Fire (The Mermaid Legacy - Book 2)

by Hardy, Natasha

  “I won’t leave you here,” I told him firmly as I swam over him, searching for the edges of the net.

  “This is a trap,” he hissed at me, his face twisted into an inhumanly furious mask as he wriggled uselessly, the long flared trousers that normally enabled him to swim winding into a knotted stringy mess and entangling him further.

  I pulled at the netting with all of my strength, focusing my fear and anger into the action and expecting the usual surge of power that this effort normally brought. Nothing happened. I tried again, concentrating on where my fingers were laced through the web of netting, willing the steely fibres to part beneath my fingers.

  Qinn twisted in the net again, and my hand, which was now entangled in the net, rasped across the barnacled rocks on which he was so tightly ensnared, scraping a layer of skin off. A wisp of my blood twisted into the cloud that surrounded him.

  “Oh that’s not good,” he whispered as we both watched my blood mix with his.

  “It’s not as bad as your cuts, I’ll be fine,” I told him, finding his statement strange.

  “They’re on your trail, Alex, your blood will only lure them closer.”

  His statement made my blood run cold.

  “Who? Neith?”

  Qinn nodded, his face twisting in pain as he pulled jerkily at the net, his movements unnatural as if his muscles were moving without his full control.

  And then he went completely still and panic blossomed in my chest as he stared past me.

  “Qinn!”

  His gaze jerked back to me for a moment before returning to what he’d been staring at. My heart thumping hard in my chest,I turned slowly to see what he was so fixated on.

  A whisper in the water had Qinn straining to touch my skin, desperation and fear distorting his normally handsome features.

  “Give me your hand.” His voice was strained.

  “What are you doing?” I whispered, as I pulled again at the net.

  “Just do it!” The panic in his eyes stopped all questions as I wriggled my hand through a tiny tear in the net to touch him.

  “Can you heal my wound?”

  I focused on the gashes that covered his body, the tattered skin and pink flesh waving ghoulishly in the ever-moving current. I knew how to use this talent well having worked with Maya, an incredibly gifted healer, to help many of the Oceanids who had been in the cave when I’d first met them, but try as I might and as hard as I willed it I couldn’t close Qinn’s wound.

  I shook my head, “It’s not working.”

  He muttered something in the liquid language of the Oceanids as he wriggled in the net, staring at my hand as I watched, in fascinated revulsion, as a rapid dark and light brown mottling raced up my arm. Quickly it spread over his too and then we both disappeared, camouflaged perfectly with the colours of the reef. The whispers were closer and they were discussing how to find me, their voices growing more distinct as I closed my eyes and strained to listen.“We picked up her scent at the surface just over the plate reef,” one of the voices was reporting.

  “And then?” There was irritation in the question.

  “Well, it got sort of garbled after that,” the voice replied. “I thought you told me you were the best tracker this side of the equator!” Definitely irate!

  “I am.” The tracker was getting irritated. “She must have had some sort of help, or she knew we were onto her or something…” he finished lamely.

  A sigh of frustration. “So where is she now?”

  In sheepish tones: “I don’t know, it’s almost as if she got out of the water…”The voices grew fainter as our pursuers swam off into the distance. I sagged with relief for a moment, but then a

  flurry of bubbles and a muttered curse from Qinn had my eyes flying to his face in panic. The mottling on his skin had grown faint enough for me to make out the fear in his eyes.

  “Alex, I’m dying, I’m not going to be able to disguise you here much longer.”

  I shook my head, tears welling in my eyes and joining the salt of the sea instantly.

  “Qinn, you’re going to beOK,” I whispered, hoping he’d prove me right.

  “No,” he mouthed.

  I shook my head, reaching through the netting to touch his skin.

  “Keep the reef behind you and swim hard until you reach the kelp forest,” he whispered. “You’ll be safe…”

  “No Qinn, you’re going to come with me, we’re going to go together.”

