Page 78 of Midnightsong
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 tian, oh tian.
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.
Thirty-Three
