Waterfire Saga, Book Three: Dark Tide: A Deep Blue Novel (33 page)

Becca’s hand instinctively went to her scalp. Her fingers touched a bandage.

“More stitches, I’m afraid,” Marco said. “It’s a miracle you didn’t fracture your skull. You’re lucky to be alive.”

“Do you have a mirror?” Becca asked.

Marco winced. “If you really want one.”

“I do,” Becca said.
I think,
she added silently.

Marco found a hand mirror and gave it to her. As he gathered bandages, a scissors, and waterproof tape, Becca grimaced at her reflection. The right side of her face was covered with scrapes and
her right eye was blackened. The bandage on her head was angled like a cockeyed hat.

She handed the mirror back. The marks on her were not pretty, but they would heal and fade. Something else was bothering her a lot more than her cuts.

“How did you find me?” she asked, still suspicious.

“We were looking for you.”

“But who—”

“Mahdi. The Praedatori are scattered now, but he managed to get word to one of them—Nero—and Nero got word to me,” Marco explained, taking the old bandage off
Becca’s arm.

Becca felt much better knowing that these goggs were connected to Mahdi.

“I traveled to Cape Horn right away and asked the head of the Warriors in America to get to the Mississippi,” Marco continued, wrapping a fresh bandage around Becca’s arm.
“She’s been looking for Ava for the past two days.”

“But she hasn’t found her,” Becca said dully.

“Not yet,” Marco said. “But we’re still hopeful. We didn’t find you right away, either. We circled the waters near the Williwaw’s cave for a couple of days,
searching for you. When a bad storm came up out of nowhere, we thought it might be the wind spirit’s doing and that you might be coming up. That’s how he works—getting the ghosts
to drive intruders to the surface, then bashing them against the rocks.”

“He sure bashed me,” Becca said, flinching at the memory of the impact.

“El got the boat close to the rocks, and I brought you in with a net. You were out cold. Soon as I had you on board, El gunned it. This is a speedboat. It does eighty knots on smooth seas;
fifty in rough ones. We were knocked about a bit, but she got us out of the storm.”

Becca watched Marco expertly cover her new bandage with tape. “You’re pretty good at this,” she said. “Do you make a habit of rescuing mermaids?”

He smiled. “Not many mermaids, I admit. But this boat—it’s called the
Marlin
—is fitted with a saltwater tank to transport sick and wounded sea creatures. We try
to do our part, though it’s getting harder, with—”

“Here you go,” Elisabetta interrupted as she returned with a mug of soup. “Drink this down. It’ll do you good.”

“Thank you,” Becca said, taking the mug. She felt reassured enough to try it.

“I hope you like it,” Elisabetta said, frowning. “I’m not quite sure how moon jelly soup should taste.”

Becca took a sip. “It’s delicious,” she said. “But I meant thank you for more than the soup. Thank you for saving my life.”

“You’re welcome,” Elisabetta said with a shrug. “Part of the job.”

“You made the Williwaw pretty angry,” Marco said. “Did you get what you were after?”

Becca hesitated. It wasn’t safe to say too much about the talismans.

“It’s okay, Becca. Mahdi told Nero about the talismans, and Nero told me. He trusts us. And we trust him,” Marco said.

Becca instinctively reached for her pocket—and realized with a start that she wasn’t wearing her jacket. She looked around anxiously.

Marco must’ve understood what she was searching for, because he lifted something from the bench behind him. He motioned for Becca to give him her mug, and in exchange he handed her the
jacket.

It dawned on Becca that he and Elisabetta could easily have helped themselves to the locket if they’d wanted to.

But it was still in the pocket. “Yes,” she said with immense relief. “I got it.”

“That’s great news!” Marco said excitedly.

“And bad news, too,” said Elisabetta.

“How so?” Becca asked, draping her jacket over the side of her tank. Marco handed her mug back.

“When we picked you up, the death riders were only three leagues from the
Achilles
,” Elisabetta explained. “I’m sure that by now they’ve staked out the
wreck and spied on the ghosts. They’ll have heard them talking about a mermaid who took something from the Williwaw and was rescued by humans in a boat. Vallerio will be informed. He’ll
get word to Rafe Mfeme, and as soon as he does, Mfeme will be after us. If he’s not already. He has speedboats, too.”

Marco smiled at his sister. “But his drivers aren’t as crazy as you,” he said.

Elisabetta laughed. “Still, I’m not taking any chances. We’re only in the southern Atlantic and we need to get all the way to the North Sea. Boats will meet us along the way so
we can refuel, but we’ve got to keep going.” She gave her brother a look. “Okay, Marco?”

“Okay,” Marco said. Elisabetta headed topside. Marco turned to Becca. “I made her stop and cut the engines so she could eat something and rest. But she’s right. Mfeme
could show up at any minute. It’s best to keep moving.”

They both heard a deep thrum as Elisabetta started the
Marlin
’s engines. She opened the throttle and a second later, they were off.

“I should leave you,” Marco said, “and let you get some rest, too. El forgot her coffee mug. I’m going to bring it to her.”

“What’s coffee?”

“The drink of the gods. To terraggogs, at least,” Marco joked. “And nothing you should try if you want to get some sleep.” He smiled, then added, “It’s
okay
to sleep, you know. You’re safe now.”

Becca nodded. Her eyes felt so heavy. Her body was aching and exhausted.

You’re safe now.

As she looked into his kind eyes, Becca believed, for the first time in many months, that she was.

T
HE DARKNESS WAS a living thing, watchful and crouching, all eyes and teeth.