  I wriggled my hand out of the net and ducked beneath him, trying to find the anchor of the net. It was wedged so deeply into the bed of the rock on which it was caught that it could only have been set up like that by a sentient creature. Qinn had been right; he was caught in a very clever trap.

  “Alexandra.” His voice was edged in pain.

  I moved back to where his head now lolled at an unnatural angle, as if his neck was too weak to hold it up any more. I supported its weight and cradled him as he spoke.

  “You must go now,” he told my, fire sparking in his eyes. “If they catch you all will be lost, please…”

  “I’m not going without you,” I replied firmly, twisting away from him a little as I searched the reef for something sharp to cut the net with.

  “Listen to me please.” His voice was tinged in desperation.

  “Qinn, if I can get you out of the net I can heal you. I…I don’t know why I can’t heal you when you’re in the net but I’m sure if I can get you out it will work again.”

  He groaned a little as he shifted one of his arms from where it had been wrapped around his midriff. Dark blood blossomed around us and bile forced its way up my throat. The net had only protected him from being carried away by the shark, but the ribbons of flesh that had clearly been ripped by sharp teeth had sealed Qinn’s fate.

  I forced my horrified gaze back to his face.

  “You are the leader we need, Alexandra, don’t let anything or anyone tell you differently…your journey is a hard one, but you must win in the end...for all of us.”

  “Qinn, you’ll be there with me...” I told him past the lump in my throat as he shook his head slightly.

  “I don’t have time...” he whispered, the spark fading from his eyes as each word came out in choppy breathlessness.

  “…and…neither…do…you.” He mouthed the last words he’d ever speak as his eyes fixed on something just past me.

  2. Voices

  I held his head for a while after the faint iridescent shade of purple I’d noticed under his skin had faded and his skin had turned milky-white and lifeless.

  There was a pressing need to leave this place, to get to the kelp forest and the land beyond it…but I didn’t know what to do with Qinn. To leave him within the net for the fish to feed on was unthinkable but I didn’t know what I would do with his body once I’d somehow managed to get him free of it. In the end the voices we’d been so focused on a short while earlier drifted on the current, far closer than they had been before.

  “I…I just got a waft of her fragrance again!”

  “She’s close, very close!”

  I left Qinn, his head lolling sickeningly in death in the ever-moving current, and pressed myself into a crevice in the coral.

  Closing my eyes I focused on the image of the mottling that had raced up my arm earlier, hoping that whatever the reason for me being unable to heal Qinn was a momentary glitch.. I knew I would be captured if I couldn’t perfect the disguise.

  When I opened my eyes again I couldn’t see the hand I knew I was staring at and when I glanced up every muscle in my body froze.

  If I’d reached out I could have touched the one closest to me. He was powerfully built, the muscles of his torso and arms highlighted by the slight emerald tinge that covered his body. He was scanning the reef where I lay, his beautiful face hard with hatred and furious determination.

  I recognised him as the leader of the Miengu, a group of fiercely aggressive Oceanids, warlike in their thinking and physically capab
le of massive destruction.

  I could feel my hair waving backwards and forwards as it swirled in the current just inches from where he stood.

  “I thought you said she was here.” He twisted to address an Oceanid I didn’t recognise. He was slight compared to the massive Miengu, his behaviour petulant and wheedling as he tried to explain my disappearance.

  “She is…or was…”

  “Which one is it?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  The smaller Oceanid was inspecting Qinn’s body, tugging at the net and snickering to himself as each tug sent a flurry of flesh and blood into the water.

  “Maybe the shark got her,” he said as he tugged, pointing at the gaping wound where Qinn’s abdomen had been.

  Instantly a fierce hatred almost overwhelmed me. It would be easy to take the two of them out, an energy ball for each would wipe the mocking smirks off their faces.

  The Miengu’s movements were blindingly fast and he had the smaller Oceanid in a vice-like unnatural grip in the time it took to blink my eyes.

