Secrets of the Deep (17 page)

Jake couldn’t tell how she was doing it. Maybe it just happened by itself, but then he caught her helping it along, casting each boy a lashes-fluttering smile and humming a mysterious little tune under her breath.

“You stop that!” he ordered, refusing to be affected himself, or at least refusing to let it show.

He would
not
make a fool of himself again the way he had in the Cupid Arrow Incident.

Nixie showed no signs of ever letting him live that one down.

He shuddered at the memory and strove against the doltish warmth he felt toward her, threatening to melt away his will. He held up the orb. “What is this thing?”

Before she could think of a lie, voices from the hallway reached him. The girls!
Thank God.

From what he understood, mermaid magic did not work on them the way it did on human males. “We’re in here!” he called.

“Jake, what is going on?” Isabelle was the first to arrive.

“Come in and shut the door. Then we’ll introduce you to our new
friend
,” he said.

“What happened?” Nixie asked in surprise, glancing around at the schoolbooks and beakers scattered on the floor.

Archie gestured at her. “This poor girl fell.”

“Did someone faint?” Isabelle asked in concern.

“Not exactly,” Jake said in a wry tone.

Still mistaking the stunning, black-haired miss for an ordinary party guest, the girls hurried over to Sapphira, who sat in the armchair like a queen on her throne.

“Careful!” Maddox warned, holding them back from treading too close to the bedraggled lace hem of her old-fashioned skirts. “Don’t step on her tail.”

“What?”
Isabelle uttered.

“Oh!” Dani exclaimed, glancing down to finally spy the frilly cobalt fringe of the supposedly royal mermaid’s fishtail.

“This is Her Royal Highness, the Crown Princess Sapphira of Poseidonia,” Archie said with a sweeping gesture at their captive, who still looked annoyed.

The girls took this in for a moment.

“I see,” said Isabelle.

Unflappable Nixie was the first to shake off her astonishment, stepping forward. “Are you hurt?”

“No, just a bit bruised from the fall,” said Sapphira.

Nixie stroked her chin in thought. “I take it you’re under a Landwalker’s spell of some sort?”

“Yes. Thank you.”
Finally, someone with sense,
the mermaid’s expression seemed to say. Ignoring the rest of them, she focused on Nixie. “You’re familiar with magic?”

“It’s what I do,” Nixie said. “Did you get splashed?”

Sapphira nodded in relief at the question that proved at least Nixie knew what she was talking about. “This should wear off shortly.” She gestured down at the lower half of her body. “The sea-witch who sold me the seaweed warned me I’d change back to my true form if I got splashed with seawater while on land. Unfortunately
someone
left several quarts of seawater sitting on this table, where I stumbled. As soon as I’m dry again, the legs should return within ten or fifteen minutes.”

Archie clutched his heart and dropped down on one knee before Sapphira. “I’m so sorry.”

Jake groaned and turned away, shaking his head.

“A towel would be nice,” Sapphira drawled. “That is what you call it, yes? We don’t have them in my world.”

“A towel. Yes, yes, of course!” Maddox rushed off to fetch one.

Isabelle eyed him skeptically as he dashed past her, then looked at Sapphira. “And, um, what brings you here this evening, Your Highness?”

“That orb I found today,” Jake said. “She came to steal it!”

“It’s mine!” Sapphira replied with grand royal wrath. “It’s a piece of my people’s history, and I demand it back!”

“Oh, Jake! I told you not to take other people’s things.” Dani shook her head and looked mortified over what he’d done. She rose from where she had bent down to gather up Archie’s fallen textbooks. “We’re so sorry. He can’t help himself. He used to be a pickpocket.”

“Dani!” Jake cried.

“Well, it’s true,” she scolded, then shook her head. “Won’t you ever learn?”

“And if stealing an ancient artifact belonging to the merfolk wasn’t bad enough,” Sapphira added with a pitiful pout, apparently having realized that the way to get to him was through Dani, “that mean boy left me on the floor when I fell and wouldn’t let the others help me up!”

“Jake! Well, I’m hardly surprised.” Dani huffed with an apologetic glance at the princess. “He’s like a feral cat. We hardly have him housetrained.”

“Oh, thanks a lot!”

