Secrets of the Deep (The Gryphon Chronicles, Book 5)

by E. G. Foley

  Red huffed and shook his feathery mane.

  Jake laughed. “You know me too well.” He turned to the ghost. “Constanzio, you must promise to bring us any news of Derek and Tex the moment you hear something. And Henry, too, of course. If they come back from their missions while we’re away—”

  “I’ll be sure to tell the gents where to find you. Well! Since the other children cannot see me, do give them my warmest regards… And I shall GO!!!” he sang, lifting his arms out theatrically to his sides.

  He then went into one of his trademark flourishes, and held the final note for an impressive length of time: “Constanziooo must go… Go, go, go, go, GO…!!!”

  Laughing, Jake applauded until his showy ghost friend disappeared. “What a ham.”

  “I heard that.” Only Constanzio’s round head reappeared, grinning. “Ciao, ragazzo!” he said, and disappeared.

  “Arrivederci, signore!” Jake said to the empty air, which was the sum total of all the Italian he could speak, aside from ragazzo, which apparently meant boy.

  The little preview of Italy’s sights and sounds from Constanzio suddenly made Jake eager to get their adventure underway. Jogging the rest of the way to the castle through the dewy grass, he took a final brief walk-through of his home to make sure he hadn’t left anything important behind.

  He took one last, hard look at his family portrait over the fireplace in the great hall. The painting showed Lord and Lady Griffon—blond, handsome Jacob, and dark-haired, blue-eyed Elizabeth—both beaming with happiness and life, while Jake, as a baby, sat on his mother’s lap, looking plump, contented, and thoroughly indulged.

  Jake narrowed his eyes at the portrait. Looking at it always made him feel like someone had stuck a knife in his heart.

  But with no desire to prolong the danger to his companions here in England a moment longer, he pulled the castle door shut and left, commending his home to the care of his former frog servants.

  Though sad to see him go, the neatly uniformed butler, footmen, and maids were mostly grateful to have been turned back into humans some time ago.

  “Do hurry, Jacob. That is quite enough dawdling,” Aunt Ramona clipped out, checking in her little beaded handbag to make sure she had everybody’s passports.

  “Yes, ma’am.” Jake strode toward the first carriage, the driveway gravel crunching underfoot.

  Archie waved from inside the second coach, where he sat with Miss Helena, Nixie Valentine, and Maddox.

  Jake sent them a casual salute in reply, then bounded up into the first coach, while Aunt Ramona gave the driver some final instructions. He slumped into his seat on the maroon leather bench across from Dani. Cousin Isabelle sat beside her.

  The girls were both smartly dressed in long, fancy traveling gowns, and between them sat Teddy, Dani’s little brown Norwich terrier, wagging his wee stump of a tail and wearing a wide doggy grin.

  He was becoming quite the little world traveler, that pup, but Dani would not have dreamed of leaving him behind. Not when he was small enough to fit in her satchel.

  Jake looked at the redhead. “Did I hear something about snacks?”

  Dani pulled out a tin of what proved to be Scottish shortbread, but she let him take only two of the sweet, buttery biscuits before putting the lid on it firmly again. “You’re not goin’ to eat them all in the first five minutes! Who were you talking to?”

  “Constanzio came to wish us a bon voyage.”

  “How nice!” Dani said sweetly.

  Jake tilted his head, finding her more curious every day. He had known Dani O’Dell for years—and she knew him better than anyone—but things felt a little different of late between them in ways he couldn’t quite describe. All he knew was that Miss Helena’s educational efforts and Isabelle’s ladylike influence had started turning the rough-and-tumble rookery lass into quite the respectable young miss.

  Just then, the Elder witch joined them.

  “Finally!” Aunt Ramona huffed. The footman closed the carriage door politely behind her, and, at last, they were off.

  Jake waved out the window. “Bye, Red! Tell Gladwin we’ll send her a postcard!”

  Red reared up and posed, wings out, in a parting salute, then he flew up to his favorite aerie on the castle roof.

