Mari grabbed Celestina’s hand and squeezed. “If I survive this, I promise. I will find you.”
Celestina pulled her into a hug and Mari hugged her back with every ounce of strength she had.
“Thank you, Celestina. Thank you for saving my life.”
Celestina pulled back, a sad smile on her pixie face. “Find me.”
<><><>
Mari said her goodbyes, nodded to Bran and stepped through the portal floating a few inches above the floor. Immediately she felt the sucking sensation of being a fly in the vaccum cleaner’s hose again. Her body felt torn apart, disintegrated into nothing, taken apart one piece at a time like a sand statue in a windstorm, and put back together again somewhere else. White light blinded her senses for an unknown length of time until the wild ride finally dumped her flat on her back. Naked.
“Naked? Really?” Mari rolled onto her side, the communication disk still safely in her clenched fist. “Celestina, you are sooo going to hear about this.”
Panting and in pain, Mari looked around and blinked a few times to clear her visioin. It appeared that Bran had been true to his word and sent her backward in time. She was lying on the deck of her forty-foot boat in the faint predawn light. Her ship, The Huntress, was tied up to the docks at the Royal Naval Dockyard marina in Sandys. Her original dive to the caves, where she’d found Raiden and died, was scheduled to take place in a couple of hours.
The Challenger Bank was only twelve miles off shore. If she fired up the engines now, she could be back in that cave before the sun rose.
Mari looked over at her gear lining the side of the boat, fresh and perfect, unused. Did she dare believe this? Did she have a choice? She remembered going down on that dive. She remembered finding the cave with the alien markings. She remembered dying in that room with two of the scariest bastards she’d ever seen. She remembered that kiss. She remembered everything.
She’d left her dive suit behind on Celestina’s ship, her swim suit had mysteriously vanished, but the communication device Celestina gave her was still in the palm of her hand. Figures.
And her left shoulder still burned.
When the Triscani had killed her this time, with Raiden writhing in pain on the floor and black ice piercing her heart, she’d known it was all too real. It hurt too much, both the blades and the thought of him lying there. She’d never kissed him in a dream. Never learned his name.
So, where did that leave her? With terror clogging her throat with bile and her head spinning. The side of her left shoulder burned and her right hand felt heavy. Mari didn’t have to help Celestina or believe her strange story, but she did. Bone deep, soul deep, she somehow simply knew that there were bad guys down there waiting for her, and that if she didn’t free Raiden, it would be bad, end of the world bad.
“This is it, Raiden. The end of the road.” Two years ago the nightmares had started. Two years ago her already crazy life had stopped making sense and she’d become obsessed with finding proof that they were here. Two years ago, Raiden’s ship had crashed and sank to the bottom of the ocean. Now a sleeping prince awaited her under the magical spell of an advanced stasis chamber with alien monsters for guards.
She’d have preferred Sleeping Beauty and a dragon.
Some fairy tale. And she didn’t recall any of the girls in the stories facing walking creatures with inhuman black eyes that seemed to suck out your very soul. Or traveling naked through time.
Mari rubbed her palm. It felt completely normal now and, somehow, that disturbed her even more than the weird metallic glove had. The weapon appeared to be gone. Perhaps she’d finally crossed over into the realm of schizophrenia and was having conversations and experiences with people who weren’t real.
She moved to the side of the boat and pointed her hand at the water once more. Breathing deeply to calm her racing heart, she focused and created the image in her mind of a fireball shooting from her palm.
With a loud sizzle, the water in front of her churned and boiled as steam rose up in a wall of scorching heat.
“Awesome.”
Real then. What about her shoulder?
Mari raced into the tiny head. Twisting until she could see her shoulder in the mirror, she tried not to react at the sight greeting her. Sure enough, the Mark was there at the top of her arm, smack dab in the middle of her deltoid, the Mark Celestina claimed belonged to both Raiden and herself. “Holy shit. It’s a Shen.”
This was not exactly like what she’d seen down in that cave. No. This symbol she recognized.
