Cursed Throne: Lord of the Ocean #2 Page 2

  Something in Zamir—Jackson—recognized its sleek profile. Latest generation. Russian-designed. Motion-seeking, not heat-seeking.

  The perfect weapon for hunting beings living in the water.

  The torpedo streaked through the water, heading straight for where Kai was fighting off a small army of divers.

  Kai, focused on the immediate battle, would not be able to break away in time.

  Kicking hard, Zamir streaked in front of the torpedo. He had a fool’s chance of turning that weapon.

  But fool’s luck was with him. The missile twisted sharply in the water and surged after him. Great. Now what? Could have used a tail instead of legs.

  Yet, not for a moment was he tempted to ask Ginny to manipulate aether to grant him a tail. That dark energy vortex seemed to have a twisted, wicked mind of its own.

  Legs would have to suffice.

  Legs, a human’s knowledge of man-made weapons, and a merman’s knowledge of the ocean.

  He was not faster than the torpedo, although he had enough of a head start to lure the torpedo toward the surface.

  Toward the rocky islet that marked the grave of thousands of Beltiamatu.

  The waters grew warmer, noticeably so. The heat from the Earth’s core was still pouring from the shattered seabed, although the flow of lava had stilled and the islet was no longer growing, its boundaries expanding.

  These waters—more than any other—was home.

  Had been home.

  He spared a glance over his shoulder as the missile narrowed the distance between them. Ten seconds…no more.

  Zamir’s heart pounded, his head reeling from the effort. The muscles in his back contracted and relaxed, surging him forward in an undulating motion. He sliced through the water. The torpedo was so close, the cold metal tip touched his toes.

  At the last possible moment, he twisted aside.

  The torpedo surged past him—its sleek metallic body within inches of his face and chest—before it slammed into the sheer rock wall of the islet.

  Flames burst in front of his face. His vision turned white.

  Chapter 2

  Shit. Not going well.

  Ginny stared at the two submarines directly overhead, their hulls cutting off the light of the sun. Ominous shadows passed over the seabed. Darkness peeled off the hull like butterflies darting off flowers.

  Divers.

  Kai was too far away, still battling the divers from the first set of three submarines. He was holding his own, and winning, one life at a time.

  And Zamir…

  Zamir was nowhere to be seen. Not after he had raced away, with a torpedo almost literally on top of him. Ginny had clamped her hands over her mouth when he had launched himself in front of it, turning the torpedo from its direct collision course with Kai.

  If anyone was better equipped to outswim a torpedo, it was Kai. But whatever the differences that had existed, and still existed, between Zamir and Kai, Zamir had—not once, not twice, but consistently—risked his life to save Kai, his heir.

  But as it was, neither Kai nor Zamir would be able to intercept the latest Atlantean assault.

  Which left her in charge.

  Which idiot did that?

  She turned to Badur and Thaleia, and spoke in Sumerian. “Can the caves be sealed from the…” She searched for the equivalent of divers, but the best she could manage was “the enemy that swims in the deep water?”

  Thaleia’s brow furrowed in confusion, then she replied in English. “I understand your language—perhaps better than you understand mine.”

  Ginny’s jaw dropped and her eyes lit with delight, but the conversation would have to wait for another day. “How deep are the caves? Can they be sealed against entry?”

  Badur shook his head. “These caves do not go into the earth. We did not dare go deep—the creatures of the dark are restless.” His words were as clearly uttered as Thaleia’s, although they both possessed odd accents, as did Kai, for that matter. Badur swept his arm out. “This is an old coral cluster, nothing more. It cannot be sealed.”

  Ginny spared a glance at the divers as they spread across the water, obviously searching for the Beltiamatu colony. “Is there any place they can hide?”

  Badur and Thaleia exchanged glances. “Medea’s cave,” Thaleia said finally. “But the monsters in there prowl closer to the surface than anywhere else.”

