Caged Lightning

by Marina Finlayson

  I moved over to the bookcase. It felt as though the stag’s eyes followed me all the way. Zeus’s balls. How could she stand to be in this room with that thing watching her all the time? Poor creature. He was a beauty, with such big antlers it was a wonder the weight of them didn’t tear the whole head down from the wall.

  Deliberately, I turned my back on him and began examining the books on the shelves. There were a lot of romances of the shaper-human kind, a few histories, and quite a lot of biographies. Who would have thought a goddess would be so interested in other people’s lives? Was people-watching the thing that kept Artemis going over the centuries, the way Hades seemed so invested in role-playing as a vampire publican?

  But there was nothing there to help me. I picked up the pottery vase that sat on top of the bookcase and tipped it upside down, but nothing fell out. The coffee table was empty but for an abstract sculpture that looked like a cross between a tree and something out of a nightmare. I gave that a good shake, too, and held it in my hands, trying to focus on it, to see if it “spoke” to me as Apollo had suggested. So far, nothing in this house was saying anything at all, and I had a bad feeling that we had wasted our time with this trip. We would have to rely on Apollo’s sources to locate Poseidon eventually.

  Which could take ages, dammit. We didn’t have time to wait around. Hestia had infected Apollo with her urgency over Zeus’s predicament, and Apollo, like the kind and generous soul he was, had passed the infection on to the rest of us. There was no way I could sit around for months, waiting, while the damn shadow shapers took pot-shots at us.

  Frustrated, I banged the sculpture back down on the table rather harder than I’d intended, and then jumped guiltily at the noise. Fortunately, it didn’t break. I gazed around the room in desperation. Was there even anything here to find? For all we knew, Artemis had some bloody mental connection with the sea god, and that was locked up tight with everything else inside my stupid head.

  I caught the deer’s sad gaze and shook my head. “What do you call a deer with no eyes? No idea. Get it?” The deer stared impassively back. “No-eye deer? Yeah, I know, you’ve probably heard it before. But that’s exactly what I’ve got. No bloody idea.” I moved closer and laid my hand on his soft nose. “Don’t suppose you could give me a hint, could you? I bet you’ve seen a lot from your perch up there.”

  I ran my hand down the deer’s neck in a regretful caress. Now I was talking to stuffed animals. Excellent. And a stuffed animal that I’d undoubtedly killed myself. He’d probably rather gore me than help me.

  My fingers felt a slight unevenness at the base of the stag’s neck, and I paused. Leaning closer, I could make out a fine line. I traced it with my finger and found it joined another, and then another. Together, they made three sides of a square the size of my hand, in fact.

  Ooh, interesting. I dug a nail into the bottom line, then wormed my way under it. The flap of deerskin peeled back, revealing something that looked like a battery compartment, only bigger. It had a small indentation on one side, just the right size for a fingertip, so I levered it up, my heart beating faster with excitement. What was Artemis hiding in this funny little hiding place?

  Knowing my luck, probably her sex toys, or a secret stash of chocolate. It was too much to hope that it might be the mysterious item I was looking for.

  Or was it? Inside lay a shell, no bigger than the palm of my hand. Gently, I extracted it. Things were looking up. It had to be related to Poseidon, surely.

  “Apollo?” I headed back to the kitchen, the shell cradled in my hand. He would know what to do with it, wouldn’t he? I sure as shit didn’t. But he wasn’t there. He must have taken my advice to go for a walk.

  I stood uncertainly in the middle of the tiled floor, turning the shell this way and that in the sunlight streaming through the kitchen windows. It was just an ordinary shell—I’d seen plenty just like it washed up on the beach at Berkley’s Bay. It even still smelled faintly salty. If it was a way to contact Poseidon, I had to say, an instruction manual would have been nice.

  My initial excitement began to fade as I held it up to my ear. All I heard was the soft shushing of the blood pounding in my own head. No unearthly voices. No one picked up at the other end: Hi, you’ve reached Poseidon—how may I help you? I tried blowing into it, but that did nothing but give me a slightly salty taste on my lips and the sudden realisation that this shell had probably once been the home of a slimy sea creature, and maybe I didn’t want to put it in my mouth.

