought the tendrils down into the grass, carefully dividing the area directly above the grave into a rectangle slightly larger than the average casket. He divided that rectangle into three squares and then neatly pulled those loose, going slowly to keep the grass unmarred and still attached to some of the top soil.

  He hoped that once he was finished, he’d be able to reset the gravesite in a manner that left only a few traces of dirt, and no real sign of actual tampering. It was an optimistic assumption, and thinking about the trouble that would follow after him if it didn’t pan out only added to the nervous tension that was already weighing down on him.

  What would his parents think of this? Or his grandfather, had any of them been alive to pass judgement? It was a question that Jack didn’t like, but not because of the answer that came to mind. His memories of both his parents and his grandfather were faint and tenuous things, coupled with the emotions of childhood, scratchy and distorted like the reel of an old VHS tape. He didn’t know what they’d think of what he was doing, or what they really would have thought about anything in particular.

  Jack shifted to using his dark tendrils to carefully scoop out clumps of soil, setting them in a singular pile to one side of the hole. The dirt was rich and thick with long earthworms. The implications of that made him wriggle underneath his skin.

  He’d killed people before, and yet the relatively benign act of digging up a grave still left him feeling unnerved and uncomfortable. Maybe it was just because he’d done the former more times than the latter? How many people had he killed over the past few weeks, anyway?

  Enough people. Enough that the number didn’t come straight to mind. Enough that tallying up the bodies he’d left in his wake felt a little like counting ex-lovers and one-night stands, leaving him sure that he’d missed at least one in the end.

  It took Jack longer than he’d been expecting to reach the casket. Six feet under was a lot deeper than the words would seem to imply. The pile of dirt next to the hole was conspicuously high by the time his tendrils finally scraped against wood.

  He slipped four of his tendrils underneath the casket and carefully lifted it from the grave, wiggling it from side to side to force it loose from the spot it had settled into. He could feel the toll the act had taken on his blood essence reserves, but he still had plenty left. Jack set the casket down alongside the hole and ran a hand across the top of it, brushing dirt away.

  He tried to lift the lid, but it didn’t open. When he added his vampiric strength to the equation, he heard the casket’s handle straining against the wooden frame, threatening to snap loose. Jack ran his fingers around the casket’s lid, where a decade of tightly packed earth had basically created an airtight seal.

  It was as though someone was giving him a final, desperate warning to not do what he was about to do. A warning from whom? From his parents, maybe? From the universe? Just what was he truly expecting to find inside?

  Jack expected the casket to be empty, though maybe that was just what his hope and his im
agination had tempted him into expecting. It was a simultaneously confusing and relieving outcome. If the casket was empty, what he’d just done would be justified. If the casket was empty, he wouldn’t have to look into the ghastly, decaying visage of his father’s corpse. If the casket was empty…

  Lights suddenly shone in the distance, aimed in Jack’s direction. He froze where he was, trying to drop as low as he could to reduce the presence of his silhouette.

  There was a car headed down the road adjacent to the cemetery. It was driving slowly, and its headlights cast shifting shadows across the headstones as it drew near.

  Jack crouched low, hurried over to a larger headstone, pressing his back against it. He could have used Shadow Form to disappear entirely, but he sensed that he was probably overreacting and didn’t want to waste the blood essence.

  The car almost slowed to a stop, as though its driver might be considering a nighttime stroll through the cemetery. Jack’s heart pounded in his chest, knowing that if he was caught, it would be incredibly difficult for him to explain away what he was doing. But the car kept driving, picking up speed again as it continued down the coastal island road.

  Jack waited for several minutes after it was out of sight before turning to look back in the direction of the casket. It loomed ahead of him, the dirt pile on one side and the surgically extracted grass on the other. The wind blew through the cemetery, making the trees in the bordering forest hiss as their leaves fluttered together.

  He had to do it. He’d come this far, and now he had to do it. Jack repeated the words in his head as he walked back over to the casket like a defensive mantra. It needed to be done. There was no backing down. He had to do it.

  Jack pulled a small penknife out of his pocket and set about breaking the dirt away from the casket’s lid. He went around the length of it and spent another minute or two brushing bits of dirt off the lid. It was a pointless gesture that had more to do with his nervousness and hesitation than anything rational.

  “I have to do it,” he whispered.

  He took a deep breath, letting his fingers settle on the casket’s handle. He closed his eyes and then opened them, knowing that it would do him no good to put off facing whatever he was about to see for even a couple of seconds. Jack pulled hard and threw the lid of the casket open.

  He stared at what he found inside, his eyes unable to make sense of it immediately.

  There was a body inside. The body of a tall man with shriveled, leathery but not overly decayed skin, and brittle hair. Brittle reddish blond hair. And a tattoo, an intricate Gothic cross that spanned most of the right side of his neck.

  The man wasn’t his father.

  Jack walked in a circle around the casket several times, examining it from every direction. He even risked turning on the flashlight he’d brought with him, but the illumination only proved it for him beyond doubt. He checked the headstone again, as though he might have somehow exhumed the wrong person. It was, without a doubt, his father’s supposed gravesite.

  Why? The question reverberated in Jack’s head with more intensity than any of the doubts that had led him down this course of action to begin with. For what possible reason could the body of another man be inside his father’s casket?

  Had his father been trying to fake his own death? No, that made no sense. There was no way that the man in the casket could have passed for James Farmoore, and it seemed impractical to use an actual body for a faked closed casket funeral. It made no sense, unless…

  Unless Jack’s father had needed to get rid of a body, anyway. Perhaps he’d been planning on disappearing, and the corpse Jack had exhumed had been the last, little loose end he needed to tie up. It was ingenious, really. A cemetery was the last place where a buried body would raise suspicion. It was hiding evidence in plain sight.

