Secrets of the Deep

by E. G. Foley

  The boys were already sprinting through the cargo hold, securing their masks as they ran.

  Archie dove down the open hatch with a splash and Jake leaped in after him just as the lantern’s little flame reached the gunpowder barrels.

  And the whole Locker exploded.

  Jake felt the heat, saw the orange glow of the huge fireball passing overhead, blowing out the walls.

  Both of them falling through the water, he reached out and grabbed his cousin by the arm. He hauled Archie near as the sea smashed in from all directions.

  Raising his free hand, Jake used his telekinesis to send out a sustained burst of protective counterforce, shielding them from the hail of wooden shards and spikes and daggers flying through the water as the great wooden coffin-ship was blown to smithereens—and, hopefully, the orb with it.

  The onslaught of knife-sized splinters would have impaled and shredded them the way it had no doubt just done to Davy Jones and everyone else inside the Locker. But with Jake warding the cloud of arrows off, they flew past, and it seemed that once again, he and Archie had survived yet another brush with doom, at least for the moment.

  They were still falling through the chaos underwater, though, tossed and tumbling about in a sea already riled up by the orb. Dark and whirling, the water raged all around them—and suddenly, Jake lost his hold on Archie.

  Separated in the gloom, he called frantically for his cousin, treading water, but the mask muffled his voice. In the clouded murk of these depths, he could barely see his hand before his face, especially with such a frenzied slurry of sand, churning foam, and debris clouding the water.

  As he turned to search for his cousin, some heavy piece of the wreckage from the Locker’s violent destruction suddenly struck Jake in the back of the head. His head whipped forward and he went somersaulting through the darkness.

  Though briefly disoriented, the flurry of ascending bubbles helped him figure out which way was up; heart pounding, he managed to right himself after a moment.

  But he felt the back of his head and winced, realizing he’d taken quite a blow. Shaking it off as best he could, he spotted the Turtle’s headlamp beaming through the cobalt blue above.

  He wished the sub were closer—of course, if it were, it could’ve been destroyed in the explosion, so the wary distance Maddox had kept was for the best. His Guardian instincts must have warned him to stay back.

  Then the balls of light that Nixie had produced in the sunken temple appeared. A hopeful sign. It meant that Maddox and Izzy must have safely collected the little witch. The ethereal balls of illumination went gliding through the water to and fro as before, searching for him and Archie.

  Jake saw the wreckage of the Locker littering the seabed in the passing glow of one. Then he spotted his cousin by the light of another. Archie, too, must have oriented himself and seen the glow.

  In the distance, Jake saw his cousin begin swimming strongly toward the sub. He relaxed somewhat, knowing Arch would be rescued.

  For himself, it was all he could do to stay conscious and focus on following the bubbles upward toward the surface. It would not be an easy swim once he got there, in this tempestuous sea. He’d been left half deafened by the blast, and was feeling dangerously woozy.

  Worst of all, the gash on the back of his head left a trail of blood floating in the water behind him as he swam…

  CHAPTER 32

  Blood in the Water

  Dark thunderclouds churning overhead…

  Slashes of lightning stabbing at the sea. Towering waves all around her. Wicked wind.

  Dani was too terrified to cry as she clung to the mast of the sailboat for dear life. It swung back and forth like a metronome. Her stomach lurched every time the tiny white vessel seesawed up the steep crests then plunged into the troughs between the waves.

  How she didn’t capsize was a miracle in itself. But perhaps it had something to do with the Hail Marys racing nonstop through her mind. She couldn’t believe her Irish ancestors had ever bothered becoming fishermen, or that her daft brother Patrick had actually wanted to join the Navy. Surely they were mad.

  Only the Gryphon had any common sense. Yes, she was with Red. She hated the ocean, the beach, the rocks. She even hated fish.

  She had decided all this over the past fifteen minutes, when the weather had begun to shift. Thunderheads had seemed to gather out of nowhere. Rising gales had begun to flap through the mainsail and the jib.

