“Baby, I’m so happy to see you,” her mother managed to choke out before pressing a hand to her mouth. “So happy to know you’re alive and safe. I thought you were gone forever. Thought we’d lost you.”
“How am I seeing you right now? I don’t get it.”
Amerin said something, her voice too low for Manu to pick up her words.
“Mom, is there a really large guy there with you?”
“Manu? He’s right here.” Sunshine tilted the shell enough to capture Manu in the frame. She wiped her face with her other wrist. “I wish I could hug you right now. Are you safe? Are you happy?”
“I’m safe,” Kai replied, still appearing dumbfounded. “I just don’t understand why Manu is there or how this is happening.”
Manu leaned forward into frame again. “Your uncle permitted me to bring this communicator to your mother. As long as you both hold one, you’ll be able to make contact with each other.”
“What am I allowed to say?”
“Whatever you desire as long as your mother is able to keep the nature of our world a secret. Our safety depends on few humans knowing the truth.”
“I’ll guard it with my life,” Sunshine promised. Her shoulders stilled, the last of her shudders subsiding and sobs quieting. She wiped her cheek again and sat on a chair in the kitchen nook. “Words can’t express how much we’ve missed you.”
Granting them privacy, Manu wandered to the adjacent living room, where framed photographs decorated the shelves and walls. The pictures of Kailani followed her all the way from her childhood to her adulthood, one of them an image of her in a sailor’s whites. He grinned.
Nearly an hour passed before the mortal woman emerged from the kitchen and found him. Instead of the clam shell, she held a glossy red bracelet. “When Kai was brought to me, she was holding this. She wore it sometimes as a child, but when she turned older, she lost interest in it. I don’t know if she’ll want this back now that she knows her origins, but I feel like I should send this with you.”
Manu froze, not because he recognized the bracelet—though he did on sight—but because he thought he’d never see it again. He’d seen it a thousand times before on his mother’s wrist: a bangle made from polished coral engraved with the names of her son and husband.
It seemed like only yesterday when his father had taken him along for a visit to the artisans’ quarter and they’d picked out the wrist bangle and had it inscribed with their names for her birthday.
After her death, General Lago became a stranger. Changed.
Blinking away the stinging behind his eyelids, he took the bracelet and smoothed his thumb over the faded lines. A single scratch marred the otherwise perfect surface.
“Thank you. I…” He paused, wet his lips, and glanced toward the window at the setting sun. Lingering longer than necessary hadn’t been his intentions. “This came from the woman who brought her to your shores.”
Sunshine nodded. “I thought so. No one ever knew where she came from. She couldn’t be identified, and her clothes were so strange. No one reported a missing young woman, so investigators shrugged it off and closed the case.”
“She was my mother.”
Sunshine’s eyes softened. “Would you like to see where she’s buried?”
Manu wasn’t prepared for the way heartache clenched around his throat. “You’d take me there?”
“Yes. Come on. The cemetery isn’t far.”
23
Family Matters
Kai and her human little sister had a lot in common. The two weren’t blood relatives, but Sunshine must have instilled certain qualities in her adopted daughters…like the refusal to accept eelshit from men.
Sadie recognized him on sight when she arrived from school. Whether it was clever deduction, or the connection was that damned obvious, she promptly jumped to the conclusion that he had something to do with Kai’s disappearance. Which he had. To her credit, she listened to her mother’s explanation and didn’t blink when Manu told her about Atlantis and that her sister was a mermaid queen descended from a goddess. Appearing more level-headed than Kai, she listened from start to finish in silence, asking at the end about their realm and how he’d found Kai.
So he told her the details about that night, as well.
Then she hit him. Hard. With enough power in the punch that he felt it. It didn’t rock his head back, but he heard her knuckles crunch and the bones come perilously close to breaking, the girl putting all her weight and power into the blow, driving the right cross from the hip like someone had taught her how to fuck someone up from an early age.
That had probably been Kai.
