Blood of a Mermaid (18 page)

Kae frowned, feeling a strong need to defend the merman she still thought of in her head as Xander. Maybe he’d lied to her – okay, he’d definitely lied. He’d also tricked her into following him using his magick, and stolen some of her memories…but there was good in him. She’d seen it in his eyes. He could not be the monster in the tales. “His heart is not dark, but merely full of shadows,” she protested. “Were he on the right side of the battle, he would be a courageous ally.”

Her father gave her a strange look. “But, daughter, he is
not
on the same side as our king. Or your friend Shea. He is Demyan’s creature.”

“He’s not a creature, Father. He’s my…friend.”

He studied her face a long while before slowly nodding. “Well then. This changes our plans slightly. We will have to swim straight for the Aegean as fast as we can and hope to intercept any confrontation.”

“We?”

Her father laid his hand on her shoulder. “Kae, from the tales I’ve heard of this Zan, he is a powerful sorcerer and can control everything around him. The ocean and the weather, as well as merfolk and drylanders alike. They say he is ruthless and unmerciful, and yet the merman you describe seems to care. About you.”

She swallowed down the fear rising in her throat. She knew what he was going to say before the words came out of his mouth.

“Kae, you’re the only one who can stop that sorcerer. And stopping him means stopping Demyan, and the war he’s trying to ignite.”

“But…” She thought back on the long swim from Cape Cod to the edge of the Arctic. “It took us two days to get here from Nantucket Sound. Atlantis is further still.”

“That it is,” Lybio agreed. “As you and I don’t have the speed granted to the Adluo clan, we’d best get started.”

Kae shook her head. “But we don’t have time, Father. We need to warn Shea now.”

“We can only do our best, little one, and trust in the gods.” He laced his fingers with hers and squeezed her hand as they started to swim. “Poseidon brought me to you, and he will help us find the prince.”

“You mean Shea,” she corrected, following his lead. It felt good to stretch her tail and work out the kinks in her fins. She’d been stuck in that cell for way too long.

“I mean the heir to the Atlantic throne,” her father said sternly. “Which makes him a prince, a fact you seem to forget more often than you should.”

“Father, you don’t understand…”

He cut off her sentence, his voice sharp. “I
understand
more than you know. And he
is
a prince, marked by Poseidon himself, the trident blazed across his back for all to see.” He paused, exhaling a long breath. When he spoke again his tone was gentle. “I don’t want to see you lose your heart to a boy who can’t return your love. You deserve to be happy.”

“
Shea
makes me happy,” she argued, not willing to acknowledge any truth in his words. She’d been alone in that cell for days with nothing to do but worry. She’d thought down this same path of reasoning more than once. Her head knew that dating a prince was illogical, but her heart felt differently.

Her father just shook his head and kept swimming.

Only two of the telescoping aluminum paddles came with the life raft, and Shea wasn’t sure they would ever reach land. For every few yards of progress the boat made, another wave reared up to buffet them backward. It was as if the ocean were toying with the survivors, teasing them with the prospect of dry land before pushing them further away. Although the rain had stopped, the dark clouds still surrounded them on all sides, swirling in the howling winds.

Shea handed the paddle to the next volunteer and inched his way across the raft to his grandmother. “It’s no use,” he said in a low voice. “The waves are too strong, and too well-timed.
They’re
not letting us make it to dry land.”

Martha frowned. “I know it may feel like sorcery, but the ocean can be capricious in her own right.” She closed her eyes. “I do not feel the presence of a magick user nearby.”

“You can feel them when they’re close?”

She opened her eyes. “As can you.”

“Hey, not to interrupt,” Chip said as he put a heavy hand on Shea’s shoulder. “But we need to come up with another plan. We’ll never make land at this rate, with the wind shifting all the time.”

“The storm will blow out eventually,” Martha said evenly. “It’s already subsiding.”

“Yeah, but some of these people can’t wait,” Chip said. “The ones with broken bones are getting way too jostled around – one lady’s femur poked right through her skin a few minutes ago, totally gross! Most of them are seasick and puking…and Hailey hasn’t woken up yet. Shea, man, we need to be on land to help these people for real.”

