Water filled my lungs, and like magic, I could breathe.
Chapter Nine
Selene
I’d stolen another pod. The first was in search of answers to my past.
This time, it was to complete my mission of the present.
And beside me was Vaughn—a glimpse of my future.
It didn’t matter if mermaids weren’t meant to choose a mate for life like shifters. I’d never quite fit in, anyway.
When I looked at him, I could see a life together. It had surprised me at first—through our time on the surface, through our kiss. But watching him struggle for breath in the tank...watching him slip away from me, something clicked. I wanted what he wanted. I wanted forever.
I glanced over at Vaughn, who was getting his first look at the katopolis.
Though no building was over a few stories tall, the lower city was enormous, spreading for miles across the ocean floor. Hundreds of ancient stone buildings were lit by orange globes and the unearthly blue glow that came from the sea floor itself.
I wondered what he was thinking, how the lower city lived up to his expectations.
“How old are these buildings?” Vaughn asked. “It’s like swimming through Ancient Greece.”
By context, it seemed that Greece may be a city. “The katopolis began with the temple district. The origins are not recorded in fact, but in story and religion. It is said that the temple at the center of the city was built by Poseidon himself, at the start of all sentient civilization in the sea.”
“Wow.” Vaughn looked at me. “Do you believe that?”
“Belief has faded with time,” I said. “Only the guardians remain strictly committed to the legends. Balthasar educated my sister and me in science rather than superstition. If there were ever gods, they abandoned this place a long time ago.”
I parked the pod on the edge of the temple district, just past the line no one was meant to cross. Everyone knew to stay away, or face the wrath of the temple guardians.
“And guardians are what, mermaid zealots?”
“Something like that.” I placed my hand on the hatch release. “Though little is known of their kind, since coming here is forbidden.”
“Great,” Vaughn said. “That means no one else will be coming, right?”
“They’re doing laps above,” I said. There were Defense Ministry pods above us as I spoke. They circled the temple district, closing in on Waffle Lick’s location, but they wouldn’t land. Not here. Or so I hoped.
Their hesitation would at least buy us time.
“Ready?” I asked.
“As ready as I’m going to be.” Vaughn nodded, and I pushed the button before he had the chance to change his mind.
Water filled the pod, and Vaughn’s eyes widened as the cool ocean overtook us.
I put my hand on his and squeezed.
It would be okay.
I willed my legs to transform, and my clothing adapted.
Water filled the pod to the brim, and the top lifted, allowing us to exit.
“I wish my clothes shifted with me when I tiger-out.” Vaughn’s voice was a little clouded in the water, but I could easily make out his words. And I wondered, what exactly it looked like when he ‘tigered-out.’
“Nanotechnology,” I replied.
“I’m impressed,” he said. “So what now?”
“We swim.” In a pod, we’d be noticed by the guardians right away. Swimming was our best chance.
I took his hand and pulled him through the empty streets toward the fifth temple, where Waffles Lick’s stolen pod had been spotted.
I didn’t share Vaughn’s certainty that Waffles Lick was innocent, but if nothing else, he deserved a chance to explain himself.
Tall shoots of kelp overtook many of the outer temples, offering thick cover for our approach.
“What’s with the glowing tubes?” Vaughn asked.
The streets below were long degraded, leaving the pipelines that carried power from the Source to the entirety of Thalassapolis completely exposed.
“The Source,” I said. “Its power runs throughout the lower city and beyond, all the way up the towers.”
“That’s incredible.”
Perhaps their surface cities were not powered in a similar fashion.
We closed in on the fifth temple, and there, through the kelp, I saw it.
A one-person pod, the hatch busted and cracked, pried open from the outside. The likelihood of Waffles Lick’s survival had just dropped significantly.
Without him, so did our chances of finding the truth about Kyril’s death.
“Oh, shit.” Concern overtook Vaughn’s face as he spotted the pod.
I wished there was something I could say to make him feel better, but false hope was not a kindness. I squeezed his hand.
“We will do what we can to find—”
There was movement in the water.
We were not alone.
I pulled the weapons from my thighs and offered one to Vaughn.
“No thanks.” He shook his head. “I won’t be any use to you if I turn myself into a kabob.”
I didn’t know what a kabob was, but my guess was something with holes in it.
“You need a weapon. Now.”
“Don’t worry, I hear them,” he said. “And I’ve got my own pointy parts.”
He wiggled his brows, and I wondered what exactly that was supposed to mean. I’d seen the one pointy part when he was naked in the tank, but man parts wouldn’t defend him from the guardians.
They struck before I could think, with flashes of gold between thick greenery.
Pale skin, and sharp swords.
Long, silver hair...and…
A metal blade sliced through the kelp in front of me. I leaned back at the last second, and the sharp edge missed me by an inch.
I pressed the button on my service weapon twice, transforming the hilt into a trident.
I could hear Vaughn grappling with two guardians of his own behind me and off to the side. Flashes of their action filled my periphery. He was holding his own.
The face before me turned from one of rage to one of recognition.
