Cursed Legacy: Lord of the Ocean #3 Read online

  Cursed Legacy

  Lord of the Ocean #3

  Jade Kerrion

  Contents

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Epilogue

  About the Author

  Other Books By Jade Kerrion

  Copyright © 2019 by Jade Kerrion

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without prior written permission.

  Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.

  Cursed Legacy / Jade Kerrion—1st ed.

  Cover Design by Rebecca Frank

  Chapter 1

  Sunlight flittered over the deep blue of the Atlantic Ocean, breaking into fractured shafts of light as it pierced the depths. Far beneath the surface, schools of silvery fish scattered into living geometric swirls, framing the torpedo as it streaked through the water.

  Bubbles and surface splashes did not follow in the wake of the torpedo; its propulsion systems were too advanced to make so telling a mistake. It was invisible to human eyes, and almost invisible to human technology.

  Its designers, however, had not accounted for the merfolk’s acute sensitivity to the shifting water currents.

  Several hundred meters south of the speeding torpedo, Kai, prince of the Beltiamatu—the lords of the ocean—twisted around in the water. His eyebrows drew together in the hint of a frown as he swam away from the ship, the Endling, to separate himself from the ripples created by the churning wake of its engines.

  His body undulated in the graceful way of the merfolk, although he had legs instead of a tail. The aether core he carried within him had stabilized his unrelenting and agonizing transformations between legs and a tail. He could, perhaps in theory, transform his legs back into a tail, but he could not work up an appetite for that kind of pain.

  Not yet.

  Perhaps never.

  Motion swirled beside him. Thaleia’s silvery hair and diaphanous tail fins swayed in the water. “How far is it?” she asked, her voice as melodic and haunting as the song of the whales.

  “Too close.” He glanced at her. His breath caught; his thoughts stuttered on the word, “Mother.” He couldn’t get the word past his lips even though he knew she was his mother. She was still Thaleia to him.

  The life-changing transition got lost somewhere between his head and his heart. A part of him craved the connection; the rest of him didn’t know what to do with it.

  Far easier to focus on the immediate crisis. “Warn the ship, then stay with—” His voice caught, too, on the word father. “—Badur. Keep him safe,” he finished.

  Thaleia nodded. The wry curve of her bittersweet smile told him that she was perfectly aware of his emotional struggle. “What are you going to do?”

  “The other torpedoes were motion-, not heat-seeking. I might be able to turn them.”

  Their eyes met. “Be careful,” Thaleia murmured, then darted into the shadow of the Endling.

  A muscle twitched in Kai’s smooth cheek. He had to keep the crew and passengers on the Endling safe; Naia was among them. His stomach tightened at the thought of the mermaid he loved—and did not deserve to have. She had risked her life to save him, and for that, she was dying, poisoned by and almost delirious from the pain of the irukandji stings.

  Her only hope of healing was at the Beltiamatu colony, but their journey from Atlantis to the Levantine Sea had been dogged by frigates, submarines, and their arsenals of missiles and torpedoes.

  His job was stopping those torpedoes.

  Kai swam against the quickening currents, acutely aware that he was less swift with legs than a merman’s tail. He stared at the torpedo barreling toward him, taking in the details of its markings and its delicate corrections in the path it cut through the water.

  He had, by necessity, learned to recognize—and defeat—them.

  The American-made torpedo was motion-seeking.

  The perfect weapon for hunting merfolk.

  Kai’s eyes narrowed. Dying was not part of the plan, even if it was one of the two likely outcomes when trying to outswim a torpedo. He darted to the side, twisted into a U-turn, then swam hard, perpendicular to the torpedo’s path.

  His timing perfect—and a fraction of a second from being utterly wrong—he sped in front of the torpedo. It turned to follow him. He kicked hard, spending more energy and creating more motion than the speed and distance demanded. He had to keep the torpedo on him instead of allowing it to turn onto the stronger wake of the Endling.

  Kai tugged the torpedo into loops, arcing to the surface then diving low, twisting into spirals that would have shaken all but the most advanced military technology. The torpedo, however, stayed on him, so close he could almost feel its propulsion churning the currents that accelerated him—and the torpedo—forward.

  His muscles burned from the effort, as did his lungs. The Endling had to be far enough away by now. If he could draw the torpedo back to the submarine—

  His mind recoiled.

  No, he couldn’t—wouldn’t—do it.

  He had seen cities burn. He had—himself—destroyed Shulim, the mer-capital, to end the plague that the diseased merfolk spread through the oceans.

  There had been enough death, and he had been the cause of too much of it.

  He did not know where, or how, the war between the Beltiamatu and the heir of Atlantis would end.

  He knew only that he was sick of continuing it.