Mari traced the circular symbol with her fingertip, identified it from her ancient world languages class. The symbol was Egyptian and was considered a symbol of eternal protection. The thought was that it was a length of rope twisted into a circle with the remaining ends forming a straight line beneath. It was used in hieroglyphs of the gods and goddesses of the ancient Egyptians’ religion, and was stretched into the more common cartouche symbol used to enclose the names of the Pharoahs or loved ones.
She’d never had a tattoo in her life. Her mother, God rest her tortured soul, was probably turning cartwheels in her grave about now. Or perhaps not. Maybe this would have given her mother some peace from the nightmares.
Now that Mari knew about the Triscani, Celestina, Bran, and the Timewalkers, she wondered about her mother’s heritage, and her own. Her mother had spent a fortune on religious cleansings, gifts to the church, blessings and even an exorcism for both herself and her daughter.
Nothing helped and now Mari began to understand why. She wasn’t crazy, and neither was her mother. They’d somehow tapped into a reality few ever saw, and no one had told them about. Her mother’s Catholic upbringing had led her to blame everything on demons and a sin-filled life. Her father had tried to cheerfully ignore them and their issues. He liked to pretend it would all go away.
Neither of her parent’s strategies had worked so Mari had decided to hunt for answers. And now, she’d finally found them. She rubbed the symbol that had magically appeared on her shoulder.
“This one’s for you, Mom. I’m going to go kill some demons.”
Mari stared into the exact replica of her mother’s brown eyes in the mirror as she made her promise. Then she rolled her shoulders, grabbed her spare swim suit from the hook where she’d left it to dry, tugged it on and walked back onto the deck. Not often a girl died, travelled through time, was revived, genetically altered by an alien to breathe water, given a personal laser weapon, a tattoo, and a boyfriend she’d kissed once right before they’d both died. The whole thing made her want to laugh, and cry, and jump up and down like a two-year-old screaming and pulling her hair out.
Too bad her mother had run the tantrums out of her back when she was small Her mother had demanded they maintain outward control, no matter how bad the dreams got for either of them. At the first sign of tears, she’d been sent to her room until she could control herself. No lecture, no beating, just the silent stare of a woman demanding perfection. Mari had been a miniature adult by age four, always in control, used to facing down “demons” in her sleep.
If only she could let loose her rage, her fear. A good old-fashioned rant was so very tempting…but impossible. At least for her.
Instead, Mari did what she always had, pulled herself together, ignored the fear, ordered her racing heart to slow down and went in to wake up her crew. “Let’s go, gentlemen! Change of plans.”
An hour later, she zipped her diving suit tight and padded the pockets of her BCD with a few extra weights and Celestina’s special disk. She was going mermaid style, taking a knife, her spool line, two lights, and one nineteen-cubic-foot pony tank and mask that she’d strapped to a BCD for Raiden. She’d be breathing water like a fish. The thought both scared and excited her. What did that make her now? A female version of Aquaman? A mermaid without a tail?
No. A Timewalker. The very thing the nasty things down there had accused her of being.
“I can do this.” Mari wasn’t sure
who she was talking to. Raiden? Celestina? Maybe the scary creatures waiting in their scary room at the bottom of the scary cave? Oh, yeah. Could be them.
Mari ignored her dive crew as they geared up behind her. They flew through their ususal routine, professional, thorough, and deadly cautious. There was no room for error on a cave dive. None. And watching them, she knew they wouldn’t be ready for another ten to fifteen minutes.
Mari couldn’t stand to wait and reasoned that taking them down with her this time would just put them in unnecessary danger. When she surfaced with Raiden, they could rant and rage all they wanted to, but their steel darts and knives weren’t going to do a darn bit of good against her enemy. No, if she let them go with her this time, she was just asking to get one of them killed. Besides, they knew more about the bends and how to deal with sickness than anyone else she knew. They might be able to help her with Raiden.
But until the Triscani in that cave were dead, taking them down with her was too big of a risk. “Gentlemen, meet me at fifteen feet.”