Still shaking her head in disapproval, Dani turned away and went back to tidying up. Just then, Maddox ran back in with the towel. He presented it to Sapphira like a knight who had just returned to give her the Holy Grail.

She took it from him and blotted her wet gown, but Archie was not to be outdone, hovering over her.

“Don’t you worry a jot,” he said, patting her on the shoulder. “Ten minutes is nearly up, then you can have your orb and we’ll see you off. Till then, would you, er, like something to drink? O-or perhaps a piece of cake!”

“Fine.” Sapphira rolled her eyes.

Nixie quirked an eyebrow as the boy genius raced off, beaming over being given permission to fetch Her Highness a snack.

Jake had had enough. “Everybody, stop being so nice to her! Just because she says something, doesn’t mean it’s true.” He strode back over to her, still carrying the orb. “If you really want this back, first you have to tell me what it is. What are these little colored lights? What makes it give off this hum? You can barely hear it, but—”

“Don’t go playing with it!” she warned.

“Why not? What does it do? What does this writing all over it mean?”

“How should I know?”

“You don’t know?” Jake echoed skeptically. “All right. Then what makes this thing so important that a supposed royal mermaid would come ashore—without bodyguards or chaperones—and risk getting caught, just to steal it back?”

Sapphira glared at him, mute.

Dani sighed. “It’s all right, Your Highness. We mean you no harm. But you might as well tell him what he wants to know. He’s terribly persistent and possibly the most annoying boy on the earth.”

“Yes. I noticed that.” Sapphira glanced around at them all, clearly resenting her helpless situation, but as Archie returned with a dessert plate piled with goodies for her, she waved him off and finally relented. “I don’t know what the orb is. But I need it back all the same.”

“Why?” Jake demanded, stealing a biscuit off the plate, earning Archie’s scowl.

“Today, Coral City, the capital of my father’s kingdom of Poseidonia, came under heavy attack. Our very palace was invaded by the most feared tyrant of the seas: Davy Jones, the captain of the
Flying Dutchman
. Ever heard of him?”

Jake started to guffaw until he saw that the mermaid’s exquisite face showed no sign of humor. “What, you’re serious? Davy Jones? Lord of the Locker? Devil of the seas? He’s just a legend!”

“Like ghosts?” Nixie pointed out.

“Or gryphons?” Archie chimed in.

“Or mermaids,” Maddox agreed, gazing, rather lovelorn, at Sapphira.

Jake glowered at them all.

“No,” Dani said with an air of authority, “he was real. Patrick told me all about it. Long ago, Davy Jones ran a tavern on the docks in Cornwall, where sailors on leave liked to go and act rowdy. They’d drink ale and gamble into the wee hours of the night, but if any of them passed out in his pub, Jones would drag the drunkards off and sell them to the press gangs while they were unconscious.

“When they woke up, they’d find themselves aboard a Royal Navy ship facing seven years’ forced labor! So, when he died, in return for his crimes, Davy Jones was forced to captain the devil’s ship, collecting wicked sailors’ souls until the end of time—anyone who drowned at sea.”

“Huh,” Jake said as they all pondered this.

Sapphira resumed her tale, looking peeved at the interruption. “Davy Jones rarely bothers us. He’s more concerned with collecting the souls of drowned sailors. But today, without warning, he descended on the city, firing broadsides and demanding that we give him that orb.”

“Ah, so it wasn’t an earthquake we heard,” Archie murmured.

“No,” she said grimly. “It was cannon fire.”

“Why does he want it?” Jake asked.

“How should I know? Probably because it’s from Atlantis.”

“Atlantis?” several of them cried.

Sapphira sighed. “Apparently he heard that thing is very powerful, but don’t ask me what it actually is or what it does. I don’t know and I really don’t care. I just want him to go away before he destroys our entire kingdom.”

“Your Highness.” Archie stepped closer, looking ready to burst with excitement. “If this artifact truly came from Atlantis, you must let us study it before you take it back. Nixie and I could run some preliminary tests. I mean—this is huge!”

“There’s no time! I need it right away.”

“Why?” Nixie asked, looking disappointed.

“These two are pretty clever,” Jake said. “I’ll bet they’ll figure it out in no time.”

She was shaking her head stubbornly. “No. I need to take it to him tonight.”

“Well, why? What’s your hurry?” Jake demanded.