Sadie ducked away and clutched her hand to her chest, swearing. His instinct was to go to her, because human beings could be so very fragile. One had never broken a hand on his face before, though.
“Sadie,” Sunshine began in a warning tone. “Baby, are you okay?”
“No, I’m not okay! He took my sister.” She didn’t cry over her injured hand, but her accusation came with a ragged sob. “He took her away from us.”
“Sadie—”
“Fuck him. All this time we thought Kai was dead—that she—that she—” Her voice broke, wavering, and then an awful, raw sob tore from her throat. “But it was just this dickhead had abducted her.”
And he felt lower than low in the face of Sadie’s righteous anger, not because she was crying, but because she was right. He’d taken Kai from people who loved her. He may not have realized the depth of their affection for her at the time, but hindsight was a powerful bitch.
“I never meant to hurt either of you,” Manu said in a quiet voice, stepping closer. “I didn’t realize her importance to your home. I was blinded by the urgency to get her away from the surface and it never occurred to me that she might be loved, that she belonged with you as much as she belonged with us.”
Sadie didn’t look at him. Her mother tried to take her hand to examine it, but she snatched it away. “Leave me alone. Maybe you won Mom over, but you’re shit.”
She stormed from the living room, heading upstairs with her injured hand.
Brow creased with stress, Sunshine watched her leave. “I should have warned you. Sadie has a bit of a temper.”
“So does her sister.”
“She’s taken Kai’s loss particularly hard. They’ve always been close, with Kai looking after Sadie.”
“I should leave.”
“No.” Sunshine sucked in a breath. “You’re some kind of Marine, right?”
“I am.”
“Then you’ve faced dangers greater than a heartbroken twenty-one-year-old, I’m assuming. If you could just talk to her, help her understand, I’d appreciate it.”
“You can just show Kai’s comm to her and—”
“I could, but I want you to do this.” The woman locked gazes with him. “Because this is your mistake. If you’re genuinely sorry for what you did to my family, you’ll do this and right the wrong you made. You owe that much to Kai, but you owe it more to the girl who has spent these past weeks thinking she drove her sister to suicide.”
Put like that, Manu didn’t have much of a choice. “All right.”
Sunshine told him where to find Sadie, then he trudged upstairs to meet his fate, passing several portraits of Kai along the way. She’d always been beautiful, even as a pre-teen, dredging up faint memories of young Princess Zephyrine in the palace, though he’d been much older, a young Myrmidon occasionally assigned to duty guarding the entrance doors or palace gates.
He reached the second door on the left and knocked.
“Go the fuck away!”
“Not until we’ve spoken,” Manu replied. Sighing, he leaned his forehead against the cool wooden door. “You have every right to be furious with me. I wasn’t thinking. Your sister had just been attacked, and I removed her from the situation as my training dictated. That was my error. It was heartless.”
She didn’t respond.
“I’l
l stand here all night talking to this door if I must.”
The pounding spray of a shower began from the attached bathroom. Manu groaned into a hand and waited it out. A good half hour or so passed before it quieted and steps returned to the bedroom.
“Will you at least allow me to look at your hand?”
“Are you a merman doctor or something?”
Finally! She speaks. “No, but I’ve seen enough injuries of the type to know when serious medical care is needed.”
The silence resumed. Just when Manu considered retreating, the door opened to frame Sadie in leggings and a blue U.S. Navy sweatshirt he suspected belonged to Kai, as it swallowed the girl like a tent. “Are you seriously going to stand here until I talk to you?”
“Yes,” he lied, like he hadn’t been three seconds from leaving. But Sunshine had a point. Myrmidons didn’t give up, and surrender wasn’t in his nature. They didn’t make excuses; they accepted responsibility for their wrongs. He’d have no doubt been back within a few minutes after devising a new strategy. “Look, I know I fucked up—”
“You speak English well, for a guy from the sea. Swears and everything.”
“Magic.”
