Chapter 32 #2
She missed his voice, his company, his touch. Thinking of him didn’t cause a sharp stab of pain anymore, and after placing the ship back to its proper place, she put Kaden’s name onto the seaflute at her bedside.
No answer from him either, and she sagged against her bed, her next breath hitching.
The ship gave her an idea. She didn’t know if any dive shops could take her out at the last minute at five p.m., but she might get lucky with shops that were open for night dives.
A search through her web browser yielded five in the area and she called all of them until one twenty minutes away from her was able to take her out on a private boat.
Angie confirmed and grabbed her dive bag and drysuit. She rushed to her car and floored it to their meeting site.
First, Cassia and Varin. Then she had to try Kaden again when she got home.
“Thank you so much for taking me last minute,” Angie told the ship captain. He drove them out ten miles west, thirty minutes on his pontoon boat, and they bobbed with the waves. The palace wouldn’t be far from here. “You don’t have to wait for me. I’ll get back on my own.”
She didn’t want him to wait because she didn’t know how long she would be. Cassia and Varin would surely send an available sentinel to escort her back once they heard what she had to say.
“You sure?” The captain set his lips in a thin line under his mustache. “I’m not supposed to leave you here.”
“I’ll pay you extra. I can find my way back on my own.” Angie rifled through her wallet and handed him sixty dollars in twenty-dollar bills, the amount of cash she always carried on her.
“You going mer hunting?” The captain pocketed her money.
“Something like that.”
The captain shrugged. “If, you’re sure. Still, I’ll hang around the area for a while. Just throw up your safety sausage if you need me to come get you, okay?”
“Thank you again.” Angie put her rebreather in her mouth and puffed up her BCD.
With a giant stride, she cracked the sea’s surface and landed among the rocky seas, waves splashing into her mask and temporarily blocking her vision.
She deflated her BCD until she sank deeper, deeper, deeper, stopping periodically to equalize, something she did not miss doing with mer magic. She hit the depth and kicked her way to the palace, her flashlight’s beam illuminating the path before her.
Angie couldn’t see the palace without mer magic, but she searched for patrolling sentinels around the perimeter.
Her flashlight landed on one and the mermaid stopped swimming, staring at Angie with bright emerald eyes, floating.
A merman in the vicinity appeared in the light.
Angie recognized both from her visit here and held up her gloved hands and log rolled, showing them, she was unarmed. The sentinels held up a trident and lance, pointed at Angie. The mermaid’s gaze was threatening, but the merman cocked his head, his visage reflecting curiosity.
She had to show her face, so she removed her mask and hood. Icicles might as well have been stabbing her scalp, and she removed her rebreather for a moment.
The salt stung her eyes, her cheeks and lips numbed, and the painful cold ramming her forehead was an iron fist squeezing it. She quickly put her mask back on with her rebreather and hood. Much better.
The sentinels looked at each other, and the merman approached, putting a hand to his lips. He motioned toward Angie.
She removed her rebreather again, and the merman pressed his lips to Angie’s, exhaling into her.
She could breathe and her vision was clear when she took her mask off. The palace materialized in glittering glory before her eyes.
“Are you here to see Her and His Majesty?” the mermaid asked.
Angie nodded. “I have important news for them.”
“Do they know you’re coming?” the merman cut in.
Angie shook her head. “I tried to contact them, but I didn’t get an answer. Please, I need to speak with them.”
“We’ll see if they’re available.” The mermaid turned to the merman. “I’ll bring her if you’ll stay.”
“I can.” The merman nodded at her and Angie followed the mermaid toward the palace.
“I will announce you,” the mermaid said, once they had arrived at the throne room doors.
Angie waited, fiddling with the mask hanging around her neck.
If Cassia and Varin wouldn’t see her, she had no semblance of a plan on what to do next.
The mermaid returned. “Please wait out here until you’re called in. ” She swam off.
The sentinel had left the throne room ajar, and remnants of Cassia’s conversation trickled through.
“...Kaden attacked...divers infiltrated Haibei...”
The Northern Queendom. Kaden was attacked? Was that why he didn’t answer? Was he alright? Was he alive?
