Page 13 of Sea of Evil and Desire (The Deep Saga #1)

11

Morgana

“S o, what’s with the rum?” I held my brown glass bottle to the anglerfish lights strung in nets above us and examined it. There was no label, but it was polished perfectly.

Edward and I had tucked ourselves away at one of the rough wooden tables in the corner of the bar.

“I mean, you guys don’t need to eat or drink. Do you?” I peered at him apologetically. Many of my questions involved reminding him that he was dead.

“Some say that the first sailor ever to drown was granted one wish, and he asked the gods for rum in the afterlife.” He chuckled, raising his tumbler in cheers.

I laughed, clinking my bottle against his glass. “Do you sleep?” I asked, setting the drink down on the grimy table.

“No, no, we don’t sleep,” he said, shaking his head. “However, we are all given rooms, which some of us like to use to imitate repose. Others fill theirs with treasures or items they’ve been lucky enough to retain.”

The little room I woke up in had resembled the one I left behind in my grandparents’ house. I guessed it was now mine, wondering who my new next-door neighbors would be as I scanned the bar.

There were few modern folks around. More people would have died of drowning when boats were still an essential means of transportation and life-saving methods were primitive.

A man with a cool stare met my gaze, and I quickly looked back at Edward. Once the man had returned to his drink, I studied him. He was sitting in the corner beside the piano, exuding an air of careless authority. His clothing caught my eye first—a long black overcoat and tall black boots, their heels encrusted with barnacles. His feet rested lazily on the table, and a high black collar framed the white material bunched at his throat.

He must have drowned sometime in the early eighteenth century, because he looked like the men I had seen in Pride and Prejudice film adaptations. His features were dark, and the glance he’d shot me was one of pure disgust, as if I were an unpleasant odor wafting across the room. He was sitting with another man, this one dressed in modern attire—a faded suit. He had dirty-blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, and his pale skin and light eyes suggested daylight might incinerate him, yet he seemed perfectly at ease in this cool climate.

Edward peered over his shoulder at the men. “That’s Donahue and Jackie,” he whispered. “Jackie joined us about sixty years ago. He was a petty criminal killed by the Irish Mob, but Donahue drowned long before even I did. He must have migrated here after the ship became a portal.”

I snuck another look at the two of them. Jackie was examining a small blade in the light of the glass jar on the table, but Donahue was now looking at the back of Edward’s head, the traces of a smirk playing on his lips.

“Who did you hang out with before I got here?” I asked, scanning the rest of the bar.

“On my own mostly.” Edward shrugged. “Although sometimes I play chess with Daniel.” He gestured at a young man in military uniform playing the piano. He had a sweeping brown fringe and a full mouth.

An elegant woman at the bar, her loose gown covered in jewels, caught my attention. Her tight curls reminded me of Skye’s. She was toying with her necklace and batting her eyes at some young men in brown wool caps.

“That woman you’re staring at is Evelyn. She was a passenger on this ship,” Edward interjected, following my gaze.

“And you said there are ships like this all over the ocean?” I asked, eyes wide.

“Yes—”

A blood-curdling wail pierced the merriment as a pirate burst through the swinging doors. Daniel’s hands froze over the piano keys, and the bar fell into a heavy silence. All eyes flew to the man.

“I told him I didn’t mean to do it. I didn’t know I was on Mer territory—I swear I didn’t.” The man trembled as his eyes darted around the room. He pressed himself into the stained wall beside the doors and slowly sank down, grasping his face.

The woman called Evelyn rushed to him. Her jeweled dress pooled on the floor as she knelt beside him.

“I needed loot to pay my debts, I did. Didn’t know it was Mer territory, honest . . .” he cried.

“Don’t tell me mermaids exist here as well?” I hissed, thinking of the insignia I had seen engraved on the bar’s door.

Edward had turned in his seat to watch the man. When he glanced back at me, his face was so pale all his freckles stood out. “They live in a castle not far from here. The Drowned and the Mer have never been friendly.”

“What happened, José?” I heard Evelyn ask.

“The Mer Prince . . . every part of my body . . . he sliced into it and let it grow back before cutting into it again with his claws . . . His claws! ” The man’s wail filled the tavern.

The Captain and Evelyn hoisted the man up, dragging him toward a door behind the bar. He thrashed against their grip, his wails echoing through the room. A ripple of hisses passed through the crowd as Evelyn shut the door behind them.

