“It’s old Morse Code,” Meifeng explained to Kai. He studied the deepening scowl on Corey’s face. “And it’s not looking good.”
Corey straightened. “It’s the Atlanteans. They know the Beltiamatu are coming for them, and they say they’ll kill Badur unless you turn yourself over to them right now. You have thirty minutes to respond; that’s not even enough time for a human to cover that distance.”
“A Beltiamatu could,” Kai said. “Even with legs, I could.”
Corey shook his head. “Apparently, they don’t think Badur’s any good as a hostage. They want you as a hostage”
“I know.”
Meifeng stared at Kai, his eyes narrowed. “All the more reason to not go.”
“If they kill Badur, then the aether core he carries will be available for the taking, and Jacob Hayes will seize it. We’ll never get it back. But if I’m there—”
“Your grandfather said not to let you leave this ship.”
“But that was before the Atlanteans threatened to kill my father.”
Corey ground his teeth. “I don’t think your father’s life means all that much to your grandfather that he’d willingly trade yours for Badur’s.”
“I’ll spend my life as I choose,” Kai retorted. “My father has stolen the aether core. My people need that aether core. I’m getting it back.” Kai staggered out of the bridge. Corey and Meifeng chased him, but he reached the ship’s rail before they did. He dived, entering the water without a splash.
The ocean embraced him, filling his lungs with the silkiness of water instead of the harshness of air. His legs ached less. His unsteady movements on the Endling’s deck smoothed into fluid undulations in the water. Tail or no tail, he was still faster than any human in the water, and he set off straight for the Atlantean ship. The water trembled all around him, making it impossible to pick out false vibrations from true currents, but his grandfather’s army was certainly on the move. If they reached the Atlantean ship before he did, Jacob would kill Badur.
Kai’s chest ached, the pain so sharp that his head throbbed in matching misery.
It was easier to deny his conflicted feelings about his father.
It was easier to dwell on the practical, the political—
The aether core. He needed the aether core for his people.
And for that reason, he needed to save his father.
No other…
A muscle in his smooth cheek twitched at the lie.
Kai was within sight of the ship when the throes of transformation caught him unaware. No tingling at his toes, heralding the sharp pain that would rip along the length of his legs. No time to draw a deep breath. No time to brace for the mind-shattering agony.
The water turned crimson as his legs flayed into shreds of flesh. His mouth opened in a soundless scream as pain squeezed the air out of his lungs. Anguish so black darkened his mind. Time slipped away like the whisper of a current against his burning skin.
Kai was scarcely aware when hands seized him. His mind was still reeling in that dark, tormented place when he was pulled from the water. Light and awareness returned slowly, along with the harsh scrape of air against the inside of his lungs. His eyes flickered open, and he stared, uncomprehending, at a world turned upside down.
He traced legs down to bodies and faces of men—young and old—all wide-eyed with silent awe, but he couldn’t put the crazy conflicting information together until he realized that he was strung up, by his tail. His wrists were cuffed together; a metal chain looped through the link between the cuffs and attached to a steel hook on the deck.
Through the blur of noise pounding through his skull, he heard Jacob’s voice. “Will you show me the aether core?”
Kai followed Jacob’s voice to a corner of the deck. There, sprawled amid cushions of wet kelp, was Badur. He was not bound, but neither did he seem aware that his son was a prisoner on board the ship. Kai screamed his father’s name, but the shout was silenced by the gag around his mouth.
“Not all the way,” Jacob continued. He leaned over Badur, his hand resting lightly on Badur’s shoulder. “I wouldn’t want you to do anything you’re uncomfortable doing, but my men are anxious. They are demanding we attack the Endling, but we don’t have to. Not if they they’re assured that you have the aether core.”
Badur’s brow furrowed, but he raised his hand to his chest.
No, Kai’s mind shrieked. No… Please, no.
The deep purple glow of aether emerged from Badur’s chest.
