Cursed Legacy: Lord of the Ocean #3 Read online

  Then from far away, a weak reply. “Grandfather…”

  Zamir kicked hard, diving until he reached a rocky sea shelf. Corals and barnacles encrusted on its surface, creating a garden in the middle of the ocean. Red column and pink fan corals trembled delicately as the water stirred around them—

  Water streaked with thin crimson trails.

  Long, dark shadows passed over the profusion of color, casting the yellow brain corals and purple-tinged sponges into deep shadow. Zamir glanced up as lean, striped shapes darted over the reef, their movements quickening at the prospect of a feast.

  Tiger sharks.

  Chapter 3

  The tiger sharks found Kai before Zamir did.

  Zamir pounded a rock against the sea shelf, but the vibrations were not enough to distract the sharks from their hunt. Their jaws slid back to expose jagged-edged teeth. Their tails flicked as they lunged at a huddled shape concealed among the corals.

  Kai uncurled and struck out at the nearest shark. Kai’s fist slammed into the shark’s pointed nose, and the predator reeled away, but another shark attacked, sinking its teeth into Kai’s side.

  Kai arched, screaming.

  The shark twisted its head, and blood gushed into the water. Shredded flesh hung from its jaws. But before it could attack again, Zamir closed the distance, yanked the WASP knife from his belt, and plunged it into the shark. The injector button released a flood of air into the shark’s body, disrupting its buoyancy. The creature’s unblinking black eyes seemed as empty and soulless, but the scarcely perceptible flick of its fins and tail hinted at its panic. It floated, turning belly-side up. The blood—Kai’s blood—drew the rest of its pack in around it.

  The tiger sharks accelerated for the kill.

  The immobilized shark vanished beneath flashing jaws and thrashing fins. Zamir ignored the feeding frenzy above the reef. Fear roared through his head so loudly he could hardly hear Kai’s choked breaths. Kai’s eyes were glazed from shock and pain. His side, torn by the shark’s jaws, was nothing compared to the raw mangled mess of his back. His skin was burned, his flesh charred. He had escaped death by torpedo, but only barely.

  “Anything broken?” Zamir asked softly.

  Kai’s only response was a slow drifting of his gaze to Zamir’s face. His lips, cracked and bleeding, breathed a word. “Grandfather…”

  “I’m here. I’ve got you.”

  Kai’s shoulders slumped as his eyes closed. His head sagged against Zamir’s chest. Zamir’s teeth clenched. Time to get out before the sharks sought a new target and a fresh feast. He heaved Kai onto his back. Kai’s arms dangled over Zamir’s shoulders. He grabbed them and held them tight against his chest, then started swimming toward the Endling.

  Kai’s hesitation before each of his shallow, pained breaths hinted at bruised, or even broken, ribs. He was a deadweight; Zamir wondered if he was even conscious. Kai took too many risks. As the heir to the Beltiamatu throne, he ought to be more careful. Ought to let others do the fighting for him.

  Others like who? His blind father? His mother—whom his father desperately needed as a guide?

  Or his grandfather who didn’t even have a merman’s body anymore?

  Ginny, who didn’t have a damn clue as to what she was doing with aether?

  Naia, who drifted in a delirium, dying from irukandji poison in her veins?

  Who else was supposed to step in and do the fighting if not him?

  The water rippled past Zamir as far away a current was born.

  Subtle, certainly, but also swift, sure, and closing fast.

  Another torpedo.

  And there was no one left on the Endling who could take it out or lead it away—except for him.

  But Kai— If he left his grandson here, to chase down the torpedo, he might never find Kai again. His teeth clenched tight against the damnable lack of options, he swam hard toward the shadowy hull of the Endling, framed by sunlight.

  He was a hundred feet from the ship when Thaleia broke away from the Endling and swam toward him. “There’s another torpedo—” Her eyes suddenly fixed on Kai’s face, then widened with equal parts shock and anguish.

  Zamir eased Kai off his shoulders and handed him to his mother. “Be careful with his back. And tell Meifeng to get the Endling moving.”

