by Lola StVil
The others float around beside me, all of us kicking gently to stop us from sinking as we look around. I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I turn slightly. Regal points down, and I peer where he points. A tiny patch of pink fabric clings to a large rock. Langston is wearing a pink jumper. She’s passed that rock.
I nod to Regal and begin kicking down towards the pink fabric. I try to ignore the panic that’s spreading rapidly through me as my lungs burn and I head away from the surface. I lead the others down, deeper and deeper until I am level with the fabric. There are no other clues as to what has become of Perry and Langston, and I look around frantically. I can already see the bottom of the lake, and they aren’t lying on the bottom. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing.
A flash of movement to the right catches my eye, and I follow it. My vision is becoming blurry, and my lungs are burning badly. I estimate I have about twenty seconds left before my body takes over my mind and I can’t hold my breath any longer. I can see by the expressions of the others that they’re all experiencing similar feelings.
The bottom of the lake is covered in a thick layer of rock, and I spot a gap in the rocks. I see the flash of movement again, and it’s inside the gap. Without any other option that I can see, I head for the gap and swim through it. It’s pretty tight, and I have to drag myself in using my hands, but as I do, my head breaks the surface of the water, and I drag in a big breath.
This doesn’t make any sense. How am I breaking the surface of the water when I am heading for the bottom rather than the top? I don’t have any answers, but as I get further into the gap, I am emerging from the water. With a final tug, I am free of the gap, and I’m falling.
I don’t have far to fall—maybe seven or eight feet—and I land on the ground with a painful slam. I roll to one side, conscious that whoever comes next is going to land on top of me if I don’t move.
I can see Kane’s head in the air now. He is panting for breath as he pulls himself through.
“What is this place?” he says.
“I have no idea, but be careful as you come through. There’s a pretty big drop,” I say.
He gets himself through the hole and hangs onto the edge, dropping to his feet without even stumbling. Regal and Saudia follow.
“I know what this is,” Saudia says quietly as she looks around once she’s in the cave. “It’s a water nymph lair.”
“What’s a water nymph?” I ask.
“Generally, they’re sprites that live in the water. They need oxygen to breathe, but they can’t live above the waterline, and they have a lair like this. The lair is surrounded by a charm that acts like a bubble, creating an oxygenated place in the water. They protect anyone who gets in trouble, bringing them to their lairs so they can breathe. But here? Well, who knows, but I’m guessing they’re not so nice.”
“Why?” Regal asks.
“Well, they’re luring people in, aren’t they?” Saudia says as though he is an idiot.
“Okay, there’s no need for that tone,” Regal snaps.
Saudia rolls her eyes.
“Perry and Langston must be in here somewhere. I’m guessing it isn’t a very big colony as there’s no welcome party, so having just two people must be keeping them tied up. Hopefully, we can take them by surprise, and if my hunch is right and they’re not friendly, we might be able to take them out before they really know what’s hit them.”
We creep along a narrow, rocky gap that leads off from the small cave we were in. Saudia is up front, edging forward as silent as a cat. She pauses, and I hold my breath, being careful not to make a single sound. She moves forward again, and I see the corridor opening up into a wider area.
The whole place is eerily silent, and I can feel my nerves jangling. It all feels too quiet, too convenient. I stand beside Saudia as we wait for Kane and Regal to come out of the tunnel. Kane emerges seconds after me, and I feel the panic creeping back in when there is no Regal.
I step towards the tunnel.
“What…?” I start.
I don’t get any further before I feel a sharp object pressing into the small of my back.
“Put your hands up, and no one gets hurt,” says a voice.
I ignore the order and spin around. A woman stands before me holding a spear. She has long, flowing red hair and piercing green eyes. She smiles at me and displays a row of wickedly sharp teeth.
Kane and Saudia have both ignored the order too, and they are facing off with a similar looking woman. But none of us are really looking at them. We’re all looking at the group of seven women who surround Regal, each with a spear pressed against him.
“Last chance,” one of them says.
I glance across at the others and slowly raise my hands. They follow suit. We’re going to have to wait until they drop their guard before we attack. I know I could take one or two of them out before they could react and I know the others could do the same, but that still leaves enough of them to kill Regal before we can take them all out.
“What do you want?” I ask.
“Patience and silence. All will be revealed soon enough,” the woman who’s pointing her spear at me says with another evil grin.
I bite back the response I want to give as one of the woman’s friends pushes her spear further into Regal, making him squeal a little.
“All of you, turn around,” the woman says.
I shake my head. She jabs me in the stomach with the spear. Not hard enough to do any real damage, but hard enough to hurt. I glare at her.
“Allow me to introduce myself. I am Charlene, queen of the water nymphs. And I expect to be obeyed. Unless, of course, you’d rather I call in the rest of my family and have you all killed.”
I slowly turn around. I hate being so weak, but I remind myself this is only temporary and once I find an opening, I’ll make this Charlene bitch pay.
“Move,” Charlene demands.
