The sunset was glorious. It made Victoria think of the old adage: red sky at night sailors' delight; red sky in the morning sailors take warning. But you couldn't always trust in that, because it only held true when the storms came from the west.

Her habitual caution was the reason that she made the mistake. She decided to check her phone for new messages and glance over the latest headlines, and look at what the weather was actually doing. She was keeping it turned off when she wasn't using it, to conserve power, since even though her solar panels made her self sufficient, she didn't have a large reserve.

The mermaid, or whatever she was, had been so quiet for so long that Victoria hadn't exactly forgotten her, but had somehow stopped regarding her as an active threat. The mermaid was hanging mostly upside down over the edge of the boat, so that she could see the signal lights that had come on when the light dimmed. When Victoria's phone played its startup jingle the mermaid abruptly pushed herself back onto the deck and turned to look at Victoria with bright interested eyes.

"A new type of musical instrument?" the mermaid asked merrily.

"No," Victoria replied, but then she hesitated. "I don't know, I guess it can be. I've heard that there are people who actually compose songs with just their phones."

"Let me try it!" the mermaid demanded.

Victoria's hands tightened on her phone, like it was her lifeline. In many ways, it was just that. It was her connection to the rest of the world. Sure, she had the required emergency radio aboard, and had even used it once or twice when she'd been in a dead area, but it wasn't the same.

"It's primary purpose is communication," Victoria clarified. "And I only have one…"

"I'll be careful with it," the mermaid promised promptly.

Victoria's phone was a rugged model that was supposed to be waterproof for up to half an hour and to a depth of four meters. It had a float attached to it in place of the typical cute charm or security cable, but she would have been reluctant to place it in the hands of a strange child, let alone a strange sea monster. The mermaid began to look impatient.

She offered quickly, "I'll show it to you after dinner?"

Her stomach growled at her own words, and she realized that she hadn't eaten anything since the mermaid had boarded her ship. She swallowed nervously as she realized that she had just introduced another potentially dangerous topic when the mermaid smiled. She seemed to have very sharp teeth, and Victoria wondered if she'd just leapt from the frying pan to the fire.

"Do you have any fresh fruit?" the mermaid asked with interest.

Victoria blinked.

After a moment, she replied reluctantly, "I have a few frozen berries left. Half a lime, and a lemon, I think." She hoarded them like treasures, eating only a little at a time, and got most of her vitamins from greens. But she could imagine that to a sea dwelling creature, fruit might be a delicacy worth bargaining for.

The mermaid's expression looked like she was pitying the poor, as she asked doubtfully, "You went ashore recently enough that you still have ice and that's all you have?"

Victoria hesitated over the 'still have ice' but decided to skip the topic of refrigeration, and replied, "There's an epidemic going on, I picked up what I could."

"Epidemic? A sickness?" the mermaid asked.

Victoria nodded.

--

The soapy water struck Mac, T'andy, and the stranger with cool indifference. Bobby lowered the squirt gun after she had their attention, and slapped the sign behind her. "No breaking the six foot rule, and no more than two to a table!" she scolded. "I let Mac off easy earlier, because he's old enough to choose how he goes, but you gents had better all take two steps back right now."

The self proclaimed Chris T'andy knew that the older vampire in front of him couldn't understand the demand, but he took two steps back and wiped the spray off his face. He was embarrassed by his attempt to form words that he felt like he almost knew, but the cold soapy water had given him a chance to step back and think, and he realized that he'd understood the second language that the elder had tried. It was the language of science for centuries, a dead language, he had spoken in Latin.

"Recedite, ne tradendae pestilentia," he attempted to explain the instruction to step back to prevent transmission of sickness. He suspected that to someone who truly spoke the language he was butchering it, and he was pretty certain that his kind couldn't catch the virus, but the older vampire stepped back without protest.

Mac gave him a look, before turning back to the bar and grumbling at Bobby, "Waste of good soap n'water."

Bobby rolled her eyes and pointed out, "In other countries people who break the quarantine restrictions are getting themselves shot with bullets you old dwarf."

The vampire turned to stare at her, but Mac laughed like it was a joke between them instead of the insult that had gotten his younger self into more fights than he could count. Bobby raised an eyebrow at him, and asked dryly, "That guy a friend of yours? He's obviously not from around here."

He glanced back toward the elder, the other, the being like himself, and the joy and fear he'd felt when he'd seen eyes like his own bubbled back up inside of him. Bobby was right, the clothes were similar to what you might see on the street, but the details were all wrong. The jeans looked like they were wool instead of cotton, and the ridges that were normally caused by the weight of the canvas folded into the seams were just… bulges. The shirt under the odd jacket appeared to have laces at the cuffs, and no seams or even a visible hemline at all. The combat boots had laces, but lacked the metal rings and other details that they should have held.

"He is a teacher?" he told Bobby and Mac a little uncertainly. "I'm not sure…"

Mac shrugged. Bobby looked them both over once more with her sharp eyes, but simply replied, "Okay."

The elder asked something that took him a bit to puzzle out, but he decided that it was probably a repeat of the words he'd said earlier in a language that the vampire hadn't known that he knew. Something along the lines of 'I will teach you, and you will teach me this language.' He sorted quickly through words that might mean yes and chose to reply, "Certes."

He was trying to decide how to say, "But this is not the place to begin," when the elder spoke again. He wished that he could ask for a written exchange, because the school days when he'd taken classes where Latin was spoken were more than two centuries behind him. He was pretty certain that the elder had said, "This is not the place."

He nodded reluctantly, and his gaze moved back to the bar where Mac was watching them with a wary expression. Bobby appeared to be focusing on wiping down the counter, but he was pretty certain that her attention was also focused on the two strangers. He was reluctant to walk away from this place that had welcomed him after so long, even though he wore a different face and it was a different era. He was reluctant to leave Mac without saying more, without…

His eyes moved back to the stranger who could probably answer centuries worth of questions about what he was, and where he came from. A flicker of movement caught his eye, and he turned to look at the frightened face of the woman who had shifted in her seat. He glanced at the other faces, and saw their stillness, their tension.

He had been connected to these people through his songs only a few minutes ago, and he had felt their enjoyment, but now they looked like a gang had walked in and started something. Or like they saw or sensed something very dangerous from the man he had been so excited to see. Or maybe, like they could suddenly see how dangerous he himself could be.

"We should go somewhere else," he said in English, before remembering to try to translate it into Latin.

The elder who had offered to teach him nodded.

Mac took a step toward him, but only a single step. It was enough to make his heart ache, and he promised rashly, "I'll come back tomorrow night."

"I'll be here," Mac replied, and it was a promise.

He smiled joyfully, and Mac blinked at him, and then gave him a wide grin and two thumbs up.