“Because he kidnapped my little sister!” the princess cried in anguish, and this time, when her big blue eyes filled with tears, Jake saw they were genuine, and they began eroding his resistance.

The room went very quiet. Sapphira glanced around at them with real desperation in her eyes.

“Princess Liliana is her name. She’s only eight years old. Davy Jones took her hostage. We tried to trick him, you see, by telling him we didn’t have the orb. That we had already thrown it into the Calypso Deep to get rid of it, but he didn’t trust us. So although he went off to look for it, he took my little sister with him as a hostage.

“Once he fails to find the orb in the canyon and realizes we lied to him, he’ll take it out on my sister, and it’ll be all my fault.” She dropped her gaze to the floor, her chin trembling. “I’m the one who was supposed to throw it in the canyon. But I didn’t. I kept it. So, please—just give it back and let me go. I can’t let anything happen to my sister. Ever since we lost our mother…”

Jake flinched at that revelation, but Sapphira turned away and angrily blinked away a tear.

“Oh, never mind!” she huffed. “This doesn’t concern you landers anyway! The orb doesn’t belong to you, and that’s the end of the matter.”

“Why did they want you to cast a real Atlantean artifact in this canyon you mention?” Archie asked.

“Because Atlantis was cursed, obviously!” she said. “But Davy Jones is cursed, too, so they’ll probably get on quite nicely together.”

“And you have no idea why he wants it?” Jake asked.

“He’s probably just
bored
,” Sapphira snapped. “Wouldn’t you be, if you had to collect the souls of drowned sailors for the rest of eternity?”

“Sheesh,” Dani said under her breath, though Jake wasn’t sure if it was Sapphira’s hostility or Davy Jones’s curse that made her say that.

The room grew silent as they pondered the situation, and then Jake heard a polite “ahem” behind him from Isabelle.

“Coz, a word with you, please?”

Jake turned and found her blue-eyed gaze fixed on him with a warning in their depths. “Of course.”

He stepped out into the hallway with Isabelle.

“I sense deception,” she murmured. “The part about the sister seems true, and she does seem genuinely concerned about her kingdom, but she’s definitely hiding something.”

“Hmm. The watery folk do have a slippery reputation.”

Isabelle shrugged. “All I know is there is something ‘Her Highness’ isn’t telling us. What that might be, I couldn’t say. Just be careful.”

“Thanks, coz.”

They went back into the room.

But despite his empath cousin’s clear warning and despite his mistrust of Sapphira, Jake already knew what he wanted to do. He couldn’t turn his back on the plight of an eight-year-old mermaid princess. What sort of Lightrider ever could?

Besides, he had immediately sympathized with the mermaid’s obvious sense of guilt over the danger she had brought to those nearest and dearest by her failure to get rid of the orb. After nearly causing a war himself, he could certainly relate to that.

As he returned to the room, the boys looked at each other, and Jake saw in a glance that both Maddox and Archie were as ready as he was to help this exotic damsel in distress in any way they could.

“I have good news, Princess Sapphira,” Jake informed her, still trying his best to seem nonchalant. “We’re going to help you.”

“Pardon?” Staring worriedly at her tail, she looked up in surprise.

“My friends and I are here on a long holiday, and frankly, it’s grown a little dull. Lucky for you,” Jake said evenly, “we’ve dealt with all sorts of trouble before, have we not?”

He looked around at the others, who nodded.

“It sounds like your sister is in real danger,” he continued, showing off just a little, his tone magnanimous, “but you don’t have to face it alone. We will help you rescue her. But I’m afraid I still cannot let you have the orb—at least until we know more about it.”

Sapphira looked dubious, scanning their faces. “
You’re
going to help me? You’re just a bunch of kids. I think he’s the only one older than me.” She pointed at Maddox, who flashed a smitten smile and couldn’t tear his gaze off her.

“Yes, well,” Jake said, feeling a ridiculous twinge of jealousy toward his friend, “as it happens, we each possess magical abilities. Well, except for Archie, who’s a scientific genius, and Dani, who’s just…Dani.”

A small sigh left the redhead. She dropped her chin to her chest.

“But even she has experience going up against magical foes!” Jake hastily amended. “So, don’t you worry. We’ll have your sister back in a trice. Trust me, I’ve dealt with far worse enemies than the old sea-dog Davy Jones.”