The spear point is on my back again, and I find the only way to stop it from breaking my skin is to move forward. The women march us along a wide corridor. We walk side by side, but there’s no way to talk or make plans without being overheard, and I keep my eyes straight to the front, scanning them around and trying to find something, anything, that can help us.
I fail miserably. The walls are bare stone with lights built in. The lights are purple, and they cast an eerie, otherworldly glow over us all.
Up ahead, the wide corridor opens out even more. The air between us and the clearing seems to be blurry, and I blink hard, trying to make my eyes focus. There’s nothing wrong with my eyes. I discover the blurriness is a force field. I feel a stinging sensation through my whole body as I pass through it.
“What the fuck was that?” Kane demands.
“I thought I made it clear I wanted silence,” Charlene says. “But I’ll answer that one question. That was a very clever little charm that strips anyone of any sort of powers they possess.”
I don’t feel any different. I can still feel my powers within me. It’s as though Charlene reads my mind.
“I’m sure you all don’t believe that. No one ever does. Go on, try it.”
Kane and I glance at each other, and I shrug. He raises his palm ahead of himself, but nothing happens.
Okay, this is bad.
“What have you done with Langston and Perry?” Saudia asks.
I feel the blood rushing to my face in shame. I didn’t even think to ask about them.
“You’ll find out soon enough. Now no more questions.”
We are marched into the large opening. It’s completely empty except for a string of fairy lights, which look completely out of place, and a large, metal cage that dominates the center of the room. The cage is empty.
One of Charlene’s people runs forward and unlocks the cage door. She makes no move to open it.
“In,” Charlene commands as I come to a dead stop.
She pokes her spear into me, and I feel my skin split and warm blood cascade out. If I
don’t move now, she’ll stick that spear right through me. I take a tentative step forward.
“Good girl,” Charlene says in a mocking tone.
The woman in front of me finally opens the cage door a crack, and the sound of whispering voices floats out. I can see Langston in there and someone else too. The woman smiles at my look of shock.
“What? You’ve never seen an enchantment like this before? Let’s just say it gets old listening to our dinner begging, so we have made it so we don’t have to see or hear any of you.”
Dinner? I think as I’m shoved roughly inside the cage. Langston looks up as I stumble inside. She runs to me and throws her arms around me.
“Oh Atlas, not you as well?”
I don’t answer her. It’s not something that needs an answer. Saudia, Kane, and Regal are shoved into the cage too, and the door is slammed shut.
The woman who Langston was talking to as we entered steps from the shadows and I see the flash of red hair. I give an angry roar and step towards her, my fist raised.
“You better start talking,” I demand.
Langston grabs my arm as the woman shrinks back.
“Atlas, don’t. She’s not like them,” she says.
I frown, but I lower my fist. Langston nods encouragingly at the woman, and she slinks back into sight.
She looks the same as the women who brought us here, except when she smiles hesitantly, the smile isn’t full of evil.
“What’s going on? What the hell is this place?” I demand.
“Sit down, and Pearl will explain everything,” Langston says.
“Fuck that,” Saudia snaps.
She goes back to the cage door and begins rattling it.
“Hey. Hey. Let us out of here,” she shouts.
No one needs to remind her they can’t hear us. She knows, but she doesn’t want to just accept our fate. She keeps shaking the cage door, but there’s no give in it whatsoever. The rest of us make our way around the bars, shaking them, running our hands over them, and looking for weak spots.
“You think I haven’t already tried that?” Langston asks.
She waits until we’re all satisfied there’s no easy way out of here.
“Langston? Where’s Perry?” I ask.
Her face falls.
“I don’t know. I was barely in the water when I was suddenly surrounded by water nymphs. They grabbed me and dragged me down here. I tried to fight them off, but I was outnumbered. I’m pretty sure I took a couple of them out, but then I couldn’t hold my breath any longer. Everything went black, and I woke up here with my powers gone.”
I think for a minute, and I finally sit down.
“Okay, Pearl. Tell us what you know and then we’re going to come up with a plan to get the hell out of here.”
“Our colony was sent here to protect people from getting too close to the Winter Demon. We created the crack in the ice so that anyone who wandered this way could be saved. We would bring them here and try to convince them to turn back. This was many years ago, before the place became so dark that hardly anyone came by this way anymore.”
I frown, and Pearl smiles.
“We age differently than you. I am actually over two thousand years old.”
I raise an eyebrow but I can see no reason for her to make that up, and when Saudia nods, I don’t question it.
“My sister, Charlene, was our leader and she was so passionate about saving people. Until one day, a young man was pulled down. Charlene fell in love with him, and after he was sent back on his way, she vowed she would find a way to leave the water and be with him. We all knew there was only one way for a water nymph to be able to leave the water and none of us thought she would actually go through with it. But she did.
“The next time we pulled in an explorer, she committed the ultimate sin. Instead of saving him, she fed on him. This gave her the ability to leave the water. But what she didn’t know, what none of us knew then, was eating the flesh of a human doesn’t just allow us to leave the water. It blackens our soul, changing us into a monster. Charlene forgot her love for the man, and instead, she fostered a love for human flesh.