  “I don’t understand. There’s got to be a place they can hide—”

  “There is nothing,” Badur snarled. The curtains of his eyelids, heavy over his empty eye sockets, fluttered. “You understand nothing. The Beltiamatu hid from no one. We ruled the oceans. The humans never came down to these waters because the seismic devices at the Oceans Court churned riptides too deadly, even for their machines of war. There was never a need to hide.”

  Ginny glared at Badur, for whatever good it did. “There is now. If Za…Zee—” She grimaced, barely catching herself in time. “—and Kai can’t get back in time, then we have to save the Beltiamatu.”

  “Too late,” Thaleia breathed.

  Ginny followed her gaze up. The divers were converging and swimming toward them. Sunlight glinted off their spear guns. Drones surged ahead of the divers, leading the way.

  The Atlanteans and their human flunkies had found the Beltiamatu colony.

  “Go!” Ginny ordered. “Get your people out. You can still outswim the humans.”

  “There is nowhere to—”

  “Open water. Anywhere!” Ginny cut off Badur’s objection. “You may not be able to fight them, but you can still get your people away.”

  “What about you?” Thaleia asked.

  “I don’t really know how to swim.”

  “You don’t…” The mermaid’s eyes widened. She grabbed Badur’s arm. Conversations, if they were lucky enough to survive, would come later. “Let’s go. We can take refuge near Shulim.”

  “That place is haunted. Cursed. It is even more dangerous than Medea’s cave!”

  Ginny glowered at Badur’s back as Thaleia led him away. That crotchety old merman was an even larger problem than the fanatical cult members from Temple of Ishtar. Clumsy, slow, and ponderous, she waded across the ocean bed and concealed herself beside large rocks. I would have paid more attention in all those toddler swimming classes mom made me attend if I’d known I’d be playing with mermaids one day.

  Her eyes narrowed as two drones approached and circled the coral cluster. Large red lights glowed on their spherical surfaces. The machines were heat-seeking, Ginny suspected. And they had locked on the colony.

  Ginny unfolded her fingers. The black aether cloud took shape in the palm of her hand, molding to the curve of her fingers. Purple streaks of lightning sizzled at its heart.

  She didn’t know exactly how to command aether, but imagination—she suspected—had a great deal to do with it. Lightning shot out from her hand, striking both drones and encasing them in a net of shimmering purple and silver light.

  The approaching divers halted, their attention swiveling down to her.

  Ginny hoped—fervently—that Jacob Hayes’s order to take her alive was still in effect.

  The divers approached slowly, although she suspected it might have had more to do with the fact that she was standing on the ocean floor, wearing a wet suit, and no other diving gear. They had probably been told that they were hunting merfolk. An underwater breathing human was possibly not within their scope.

  The purple lightning around the two drones sizzled and crackled. Currents twisted away as if aether were churning the molecules in the water.

  Like a bath bomb. Without the floral scent.

  The dazzling flash took everyone—especially her—by surprise.

  Shards of steel fanned out in the water like a thousand knives propelled into deadly speed. Purple streaks of lightning were still arcing across the shattered remains of the two drones when the shards sank their pointed tips into the divers’ bodies.

  No, no, no! T
hat’s not what I meant to do!

  The divers stiffened. Blood trailed dark crimson ribbons across the water.

  Bodies floated, life expunged like air from a pricked balloon.

  Horror closed its cold fist around Ginny’s heart.

  What, then, had she meant to do—if not this?

  Aether did its own thing, but she controlled it. She turned it loose and allowed it to wreak its transformational magic in small ways, large ways, funny ways, deadly ways—as it chose.

  But she let it loose.

  Which meant she—and no one else—was responsible for what it did.

  The long shadows across the sand shifted. Sunlight illuminated the coral cluster just as the merfolk emerged from their fragile shelter. They clustered together for protection, their anxious gazes darting across the bodies of the slain divers, before fixing on Ginny.

  As if she was as much the enemy.

  An alarmed cry rose up from the Beltiamatu. One of them pointed up at the submarine, and at the torpedo streaking toward them.

