Salt & Stone: A Water Elemental Novel & Mermaid Fantasy (The Siren's Curse Book 1)

by A. L. Knorr

  “I’m the one who took the pendant from the museum. I stole it.”

  Emun moved closer, his frame tense with a new energy, but he didn’t say anything.

  “But it wasn’t my fault. They made me do it.”

  Emun and I shared a look.

  “Who made you do it?” he coaxed.

  “Adrian did, this guy I played cards against at the Leviathan. It’s an underground gaming community, and it used to be so fun. I loved it while I was winning, but then I played against Adrian.” She hiccupped and swallowed again.

  Adalbert reappeared with a glass of water and handed it to her before retreating to clear the dining room table. She took the glass and drank three big swallows, a dribble going down her chin. She brushed it away.

  Her words tumbled out in a rush, almost impossible to understand as her accent thickened. “I owed him a lot of money, more money than I had, and I was too embarrassed to go to Antoni and ask for help again; he’d be so ashamed of me.”

  Her face crumpled again and she fought for control.

  “Slowly, slowly,” Emun soothed her. “We’re not going anywhere.”

  She nodded and took another big breath. “I begged Adrian for some other way to pay him back, a payment plan or a favor or something. He wouldn’t let me pay it back over time, but he agreed to a favor––”

  “Stealing the pendant?” Emun asked.

  She nodded.

  Emun looked at me. “Do you know this Adrian fellow?”

  “Antoni named him when I saw him and Lydia together at the exhibition opening, but no, I don’t know him.” Even to my own ears my voice sounded harsh and angry. Would I have to be a century and a half old before I could sound as calm as Emun did when stuff went sideways?

  “Go on, Lydia.” Emun crouched down so he could look up at her compassionately. “We’re going to do our best to make this right, but you can’t leave out any details, okay? Tell us everything.”

  She nodded again. “Okay. Adrian asked me to steal the pendant in exchange for the debt to be wiped out completely. At first I didn’t agree, but then he got scary, threatening to harass my mom, my brothers. It seemed like he wanted the pendant way more than he wanted the money. When I told him that the museum security would catch me for sure, because I’d never stolen anything big before and didn’t know how to do it, he told me that the museum would be having an event soon, and that if I was smart, I could figure out a way to attend.”

  “That was why you wanted to come to the event,” I said, “so you could scope out the pendant, not because you wanted to support your brother’s girlfriend. Did you use Antoni’s connection to me to get in?”

  She nodded. “I’m so sorry, Targa.”

  “I know you are,” I replied. “I can see that.” Now that your brother is in trouble. I wanted to strangle the girl. If anything happened to Antoni…

  “I’ve been so cold to you because I was terrified that you could see right through me.”

  “I understand,” I said through a tight jaw. “Then what happened?”

  “Adrian formed a plan. He had me meet with one of the museum staff who gave me the key to the display case, the code to the back door and information about how the security system worked.”

  I wondered how Adrian had “convinced” this poor museum employee and would have guessed that it wasn’t with his natural charm. But that wasn’t the most important thing right this minute.

  “It actually wasn’t that hard,” she went on, “but I have never been so scared in my life. I was to deliver the pendant to Adrian today. A couple of hours before we were to meet, Antoni confronted me and said he knew that it was me who had stolen the pendant. He was so furious.” She squeezed her eyes shut and more mascara-tainted tears dripped from her eyelashes. When she opened her eyes it was to look up at me, pleading. “I love my brother, I love my family.”

  My heart had begun to pound and my hands and feet ache with the desire to start running. “I don’t doubt that, Lydia.”

  “I told him everything…and he went to the meeting.”

  “Where?” Emun asked.

  “At a small private airstrip. Antoni told me to stay back while he talked to them, he took money to negotiate with them. I couldn’t hear what they were saying from where I was hiding but they had a conversation, and it even looked somewhat friendly, at first.”