  She’d taken one look at those spiraling black clouds forming overhead, and had known in her gut it was all due to the orb, and that the end of the world was probably at hand.

  This was not something she had planned on in her haste to retrieve the wayward Liliana. Then she’d taken a good, hard look at her situation—a completely inexperienced sailor, aged almost twelve, alone at sea, a mile from shore—with a monster storm of supernatural proportions on the way.

  Her little white twenty-foot sailboat was no Noah’s Ark. She saw there was an excellent chance she was going to drown.

  With a gulp, she had vowed to stay calm and asked herself a serious question: What would Maddox do?

  Well, of course, she had the sense to lower the sails and wiggle a cork life ring around her waist. Then she had dropped anchor, giving the boat some drag so the wind didn’t carry her off all the way to the Barbary Coast.

  She gave up on trying to find Liliana. The mermaid would be safer in the depths than she was at the surface, anyway.

  Though she tried to start rowing back to shore, the wind was against her, so she gave up on that with a grim decision to save her strength in case the boat capsized and she had to swim.

  There was no way around it. She was just going to have to sit out here on the open water, take the brunt of the storm in the face, and hope that, somehow, Jake saved the day.

  Before long, the first fat raindrops had splashed her in the face, taunting her—as if the seawater sloshing over the sides of the boat hadn’t already drenched her from head to toe and left her sputtering.

  The next thing she knew, she was battling the elements and fighting to keep the boat from tipping over, but as the crashing waves grew higher, she had even given up on that, and ended up in her current spot, hugging the mast like it was her father.

  It was while the boat perched on the crest of another ten-foot swell that Dani saw the explosion—heard the muffled blast, and witnessed the sea bubble up and churn with a frothing burst of white water.

  Then the sailboat dropped into the trough, and once again, the motion made her want to puke. But as the battered craft climbed again, she reached for the telescope hanging from a strap around her neck. With shaking hands, she lifted it to her eye as she reached the peak again, quickly scanning the same area.

  The white foam and fizz in the water was already dissipating. To her amazement, the force of the wind eased off a little, and the lightning stopped.

  And in her heart, she knew.

  He did it. He destroyed the orb. Wonder filled her. But how could she doubt? Of course he did it. He’s Jake.

  The boat plunged again into another trough, but this time, she was smiling. Besides, the drop was not as drastic now that the orb had quit disturbing the atmosphere. Without the wind whipping the seas, the waves began to slacken.

  On the next crest, she looked eagerly again through the telescope and saw a blond head pop up above the water. “Jake!”

  She was confident he would soon see the white boat heading toward him, since there was nothing else out here to break the horizon. From the moment she spotted his golden hair amid the steel-gray waves, joyous hope filled her.

  With the violence of the storm finally starting to ease off, she decided to hurry and go get him. The little boat wasn’t hugely safe, but it was better than treading water.

  “Hold on! I’m coming!” she shouted, unsure if he could hear her. The wind seemed to carry her words away, and her throat was raw from all the salt water she had swallowed—and, in all honesty, fro
m the considerable amount of terrified screaming she’d done.

  Ignoring the seasickness, she carefully released her death grip on the mast and sat down to take up the oars, her back to Jake, since that allowed for the most powerful strokes. Her face felt raw, chapped from salt and wind, and her pirate hat had long since blown away, but nothing would deter her now as she threw her shoulders into each sweep of the paddles.

  Rowing toward Jake as hard as she could, she glanced over her shoulder to make sure she was still on track. Jake must’ve spotted her, for he started swimming toward her boat. She grinned and looked ahead again, plowing the waves deeply with the oars.

  But the next time Dani looked over her shoulder to check her direction and to see how much farther she had to go, a small scream escaped her.

  She paused in rowing and whipped herself around in a panic at the sight of several shark fins circling him.

  No, no, no. Get away from him!