  The merfolk scattered as Ginny flung her arm out. Aether lightning burst from her fingertips, encapsulating the torpedo, stopping it cold in the water. She blinked and was about to exhale a sigh of relief when a second torpedo shot past the first.

  Before she could react, it smashed into the coral cluster. Flames flared for an instant before it was quenched by water. The white skeleton of dead invertebrates shattered into dust. Beneath the dust, blood spilled from broken bodies, ripped tails, and torn limbs. The surviving Beltiamatu—the lucky few who had first emerged—escaped into the dark, deep water, but many—far too many—had been killed while still in the caves.

  Ginny’s mind was still churning from horror when her heart and her body reacted. Aether slashed out, its purple glow arcing toward the submarine. Water superheated into a boil.

  An instant before the surge of aether would have struck and swallowed the submarine, a green streak of light cut through the surface of the water and smashed into Ginny’s aether blast.

  Dark energy collided, and the ocean erupted into a water spout.

  A tiny ripple churned into a monstrous tidal wave.

  Ondine!

  The human woman, obviously possessed by something, was a total pain in the ass.

  Ginny’s thoughts tangled in unuttered curses. If she could lead the submarines away from the colony, the merfolk could save their injured and recover their dead. She kicked off the ocean bed and dog paddled toward the surface, but it seemed to her that even the fish, injured by the blast, moved faster than she. Her legs kicked, but she wasn’t sure what to do with her arms, or why they felt like they were dragging her back instead of pushing forward.

  If she was going to keep hanging out with the Beltiamatu, she was going to have to learn how to swim.

  She clawed through the water as divers swarmed out from the submarine. Some swam toward her, others toward the destroyed colony. Those would be in for a surprise, Ginny thought grimly. When cornered, the Beltiamatu were perfectly capable of putting up a good fight.

  As for the ones headed toward her, what would she do?

  Indecision skittered on the edge of guilt. They were people—her people—humans unwittingly dragged into something larger than them. If they were killed, it would make the war between humans and merfolk that much more inevitable.

  And what would that make her, especially after all her preachings of peace, of not repeating the mistakes of the past just because—?

  A fraud?

  A diver fired his spear gun at her. Ginny flung her arm out. Aether flashed, coiling around the spear like a glowing rope, transforming it into a burst of bubbles.

  Ginny’s eyes narrowed. It was better to be a living fraud than a dead one. She wanted to return to her university someday, and all those student papers—she was falling way behind on grading them. She extended her hand, and aether flared into a large translucent sphere enclosing the divers. Cautiously, they approached the curve of the sphere. One of them touched it gingerly.

  He didn’t get electrocuted.

  Which was a relief.

  Ginny wasn’t entirely sure what would happen, but it couldn’t go on like this. Dread weighed heavily against her chest. She had to learn to control aether, or stop using it. It was too careless, too irresponsible otherwise.

  And she was not that kind of person.

  Unless she were trapped, or panicking.

  Or possibly hangry.

  She swam past the trapped divers. Sunlight beckoned to her, drawing her up to the surface, but it still seemed like forever before she clawed her way above the waves. In the distance, the rocky islet born from the flames and boiling mud that consumed the mer-capital Shulim, rose above the water.

  And a large ship was heading toward it.

  A warship.

  Chapter 3

  Zamir did not know how long he floated, unmoving, in the water. He stirred slowly as pain rattled his skull. Grimacing, he opened his eyes, then immediately shut them against the glare of too-bright light.

  Waves washed over his body, the gentle rhythm quickening until it rippled on the edge of panic.

  His head still spinning, he reached out. His hand brushed against the jagged edges of a large stone.

  Where the hell—?

  He managed to crack open one eye. The muscles in his bicep corded as he pulled himself onto a rocky knoll.

  His gaze flicked across the seemingly featureless ocean, no other land in sight, but he knew exactly where he was.

  Shulim.

