Tempest Unleashed (11 page)

Except now, it looked like even that sanctuary had been taken from me. I fumed as I swam away from Coral Straits and out into the ocean. I wasn’t planning to go far, but I was going stir-crazy sitting in my room. Besides, I figured I should take advantage of my free time. Between school and training and learning to be an “adviser” to the merQueen, I didn’t get nearly enough of the stuff.

Part of me wanted to hightail it over to Kona’s, to pour out my latest problem in his lap and let him solve it, but just the idea seemed ridiculous. Kona had enough to worry about right now without my adding to the mix complaints about my psycho-Queen and new trainer. I had to deal with this on my own.

Which, for now, meant not dealing with it at all. Shoving Sabyn and Hailana out of my mind, I concentrated on swimming. On pulling one arm after another through the water.

I dived deep, went through a forest of kelp and seaweed, and relished the feel of the feathery stuff as it brushed against my highly sensitized skin. Then I swam back up some and shot the North Pacific current—it wasn’t nearly as exciting as surfing, but it was as close as I could get down here.

I let the current take me for about fifty miles, tumbling head over tail part of the way before dropping out to just float. I tried to clear my mind, tried not to think, but everything that had happened these last two days crowded in on me.

I didn’t know what to do. I felt stuck, trapped, like every way I turned was fraught with disasters and every decision I made was wrong. I wanted to love it down here under the ocean, wanted to be proud of the decision I had made to become mermaid, but it was hard. Harder now, even, than it had been eight months ago.

It just seemed like I didn’t belong here, no matter how hard I tried. I had Kona, who treated me really well and said he loved me, but Hailana’s words kept replaying in my head. That Kona’s parents would never let him end up with a mermaid, and most definitely not one who was half human.

Was she right? Was I being naive to think that this thing we had would last forever? And if it didn’t, what would that mean for Kona and me? What would happen to us when it was time for him to settle down? What would happen to
me
if he had to pick some nice selkie girl to be with?

Ugh. I was turning into one of those weepy, indecisive girls who couldn’t do anything without her boyfriend to guide her. Just the thought made me break out in hives.

I don’t need Kona
, I assured myself. I loved him, wanted to be with him, but I didn’t need him. I could do this, could be mermaid alone, if I had to.

But I wouldn’t have to, I told myself. Kona loved me and wanted to be with me as much as I wanted to be with him. He didn’t care about me not being selkie—he would have told me before now if he did.

Yet, even as I protested, I knew Hailana’s words made sense, too. How could they not when I’d witnessed back on land how right they were? I’d been with Mark, had loved him completely, but even with that we hadn’t been able to make it work. Not when I was only partially like him. Only half human.

Either way, I wasn’t normal. Wasn’t like everybody else. Which left me with the same question I’d had most of my life. Where did I fit in? Where did I truly belong?

An octopus swam close enough to brush against me with its long, dangling tentacles, and I yanked my attention back to the present. I was doing it again—swimming in the open ocean like it was no big deal. Like there wasn’t a war brewing that could wipe me, and the other shifters who lived in the water, right out of existence.

Shoving my worries away for good—or at least until I had more time and energy to deal with them—I turned and started to head back to the city. Though Hailana’s waters were relatively safe, it wouldn’t pay for me to get too far from civilization.

I was about halfway to Coral Straits when I felt a tug deep inside myself, like a chord had been played that only I could hear. It vibrated through me, called to me in a way nothing but the ocean itself ever had before.

At first I tried to ignore it, but the vibrations quickly grew worse until I felt like I was going to shake apart. Slowing down, I glanced around to see if I had somehow managed to swim into a trap. If, even now, Tiamat was lying in wait for me.

I couldn’t see anything though, couldn’t sense the dark acid of her energy anywhere around me. Which meant that whatever I was feeling was not coming from her. I didn’t know if that made me feel better or worse—or even if it mattered, when the noise and the vibrations were getting worse until I had to move. Had to dive.

