Eat Your Heart Out (Descendants) (3 page)

Warmth crawled through her, settling in her cheeks. It was a history text, and an old one at that. Rachel met Sid’s eyes. He was watching her closely. “Sid, this is so pretty.”

Sid screwed his mouth to one side and fiddled with his hands. “You like it? I know you want to study history and mythology, and I thought you might like this. I read it a while ago when I was still at university. It’s one of the classics.”

“I love it. Really.” She turned and smiled at everyone gathered round the table. Bruno still hadn’t joined them, though he was mowing down a second helping of cake. “I love everything. Thank you, guys. This has been great.”

Kendra bounced on the balls of her feet. “That’s not quite all.” She looked ready to burst and clapped her hands together. “I talked to Kai, and he’s invited us all to visit the mer city.”

Daphne actually squealed and grabbed Kendra in a hug. It was a well-known secret she’d been waiting a long time for this rare invitation. Kendra spun away from Daphne and was pulled straight into Rachel. Rachel hugged her best friend tight, a grin stretched ear to ear.

She kept an arm hooked around Kendra’s shoulders and looked at them all—her best friends, her family. Her cheeks ached from smiling, but she couldn’t stop.

CHAPTER 4

“
Ow!”

Rachel jumped away from Sid’s poking finger and accidentally jammed a
hip bone into one of the boat seats. She sucked in a breath past her teeth, one hand going to her hip and the other to the angry red remains of Willem’s shoulder bite.

“Sorry, did that hurt?” Rachel couldn’t see Sid’s eyes behind his dark sunglasses, but the boy’s eyebrows pulled together.

She rubbed harder at her right shoulder and settled for a flinty glare over the top of her own sunglasses. Hunched in his seat near the stern, Bruno chuckled at the two of them then bent back over the leather-bound journal he’d been reading. Rachel eyed him: He wasn’t going on the dive and was dressed like a man who’d possibly never seen the ocean. He wore long sleeves, long pants and heavy boots all in varying shades of khaki. Then he topped it off with an honest-to-god club leaning against one knee.

“It’s your first scar, isn’t it?” Sid’s question drew Rachel’s attention away from Bruno. He stepped closer and touched the scar again. He was gentler this time, but the touch still made Rachel fidget. His fingers were warm against her skin and made a current zing down her arm to the tips of her fingers. Sid’s hand lingered at her shoulder until spots of red flared in his cheeks and he pulled his hand away like it burned.

Overhead, the sun warmed Rachel’s back and shoulders and glinted off the deep blue water of Breaker Cove. The ocean was slack and lapped against the sides of the speedboat. It was the definition of a perfect Georgia day on the water. Except for the bright red, jagged scar ripping across her shoulder. Rachel sidestepped Sid and pulled her wetsuit up her waist then twisted to zip it up the back.

Alongside the anchored boat, Kendra and Daphne were already bobbing in the water, Daphne in full scuba gear and Kendra sporting only goggles and a dark blue swimsuit. Underwater, Kendra’s long-dormant half-mermaid genes would kick in, leaving no need for the regulators and oxygen tanks. Rachel watched them, the excitement bubbling as they waited for Kai. She wanted to feel that same excitement. She pressed her lips together, fingers prodding at the remains of Willem’s bite.

Sid repeated his question, and Rachel finally nodding. “Hopefully it’ll go away.” She didn’t want this reminder sitting on her shoulder for the rest of her life.

“It’s okay if it doesn’t though,” Sid said with a shrug. “Our scars, they’re like our own little history books. We all have them. It’s part of who we are.” To prove it, Sid reached down and pulled at the bottom of his wetsuit, peeling it up and over his calf. A shiny, raised slash cut across his skin, but it had faded with age. “This was my first, courtesy of a particularly angry water demon in the Ardennes.”

“How long ago was that?”

“He was nine,” Bruno spoke up, his voice gruff. A scowl furrowed deep lines across his forehead.

Rachel looked between Sid and Bruno. “But I thought you didn’t inherit until you turned ten?”

“He didn’t.” Bruno growled.

