Chapter 5
I was still grinning over Mikaela declaring Vorzak stupid the next afternoon as I headed for my Extreme Water Sports Ed class.
I’d managed to avoid Vorzak for almost twenty-four hours at that point and I was actually in a pretty good mood. I’d calmed down the afternoon before during Culinary Arts, my second favorite class.
Good food was always a cure for a siren’s temper.
Then, this morning, I’d attended the Art of the Poison Garden and I now had many, many ideas of how to get even with Vorzak if he kept annoying me.
I’d actually spent some time looking up what might cause gastric distress for a human, but that wouldn’t impact a snake’s constitution at all. There was an entire section in our textbook on poisons for supernaturals, ones that merely debilitated all the way up to those that killed.
I was particularly interested in the section dedicated to gorgons.
I didn’t want to kill Vorzak, of course, but I certainly wouldn’t mind torturing him a little.
I was busy imagining scenarios involving pain for Vorzak the man and entertainment for his adorable serpents when I entered the pool room and saw Vorzak standing next to the Olympic-sized pool.
My amusement immediately died.
I stamped toward him and snapped, “What are you doing here? You’re not in this class!”
He grinned at me. “I am now. Just transferred in.”
“From where?” I snarled.
“Extreme Sports. My snakes love the water. Thought it’d be good for them to play in the pool a little.”
“Play in the pool?” I demanded. “You have no idea what you’ve signed up for, do you?”
He shrugged. “It can’t be any worse than Sports Ed.”
“You idiot. It’s Sports Ed underwater.”
“So?”
“So, do you have a plan for how you’re going to breathe underwater?”
He looked startled.
“We spent all last semester perfecting different ways to do so. I have no less than ten spells I can call on at any moment and I’m a siren. I don’t actually need any of those spells.”
“Huh.”
“All right!” Professor Puddlemoan stamped into the room. “No lollygagging around! Get in the pool and enter the tunnels now!” When no one moved, he lunged forward and yelled even louder, “Now, now, now!”
Students began diving into the water as I processed the fact that Vorzak had no plan at all.
“Damnit. Can your snakes breathe under water?”
“No, but as long as we stay close to the surface, they’ll pop up on their own when they need a breath.”
I just stared at him. “You do realize this is an underwater sports class, right?”
“Well, sure, but it’s still just a pool.” He waved a hand toward it. “I mean, I know it’s deep, but it’s not like it’s the ocean or anything.”
I shook my head in exasperation. “This class doesn’t stay in the pool, moron. Sometimes, we’ll be swimming in the moat.”
“Where the kraken lives?” he exclaimed.
“And sometimes we’ll be in the deep, dark depths of the ocean.”
Finally, he started to look a bit worried. “I don’t suppose there are any scuba diving tanks around.”
“Ugh. Here.” I took off my shell necklace, then motioned for Vorzak to bend down.
I hooked it around his neck, trying not to breathe in his luscious scent, even as I sneaked a couple kisses to a few of his snakes.
“Once you’re underwater, squeeze the shell in your hand hard.
That should release the spell that will give the person wearing it the ability to take in oxygen through their skin, basically turning you from a singular breathing organism to a bimodal one, allowing you to breathe through your skin while in the water yet still with your lungs when outside it. ”
“What about you?”
“I’m a siren. I’m already a bimodal breather.
” It was because of my abilities that I’d even considered trying to develop a spell that would gift that ability to someone else.
Most of the other students worked on some form of charm that would provide oxygen at various intervals.
If they did try for bimodal breathing, they typically went for spells that gave them gills.
“Really?”
“Yep. Here’s the critical part: It won’t feel like breathing so you’ll have to resist the temptation to inhale because if your lungs fill with water, the minute you come up for air, you’ll drown.”
“Why aren’t you in the water?” Puddlemoan bellowed as he stamped toward us.
I rolled my eyes and said to Vorzak, “Good luck,” then dove into the pool.
It was a typical Olympic-sized pool with ten lanes, but that was pretty much where the similarities ended.
The shallow end was over seven feet deep and it just got deeper from there.
For those who just came to the pool for exercise, they might never realize the pool itself had secret entrances to secret tunnels that led elsewhere.
For those of us in Extreme Water Sports, though, we were required to pick a lane, swim to the end of it and then use one of those entrances to begin the day’s challenges.