At first, I thought I was getting away from the sound, from whatever it was that had burrowed inside of me, because the deeper I went, the lower the vibrations became. But as I got near the bottom of the ocean floor, I realized it wasn’t getting harder to feel because I was getting away from it, but because I was getting closer. I was heeding its call and being rewarded by the lessening of pain.

The knowledge immediately threw me into retreat, and I swam straight up. Only to get to a point where I was shaking so badly that I could barely breathe, barely think. Barely swim. The water seemed to get thicker, until I felt like I was slogging through quicksand. No matter how hard I fought, I was getting nowhere. Just sinking down, down, down.

A little freaked out, I finally stopped fighting the pull. Figuring I could either wear myself out completely or meet this thing—whatever it was—while I still had some energy to fight back, I decided to dive deep again. I arrowed straight down until the weird feeling inside of me was all but gone and I was only a few feet from a series of caverns carved into the ocean floor.

I eyed them suspiciously. The last time I’d been in an ocean cave, I’d nearly died—and had ended up having to kill someone to escape. So to say that I really, really didn’t want to go in there was a little bit of an understatement.

Still, I was smart enough to know that whatever this was wasn’t going to leave me alone until I did. For a second, I longed for life before my seventeenth birthday, when my body actually did what it was supposed to, what I wanted it to. From the moment last fall when I’d been surfing and my legs had tried to become a tail, I’d been losing control—over myself, my life, my destiny.

This was just one more betrayal.

Sucking in a deep gulp of water, and what I hoped was a bunch of courage to go along with it, I swam right up to the mouth of the cave.

If the opening was anything to go by, this cave was a lot larger than the last one I’d been in. I didn’t know if that was good or bad. More places for me to hide, but that went both ways. Whatever, whoever, was doing this to me could be somewhere inside, just waiting to spring the trap.

And yet I was going in anyway. If Kona ever found out, he would kill me. So would Mahina. She was constantly on me about doing stupid things that put me in jeopardy—part and parcel of having a certified genius as a best friend. This definitely counted as both foolish and dangerous, but it wasn’t like I had a choice. I’d tried to leave, I really had.

Screw it.
Annoyed with myself and just about everyone and everything else in my life, I put every ounce of strength I had left behind my kick-off, then plunged through the opening of the cave and straight into the middle of the first room.

It wasn’t anything like what I was expecting. The last cave had been black, empty—filled with sharp rocks and barren rooms. This one was alive with color and life. Though it was dark, my natural phosphorescence partially lit up the world around me with a purple haze. Plus, there was an entire school of fish in this room, all glowing a beautiful orangey red.

Thanks to their light, I could see clusters of multicolored coral and sea anemones lining the floor, as well as gorgeous stalactites dripping down from the ceiling. They made a kind of maze for me, around long, sharp, rainbow-colored spears arranged with no rhyme or reason, that I had to navigate through and around to get to the back of this first cavity.

As I swam, the fish darted up to me. Some whirled back and forth in front of me, while others circled my arms or played peekaboo in my hair. I couldn’t help laughing, and tried to send them a sense of my amusement. If I’d had Kona’s talent, we actually would have been able to talk to each other, but since I didn’t, I settled for reaching out to pet them.

Most of the fish zipped away the second my hand came anywhere near them, but a few curious ones stuck around and let me stroke their sides or tails. They felt a little rough, scaly, but kind of silky too. I liked it.

Two huge stalactites loomed in front of me, the opening between them too narrow for me to squeeze through. I dived deep, got under them, but ended up brushing the tip of my tail against a fire coral.

Crap. It wasn’t the first time I’d been stung—while mermaid or human. But fire coral was obnoxious, its sting hurting more than a lot of the other kinds.

I swished my tail back and forth in an effort to shake off the last of the stinging cells, as Kona had taught me. The burn lessened a little, and I realized it was already healing. Huh. I’d been stung a lot in human form and it had never healed this quickly. Always nice to discover something else cool about being mermaid.

Feeling better already, I finished the obstacle course of the front room and ended up in a long, dark passageway. With the sting feeling better by the minute, I concentrated on exploring the cave, trying to figure out what it was about this place that called to me so completely. I had no sense of danger, no little niggle at the back of my neck telling me something was wrong.