Oh, tiān.
“...strike before the landwalkers come...discuss plan of attack...”
The color drained from Angie’s face.
Silence.
A sentinel inside the throne room pushed the door open toward Angie, and she kicked herself backward. “Come in.”
Cassia put her seaflute away when Angie entered.
“Queen Cassia, I got good–”
Cassia cut her off with a swift glare, her eyes as icy as the Arctic Sea. “What are you doing here?”
“I have news from my governor, he’s willing to–”
“Thank you for your attempts to help. But you’re no longer needed.”
What in the nineteen levels of Hell?
“No!” Panic clawed at her innards. Cassia couldn’t send her away, not when she was so close. “Please listen to me. My leader is willing to speak with you.”
“That will not be necessary. You can see yourself out, and if you return, I will no longer be able to guarantee your safety here.” Cassia’s words bit at her and Angie shrunk backward.
What changed? Where Kaden’s aunt once welcomed her into the queendom, her demeanor was a glacier, treating Angie as if she were nothing more than a disdainful stranger.
The queen addressed the sentinel who had let Angie in. “Bring her back to the surface.”
“Queen Cassia, no!” Angie’s protests were futile as the sentinel grabbed her by the arm, leading her into the open sea.
The sentinel let her go when they had made it some distance–how far, Angie hadn’t the first idea–from the palace. “Keep going up. You’ll get to the surface from here,” he said, before turning tail and darting back toward the palace.
Angie gritted her teeth and swam. She had to make it out of the sea while she still had mer magic. Go up. Sure, that didn’t sound bad at all. If she had any idea which way was up. The deep sea was fathomless, endless.
Bluish black and greenish Pacific lampreys rose from their seafloor burrows when she passed, their sharp teeth bared at her, and she shrunk back. She must have disturbed their homes by kicking up sand.
Electric rays and skates glided beneath and over her, and a black viperfish, its visible lower jaw filled with sharp teeth, swam past.
Animals that on a normal day would send a thrill of excitement through her.
Now, she was too panicked to truly appreciate their presence.
An elusive king-of-the-salmon brushed past her and she took a moment to gape at its size and majesty, nearly as long as she was tall.
She kept kicking upward until she was tired, but none of her surroundings looked familiar. Not one single coral or rock formation.
She spun in circles. No mer around. It was her alone, hanging in the deep sea, and a frightened whimper escaped her throat.
Keep moving.
Up.
She had to go up.
The mer palace was a thousand feet beneath the surface. She should have seen some sign of the light zone by now.
Where had the currents carried her? Her breaths grew shallow and tight. Spots appeared in her sight and she couldn’t blink them away.
A lone dogfish entered her field of vision, making a circle before her eyes, and stopped and faced Angie briefly, the scratch across her right eye prominent.
The same dogfish she fought to throw back into the sea at Shoreline beach, the one she saw when she was with Calora the previous time.
Angie’s gut instinct kicked in to follow her and nearly folded in sheer relief when moonlight filtered through the surface.
Oh tiān, oh tiān.
The dogfish faced downward and moved out of sight.
Angie stopped for a breath to settle her nerves and her mind before she broke the surface and swam for her life toward the fuzzy shoreline in her sights.
Distant seals’ barks and grunts carried on the passing breeze, letting her know she was getting close to making landfall.
In the distance, the moonlight winked on the dive boat that took her there, traveling in Angie’s direction. The dorsal and caudal fins of two mer tails appeared over the surface, causing the boat to turn around and back to where Angie and the captain left from.
They vanished into the horizon.
Damn it. Now the mer weren’t allowing the captain to come back for her.
Her arms and legs cramped from the constant exertion. The wind caressed her cheeks, and the moon and her flashlight illuminated the path back to her car.
And when she crawled onto sandy, solid ground, she stumbled to her car and threw open the back seat door. She undid her BCD and groaning with exertion, hauled it with her half-full Nitrox tank and rebreather into her backseat. They were going to soak through her cloth seats, but she didn’t care.
She had to get home and call Kaden again, praying to her ancestors that he still lived.