by A. L. Knorr
In a matter of hours, we had returned to the shores beside the airport of Ponta Delgada. The sun was blazing in the sky but the area was deserted as we emerged.
Erasing Adrian’s mind of the events that had taken place, I suggested he find a hotel, take a hot bath, order a hot meal, and go to sleep. We took the small black device and tablet at Antoni’s suggestion, then climbed out of the sub and Emun and I changed into our original clothing.
Poor Ivan was nearly frantic with worry after so many hours without contact, but within a matter of hours he had notified the airport in Gdansk and had us in the air.
My last thought before losing consciousness was that I couldn’t wait to be alone with Antoni to discuss everything.
26
Waking in my own bed with Antoni beside me, my eyes fell on the strange black device and the tablet which Antoni had left on the bedside table. Reaching for the tablet, I pressed the home button, but the battery was dead. I slipped out of bed and took it to where my phone charger was plugged into the wall, grateful that they were the same brand.
“Does passing out on the plane have something to do with what you are?” Antoni asked behind me.
I straightened suddenly. “You’re awake!”
He nodded and gestured for me to come back to bed. I plugged in the tablet and slipped between the covers, snuggling into the crook between his arm and chest. Suddenly, I sat up again. “Did you see Lydia? She’ll be frantic!”
“I saw her. I sent her home last night after we arrived. I told her I’d talk with her later.” He pulled me back down to settle in his arms again. “I wanted to talk to you so badly last night, but you seemed beyond exhausted. Almost sick, to tell you the truth.” He kissed my forehead. “Just as I was feeling better, you fell apart on me.”
“Yes. Sirens aren’t good at flying. I think it has to do with how far we are from the ocean.” I described the sensations that came over me when I ascended in a plane, how they grew more severe with every thousand meters above land and sea the plane rose. “I really wanted to talk to you last night, too.”
He gazed at me, eyes taking in the features of my face. “We both have some explaining to do.”
“Can I start?”
“Please.”
I rolled over and propped my head on my hand, tucking a pillow in front of my stomach and letting my other arm rest on it. “You don’t know how much I wanted to tell you, to show you what I am. So many times, I condemned myself for keeping my secret from the one I love. I just couldn’t, because…”
He waited, eyes one mine.
“Because my mother had drilled into me since childhood how important it was to keep her identity a secret, even from my father.”
“Your father wasn’t a mer… person? Like Emun?”
“No, he was just a man.”
A narrow frown line appeared between Antoni’s eyes. “I think I know how he would have felt if he knew. If you don’t mind me saying so, I think she should have told him.”
“Maybe she should have,” I admitted, thinking that as much as I admired my mother, she wasn’t perfect, and she had made mistakes in her life. “Mom loved him so much, and he loved her. In fact, their love was so powerful, it’s why I’m able to do what I can do. Control water, make ice, or hot water, that kind of thing.” I left out that I could stop a tsunami or make a massive whirlpool in the ocean; there was no need to brag…or scare him.
“It’s magic.” He rolled over onto his back and looked at the ceiling, rubbing his temples with his fingertips. “Magic is real.”
“Some is, I guess. Yes.” I wanted to tell him what my friends were capable of, but one thing at a time. The poor guy had a lot to digest already. “You’re not in as much shock as I thought you would be.”
He faced me again. “That’s because I’m pretty sure I met one of you before. I just didn’t realize it until recently.”
He had my attention. “Really?”
He nodded. “I did a semester of university in Warsaw, a kind of internship when I was in first year. I met a girl named Lusi.” He knocked his shoulder up and amended, “Woman, not girl. She looked young and she was wild, but she was no girl. She had long, bright blond hair and dark eyes that seemed to change color with her emotions.”
I ignored the tiny darts of jealousy searching for a target as Antoni talked about this girl from his past. I could tell by the way he spoke about her that they’d been more than friends.
“On New Year’s Eve we went out together with a bunch of friends from Uni––a house party. It got pretty messy, and Lusi, who could be a bit of a hothead, got into a row with someone, so I dragged her out of there before things could get bad. We ended up going back to her apartment and having a few of our own New Year’s Eve drinks.” Antoni cleared his throat, clearly uncomfortable talking about this part of his past.
“It’s okay,” I said, “go on.”
“When she took off her dress, I saw she had an interesting tattoo. Here,” he pointed to his hip bone. “I asked her about it and she began to spin a crazy story. It was very entertaining and pure fiction. This was part of Lusi’s charm, she rarely answered a question directly, and instead liked to weave a web of intrigue around herself. She told me she was a very old mermaid, one who swam up the Warsaw river in medieval times, became trapped by some merchant men, only to be freed by some local fishermen who felt badly about keeping such a beautiful creature penned up. She was so grateful for being rescued that she pledged to become a protector of Warsaw.”
I absorbed this, in no doubt whatsoever that what Lusi had told Antoni that night, pretending to be in jest, was actually some form of the truth.
“Her tattoo was very old, she said, a glyph from a long-dead language, and that it meant ‘anything for you.’ She’d tattooed it on herself so she’d never forget about the love a triton had for a siren that was powerful enough to set all sirens free.”