Sid looked away over the cove and shrugged again. “Like I’ve said before, my father was strict about my training. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t yet
see
the water demon.”

“Sid, that’s …” Rachel reached out, but he shifted away, his lips tight. She shuddered to think of how frightened she would have been, just a child fighting an invisible monster. It sounded like something out of a horror story.

Sid clapped his hands together once then snapped his mask in place. “Right. Enough about my wonderful father.” He perched at the edge of the boat and grinned around his regulator. “We’ve got a mer city to explore.”

Rachel watched him flip over the side before she turned to Bruno. “Did his father really do that?”

One of Bruno’s hands wandered to the heavy wooden club leaning against his leg and pulled it over his knees. His fist where he gripped the club was tight, making veins stick out along the top of his hand and worm down his forearm. “It’s not my story to tell,” the older man said before bending back over the writing.

That only made Rachel frown
more. There were times Rachel begrudged her mom for not preparing her, for keeping her in the dark. But if the alternative were Nicholas Martin … She eyed the club while she adjusted her own gear and prepared to jump over the side of the boat. “Okay, well, um …” Bruno didn’t look up from the journal. “Don’t, uh, beat anything to death while we’re under.”

Bruno nodded. “Not unless it is deserving.”

* * *

The images floating before Rachel were ethereal. The bright sunlight above pierced the water and shone down on so many different variations of blue Rachel felt dizzy with it: aquamarine, turquoise, cerulean. And
deeper, cobalt giving way to midnight.

Silver flashed in the distance, the ebb and flow of a school of fish. Closer, another spark of silver flickered as the merman Grey pumped his tail. Rachel swam behind, staring at the way Grey and Kendra’s merman father Kai moved, the way the water slid around them, like it and they were connected. Next to
their graceful movements, Rachel felt a bit like rag doll trying to dance. She readjusted her harness and kicked forward. Beside Grey, Kendra pulled her long body into a ball to flip in the water and looked back at Rachel with a mile-wide grin. The girl’s cloud of hair floated around her face, but there was no missing the gills slashed along the sides of Kendra’s neck. Here underwater, they opened and closed with regular beats, giving her all the oxygen she needed.

There was something building deep inside Rachel—a pressure, a rolling, pulsing thrum of anticipation that made her insides fizzy and her fingers and toes prickly. This was it: A chance to finally see the
mer city. It was an invitation most Descendants went their entire lives without ever receiving. It made her lightheaded and heavy at the same time, a mix of excitement and dread. And a terrible curiosity that compelled her to swim faster, to look at everything, to try and remember every moment.

Rachel kicked her
flippered feet and surged ahead through the water toward the two mermen. They were opposite ends of the spectrum. Grey seemed to refract the light. It shimmered against his silvery skin and hair and made him nearly invisible when he turned a certain way. There was no slipping into invisibility for Kai. He pulled the light into him, absorbing it into his dark skin and throwing it back in a muted golden hue. He was darker than his daughter, larger and bolder in the powerful way he cut through the water, but there was no mistaking Kai and Kendra’s familial likeness.

Below, the cove’s white sands dropped away as they swam out toward the open ocean.
Out here, where the ocean floor was murky and far away, Rachel was reminded how much she was an intruder to this world. The oxygen tank and tubes connected to her mouth were all the confirmation of that fact she needed. She darted closer to Sid and Daphne, and was suddenly aware of the feel of the short blade strapped to her thigh. It was such a small thing, hardly a weapon in the face of all the ocean could toss her way.

But then all thoughts of her inconsequential diver’s blade were swept from her mind. The group had arced south, toward the very tip of the cove. The sands rushed back up to meet them, and a forest of kelp swayed in the push and pull of the tides. They swam just above the green fronds, sending the plants fluttering away on the surge of their kicks.

Up ahead, Kai and Grey contracted, their scaled tails curling up toward bare stomachs. They hung in the water for a moment then shot downward. Kendra spun to face Rachel, Sid, and Daphne.

“Ready?” Bubbles jetted from her mouth as she spoke, but Rachel could clearly understand her. There was a rounded, musical quality to her best friend’s voice underwater, but it was still Kendra.

