Tempest Revealed (14 page)

“There are some things humans don’t want or need to know.” Kona said the word
human
much like I would say
cockroach
.

“Tempest doesn’t keep secrets from me,” Mark told him, taut and furious.

Kona laughed, actually laughed, and it was my turn to contemplate violence. It was hard enough to keep a relationship going with Mark without Kona deliberately sabotaging us. Then I remembered that it didn’t really matter, that I was planning on breaking up with Mark anyway.

But it
did
matter. I couldn’t just stand around and watch while Kona poked a stick at Mark like he was an animal in a cage. I didn’t care who Kona was or what he wanted. Some things just weren’t right. “Stop it!” I hissed.

He didn’t answer, just smiled benignly like he couldn’t
imagine what I was talking about. I snarled back, even as I reluctantly pulled away from Mark.

He wasn’t happy, but at least he let me go without a fight. “Fine. I’ll be right here if you need me.”

“What do you think I’m going to do to her?” Kona demanded. “Get rid of whatever brainwashing you’ve thrown her way?”

“You’re not the one I’m worried about,” Mark sneered. “Although maybe I should be. You’ve already proven you can’t protect her when she’s with you.”

“And you can? What are you going to do, throw your surfboard at the big, bad sea witch?”

“I sure as hell wouldn’t ask Tempest to sacrifice herself to save me.”

“Bullshit!” Kona was up in Mark’s face now, fists clenched and face livid. Mark wasn’t backing down an inch, though. “You seem to have forgotten. She nearly got herself killed saving you not very long ago.”

“Just me, huh? Funny, I seem to remember you being there too. But I guess I can see how you might have forgotten—considering you kept fainting whenever stuff became a little too intense.”

“Really? You want to play this game?” Kona demanded. “The guy who had to run back to the surface just when things got interesting?”

“I was out of oxygen!”

“One more reason it sucks to be human, huh?”

Mark flinched almost imperceptibly, but Kona obviously caught it because he relaxed suddenly, a superior look on his face as he finally found the weakness he’d been searching for.
“How does it feel knowing you’ll only ever have half of her?” he asked, his tone almost conversational now. “Do you lie awake at night wondering what she’s doing? Who she’s doing it with? Knowing that no matter how much you want to, you can’t reach her? You just have to wait around until she remembers you exist?”

I’d heard more than enough. “Stop it!” I hissed, maneuvering myself between them. Then I slapped a palm on each of their chests and shoved them. Hard. Which, I admit, probably wouldn’t have had much effect if I’d been using my human strength, but I threw a hefty dose of power behind the push and both guys stumbled back a few steps. They nearly fell, would have if I hadn’t stopped them with the same telekinetic hold I’d used on my father that morning.

Of course, neither one of them was paying attention to what I could do—not when they were both so pissed, at me as well as at each other. Their anger didn’t bother me. After all, I had plenty of my own to bury the guilt under. But that didn’t mean I was going to put up with them attacking each other like two junkyard dogs intent on marking their territory.

I took a deep breath, counted to ten. And let the anger go even as I searched for words that could reach them. They didn’t magically pour into my head, but at least I got an idea of where I wanted to start. “Look, I’m not going to do this with you guys. I’m sorry—you don’t know how sorry I am that I mixed everything up like this. I know it’s my fault, and if I could go back and change everything that happened, I would. But since that’s not possible, can you at least not beat the hell out of each other?”

I turned to Mark, put a soft hand on his arm. “If it’s about
Tiamat, I need to talk to Kona. Can you give us a few minutes? I promise it won’t take long.”

Mark nodded, but he didn’t look happy as he took a couple steps away from us.

I looked at Kona next. His arms were crossed over his chest and he looked pissed, more pissed even than when he’d been going after Mark. I decided to ignore it. At least he and Mark no longer looked like they were about to throw down any second.

“You wanted to walk,” I told him, making sure not to touch him as I stepped away from Mark. “So let’s walk.”

Kona nodded, then led the way down to the water. As soon as my feet touched the surf, my power welled inside of me. I could feel it pushing up against the walls I used to cage it, pouring through cracks in my defenses until my entire body felt like it was burning up.

