Page 28 of Sea of Evil and Desire (The Deep Saga #1)

26

Morgana

“A re you truly intending to wear that?” Edward nodded to the blade now hanging at my hip.

We’d been about to leave the Taberna when the old merman called me back. He pushed a small scabbard into my hands. It perfectly fitted the dagger I had retrieved.

“This is a gift—I may have underestimated you. I hope that I have.” His tone was finite, so I accepted the sheath and slung it across my hips. I was acutely aware of its presence at my side. I couldn’t believe my life had changed from a sad art house film into a Hollywood blockbuster. I kept expecting the blue screen to lift away and stagehands to rush in to change the props.

“Not all of us have webs , you know!” Edward muttered, his boots sinking into the soft sand of the dunes.

“Sorry, I forgot!” I floated in mock repose, beating against the water with my webbed feet as Edward struggled toward me.

Neither of us felt like going back through the tunnel, which meant crossing the dunes. I watched in awe as my footprints dissolved behind me. It was like traipsing across a blue moon. No wonder NASA had chosen to study the ocean before taking their chances with Mars.

“You can carry your own belongings if you wish,” Edward grumbled, gesturing to my preservation potion and the children’s book tucked inside his maroon uniform. As if relieving himself of these two items would speed him up.

Behind him, the dunes undulated like the back of some great, slumbering beast. They stretched in torrents beneath me, rising and falling like a desert beneath the waves.

“I do wonder how . . . old . . . that merman truly is,” Edward panted as he made it to my side. The sand from the giant dunes swirled around him with each step. “Surely, he would have seen some of the great battles.”

“You think?” I asked, rubbing stray specks of sand from my eyes.

“The Mer have an extended lifespan, so to be that aged, he must be thousands of years old. He’s been running the Taberna for as long as I’ve been among the Drowned, yet I’ve never dared to speak to him until today.”

Archōn Agorá stretched into the blue waters beyond a light haze around the scattered boulders marked with runes. Edward was right—this had once been a magical place, and it was old. I could feel it in my bones.

Cold leached through me as I thought about the cloaked figure that had slipped into the cavern; there had been an otherness about it. I could sense it in the same way that I could feel the primeval power of this place.

“Although we harbor resentment for the Mer, I’d wager few among us would trade our manhood for a tail.” Edward chuckled as he watched a large fish with a tail reminiscent of the Mer’s nibble at a bushel of seaweed nestled between the ruins.

“So Mer don’t have sex, then?” I forgot about the cloaked figure, stumbling over a clump of coral in my curiosity.

“Do you suppose engaging in humanlike intimacy with a tail is possible?” Edward raised his brows.

“But how do they reproduce?”

“Much like fish, naturally. The female lays her eggs, which the male fertilizes afterward.”

“You’re kidding!”

“I’ve heard they possess certain erogenous zones, enabling them to experience the same pleasures as humans—maybe greater.”

The ruins were giving way to sandy plains, interspersed with rocky outcrops and lumps of coral. I couldn’t help but wonder what it would be like to embrace one of those beautiful creatures. The prince’s dark hair and muscular arms covered with ink caressed my mind. How would they feel around me?

A kelp forest swayed to our right as the sand became increasingly rocky and began to slope downward. I recognized these waters—soon, the ground would dip further, taking us to the outskirts of the hydrothermal vents.

Hunger overcame me as schools of fish darted in and out between the fronds. Dark shapes were gliding among the leaves. A pod of seals . Could they know the answer to why I had found myself in this strange underwater world? Could one of them be a Selkie?

“I’ll meet you back at the tavern.” I motioned toward the dark shapes among the fronds.

“Are you sure?” Edward glanced over his shoulder as if to make sure the cloaked figure hadn’t followed us.

“I’m going to see if I can find anything out from them.”

“Suit yourself.” He shrugged.

The seals surrounded me. Their fur shone in the sways of the ocean, and my fur bodysuit shimmered the same way, but my long red hair made me an outsider as it snaked around my shoulders. One of the seals turned its dark eyes upon me, and my heart beat faster.

“Hello,” I said, the sea language leaving my lips in bubbles.

The seal eyed me carefully for a second, then returned to its comrades and its food.

Of course they weren’t Selkie seals! Edward had said that they were extinct. But perhaps I could communicate with ordinary seals without Edward or Finn nearby. I let my surroundings wash over me. I couldn’t read the seals’ emotions, but their wildness, serenity, and pure love for the ocean radiated from them. It was comforting.

I sensed more prey nearby and sped toward the scent. The pod did the same, and with my webbed feet and hands, I kept up easily.

They accepted me as a silent red-haired feeding companion in a tattered version of their own skin. Together, we swam through the kelp forest, aiming for the lighter water, where the fish swarmed.

Kelp strands wound around my ankles in a gentle caress, releasing me as I kicked forward. Soon, the water grew brighter, and the vines around me became dark outlines against an aqua background.

I swam and ate with the pod for what seemed like miles, the pearly scales of the fish I consumed escaping the corners of my mouth and dancing between the kelp fronds.

When the seals popped their heads above the waves to replenish air, I went with them. I reached out gingerly to pat one. It didn’t dash away, and its coat was sleek beneath my fingers.

The water grew darker again, signaling our return to deeper territory. I wondered how far the kelp forest stretched. By my estimate, it must have been miles.

