Page 15

Marinah

I slept like the dead. When King walked back into the room, the smell of bacon drifted in with him, impossible to ignore.

“Wake up, sleepyhead,” he said softly.

I rolled over and squinted at him. “Why are you whispering?”

“If you were still asleep, I was hoping you wouldn’t hear me,” he replied, a grin tugging at his lips.

“Do you have any idea how much work we have ahead of us?” I asked, already feeling the weight of everything we needed to prepare. At King’s insistence, we actually slept last night instead of working through the night.

“You said it yourself,” he challenged. “We’re ready and have been for years.”

I couldn’t argue with that. The truth was, King had prepared for this moment for longer than I cared to admit. The next forty-eight hours would bring pandemonium, and sleep would be in short supply. The full night of rest would help us get through it. Tossing the bedding aside, I stood up while King set the tray down and removed the lids.

The sight and smell of food made my stomach clench in hunger. Shifting straight into Nova had taken more out of me than I’d realized. I’d had a huge dinner the night before, but my stomach had forgotten.

“Your half is two pounds of bacon, a dozen eggs, and ten pieces of toast,” King said, eyeing me seriously. “Don’t touch my half.”

“I love you and won’t touch your food,” I promised with a sweet smile, crossing my fingers behind my back.

Callie scrambled out of my way as I practically charged the table. Her hiss of displeasure didn’t even faze me. I pointed toward her food bowl near the bathroom door, where her water dish sat as well.

“Cat food,” I said pointedly, before gesturing to my plate. “Warrior food.”

Her indignant stare was almost enough to make me laugh, but I was too busy piling bacon onto my toast to care.

An exaggerated huff escaped King. “How did you know the whistles were damaged?” he asked curiously, though there was burning fury in his eyes. He’d been stewing over this since yesterday.

After the Campbell incident, we returned to the citadel on the motorbikes. The roar of the engines drowned out any chance for conversation. As soon as we arrived, one of the men reminded me of Ruth’s pending punishment. Apparently, she’d been up to her usual antics, and the entire citadel was living in fear of what she’d do next. She had a way of weaseling around the rules I set in place. It was hard to fault her, so I planned to add new rules to get rid of the loopholes she found.

I’d headed straight for the gym, leaving King no opportunity to question me. Two hours of dealing with Ruth, who could barely lift her arms by the end, and her right-hand boy, Che, who she’d roped into trying to get her out of trouble, had worn me out. King had finally put his foot down and forced me to eat while he checked on Nokita’s progress. I was asleep before he returned.

Between bites of bacon, eggs, and toast, I finally answered. “Knet and the Federation had a plan in place. It’s the only thing that made sense. Why else would Knet leave now?” I paused to take a long drink of orange juice, savoring the sweetness. “And how could the Federation implement an attack on us while losing their eyes and ears on the island? Knet must have had help.”

I used a piece of toast to sop up some eggs, shoving the mixture into my mouth and swallowing before continuing. “Since Knet worked with the hellhounds, it made sense they’d use the hellhounds against us. While I was meditating during the meeting, it hit me. The only way to use the hounds as a weapon would be to sabotage the whistles. Everything fell into place after that. I just wasn’t sure who the traitor was.”

King’s expression stayed skeptical, so I went on. “Think about it. You and I, along with the guard, carry our whistles at all times. The rest of the whistles are kept in strategic locations around the citadel, making them accessible to everyone. Our Warriors are better at killing hellhounds than directing them with the whistles. The simplest way for the Federation and Knet to cause massive casualties would be to sabotage them. It’s efficient, and it’s exactly the kind of move they’d make.”

King leaned back, mulling it over while I used another piece of toast to clean my plate.

“Hmm,” he said after a minute passed.

King said “hmm” whenever he didn’t quite know how to respond to me. He started to ask another question, then stopped, running his fingers over his braids then pulling them to one side. His eyes dropped back to his plate, still piled high with food.

Meanwhile, I refilled my empty plate because my stomach growled again. I didn’t think I’d ever been this hungry in my life. It had to be Nova. It made sense that shifting into that form would require more fuel. Someday, I’d actually learn something useful from my grandmother’s journal.

When King looked up again, his confusion was obvious in his poor Warrior eyes. He didn’t handle change well. “Meditation?” he asked solemnly.

I gave him his own complicated expression right back. “Uhm.”

I finished off the eggs and popped the last piece of bacon into my mouth. “We’ve got a lot to do, but I want to see Nokita’s little submarine first.”

King just shook his head in defeat. He’d come around eventually. Once he allowed different ways of thinking to replace his natural stubbornness, he’d see what meditation could do for us.

An hour later, we rode the motorbikes to the shipyard. I’d only been there once before, and it was just as creepy now as it was then. The old ships were decrepit piles of rusted steel, looking like they belonged at the bottom of the ocean instead of secured to the endless stretch of brown docks.