  “Perhaps you don’t understand the importance of finding this little girl…alive?” The words were hissed through clenched teeth. “Because that is what she is, a stupid little girl who has had only three days to learn to swim underwater and yet you…” He tightened his grip on the smaller Oceanid, forcing a stream of bubbles and a wheeze of pain out of him, “can’t seem to find her!”

  “She could still be here,” the smaller Oceanid wheezed. “And she’s alone now so she’ll be much easier to find.”

  The larger considered this for a few more moments, the thick bands of muscle on his arms continuing to squeeze the smaller Oceanid before releasing him as his skin took on the same ghostly pale blue tinge that now covered Qinn.

  “What do you mean?”

  “She could be at the surface or something…every time her scent disappears it’s as if she has left the water. Perhaps there’s a boat or something....”

  His comment gave me much-needed insight into the potential power and threat of how the water spread my scent. It seemed that when I was in the disguise Qinn had taught me to use, or out of the water, I was undetectable.

  As I watched the Miengu push himself off the ocean floor in a swirl of white sand and swim straight for the surface in an elegant wavelike motion, his arms taut at his side and his stomach muscles rippling as he moved, the kernel of an idea began to form. The smaller Oceanid followed hurriedly, scanning the blue expanse of water as he went.

  I eased out of the crevice only able to maintain my disguise by allowing the current to move me at a painfully slow pace in forward and backward swells across the coral, and away from the other Oceanids and Qinn’s still trapped and lifeless body.

  A cascade of dark rocks ornamented in living colour rose out of the sea bed and I managed to back my way into an opening in one of them, hoping against hope as I did so that there wasn’t a large and hungry predator waiting inside it.

  I kept the disguise despite the gloom of the cave, watching warily as they returned from their search of the surface, the bigger Oceanid continuing to roughly motivate the smaller to find me.

  “You don’t honestly think she’ll co-operate when you do find her?” The slighter one floated above the larger as they searched, scanning the reef constantly, his chest moving as if he were breathing but without the regularity that ordinary breathing produces.

  “She won’t have a choice.” The Miengu was irritating the sea creatures, sending bursts of brightly coloured fish and irritated crustaceans swirling into the water. “Neith isn’t planning on giving her an option to co-operate or not, that’s why she’s too scared to just attack him straight on, she knows he is more powerful.”

  His statement made me angry, mainly because what he was saying was true and I hated the cowardly choices I’d made so far in Merrick’s rescue mission.

  I knew, of course, that the plan we’d made was supposed to be the most logical, the most objective, but hiding here in the cave helplessly with Qinn dead, I wasn’t so sure any more.

  “If she is so powerful why didn’t she free her friend from the net?”

  The Miengu stopped and straightened. His back was to me but I could see the tension in the thick muscle that ran down his spine as he considered the other’s question.

  “Perhaps she didn’t try,” he replied.

  “No, her fragrance is all around there.”

  They dropped out of sight and I had to use all of my strength and concentration to maintain the disguise and zone in on listening to their voices at the same time.

  “Do you see here?” It was the smaller Oceanid’s voice.

  A grunt in reply.

  “And here and here. This is all her.”

  They were quiet for a while.

  “I knew this Oceanid.” The Miengu this time. “His name was Qinn, he was in the pod with us for a while, his talent was disguise.”

  “It doesn’t look like it helped him much.” A snicker that was quickly cut short with a gurgle of pain.

  “He was a good man.”

  They swam back into view, the Miengu scanning the reef methodically as he did so.

  “She has probably learnt how to disguise herself from Qinn.”

  “She can do that?”

  A grunt.

  “I’m going to report what we’ve found and get some help. You wait here and be alert. She’s still here, I’m sure of it.”

  He left without another glance, disappearing quickly into the darkening blue.

  I watched the smaller Oceanid as he drifted lazily over the coral, seemingly disinterested in the task he’d been assigned.