She grabbed the gear she’d put together for Raiden, tucked the pony tank and attached gear under her arm, and jumped off the swim platform, determined to take her first breath of water since Celestina had let her out of the tank in what for her had been just a few hours ago. She bit down alarm and told her brain to shut up when it protested the move. She grabbed hold of the anchor rope and held on with the top of her head skimming the top of the water in case she needed to make a quick exit. Mari opened her eyes, the first test, and found that she could still see perfectly without a mask. Genetic mutation holding firm? Check.
Time for a giant leap of faith.
Hours of diving and training kicked in as she fought off the panic and forced her body to do what it didn’t want to, what it shouldn’t be able to do, inhale liquid like air.
Cold fluid made its way down her throat into her oxygen-starved lungs. She ignored the sensation and focused on the play of sunshine on the waves above her, the cool slide of the current caressing her dive suit. She allowed her body to drift a few feet down as she hung on to her anchor rope and tried to equalize the pressure in her ears. Breathe in. Breathe out. Ignore the cold. Ignore the water invading her sinus cavities like chilled, wormy fingers. Ignore the alien feel of her body cavity filling with something it shouldn’t. Ignore it.
Breathe, dummy. Just breathe.
It could have been two minutes, it could have been ten, but she finally adapted to the water inside her lungs and could move without a major force of will. Now that she had the breathing conquered, and her panic pushed into a tiny locked box inside her mind, she looked down at the ocean floor below her and selected a nice, uninhabited stretch of sand. Raising her palm, she fired her new, handy-dandy blaster at nothing in particular.
Sand burst from the bottom in a swirl of light so bright she had to cover her eyes and wait for it to clear.
Able to blow shit up and kill bad guys?
Check.
She stared in wonder at her palm. No burn marks, no pain. Nothing. She felt like J looking at the Noisy Cricket blaster in Men In Black. Didn’t look like much, but it sure packed a punch. Darn aliens had all the good toys.
And now it was hers.
Time to go deep and kick some bug ass. If she spent any more time thinking, she was afraid she’d lose her nerve. No thinking. Thinking would only scare the crap out of her.
She kicked off the line and adjusted her BCD to sink straight down along the anchor line. When she was close to the cave depth, she swam straight for the cave’s hidden entrance along the rock walls, mermaid style. She hauled the small rescue tank and BCD vest along behind her.
She knew where the offshoot cave was this time, and laid her dive line as she went, swimming straight to it. The symbol was there. More proof that she wasn’t crazy, and that everything in her memories had actually happened. Those scary things were still down there. What were they doing, anyway? Staging Earth for an invasion? Studying human biology? Selling Earth’s resources? Creating creepy mutant babies?
Kidnapping alien kings and waiting for an opportunity to wipe out Earth? That was what Celesina implied. But why? None of it made sense to her. But she knew one thing, those creatures were scary as hell and didn’t belong here. Even if she only got to take out two of them, Earth would be much better off.
She stopped swimming and floated at zero buoyancy facing the underwater doorway. The flow of water and sound calmed her and she soaked in the rhythm of the water and the Earth, listened for the steady beat she’d been missing on Celestina’s ship.
The slow pulse inside her head, the measured beat of Raiden’s heart, filled her mind like an echo. She counted to ten. Fifteen. Beat. Counted again. Relief made her smile and she opened her eyes. He was alive. The empty void filled. She could feel him again, sense that she was getting close.
Mari approached the alien vampiric crystal, the one that required blood to open the door.
Her blood.
Beat. Silence. Counted to twenty this time.
Too long between heartbeats. Too long.
I’m coming Raiden. Hang on. Mari cut her finger, smeared blood on the crystal and wondered why her blood was a key in the first place? She wasn’t an alien. Celestina said she was descended from other Timewalkers. Perhaps that was why it worked? Or perhaps the Timewalkers had a traitor among their kind who didn’t expect anyone else to find this place?
Once inside on the landing platform, the door closed behind her and the water drained away. She set the small rescue breather and mask on the floor. She doubled over to expel as much fluid from her lungs the she could, forcing herself to cough. But it wasn’t enough.
