Chapter 2
Two
Kaden
Kaden glided through the viscous seas as they made their way back to the palace, his tail, hands, and torso moving in harmony to streamline his movements through the water’s natural resistance.
He put his free hand on his chest where a dull ache had emerged since he had taken Angie undersea.
No, not again.
When Kaden left Angie after her first tidesweek at school, his chest ached as he cut his way through the sea.
Not in the way that he missed her.
This was a blooming pain, as if an invisible hand punched his sternum from the inside, unlike the usual brief pang of discomfort he got after giving her breath—which would fade in the flick of a tailfin. No, this felt deeper and gnawing. And it persisted.
Odd. He could talk to Angie about it.
Perish the thought.
She didn’t need to worry for him on top of her schoolwork and part-time job. She needed to focus and he wouldn’t let himself be a burden on her.
The pain dissipated within another flare of his gills and he relaxed.
Nothing to worry about.
Since that day over a tidesyear ago, the odd pains came on and off but never hurt him long enough for him to truly give it more than a moment’s thought.
But today, it lingered. Despite his best efforts, he struggled to keep pace with Angie.
If he swam any faster, a bout of fatigue would strike him from head to tail.
Kaden parted his lips taking in a long swallow of seawater and calming himself as he turned his focus to his lover.
Each time he saw Angie—thought of her—his heart felt like it would burst with passion.
He had spent close to a tidesweek looking for and picking out those flowers, but it was a feat worth enduring to see the happy surprise on her face.
Perhaps, the effort to search for the flowers or, more likely, the stress of his royal duties here and back at home, was the culprit for his chest ache. He needed a good, long rest, was all.
Having her at his side made the swim to Haiping’s palace a quick one.
He found himself before the jade doors, gleaming in the darkness, the single bright spot in the black canvas of the deep sea.
When he and Angie approached the Mer-Queen and Mer-King in the throne room, they swept out their arms in a warm welcome. King Varin, his hair strands of suede, tawny skin smooth and taut kind eyes like two shimmering sapphires, was soft-spoken.
Cyrus’ and Kaden’s Aunt Cassia was Serapha’s older sister and always a familiar face he relished seeing when he visited them. She was Varin’s opposite with her firm and direct tone, hair as dark as the depths with sharp, moonstone eyes, and harsh lines and angles.
Both rested on their respective throne pillars of onyx and crimson fire corals, yu wiggling in and out behind their heads and at their sides. Deep-sea corals decorated the ceiling above and walls around him and burnt orange and prismatic creatures Angie called sea stars crawled amongst them.
“Still tides to you, Kaden and Angie. What brings you to us?” Varin held his iridescent tail and hand tightly to the pillar to keep his balance against the force of the currents.
The dimmed lights from bioluminescent creatures highlighted their dark hair with muted pinks, blues, and purples. and the glowing creatures illuminated the bangles and clasps snug around their arms and burrowed in their hair.
“An update, my Queen and King. I have news. Well, Angie does,” Kaden said after a formal bow with Angie following suit. An automatic move after over two decades of bowing to his parents.
Cassia held up a hand before he could say more. “What did we tell you about addressing us?”
Kaden nodded. Aunt Cassia had repeated it to him over and over since he and Cyrus were children that just because Serapha and Aqilus had their sons address them by their titles, she did not want, nor expect that treatment.
And when Cassia met and bonded with Varin over twenty tidesyears ago, he had insisted on the same.
Kaden had yet to kick the habit of calling them by their titles.
“Aunt Cassia and Varin.” The titles sounded strange on his tongue.
“Better. Now, what was it you wanted to tell us?” Cassia adjusted the band of pearlescent eelgrass silk around her chest, her expectant gaze flickering between Kaden and Angie.
Beside him, Angie fiddled with the strap of her swimsuit, her nervousness palpable. He gave her an encouraging nod and she straightened her shoulders as she repeated to them that she had told Kaden.