  “Did Antoni have the pendant with him at this point?” Emun interrupted.

  She shook her head. “No, I still had it. Antoni didn’t want them to know where it was so that he could use it as leverage. He just wanted them to take the money and forget about the pendant, but he also wanted to know why they wanted it so badly. Apparently, it isn’t even worth that much, and they didn’t want anything else from the museum, just that, which made no sense.”

  “They never told you why they wanted it?”

  She shook her head. “And I never thought to ask; truthfully, I was too scared to care. Everything was going fine until two more men came out of the small plane sitting on the runway. The three of them overpowered Antoni and held him down on the pavement and started yelling into the darkness that they knew I was there and if I didn’t show myself and deliver the pendant, they would kill my brother.” Her body began to shake as she came to this part of the story and I thought she was going to lose control again. My own core quivered with terror and anger at the word ‘kill’.

  “Easy now,” Emun said quietly, as though soothing a spooked horse. “What did you do?”

  “I came out, of course,” Lydia cried out harshly. “I gave them the pendant and just wanted them to go away, but then…” her face collapsed again, “they took Antoni with them.”

  My throat closed up with fear and confusion, and I found myself lost for words. Thankfully, Emun asked the question for both of us.

  “Why would they do that?”

  “I don’t know!” she wailed. “I don’t know, I don’t know! They got the pendant. I don’t know why they took my brother! If I’d only hidden close by, I might have heard what was said before they put him on the ground, but I was too far away!”

  “Did they fly away with him?”

  My palms came to my eyelids and pressed there, blocking out the awful look on Lydia’s face. This is a nightmare, this can’t have happened. Anger shook my body, anger at Lydia, anger at these men, anger at Antoni for being so stupid as to face them alone, anger at myself for letting Antoni confront Lydia by himself. But larger than the rage was the debilitating fear that they would hurt Antoni, that they’d hurt him already.

  I assumed that Lydia had nodded in the affirmative to Emun’s last question because he said next, “Do you know where they were going?”

  I opened my eyes and saw Lydia shake her head.

  “What were they flying? Describe it to me,” he said.

  “It was a small plane.” She seemed lost for words.

  “Did it have a propeller on its nose? Or maybe two on its wings?”

  She nodded.

  “Which one?” Emun asked.

  “On its nose.”

  He nodded. “How many people do you think it could hold?”

  “Maybe six or eight, not very many.”

  Emun took this in.

  “What should we do?” Lydia drew a shuddering breath.

  Emun’s voice became an emollient balm, an extracting elixir. “Think back, Lydia, to any interaction you had with Adrian. Did he ever mention any place at any time, even in passing?”

  Her face softened at his question, but never did she lose her look of lucidity. “Ponta Delgada.” She looked up at me with a startled expression, like someone other than her had said it. “Where’s that?”

  “It’s a long way out into the Atlantic, well off the coast of Portugal,” said Emun.

  Our eyes met.

  “It’s part of the Azores,” he said to me, meaningfully.

  I made the connection shortly after Emun had, though neither of us said it out loud.

 
Atlanteans.

  21

  “Hello?” A deep, drowsy voice answered the phone.

  “Ivan? It’s Targa. I’m so sorry if I woke you.”

  “Miss Novak?” The voice brightened. “You didn’t, I was just reading a book by the fire, it calms me before bed.”

  “You haven’t been drinking, by chance?”

  There was a pause. “No, ma’am.” He sounded a little startled, if not affronted.

  “Sorry, I had to ask. I don’t care if you like a nightcap, I just…well, we have an emergency. How soon can you be ready to fly?”

  “Uh…” He droned for a moment and I heard noises in the background, fabric rubbing on fabric, and the sound of feedback as things banged against the receiver. “Sorry, let me just…I have to call ahead and get cleared for takeoff. If there are no issues, we can be ready in about an hour. Where are we going?”

  “The Azores.”

  There was silence as he digested this. “Is everything all right, Miss?”