Agony seized Kai, shredding, shattering along the length of his tail, ripping it apart. Only the tight shackles around the base of his tail—now his ankles—kept him from falling to the deck. Flesh sloughed off his body. His blood spilled down his chest, over his face, his hand, then along his arms before dripping onto the deck.
His tail reformed into legs—his much longer tail gave way to shorter human legs—and there was not enough slack in the chain that bound his arms to the deck. He was yanked up. Agony punched through his shoulders as they were torn from their sockets. He screamed into the gag, the sound scarcely covering the audible twin pops of bones tearing out of their joints.
The pain was still a live, roaring fire in his body when it surged again, as if oil had been thrown over it. He writhed, arcing in agony as his skin peeled off his legs and flesh dripped off before melting together into a tail.
In Badur’s innocently unaware grasp, the aether core shimmered and tortured Kai with every pulse of its ethereal glow.
Blood pouring from Kai’s body soaked into the gag until the smell and taste of his blood suffocated him. Pressure pounded against the sides of his skull, against his chest. He couldn’t breathe, couldn’t draw any breath between the unrelenting surges of anguish. His eyes flared wide, blind with agony, as his scarcely formed tail ripped apart into legs.
The tightness around his chest surged into unbearable pain. His heart, driven past all endurance, clenched, stuttered, failed.
Something exploded through his mind.
Absolute, utter clarity—he was dying.
“Stop it!” a man’s deep voice shouted from beyond his fading awareness. “What the hell are you doing? This isn’t right! None of this is right!”
A roar of agreement rose. Movement blurred around him, and then he was falling. Arms caught him. The steel cuffs around his legs and his wrists yanked away. A whirl of faces, features indistinguishable behind the red haze of pain, surrounded him. “He’s having a heart attack!” another man shouted. “Get the defibrillator!”
Kai’s mind was lost, his thoughts drifting, disconnected, beyond his grasp, when something jolted through him, yanking him back into the screaming mass of raw agony that was his body. His heart thudded once, the sound lost in the vast emptiness that surrounded him.
Too little. Too late. His thoughts flittered away on the whisper of his final breath.
Then another jolt, this one sharper and nearer than the one before.
The third jolt blasted pain through him, drowned him in it, buried him in it.
The dark, tattered specter of death faded. Kai’s heart pounded, the beat weak but steady. His vision was still a blur of white ghosting against black. The babble of voices surrounding him bounced off the insides of his skull, words and phrases blending together into an incoherent whole. “Take him to the sick bay…blood transfusion…med evac…keep that bastard Jacob away from him till we get to Portland…because we’re not monsters, damn it…we fight battles, but this isn’t a battle…it’s torture! Taking over this ship…put Jacob and the other two in the brig...the damn merman too…wait, what—”
Waves surged up around the ship, drenching the deck in blinding sprays of salt water and sea foam. Legions of Beltiamatu warriors leaped from the ocean, the sun glinting off the platinum spears in their hands.
Chapter 19
Spears cut through the air, sinking into the chests of the sailors clustered on the deck. Men crumpled to the deck, the blood trickling
out of their bodies blending into the crimson puddles of Kai’s blood gleaming against the polished steel surface.
Zamir alone, of all the Beltiamatu warriors leaping from the ocean, somersaulted in midair to land on the deck. He swiveled, following Jacob’s frantic movements as the Atlantean yanked a spear from a slain sailor’s body and sprinted toward Kai.
Jacob stood over Kai, the spear clasped in both hands, poised over Kai’s chest.
In that split second, between life and death, Zamir hurled his spear.
Jacob’s grip tightened, his knuckles white, then abruptly slacked. He stared down, as if bewildered, at the tip of Zamir’s spear, emerging at his chest. His spear tumbled from his weakened grasp, and he folded over like a marionette with cut strings.
Zamir pushed Jacob off Kai’s body, then combat rolled over Kai, coming up to his feet with Kai slung over his back. The metallic scent of Kai’s blood filled his nostrils, sickening him to the pit of his stomach. Zamir ran to the side of the ship and lowered Kai, his skin slippery with blood, into the waiting grasp of two wide-eyed Beltiamatu warriors. “Take him back to the Endling.”