  Thaleia did not slow him down with any questions. She swam Kai back to the ship. Zamir turned and pushed against the current spawned by the incoming torpedo. Moments later, the Endling’s engines emitted a low rumble, and a flood of water swarmed out in its wake, disrupting all local currents.

  The torpedo’s smaller imprint vanished in the babble of information. Damn it! Kai or one of the other Beltiamatu would have been able to pick out the subtle differences.

  Zamir, however, no longer possessed a Beltiamatu’s body or its perfected awareness of the ocean. He could follow a strong current, but weak and subtle currents were lost on him. He had lost the torpedo. All he could do was stay on the course he had been following and hope that he regained enough awareness of the current before the torpedo came upon him, unaware.

  He swam hard, putting distance between him and the Endling. The currents churned by the wake of the Endling were just fading into background noise when he finally picked up on the torpedo’s surge—fast, strong, and—

  His head snapped up. Less than fifty feet ahead of him, the torpedo parted the water. Zamir kicked across the path of the torpedo, but the weapon surged past him without turning. Closer! Zamir chased the torpedo—the reduced water pressure in its wake gave him a burst of speed—and he grabbed the torpedo’s small side fin. Thin bands protruded on each side, where the torpedo had been welded together. They were the only safe places to touch the activated warhead. The torpedo was motion-seeking and exploded on impact. The tip of the warhead was most sensitive, but the sides were too.

  He couldn’t risk an explosion while sitting on the torpedo, but he had to turn it. Kicking hard, he pulled himself along the length of the torpedo, touching only the thin side bands. When he had reached near the front of the torpedo, he turned himself, so that his legs extended over the warhead. Then, he kicked off to the side.

  The torpedo angled toward the flurry of bubbles he created, gradually turning until it was pointed 180 degrees from its previous direction, which would have taken it straight to the Endling.

  Instead, in the distant blue, three large, long shapes loomed in the water. Far from sunlight, the gray of their hulls appeared black.

  Submarines.

  Zamir’s eyes narrowed. Perfect.

  He adjusted the direction of the torpedo, kicking enough bubbles in front of it to keep it fixed on the center submarine. The three submarines did not attempt to change course, although they must have surely picked up the incoming torpedo on sonar. The decoys spent their energy uselessly behind the submarines as the torpedo closed in from the front.

  Zamir allowed himself to float off the torpedo. He glanced over his shoulder. It was still right on target, and the submarine was almost too large to miss.

  He just had to get out of the blast radius.

  Zamir swam as hard as he could, but the explosion propelled him forward, flinging him through the water as if he were weightless. His senses spun, and bright lights were still flashing through his skull when he finally straightened and glanced back at the trio of submarines.

  Two of them were still there, their running lights scarcely visible behind the profusion of debris from the center submarine’s shattered hull. Small specks—human-shaped specks—floated among the debris.

  Zamir grimaced against tightening sensation in his chest.

  No!

  He refused to feel guilty over the human lives lost. If Jacob Hayes was so determined to drag humans into the ancient war between the Beltiamatu and the Atlanteans, he could deal with consequences of lives lost.

  Even though, once, it had been the place of the Beltiamatu to stand between the humans and the power-hungry Atlanteans.

&nb
sp; Times change. Zamir ignored the painful twinge of guilt. Now the Beltiamatu were fighting for survival.

  And it all hinged upon Kai.

  Zamir had to swim hard to catch up with the Endling. Motion flurried beneath the hull. Both Badur and Thaleia turned as he approached. “How is Kai?” Zamir asked.

  Thaleia shook her head, gesturing toward the kelp hammock secured beneath the Endling’s hull—a safe place for a resting mer-prince. “I’ve treated his wounds with gishtil, but I’ve never seen burn wounds so horrific. Can…can Corey do anything for him?”

  How desperate did she have to be to turn to a human for the care of her son?

  Zamir shook his head. “Unlikely. I know humans can treat burn wounds, but at hospitals—not from a first aid kit on a small ship.”

  Badur snarled. “Once again, Kai’s gotten hurt protecting you and your kind.”