  “I’ll tell you more on the plane. Meet you at the airfield?”

  “Yes, okay. See you there.”

  Emun waved at me desperately and was mouthing something at me.

  “Wait, one moment, Ivan.” I pulled the phone away from my ear. “What?”

  “Ask him what model of plane he’s flying.”

  I put the mouthpiece back to my lips. “What model of plane do we fly, Ivan?”

  “It’s a Gulfstream G650.”

  I relayed this to Emun and he nodded, looking pleased.

  I put down the phone and looked at Emun.

  “And so we are aligned,” he said, quietly. “We need to move, now.”

  Lydia got to her feet. “I’m coming with you,” she said shakily.

  I rounded on her without tempering myself. “No you’re not, you’ve done enough damage. You’ll just get in the way.”

  She staggered back against the couch, her face pained, her lips parted to protest, but she didn’t say anything. I called Sera and asked her to make up a room for Lydia, and to ‘look after her.’ Sera nodded in understanding.

  Emun and I took a car from the garage and headed for the airstrip the company leased from, a different one from where Antoni had been taken.

  “I’m having a hard time with…thinking,” I said to Emun as we sped through the dark, wet evening, the lights of the city blurring by. “What are we going to do?”

  “If they land before we do, we’ll have lost him. It’s our only chance.”

  “But they’ve already left. They’re at least a couple of hours ahead of us.”

  “I know, but listen to me. I was a pilot in another life.”

  “Of course you were.”

  “Ponta Delgada is a little less than twenty-five-hundred nautical miles from us. According to the description Lydia gave, they’re flying a turboprop. It can’t go any more than a thousand miles on a single tank of fuel, and probably quite a bit less than that.”

  “They have to stop and refuel somewhere. Maybe even more than once,” I surmised. Hope fluttered in my breast. “But we don’t.”

  “That’s right, but they could also switch planes in Nantes, or in Porto. If I were them, I would, because from Porto to the Azores is just under a thousand nautical miles, it would be foolish to take a turboprop from Portugal to the Azores, even on a day with favorable winds.”

  I pulled the car into the parking lot at the airstrip and we got out. We met Ivan on the tarmac and got settled into our seats as Ivan and the tower relayed information back and forth. The Gulfstream began to taxi.

  Ivan’s voice came over the intercom. “I hope you brought some food, there wasn’t time to assemble anyone for the crew. It’s just us.”

  “Bless him,” Emun said across the aisle. “He sounds cool as a cucumber for someone who was about to go to bed an hour ago.”

  I nodded but wasn’t really listening.

  “You okay?” Emun asked.

  “I don’t like flying.”

  “Oh.” Emun sat back in his seat and looked to be getting comfortable.

  “Wait, you were a pilot?” What he’d said earlier finally sank in. “What insanity came over you that made you want to be a pilot? Doesn’t flying make you feel sick?”

  Our bodies pressed back into our seats as the plane took off.

  “Sick? No, I love the freedom of flying, of seeing the world from above.”

  My bones were transforming into lead and his voice began to drone. My eyelids drooped, my head became heavy, and I fought to keep it from drooping forward. With effort, I leaned back against the seat instead and looked at Emun from under lowered lids.

  “Targa?” His features were a blur of concern.

  “I can’t fight it…” I murmured, my words on a whispered breath. I led my lids drop as the ponderous darkness took me.

  22

  I came to as someone was shaking my shoulder. Opening my eyes, I saw Emun standing over me, his blue eyes dark with worry.

  “Targa?”

  I tried to tell him I was okay, but it came out a garbled mess.

  “You slept the entire time. Are you all right?” Emun knelt beside me in the aisle. “Ivan told me you always fall asleep when you fly, but I’ve never seen anyone out so cold and so fast before. It was rather alarming.”

  He handed me an open bottle of water.

  I took it and drank slowly, the haze beginning to clear. “Ponta Delgada? We’re here?”