With Kai safely sent on his way, the tight bands of fear around Zamir’s heart eased, but fury stepped into its place. He spun around, but Badur was gone. Surely not back into the water— Zamir’s gaze swept over the deck, then fixed on a sprinting figure on the other side of the deck.
Badur’s long tail was slung across that man’s shoulders.
No human could have so easily carried a Beltiamatu. It had to be Marduk.
The slim, female figure running ahead of Marduk had to be Ondine.
They hurried through a door on the deck then vanished from sight.
Zamir sprinted after them, leaping over the bodies of sailors sprawled over the deck. Their torture of Kai had turned into a massacre, Zamir thought grimly. Their gathering had made them easy targets for Beltiamatu spears; the tightly packed crowd made escape impossible. Some of them had been armed with handguns, but their weapons backfired and jammed, creating even more panic and chaos.
Easy pickings.
The twinge of uneasiness, of guilt, in his chest had to be Ginny’s influence. Proof, if he ever needed it, that his ancestors were right, that no good came out of Beltiamatu interactions with humans.
He would have to end it.
And judging by the sudden, sharp ache in his chest—the immediate, emotional rebellion—the sooner the better.
Before he fell in love with her.
Zamir snatched up a spear from the body of a fallen sailor then rushed in through the door Marduk had entered. A faint motion, or perhaps even something as fragile as a breath, shrieked a warning. He dropped to his knees and arched back, sliding forward as a heavy steel crowbar swung over his head. Twisting around in a single, fluid motion, he drove the spear tip into the sailor’s side, then heaved the man’s body over his head, sending it crashing into a second sailor concealed in the darkness, awaiting his turn to attack.
The second man was still flailing beneath the weight of the first when Zamir pulled out the spear from the first man’s chest and plunged it into the second. The panicked expression on the sailor’s face slacked in death.
Zamir raced through the corridors, his footsteps scarcely making a sound against the coffin of steel around him. Other footsteps did, but the resonating echo made it nearly impossible to pinpoint the source.
He slipped—almost—on a streak of blood. Zamir knelt to run a finger through it. It smelled different, not obviously, but subtly enough for someone attuned to the differences between Beltiamatu blood and human blood to detect.
It was Beltiamatu blood.
Surely not Kai’s. If someone had stepped in Kai’s blood on the deck, it would have scrapped off the soles of their boots by the time they reached the belly of the ship.
The blood had to be Badur’s.
Was he badly hurt? If he died… Zamir’s throat clenched. His emotions shied back from something he refused to examine closely, but strategy—strategy and tactics—he could handle. If Badur died, the aether core would be free for the taking, but neither he nor Marduk could absorb it, which left…Ondine?
It would be a disaster beyond imagining if Ondine absorbed the aether core, combining its vast powers with the power that already existed within her.
Zamir quickened his steps, following the thin trail of blood down steel steps, onto the lowest deck. The corridors, scarcely wide enough for two, opened into a space as large as the width of the ship, and half its length. Two submersibles occupied most of the space; Ondine commandeered one of them, and Marduk and Badur the other.
How the hell did they think they were going to get out?
If the ship had not been disabled by the EMP devices, the bay doors would open, filling the space with water so that the submersibles could leave. The doors would then close and then massive pumps would dispel the water from the submersible storage area.
But all of that was an impossibility—
Green light arced from Ondine’s submersible, striking the bay doors. Steel dissolved, as fragile as crushed corals. Sea water rushed into the ship. Aether magic twisted like rope-like chains between the two submersibles, and their engines purred to life.
Both submersibles whirred out of the ship. Zamir pursued them, but a final arc of green aether magic blasted past him and struck the inner wall of the submersible bay, smashing a hole through it.
Sea water rushed up. It would fill the ship and sink it.
The humans on the ship would die.
Zamir dove into the rising water and swam out of the ship through the bay doors. The Beltiamatu immediately rallied to him. “Do we pursue them?” they asked, their gazes following the two submersibles as they churned away from the doomed ship.