  As the shiny black coach rolled down the long drive, creaking under its mountain of baggage, Jake looked across at Dani. Her green eyes shone with excitement for the journey ahead.

  “I cannot wait to see Paris! I never thought I’d ever get to see the world.” Dani swung her feet just a bit, her tan boots laced up to where they met the hem of her shin-length gown, and she bounced happily on her seat, much to Jake’s amusement. “This is going to be amazing! We’re going to see so many marvelous old things! Old churches, old paintings, old palaces, old ruins…”

  Jake quirked a half-smile. “I had no idea you liked old things so much, carrot.”

  “Old things have presence. I mean, just look at Her Ladysh—” Dani suddenly stopped herself, aghast. Wide-eyed with her blunder, she gulped and lowered her head, her cheeks strawberry. “Never mind.”

  Jake stifled a chortle and kicked her lightly.

  Dani sent him a mortified look.

  “I’m sure she meant it as a compliment,” Isabelle said with the utmost delicacy, her lips twitching.

  Aunt Ramona’s eyebrow arched high. “Indeed.”

  Well, people did speculate that the Elder witch might be as much as three hundred years old, Jake thought with a grin.

  “Humph,” said Her Ladyship, then she gazed out the window, her stern lips pursed like she was holding back a chuckle.

  And at last, their Grand Tour got underway.

  # # #

  Meanwhile, on the far end of the Continent, disgraced archeology professor Dr. Dmitri Giannopoulos stood quivering with scholarly excitement on a rocky Greek beach. He could hardly believe it.

  The day of his destiny was at hand!

  Soon, everyone who had mocked him would be sorry—especially the academic board, those closed-minded fools. They had claimed he had embarrassed the university with his “rantings.”

  Well, they were the ones who would soon be embarrassed when he and his patron proved Atlantis was real!

  Dmitri looked askance at the tall, inscrutable Englishman standing silently beside him, staring out to sea. The earl clearly wasn’t ready to tell him what was about to happen, but no matter. His own whirling thoughts obsessed him. He could almost taste the fame and fortune that would soon be his…

  Yes, yes, the world might think him a crank right now, but they had called Dr. Schliemann a crank, too—until the German archeologist had dug up the lost city of ancient Troy, and shoved the solid gold Mask of Agamemnon down their blasted throats!

  Now world famous for his discovery, Schliemann had proved that mankind’s oldest myths and legends could be real.

  Dmitri heartily agreed. That was why he had written his book, The Lost Secrets of Atlantis. The one that had got him sacked from the university and turned him into a laughingstock.

  He had burned to show the stodgy academics they were wrong. That there had been an ancient civilization some twelve thousand years ago before Noah’s Flood had wiped it off the map. Alas, expeditions like Schliemann’s were hugely expensive, so Dmitri had had little hope of ever pursuing his dream, especially after he’d been fired.

  But then a miracle had happened. His poor little book had found one fan, at least, making its way into the hands of the strange British earl.

  Money was no object to Lord Wyvern.

  It seemed that while other rich, eccentric British lords with a taste for archeology were off chasing mummies throughout Ancient Egypt, Wyvern’s pet passion was Atlantis. A family interest of some sort, His Lordship had claimed.

  In truth, the earl made Dmitri slightly nervous. There was just something about the man, so tall and commanding. A coldness that went deeper than his merely being English…

  But no matter.
Wyvern was filthy rich, and he had sought Dmitri out some weeks ago for his project.

  “We have a shared interest, you and I,” he had said. Then His Lordship had explained how he needed an ally with some archeological expertise and a familiarity with the region. Dmitri had leaped at the chance—obviously!—and they had become partners in the grand enterprise of pulling whatever remnants of Atlantis they could find out of the sea.

  Wyvern would pay for everything and choose their first location, as well. All Dmitri had to do was act as His Lordship’s liaison in-country, and see to the particulars. Perhaps falsify some documents for him when the time came to smuggle any artifacts they found out of the Mediterranean without attracting the notice of the Ministry of Culture…

  Admittedly, Dmitri had some skill in this dodgy practice. He was not proud of it, of course. But after being fired, he had to survive somehow.