“Fuck the Mer and their prince,” a pirate with a black mustache snarled.

I swallowed as I glanced from one murderous-looking Drowned to the next.

“You’ll get used to it. The Drowned hate the Mer, and the Mer hate the Drowned.” Edward sighed. “It’s been like that for thousands of years. José is not the first of us to have a run-in with Mer Prince Aigéan, but he will be okay after some rum.”

The man’s wails seeped through the closed door, tightening something deep inside me. I took a long gulp of rum.

“Would you like to see the rest of the boat?” Edward gestured toward the grand doors, trying to distract me from José’s screams.

I followed him back to the gloomy room under the stairs, where he unhooked an anglerfish lantern from the array hung on hooks beside the door. I hadn’t noticed them when I arrived because I’d been so fascinated by the insignia.

“This ship was similar to Titanic and also found itself at the bottom of the Atlantic,” I could hear Edward say as he navigated the darkness. We descended a different staircase, which led not to the cabins but into the shadowy depths of the lower decks. “She was just as magnificent, but not nearly as famous, so we get no human investigation. Thousands of ships strewn around these waters will never be found.” Anguish trickled into his voice.

“This was your ship,” I whispered.

“ SS Jones’s Lady , she was called. I say it was the name that doomed her. She went down in February of 1914.”

“How did it sink?” I asked as we veered left at the bottom of the stairs into more darkness.

Edward was sure to know his way around, but that didn’t stop my heart from quickening as I followed his lantern into the gloom. Slimy shells crunched underfoot as I carefully felt my way. Now and then, he would help me skip a spot he knew had decayed completely.

“It was a cold night . . .” Edward’s voice softened as he traveled back in time. “The sky was starry and clear, but a ghastly wind blew up. It howled through the great rooms. The guests grew apprehensive, so we had the pianist play a jig to distract from the wind, and we kept the whisky flowing. Everyone was having a smashing time when we felt the jolt and heard metal scraping against metal.” He stopped, and I almost walked straight into him. “We rushed to the deck and saw that we had collided with a large bulk carrier ship.” He shook his head. “I watched in horror as it sank in minutes before my eyes. Dread filled me. Drowning is awful, but it’s that very moment when you realize it’s about to happen that’s the worst. Nothing can compare to it.”

“What happened next?” I whispered.

“That was it for her.” Edward shrugged. “The carrier had grated a big tear in the right-hand side of her hull. We slowly filled with water and were at the bottom of the Atlantic within hours. I stayed with the ship until she was swallowed by the icy depths, debris swirled around me. Something tore through my belly, and then, darkness. When I woke, I was here.”

A shudder brushed my arms. Perspective—that’s what Edward’s story gave me. I was lucky to be alive.

He steered me through a broken doorway. A patch of the ship’s side had been torn off here, illuminating the space with shafts of deep emerald light.

“I present the swimming pool.” Edward swung his lantern around the room.

“Looks more like a garden now.” I laughed, taking in the sluggish plants and crustaceans that had made the giant basin in the floor their home.

“This place is my favorite. Come on.” Edward led the way to a doorway across from the pool.

I didn’t need his light anymore. I could see even after he had steered his lantern elsewhere. I kicked off from the boat’s surface and found that my webbed feet equipped me with an aqua ability I never had in any Kansas City pool. Interesting. It’s a shame they’re so hideous.

We passed a brass-doored elevator. Its twisted gates were locked, and I shuddered as I imagined the people who might have been trapped there.

“Are there bones?” I asked as something crunched under my feet.

“No. Bones dissolve after years of being in the deep.” Edward’s voice drifted eerily out of the shadows.

I followed his light through a murky hallway until a staircase emerged from the gloom, its once-grand design now deteriorated. It led to a room that must have been reserved for first-class passengers. A massive chandelier lay crashed in the center, its glass beads green with grime.

Viridescent light filtered through the cracked panes of once beautiful windows, illuminating the algae draped over everything below. The were other remains in the space, but the sea had rusted them into the unidentifiable. I stepped over a spoon and sent what I thought was an ashtray skidding. Dim jade light made its way through missing portions of the wall, and sausage-like sea plants hung in bundles from the dark corners.

“I spend time here occasionally, to remember.”

I couldn’t make out Edward’s features, only his silhouette. Without the lantern and my new aqua vision, this room would have been pitch-black.

“It’s beautiful in a haunting way,” I breathed, casting my eyes over the shattered glass ceiling.