“It was the same glyph as the one on the pendant.”
Antoni nodded. “Yes, the same. When I saw it in the museum, I was astounded by it, because I had always thought her story to be completely made up. Even after seeing plenty of artwork around Warsaw of a mermaid with a sword––the protector of the city––I thought she was very clever to take something from legend and make it sound so real. I just thought the statues and crests of that mermaid had inspired her, but it seems it was the other way around. I can still hardly believe it.”
“When’s the last time you spoke to her?”
“Not since University. We stayed in touch for a while, but communication with her became less and less frequent, until finally we lost touch completely. I don’t even know if she’s still in Warsaw. She’s not one of those people who maintains relationships for a long time, and never claimed to be. She always warned me that she would break my heart if I got too close to her.”
“And did she?”
The corner of Antoni’s mouth twitched up and his dimple appeared. “A little. Though she and I would never have worked. She was far too volatile, almost scary, and you could never get a straight answer out of her. But after she told me the story of the mermaid, she saw that I was curious about the old language. I looked it up and couldn’t find anything like it. She began to teach me a little. Not much, mind you, I didn’t have time to learn a whole language on top of my studies, but enough to understand the principles of it.”
“That’s why Adrian and those men kidnapped you? They wanted you to interpret for them.”
“Exactly. And what they found, Targa…” he shook his head. “It will rock archeology and history forever if it gets out. Especially now that I know you’re real. The ruins they found suggest an entire underwater city with a rich culture and even a monarchy of some kind.”
“What did they tell you about it?”
He chuckled. “Not much. They weren’t interested in educating me, only in utilizing what little knowledge I already had.”
“Do you think it was Atlantis? Where we were?”
“I don’t know. It seemed like it could be, but there was a name in the glyphs and it wasn’t Atlantis.”
“What was the name?” I was almost holding my breath, and gripped the sheets with a fist.
“Okeanos.”
I blinked. “Never heard of it.”
“Me either.”
“But Gerland is an Atlantean.” I wrinkled my nose, confused.
Antoni shrugged. “I can’t explain it, love. I can’t even tell you if Okeanos was a place or a person. What they showed me were photographs of mosaics that were partially ruined and had more to do with the legend of the sea deity who made this aquamarine for his lover. That was all they cared about, not the place.”
“Just one aquamarine?”
Antoni propped his pillows against the headboard and sat up, snugging his back up to the wall so he could sit straight. “Yes, it didn’t start out in a million little pieces like the way it was when we saw it. In the ruins, the mosaics depicted it as a six-sided column, huge, as thick as a man’s leg.”
“How did it end up being cut into all those gems?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know. What they had me trying to read was just talking more about the effect the aquamarines have on mermaids and men. For mermaids, it lifts an ancient curse that was placed on them by a very old, angry sea-god of some kind. The glyphs described the effect it had on sirens in a strange way––a sort of ‘waxing’ effect on her.”
“Waxing?”
“Yeah, like the moon.”
What did that mean, I wondered? Considering the siren cycles, I wondered if it meant that if a siren was in a land-cycle, the gem would lock her there, and alternately, if she was in a salt-cycle, it would lock her there also. “Did it say anything else about the effect it had on mermaids?”
“Probably, but they didn’t give me much time to look at those photographs. They moved me on to try and decipher how to get the gems out from under that dome, and the effect that they had on humans.”
“Allowing them to breathe underwater.”
“Exactly. This Group of Winterthür, they’re a secret association of the world’s wealthiest. Emun told me a bit about them on the plane. Their purpose is to acquire powerful ancient relics for themselves, and exploit them however they see fit without letting the world know that they exist.”
“The group, or the relics?”
“Both.” He nodded thoughtfully. “You know what’s also amazing, is that Lusi had one of them.”
“A gem?”
“Yes. I remember it well because I never saw her without it. It was a ring. She wore a lot of rings, changed them every day, they were kind of her thing. But there was one that she never went without. It wasn’t that pretty or special looking, it was just plain silver with an aquamarine held in a claw setting. It was small and unremarkable. But now I understand the value it likely had for her.”
I rolled onto my back and sat up, sitting against the pillow beside him. “It would have been nice to know about all of this sooner,” I grumbled.
“For your mom?”
“I guess you’ve figured out by now that she’s not working for The Bluejackets.”
Antoni nodded. “I never really believed that story, you know.”
I laughed, humorlessly. “You’re not easy to fool.”
“Well, Lusi had me fooled for years. It all came rushing back when I saw the glyph at the exhibition. At first I couldn’t remember where I knew it from, but it bugged me so much that I couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
“When did you figure it out?”
“Not until those men were shoving the tablet in front of my face and demanding that I tell them what the glyphs meant, did it come clear. Before that, I had thought that maybe Lusi’s ring and the pendant were made by the same jeweler, one of those old companies, you know. Like Novak, handed down through generations. But it was much bigger than that. And you know what else I figured out?” He took my hand, lacing his fingers through mine.
“What?”