Shea looked across the water. He could see the stretch of beach they’d been paddling toward, so close and yet so impossible to reach. An idea occurred to him. “Is there any rope on this raft?”

Chip’s gaze moved over to the compartment where the flight attendant had found the first aid kit. “I think I might’ve seen some coiled in there with the paddles. Why? What’re you thinking?”

What Shea was actually thinking was that if he transformed his shape, he could easily tow the raft through the waves to the shore. But Chip didn’t know anything about that side of Shea. What could he say in way of explanation?

Before he could think of anything, Martha spoke. There was an element of command in her voice that Shea had never heard before. Martha simply told Chip to get the rope and he turned to comply without asking another question. Shea looked at her, puzzled.

Martha shrugged. “
Syren
training 101. It’s like riding a bicycle, I guess.”

In seconds, Chip returned with a spool of nylon anchor rope, still in its original shrink-wrap plastic. Shea read the packaging quickly, and saw that there claimed to be 120 feet of twisted nylon rope, strong enough to anchor 3,700 pounds. A metal carabiner sat attached to the exposed end. “Good enough,” he said out loud.

Ripping off the plastic, he handed the end with the clasp to Martha. “Attach this to something secure. There’s probably a metal ring on the raft somewhere for just that purpose. And tell Chip to get ready to paddle hard.” Before she could even acknowledge his words, Shea sat down on the edge of the boat and removed his sneakers. Holding the rest of the spool tightly in his left hand, he closed his eyes and tipped himself backward into the waves, just as he’d seen Chip do earlier. He would have to trust that Martha could take care of any questions from their fellow passengers.

As he sunk below the surface, he glanced upward, making sure he went far enough under so that no one would be able to see what happened next. He took a deep breath of the Mediterranean water, relishing the clean, salty taste for a moment as he plunged deeper. Finally, he took his transmutare stone into his free hand and spoke the words. “
A pedibus usque ad caput mutatio.”

A hot tingling sensation shot through both of his legs, starting right behind his bellybutton and zinging down to the tips of his toes. The water around him warmed as millions of tiny bubbles began to whirl, starting at the soles of his feet and swirling ever faster around his legs, binding them together. He took another deep breath, trying not to freak out.
Paralysis is part of the process
.

A tightly seething circle churned around his body, the heat moving further and further up his legs. Each second seemed an eternity until suddenly the bubbles all stopped their frenetic movements and dissipated, rising slowly toward the surface. Even though the whole thing took less than a minute, Shea knew he didn’t have any time to spare.

The sorcerers might not be here yet, but they were coming. Of that Shea was sure.

Spooling out the rope as he swam, he put a good distance between himself and the raft before surfacing. Even with the wind and waves buffeting the boat, he didn’t want to take the chance that any of the other passengers would see his green and gold tail flicking behind him. The land looked to be another hundred yards away.
So close and yet so far,
he thought. Looking back to the raft, he lifted his arm high above his head as he crested on a wave, trying to catch Chip and Martha’s attention. He saw Martha acknowledge him by raising her own hand. He turned to swim toward shore.

Thirty feet of rope stretched between Shea and the raft, with waves rising and falling between them. He held onto the spool of remaining rope with both hands, pulling forward against the weight of the boat. It felt as though he were tied to an unmovable block of cement. He clenched his jaw and concentrated on pumping as hard as he possibly could, every muscle in his tail straining. His chest and biceps burned with the effort of towing against the tide, until finally he felt something give.
Forward movement!

Once Shea got the momentum going in the right direction, the wind and water started working with the paddlers instead of against them. As they neared the shoreline, the waves began to gravitate naturally in the same direction, helping to push the boat toward its intended destination. With each passing minute, Shea could feel the distance growing shorter, but the combination of undulating waves and heavy cloud cover made it difficult to judge. Holding tightly to the spool, Shea dove down underwater, and saw that the slope of the bottom was angling more sharply toward the surface.
The beach must be close,
he thought as he headed back upward. This was the tricky part. How could he finish towing the raft without anyone seeing his tail?