  Perhaps it was like summoning a genie and you had to rub it. Feeling like a complete idiot, I rubbed, gently at first, then more vigorously. Nothing happened, of course. Was it just a random shell? But I couldn’t believe that. Surely no one in their right mind went to such lengths to hide something unless it was valuable. Of course, there was always the possibility that Artemis was cracked in the head. I sure felt like it, standing in the kitchen and rubbing a stupid shell.

  “Zeus’s balls, Poseidon. Couldn’t you have made it a little easier?”

  “Couldn’t you try asking nicely?” a deep voice boomed.

  I whirled, but there was no one there. It had sounded as though a man were standing directly behind me. I peered suspiciously at the shell. It was buzzing against my hand, so faintly I might not have noticed it if I hadn’t been so focused on it.

  “Hello?” It was bad enough that I’d been rubbing the damn shell—now I was talking to it? “Who’s there?”

  “Have you gone senile since I last saw you, Arti?” the voice replied.

  I glared suspiciously at the shell, but the voice didn’t sound like it was coming from inside it. It reverberated in the air all around me.

  “Surely you’re too young to be losing your memory?”

  “Yeah, that’s a funny story, actually.” Just as well my voice still sounded the same. “But one that I really need to tell you in person.”

  “Has something happened?”

  “You could say that. Apollo and I need to see you. How do we find you?”

  Apollo walked past the kitchen window, heading for the back door, the sun shining on his golden curls.

  “Name the place and I’ll be there.”

  Well, that was easier than I’d expected. “Berkley’s Bay. When?”

  “I can be there tonight.”

  Apollo opened the door, a quizzical look on his face.

  “Great. We’ll see you there.”

  Abruptly, the buzzing feeling in my hand stopped. Poseidon must have “hung up” or whatever you did with a shell phone.

  “Tell me you got through to Poseidon,” Apollo said, his face alight with hope.

  “I got through to Poseidon,” I said obligingly.

  “And?”

  “And we have a date. Berkley’s Bay, tonight.”

  7

  At eight o’clock that night, Apollo and I walked out onto the wharf at Berkley’s Bay. The two big dolphin-watching cruisers were tied up, their decks dark. The fishing boats were already gone for the night. There was no one out here except the two of us.

  I pulled my jacket closer around me, glad that I’d worn it. We were halfway through spring, but the sea breeze still had a bite to it once the sun went down and the warmth disappeared from the day. Behind us, the lights of the town glowed brightly as twilight faded into darkness. I could see our lounge room window from here. Syl and Lucas were there, watching TV.

  True to her word, Syl had been all packed when we got back from Albany earlier, ready to move into hiding. Only the news that we were meeting Poseidon that very night had stopped her nagging me to leave town. It was a rather grumpy cat shifter that I’d left sprawled on the lounge with her werewolf boyfriend. She would rather have come with us, but Apollo said that Poseidon didn’t like strangers, and she and Lucas had had to stay put. We were going to have enough trouble explaining my unfamiliar appearance to the sea god, without throwing in anyone else.

  My boots clomped on the rough wooden planks of the wharf
as we paced all the way to the end. The sea was calm tonight, with only a slight swoosh as the water coiled around the jetty posts beneath our feet. I turned my back on the town and looked out to sea, but only the lights of a distant fishing boat interrupted the darkness.

  “Are you sure this is the right place?” I asked.

  Apollo shrugged. “Once he gets close enough, he’ll sense us. He’ll find us.”

  I glanced back again at the town. What if Poseidon turned up in a chariot pulled by dolphins, or something equally outrageous? Even a yacht would excite comment. “Won’t people notice there’s another god in town?”

  “Poseidon’s no amateur. Stop fretting.”

