by Tricia Barr
Sebastian shrugged in acknowledgment and took another bite.
Phoenyx’s inner child was bouncing inside her. Mermaids. Despite her natural aversion to water, she had been fascinated by mermaids as a young girl. An Ariel doll from The Little Mermaid had been her constant companion for most of elementary school. To think that the subject of her girlish fantasies could really exist was enthralling. But the creatures Sebatian described sounded nothing like the singing undersea princess she had adored. They sounded barbaric and frightening. But then, considering her own actions, what was barbaric really?
“Did you ever go back in any of your subsequent lives?” Skylar asked.
“No,” Sebastian answered. “There was only one life after that that Ayanna found me and that I remembered. Going then wasn’t plausible.”
“So you have no idea if these creatures kept the stone for you,” Skylar surmised.
“It’s the only hope we’ve got. I have to believe they kept it. And giving it to them seemed like a better idea than letting it disappear in the ocean as I was dying,” Sebastian added sarcastically.
Phoenyx and Ayanna snickered.
“Speaking of dying, what happened to you?” Sebastian asked Ayanna. “The ship went down and I didn’t see you anywhere in the water.”
“I was able to use a piece of wood from the wreckage as a little raft. I was floating in the sea for days when a passing merchant ship found me and picked me up,” Ayanna explained. She grimaced and said, “It’s shocking to hear that all those sailors died like that, being dragged down by…whatever it was you encountered. When I surfaced, I didn’t see a single soul floating about, and I certainly didn’t see anyone suddenly pulled down. I was completely alone out there. I wonder why I was spared.” She looked away thoughtfully.
“Well—just a thought—you were the only woman onboard any of the ships,” Sebastian pointed out. “Maybe the mermaids only go after men.”
“Maybe,” Ayanna said dubiously.
They were all quiet for a moment as they considered the story and chowed down on their various Egyptian baked goods. Phoenyx tore into a honeyed bun as she thought. This new information had her at a loss. She was skeptical whether or not they’d even be able to find these creatures if they searched them out, and she was afraid of what they might face if they did find them. There was no certainty that the mermaids had kept the stone. They were beings completely alien to her way of thinking, to human ways of thinking. So what if someone with an unexplainable control over water, over their realm, came along claiming to be a powerful elemental spirit. Would they have the frame of mind to care enough, the reverence to keep a promise to a dying man? A man they probably still…ate? Ugh, the thought repulsed her and she had to swallow extra hard to keep her food from coming back up.
But what other option did they have than to follow up on this lead? They needed to find that stone fragment, and they had no choice but to go to where the fragment was last known to be. Lily needed them to find it. Phoenyx thought of Lily, imagined how she was being treated as a once-again prisoner of the Four Corners, and her quick anger inspired determination.
“We have our destination,” Phoenyx said. “Well, roughly. How do we get there?”
“I’ll have the pilot submit a flight plan to the Florida Keys,” Ayanna said. “And from there, we can arrange sail to that general region. You’ll have to forgive me, Sebastian, but finding that spot again will be up to you. I was never a sailor, I have no skill for navigating. My only memory of that spot was the fear of starving at sea being unable to die.”
Phoenyx cringed at that. Immortality had its drawbacks after all.
“Once we find the site of the shipwreck, how do we proceed?” Skylar asked. “Only one of us can essentially breathe under water. The rest of us will need diving equipment, that is, if we all choose to go under with Sebastian.”
“That’s true,” Ayanna said. “When we get to Key West, we can secure diving equipment.”
Skylar nodded, but he didn’t seem satisfied; who would be with the prospect of meeting the creatures they were searching for?
Ayanna called the pilot and arranged flight to Key West. They headed to the airport as soon as she hung up so as to avoid any possible delays. None of them wanted to relive the episode of their landing.
While waiting in line at security, it suddenly dawned on Phoenyx that, in order to go through with their next venture, she would have to go under water. There weren’t many things that she feared in this world, but she was completely and irrationally terrified of water. All her life, it had just seemed a quirk unique to her. Every summer, she would see the neighborhood kids frolic in pools and playing water sports, and despite her then desperate desire to fit in, nothing could make her join them. Now that she knew who she was, that she was Fire, it made sense. How ironic to be terrified of water and yet fatefully bound to Water himself.
In this life, she had only just begun to let Sebastian slowly wean her in to leisurely water-based activities, such as Jacuzzis and bubble baths, in which cases she only ever let half of her body submerge. But the task before them would require her to not only get her entire body under the water, but to go who knows how far deep in the water, and there would be nothing leisurely about this activity.
She paled at the realization, hating that this was something she absolutely had to do in order to save Lily. The idea of it was a claustrophobic nightmare. She would rather endure almost any other horror than this. For the first time since this all began, for the smallest second, she entertained the notion of letting the Four Corners restart their clocks and taking her chances with her next life. But she quickly discarded that thought and asserted herself to this course of action. She would just have to suffer through it and pray that nothing with her diving equipment went wrong. Oh, if only I could just stay on the surface and wait for them, she thought, but this would be a frightening journey for all of them, and she could not ask them to do it if she was not willing to do it too.