A golden fish shimmied before me; I snatched it and bit into its still-wriggling body. When I emerged, my seal companions had vanished.

I sensed the seal pod was gone—they had returned to the shallower water. And there was something else, something that made the fur on my arms rise. Suddenly, I craved the warm glow of the tavern and the jostling Drowned.

I headed in the direction my senses told me SS Jones’s Lady lay, and soon, the kelp fronds began to shrink, replaced by coral-encrusted rocks and soft sand. The ocean floor spread out beneath me as I swam. Long sandy turrets stretched between the rocks, and coral blossomed below me in dark fan-like structures and little skeletal trees.

A patch of shining coral caught my eye, and I dived to examine it as my hair billowed around me in the swell. First, it shimmered pearly pink and then transitioned into a twinkling aqua. Strange . The green rocks before me were also covered in this coral, glimmering alluringly.

But wait—it wasn’t just on the rocks. It also covered bits of the sandy sea floor, and the patches were becoming broader and thicker.

“It’s not coral,” I said aloud, reaching for the substance. It stuck to my finger and glimmered as it dripped down its side.

Mer blood! A gasp escaped my lips, and I shook the liquid from my finger. I careened forward, glancing over my shoulder and simultaneously colliding with something.

The glistening blood was all over me. I shook it off frantically, stepping backward to get my bearings. I had struck something anchored and looming large—a driftwood pole with a wooden crossbar, a mermaid’s form attached to it.

Blood spilled from slashes on the mermaid’s belly and wrists. Her wrists had been shot through with arrows, attaching her crudely to the driftwood cross.

She was young and beautiful—at least she would have been before her face was marked by death. Indigo shadows hung around her eyes and mouth, her skin was sallow, and her tail had faded to a lifeless gray. Her long red hair drifted mournfully behind her, the strands brushing against her torn wrists as if trying to offer comfort.

The water around me seemed to be getting thicker and heavier, pressing against me with the invisible weight of fear, and my whole body went rigid as every muscle switched into alert mode. I couldn’t move even though my instincts were screaming for me to run . . . hide . . . get help .

Although they had the tails of fish, the Mer still felt acutely human.

I staggered backward, and a sob escaped my lips as I took in the girl’s limp body again. There was no help to be had. She was dead and had been for hours, by the looks of things.

This was pure evil.

I slid the arrows from her limp wrists, removed the ropes, and shut her eyes. Her red hair snaked around her torso as she floated from my arms, and she looked like one of the wooden figureheads I had seen on depictions of ships. The current lifted her, and soon, her body was swallowed by blue.

Why murder then display the body in this manner? Perhaps the killers had been trying to make a statement.

I was desperate to return to SS Jones’s Lady . Even if the culprit was there somewhere celebrating, so were Edward and the Captain. I needed a friendly face. I needed a face that could replace the dead mergirl’s, now burned into my subconscious.

I moved away, but as I did so, little fronds of the pale treelike seaweed that littered the rocks followed me. I lunged forward, but they reached for me.

What the fuck?

I dived to examine the seaweed, holding my hand above it as if to say sit to a dog. The seaweed stilled.

I moved my hand back and forth, and it followed.

I twirled my hand in a circle, and the seaweed circled alongside it.

A twinkling caught my eye—the blood of the dead mergirl was still on my skin. Edward’s words echoed in my mind. Mer blood is powerful, but its powers come at a price. I let out a bubbly shriek, wiping the shimmering substance from my arms, legs, and torso.

My muscles ached, but I kept going. I couldn’t stop. Not now. The blood graffiti, a fishtail, and now a dead mergirl.

Who was doing this, and why?

There was something meditative in this endless swimming. Time began to lose meaning as I replayed the images in my mind. There was an ancient grudge between the Mer and the Drowned, but Edward said he had never seen anything like this in his hundred years. The last battle had been the Battle of Port Royal.

Could the attacks be related to a war that ended over three hundred years ago?

Bubbling pillars rose beneath me, marking the edge of the stalagmite forest, and the water around me grew dimmer, cloaking the landscape in shadows. I found myself glancing over my shoulder as if the murderer might appear with the darkening of the environment.

Edward and I had stuck to the sandy track that ran alongside the heat vents, but now I swam across them. Shimmering water cascaded below me, and the darkness weighed upon me. I peered ahead, hoping to glimpse the glowing pillar corals that marked the tavern’s entrance. Now and then, I rushed forward, thinking I’d spied them, but finding only a deep-sea creature’s bioluminescence. They danced before me, teasing and taunting, before skittering away and leaving murky darkness in their wake.

A whisper cut through the eerie silence. Was it behind me or in my mind?

Siana , the voice purred.

I spun around. Where had it come from?

Darkness undulated around me. It seemed to move, shadows creeping from the spaces between the gnarled pillars.

Where were the fish? Usually they crowded the heat vents, nibbling away with an assortment of pale shrimp, but there were no animals here now. Even one of the aliens of the deep would have been comforting in this darkness.

Wait. There was something in the shadows—slits of red. Eyes . The slits blinked, and I froze. I knew in my bones this was not a hallucination.

I remembered the dagger at my hip and unsheathed it. With the blade in front of me, I began to swim.

Somnus Siana, somnus. That voice, again, hissing in my subconscious. Siana, it called me.