  I fell silent, stamping my feet in their combat boots to stop my toes getting cold. A strand of hair had come loose from my ponytail and was attempting to beat me to death. The wind seemed to have picked up even since we’d come out here. Impatiently, I tucked it behind my ear. Then I shoved my hands in my pockets to keep them warm … and found the pockets unusually empty.

  “Damn.”

  “What?”

  “I just realised I must have left my phone on charge.”

  “I’m sure you’ll manage to survive a couple of hours without it.”

  All at once, the wind died, and only its sudden absence made me realise how loud it had been. I eyed Apollo, uneasy.

  “He’s coming,” he said.

  I strained to see anything in the blackness to seaward, but even with my night vision boosted, it was a hopeless task. The salt smell of the sea rose up all around me, very strong.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Just wait.”

  Steam started to rise from the dark water beneath us. No, wait—it wasn’t steam. As it rose, it coalesced, until thick mist was swirling around my knees.

  “I shouldn’t be alarmed by this, right?”

  “All perfectly normal,” he assured me.

  “Good.” It never hurt to check these things. I’d seen some screwy things lately, and most of them had been trying to kill me. The mist thickened at an impossible speed, flowing down the jetty behind us until the whole town was hidden from sight. In fact, I could barely see Apollo, and he was standing close enough to touch. “Is it just me, or is it getting colder?”

  Something loomed out of the mist, something that towered way over our heads, like a mountain made of mist itself. I gazed up at sheer white sides, at cracks and lines that streaked through the behemoth like flaws through marble, and my mind boggled at the sheer impossibility of it.

  “Well, that’s a new one,” Apollo said, as cool as a cucumber. “Last time, it was a floating island. I’ve never seen an iceberg before.”

  It didn’t make any sense. We were way, way too far from the southern pole for an iceberg to be floating up to the jetty at Berkley’s Bay. How had it not melted? But then, how many of the things that had happened in the last few weeks had made any sense? After dragons made of fire, three-headed dogs, and statues come to life, how odd was an iceberg in these temperate climes, really? Poseidon wasn’t even trying.

  A door opened in the side of the iceberg, though before it opened there had been no sign that a door existed. A woman in a white fur coat with long hair the colour of seaweed stepped out onto a flat part that was almost level with the jetty and bowed.

  “Please follow me. Lord Poseidon is expecting you.”

  Apollo gestured for me to go first, so I stepped up onto the surface of the iceberg. I expected it to be slippery, but it was so dry I could have been walking on wood or concrete. The iceberg was so big that it didn’t rock or move in any way, as if my weight meant nothing compared to its own enormity. I couldn’t quite get my head around it—icebergs were meant to have most of their bulk under the water, but that surely couldn’t be the case here. The part I could see was gigantic, and I knew the water here was nowhere near deep enough for another ninety per cent to be lurking underneath the surface. More magic, I supposed.

  Perhaps it wasn’t even an iceberg, just an illusion cast on something else. It was sure cold enough to be one, though—the green-haired woman’s breath was forming white clouds in the air in front of her face. That fur coat wasn’t just for show.

  “My lady,” she said, bobbing into another little bow as she waved me through the door.

  The temperature dropped at least twenty degrees as I passed inside, and I pulled my leather jacket a little tighter around myself, wishing I had a fur coat like hers instead. Everything was white, with the floor and walls forming one seamless whole. It looked like someone had carved tunnels out of the ice. Points of light marched along the ceiling at regular intervals, but they weren’t light bulbs, just lights, and too bright to stare at long enough to make out what was causing the glow. More magic?

  “I thought you guys had all updated into the twenty-first century?” I muttered to Apollo as we followed our fur-clad guide along the stark white corridor. A luxury yacht might have been nice. “I’m going to freeze to death before we even get to see Poseidon.”

  He took my hand, and his was as warm as if he were strolling along a sunny beach, not deep in the bowels of a bloody iceberg. “Poseidon is old-school. He enjoys his little extravagances. You are cold. Gods can adjust their own body temperature, you know.”

  “No, I did not know.” Having the power didn’t mean I knew how to use it. My teeth ached with cold, and it felt as though every outward breath was extracting more of my body heat, leaching it all out into the frigid air in clouds of steam. “No one ever tells me these things.”