In fact, I felt more right in this place than I had in a while. I certainly felt healthier and better than I had since getting attacked yesterday. It was like being here, in this cave, was feeding my energy, my power.

It sounds crazy, I know, but with every room I swam into, I seemed to get a little bit stronger.

Which was pretty much a guarantee that I wasn’t going to stop until I’d explored the whole cave—or as much as I had time for today. As I swam through a room that branched off the main passageway, I found another, narrower route. I followed the path—I couldn’t help it—and about halfway down found a hole in the floor that was barely big enough for me to swim through.

For long seconds, I contemplated it. Told myself it was a bad idea to go down there when I had no idea where it led and, unlike the rest of the cave, there seemed to be no other life forms in it.

And yet, somehow, I knew it was exactly where I was supposed to go. Sick and tired of the mysteriousness, of the unknown forces pushing at me when what I wanted most was to be normal—a normal human or a normal mermaid, at this point I didn’t care—all of a sudden I wanted nothing more than to turn around and leave. No matter how beautiful the cave was, I didn’t want to communicate with forces I didn’t understand. Any more than I wanted to be the subject of that stupid prophecy that had everyone treating me like I was different. Special.

Better to just do it
, I told myself.
Get down there, see what it is you’re supposed to see, and then get back to the city.
Mahina was probably looking for me, and God only knew what Hailana would say about this latest disappearance of mine.

So that’s what I did. I arrowed myself straight down into the small hole in the cavern floor. My arms were out in front of me, helping me swim, and the second they came into contact with the hole, an electric current jolted through me, paralyzing me even as it knocked my teeth together in the closest thing to a seizure I had ever experienced.

I tried to pull back, but I couldn’t move. The electricity was zinging through my body, pulling me deeper and deeper into the hole without any effort on my part.

There was a whole section of my brain that was terrified, convinced I was going to die down here. But at the same time, it was kind of fascinating, this strange pull the current had on me. Even though it hurt, like getting zapped by a bunch of shocks at exactly the same time, another part of me understood that if I could just keep calm, just go with it, the pain would soon be over. Whatever oceanic force had grabbed on to me would relinquish its hold as soon as it brought me where I needed to go.

I floated down into the hole, through a passageway so narrow that I felt the rocks scrape at my shoulder blades and hips, then somehow moved into an even narrower tunnel. At one point, I had to hold my breath—just the in and out of my gills was too much for the tiny space. And then I was at the end, opening into a cavern so large that I couldn’t see the top or bottom of it.

The second I slid into the room, the electric force released me. I plummeted a few yards, straight through water so icy I knew it had never seen sunlight, before realizing my body was once again under my control.

Slowing my descent with a flick of my tail and a few strokes of my limp arms, I took a second to assess my physical condition. I was weak, tired, my skin a million times more sensitive than it had ever been before. My breathing was harsh, my gills sucking water in like they were afraid it was about to run out. And my head—it hurt almost as much as it had yesterday, after I’d lost all that blood. I couldn’t help wondering how many brain cells I’d killed in the last twenty-four hours, between the blood loss, Sabyn’s attack, and now this. With my luck, enough to cause some serious damage. This whole underwater thing was working out so much better than I’d planned.

But self-pity wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Of course, neither was sitting around in the dark. Though I was still glowing, it was nowhere near enough to actually help me out. This part of the cave was so huge that I didn’t illuminate much of it. Closing my eyes, I concentrated as hard as I could, praying I had enough power left to do what I needed to.

My palms grew warm, tingled, and I wondered if there was a way to use what Sabyn unwittingly taught me to help me down here. In the training circles, I’d used my energy and light to create a spear. Down here I only wanted something to help me see.

Rubbing my hands together as I focused, I pulled them apart slightly when they started to burn. Opening my eyes, I could see the small spark of light resting in the center of my left palm, and I pulled my right one back a little, rolling them around so that I could mold the light into a ball. Then I used my mind to send the light straight out in front of me. It stopped about fifteen feet away and cast an eerie glow on the wall in front of it.