  “My kind?” Zamir clenched his hands into fists. “You know nothing about me and my kind.”

  “Arman—the first commander of the starship that brought the Illojim to Earth?” Badur sneered.

  “A facet. You know nothing about the rest of me.”

  “Jackson—a human, a warrior among men? And is it true what Ginny says, that you carry a facet of Nergal in you too?”

  Damn it. Zamir and Ginny had spoken together—often—on the deck in quiet tones. What else had the Beltiamatu overheard?

  Badur went on. “We let you and your companions stay because Kai insisted upon it. As if he owed you some kind of debt for having freed him from the Atlanteans. I don’t know what kind of unholy influence you possess over our prince—over my son—but it ends here. He has suffered enough, undertaking risks like retrieving the aether core from Atlantis—”

  “He was the only one who could carry the core!” Zamir’s eyes narrowed. “But you can too, can’t you? Your blood is royal, like his. Blind or not, you could have carried that core as easily as he!”

  “We don’t need that core!” Badur snarled. “I’ve lived in the colonies almost longer than I lived at Shulim, and I can assure you that the aether core isn’t necessary for survival. There was no need to retrieve it. No need to risk the dangers of Atlantis. There was no need to antagonize the Atlanteans and their human allies. But Kai took on the deadly task of leading the torpedo away only to save the ship and its human occupants, not the Beltiamatu.” He jabbed his finger in the direction of the Endling. “Your external influence on our prince must end.”

  “External influence? Like the external influence Thaleia exerted on you to abandon your responsibilities as prince of the Beltiamatu? To abandon your only son?”

  Badur’s jaw dropped. His roar of fury extinguished the muffled sound of Thaleia’s shocked, pained gasp. “You know nothing about the traditions of the Beltiamatu, or about the decisions I made.”

  “I know far more than you think!” Zamir retorted. “You defied the tradition that demanded Thaleia pay—with her life—for the birth of your son, the continuation of the royal line. You—who were the only heir to the throne and your father’s only child—abandoned your duties and fled from Shulim with her. And when she gave birth, and when your father’s guards came for you, what did you do? You chose her—over your father, over your kingdom, over even your newborn son!”

  “Chose? What choice did I have? They would have killed her!”

  “We all have choices, and you made your choice. She mattered more to you than your people and your son. Why play up the needs of your people and your son now that it is convenient to do so? They mattered nothing at all to you for the past hundred years.”

  “You know nothing of this!” Thaleia shouted. “They blinded him. Castrated him.”

  “So that he would not be a threat to the throne?” Zamir returned. “The soldiers would not have done this to him if he had not insisted so. They would have simply killed you, and brought him and the infant back to the king. Back to me!”

  Badur’s face went blank with shock.

  Thaleia recoiled.

  She shook her head, her silver hair swaying in the water. “You…” Her gaze swept over Zamir from head to toe. “No, it cannot be. You are not the mer-king.”

  “You want to know how many physical and psychic shards exist in this body?” His lips tugged away, baring his teeth in a snarl. “Four—Arman, Jackson, Nergal, and me.” His gaze flicked to Badur. “I had no reason to associate Badur and Thaleia with Bahari and Taraneh, especially not after I’d given you up for dead. Especially when there was hardly anything left to physically associate you with the son I remembered. Your hardship and your pain have changed you.”

  “And still there is no grief, no sympathy in your voice,” Badur sneered, but his voice roiled with anguish.

  “I grieved, a hundred years ago, when my soldiers returned and told me you had died beside your lover, fighting for her life. I grieved every night for decades when I watched over your sleeping son and saw in his features my memory of yours. I worried for years on how Kai—too young for the throne—would step up to his responsibilities. It seems that I needn’t have worried. Kai knows how to lead. He knows how to be king. He has wrestled with difficult choices, and made the right ones—choosing the survival of the ocean over his own people. He protects those under his leadership. You—on the other hand—know only how to live in the moment, choose in the moment, never contemplating the consequences of your decisions that extend beyond you! That it could scar—forever—the son you abandoned. Do you think you can return into his life now? Pretend affection? Claim influence? Protect him from me—his own grandfather? His only family?”