  Emun nodded.

  “What time is it?”

  “Early morning, the sun isn’t even up yet.” He spoke very quietly, in case Ivan was listening. “Listen, we don’t know how much time we have. We need to get into the control tower. Do you think you can do that for us? With your voice?”

  I nodded and got up slowly, my head spinning. Emun put a hand under my elbow and steadied me.

  We exited the plane and met Ivan on the tarmac.

  “Emun told me what happened,” Ivan said, brow creased with worry. “And that you’ve alerted the authorities.”

  I looked at Emun with surprise and I was gripped by a sudden panic. What had he told Ivan while I was sleeping?

  “The police are waiting for us inside,” Emun told Ivan in that soothing tone he’d used on Lydia. “We’d better not keep them waiting.”

  “You know how to reach me. I’ll be ready to take you home when your business is concluded here, just give me as much notice as you can. God be with you.”

  “Thank you, Ivan.” Emun took my elbow and we left Ivan to park the jet and headed for the airport control tower.

  “What did you tell him?” I whispered as we approached one of the doors.

  “A version of the truth,” Emun answered before putting his finger to his lips and nodding at the two airport security guards who passed us going the other way.

  “You’re headed the wrong way,” came a friendly voice and we turned to see one of the security guards had stopped on the tarmac and was pointing towards the arrivals building. “This is the air-control tower,” he said. “That’s arrivals, over there.”

  I was on stage.

  My siren sound filled the air with its stringed instruments. “We need to see the planes scheduled to land in the next twenty-four hours. Get us the schedule.”

  “I’ll get you the schedule,” he droned, his face dropping from friendly to blank. He walked past us like a zombie and disappeared inside.

  “Wow,” Emun said under his breath.

  “You can fly without feeling like lead weights are attached to every joint, so consider us even,” I replied, quietly.

  The guard returned with a clipboard and handed it to us without question.

  “Thanks,” I said. “You can go about your normal business. We’re approved to be here.”

  “You’re approved to be here,” he muttered, and walked away.

  We watched him join the other guard and they exchanged a few words before going about their work without giving us another glance.
/>   Emun took the clipboard from me and began to read it over in the glare of the airport lights.

  Ponta Delgada was a long, kidney-shaped island, one of the larger ones in the Azores. The airport, known as Nordela, had a single airstrip which ran along the coastline. At the end of the airstrip were a cluster of small buildings, a car rental building, and a parking lot for planes.

  According to the clipboard, three small planes, which seemed to fit what we were looking for, were scheduled to land in the next few hours.

  The small airport was open with short grass, no trees or brush behind which to conceal ourselves. Fortunately, it wasn’t light yet, so we chose to settle ourselves in the grass near a storage unit between the arrivals building and the refueling station. The first plane on the roster was scheduled to land in the next five minutes, but Emun pointed out its lights as they descended a few minutes early.

  The small plane bumped along the runway, finally turning into its parking space in front of the arrivals building. We couldn’t tear our eyes from the plane as we watched three men come down the narrow steps. When they were followed by three women, Emun muttered that it wasn’t the plane we were waiting for.

  Twenty minutes later, the second small plane landed, and we watched it through greedy eyes as it coasted to a stop at the end of the runway nearest us.

  To our surprise, the nose of the plane turned left rather than right––away from the arrivals building, and began to taxi toward the far edge of the runway.

  A couple of the airport’s employees began to yell to one another, noticing that the plane was behaving strangely as well.

  “What are they doing?” I squeaked, watching the plane roll away from us and toward the rocky edge which seemed to fall off into the black oblivion of the sea.

  Emun and I were on our feet, stunned, as a few employees got into a small motorized cart and buzzed after the errant plane.

  We began to run.

  In the distance, the lights of the plane came to a stop, seemingly on the edge of nothing. Shadowy figures emerged from the belly of the plane, dropping right onto the ground.