Creatures moved about in it, seeing but unseen. Ling could feel them. She was in the Abyss, about two leagues from the prison camp, where her father had told her the puzzle ball might have
drifted.

She held a fat moon jelly in her hand. It was her only source of light. She couldn’t cast the most basic illuminata. She couldn’t cast
anything.
The sea wasp’s venom
had sickened her so badly, she’d lost most of her magic. Even her omnivoxa powers were weak. She could speak only a handful of simple languages. Ling shone the moon jelly’s glow over
the Abyss’s jagged south side, looking for Sycorax’s ancient talisman. She moved back and forth along a section of wall and, finding nothing, descended farther.

As she did, a sharp pain stabbed at her brain.

Depth sickness,
she thought.
It’s starting
.

She wasn’t surprised. She’d been searching for ten hours straight. She knew the symptoms—headache and nausea, followed by disorientation. Then things got really bad. Victims
struggled for oxygen. They coughed blood and became uncoordinated. A brain bleed usually finished them off. Either that or suffocation.

After Ling and the manta ray had parted company, she had crawled into a cave and stayed there for two days—sick and shivering—waiting for the swelling in her tail to go down. On the
third day, hunger had driven her out to forage. She’d found fish eggs and some bitter seaweed that she’d choked down. The food gave her energy and strength. On the fourth day, she set
off in pursuit of the puzzle ball.

Ling knew she was lucky to be alive. She didn’t feel lucky, though. She had no idea how long it would take her to regain her magical powers. What if they never came back? That thought was
so terrifying, she couldn’t bear to dwell on it.

She kept moving down the south wall of the Abyss now, sweeping her tail fins over clusters of tube worms to see if the puzzle ball had landed in their midst, peering into small caves and
niches.

A wave of dizziness washed over her. She closed her eyes until it passed, then started laughing. She was searching for a
ball
, no bigger than the palm of her hand…in the
Great
Abyss
!

“I’ve lost my mind,” she said out loud.

The puzzle ball could have landed on any one of a million ledges that lined both sides of the Abyss. It could be buried in thick silt or wedged into a crack. Or it could be leagues below her,
and still falling. Legend had it that the Abyss was bottomless.

“This is totally insane,” she said out loud, still laughing. “It’s impossible!”

She laughed so hard she started to struggle for breath—which made her realize that her depth sickness was getting worse.

“You’re becoming hysterical,” she told herself. “Knock it off.
Right now
.”

Ling was strong; she knew she was. And strong mer didn’t lose it. They didn’t come apart. They got the job done. She descended again. A small hollow lay in a rock below her. Holding
the jelly in one hand, she grasped the edge of the cavity with the other and peered into it.

She didn’t even have time to scream as a bony face with gaping jaws lunged at her. The giant fangtooth’s sharp teeth missed her face by a hairsbreadth. Panicking, Ling raised both
hands to protect herself from the fish and dropped the moon jelly. The current carried it away. The fangtooth shot toward it.

“No!”
Ling cried.

But it was too late. The fish snapped its jaws shut on the tasty jelly and swallowed it whole.

Ling didn’t know what the fangtooth did next, or where it went, because she couldn’t see
anything
. The water around her was still and silent, the darkness overwhelming. It
felt to Ling as if it was swallowing her whole, the way the fangtooth had devoured the jelly.

All she could hear was the sound of her own breathing, rapid and shallow. Dizziness gripped her again. It was so bad this time that she became violently ill. When the racking spasms finally
subsided, she realized she had no choice but to ascend. Her breathing was too ragged; it had to normalize. She had to find another source of light.

She swam upward, but after taking a few strokes, she realized the water was getting colder, not warmer. Was she swimming down instead of up?

Dizziness struck again. Ling swam in the direction of the wall, hands outstretched. If she could find it, she could steady herself against it and hopefully beat back the spinning in her head.
But the wall was nowhere to be found. Ling was flailing in the black depths now, completely disoriented.

And then she saw a light.

“Oh, thank gods!” she said, swimming toward it. “Hey!” she shouted. “Wait! I’m over here.”

The light glowed more brightly. It came toward her. Ling put on a burst of speed, rushing to meet it.

And then she stopped short, unable to believe what she was seeing.

A man was carrying the light. A human. He had blond hair and empty eyes. He wore a black pearl at his throat.

“Hello again, Ling,” he said.

“No!”
Ling cried.

It was a face from her nightmares. The face of a monster.

Orfeo.

“N
O,”
LING WHISPERED. “It can’t be.”

Orfeo was here with her in the Abyss.

Crying out in fear, she turned and bolted away from him—only to be brought up short by the appearance of someone even more terrifying.

Morsa.

The goddess was swimming toward Ling, her serpent’s tail twining in the water, her lipless mouth twisted into a smile. The scorpions wreathing her head raised their venomous stingers.

“Have you brought me a sacrifice, Orfeo?” she asked in a dry, dusty voice. “You are ever my faithful servant.”

Ling screamed. She tried to swim away from Morsa, away from Orfeo, but wherever she went, they were there, reaching for her.

Whimpering, she closed her eyes and curled into a ball, waiting to feel Orfeo’s rough hand clamp down on her, or Morsa’s lethal sting.

But she felt nothing.

Slowly, she opened her eyes. Both Orfeo and Morsa were gone.

“They were never here,” she said to herself. “You’re hallucinating.”

Ling knew she had to ascend.
Now
. If only she could find a creature that wasn’t a predator, one that could tell her which way to go. She needed help but was afraid to call out for
it. What if her pleas summoned another fangtooth…or something worse?