  After a few failed ventures, he had opened his little gallery shop on the island of Malta, selling fake antiquities to tourists. And moving real ones out of the region for the truly rich clients like Wyvern, who wanted authentic Greek and Roman treasures for their country houses back in England or France or wherever.

  Dmitri had long rationalized his illegal little side business by telling himself he was only saving up for his great someday expedition. And now, at long last, someday had arrived.

  Wyvern had promised he’d hold real Atlantean artifacts in his hands this very day. Vindication was so close Dmitri could smell it.

  Provided, of course, that Lord Wyvern wasn’t barking mad.

  There was that possibility. For the rich earl, bless his heart, had also claimed to be some sort of sorcerer or druid.

  Ah, those English. So eccentric, Dmitri thought nervously. For all he knew, the man could be an utter loon. At this point, though, he could not afford to doubt him. “Your, er, source was certain this is where we ought to start our search, my lord?” he asked gingerly. “I don’t believe you ever mentioned how this person determined these coordinates.”

  “No, I did not,” Wyvern said with a chilling half-smile. “Nor did I say it was a person that told me.”

  Dmitri frowned, squinting against the brilliant sun.

  “Now if you don’t mind,” said Wyvern, “I require silence.”

  “Of course, my lord. Apologies.”

  Well, gracious, if Wyvern had gained his knowledge of Atlantis by some occult or paranormal means, that was the earl’s own business, he decided with a shrug. As his former students could attest, Dr. Dmitri Giannopoulos was unusual for a scientist; instead of believing only in what he could prove with his five senses, he knew the world and especially the sea were full of stranger things than most people realized. Fish that were supposed to be extinct for millions of years, for example, occasionally turned up in fishermen’s nets.

  And then there were the mermaids.

  As the son of a humble Greek fisherman, Dmitri had first seen them with his own two eyes as a boy: a pod of merfolk swimming through the waves with their dolphins.

  They looked just as they did in the ancient tiled mosaics in the museum, the females longhaired and lithe, the males curly-headed and athletic, their powerful arms flexing as they carried their spears.

  He had instantly wanted to catch one, but his father had said it was terrible bad luck. You didn’t want to anger their kind, Papa had said, for they could talk to the fishes, and they’d wreak revenge by making sure that no one in your village ever caught another fish again.

  Of course, by the time Dmitri had grown up and lost his job and become the laughingstock of Greek academia, his papa was dead, so it had been easy to brush off the old man’s superstitious warnings.

  Desperate for an income before he’d opened his flimflam shop, he had sailed out in his father’s old fishing boat, determined to catch a mermaid for public display. Perhaps he could not yet prove to the world that Atlantis was real, but he’d be on the right track, he had reasoned, if he could at least show the world a real, live—or even a dead—mermaid.

  Gawkers at the freak shows would pay good money to see that, he had no doubt. But it wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Every time he had got a mermaid into his net, she would laugh in his face while her friends circled his boat like sharks or leaped up like dolphins to cut her free.

  They weren’t very nice. Toying with him had become a sort of game to the younger set. They were as bad as his students! Their mockery had only made him more determined to take one alive. Ultimately, though, he’d had to abandon his quest after a whale had rammed his boat with its head.

  Whether it was a pet of theirs or just a friend, Dmitri could not say, but he’d learned his lesson. While the mer-brats had splashed about, laughing and jeering at him, he had gone limping back to shore with a hole in the side of his father’s boat. He’d never bothered them again.

  Shortly after that, Dmitri had opened his fake antiquities shop—and it was there that the mysterious Lord Wyvern had first contacted him.

  He still wasn’t sure what to make of the man. How could a British earl with no archeological background be so confident about where to find the ruins of Atlantis when he, a trained field researcher, had studied the question for a decade and still could not be sure whether to even start the search around the Pillars of Hercules or among the Caribbean islands?

  Ah well. Dmitri had no desire to question him, considering Wyvern was the one with all the money.

  The earl had sworn him to secrecy, then given him his instructions, and while Wyvern had returned to England for a while for reasons of his own, Dmitri had got to work making all the arrangements for their quest.