I glanced down, realized with a sinking heart that I was glowing, the phosphorescence that allowed mercreatures to see one another when deep in the ocean spinning out of my control. Usually I could tamp it down when I was on land, but tonight that seemed to be beyond my command. Like so much of the rest of my life.

I looked behind me, saw that Mark was staring at the purple luminosity that surrounded me. I told myself that it was a good thing, that visual reminders of how different I was could only help convince Mark that we weren’t right for each other. But knowing all that didn’t keep my stomach from twisting sickly.

“What’s wrong, Tempest?” Kona asked snidely. “Mark not so down with your mermaid side?”

“Mark and I are just fine, thank you.”

“Yeah, I can see that.” He turned away, looked out at the ocean, and I regretted the churlish words. I had no business rubbing my relationship with Mark in his face. Not when I knew how much it hurt him—and not when he had done nothing but try to make my whole transition to being mermaid easier for me.

“Look, I’m sorry,” I told him. “I didn’t mean—”

He made a dismissive sound low in his throat. “It doesn’t seem like there’s much you do mean. Right, Tempest?”

“What exactly are you implying?”

He just stared at me, his enigmatic silver eyes swirling with a mixture of rage and power and some other emotion I couldn’t begin to identify.

I sighed in response, frustrated with him and the entire situation. “Fine, if you aren’t going to answer me, can we at least talk about whatever it is you want to discuss? You came all this way to say it, so it must be important.”

He was quiet for so long that I started to think he wasn’t going to answer me. Then he said the two words I’d been fearing since I first saw him towering above Mark and me on the beach.

“Hailana’s dead.”

Chapter 12

My knees went weak.

The news wasn’t unexpected—I’d been preparing for this moment, in part anyway, for the last four months. And yet it was still shocking. As horror reverberated through me, I fell to my knees on the wet, hard-packed sand.

“Tempest!” I heard Mark, knew he’d be running toward me.

I held my hand up to stop him, forced my paralyzed throat to speak. “I’m fine!” I called.

But I wasn’t, not really. I was freaking out, mind racing and heart beating wildly. I wanted to feel sorrow at Hailana’s passing. She was my queen, after all, and my last real link to the mother I still didn’t understand. But it was hard to be upset about losing her, specifically, when she had been so horrible to me. Still, I had never wished her dead. She had done a lot of good things for Coral Straits in her heyday and she had served them well.

Better than I ever could, I told myself as I tried to deal with my rapidly shifting reality.

Everything I had been preparing for—everything I had been terrified of—was coming to pass. And no matter how much I wished it were otherwise, I had no idea what to do about any of it.

“So, I’m … merQueen now.”

“Yes.”

Again, his answer wasn’t a surprise, but it escalated my terror anyway. I felt like I was drowning, like the weight of the entire ocean was suddenly pressing down on my chest and I couldn’t get any air.

“Breathe,” Kona said, crouching next to me.

I pressed a hand against my chest, gasped. “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.” He wrapped his hands around my upper arms, held me gently, securely, and I knew—though he didn’t say a word—that this was the closest he could bring himself to offering support. “You need to get up, Tempest. Mark’s keeping his distance, but if you don’t show him you’re okay soon, this will get ugly.”

I glanced behind me again, saw Mark standing under a lamppost about fifteen feet away. Unlike a lot of the others on the beach, its lightbulb was still intact. I could see his face in its reflection and he looked frantic, angry. That’s when I knew Kona was right. I pushed myself to my feet, to placate Mark but also to prove to myself that I could handle this.

“When did she die?” I asked Kona as I brushed the sand from my legs.

“From what I understand, it was the day you left to come here. They sent a messenger out to find you at the same time they sent the announcement to me, but he couldn’t catch up with you.”

“I was moving fast.”

Kona’s jaw tightened, but he didn’t say anything else.

“So she’s been dead five days.”

“Yes.”

“When’s the funeral?”

“I believe they’re waiting for you.”

I nodded, rubbing my hands up and down my upper arms in an effort to chase away the chill that was blanketing me. “Right. Of course. So, um, what happens now?”