The spool in his hands held almost a hundred more feet of rope. Trusting that the nylon would be strong enough, he swam faster, letting out additional rope as he went until it was all out, the end attached securely to the metal spool. Holding the spool with both hands, he kept swimming. In ten minutes, he was near enough to the beach that his tail fin brushed the sandy bottom as foamy waves crashed on the rocky shoreline.

He could see trees and large rocks just beyond the beach, perfect for tying the rope to secure the raft. Unfortunately, he couldn’t cross the open stretch in his present form. Grasping his transmutare stone, he closed his eyes and uttered the words that would transform his tail back into legs. When he looked down again, he could see his bare toes sticking out below the same soaking wet blue jeans he’d been wearing when he jumped off the life raft.

The rope slackened. Shea realized the boat must be getting closer to shore. Quickly, he stood and pushed his way through the surf and out onto the beach. Pulling the rope along with him, he ran to the tree line and tied the end of the rope around the closest tree. He could see the raft bobbing atop the waves, coming closer to land.

Panic gripped him as he realized simply pulling them to shore would capsize everyone on board. As he watched, a monster of a wave swelled behind the raft, catching it in its updraft. The crest of the wave began churning downward with maximum force, but somehow the raft stayed right on the curl, riding the wave like an expert surfer on his favorite board. To Shea’s astonishment, the lifeboat rode the wave all the way onto shore, sliding smoothly up the sand and rocks, remaining steady as the water receded.

Shea pulled the rope taught and tied it off around the tree, making certain the waves couldn’t take the passengers back out to sea. As he ran back down to help, he saw the passengers patting Chip and another young man on their backs, praising their efforts. His grandmother caught his eye and gestured for him. When he reached her, Martha threw her arms around his neck and hugged him tight. “Well done, boy-o,” she said softly in his ear. “You may not get the recognition, but we both know what you did.”

He smiled, hugging her in return. “I think you may have used more than a little mermaid magick yourself, Gramma. Who ever heard of a lifeboat this large acting like a surfboard?”

She chuckled as she stepped back, but her demeanor quickly sobered. “Let’s help these people off the boat and up to the tree line as fast as we can get them moving. Then you and I have more work ahead of us.” He nodded in agreement and turned to help the injured passengers.

The storm clouds slowly dissipated, allowing the sun to finally break through as it made its descent below the horizon. The last of its golden rays played along the surface of the sea, seeping beneath the waves to color the water in a range of brilliant hues.

Zan didn’t notice the shimmering beauty surrounding him as he cut swiftly through the now golden waters of the Mediterranean Sea. He was totally focused on finding the landing site of the Olympic airliner he’d crashed with his magick.

There were times he could pinpoint his storm clouds with such precision that the effects concentrated on a few square meters. When he’d been sent to Oklahoma, in the heart of drylander territory, he’d been able to focus dispassionately and create such a targeted storm. Today, however, had not been one of those times.

He’d let his emotions cloud his judgment and interfere with his magick, creating a much larger, more powerful storm than he’d planned. Okay, he hadn’t planned on creating any storm at all.
This was supposed to be an easy in and out, grab-the-boy-and-go kind of mission,
he reminded himself.
Once again the drylander screwed up my plans.

The whelp had blatantly disregarded his warning note. How could he care so little for Kae’s fate as to ignore a threat against her life? How could he give the token of his
supposed
affection for the beautiful mermaid to that drylander girl? If their places were reversed, Zan knew he’d do anything to save Kae. He’d already stood up to Demyan once.
And I’ll do it again if needed
… he noticed the water around him warming as the magick began to swirl around him.

“This is how I get in trouble,” he said out loud, closing his eyes. He forced himself to relax, concentrating on each individual breath until the magick subsided.
I need to let go of these emotions
, he thought.
Love is a dangerous creature
. Especially when tied to unbridled magick.