“We haven’t heard news from Serapha,” Varin set his lips into a thin, pale line. He reached for the seaflute tied around his waist. “But we’ll get in touch with her. And Kaden, would you check on the villages outside the palace? Let us know if there’s anything we need to know.”
“Will do.”
“If there’s nothing else, you’re both dismissed,” Cassia said, her attention on Angie.
Kaden watched his uncle as Queen Serapha’s lilting voice came through his seaflute.
Another bow and he was on his way to his guest quarters, swimming out to the open sea from the throne room and looping his way upward, reaching another gilded section of the palace on a layered, oblong rock some feet above the palace’s apex.
From his vantage point, the mer and sea life swimming leisurely below looked like amorphous shapes, the occasional flash of color coming into view from glossy mer tails.
“I hope your mom is okay,” Angie offered when they were at his door. “I mean, Stefan is on it too. Hopefully he caught them in time.”
“I hope so,” Kaden replied, his thoughts lingering on why Cassia rushed them out prior to calling his mother. And the way she looked at Angie before, though Angie was the one who brought the plight to their attention.
Then again, though she was friendly with Angie and had invited her to family gatherings, she had admitted to Kaden, in private, that she remained cautious of humans reneging on their truce.
He turned to Angie and trailed his arms down her lower back to encircle her waist and pulled her flush to him.
She wrapped her legs around the distal part of his tail until a current passed.
“It’s getting late. Do you need to leave?
Or can you stay longer?” He pressed his lips to her ear. A shiver caused his nerves to spark.
She put a hand on his chest. “I’d love to, but I do have to get back by mid-morning. Work and Lulu await.”
“Good.” He pressed a kiss to her forehead. “Because I had a small meal ready and my pillows fluffed in case you would say yes.”
“Oh, you knew I had no reason to decline.” Angie tossed him with a mock-exasperated eyebrow raise.
A hearty laugh rumbled from Kaden’s throat. “Because you told me.” He pulled her in for a long kiss, running his fingers through strands of her hair flowing with the currents. “And about my having the urge to take you entirely?”
Angie raised an eyebrow, her beautiful face aglow. “Yes?”
He traced a finger around the soft outline of one of her breasts. “I think it might be striking me now.” Did she want the same? Kaden studied her expression.
“You and me both.” She kissed him again and he opened the door, tugging her hand so she floated in beside him.
After the tides shifted, he escorted Angie back to the surface and then returned to his quarters.
His guest room was sparsely decorated. A simple beige seagrass-fiber hammock in the center, thick enough so he’d get a decent night’s rest each moontide, but too thin to be truly comfortable.
Angie had never mentioned how she felt in it when they slept in this hammock together.
If she had any complaints, she kept them to herself.
When they first met she might have given him some snarky remark about it, but in the past tidesyear, she seemed to have mellowed, her expression speaking of joy instead of horror and anger.
At times, he missed her remarks. Her fiery attitude was a part of her that he fell in love with.
At the time, the war may have had much to do with those emotions.
And that assfish-brained brother-in-law of hers. If Kaden had ever seen Nick again after he tried to murder him in front of Angie and Zixin, and with the way he treated Angie, he wasn’t sure he would hold back from strangling the man with his bare hands. Or his tail.
The seaflute tied to his table hummed causing vibrations to ripple through the water. His mother’s voice filled the space.
“Kaden? Are you there?”
He scrambled to the seaflute, untying it and holding it close to his lips. “Mother?”
“Oh, good. Listen, I relayed this message to Cassia and Varin, but I also wanted to let you know. I spoke with some of my sentries about your and Angie’s concerns of the landwalkers returning.”
Kaden balked at the word ‘landwalkers’, but she would not call the humans by any other name. He stayed quiet, letting her continue.
She didn’t miss a beat, even with his silence. “There are landwalker divers skulking around the palace area. They never stayed to interact with us and left before our sentinels had a chance to confront them. I do not trust their intentions and have more sentinels patrolling in a wider swath.”
“Glad you’re okay.”
“Yes, I appreciate the warning. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must attend to some pressing matters with my sentinels.”
Kaden shook his head and pursed his lips.