If I’d still been Kona’s girlfriend after his parents had died, I’d probably know the steps that went into the coronation of a new monarch—selkie hierarchies weren’t that much different from merpeople’s, after all. But as we’d broken up within days of his parents’ deaths, I hadn’t been there to witness everything Kona had gone through to ascend the throne.

I had wanted to be there, had wanted to support him. Even though I had broken up with him, I still cared about him. But since he’d become king, he’d turned angrier, blocked me out. He hadn’t wanted me anywhere around, and I hadn’t pushed. The last thing I’d wanted was to make things harder for him.

Now I wished I
had
pushed. Not necessarily because of the situation I was in—after all, I’d known Hailana was dying and had spent a bunch of time researching mer customs and law recently—but because of Kona. It was obvious that the last few months hadn’t been kind to him. He’d lost weight, grown harder and more cynical until I could barely see the guy I had fallen for a year ago. If I’d been around more, if I’d pushed harder, then maybe …

I shook my head as the truth crashed in. There was no
maybe. When I’d broken up with Kona, I’d ruined everything we had between us—not just our relationship, but our friendship as well. To be honest, a part of me was shocked he was here now. He could have sent someone to find me instead of swimming all this way himself. Yes, the fact that Hailana was dead was big news, but he was the king. If he didn’t have anyone he trusted to deliver the news, then we were all in even bigger trouble than I’d imagined.

“What happens now,” he said, repeating my words, “is that you get back to Coral Straits and assume the crown as quickly as possible. It’ll take two days for you to get home, which means that your people will have been without a leader for a full week. That’s an unacceptable lag between competent governments, although I am using the word
competent
loosely.”

For a second, I wasn’t sure if he was insulting me or Hailana—or both. Either way, he sounded so stuffy, so monarch-like, so different from the guy I used to know that I couldn’t help myself. I lashed out at him, demanding, “Why does that one week matter so much? You’ll have been gone almost as long and that’s okay for you, but it’s not okay for me?”

“Well, I would say partly because my assuming the mantle of clan leadership has been predetermined for nearly two centuries and partly because when my parents died I wasn’t off on some beach somewhere nailing my human girlfriend.”

Oh, he was pissed. Though neither his voice nor his face changed during his diatribe, rage crackled in every syllable he spoke. I willed my own anger to rise in response, but there was nothing. Just an overwhelming sadness that I had once again
screwed up something beautiful. Especially when I looked into his eyes and saw the pain he was working so hard to hide.

“Thank you for coming to get me,” I told him, laying a hand on his bare biceps. “I know you couldn’t afford the time to do this and I appreciate that you did anyway. That the news came from you.”

He looked away, his jaw working. For long moments he didn’t say anything, didn’t do anything. But then his head jerked in a strange up-and-down motion that I realized was supposed to be some kind of nod. It wasn’t much, but it was a start.

“And I’m sorry. For everything. I never meant to hurt you.”

He pulled away, all but turned his back on me as he looked far out to sea. His head was thrown back, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his board shorts, and for the first time since I’d met him, he looked alone. More, he looked lonely.

“Kona—”

He turned back to me, and the vulnerability was gone. In its place was the arrogance of a king, the arrogance I’d grown far too used to seeing lately. “You didn’t hurt me,” he said. “You simply reminded me of what I knew all along. Selkies and humans don’t mix.” If possible,
human
sounded even worse when he said it this time.

I nodded, unwilling to get into yet another argument with him. “I’ll head back first thing in the morning. After I say goodbye to everyone—”

His sigh was extremely put-upon. “Tempest, I don’t think you quite understand.” He waved an arm, and I saw a number of selkies lift their heads out of the water. “You’re a queen
now—and more of a target than you’ve ever been. You don’t get the option of swimming around the ocean unprotected anymore.”

I reeled a little under his matter-of-fact summation of events. I was a queen now. I was a queen. I was merQueen. “You came to escort me back?”

“I came to ensure your safety. The last thing I need is an ungoverned kingdom along my most vulnerable border. But I’ve already been gone several days. We need to leave, tonight.”