Something shone on the far wall. It looked like graffiti—the kind you would find under bridges on land. “KILL THE MER.”

Edward let out a horrified gasp as he noticed it too. I propelled myself toward the wall. Darkness festered at its base, and someone had scrawled the words across its uneven surface.

“Was this always there?” I turned to Edward, who had frozen a few meters behind me in his pool of lantern light.

“No.” His voice was sharp with fear as his eyes darted across the scrawl.

I inched forward, drawing closer to it. Written in light crimson, it glinted with silver under the emerald glow.

“How would paint even work down here?” I wondered aloud. The letters had been done clumsily, and droplets ran down from each one.

“Th-that’s not paint,” Edward stammered. “It’s blood .”

“But it’s silvery?” I reached for the shiny substance.

“Don’t touch it!” He cried. “It’s Mer blood. Oh, this is bad. Really bad!”

“Are hateful acts like this committed often by the Drowned?”

He shook his head. “Mer blood holds immense power,” Edward whispered. “Some Drowned trade for it at the Sunken Bazaar, but that power always comes at a cost.”

I looked back at the blood, now shimmering with the hues of a pearl. “It’s so . . . beautiful.”

What kind of magnificent being could produce such a substance in their veins? A chill crept over me, pebbling the fur-covered skin on my arms. I pictured Walt Disney’s Ariel when I tried to imagine these creatures, but somehow, I didn’t think the Mer would look like that. José had mentioned claws.

“There used to be an alliance between the Drowned and Mer, but this was over three thousand years ago, in the Days of Gods.” Edward shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. “This was before the curse that started it all, of course . . .”

“The curse?” I furrowed my brows.

“After the Battle of the Caeruleus Templum, it is said the gods cursed the houses of Mer and Drowned. Since then, they have been feuding, but there hasn’t been a battle in over three hundred years.”

I looked back at the words, sensing their otherness. They changed from translucent aqua to silver to light pink in the murky light, the dark surface revealing all of the brush’s sprays and flicks.

“Who do you think did this?” I thought of all the rugged candidates I had seen in the bar.

“Every Drowned whispers foul words about the Mer.” Edward’s eyebrows drew together. “But most Drowned are cowards. They mutter foul words and trade in bootleg blood from the naturally deceased but cower when faced with the Mer. No one dares provoke their wrath. You saw what happened to José.”

“Let’s get out of here,” I said, rubbing chills from my arms as I returned to Edward’s side.

He released a long exhale, a clear sign of his relief.

I stumbled over a rusted object, perhaps a twisted piece of metal. He grabbed my elbow to steady me.

“How is this room so decayed in comparison to the bar?” I grumbled, rubbing my knee.

“We use preservation potion—that and the Captain’s magic as a Protector—but it can only go so far.” He held his anglerfish lantern higher, and the pool of light illuminated the doorway ahead.

“Preservation potion?” I scoffed.

“It’s made by the Mer House of Niveus in the Arctic Ocean. They allow the Drowned to purchase it in large quantities. Well—they allow the Captain to. Even this part of the boat would be more decayed without it.” The words rolled as casually from his lips as if he’d been discussing the weather.

“You mean there is more than one kingdom of Mer?” My mouth fell open, and I banged my shoulder against the side of the door, some wood floating off into the darkness.

Edward turned to me in exasperation. “Do take care, won’t you!” He took me by the hand and guided me back down the dark hallway. “There are currently seven great Mer Kingdoms—Krumós, Thálassa, Niveus, Neptūnus, Pācificus, Mors, and Okeanós.” He rattled the names off like a kid in a classroom listing America’s fifty states. “Each house wields unique powers drawn from the ocean within which it stands. The House of Niveus can command the power of the icy Arctic Ocean. Hence the preservation potion that allows us to freeze the erosion of time.”

“And what about the Mer who live in this ocean? You said their castle was not too far from here. What power do they command?” I found myself swallowing as I asked the question, thinking of the fear I had seen in José’s eyes.

“They are the House of Neptūnus, the largest of the houses, and they draw their magic from the Atlantic Ocean.”

The skin on my arms prickled again. “What does that allow them to do?”

We had reached the outskirts of the room with the empty pool. Edward strode ahead of me, his maroon uniform billowing around him.

“Well, I’m not entirely sure of the particulars, but they can harness power from storms, ocean fogs, and, naturally, the tides.” He shrugged.