  It would also seem to imply that his father was a killer.

  Jack sucked in air through his teeth, feeling his stomach churn in a viciously unpleasant manner. He didn’t want to believe it. It was horrifying, and it tainted what few memories Jack had of the man who’d raised him. It made sense, but a part of him pushed back against it, unable or unwilling to accept that his father had been capable of such things.

  Why did it make him feel so disgusted to think of his father as a killer? He was a killer himself. Was it so hard to accept that his father might have had his own dark side?

  Jack had fallen to his knees at some point. His face was wet, and he reached up with a dirty hand to wipe away the tears that had sneaked up on him. The wind blew through the trees again, and this time, the leaves sounded like an ominous reprimand.

  He’d opened the casket, and now he had to accept what he’d found inside.

  CHAPTER 2

  It took him a few minutes, but Jack eventually managed to regain his composure. He hesitated as he walked back over to the casket, deciding at the last second to cut a lock from the dead man’s brittle hair in case he could use it to identify him.

  It was a mystery that Jack wouldn’t be able to let lie, even if it was probably in the best interest of his psyche for him to do so. He closed the casket and used Spectral Hand tendrils to lower it back down into the hole.

  It didn’t take nearly as long to push the dirt back in as it had to dig it out. Jack carefully set the grass squares into place on top, frowning as he looked at the final result of his handiwork. There was still a decent amount of dirt on the ground, and the area he’d dug up looked a little sunken compared to the rest of the cemetery. Still, it would probably pass at a glance, and within a few days, the grass would grow back in seamlessly.

  He walked out of the cemetery slowly, caught up in his thoughts. Jack hadn’t taken the mansion’s car, as he hadn’t wanted the act of finding parking for it to give away what he was doing. He walked alongside the road, slowing as he approached a grassy side area.

  It overlooked one of Lestaron Island’s nicer beaches, though a steep hill made it impractical to head directly between the two without following the road around. Jack sat down on the grass and sighed, wishing he could slow both the frantic flow of his thoughts and the pounding of his heart.

  He stared out at the stars, the moon, and the ocean, and tried to clear his head. It was close to midnight. He hadn’t told Ryoko where he was going, and he’d need to be getting back to the mansion soon enough.

  A noise came from the beach below. It was the sound of a young woman’s laughter. Jack blinked and squinted down at the surf. There was someone there, playing in the shallows.

  Jack stared at the woman’s silhouette as she moved. She was dancing, kicking through the water and splashing about. She was dancing completely free, in the way that only a child or an adult who’d managed to momentarily escape from their own burdens could.

  And she was also meandering deeper out into the water with each step. Jack frowned slightly as she reached waist level, and then continued further out. He stood up when she made it far enough to be up to her shoulders, wondering if he should call out to her.

  The woman windmilled her arms overhead and then disappeared under the water’s surface. Jack waited for ten, twenty, thirty seconds. She didn’t resurface.

  He swore under his breath, wondering if he’d just watched someone being swept out to sea. He hesitated for only a moment before taking a loping step and jumping across the stretch of steep hill separating him from the beach fifty feet below.

  The ground underneath him was a sharp enough drop-off that, for any normal human, the landing would basically ensure a broken leg. Even with his vampiric physique, it still would have been unpleasant, given how much momentum the fall would impart.

  Jack didn’t fall unaided, however. As soon as gravity began to take hold, he channeled his blood essence and cast Shadow Levitation. A cloud of ambient darkness rose up from the ground underneath him, buoying his body and softening his drop.

  He’d experimented enough with Shadow Levitation over the past few weeks to know what the spell was capable of. It
wasn’t the same as flying, and its effects were limited by the amount of illumination in the area where he was using it. At night, he could lift himself a few dozen feet in the air for a minute or two at a time. During the day, it was basically useless outside of when he was in the shadow of a building or within a darkened room.

  It wasn’t fast or particularly glamourous, and it took a serious toll on his blood essence reserves, but it was still incredibly useful. Jack floated down to the beach comfortably and barely bent his knees as his feet hit the sand. He’d held his gaze on the spot where he’d seen the girl go under, but he hesitated before charging into the water.

  He was wearing his grandfather’s leather duster, which was lined with a thin layer of chainmail, just about the worst thing he could go into the water with. He shrugged his way out of it and kicked his shoes off, and after another moment of consideration, he pulled off his t-shirt and jeans, too. Jack wasn’t the best swimmer, and he felt like he needed every advantage he could give himself if he was to be helping someone in the midst of drowning.

  He sprinted forward into the water clad only in his boxers and gasped at the cold as soon as the water was up to his waist. The girl had gone under further out from where he was, and his teeth were already chattering when he committed and dove forward, submerging himself completely.

  The chill was enough to take his breath away a second time, but Jack forced his arms and legs into motion, swimming as fast as he could. He accidentally took in a mouthful of water and grimaced at the disgusting saltiness of it. Ahead of him, he saw a flash of movement. An arm frantically reaching up past the water’s surface, maybe?

  “Hey!” he shouted, forcing his head up to get the word out. “Are you okay? I’m here to help!”

  The woman was back underwater again, but Jack heard the sound of feminine laughter, loud and clear. He was far enough out to be in over his head, and he felt a slight edge of nervousness as he considered what would happen if he ended up caught by the current.