“That I did drown that day on the Baltic, when we went sailing, and you were able to save me because of what you are.”
I swallowed down the lump in my throat. “I’m glad you finally know the truth. And I’m glad you’re not rejecting me because of it.”
“You’re crazy to think that I would. I’m in love with you, Targa. It doesn’t matter where you come from.”
“Siren allure can make men do things they might not do if they were in their right mind,” I added.
“Do you think I’m not in my right mind?”
Slowly, I shook my head. “I’m sorry, Antoni. Sorry I didn’t tell you the truth.”
“I’m sorry you didn’t either, but it’s out now, and if it wasn’t for the memories I have of Lusi, I’m not sure how I’d be taking it.”
“But you’re okay?”
He squeezed my hand and smiled in response.
“How did the men know about those caves?” I asked. “How did they know where to go?”
Antoni’s face expressed a kind of respect. “The pendant led them there. That’s why they wanted it so badly. According to the glyphs, because the gems were all one piece in the beginning, the individual gems are magically bound together.” He gestured to the black device on the bedside table. “Hand that to me and I’ll show you.”
Retrieving the device, I put it in Antoni’s hand. “This is actually a camera of sorts. They took the gem out of its setting and put in here,” he lifted a little panel to reveal a pocket inside. “The camera inside took continuous photos of it using Kirlian photography. Have you ever heard of it?”
I shook my head. “What does it do?”
“Essentially, it captures a thing’s energy and makes it visible. You can put whatever you want under this special camera, an apple, a shoe, or in this case––a gem. Its energy appears as waves of light. Every time they snapped a photo of it, its energy was pointing in a direction.” He pointed to a little clear button on the side of the device. “The light came out here, all they had to do was follow it.”
“So they’d never been in those caves before?”
“I don’t know, we weren’t exactly chit-chatting about it. But I don’t think so.”
I digested this, sitting back against the pillows. And inevitably, my thoughts came around to my mother. I had a way of calling her, and I had something to give her that would free her of the curse. But there was still so much I didn’t know. What would the gem do to a siren who was in a salt-cycle? Would it free her immediately? Would it send her deeper into her salt-state? The gem had proven that it had different effects on different beings, and because of what it had done to me, I didn’t trust it.
“Targa,” Antoni said, softly, bringing me back to the present. I looked into his eyes and saw worry there. “Who is Emun?”
“Oh.” I was startled by his question, though it was completely valid. “Emun didn’t tell you on the plane? I thought for sure you would have talked all the way home.”
“He didn’t seem to want to talk to me very badly. I tried to ask him some questions, but he just kept telling me to wait until you were awake. He told me a bit about the Group of Winterthür, but he didn’t want to say much else without you being lucid.”
Respect for Emun swelled in my heart. He hadn’t had to do that. He could have spilled the whole story while I was unconscious, yet he resisted.
“Prepare yourself to be amazed again,” I said. “Emun is a Novak. He’s one of Sybellen’s twin boys.”
Antoni looked as stunned as I expected him to look. “He’s a Novak?”
I nodded. “The one true heir to the Novak fortune.”
His mouth opened and closed again. “But that would make him…”
“A century and a half old? Yes. He’s a triton. They live a long time. I’m still amazed he even exists. Mom always told me that the mer-gene could only be passed down from mother to daughter, that there was no such thing as mermen. She was wrong, but perhap
s not very wrong. Emun says he’s never met another triton, which is pretty weird.”
A shadow passed over his face. “You mean ‘we’… ‘we’ will live a long time. You and Emun both, as will Mira.”
“If something doesn’t kill us, yes, I suppose so.” My heart ached at the look on his face as he thought about this. It wasn’t a happy realization for him, and one I had avoided thinking about, myself.
“Targa,” he began, voice gentle, eyes downcast. “I will understand if you…want to be with one of your own kind. In spite of what Martinius believed, you are insistent that you are not a Novak. It would be convenient for you to be with Emun, if that was what you wanted. It would allow him to take his inheritance, and for you to be here too, without having to answer too many questions.”
“You need to stop this line of thinking, Antoni. The only reason I am here is for you.”
“Not for Martinius?”
“You remember how resistant Mom and I were to taking Martinius’s fortune. We just couldn’t see a way out of it, and didn’t want it to go to the government. But now that Emun is here, I know what to do with it.”
“That will be very tricky, legally, Targa. You’ll be in for quite a battle. It would just be easier if you guys were…married.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. I’m in love with you, Antoni. I’m not interested in Emun in that way. And there isn’t much a siren voice cannot accomplish, you know.”
Still, he looked doubtful. I leaned over and kissed his lips, wanting to change the look on his face so desperately. He began to kiss me back, hesitantly at first, but as I persisted, and put my hands on his torso, he melted into me and I into him. In that moment, all I cared about was making him believe that he was the one for me.
The only one.
27
We found Emun sitting on one of the couches at the top of the main staircase. He was sitting upright, hands on his knees, and forward on the seat as though he was about to stand up and bolt into a sprint.
“Morning!” He smiled at us, face bright and hopeful.