The towering ships bobbed slowly in the nearly black water, making eerie creaking sounds that only added to the place’s unsettling atmosphere.

The first time I’d come here, I’d made the mistake of asking Nokita why the ocean water around the ships was so dark. His explanation had made the shipyard feel even creepier.

“The black water is death,” he’d said matter-of-factly. “When animals, humans, and plants die in the water, their nutrients are absorbed, and they sink to the bottom. The water turns black because death lingers, and so far, the ocean’s lost the battle to return itself to blue.”

The memory sent a small shiver down my spine as I stared at the inky waves, the sound of creaking steel echoing around us.

I rubbed my arms as we walked the long deck between gargantuan ghost ships, searching for Nokita. “Over here!” he yelled after what felt like a mile of walking, though that might’ve been an exaggeration. We finally located him, or more accurately, he located us. He was in a mid-sized enclosed bay, working on what had to be the smaller sub.

He stuck his head out of the glass dome, grinning. “She’s almost ready.”

I peered at the dented hunk of metal that had clearly seen better days, then glanced uneasily at the black water surrounding it. “How close?”

“Give me ten minutes, and we’ll take her for a spin,” he said cheerfully.

Not happening.

Ten minutes later, I was sitting inside what Nokita had lovingly referred to as a “death bubble.” He’d explained it could descend a thousand feet before reaching its collapse depth, which would crush the entire sub and us along with it. Wasn’t it me who said this wasn’t happening?

After spending years in a small cubicle, I’d discovered I didn’t like tight spaces, especially not when they were surrounded by black water that screamed death.

“You okay, baby?” King whispered.

“Swell, baby,” I replied, not taking my eyes off the dark nothingness in front of us. I had the distinct feeling that if the water cleared, I’d be able to say, I see dead people. Worse, I’d probably see half-eaten dead people who had been decaying beneath the water for years.

“Queen,” King said, his tone teasing.

I shot him a sharp side-eye. He knew that word irritated me.

His lips quirked, and I realized he was trying to distract me from my very real terror of being inside the bubble of death. Like that was going to work.

“Ready to launch?” Nokita asked, his chipper tone grating against my nerves as he flipped several switches on the control panel.

When he worked on planes, he was a pilot. On a sub, he was the skipper, or whatever the hell they were called. Nokita spoke with the vernacular of a man who lived and breathed engines, completely at ease with anything mechanical.

King had once told me Nokita started fixing tractor engines for his neighbors when he was a kid because he hated working the farm fields with his father. By the age of sixteen, he’d already built a thriving farm mechanical business.

And now, here I was, putting my life in the hands of that same boy-grown-man, sitting in his tin-can submersible surrounded by death water. Fantastic.

“Have you ever manned one of these things?” The second the words left my mouth, I regretted them.

Nokita turned in his seat, reading the fear in my eyes. “Never,” he said, glee dripping from his voice. He didn’t even try to hide it.

They set me up, he and King both. Here I was, finally stepping into the leadership role, and now they were taking me out into the blackest depths of death water to do away with me. I’d become part of the muck below, and no one would even remember who I was. Even Ruth would say, “Marinah who?”

The near-silent hum of the engine caught my attention, and I was surprised by how quietly it ran. All I could hear was the soft whir of small paddles spinning through the murk beneath us. Nokita expertly guided the sub clear of the bay, backing up farther before moving forward.

“Once we’re out of the yard, this baby can travel up to four knots,” he announced proudly.

Yippy. I could probably tie four knots in my boot faster than this thing could move, and that was if I knew how fast a knot was.

If I’d thought the water looked bad from above, I was wrong. This was far worse and well beyond creepy.

The sub’s light made it worse still. Moss hung from steel cables attached to the ships, rising from the water in slimy ropes that made my stomach churn. The rusted metal hulls of the ships loomed around us, jagged and decaying, and I couldn’t help but wonder how they hadn’t already sprung leaks and sunk to the ocean floor.

Nokita maneuvered us farther down, turning the sub’s front lights a bit brighter. The enhanced glow illuminated the ocean floor. A military boot jutted out of the silt, an eerie marker in the graveyard of nothingness. Here and there, I caught glimpses of a pot, a rifle, and then…

It took a moment to make sense of the next discovery. Skulls.

They rested in the silt at odd angles, their hollow eye sockets staring back at me. My stomach clenched as I realized what I was looking at.

When King had arrived on the island, the population was nearly decimated, with the survivors forced into hiding. The Cubans had fought the hellhounds long after their government ceased to function. The people who remained were a ragtag group, struggling to find enough food and medical supplies to stay alive.

Don’t get me wrong. Those who survived did so because of their strength and tenacity. But now, staring at the evidence of their valiant fight, the haunting remnants of their battle, it sent a chill through me that I couldn’t shake.