“Follow them from a distance. I need to know where they are going. Do not engage.”
The Beltiamatu nodded. Two warbands—each thirteen strong—raced after the submersibles. Zamir, accompanied by the remaining warriors, broke the surface as the ship’s deck sank beneath the water. Injured sailors thrashed against the tossing waves, their blood turning the white sea foam pink.
“Where’s the closest ship—not the Endling?” Zamir asked.
“A large cruise ship, directly south, two full leagues away.”
“Take the survivors to the ship. Do not allow yourselves to be seen.”
The Beltiamatu warrior nodded. The merfolk spread out, reclaiming their spears and seeking survivors. One merman swam past Zamir, propelling two humans ahead of him, their faces positioned above the water. “Stop,” Zamir ordered, his eyes narrowing on the face of one of the humans. “I’ll take that one.”
The mer-warrior turned his burden over to Zamir, then found another survivor to lead to safety.
Zamir turned his attention to the injured man he held. The man sneered, but his face was blanched and blood leaked from the corner of his mouth. “I’m not afraid of you.”
Zamir chuckled softly, the sound cold and without humor. “Then you are a fool, and I have never taken you for a fool, Jacob Hayes.”
Chapter 20
“Is he going to make it?” Ginny asked in lowered tones as Corey drew Kai out of the ocean and gently placed him in an inflated lifeboat filled with water and located in a shaded part of the deck, sheltered from the sun’s full heat. Kai’s erratic gasps of air settled into an easier rhythm the moment he was fully immersed in water, but they were still uneven, the quick shallow gasps interspersed with a rare deep gulp of air.
“There are no injures to bandage up,” Corey said. “Most of the problem is pain, fatigue, and blood loss from repeated transformations. There’s nothing we can do for him on this ship. There’s nothing we can do on land either. Beltiamatu blood and human blood have vastly different markers. We could very well kill Kai with a blood transfusion.”
“So you’re saying he’s just going to get weaker and weaker from each transformation until he dies?”
“That�
��s what I’ve been saying for days now,” Corey snapped at her. He folded up his stethoscope. “He has arrhythmia. He probably had a heart attack, and the idiots on that ship tried to bring him back with a defibrillator. They saved his life, but didn’t dry off his chest before doing so.” Corey traced the faint burn marks on Kai’s chest. “It’s not a bad price to pay for being alive, but an unnecessary price if their medics had been more on the ball about their jobs.” He gently massaged salve into the raw skin on Kai’s ankles and wrists. “These may scar, but they will heal.”
“They say the humans strung him up by his tail…his ankles,” Thaleia spoke on behalf of the Beltiamatu who had brought Kai back to the ship and who now sat on the rail around the Endling. “And each time he transformed, the blood poured down his body.” Her voice cracked into heaving sobs. “He was covered in blood when Zamir returned him to the ocean, and they said…” Her shoulders shook. “They said Badur did this to him. That he held the aether core outside of his chest, and forced Kai through three transformations, one after another.”
“I…” Ginny took Thaleia’s hand. She fumbled for the words. “Surely there’s another reason. Another explanation. Badur would never—”
The Beltiamatu seated along the rail turned around. The scarcely audible murmur of their higher-pitched voices was like chirping birds. Several mer-warriors reached down to the water, and Ginny gaped as they pulled Jacob up.
Bleeding and almost unconscious, Jacob slumped over the deck.
Corey hurried over to the injured man, and after a quick examination, glanced up at Zamir who had climbed aboard after Jacob. “Treat him, or shoot him?”
“Corey,” Ginny snapped.
“It’s a fair question,” Corey responded with a scowl. “We’ve got lots of problems, and the way I see it, Jacob’s one of them.”
One of the Beltiamatu spoke, his voice too squeaky to make out, but Zamir, apparently, had no trouble understanding him. “The scouts say that Jacob persuaded Badur to reveal the aether core. There was no sign—” Zamir swallowed hard. “—that Badur knew Kai was on board their ship.”
Cursed Legacy: Lord of the Ocean #3 Page 11