Freezing, I pressed my hand against Edward’s chest to silence him. A gasping echoed from the room we were about to enter. I peered in through the dark doorway as the cries grew louder—a woman’s cries. Had these creatures, powerful enough to command the Atlantic, descended upon the ship to take retribution?

Edward listened momentarily before rolling his eyes and continuing on. I followed his lantern light, marveling at his daring. Were we about to walk in on the graffiti culprit or, worse still, the “Neptunes” or whatever Edward had called them?

The gasping transformed into shrieks, and a thudding noise made me think someone was being beaten. Edward disappeared through the doorway, so I stepped in after him. As I entered the space, he turned to me, barely suppressing a smile, and I saw the source of the sounds that had chilled my blood.

A woman in a ruffled eighteenth-century dress was down on all fours and almost smothered by her layers of clothes. Her tightly wound curls bobbed about her face as a gnarled sailor made love to her from behind.

“Oh my gosh!” I giggled into the darkness as Edward and I felt our way back up the stairs.

“You’ll get used to it.” His voice was cool.

“What?”

“The sex. All the Drowned do is drink, gamble, and nookie.” He took my hand to guide me over an eroded step.

“So you can feel pleasure, then?” I scrambled up behind him, and our bodies were pressed against each other.

“Yes, we were granted that. Perhaps it has something to do with one’s soul still being intact. Or perhaps one of the first Drowned suggested it when they made their deal with the oceanic gods. Drowning makes for a vulgar afterlife.” He let go of my hand and propelled himself away from me up more slimy stairs.

“Do you ever do it?” I used my webbed feet to catch up to him.

“No,” he said shortly, retaking my hand as we reached another missing step. His touch didn’t evoke the all-over awareness that Finn’s had.

While Edward found it distasteful, I thought sex in the next world was a good thing—it likely kept the Drowned from being even more aggressive and miserable. The woman we’d interrupted came from an era when promiscuity had been frowned upon. If she hadn’t been married when she drowned, she’d probably been a virgin—just as I would be if I were dead now. If Finn and I shared this afterlife, I’d let him bend me over like that.

My cheeks warmed. I was becoming one of the vulgar Drowned.

That didn’t take long.

Rows of identical doors stretched before me, distinguished only by their numbers. Which one was mine?

I needed some solitude to process . . . everything , but the thought of accidentally disturbing one of the grisly pirates from the bar sent a chill through me.

I only remembered the inside of my room—a patchwork quilt and a dressing table with drawers. As these images danced in my mind, I was drawn to 207 , just to the left of the spiraling stairs.

I turned the handle, and the door creaked open. Relief washed over me as I stepped into the room I remembered.

How strange. It was as if I’d instinctively known which one it was. On land, I had read emotions, but I could sense other things here.

I closed the door behind me, leaned against it, and surveyed the space. The quilt was the same as the one I had on land. I ran my hands over it, climbing onto the squeaky mattress and wrapping the blanket around me. I stared at the grimy ceiling and blew out a long breath. How did I end up here?

If the Captain—who I assumed knew more than anyone—kept his secrets, how was I supposed to uncover what I was or why I was here?

I am not here to give people the answers . . . His words echoed in my mind. Typical.

I tossed off the fraying quilt and went to the dirty mirror. Flecks of green algae flowed into the water as I cleaned the glass. Scooping my hair back, I inspected the gray fur covering my chest and arms. Then I peered at my left shoulder, where the inky crescent moon rising above the rolling wave remained unchanged. The Symbol of the Ocean, the Captain had said—whatever the hell that meant.

I moved my hands across the fur on my right breast; the traces of a nipple peaked beneath it. My fingers traveled over my abdomen. The pelage stretched almost all the way across it, sleek and smooth under my fingers. I took a deep breath as I slipped my hands over my pelvis and between my legs. I exhaled in relief when I felt my human woman parts’ warmth and familiar shape. Thankfully, from the outside, the thick fur suit obscured any defining contours.

I returned to the bed and curled up beneath the faded quilt. My eyes drooped with fatigue—at least I still slept. Some strange magic had brought me here. What else could it be? I’d gone from never setting foot in the ocean to finding myself deep beneath it. I wanted to believe this was all a dream, but I knew in my heart that it wasn’t.

Though some of the Drowned bore signs of decay, they still seemed more human than I was now. I could already hear the whispers of “monster” and “freak” that would haunt me if I ever returned to the land.

I can never go back like this.