  Dread seized her, and she could have easily spiraled down into phobic hysteria. But she choked back her terror and refused to give in to fear, redoubling her efforts. Instead of just relying on the oars, she quickly fed out half the mainsail, now that the wind had grown more manageable.

  Hands shaking, she adjusted the angle of the yard, then looped the sheet around the winch and secured it to hold the sail in place. Returning to the oars, she faced forward this time so she could keep an eye on things, and started rowing again to get there even faster.

  Don’t you dare hurt him.

  When one of the owners of the circling fins leaped, breaching out of the water, Dani winced to see that these were not actual sharks, but Davy Jones’s shark men. Her heart sank.

  All too well, she remembered her horror of those monstrous creatures down in Driftwood, and her feelings about them hadn’t changed.

  But she was not about to let them kill Jake, and this time, she was sure they would. That explosion had made it fairly clear that he’d destroyed the orb and possibly Davy Jones along with it—if Jones could be destroyed.

  So far, thankfully, Jake seemed all right. He had pulled down his mask and was still treading water, no doubt terrified, trying to keep watch around himself in all directions. The shark men hadn’t attacked yet.

  Maybe they just wanted to torment and terrify him for a while before moving in for the kill. Thank goodness he has his telekinesis. If he can just hold them off for another minute or two…

  She was almost there. Dani knew she was sailing straight into the greatest danger of her life, and could have easily been paralyzed with fear, but whatever it took, she would never abandon Jake.

  Grimly resolved on the battle, she secured one oar back in place against the gunwale, but pulled the other free from the oarlock to use it as a weapon. Standing up, one knee braced on the bench, the other foot planted firmly, she let the sail propel her right into the midst of the circling shark men.

  “Get in!” she shouted as the boat pressed on toward Jake, driven only by the wind now. Raising her oar like a club, she bashed the first shark man who tried to lunge at her in the head.

  The next few minutes were a blur. She had her oar and was whacking the shouting, cursing shark men every which way as they tried to get to her and Jake, and to tip the boat over. It would’ve been bad enough if they were regular sharks, but these hideous pirates also had human hands and muscled arms—human wits and human rage—and they kept reaching up, grasping the edges of the boat.

  “You killed our captain!”

  “You blew up our boat!”

  “You’re gonna die, boy!”

  “Get away from him!” Dani kept clubbing them back until Jake finally managed to scrabble up out of the water and heave himself safely into the boat.

  Glancing over just to make sure he still had all his limbs, she saw the source of what had attracted them. “You’re bleeding.”

  “I know,” he panted. “And you’re not supposed to be here.”

  “You’re welcome,” she said.

  He grinned. At once, Jake unlocked the other oar from its holder and joined her in this odd game of cricket, continually slugging the shark men away with their bats.

  They kept coming back, though, only getting angrier. Everywhere around them, the water was churning and splashing. The shark men, enraged, kept leaping up, snapping their jaws.

  Dani was fairly sure they were in the middle of a feeding frenzy; only, none of them had managed to get a bite yet. They were certainly determined.

  “Do you think they’ll give up soon?” she asked anxiously.

  “Uhh,” said Jake.

  Frankly, she was not sure how much longer either of them could hold out. She was exhausted and he was losing blood from a nasty gash on the back of his head. She cringed at the sight of the scarlet trickle running down his neck onto his back. Always getting into trouble.

  At least the sky was starting to clear and the waves were returning to something closer to their normal height for a summer afternoon.

  Whack!

  “Go away!” Dani yelled, this time at the thresher shark man, who snarled at her in reply before sliding back under the waves.

  She heard him punch the bottom of the boat as he passed beneath them.

  “I guess they didn’t all die in that explosion I saw,” Dani remarked.

  “Most did. These were posted outside the Locker, on sentry duty.”

  Just then, she felt the vessel lurch and heard a wooden sort of crunch from below the stern. Dani gasped. “Uh-oh! I think one of them just took a bite of the rudder.”