Just like the Mer-Queen. Even when he was here, his conversations with her were always short and to the point.
He placed his seaflute back in between his belongings on his desk, made of smoothed and polished coarse-grained, igneous rock.
When he first arrived in this palace, he’d realized all the stones and corals they used for furnishings were smooth—much smoother than the roughshod, natural rock his queendom utilized.
He wasn’t used to his belongings slipping and needed to gather stones from the ocean floor to keep them still.
Though Serapha assured him she was okay, the increased diver presence unnerved him. He needed to go home and check on his mother.
A pod of chefs held out bags for him when he swam into the kitchen before making his way home. There was one final thing he wanted to do. “You asked for these, Your Highness?” a young merman asked with a bow.
“I did. Thank you.”
With a shy smile, the merman returned to his duties.
Kaden dashed away from the palace, holding the too-full bag to his chest as if it held the rarest of seaglass inside. A nip came at the tip of his tail, and jerking it away, he looked to see what bit him.
A silver wolf manyu retreated into a crack in the rocks next to him, beady eyes fixed on him, as if daring him to come too close again. His partner, a smaller sepia-shaded manyu, poked her head out to see what the commotion was about.
Of course, they were a mated pair. When they saw nothing of note, they disappeared back into their hiding hole.
He moved away from the rocks and stayed safely afloat of the jagged corals and thick beds of seagrass filled with deadly, venomous sunflower sea stars camouflaged within.
His destination came into view, and he pumped his tail faster.
The bag weighed on his arms, making his muscles ache.
A small village lay below, the tops of tiny homes and gardens blurry and hidden in the abyss—a community affected by a temporary drought from pollution and tainting of their food source, likely because they lived so close along the land city’s shores.
Kaden dove.
The villagers stopped what they were doing when he arrived and clamored to greet him.
“Your Highness! You came to our humble, little town for a visit?” a mermaid with a sapphire tail asked, holding a squirming merling in her arms.
“I did. Some food for you.” Kaden opened the bag holding sweet, salty, and bitter seaweed, edible kelp, sea lettuce, sea truffles, and sea caviar—salty, gelatinous pearls made from kelp and seaweed.
“You came!” Mermen and mermaids and their children swam to him, each taking a portion and leaving enough for the rest. “Thank you, Prince Kaden!”
“Thanks are not necessary. Your being fed is.” Kaden hung back, shaking hands and conversing with the villagers until the tides shifted again, the hour growing late.
A drought from pollution. He’d have to bring it up to Cassia and Varin to ask for more assistance there. Hope swelled that Angie would be able to pull through with her project and clean the ocean’s litter.
He and Cyrus loved visiting the small villages and towns on the outskirts and keeping abreast of the happenings outside the queendom. The commoners’ problems were their problems, the two princes liked to say.
A call to Angie’s seaflute resulted in her silence, likely because she was still at school. He would try again later and set off for Haibei.
Kaden had made it halfway to his home queendom, two tidesdays later, and having just come down from summoning a powerful wave that propelled him two nautical miles, when the currents carried a disembodied voice into his ears, along with the incessant hum of his seaflute on his waist.
“Kaden? Kaden, you better be there.” The voice came clearer and louder. Princess Adrielle’s, his brother’s lifemate.
Kaden stopped and untied his seaflute. “What’s going on?”
Even before Adrielle spoke again unseen breaths whispered across his skin, making it crawl as if a hundred tiny parasites crawled beneath.
“It’s the queen.” Her voice dropped low, tremulous, and apprehensive.
“What happened?” Kaden’s voice pitched higher and faster with each word. The waters might as well have slowed to a standstill around him.
“She was—she...” Adrielle coughed and went quiet.
Kaden blanched, the growing silence between them unnerving. “Adrielle, tell me.”
“Sh-she was killed.”
The rest of the blood drained from Kaden’s organs, leaving him cold and hollow. Adrielle’s wobbly voice, so close to him a moment ago, sounded as if she were somewhere far, far away.
“Kaden, the throne sits empty.”