“One by one, she convinced the others to join her. All except me. I just couldn’t. It went against everything we believed in, and whenever I was tempted, I would think of my mom. My mom died saving a human and with her last breath, she told me that there is nothing more honorable than dying saving a human. I guess it made me value human life a lot more than the others did.
“Now, Charlene and the others lure humans in to feed off them. No one has been by in so long though, and I was beginning to think no one would ever pass by this way again and that everything would be okay. And then your group showed up.”
“So Perry…” Saudia starts and then stops, not wanting to say the rest.
But I remember what Charlene said about dinner, and I know that’s what has become of Perry.
“Perry will be sustaining them. He will be kept alive as long as possible so they can drag out their meals. But now that they’ve got you as well, they might give in to the urge to really feast.”
I shudder. We have to get out of here while Perry still has a chance.
“How long have they kept you a prisoner?” Regal asks.
“I’m not sure.” Pearl shrugs. “I kept count at first, but then I stopped. What was the point? At my last count, I’d been here one hundred and fifty-two years. And that was a long time ago.”
“But there has to be some way out,” I say, trying and failing to process what it must be like to be alone in a cage for so long.
How is Pearl not completely insane?
“There is,” Pearl says.
She points through the bars and up to the ceiling. I look up and see something I missed before. A large red button hovers just below the ceiling.
“That button controls everything. The lock on my cage, the enchantments. And if I could press it, I’d be able to get free. But I have no way of reaching it. Charlene took great pleasure in telling me she was putting it there to torture me until I either saw the light and allowed myself to become a vicious flesh eater like them or until I died alone. That thing, it haunts me. I fear eventually it will send me over the line to crazy, but given the choice of being sane and living like this, maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.”
“If we could just get our powers back, I could press that button without having to leave the cage,” Regal says.
Pearl looks at him in excitement.
“You could? But how?”
“My power is telekinesis. I could throw something up there that would press the button,” he says.
He looks around and then points to the upturned crate Pearl is perched on.
“We could break that down and use a piece thin enough to fit through the bars. And their enchantment would work against them. It would protect us from sight and sound while we broke it up.”
“But there’s no way to get our powers back without pressing the button first,” Langston says glumly.
Pearl suddenly looks down at the ground, refusing to meet anyone’s eye.
“Pearl?” I say.
She ignores me.
“Pearl? What are you hiding?”
“Nothing,” she says so quietly I can barely hear her.
“Look, just tell us what you know,” I say.
“Fine,” she says, looking up at me. “But you won’t make me do it. You can kill me if you want to, but I won’t do it.”
I frown, and she goes on.
“I can give him his powers back. But it will mean him drinking my blood,” she says.
“And you really won’t let him do that? You won’t bear a moment of pain while we cut you slightly and spare a drop of blood to save us all?” I ask.
She shakes her head.
“You don’t understand. Even a drop of my blood will kill him. He might survive a minute or two, but then he would die. My blood is poison to anyone who ingests it. And it will be a more painful, more h
orrific death than you could ever imagine.”
“I’m willing to do it,” Regal says without hesitating.
Saudia shakes her head.
“What’s the alternative, Saudia? We can all become fish food and die down here, or the rest of you can escape.”
“No,” Pearl says. “Even if you will do it, I won’t.”
I smile and jump to my feet in excitement.
“Yes you will,” I say to Pearl.
She shakes her head, but I go on before she can say anything.
“Look, I get that you don’t want to kill anyone. But what would you say if I told you that all you would be doing was causing Regal a few moments of pain? Sure, it might be excruciating pain, but it’ll only last for a second or two, and then he’ll be cured, and we could get out of here.”
“Well, I’d say yes assuming he agreed to it, but it’s impossible,” Pearl says.
I can see the hope in her eyes.
“We use one of the vials of Gelliom potion. Sadie said to use it wisely. What could be more important right now than this?”
Kane and Saudia are on their feet now too, the excitement flowing off them as they grin and high-five each other.
“Regal? You game?” I ask.
He nods with a big grin.
“What’s Gelliom potion?” Pearl asks.
I quickly explain what the potion can do. Pearl nods her head.
“It could work. Once you get back to this witch of yours, have her give you a cleansing potion. That will remove my venom from your system. But there’s one problem.”
“What?” Langston asks.
“The potions you carry have been through the force field. Their magic, like yours, has been stripped away. Regal, you’ll have to fight the pain and hit that button before the magic will return to the potion.”
“Got it,” Regal says.
Pearl looks doubtful.
“Seriously, I can handle the pain,” Regal says.
“I sure hope so, because if not, we’re all doomed in different ways,” Pearl says.
Kane has ripped the crate apart, and we have a piece of plastic thin enough to fit through the bars.
“Okay, let’s do it,” Regal says.
Kane pulls out a small knife and holds his hand out for Pearl’s hand. Pearl shakes her head and takes the knife from him.