  He grinned at the petulant tone in my voice and patted my hand in a deliberately patronising way. “There, there. Poor little Arti. Just think yourself warm. It’s easy.”

  Easy for him, maybe. I would have sighed, but I was trying to limit my breathing to the bare minimum necessary. How could these people stand to live like this? I stared at the back of our guide’s green head and tried to “think myself warm”. I imagined a warm golden light spreading from the centre of my chest out through my body, filling my arms until the aching cold receded from my fingertips. I willed warmth and feeling back into my frigid toes and warmed my frozen face. A sensation like blushing spread over my cheeks as the warmth swelled up from my neck in a wave.

  “Don’t overdo it,” Apollo said. “Your face looks like a tomato.”

  “Thanks,” I said, dialling the golden light back a notch. I felt so much better. Now I could look around and enjoy the wonder of being inside this impossible iceberg, watching the frozen walls glitter like a fairyland, instead of fearing my extremities were about to drop off from frostbite. “That helps a lot.”

  “You will remember these things eventually,” he said, though whether he was trying to persuade himself or me, I wasn’t sure.

  Our corridor crossed another. Music was playing somewhere down the other hall, a soft guitar piece with a mournful tone. A man came out of another one of those now you see them, now you don’t doors. He stopped short at the sight of us, then dipped into a hasty bow. He was still bent over when I looked back, his green hair falling about his face.

  Did everyone here have hair that looked like it was made of seaweed? I wanted to ask Apollo if our guide was a nymph or perhaps a Merrow, but it seemed rude to chat about her behind her back, so I contented myself with admiring the glittering white walls and listening to the echo of our footsteps in the long blank hallway.

  I’d “met” a Merrow before, but I’d been underwater in the pitch-black canal at Brenvale at the time, too busy fighting for my life to catch a glimpse of whoever was trying to drown me. If it hadn’t been for the arrival of the mysterious Mac, who had chased the Merrow away, I wouldn’t have survived the encounter.

  We seemed to have been walking down this corridor much longer than should have been possible, even inside something as big as the iceberg, when we arrived at a set of double doors. There was nothing hidden—or even tasteful—about these ones. They were gold, and covered in carvings of Merrow and fish. Some
of the Merrow were twining around each other in ways that made me look away hastily, fixing my gaze on the ornate handles that were as long as my arm.

  Our guide thrust the double doors open, revealing a large room that was remarkably comfortable despite being basically an ice cavern. Glittering icicles hung from the ceiling like stalactites, poised above our heads like clear daggers. Colourful rugs were scattered across the floor, and I wondered briefly what stopped them getting wet, before I reminded myself: magic. How long would it take me to get used to its constant presence in my life? Lounges grouped in a loose circle stood in front of a fireplace where bright flames crackled merrily.

  A fireplace. Inside an iceberg. Right.

  At our entrance, a man rose from a truly stupendous piece of furniture—sort of like a cross between an armchair and a clam shell—upholstered in a satin that matched his piercing green eyes. Apart from the eyes, his main feature was a white beard that foamed down his chest nearly to his waist. He wore a long robe, also green, and looked rather like he should be playing the role of wizard in a children’s story book.

  “Told you he was old-school,” Apollo whispered.

  “Lord Apollo and Lady Artemis, my lord,” our green-haired guide announced, before withdrawing and pulling the great golden doors closed behind her.

  Poseidon crossed the carpet with sure strides for someone who looked so old, his green robe swirling around his feet. He shook hands with Apollo. “Welcome, my boy. You haven’t changed a bit.” Then he turned to me with a frown. “You, on the other hand … why are you wearing that face when your own is so lovely?”

  Nice one, Poseidon. Way to tell your niece that you think she looks like a troll. “I don’t actually have a choice at the moment.”

  The frown deepened. Those thick white eyebrows drew together, and he looked less like a kindly wizard than before. More threatening. It reminded me that Poseidon’s temper was legendary. “Why not?”