  Kai groaned softly.

  Thaleia rushed to his side. Badur followed the swaying currents. “Kai?” Badur called quietly. “We are here.”

  But Kai’s gaze, glazed from unrelenting pain, passed unrecognizing over their faces, then fixed on something over their shoulders. His lips moved, the sound scarcely audible. “Grandfather,” he whispered in Beltiamatu.

  Zamir pushed past Thaleia and held Kai’s hand. It hurt to realize how little strength there was in Kai’s grip. “I am here, Kai.”

  Their eyes met briefly, then Kai’s eyes closed, as if he was finally able to relax enough to sleep, knowing that his grandfather watched over him. A ghost of a smile passed over his lips as he faded into unconsciousness.

  Thaleia pressed her hand over her mouth to stifle her soft sobs. The grief in her eyes spoke of the shattering guilt.

  In the moment of his most naked need, his most wretched pain, Kai had turned to family—and it had not been his parents.

  Had they really expected him to? Zamir wondered. Did they think Kai was raised so poorly, so deprived of affection that he would crave the little dribbled out by the parents who had chosen each other over him?

  Badur’s lean face, set in sharp lines, accentuated his haggard appearance. The curtains of his eyelids sagged over his eye sockets.

  There was, now that Zamir was looking for it, fragments of the prince Badur had once been in the person he had become.

  Zamir did not know how much of it was spurred by his own wistful imagination.

  He had grieved for his dead son.

  And he wasn’t certain he was ready to forgive his living son.

  Badur looked up sharply, glancing over his shoulder. “Another torpedo.”

  Zamir was too close to the currents churned up by the Endling; he could not sense anything. He swam away from the ship, in the direction of Badur’s glance. The ocean shifted around him, but he could not feel the subtle pulse of an incoming torpedo. He hovered in the water, endless blue surrounding him. The Endling was a speck in the distance.

  And nothing.

  Anger chased disbelief in circles around his mind. Had Badur lied to him?

  He was turning in the water to hasten back to the ship, when the current brushed against him, heralding the approach of a torpedo.

  It was an odd thing to feel relief while swimming toward a torpedo, but it mattered that Badur h
ad not lied.

  The warhead emerged from the darkness, swift and sleek. Fortunately, like the ones before it, it was light and experimental, intended for small and swiftly moving ships that could change direction quickly. Zamir turned the torpedo almost as easily as he had the last and sent it toward the submarines.

  But just as that explosion roiled through the water, another distant explosion rippled toward him.

  The Endling.

  His heart racing, fear lending him greater speed, Zamir raced back to the Endling. The speck grew larger far quicker than it should. The ship was dead in the water, but there was no hull damage that he could see. Zamir swam up to the surface and popped his head up above the water. The air was heavy, stripped of breezes or anything alive. The sky was a brilliant, cloudless blue.

  Smoke rose from the back of the Endling. Engine damage, possibly from a missile, was Zamir’s best guess—a glancing attack, not enough to sink the ship, but enough to stall it.

  He had to get back to the Endling. Until they were on the move again, the ship had to be defended. And if there were casualties on board, he would not know until he reached the ship. At least, Kai, under the hull, had been protected from the worst of the attack—

  Kai—

  Zamir’s thoughts froze as his gaze swept over the smooth underside of the Endling’s hull. No kelp hammock. No hovering Beltiamatu.

  Badur and Thaleia were gone.

  And they had taken Kai with them.

  Chapter 4

  “What do you mean gone?” Ginny raised her gaze from the smoking engine. “Where would they take him?”

  “Just fix it, will you?” Zamir pointed at the dark energy vortex swirling in the palm of her hand. The heart of the aether core shimmered, purple sizzles darting through the black like lightning through a storm cloud.

  Ginny’s blond hair, pulled back in a messy ponytail, swayed, the tips brushing against her shoulders. “We were going to be fine. The missile barely grazed us. I blew it up before it struck us, but one of the fragments fell through the deck and hit the engine. The hull’s fine. We didn’t even get any water in the engine room.”