Neil's eye had swollen and stung like crazy. He trembled on the deck, tied up beside his mother. The still bodies of Ichmaël and Odette lay just off to the side in a congealing pool of blood, the shells from David's handgun still scattered on the wood.
"You probably think this is one big joke, don't you?" David strode before them. "Is this some kind of family business, then? Infiltration and espionage? Now, where's the boy?"
"Untie my mother, David. She can't sit on the floor for too long."
"Be quiet, son. I'm fine."
"Listen to me! Where is he?" He pushed the barrel of the gun against Neil's temple. "I need that boy. If top brass discovers he's out of our custody, I'm in deep shit, and so are you. I'll drag you down, Cole. They'll drag you down if I don't."
"You had no idea what he was capable of, you stupid man," said Fleur. "You were on the right lines, at least, but you didn't know how to get the most out of him. I have the research of his previous guardian all up here, in my head. You kill me, or hurt my son, you'll lose that information forever."
"Mom…" He had never heard her speak so protectively before about him, and his heart churned in his chest. Perhaps in his starved emotional state, all he wanted was to embrace her.
"Well, I'm a haggling man, Ms. Cole-"
"Mrs. Cole."
"Regardless," continued David, "I'm willing to talk, maybe even work together."
Fleur looked at him, dead in the eye. "Tell me what I stand to gain from this. I'm listening."
*****
Fleur nodded as David told her what he knew of Craig. As serendipity would have it. Neil's dad had signed an NDA with the FBI to never say a word about Craig, and Fleur had promised Hines on his deathbed to take it to her grave. Neither of them had known.
"Turns out Craig is a stubborn little bastard," said David.
"His girlfriend too."
"Girlfriend?" David quirked a brow. "You mean Helen Newman? Is she here?"
"I have reason to believe when his species reach sexual maturity and are seeking to impress a mate, a bioluminescent secretion occurs under his skin and lubricates the barbs that I'm after. But I need more than just Craig's. A hell of a lot more. It's why I brought him to this set of underwater caverns."
"Wait, what does Helen have to do with any of this?" Interjected Neil. "Why did you send her on a hunt for that plant that doesn't even exist?"
"Because she might have objected to being used as bait, for both Craig and what I hope is also down there."
He looked at his mom, and she looked right back. Her eyes void of emotion once again from that fleeting moment. Had it even been there? Or was he just part of the bargaining chip this whole time? Perhaps his head was still spinning from David's right hook, and Neil was still feeling the nausea from it. "Bait?" He finally asked.
"The bioluminescence will, I hope, act as a lure for others like the boy who live down there."
David's attention had definitely piqued. He began to untie her. "More, you say?"
"I'd bet on it. Hey! Watch the back, I have a twisted spine. Listen: you'd like opportunities to breed these creatures, right? If I can get enough of a sample of the barbs I need, you can take as many of them as you want. I want payment for you killing those two frogs of mine, too."
Neil's world was fast falling down around him. He'd trusted both of these people - to varying degrees, at least - and as he watched David lift up his mother and the pair of them walk over the corpses of her goons, away from him, his heart skipped a beat. "H, hey!" He called, but he was invisible, to them anyway. "Are you going to untie me too?"
Silence. He huffed and pulled at the coarse rope as he mumbled to himself, "so much for Neighborhood Neil." What was he supposed to do now? He did the only thing he could do: he thought.
He thought about his dad, his skin almost leather from months spent out under the sun, on the crystal blue waters off the California coast. Jack Cole was a man destined to spend his days embraced in nature, almost the opposite of the woman he ended up marrying and having a child with. What had even brought the two of them together? He mused to himself in his dazed state.
He also thought of Helen and Craig, somewhere beneath his feet. Perhaps her air had run out already, or he had gotten lost trying to find her.
*****
Fleur, with the help of David, went down the narrow stairs below deck one painstaking step at a time. She was barely fifty, but she moved like a seventy year old.
"You didn't have to break my cane, you know. Who do you think you are, the KGB?"
"American equivalent, perhaps." He chuckled. "I can make the appropriate arrangements if you haven't."
"Not to worry," she said as they approached the sleeping quarters, "It was serendipity he fell in love with that girl, and I took advantage of that situation."
"Clever. So you don't need anymore hands down there."
She looked at him with a glint in her eyes. "No, no hands needed."
With care, David led her to the bed and she groaned as she sat on the dusty bedspread. "Ugh, I'm sick of living like this. Those barbs of his are a long shot as it is."
He offered her a drink. Warm whiskey from a flask in his jacket inner pocket that he poured himself one first. "Do you think she's dead yet?"
"Doesn't matter to me. The boy is worth the same living or dead, all I needed her for was to invoke his bioluminescence and, as a consequence, his barbs."
"Well then," he said as he clinked her flask with his plastic tumbler, "here's to future investments."
Fleur took a long draught from the flask, her throat bobbing as the fiery liquid entered her frail body.