Nokita adjusted course, navigating us into open water. As the shipyard faded behind us, he filled the silence with an animated monologue about Baby Boot’s latest antics. His chatter, oddly comforting, helped distract me from the reality that we were submerged, entirely dependent on tanked oxygen and a thin metal hull.

Then, mid-sentence, Nokita stopped talking. The sub’s interior went deathly quiet. For a few seconds, none of us even breathed. What lay before us took every ounce of our mental processing power to comprehend.

“Those aren’t what I think they are, are they?” Nokita’s voice cracked, his usual calm replaced with something an octave higher.

As far as the sub’s lights reached, hellhounds floated eerily, suspended by weights roughly ten feet above the ocean floor. They writhed, claws swiping and fangs snapping, their grotesque movements forming a macabre dance of death.

“There are thousands,” King growled, his voice holding restrained horror in the cramped space.

A cold dread sank into my bones, rooting me in place. Even the hair on the back of my neck was trying to retreat. “We need to go back to shore. Now.”

King ignored me. “Do you see the red blinking lights on their collars? Take us closer.”

Nokita’s hand hovered over the steering lever, and he glanced at me.

“Don’t take us closer,” I blurted. My rational mind knew the fear was illogical, the hellhounds couldn’t touch us, the sub wasn’t going to spring a leak, and my boots weren’t about to get soaked. But none of that mattered.

King turned, his lips curving into that faint smirk of his, his eyes glinting with amusement. “Scared, baby?”

“I hate you,” I snapped, shutting my eyes tight. In my mind, I took Bertha apart piece by piece, focusing on the familiar motions to calm myself. After a long exhale, I opened my eyes and muttered, “Take us closer.”

The sub glided forward, dipping lower into the abyss. The water pressed against the hull with a muffled groan, as if the ocean itself resented our intrusion. Hellhounds thrashed as we passed, their grotesque limbs flailing, distorted by the murky depths. A claw scraped against one of the air tanks, emitting a screech that reverberated through the vessel, like nails on a chalkboard amplified in a cavern. I winced, every nerve in my body taut, the sound lingering like a phantom whisper.

Nokita maneuvered us farther down, the sub's lights flickering as shadows danced across the control panels. The red blinking lights affixed to the hellhounds' throats became clearer, casting eerie glows that pulsed in sync with the metallic devices embedded in a small box on each collar. Each pulse seemed to echo a heartbeat, not ours, but something alien and malevolent.

A sudden jolt rocked the sub as another claw struck the hull, the impact resonating like a death knell. I held my breath, the air thick with the stench of brine and fear, as the hellhounds' eyes glowed with a hunger that transcended the physical.

“They’re going to release the hellhounds electronically,” I said, my voice edged with fury. Rage boiled within me, and K-5 surged through my veins. I inhaled sharply, struggling to hold Ms. Beast back as her anger slammed into me like a sledgehammer. My chest tightened, and I couldn’t catch my breath.

“Marinah.” King’s voice floated into my consciousness, his warm hand skimming over the hot flesh of my arm. I swatted him away, irritated and unable to focus. Ms. Beast growled deep inside me, pacing the confines of her intangible cage. Behind her, the shadow pulsed, the vibration inside me growing louder until it spoke a single word.

Protect.

“Marinah.” King’s voice cut through the haze, louder this time. My eyes snapped open, and the fog began to clear. Blinking a few times, my surroundings stabilized. I realized I was leaning against the cold inner wall of the mini sub, King’s hand wrapped tightly around mine. If there had been room, I would likely have been in his lap.

“What happened?” I asked, my voice groggy as the last remnants of the fog lifted.

“Your K-5 spiked, and you nearly shifted,” King murmured, his gaze fixed on me. “Then you passed out.”

“I’m fine,” I said quickly, though my voice lacked conviction. “Beast was trying to tell me something.” My mind flickered to the precarious situation we were in. If I had shifted, the bubble would have shattered, and the ocean would have rushed in. That was not a death I was ready to face.

“You blacked out and slumped to the side. That’s not fine,” King said, his tone harsh as he turned to Nokita. “Get us back to shore.”

I didn’t bother pulling rank or playing the queen card. When King went into full protective mode, he was immovable. Instead, I focused on what had happened. “Something upset Ms. Beast,” I admitted, my voice softer now. “I’m worried it’s Nova.”

King’s concerned eyes locked onto mine.

I grimaced, trying to ease the tension. “Maybe I have multiple personality disorder,” I joked weakly, though it didn’t land as intended.

King’s expression didn’t change, and his hand remained firmly locked with mine as if to anchor me.

“Nokita. After you drop me and King back on shore, I need you to locate any other waterlogged hellhounds. Use whatever means you have.”

“Yes, alpha,” he said.

I heard the same horror in his voice that King and I felt. Part of it was the underwater nightmare we had just witnessed, and part was because I passed out. Nothing about this was good.