As I swam, I was relieved to see Vorzak swimming one lane over, matching his pace to mine.
Considering I was one of the fastest swimmers at the Academy, that was pretty impressive.
Better yet was that his snakes didn’t seem to have any trouble staying underwater with him, which meant the spell must have worked.
When we reached the opposite wall, I motioned him to follow me and I dove deep.
Somewhere around ten feet down were the tunnels we had to enter. I swam to Vorzak’s side and showed him a button on the wall.
He pushed it and a piece of the wall slid to the side, revealing a long water-filled tunnel.
Vorzak gave me a wide-eyed look.
I took a moment to check in with each of his snakes.
They floated in a cloud around his head, dancing and weaving in the water as they always did on land.
Adorable.
I gave Vorzak a thumbs up and motioned to the tunnel.
He hesitated and I made a shooing motion with my hands.
A resigned look on his face, he used his arms to propel himself up, then slid into the tunnel feet-first and disappeared, the wall sliding back into place behind him.
I quickly swam back to my own entrance, pushed the button and dove into my tunnel headfirst.
The currents that were in the tunnel immediately grabbed hold and yanked me forward.
The force was so great, I wished I’d warned Vorzak not to try and swim, but to just make his body an arrow pointing the way the water wanted it to go.
Then again, no one had warned me.
It was just something every student learned their first time in the tunnels.
A couple minutes after I entered the tunnel, I was hurtled free and plunging downward over the side of a giant waterfall.
I loved it when the tunnels sent us over the waterfall. It was like the best roller coaster ride in existence. For a split second, as I was in freefall, it felt like flying.
Then, I hit the water, my hands paving the way as I dove deep into the lagoon that would eventually shoot us out toward whatever obstacle course Puddlemoan had set in place for us that day.
The dive I’d just taken was easier for me than for most students, mostly because I was born bimodal and thus, was used to transitioning back and forth rapidly from water-breathing to air-breathing.
The other students typically struggled during transition moments, almost as if their lungs would forget how to function after breathing through gills or vice versa.
The shock typically only lasted an instant, but it could be disorienting at first, especially as students had to remember not to breathe through their mouth or nose when in water and to breathe when not.
I hadn’t had a chance to warn Vorzak of all the possible complications, so I was relieved to see him swimming effortlessly just ahead of me, though that didn’t last long because the whirlpool at the center of the lagoon caught us both and dragged us down.
Long moments later, we shot out of a second tunnel into the briny waters of the sea.
We were deep in the oceans surrounding the island where Blackthorn Academy stood, in waters that were well-known for being home to every supernatural creature imaginable.
I suppose we should consider ourselves lucky, though.
We could have been thrown into the moat instead.
Checking the gauge on my suit, I saw that we were only twenty-five meters below the surface. As a siren, I could travel hundreds of meters deep, but that wasn’t the same for every supernatural, though we could commonly travel further than a human.
As we were well within the safety margins for both humans and supernaturals, I relaxed.
Seemed Puddlemoan was giving us a soft start to the semester.
Nice.
Our first challenge revealed itself immediately.
A bright light in the shape of a number one appeared in the distance.
As we got closer, it became clear that our first challenge was to find our way through a very spooky-looking underwater maze.
As we swam through the maze, seaweed formed a canopy above our heads and the ocean floor shifted, rising and sinking to create walls that weren’t stable or permanent on either side of us.
We got lost, of course, hitting one dead end after another before eventually reaching the remains of what appeared to be an ancient shipwreck.
I might have considered the ship to be yet another dead end, except there was a huge hole in the side of it.
Seeing that hole, we were faced with a choice. We could go back or we could go through it.
Even knowing it was probably a bad idea—who knew what creatures made their homes inside it—we swam straight into the bowels of the ship.
It was dark inside, darker than it’d been in the maze, and even my spelled ball of light wasn’t enough to fully penetrate the darkness.
Vorzak stayed close as we swam through what appeared to be the bottom level of the ship.
We were deep inside, swimming toward a gap in the ceiling when I saw the dragon.
He was directly above us and appeared to be sleeping. Unfortunately, his head was resting right beside the hole we were aiming for.
Vorzak caught my arm and pulled me back.