  Down to the seabed, then. He would lead the torpedo down to the ocean floor and hope that he could twist away in time from the impact of the explosion.

  He turned to dive, then felt the whisper of a different current brush against his skin.

  Not strong enough to be an approaching submarine. And the Endling was too far away.

  Another torpedo.

  And it was headed straight for him.

  Kai did not have enough time to detonate the first torpedo before picking up the second.

  If he turned away from the second—and he still could safely turn away—the torpedo would travel straight on, past him, and fix on the Endling.

  And he did not dare pick up both. Two motion-sensing torpedoes traveling side by side behind him would likely explode, and at a time he could neither predict nor control.

  Kai’s mind churned through the rest of his limited possibilities. Leading the first torpedo into the side of the second was likely the safest recourse for him, but the margin for error was too large. If he miscalculated his speed, if the first torpedo did not graze close enough to the second, he would not have time for another run before the second
torpedo fixed its sights on the Endling.

  Head on.

  It was the only way.

  Teeth gritted against muscle fatigue and the rapid—too rapid—pounding of his heart, he twisted into a turn and led the first torpedo toward the second. The water trembled, peeling apart before him and before the second torpedo to create a dead zone between them, absent of currents—like the quiet before a storm.

  The second torpedo emerged, like a pinprick in the darkness, then expanded rapidly as it closed the distance.

  He was mad. What he was doing was insane.

  What he was attempting, no Beltiamatu had ever been crazy—or desperate—enough to try.

  But a torpedo strike on the Endling would be catastrophic, so what choice did he have?

  The first torpedo pursued him, so close its warhead almost touched his toes. Perfect, his mind noted clinically. The smaller the distance between him and the two torpedoes, the higher the chances of mutual detonation.

  Willpower and raw nerve kept him on target until it seemed as if the second torpedo was the only thing in his field of vision. The surroundings blurred, the information pointless in the face of nearly certain death.

  Turn now, his instincts screamed at him. Turn!

  Not yet. The several feet of water between him and the second torpedo still gave the first torpedo enough space to eke out a sharp turn to follow him.

  He needed inches between him and the incoming torpedo.

  Or better yet, almost no space at all.

  Turn! Turn! Turn!

  His rapid heartbeats flooded his body with adrenaline. He was so close he could have merely extended himself to touch his fingertip to the warhead of the second torpedo.

  Instead, in a single, swift motion, Kai rolled aside. The sudden motion wrenched pain through his shoulder and back, but even that was nothing compared to the searing blast of heat, the rolling sound waves, and the shrapnel that sprayed outward like an exploding star.

  His world flashed white-hot with anguish.

  Chapter 2

  Gossamer-thin sea foam spread like a tattered bridal veil over the water, dissipating in the wake of the Endling.

  Nothing on the surface of the water hinted at the underwater frenzy.

  But Zamir, leaning over the rail of the Endling, knew.

  He was once the mer-king. He could still read the subtle twist of the currents.

  He was Kai’s grandfather. He knew his grandson well enough to realize Kai was entangled in that swirling madness, doing everything he could to protect those on the ship—Meifeng, the navigator; Corey, the medic; the mermaid Naia, unconscious in an inflated life raft filled with water, and of course, Ginny Waters.

  She stood beside him, a wisp of a human woman, a much-too-young professor of ancient civilizations whose idea of the great outdoors was a picnic on the university quad. Yet, she had trekked through pestilence-plagued jungles and swum through titan-infested waters.

  The aether core she carried—a gift she had unwittingly accepted from Kai weeks earlier—gave her extraordinary reality-altering powers.

  The creativity and courage required to wield it, however, came from within Ginny.

  She had many reasons for accompanying Kai and Zamir, but he suspected—from her frequent oh-my-God-what-are-you-doing glares—that she considered thumping common sense into the thick skulls of her Beltiamatu companions her highest calling.

  He didn’t know what to do with her.

  The problem was that, increasingly, he didn’t know what he would do without her, either.

  The ship rippled over a wave that should not have been there.

  Zamir had just enough warning to grip Ginny’s arm.

  She yelped louder than the resonant boom rising from the ocean. A hundred feet south of the Endling, water surged twenty feet into the air, its cascading spray spreading like a fountain. The ship, a compact pirate hunter, with space enough for six crew, tossed on the sudden waves.

  “Was that a torpedo?” Ginny demanded shrilly.

  Zamir shook his head. A muscle twitched in his smooth cheek, but his voice remained flat. “At least two.”

  “But…” The spray of water settled like white foam over the waves. “Two? Kai exploded them against the sea floor, right?”