“Daughter of Irina.” He sounded surprised. And with his attention affixed on my face, he seemed to be talking to me.
Those bright violet eyes were unmistakable. They were just like those of the men who’d attacked me at the colosseum. They were just like mine.
Who was Irina?
The guardian didn’t attack a second time, and I was left frozen, unsure whether to strike or to question him. What if this Irina person was my mother? What if he knew something more?
“Your kind is not welcome here,” a voice said from behind me. “Prepare for death.”
I turned.
“She’s an officer from the towers. We’re just looking for—” Vaughn easily dodged the first guardian’s attack, and shoved back a second.
“The towers have no authority here.” The guardian jabbed his knife toward Vaughn, and I swam forward to defend him.
Vaughn should have taken the trident. He should have—
A sharp pain pierced my neck and my vision blurred. Darkness threatened the edges of everything, slowly overtaking the world.
“Selene!” There was panic in Vaughn’s voice, but he sounded so far away.
And there was a noise, trumpeting out through the water.
Everything was distant...and dark...and...
Chapter Ten
Vaughn
The Callous Cutlasses, Merciless Mersoldiers, the Briny Bunch—yeah, I liked that last one.
But no matter what amazing name I came up with for them, the guardians really knew how to swing a sword.
Two of them flanked me, working in unison to pin me in place.
A few cuts on my arms, one on my side, and I was done fooling around. It was time to call forth my tiger.
But before I could shift, movement caught my eye—Selene.
She was swimming towar
d me, panic in her eyes.
The guardian behind her stabbed a needle into the side of her neck.
“Selene!” I cried out.
She was so close, but I couldn’t reach her. I had to move.
Rage and panic flooded my veins, and my first instinct was to protect my mate at all costs.
Fur rippled across my skin as the fabric of my being reshaped in a violent shift.
Blades swung above me, under me.
Something caught my tail.
With a flip of my body, I whipped around in the water and swiped the first guardian across the chest with my massive paw.
The second charged, and I dove down, easily swimming out of the way. Turned out, I wasn’t half bad at fighting down here, and I snapped his calf with my jaw.
I couldn’t spare another moment on the distraction. I needed to help Selene—
A horn sounded, echoing out into the waves.
Selene.
I turned back, and didn’t see her. Through the thick green leaves I searched, frantically looked for the woman I loved.
“Selene!” My tiger voice was a violent roar in the eerily silent ocean.
I barreled through the plants, searching for her. The water and greenery gave way to my paws, allowing me to swim faster as a tiger than I had as a man. But to no avail. I couldn’t find her anywhere.
I turned back to confront the bastards that I’d been fighting when she’d been grabbed.
They were gone, too.
The sound that echoed from my chest was one of desperation, one of heartache, one of fear. Where had they taken her?
I’d kill them...I’d kill them all.
I swam for the nearest temple. If the Briny Bastards were supposed to be guarding the shithole, they’d come when I tore the hell out of the place. They’d come, and I’d force them to give her back.
Selene.
It wasn’t worth it. This whole trip had been a mistake. Protecting Joseph Wafflick wasn’t worth losing Selene. Nothing was.
I had to find her.
The entrance of the temple was dark. The walls and ceiling and floor were all made of smooth, charcoal-colored stone. There were small, orange bulbs along the dark halls, offering just enough light to see the way.
I followed the wide hall through curves, and swam down where the floor sloped.
There was no sign of anyone—no noise, no movement, nothing.
Helplessness was not a feeling I had ever known. But having my mate ripped away, not knowing where she was, how to help her, where to look—helplessness was the only way to describe the bile churning in my gut.
I searched an open room, with an empty pedestal at the center, and another empty room after that. And I found my first guardian—floating lifeless in the water, blood seeping from the wounds in his chest and neck.
And then I found another, and another.
But no sign of who had killed them. No sign of—
I heard something. A rustling.
I followed the direction the sound seemed to have come from.
There was a scent, something that didn’t belong, not just the salty dampness of the ocean or the metallic scent of the corpses. I smelled old meat and cheese...and wolf.
I shifted back to human form as I grew closer.
“Waffles?” I called.
I heard a heartbeat.
It couldn’t be true. As soon as the little sub was busted open, Waffles would have drowned.
“Vaughn?”
A set of dopey eyes and a mess of shaggy hair popped out from behind a huge metal box.
“Joey, I can’t believe you’re alive.”
“Vaughn, buddy!” He swam toward me with his arms open, but stopped short before he reached me. “No hugs while you’re naked.”
I looked down. I hadn’t even noticed, not that I wanted a hug anyway.
“Have you seen Selene? Do you know where they took her?” I asked.
“The guardian girl?” Waffles shook his head. “Nope haven’t seen her.”
Guardian girl. The hair and eyes were the same, for sure. And Selene didn’t know her birth parents. Could they have been guardians?
I shook the thought. Whatever answers Waffles had, he could tell us later. Right now, I needed to find Selene.
“Any idea where they’d take her?”
“Maybe.” Waffles shrugged.
