The Night Season by Chelsea Cain Page B

been given by an expert. Archie could see why the guy had been promoted.
    Robbins leaned close to them, his face tense. “Not just Henry—the three other victims, too. All tested positive for TTX.”
    It made one thing make sense. “The puncture wounds on the palms,” Archie said. “But couldn’t someone have isolated the poison? Be injecting it with a syringe?”
    “The point of entry on the palms is from a beak, not a needle,” Robbins said. “A blue-ring delivers venom by puncturing its prey with its beak. But let me be clear, this isn’t accidental. This thing is being used as a weapon.”
    “So what’s the antivenom?” Archie asked.
    “There is no antivenom.”
    Which meant there was no cure. Which meant that Henry was still dying. Archie felt a wave of nausea rush over him, and he reached out and steadied himself on the back of the trailer.
    “The treatment is palliative care,” Robbins said quickly. “Keeping him breathing. Keeping his heart beating. He’s lucky Claire and Susan found him when they did. If he can make it twenty-four hours, odds are he’ll recover.”
    Eaton pulled some more at his tie, and looked around them at the National Guard, the cops, the massive sandbag effort that had drawn thousands of volunteers to the river’s edge. He didn’t look so calm anymore. “Wait a minute, son,” he said to Robbins. “You’re saying that there’s some sort of deadly octopi in the water?”
    Archie could see Robbins bristle at “son.”
    “Octopuses,” Robbins said. “‘Octopi’ would only be correct for a second-declension Latin noun. ‘Octopus’ is a Greek third-declension masculine. And no, that’s not what I’m saying.”
    Archie was doing math. He had last talked to Henry at six. It was now nearly three A.M. Nine hours had passed. That left fifteen to go. Fifteen hours between life and death. It didn’t used to seem like such a long time. You could drive from Portland to Los Angeles in fifteen hours. Now it seemed like a lifetime. For Henry, it might be.
    Three people had been murdered.
    Archie coughed, the taste of diesel a paste in his mouth.
    “The water’s rising,” Eaton said. “If there’s something deadly in there, we need to warn people.”
    They weren’t in the water. The chief hadn’t made the leap yet.
    “Octopuses live in the ocean,” Archie said. He scanned the Wikipedia paragraph on habitat, the page already soft and damp in his hand. “These blue-ringed octopuses, their habitat is temperate salt water. They wouldn’t last more than a few minutes in the Willamette.”
    Eaton’s phone rang. He didn’t pick it up. He put his hand to his upper belly, like it hurt. “So where are these people picking them up?” he asked. “Off the sidewalk?”
    Archie thought about it. “Maybe someone hands the thing to them.”
    “What?” Robbins said dryly. “Like, ‘Here, hold my octopus.’”
    Archie’s mind was working now. He didn’t feel cold anymore. It was like everything else fell away and the world narrowed to this one task, this one job—find the answer. It’s what made him good at being a detective, and bad at being a husband. “Where do you get these things? Besides Australia?”
    “You can buy them on eBay,” Robbins said. “I checked.”
    Eaton shook his head slowly. “Some nut is using a goddamn fish to kill people?”
    “Not a fish,” Robbins said. “A cephalopod.”
    Archie remembered the empty plastic bag they’d found at the Japanese American Plaza.
    “How big are these things?” Archie asked Robbins.
    “Roughly?” Robbins said with a shrug. “The size of a golf ball, maybe.”
    Archie stepped away from the back of the idling command center and peered around to where Heil, Ngyun, and Flannigan were standing, waiting for news of Henry and the toxin. All three rolled up on the balls of their feet when they saw Archie look their way.
    “Heil,” Archie called. “Get that bag tested for traces of salt water.”
    Archie gazed