Kendra grinned and then disappeared in the wake of Kai and Grey, leaving behind only a froth of bubbles. Rachel kicked forward and peered over the edge of a steep decline. Her mouth dropped open, and she had to grab for her regulator before it floated from her mouth.

There before her was the
mer city.

CHAPTER 5

The
mer city was wild and beautiful, a thing that at once looked like it had grown from the ocean floor and at the same time carved by man. Or, more appropriately, merman.

“Come on!” Kendra shouted from far below.

Rachel tore her eyes from the mer city. Kendra floated at the bottom of the kelp hill before arched gates encrusted with barnacles. She spun in fast circles, laughter pouring out of her on a stream of bubbles.

Behind the gates, the
mer city was a warren of twisting coral spires and rock chipped away into the shape of curving, fanciful buildings. It climbed up and up to the very edge of a giant underwater cliff, a wall of algae and moss studded with holes like windows in a high-rise.

Something nudged Rachel in her back, and she spun. Daphne held up a small whiteboard, the only way the non-
mer part of the group could communicate underwater. It spelled one word in all caps:
WOW
. Rachel nodded back. Wow was right. In fact, wow was basically the only word circling around in her head at the moment. She’d pictured the mer city a thousand times since Kendra had first been invited, but this was beyond everything. It made her feel weightless and dreamy.

Another
nudge—more of a sharp poke. Sid jabbed a finger back at the city, where flashes of silver, gold, bronze, even iridescent darted across narrow lanes between buildings. The merpeople. Perhaps hundreds of them. At the city’s edge, a herd of hippocampi gathered near the bounds of a barnacle-covered fence, their deep black fish eyes on the three of them and harnesses the only thing keeping them from investigating further. There were dozens of the curious and elegant creature, a strange cross of seahorse and land horse. Their colors shimmered through the water: greens and blues and dappled pearl.

Movement caught Rachel’s eye, and she spun as Kendra, Kai, and Grey swam back to them. Grey ran a hand down Kendra’s back to settle at the base of her spine and leaned his mouth close to her ear. Even in the low light, Rachel didn’t miss the blush bloom across her friend’s cheeks. Or the glance Kai cut their way. The large merman flared his nostrils then held a hand out to the three humans floating uncertainly at the edge of the hill.

“Please,” Kai said, his voice baritone. It vibrated around Rachel, deep and low enough to feel in her stomach. “Come with us. You make the mer nervous.”

Rachel laughed around her regulator.
She
was making the mer nervous? Rachel could barely feel her limbs, they were so alive with energy and trepidation and excitement. But she nodded and drifted down the kelp hill. She ran her fingers through the grasses as she went—silky yet with rough nodules that pulled at the wetsuit where they made contact.

At the entrance to the
mer city, Kai stopped. The gates remained closed, and they were so crusted with shells and barnacles Rachel wasn’t sure they’d even open. Kai picked up a bell—also heavy with shells—and held it out in front of his chest. His bicep bulged under the weight of the bell, and his jaw was set in a hard line against the strain. He looked to Sid, Daphne, and Rachel, nodding once at each of them and touching two fingers to his forehead in the traditional mer greeting.

“Descendants, I welcome you to the
mer city. We are happy to have you as our guests.” The bell rang out like a timpani, a deep bass that quivered through the water and rattled their bones. All around, the kelp fluttered flat at the tone, like it was bowing. Behind the gates, a flurry of movement rippled through the city: merpeople rushing to windows to watch, hippocampi straining against their harnesses.

Grey put both hands to the massive gates, and with a groan that shuddered under the sand, the
mer city opened. Kendra kicked back to them like an eager puppy and hooked an arm through Rachel’s. “There is
so
much I want to show you,” she said, close to Rachel’s ear.

Rachel squeezed her best friend’s arm and let
herself be led past the gates.

Kai and Grey led them through the city, down lanes of crushed shell and courtyards where orange and yellow coral was planted like rose bushes. Yet the city was empty—or it really wanted to appear empty. Rachel would hear voices around a next corner, melodic as a symphony, but only see a flicker of tail as the last
mer hid. In the city center, the pink coral spires and brown rock buildings twisted overhead, sometimes curving together to block out the light nearly altogether. In the murk of these narrow alleys, Rachel didn’t miss the flashes of silver and gold as merpeople spied on them. She heard their giggles like bubbles blowing against her back and felt their movements as they jetted through the water unseen.

