13. Chapter 13
Icouldn’t speak about my plan until we had the team together. I needed the feedback as to whether I was truly crazy, because Ben had a habit of agreeing to all my hair brained ideas. The sun sank toward the horizon by the time Ben and I made it back to Dawn and picked up my car where I’d left it at the park. Despite my exasperation, Ben insisted we stop by the hospital to get Adrian, and Kira texted to let me know she would pick up Bronwyn and meet us at the scuba centre, as requested. That was, after all, where we would have everything we would need.
Before Kira and Bronwyn arrived, I unlocked the scuba centre and hurried into the storeroom to grab supplies.
“What exactly are you doing?” Adrian asked from the doorway as he watched me pile six pouches of oxygen enchantments onto the break room table and disappear into the storeroom again.
“I’m only going to explain this once,” I said, picking up a couple of scuba suits and dashing back out again. “So we’ve got to wait until Kira and Bron get here.”
“Has she snapped?” Adrian asked Ben, who had dutifully sat at the break room table with his hands clasped together.
“If she has, you’d better stay on her good side,” Ben said.
“Too right.” I grabbed Ben’s arm and yanked him to his feet, holding the scuba suit up against him. “Try this on. You too,” I added, throwing another one at Adrian.
He threw his hands up just in time to stop the suit wrapping around his face. Damn, that would have been funny.
“Yeah, she’s lost it,” I heard Adrian say as I ran back into the storeroom. “Best behaviour it is.”
I was halfway through digging out a bunch of waterproof bags when Kira’s voice drifted in from the break room. I stuck my head through the open doorway to see Kira and Bronwyn ogling the spectacle that was Ben and Adrian in their underwear, pulling on their scuba suits.
“This isn’t a recreational trip, is it?” Kira said, more of a statement than a question.
I met her gaze, which had a steely glint. I knew the look; she was building walls inside, and if this plan went wrong, she would happily shove the final brick in place.
“It’s a bottom-of-the-barrel kind of trip,” I said. “How’s Ali?”
Kira wrapped her arms around her body, and her wings curled around her shoulders. “She’s in the best place.”
My stomach rolled. Did she have to make it sound like Allison had died?
“Can you tell us what’s going on now?” Ben asked, zipping up his suit.
“Right.” I grabbed some waterproof bags and slung them on the table, almost knocking all the pouches off. “What I’m about to tell you stays strictly between us. Janeira told me all this in confidence, and it’s important that I keep her trust.”
“Girl, dish.” Kira sat down on the seat Ben had occupied.
I smiled at her. At least her sass hadn’t gone anywhere.
“There’s a shipwreck in a cave underneath the island,” I said. “But it’s not really a wreck, as such. It’s cursed.”
“Like everything else around here,” Bronwyn said, fiddling with her amulet.
Couldn’t argue with her, there.
“A time bubble has preserved the inside of the ship,” I said. “Which, according to Janeira, has portals to important times in Dusk’s history.”
Ben froze as he tugged the zip securely on his suit. “You mean important times like a phoenix losing its shit?”
My fingers tightened around one of the bag straps. “That’s what I’m hoping.”
“Are you saying that if we get inside the ship we could go back to a time before... all this?” Bronwyn asked.
“In theory,” I said.
“So you don’t know that we can get inside?” Adrian asked, hopping to put on a scuba shoe. “That really is the bottom of the barrel.”
“It’s never been done.” I gestured to Bronwyn. “But nobody’s ever had an amulet that can open gateways before.”
Kira got up from her chair so abruptly that she knocked it over, inches away from crushing Ben’s foot. She pointed at me and opened her mouth, but nothing came out. A speechless Kira. We really were living in the last days of man.
“Are you sure about this?” she eventually asked, but the moment she stopped speaking she waved her hand at me and then again at Ben. “No, of course you’re not. Let’s do it, anyway. Where can I get one of these monstrosities?”
For the first time in too long, I prepared a group for a dive. I fitted them with scuba suits and oxygen enchantments, masks and flippers, and we filled the waterproof bags with anything else we might need. Backup oxygen enchantments, snacks, clothes, and mobile phones were all I could think to include. I packed myself a few branded uniforms as backup clothing. Given how often I tore through clothes, it was better to play it safe.
Without the boat to take us out, everyone piled in my car and I drove us around to the beach nearest to where Janeira had taken me, on the eastern shore of Dusk.
“Can you walk me through what we’re doing?” Bronwyn asked, pulling her bushy hair back into a ponytail. “I’ve never been... what do you call this again?”
“Scuba diving.” I slipped off my dress and wrapped it around my waist to prepare for my transition. Parading around in my sports bra would have to do. “And the plan is we dive to the ship, use the amulet to open a portal, and get in there.”
“But how...how...?” Bronwyn gestured wildly to her flippers and goggles that she had laid out on the beach.