  Breathing hard, he rose to his feet. Zamir staggered as he moved farther inland, away from the ship that appeared on the horizon. Whatever damage he had sustained in the blast did not seem permanent. No broken bones. No open wounds. The pain pulsing through his skull twisted nausea in his stomach, but it would quickly pass.

  Except that it didn’t.

  It grew more intense the closer the ship approached the islet.

  Something in him instantly classified the ship as of Chinese design, a swift but well-armed frigate built to accompany larger battleships and aircraft carriers. Thank you, Jackson. Zamir squinted against the glare of the sun, trying to make out the figures standing at the bow.

  One of them was female.

  Tightness clenched his heart. He did not need to see her face to know with absolute certainty who she was.

  Ondine Laurent.

  Her loyalties were as malleable as her identity, her human body a mere shell for possession by greater spirits.

  A splinter of fear niggled in his heart.

  Something in him reacted to something in her.

  The air streamed through her long auburn hair, tugging it away from her precise, almost merciless beauty, and her vivid green eyes. She waved cheerily at him, as if an army of submarines, drones, and divers had not just assaulted a small and struggling mer-colony at her and Jacob’s command.

  Jacob Hayes, the heir to Atlantis, stood beside Ondine. His face was angular, his narrow eyes and the high slash of his cheekbones testaments to his ancient, otherworldly heritage. The right side of his face was scarred from his underwater battle with Kai, the skin seared by the blast of a sonic gun, his eye white, but his vision miraculously intact.

  His other eye bore testimony of his royal blood—the black of his iris ringed with gold, like the corona of a solar eclipse.

  A muscle ticked in Zamir’s cheek. The frustration gnawing at him curled his hands into fists. The merfolk and Atlanteans had been at odds for too long.

  The Beltiamatu’s mistake was not ending the war with the absolute destruction of Atlantis.

  Their mistake was allowing a handful of ships to slip past them.

  And now, with the merfolk reduced to scattered survivors, it was on him to remedy the mistake of so many generations, of millennia past—to forever wipe out the plague of Atlantis—while Kai focused on rebuilding the Beltiamatu empire.

  It was the only way to protect human civilization an
d governments from the tyrannical ambitions of Atlantis.

  A grinding sound rose from the ship as it dropped anchor in the deep water scarcely less than ten feet from the islet. “Hello, Zamir,” Ondine called out lightly. “Or do you go by another name these days?”

  He said nothing, merely folded his arms across his chest.

  Ondine continued, “What about Jackson—the human whose body you stole? Or Arman, the First Commander, whose soul you do not deserve?”

  Arman.

  Zamir finally had a name for the soul gifted to him by Ereshkigal, patron goddess of the Beltiamatu.

  Ondine’s smile widened. “And those are just the ones you know of.”

  Zamir kept his expression neutral and unrevealing, even though his thoughts churned. This was not the first time Ondine had implied that more than three segments of various lives had united into his identity.

  But what else could there be?

  If there was another personality, it was quiescent.

  For now.

  Ondine shrugged. “You should know that while you were off playing tag, a torpedo took out the mer-colony.”

  A cold fist squeezed all the air out of Zamir’s lungs. Ginny.

  Ondine’s eyes narrowed into emerald shards. “Not Kai? Not the pitiful remnants of your once powerful empire? But Ginny? An ignorant, clumsy human woman, woefully out of depth in events far greater, far more world-changing, than she has ever dreamed?”

  Zamir met her glare with iron calm. “I hear fear and jealousy in your voice.”

  Ondine spread her lips—more snarl than smile. “It’s neither. Don’t get too attached, Zamir. Not until you know yourself.”

  Jacob growled. “We’re wasting time. You want this man, then get him onboard. We’ve lost four of our six submarines, but they’ve got the merfolk on the run, and they say the woman Ginny is headed toward the surface. She’s the one we have to capture.”

  Ondine waved her hand dismissively. “You’re fixed on the lesser prize, Jacob. Aether will avail you nothing in the long run. You won’t even be able to get it out of her.”