  Zamir shook his head again. His knowledge and familiarity with human weapons came from the shard of Henry Jackson—USAF test pilot, and former first mate of the marine research vessel, Veritas—one of the four aspects tangled in the physical and psychic chimera he had become. “If they had exploded against the sea floor, they would never have caused that much surface disruption.”

  Ginny drew a sharp breath. “And…Kai?”

  He gripped the rail, his knuckles white. “Turn the ship,” Zamir tossed the order over his shoulder. “We have to check on Kai.”

  “Aye,” Meifeng shouted through the open door of the bridge. “Better make it snappy, or we’ll lose our hard-won lead on the cult.”

  The Endling battled the currents, riding up one wave, then sliding down the other side. Meifeng cut the engine as the ship neared the site of the explosion, and the Endling drifted sideways.

  Ginny leaned over the rail. Her gaze swept across the water. “I don’t see him.”

  “Unconscious Beltiamatu don’t float.” Zamir shrugged off his jacket and kicked off his shoes, before diving into the water.

  The ocean welcomed him back. After all, he had once been the king of the Beltiamatu, lord of the ocean. Many deaths and transformations later, he could still breathe underwater even though the rest of him was no longer perfectly optimized to live in the sea. He glanced over his shoulder at the two sleek figures following the ship, their tails undulating in the water.

  Badur and Thaleia.

  Once, long ago, they had gone by Bahari and Taraneh. His son, and the mermaid for whom his son had sacrificed everything.

  Tightness clenched around Zamir’s chest. Kai and Ginny had faithfully kept his identity a secret from the merfolk. The secrecy had initially stemmed from practicality. It was easier for Kai to rally the scattered Beltiamatu survivors if they did not have to contend with their polarizing king.

  The secrecy, however, had become personal when Zamir and Kai finally discovered that the blind merman Badur was the missing link between grandfather and grandson.

  And then it had seemed even more important to keep the secret from Badur and Thaleia.

  Some rifts were too vast—too infinite—to bridge.

  Badur’s hand rested lightly on Thaleia’s lower arm. He was, despite his blindness, functional. He and Thaleia had found ways around his disability. “Kai?” Badur’s voice, almost as melodic and harmonious as the ocean song, carried a sharp, even authoritative, edge. It seemed that his years as heir to the Beltiamatu throne were not completely lost.

  “I don’t see him.” An undercurrent of panic rippled through Thaleia’s voice. A mother’s love. A mother’s fear.

  “Stay by the ship,” Zamir told them. “I’ll find him.”

  “No!” Badur snapped. “He is our prince—”

  Zamir bit back a snarl. He was getting tired of Badur’s insistence that only the merfolk gave a damn about Kai. No one cares more for him. I raised him from the moment he—a starving, screaming newborn, seemingly an orphan—was handed over to me. He was an orphan only because both of you chose each other instead of him. He is my grandson, and for nearly a century, I was his only family.

  But of course, neither Badur nor Thaleia knew it—and despite Kai’s increasing objections to the perpetuation of the lie, Zamir wanted to keep it that way. They—all of them—had too much to do. The survival of the Beltiamatu race was at stake. No one could afford to get bogged down and sidetracked by emotions—by resentment and hate—decades old.

  Perhaps when it was over—

  But not until then.

  “You cannot find Kai. You are blind,” Zamir threw out the facts. He did not say, “You are useless,” but Badur must have surely heard th
e unuttered words.

  A stricken expression passed over Badur’s face.

  Zamir would not have recognized his son. It wasn’t about the century that had passed since he had last seen Badur. It was more about the hardship his son and Thaleia had endured in the colonies, far from the splendor and wealth of Shulim, the mer-capital. Deprivation had weakened them, undone them. Blindness had further wrecked Badur, turning him into a bitter, haggard mockery of his former self.

  There was little—nothing—of the son Zamir remembered in the blind merman before him. Except perhaps in the way he raised his chin, the way he stared straight at the world, unflinching, his blindness notwithstanding, and in the way he had challenged the titan and offered up his life for Kai’s.

  A father’s love. A father’s fear.

  Zamir glanced at Thaleia, and she nodded, placing her other hand on Badur’s. She, at least, had a better handle on the situation. It was easier for Zamir to find and save Kai, if he did not have to also worry about the safety of a blind merman. Badur and Thaleia hovered in the water, close to the Endling as Zamir dived deep, following the currents until they dissipated.

  The trail died far above the ocean floor.

  And Kai was nowhere to be seen.

  Not killed, surely. There was not enough blood in the water for that. No mangled remains. He forced his voice into the higher pitch of the Beltiamatu, and hoped the water would carry the vibrations farther. “Kai!”

  Moments passed.

  The only thing he could hear was the rush of blood in his ears, keeping pulse with the rapid thudding of his heard.