I had almost forgotten that Bronwyn came from a different time; a time without scuba diving as we knew it. I fitted her suit with an oxygen enchantment and talked her through how to use it. The easiest way to explain using this enchantment was just to hold her breath and continually exhale. It went completely against our natural instincts, but with enough practice, anyone could do it.
“So... what about this shipwreck, then?” Adrian asked, as he slipped his flippers on. “How do you know where the portals are? What are we looking for?”
I froze as I handed Kira her goggles.
“Uh...” Had I completely forgotten to tell them what we could walk into? “Janeira said the portholes are the gateways to different times. Everything’s intact in there, including... the pirates.”
“Pirates?” Adrian’s tone steeped higher. “You didn’t say anything about pirates.”
“I realise that now.” I chewed my lip. This idea had taken on a life of its own so quickly that I hadn’t thought about what would happen if we actually got into the ship.
“Oh, please.” Kira popped her goggles on and stared at Adrian with her hands on her hips. “We’re going to die here anyway if we don’t do something. If you ask me, death by pirate is a cooler way to go.”
Ben and I exchanged worried looks. I hadn’t intended for this to become a suicide mission. Quite the opposite, in fact.
“She gonna be okay?” Ben muttered once he shuffled over to me.
“I’ll reel her in.” If Kira got into a fight with a pirate, it wouldn’t be the first fight I’d pulled her out of.
“Well, now I’m glad I brought athamés,” Adrian said, holding up his waterproof bag.
“You brought athamés?” Ben threw his hands into the air.
“Yeah, I did!” Adrian looped the bag onto his back. “You think I’m going to walk around without protection since those guys threw us in the trunk?”
“Oooh, can I have one?” Kira asked, fluttering over to him with her scuba shoes scuffing the sand.
“Help yourself.” Adrian turned around and let Kira unwrap his bag and dig around in it.
She whipped an athamé with a green crystal buried in the ornate hilt and held it up to the dying sunlight to look at it closer. “Ah-hah! That’s what I’m talking about.”
Ben’s hand rested on my lower back as he leaned in to me. “You keep an eye on her. I’ll deal with him, okay?”
“Deal.” Even with our divide-and-conquer technique, it looked like they would keep us busy.
When we finished organising ourselves, the sun dipped too close to the horizon for my liking. Diving in this light wasn’t something I had done often before I learned I was a mermaid, and with less experienced divers in my charge, we couldn’t leave it much later.
I waded into the ocean and made everyone turn around so I could transform without anyone seeing anything they shouldn’t. But Ben stood resolute, hands on hips as he watched me unwind the dress from my midriff, the cheeky look on his face as adorable as it was defiant.
I stuck my tongue out at him like a child and stuffed the dress into my waterproof bag before diving into the ocean and allowing my tail to burst forth.
“Bronwyn, you’re staying with me,” I said, reaching a hand out to her as the others waded in.
No way could I let her flounder around on her own when this was her first dive, with or without oxygen enchantments. The ocean was a disorienting place.
Bronwyn swam over to me with an odd dog paddle, and I wrapped an arm around her waist. Yeah, she wouldn’t last a minute under the water.
“You guys follow me and stay close,” I said. “I’ll check in on you as we go.”
“Okay, okay, let’s go.” Kira dipped under the water and swam past me, splashing Bronwyn and I in the face with her flippers.
“All right then.” I rolled my eyes and watched Bronwyn follow Kira with her gaze. “Ready?”
Bronwyn nodded, and I submerged us.
With a few powerful beats of my tail, I overtook Kira and sent a flurry of bubbles her way. As much as I wanted to zip through the water, I forced myself to keep a steady pace and checked over my shoulder regularly to ensure Ben, Adrian, and Kira were still following me. They were all fairly experienced divers and kept up, but the swim still took us far longer than it had Janeira and me. I could never go back to suit diving if I tried.
Darkness descended on us as we swam through the crevasse in the cliffs, but the flash of the headlamps I had given the three of them lit our way. I could use my echolocation in a pinch, but that wouldn’t help my passengers.
Before long, the shadow of the shipwreck came into view and I checked once again to make sure I hadn’t left them behind. Kira powered ahead of Ben and Adrian, heading straight for the side of the ship. We arrived at one porthole and I checked inside, but thankfully no faces stared back at me like before.
Bronwyn grabbed her amulet, unhooked it from her neck, and held it out to the side of the ship. Unlike with the barrier, the amulet didn’t stick to the ship, and Bronwyn fumbled with it to keep it in place against the faded wood. A few moments passed, and my heart thrummed with a rage I could barely contain.
This couldn’t be it. This had to be our chance to save the island. If we didn’t have this, there was nothing else but a miserable end for us all. I grabbed the amulet from Bronwyn and slammed it against the side of the ship. My lips parted in utter shock as the amulet lit up, bathing us all in a green glow, and a portal spread into existence across the planks.