“Is this where they brought you?”
Waffles shrugged again. “Kind of.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Well, it all started the night of the banquet. There I was enjoying the appetizers when Mr. Rose pulls me aside and says he has an extra top-secret assignment for me. I was still hungry and didn’t really want to leave, but it was my duty as a sworn agent of the Tribunal.”
Rose?
“Rose took me down to some kind of water garage and asked me to get on one of those mermaid subs, and that was it.”
“What was it?”
“The sub just started going on its own, and next thing I know, I’m sitting at the bottom of the ocean surrounded by these old buildings from ancient geese.”
“Did…did you say geese?”
He had to mean Greece...didn’t he?
“Yeah, you know, like with zoos and hernias—geese gods. They were the original shifters. Didn’t you learn this stuff from your pack? Or in Tribunal training or wherever you came from?”
Zoos...Zeus? I didn’t even want to guess what hernias was supposed to mean.
I sighed and rubbed my palm over my face. Maybe I’d be better off wandering the ocean searching for her. Might be faster, and a hell of a lot more useful, than this story right now.
“We’re getting off the subject. How are you here? Not drowning?” I asked.
“I was getting to that. I sat there for a while, in the sub, waiting for my next orders from Mr. Rose, when these guys dressed in golden armor ripped open the hatch on my sub and pulled me out into the water. Oh boy, I thought I was dead for sure. I mean I’d heard all about the guardians and their ‘stab first ask, questions later, motto.”
He didn’t know the difference between geese and Greece, but he knew about guardians—sure, why not?
“It felt like my body was going to get crushed like a pop can. Like the big fingers of the ocean were squeezing so hard my eyes were going to shoot out of my skull. If I wasn’t a shifter, I probably wouldn’t have lasted more than a few seconds.”
“Joey.”
“Right, okay, so I’m floating there waiting to die and I see this little purple lobster. I’d read about these special magic lobsters that could make people breathe underwater, and I think, hey, even if I’m wrong, it’s not a bad last meal. I’d rather have a steak, but what are you gonna do, right? So I gulped that sucker down and then I could breathe.”
“Unbelievable.”
“Those guys who pulled me out looked pissed, I guess they were saving that snack for later. But hey, you snooze, you lose.”
“Then what happened?”
“Then they pulled me back here and guarded me…until this.” He gestured to a corpse.
“What happened to them?”
“It was that green chick. Linguini.”
“Ligeia?”
“Yeah, that’s what I said. Anyway, she comes in here and it was like something out of an action movie. Just like bam, boom, jump-kick, stab, bleh!” He stuck his tongue out and gestured as if he was being pierced with a trident.
“Waffles!”
“Sorry, sorry. Anyway, she found me hiding under the altar here. That was the second time I thought I was dead, but she said she wouldn’t soil her weapon with my blood. That was sweet of her. She’s pretty nice except for all the murdering. And she’s pretty.”
His smile was wide, and almost drooly. If we hadn’t been underwater, he probably would have been drooling. I remembered the posters of mermaids from his walls...it wasn’t damning evidence of his master plan; he just had a thing for sea people.
&nb
sp; “How long ago did she leave?”
“I don’t have a waterproof watch.”
“Yeah, okay,” I said. If she had a pod, she could be anywhere by now.
“I don’t know where she went, but she was real interested in that map on the wall in the other room,” Joey said.
I followed as he headed back the way I had come.
“There.” He pointed to a mosaic on the wall behind the empty altar.
It didn’t look like anything to me. But then I squinted, and I guessed it was kind of like the map from the file under Waffles’s bed. But it was smaller, not the whole city.
“It’s the temples.” Waffles ran his fingers along the tiles.
“Are you sure?”
“Yep. It’s just old, so most of the city wasn’t built when it was made. But see that blinky blue spot?”
Now that he mentioned it, there was a faint change in one of the tiles, like a pulse.
“That’s where the device is today. They move it all around and no one is supposed to know, but I mean, why let Tribunal researchers down here if they don’t want anyone to know things, right? Guardians are stupid.” He laughed.
Tribunal researchers?
The horn.
“What was that noise, Joey? The horn? What did that mean? When the guardians heard it, that’s when they took Selene and left.”
“Oh yeah, they do that when whichever temple has the device is in danger. It’s a defense call. Like heeelllppp friends.” He said it like he was trying to sound like the horn.
“And the guardians, they go here?” I pointed to the blip on the map.
“Yep. The temple of greasy zoos.”
“Okay then, to the temple of greasy zoos.”
Chapter Eleven
Selene
Floating in darkness, my mind wandered.
Memories enveloped me in a hodgepodge of consciousness somewhere between dream and reality. I was floating, lost in the ocean of my thoughts.
There was the question of my past—who were my parents? That guardian had called me daughter of Irina. Did that mean he knew them? Was I stolen away or did they give me up willingly? Where were they now?
The Ocean's Roar: A Tiger Shifter and Mermaid Romance (The Protectors Quick Bites Book 3) Page 8