From that moment, he had her hooked. Both brows jumped up and Sadie fell back a step, gesturing for him to step inside a feminine, frilly room decorated by a combination of butterfly-themed art and what he presumed to be popular human movie posters. He recognized a couple imported to Atlantis. “Magic? Like, Merlin and Harry Potter magic spell casting?”
Not so honorable that he wouldn’t use her curiosity to his advantage, Manu grinned. “While I am familiar with Harry Potter,” he said, noting the way her eyes grew large when he nodded toward the untitled Deathly Hallows poster of Harry and Voldemort facing off, “and the tales of Merlin, it’s a different kind of magic. I don’t actually speak English. Mastery of language is a gift we’re all born with in Atlantis. When I speak to a human, my tongue is automatically translated to something you can understand. Slang gets a little tricky, though, especially if I haven’t visited a land in a long while. It’s always changing, and words gain new meanings.”
A computer desk and chair occupied one corner of the bedroom, a television set and futon close by. Sadie gestured him toward the latter and rolled the desk chair up. “Keep talking.” Good. He still had her hooked.
“Kai just learned the language. Relearned it, rather. She was away from us so long she’d lost many of her gifts.”
Sadie flexed her hand quietly, listening to him. He could tell from the way she moved it, and the lack of swelling, that she probably hadn’t damaged it enough to require further care. “Is she happy?”
“I think so. She…your sister is an amazing person, and I consider myself fortunate to be in her service, Sadie. There are no words to express the regret that I have for how I took her from you both. But time wasn’t on our side that evening. As I said, she was in tremendous danger.”
“These things that want to hurt her. They’re real? All of this is real?”
He nodded. “Every word.”
“Then I guess…thank you for rescuing her that night. I don’t have to like that she’s gone, but it’s better than her being dead.”
Gaze dropping to her hand again, he nodded and held his out palm up. “May I?”
“Fine.”
Once he had her smaller hand in his, he palpated the knuckles and felt for breaks. At most, he suspected a hairline fracture. “I expect it’ll be fine, but you should ice it,” he murmured, letting go. “You know, you throw an impressive right.”
“Kai taught me.”
“I’m not surprised. She hit me with one of those, too.”
Sadie appeared delighted, her peal of laughter no doubt inspired by the grimace he exaggerated. “Did she almost break her hand, too?”
“On the contrary, she almost broke my face.”
Her grin only widened. “Too bad I couldn’t do the same.”
The aroma of frying meat and garlic wafted to Manu before he made it downstairs, a delicious and savory smell permeating the entire lower floor of the two-story home. His stomach rumbled loud enough for Sadie to glance at him.
“What the hell do you people even eat? Tuna?”
“Among other things.”
Giving him no chance to sneak out the door, Sunshine emerged from the kitchen with a towel in her hands. “Where do you think you’re going?”
“Uh. Home?”
“No, you’re not. Go sit down somewhere. Sadie, show Manu a movie while I finish dinner.” As if sensing the protest on the tip of his tongue, she held out a hand. “Non-negotiable. Sit down, put your feet up, and watch a movie.”
A devilish glint shone in Sadie’s eyes.
Less than an hour later, Manu was sucked into the perils of Middle-earth with a plate balanced on his lap, Sunshine’s daisy-themed dinnerware loaded with an assortment of what had to be the most delicious cuisine to ever touch his lips. Why were humans so angry and violent when they had access to the culinary delight of fried chicken and beer?
He’d never seen The Lord of the Rings, on account of disinterest, rather than inaccessibility. Frodo’s tale had long ago made the cut, one of a small number of imported movies brought from the surface realm. Their government didn’t like to bring too many, afraid of introducing too much human culture.
“This is one of Kai’s favorite movies,” Sadie told him. “Both sets are hers. We only saw The Hobbit trilogy in the theater, but we’d watch all six at least once a month together, sitting here on the couch with popcorn and pizza. Mom sat with us, too, most of the time, because she’s a big fantasy lover and crazy about anything to do with magic. If there are witches involved, she’s down for it.”
“That’s a nice tradition to have. I can understand why she favors them. Which is her favorite part?”