  “Charming,” Jake said through gritted teeth. They exchanged a grim glance, then he swatted away a large, angry half-hammerhead with tattoos on his arms.

  The next one—half tiger shark, she guessed, judging by the brown stripes all over his bronze skin—lunged up at her and tried to grab the oar. “Gonna have you for lunch, girlie!”

  “Get back!” she bellowed, then a strange thing happened.

  The tiger shark man jerked backward, as if something below had grabbed him and pulled him under.

  A startled expression flicked over his striped, black-eyed face before he disappeared underwater.

  It happened again to another attacker over on Jake’s side.

  The rest kept coming, but one by one, the shark men kept getting pulled underwater and not returning.

  Dani and Jake looked at each other in confusion, and the shark men themselves were starting to panic.

  They left off their attacks, treading water, glancing around anxiously. “What’s down there?”

  “Please tell me it’s not—”

  All of a sudden, Thresher Shark came flying up out of the water and went careening through the air, as if he had been thrown.

  He flew over them with a shriek and landed with a great splash many, many yards away—and he didn’t come back.

  Then another one flew by in the same fashion, arcing through the air above the sailboat.

  “Did you see that!” Jake cried, his club still at the ready.

  “Yes, I did,” she murmured, tilting her head back to watch, mystified, as another sailor was flung through the air, his arms and legs flailing, his fishtail flapping.

  “No, not up there! Below us!” Jake said, pointing at the water. “Look beneath the boat, carrot!”

  “I am not sticking my head out over the side of the boat, Jake. One of those brutes could pop up and bite it off. Just tell me what you saw!”

  “It’s the Colony!” he said.

  “The Colony?” she echoed.

  “Remember? Those huge, weird, shaggy creatures in the Seaweed Forest—like the one that nearly ripped my arms off for swimming off the path? You remember! Liliana knew how to talk to them?”

  “Ohh, of course!” Dani exclaimed. So that’s where she went!

  “The mermaids told us these creatures really hate the shark men. Guess they weren’t joking. Good timing down there!” He waved at the huge, kelp-covered creatures that had so terrified th
em while passing through the Seaweed Forest.

  “Hate to tell you, but their arrival here is no accident, believe me,” she said ruefully, and sure enough, Liliana surfaced well behind the Colony.

  “See? I told you I could help!” she called proudly. “I remembered the one thing the shark men are scared of!”

  “Well done, Your Highness!” Dani shouted back, laughing.

  “She’s a mermaid again?” Jake asked, looking confused.

  “It’s a long story,” Dani answered, but at last, they were able to catch their breath.

  The shark men were either fleeing for their lives or being gruesomely dealt with underwater by their bizarre mortal enemies.

  Jake peered over the gunwale. “I think we’re all right now—by some miracle. Though I’m still wondering what the deuce you’re doing here, carrot.”

  “If you scold me right now, I’m warning you, I still have this oar–”

  “Wouldn’t dream of it.” Jake collapsed onto the bottom of the boat and slowly started laughing in relief. “I can’t believe we actually did it. That was a close thing there, for a minute.”

  “Is the orb destroyed?”

  “Aye, I think so. Blown to smithereens. And so is Davy Jones, at least for the time being. Pity. I was almost starting to like him.”

  At that moment, they heard the by-now-familiar notes of the Triton Trumpet.

  Lil turned toward the sound with an eager gasp. “It’s my sister! Maybe she brought Papa!” She dove underwater to find out and returned a moment later. “I don’t see my father, but Sapphira’s coming with Tyndaris and his troops!”

  “Better late than never,” Jake murmured wryly.

  “Sorry about the delay,” Sapphira called upon her arrival. Tyndaris and his men started surfacing behind her. “I would’ve been here sooner, but we ran into a…slight difficulty.”

  “Is Papa all right?” Lil asked anxiously, bobbing up out of the water.

  “Liliana?! Yes, he’s fine, but—Sweet Poseidon, what are you doing here?” the elder princess cried.