Snap out of it, she told herself. She had to distract herself. She wouldn’t be able to bear another ten hour flight if she obsessed about diving, and all the ways it could go wrong.
Sebastian squeezed her hand, as if sensing her tension. She appreciated that he never asked what was bothering her. He always knew that she would talk when she was ready, and in this moment she certainly didn’t want to confess to him how terrified she was about a little dip in the sea. She knew how silly it would sound, especially to the living embodiment of Water.
She let her mind move to thoughts of him, to her memories of their past together, all the adventures they had shared. She made it through security and the wait to board the jet by attempting to organize her memories chronologically, all the way from the beginning. She hadn’t quite regained all her memories, so there were still quite a few gaps, whole clusters of lifetimes she could not recall. And of the lives she could recall, not all of them included Sebastian. The lives in which she hadn’t met Ayanna and gotten her memories back, Sebastian’s absence was barely palpable; but the lives when Ayanna had made her remember Sebastian and she never found him were painful punctuations in her history. In his retelling of his dream, Sebastian had briefly mentioned the pain of her absence in his life as a pirate. Had he been as miserable without her as she had been without him?
As they boarded the plane and prepared for takeoff, she thought about his story of how he reclaimed the stone from the general’s daughter. He knew of Phoenyx’s existence in this world, and yet he was willing to sleep with the poor desperate virgin to get the stone from her. Oddly enough, it didn’t bother her. It wouldn’t be fair to Sebastian if it did. How can you be faithful to someone you don’t know you will ever see before you die? In the lives she had spent without him, both when she was aware of his existence and when she was oblivious of it, she had taken lovers. With her passionate nature, she would surely go insane without satisfying her carnal hunger. Sebastian’s sexual appetite was very much the same as hers,
and it would be ridiculous to expect him to refrain from sex for an entire lifetime just because he knew she was out there somewhere. She knew that the lives they had spent together, they had never had an episode of infidelity, on either of their parts. And the lives they spent apart, she had never fallen in love with anyone else, not truly. She wasn’t sure if she wished the same were true for Sebastian. If I couldn’t be there to make him happy, didn’t he deserve to have someone who did?
These thoughts began to plague her, so when they had a moment to speak, she took it.
“I can’t stop thinking about your story,” she began, as they tucked together into seats on one side of the plane, with Ayanna tapping away on her smart phone and Skylar reading a book on the other side. “A life as a pirate sounds fun. I imagine you as a cross between Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean and Captain Hook from Once Upon a Time.”
Sebastian snickered, and she could almost see the mental images playing across his mind’s eye.
“Well, I can assure you I didn’t wear nearly as much make up as Jack Sparrow,” he said. “And it wasn’t anything like the movies, but yes, it was a lot of fun. I had made quite a name for myself before Ayanna found me, which is probably about the time the fun ended.”
“Why is that?” Phoenyx asked.
“Well, it’s not that I didn’t enjoy having her as part of the crew, but once I knew who I was and what I had to do, everything changed. Before her, I didn’t have a care in the world. I traveled aimlessly from port to port, stealing and swindling whatever and wherever, I really wasn’t the best version of myself, to be honest. Once she opened my eyes to all this,” he made an all-encompassing gesture with his hands, “my life became a mission, first to get the stone back into my grasp, and then to find a place to hide it for future me, future us.”
He looked out the window in silent contemplation for a moment. She thought about what he had said, that he wasn’t the best version of himself before he remembered. It made her think of who she was in the lives where she had remained oblivious to her true self. There were certainly a few that she was a terrible version of herself, and one or two where she really hurt people she loved by accident, like her dad in this life. But never had she been a bad person, and she couldn’t imagine Sebastian ever being truly bad either.
“I can’t imagine any version of you that I wouldn’t love,” she said softly.
He smiled and put his hand over hers. “I always hoped that, because without you I really am quite the scoundrel.” He laughed, and then looked pensive. “I don’t like who I am when I don’t have you. Looking back on the lives I’ve endured in the absence of you makes me a little sick, honestly. Even in this life, before I found you, I was heading down a dark path. Being alone in the world with powers and looks like mine, without love and companionship to ground me, makes me truly wicked.” He looked out the window again, grinding his teeth and almost scowling. “That’s only one of the reasons why I have been fighting to get that dagger all this time. I don’t want to have to keep starting over without you and struggle with my own darkness.”
She nodded, understanding perfectly well what he meant about battling the darkness within. The only problem was, she was still battling hers, even with Sebastian in her life…
“In that life, even knowing that we would be together again eventually, even knowing how long we’ve existed and that a lifetime in comparison is nothing but a blink, I couldn’t bear living those few years without you. I never want to know that misery again, and I don’t ever want you to have go through it either—I know you’ve had to survive lots of lives where Ayanna found you and you didn’t find me. We have to find all the pieces of the stone, for all of us. A life without you is no life at all.”
Love and adoration for him swelled up inside her, and it was all she could do not to throw herself at him in front of Skylar and Ayanna. So she settled for kissing him, her mouth lingering on his as long as he would let it.