“We’re not there yet. Her favorite from this one is coming up though.”
“Brownies are in the oven,” Sunshine called from the kitchen.
He ate those as well, wondering what the hell had just happened and if the two humans had cast some sort of addiction spell over him, because nothing, not even his sense of order and responsibility, could move him from the couch. He needed to know the fate of the two hobbits as much as he needed air. Or water. Or another drumstick from that endless pile of delicious, mouthwatering sin. Surface cuisine would be the end of him.
Kai called on the communicator during some point near the middle of the second film, having concluded her evening responsibilities in Atlantis. While the three women talked in another room, he stuffed his face with more fudge brownies.
No wonder Kai didn’t want to leave the surface world behind. If he’d grown up with the Lord of the Rings and fudge, he would have held a grudge against whoever took him away from it too.
24
The Accord
In the ruins of a sunken ship rotting two hundred leagues southwest of Atlantis, Calypso awaited intel vital to the success of her newest scheme. While it had been decades in the making, it may never have been possible to crush her enemies so thoroughly if not for the return of her nemesis’s little brat. And what a brat she was; the inferior progeny of a nigh-unstoppable goddess, a weakling spawn unable to hold her own in battle and distrusted by the mers in authority.
Those imbeciles didn’t understand the latent power Zephyrine commanded. Otherwise, they would have put the young princess in play at their first opportunity. Every second they hesitated to place her on the throne was to Calypso’s benefit. But they were afraid, far too willing to ignore her existence and pray for a miracle from their goddess. And then there were some, like her Atlantian benefactor, who chose to offer the Gloom Queen a fragile alliance. Even worse than the traitor who crawled to her, licking her figurative feet, were the idiot Loyalists hoping to depose the monarchy altogether.
Fucking marvelous. Those spineless worms would hand the kingdom to her on a coral platter.
Every delicious tidbit of
news from Atlantis turned her ever more gleeful. Twenty-five years she’d waited to end the line of Thalassa, forced to take her victories in nibbles and bites, never able to satiate her appetite for vengeance. Now it was finally possible, Zephyrine’s return presenting her with a golden opportunity to crush her enemies.
Calypso had sent her favorite daughter to the rendezvous with their confidante. Meeting them beyond the city would be a risky maneuver for their conspirator, but it was the safest method to avoid detection by inquisitive Myrmidons. After all, they’d come close too many times before.
A low voice stretched across the water, the caress of magic and spirit touching her consciousness. He has arrived, Mother.
Bring him to me.
Calypso swam down the dim ship’s passage, propelled by the many dull gray tentacles replacing the lower half of her body. Her dark hair, once a magnificent mane of golden curls trailing down her naked spine, rested in brittle strands of dark green kelp against the tough barnacles covering her back. Strength and power beyond measure hadn’t come without a cost; Phorkys and Keto’s blessing had corroded her natural nymphly beauty, transforming and mutating her into something different.
Would she have made the same choice again if given the chance today? The question boggled her mind. Until now, the sacrifices had never felt worth it. Until now, she’d doubted she would ever take vengeance for the wrong committed against her.
Narkissa and their guest waited in a private cabin in the belly of the ship, hidden from eyes of Myrmidon patrols. Every so often since her arrival, she’d noticed the headlamps from their gliders in passing, or she felt the disturbances of their craft. If they knew she’d dared to come within the usual boundary, they’d have called in their forces at once. Not that they stood a chance of defeating her.
The Myrmidon in the cabin was a handsome creature with high cheek bones and full lips, silver and blue hair bound in shoulder-length braids floating around his gorgeous face. She coveted him at once, desiring him for a lover though the likelihood of ever having him was as great as her chances of walking on dry land. Impossible. Narkissa watched him too, pursing her dark lips and spiraling a dark strand of hair around her finger. The Gloom hadn’t defiled the beauty of her daughters as greedily as it had taken Calypso’s—after all, the price had been hers to pay.
Return to Atlantis: a Fantasy Romance (Kingdom in the Sea Book 1) Page 17