  As it turned out, they didn’t have to travel far at all. A stash of Atlantean artifacts had supposedly been hidden just off the coast of Greece in an undersea trench called the Calypso Deep.

  It was the deepest point in the Mediterranean, or more specifically, the section of the Mediterranean called the Ionian Sea.

  I hope he’s right, Dmitri thought, but he still had his doubts—especially about how Wyvern intended to retrieve the Atlantean goodies from such crushing depths, beyond the reach of man. Nobody knew how far the Calypso Deep stretched down into the earth. It couldn’t even be measured. It just kept going on down, down, down.

  But no matter. Dmitri had done the earl’s bidding anyway, carrying out all his instructions to the letter. First, he’d procured a fine yacht for the earl’s use. Next, on His Lordship’s behalf, he had leased the tiny, private island of Nisáki, barely bigger than a dessert plate.

  The uninhabited island was rocky and wild and pristine, home to nothing but seagulls and a few stray seals basking in the morning sun. High above them, its dramatic pinnacles bristled with spiky rock formations known by locals as the Cyclops’ Crown.

  Lonely little Nisáki had cliffs and caves, scrub brush and wild olive trees, and not much else. It was edged with rugged pebble beaches, like the cove where they now stood with a crescent-shaped bluff at their backs.

  Dmitri still wasn’t sure exactly what they were doing there. He glanced again discreetly at Wyvern, still waiting.

  As for the earl, he was acting like, well, like a sorcerer—albeit one dressed in finest London tailoring.

  Given that Dmitri believed in Atlantis and knew for a fact that the merfolk were real, it was perhaps not that great a leap for him to suppose that what people thought of as magic might turn out to be real, as well.

  Who could say? There were probably logical explanations for such things—answers as yet unknown to science. And since the only intelligent way to go through life was with an open mind, he kept his mouth shut and watched.

  Lord Wyvern lifted his hands over the rocks and boulders strewn along the shoreline and closed his eyes.

  As he began to mumble a chant, Dmitri was suddenly startled to notice for the first time that the earl had a physical deformity: the otherwise tall, princely man had six fingers on each hand.

  Dmitri grimaced as he stared at the abnormalit
y, since Wyvern couldn’t see him, his eyes shut in deep concentration.

  Honestly! he thought in disapproval. The aristocrats and royals of the world really needed to stop marrying their cousins, or this sort of thing was bound to happen.

  He couldn’t help thinking of the giant, Goliath, and his savage Nephilim brothers in the Bible. They, too, had been described as having six fingers, and like them, Wyvern was also unusually tall, maybe six foot six, though Dmitri would hardly call him a giant…

  And just as Dmitri was contemplating Goliath’s nemesis, the short, scrawny, teenaged future King David, flinging his little rocks from his famous slingshot, Lord Wyvern made the boulders in front of him fly up, defying gravity.

  Dmitri’s jaw dropped. Before his eyes, the levitating boulders began stacking themselves into roughly humanoid shapes with arms and legs and heads and came to life.

  He quite forgot to breathe for several moments. If it hadn’t been for his familiarity with mermaids, he would have fainted on the spot.

  One, two, three rock monsters towered over Wyvern, arrayed along the beach. His own army of giants, like huge, animated rock formations. They shuffled their massive feet, rolled their stiff granite shoulders, glanced back and forth at one another with glowing orange eyes. Dmitri barely dared blink, staring up at the three creatures. How…?

  His Lordship walked from one to the next, staring at each craggy boulder face and giving them their instructions in the same unknown tongue he had been speaking in since he’d started with the chanting.

  Druid language, maybe.

  But he finished in English. “Bring me the tools of my ancestors. Go!” With a large, swirling motion, he waved his weird hands toward the sea, as though directing gigantic marionettes.

  Golems. I think they’re called golems in the occult literature, Dmitri thought, finally managing to scrape the tatters of his wits back together as he stared. How could this be happening? He was open-minded, but this was a bit…much.

  Blank with shock, he watched the massive rock monsters pound slowly into the waves.