When he pulled away, he said so softly only she could hear, “I know you’re afraid of what will happen when we have to dive, but please trust that I won’t let anything happen to you. No matter what happens, I promise I will keep you perfectly safe.”
This promise meant the world to her in this moment. And she did completely trust him, not only with her life, but with her soul.
Flames engulfing her. Panic. Desperation. Indignation. Fighting the pain, fighting to survive the burning. Flash of Lily’s face, full of both pity and terror. We’re innocent! I’m innocent!
She felt herself mouthing those words as she was brought out of her fretful sleep. Despite her ill ease, Sebastian’s comfort had calmed her enough to take a short nap, but the images that haunted her in her sleep were far from comforting. It was the same thing she was dreaming about last night, the same scenes repeating, pushing as if to reach some unknown point. She knew they were memories, at least partially. What was her brain trying to remember? And that look on Lily’s face in her dream. Phoenyx’s anxiety to save Lily was clearly invading her REM cycle.
As she came to her senses, she felt the cabin shake, which must have been what woke her. She didn’t remember there being this much turbulence on their way to Egypt.
She looked out the nearest window. The world outside was once again black, and she wondered where they were. Several hours had passed before she had fallen asleep, and she wasn’t sure how long she had been asleep. It felt like they had been flying over the Atlantic Ocean forever. With all this turbulence, she hoped they would reach land soon.
The cabin shook angrily once more, and just as she was turning her vision toward the inside of the plane, she saw a flash of light outside in the corner of her eye. What was that?
“Lightning,” Skylar answered her internal query. “We’re flying through a storm.” His voice was strange, sounding almost pinched and dry, and he appeared very uneasy and tight. His arms were crossed tightly around his chest, his jaw clenched firmly, and his legs, too, were crossed so strongly they looked as if they might crush each other.
“Storms usually make Skylar edgy,” Sebastian informed her. “With all the static frequencies in the air, it really rubs him the wrong way.”
“On the bright side, I can hardly hear any of your thoughts,” Skylar said, an attempt at a joke but his voice fell flat. He even looked a bit nauseous.
With Skylar being Air, it made sense that he would be affected by storms, especially one with lightning. And being so high up, literally in the heart of the storm, completely surrounded by it, there was no relief in sight for poor Skylar. Phoenyx had only average senses and the hairs on the back of her own neck were standing straight up. She wished she knew how to comfort him.
“What are you feeling?” Ayanna asked him sympathetically.
Skylar took a deep, labored breath. “Have you ever had one too many five-hour energy shots? Imagine that tenfold. There is a mania of static coursing through every one of my appendages, and the pressure coming down on my ears is booming so loud I can barely hear myself speak. It actually feels like I’m right back in that stretcher at the Four Corners Lodge being electrocuted.”
Phoenyx winced. She remembered all too well the hell they had been put through, nearly having their souls ripped out. Poor Skylar to be so sensitive to this.
Suddenly there was a loud boom that echoed through the cabin, and the lights flickered menacingly.
“What was that?” Ayanna asked.
“Something bad,” Skylar said breathily.
Ayanna stood and stumbled through the cabin toward the pilot’s room. She opened the door, and a slew of curses from the pilot’s lips slipped passed her, only stopping when the pilot realized she was there.
“What’s going on?” she asked him.
“I’m not entirely sure,” the pilot answered, flustered. “Everything is malfunctioning. This storm really came out of nowhere. If I had to make an educated guess, I would say that we’ve been struck by lightning. I’m doing everything I can,
but with the computer system acting up, it’s hard to tell what the extent of the damage is.”
Struck by lightning? Damage? Phoenyx was silently praying that she was still dreaming, that she would wake up. What were the chances of storms crashing planes anymore these days?
The lights flickered one more time and then everything went black, save for the brief flashes of lightning sneaking in through the tiny windows.
“Shit!” the pilot grunted, slamming his fist on something.
Phoenyx instinctively grabbed the first thing she could find in the darkness and willed it to ignite. Flames lit instantly on the napkin she was holding, and the cabin dimly illuminated. It was enough light that she could find her way to the bathroom stall and grab a large handful of paper towels to replace the napkin when it burned out.
Before anyone could react to the change in light or their situation, the plane suddenly tipped to one side, throwing them all off balance and crashing into the floor or a nearby wall.
“Ahh!” Ayanna screeched, and Phoenyx could see that she was clutching her shoulder. The dip must have knocked her injured shoulder into something.
“What’s happening now?” Sebastian yelled to the pilot.
“My best guess is that the engine on the right wing went out,” the pilot said.
He didn’t have to explain for everyone to know what that meant.
“We’re going to crash,” Phoenyx thought aloud.
“No, we’re not,” Skylar said. He was now on the floor, arms hugging his bent legs against him, eyes squeezed shut.
With a rollercoaster lurch, the plane righted itself.
Phoenyx looked around at everyone, assessing herself to be sure she was could trust her senses, and then she realized what must be happening—Skylar was controlling the plane with his telekinesis. And the difficulty of the task was painfully obvious in the strain on his face. Even in the dim orange light of her burning paper towels, she could see that all color was gone from his face. Every few seconds, he let out a gasp, as a weightlifter might do while struggling to lift his max weight.