She was drowning standing in open air. She tried to take a deep breath but it felt like her lungs exploded into a million tiny pieces. Her lung tissue did something no human’s should have been able to do, absorbed the fluid that remained and pushed it into her bloodstream.
Every limb expanded like a water balloon before the water traveled to her pores and rose up on her skin to run over her sensitive flesh like small streams of sweat. She was like a kitchen cloth being wrung out over the sink. Water flowed off her body and dripped onto the floor until her lungs were completely clear. Time to get what she came for.
Ruthlessly she squeezed her thumb to get enough blood to enter.
She didn’t waste time on the little prison cell that housed Raiden’s sleeping form. She felt a bit like she was jumping off a bridge. It was not something she wanted to stop and think about. She’d had a bungee cord tied around her feet and jumped off a bridge in New Zealand. They didn’t let her look over the edge until she was ready to jump. And once she was on the ledge they didn’t give her time to stop and think. Countdown. Leap. Thinking would have given her time to be scared, more scared.
“This time, you get to die. Alien assholes.” Mari leaned her forehead against the closed door, the door she knew the dark things hid behind, and whispered her vow. Killing these alien monsters was worse than jumping off a bridge. Much worse.
But, for the first time in two years, she actually believed she had a fighting chance to get out of here alive.
She squeezed her thumb again until she was sure she had enough blood to operate the crystal doorway, and opened it. As before, the two faceless beings rose to inspect her, surprised by her entrance. She didn’t pause to talk, or wait for them to speak to her, she simply raised her arm to the nearest one and fired a blast of light. The monsterdisintegrated before her eyes and fell like a cloud of dust to the floor.
Yes!
The other raced for her with inhuman speed. She immediately turned and fired again. The flash of light cleared and there was nothing left of the creatures but a faint dusting of black ash where the two aliens had been. Mari kicked at the pile with the toe of her dive bootie. The ash mixed with water and congealed between the threads. Mud under her shoe. Gross.
“Take that, you assholes.” Celestina promised her that this was the only wea
pon that could distort their molecules enough to banish them from this world. She hoped they were dead. Really, really dead, and not just banished to some other dimension waiting to pop back out at her, or travel through time to kill her again.
Not that it would matter. There were more of them somewhere, a whole society, if that was what she wanted to call it. And after a lifetime of nightmares, Mari had long ago resigned herself never to sleep peacefully again.
With the immediate threat gone, the blaring noise of hundreds of screens assaulted her ears. Radio chatter from military men speaking in English, Chinese, Russian and a handful of other languages she couldn’t recognize or understand flooded the room. She searched the perimeter of the room. It was a very plain room. Two chairs, hundreds of monitors and radios. No water, no food and nothing to indicate that any human had ever been here before. There were no creature comforts of any kind.
Then she saw something stuffed in the corner leaning against the wall. A small black stone with her new symbol, the Shen, engraved in its center. She had no idea what it was, or who it belonged to, but it was a Timewalker symbol, and these aliens had no right to it.
“I’ll just take that, thank you.” Mari stuffed the stone in a pocket and zipped the fabric around it. She looked around, relief making her shake like a leaf. She’d killed them. And thanks to Celestina, it had been easy.
The room left a bad taste in her mouth. Whoever built it was obviously using it to spy on governments the world over. Alien murderers did not need to know where the President was at any given time, or the leaders of any other country.
Celestina hadn’t said anything to her about destroying this place while she was down here, but those alien creatures were using it for something and whatever that something was, it wasn’t good. Decision made, Mari pulled her waterproof camera from her pocket and took at least fifty photos, every desk, map, chart and screen burned into digital data for inspection later. That done, Mari tucked the camera away and raised her hand. She fired at the hundreds of monitors lining the walls. She kept at it until she felt like her hand was on fire and there was nothing left but heaps of ash.
Blue Abyss: Timewalker Chronicles, Book 3 (The Timewalker Chronicles) Page 6