  As I planned my escape, to dart out in disguise and gradually allow the current to drift me away, I wondered how many more Oceanids like Qinn would die before Merrick was rescued. I hadn’t known Qinn well but my inability to save him had come as a sharp shock to me. What if Sabrina, or Maya, or any number of Oceanids all followed me to Neith’s lair only to die…

  Every muscle in my body tensed as the Oceanid swam purposefully towards my cave. He stuck his head into the opening, his eyes darting around the space, a confused expression on his face.

  I had drawn back my fist and was about to hit him, making my escape a clear possibility, when he darted out of the cave and swam swiftly away.

  I’d managed to move only a few metres out of the cave when he returned to exactly the spot I’d been in, ruffling the coral and sea creatures I’d been imitating to check for a normal response.

  This close I could see the faint yellowish sheen that shone just under his skin and watched as irritation replaced his puzzled expression. I allowed myself to drift in the ever-moving backwards and forwards motion of the current, emptying my mind of every thought and pushing back the fear that threatened to blossom around me in the telling water.

  He floated upwards into the middle of the blue, his eyes scanning the reef intently.

  He was clearly waiting for his partner to return from Neith. And then it hit me, the obvious plan I’d missed. With Qinn’s gifting of disguise, I’d easily be able to follow them into Neith’s lair and then once inside I could free Merrick.

  I waited for a long time.

  The water darkened, the pale blue fading to a rich navy from the sea floor up. I hoped he wasn’t talented with great sight as well as the ability to track scent so effectively. Merrick had explained the Oceanids’ talents as being single-faceted, with each Oceanid inheriting their talent from their forebears.

  As the reef became enrobed in night I wrapped strands of sea weed around my body, allowing me to rest and wait and watch.

  3. Enemy

  I woke with a start from a sleep I hadn’t intended to fall into. The scent and flavour that filled my mouth was sheer agony and bliss at once.

  I’d come to recognise Merrick’s distinct fragrance and the delicious flavour that lingered on the back of my tongue every time he was near me, while he was helping me to discove
r the talents that were part of my DNA.

  In the green light of the wooded valley we had been sitting in I’d discovered the distinctly exotic fragrance of his skin and been amazed by the strength of it. In the water it was overpowering to the point that it seemed to affect every cell in my body, galvanising me to action.

  The time it took to impatiently pull the strands of sea weed I’d wrapped myself in saved me.

  Had I not had them wrapped around me I would have shot forward and into the danger that lurked around me without a second’s thought. Instead, as the last piece gave way beneath my impatient fingers, a current of excitement, hope and sheer aggression flowed into the water incapacitating me momentarily.

  They were here. Lots of them. And they had Merrick with them.

  I sank to the rocky sea floor and tried to work out how I could get to Merrick. I had settled on an “all guns blazing” strategy, planning to hurl every talent at them in a flurry of distraction while I tried to find Merrick.

  “To the left,” a voice whispered in the water. The current of their movement swirled around me as they swam past my hiding place, paying no attention to me as I lay pressed against the rocks.

  “Are you sure it’s her?” one of a group of three asked.

  “I’d recognise her scent anywhere.” It was Nereus who answered. He was a powerful Traduzir, an Oceanid with the same talents as Merrick but with few ethics to temper his power. He had attacked me on the one occasion Merrick had left me alone, wanting to take me as the prize his twisted mind felt he deserved. Bile rose in my throat at the implications of being caught by him.

  I risked a peek above the tumble of rocks, watching as the third shook his swirling hair as they swam away from me.

  “You would have thought that the fortieth generation Gurrer would be a lot smarter wouldn’t you?”

  Their voices were fading quickly and with it Merrick’s scent. I hadn’t seen him with them but it was obvious he was close.

  I slipped from my hiding place and followed them, using the contours of the animal-encrusted rocks and drift of the current to carry me inconspicuously forward as I tensed every muscle in preparation for the attack.