As they passed under an arch made of pale orange coral, Grey let go of Kendra’s hand to come swim between Sid and Rachel.

“They’ll get over the shyness,” he said with an easy smile. A rope of silvery hair floated in front of his eyes, and he flicked it away. “I’ll take you by the guppy academy later. They won’t be able to get enough of you.”

But first, they stopped before an odd building. It was curved and sharp at the same time, with a giant swell of crusted metal sharpening to a point above their heads. It was only when Rachel looked closer that she realized it was the bow of a sunken ship, most of it buried beneath sand and reef.

A merman swam from a dark hole yawning in the side. He was old, his skin a dull pewter and his hair a mess of green and white that was tied in a knot atop his head. He tapped two fingers to his forehead in a quick greeting, his eyes on Rachel.

“Ah,
Mallu. There you are,” Kai nodded to the older man and turned to the others. “Mallu is a city elder, and it was he who granted you access to visit us.”

Daphne kept compulsively putting her fingers to her forehead in a perpetual greeting. Rachel flashed her mom round eyes and a tiny shake of the head, but Daphne just performed the traditional
mer greeting to her daughter instead. Rachel grumbled against her mouthpiece and grabbed for her own whiteboard.
THANK YOU
, she wrote.

Mallu’s
voice was high and cracked through the water. “Save for those like young Kendra, who we consider citizens, you three are the first humans welcomed into our city since its founding. It is a great honor for you.”

Rachel wasn’t sure how to respond to that, so she held up the whiteboard again and gave
Mallu a thumbs up, which immediately felt like an amateur move.

Kai cocked his head at her—which only made Rachel feel even more like a fool for the thumbs up move. Who did that? Her cheeks colored behind her mask. Kai smiled gently. “So,” he said. “I thought we could see the hippocampi herd, then Grey is eager to show you the city academy. It’s where he’s been apprenticing as a teacher.”

Kendra beamed at Grey and reached out to pull him close, one hand snaking around Grey’s narrow waist. But one sharp look from her father made her backstroke away. Kai coughed—it issued as two giant bubbles that floated above his head—and led the way, Mallu at his side.

Away from the hulk of the sunken ship, the
mer city thinned out to large yards of kelp growing between shell-studded fences. The sounds from within the city—the melodic shouts echoing down lanes and clamor of hidden merpeople at work—fell away to a heavy, liquid silence. Water gurgled around tails and limbs, pulsing in Rachel’s ears. She shook her head, like her ears needed to pop.

Ahead, thick poles stood in the center of a giant paddock, attached lead lines rustling with the movement of an entire hippocampi herd. The beasts tracked the group with their glassy black eyes and tugged closer, making their lines creak against the iron rings pounded into the anchor poles. A hippocampus swam close, and Rachel paddled nearer to get a better look. She’d only ever seen the animal in the Corpus, and the odd form of the mar-beast intrigued her. The animal was massive, at least as large as a horse. Her face was reflected in its black eyes, yet where a land horse would have long
lashes, here the hippocampus had a second fish eyelid that slid like a film over its eye. Behind ear stalks, it had a ridge of flowing hair—something between a mane and a bouquet of kelp—running from the top of its horse-like face and down its neck. But where a horse had four legs, this hippocampus had a back that curved in an S and ended in the rigid tail of a giant seahorse.

The hippocampus whickered and nudged its head forward, like it wanted a nice pet atop its head and possibly a sugar cube. Rachel nearly had her hand over the fence when Kai grabbed her wrist.

“Careful,” the merman said sharply. He plucked a frond of reddish-brown seaweed from a nearby clump and held it out for the hippocampus. The beast wriggled closer, sniffed at the seaweed, then snapped at it with alarmingly serrated teeth. Forget grass-chewing horse teeth, these were something Rachel expected to see inside the business end of a shark. The seaweed was shredded in seconds.

Rachel reared back, to the apparent delight of
Mallu. “Yes,” the old merman said with a piercing laugh. “Not quite the same at the beasts I remember from my youth walking on land.”

Mall
u swam closer, and the hippocampus shied away with a whinny. But the older merman jutted a pewter hand out and ruffled the hippocampus’ mane. The beast whinnied again, its nose opening in a snort. Mallu laughed and slapped at the side of the hippocampus’ head. It jerked, its whole body going stiff with the slap and its nostrils flaring wide.

“Hippocampi are sensitive to their surroundings,” Kai said, nervousness lacing his deep voice. He peered through the water, eyes narrowed. “They can sense what we—”

But then the beast bucked wildly, the curved tail lashing out and knocking against one of the anchor poles.

Rachel pushed away from the wall, her kicks short and powerful.

A shriek tore from the hippocampus, something high and keening that quivered through the water. The sound made her brain ache. The frightened hippocampus bucked again—once, twice. Nearby, more of the herd shook their heads and started shrieking. It was a terrible sound, shattering against Rachel’s exposed skin and scraping down her arms and legs.

“Grey!” Kai’s voice punched through the water. “The herd!”

But then the water dissolved into frenzied hippocampi shrieks and angry bubbles. Rachel twisted against the torrent, but the water pressed in on her, a whole ocean like lead on her shoulders and chest. She tried to slow her heart, slow her breathing, but every breath was quick and shallow. Everything in her demanded to open her mouth wide, to
breathe
. But down here, that meant death. Rachel clamped her teeth down around the regulator, her jaw aching with the ferocity of it, and pulled a thin breath in from her tank.
The shrieks were a terrible chorus now, a then they were joined by a low groan. The anchor poles were giving way.

Sand whipped up in a storm around Rachel, and she jerked in a circle as a thick lead line snapped against her arm. Something tore past her, shrieking as it went. Another hippocampus butted its head into her chest, pummeling the breath out of Rachel and flinging her backward. She landed against something solid and already had her pitiful blade out to defend herself when she recognized Sid’s gray eyes. They were wide with fear.

Sid grabbed hold of her arm and pulled her through the water, but Rachel wrenched away. Somewhere in the murk, someone screamed—loud and high. Rachel spun, her heart hammering. That scream, it’d sounded like Kendra. Sand and torn kelp and empty lead lines surged around her, hippocampi appearing out of the murk like specters. Rachel’s muscles quivered with impotence. She was helpless down here, just a floating chum bag. She needed to
do
something. Sid tried again to grab her arm, but Rachel shook her head violently. She spit out her regulator—“Mom! Kendra!”—but the words came out muddy as the whipped up water.

Another hand shot out of the churn and grabbed hold of Rachel’s arm. The water cleared around Grey, green eyes flashing and the sharp planes of his face tight with fear. “Have you seen Kendra?” There was terror in his voice.

Rachel shook her head again. Dammit. She needed to be able to speak. She spit out the regulator again and mouthed the word
Mom?

“She’s with Kai. But I can’t find Kendra or
Mallu.” Grey whipped his head to the side as another shriek tore through the water. “Get back into the city. I’ll find them.”

Everything in Rachel pulled her back, back to make sure her mom and best friend were okay, but Sid dragged her onward. They kicked their legs, yet the herd of hippocampi stampeded around them. One of the powerful beasts buffeted against her side, and Rachel was thrown into one of the shell fences. A yelp of pain tore up her throat as the shells sliced down her side, ripping open her wetsuit. There was a roar beside her, and blood bloomed in the water. Sid appeared at her side, his dive blade held out in front of him and an injured hippocampus snapping at him. Behind it, another frenzied beast butted into the creature’s back, and the animals rolled over together, carried away on a current of their brethren as they snapped and tore at each other.

Sid and Rachel darted over a field of kelp, the spires of the mer city growing closer with each kick. Yet blood still leaked from Rachel’s side, and Sid had a nasty bite on his forearm. Hippocampi darted and surged around them, but the herd was thinning, spreading out over the city. Sid grabbed Rachel under an arm and hauled her down a narrow alley.