Blue Abyss: Timewalker Chronicles, Book 3 (The Timewalker Chronicles)

by Michele Callahan

  Chapter Six

  Tim looked to Raiden. “What is on your ship?”

  Raiden remained silent for half a minute as they all stared at him. Mari began to doubt that he would answer at all, his gaze fixed firmly on her until she felt her cheeks heat under his scrutiny. Did he not like the fact that she hadn’t claimed him? He hadn’t exactly claimed her either. She was about to start squirming when he turned to face Tim. “I hid something on my ship, something the Triscani will do anything to acquire. I must beat them to it.”

  “A weapon?” Tim stared at Raiden, obviously willing him to tell the truth, to reveal all.

  “Not exactly.” Raiden didn’t say more and Mari held back a grin.

  Tim snorted. “Not very helpful.” Tim rotated his head on his neck, tendons popping and cracking with his frustration. Mari would bet her life savings that he did that a lot. “You human?”

  “Not exactly.” Raiden’s shoulders were straight and stiff, his gorgeous black-and-silver hair swayed on his head like living reeds in a river. They were just long enough that she could bury her fingers in it and lose sight of them. She wanted to touch it, touch him.

  But, as she’d told Tim and Sarah mere moments ago, he wasn’t hers to touch, despite what Celestina claimed. She barely knew the man, had spoken a handful of words to him. He wasn’t human. He was sexy as hell, but definitely not interested in sticking around Earth. And even half delirious from stasis, he’d curled her toes with a kiss.

  Oh, yes, Raiden was a broken heart just waiting to happen.

  Tim ran his hand over the top of his bald head. “Okay, you want to keep your secrets? Fine. I guess we don’t have a choice. We have to trust you. But I do need to know how big the damn thing is. What’s it going to take to get it off your ship?”

  Raiden considered him, then shrugged. “It is small enough to fit in my pocket. Just get me to my ship. That’s all I need from you.”

  Tim looked to Sarah, who nodded. “Granny T said to be on the beach today. We have to follow through.”

  Tim was the one to pace now. “So, Mari, you’re a mermaid…” he looked worried, “…who has to watch out for hypernatremia. And his ship is underwater…”

  Mari would swear she heard him mumble something about a man named Luke laughing his ass off right now. He turned his intense green eyes on her. “Do you have problems in freshwater as well?”

  Mari shrugged. “Don’t know. Haven’t tried it yet.” She didn’t want to seem stupid but, “What is hypernatremia?”

  “Salt imbalance. Too much salt in your system. Athletes and soldiers worry about having too little. Seems swimming with the sharks made you take in too much.” Tim shrugged. “Not a damn thing we can do about it anyway, except have salt and water waiting every time you get out of the water, so we’ll be ready either way.”

  Had he just said “We”?

  Sarah turned, her gaze moving between Mari and Raiden. “Tell us what you need. Tell us everything. Let us help.”

  Mari glanced at Tim for confirmation of the offer. He shrugged and actually grinned at her. “Getting bored down here anyway.”

  Mari ignored Raiden’s scowl and plowed ahead. Her tingling shoulder and lack of resources made the decision easy. They were human. Sarah was a Timewalker. They’d seen the monsters. And she had a very bad feeling that they didn’t have time to find another way. She’d take help from the devil himself if it would help Raiden find his ship. Whatever it was he needed to recover, the Triscani wanted it badly enough to lock him in a cave for two years instead of killing him. Her dreams didn’t matter anymore. Or her nightmares.

  She was half in love with a man she’d dreamt of for two years, but never met before today, a man that terrified her and made her horny as hell in equal measure, and she was talking to complete strangers about aliens and time travel. It was official. Give her a badge. She was a total headcase, but there was no going back now. Not for her. Still, they seemed really, really nice…and the Triscani were really, really creepy.

  “I’ve got to dodge the Triscani and the military, find a hidden spaceship on the bottom of the ocean and get him onto the ship to retrieve his top-secret whatever. We’ve got to find it or, according to Celestina, there is a huge battle coming up soon, and if we don’t defeat the Triscani, the Lost King’s relatives will wipe out Earth to protect their world.”

  Raiden’s gaze left their visitors and searched her face. “Celestina told you this?”

  Mari nodded, not breaking eye contact. Just looking into his eyes was making her head buzz with energy. “She didn’t exactly tell me all of it. Some of it she just kind of downloaded into my head.”

  Tim looked to Raiden for a reaction, but her man didn’t so much as blink. He believed her. No question.

  “Christ.” Tim groaned and rubbed his hand over his bald head in agitation. “The whole fucking planet.” He didn’t even question her statement, simply accepted it as fact. Who are these people?

  Timewalkers.

  Right.

  “Lightning time!” Sarah grinned and clapped her hands, eyes lit up with more than laughter. Were those sparks inside Sarah’s eyes? “Sounds like fun, as long as I get to meet the sharks.”

  “We’re going to need the boat and sonar, a map, dive gear…” Tim went on, making plans.

  In for a penny… Mari interrupted, “I’ve got pictures of the inside of their hideout on my camera. I need to know what’s on them. I think we should take a look before we do anything else. They had maps, charts and timelines down there.”

  “Digital, right?” Sarah headed for the door when Mari nodded. “I know where the camera is. It’s still in your dive suit. I’m on it.”

  Raiden turned his head to face her, gaze steady and unblinking. Do you trust these people?

  Yes. It wasn’t logical, she supposed. But, what choice did they have? Her gut told her they were good, solid people. Her instincts had led her to the cave, to the man sitting beside her with smoke-gray eyes and kissable lips. Now, if only she could relive the fantasies about him and forget the rest. If only…

  She kept her eyes on Raiden but spoke to Tim. “You won’t need sonar, Tim. I know how to find his ship.”

  Raiden’s hand squeezed hers. “How can you know that?”

  “Trust me.” Mari smiled, leaned back and closed her eyes. How indeed? Even she didn’t believe it.

  A few minutes later Sarah walked back into the room toting a tablet. Mari caught sight of the photos she’d taken of the cave markings and the Triscani control room. Sarah flicked her finger across the screen, scrolling through the pictures until her eyes rounded and Tim froze in place where he stood looking over her shoulder.

  “Oh, my God.”

  <><><>

  Raiden paced the small confines of Tim and Sarah’s tiny living quarters, every nerve fiber tuned to the woman still sleeping in the bedroom. Mari had been asleep for over an hour while he and their hosts made plans to search for his ship. She slept still, and every moment he spent with their hosts baffled him. How could these people not know what they were? They were like children, completely unaware of their people’s power, their status, or their history on Itara.

  Their apparent lack of knowledge tested his fragile sense of reality. It was like he had gone to sleep in a stasis chamber and woken up in a completely different time. Mari had told him the year on Earth’s calender. But how could this be? Had this been part of the traitor’s plan all along?

  He did not know what his brother’s treachery may have unleashed. Was it truly possible that his entire crew had traveled through time? The technology was both illegal and in the sole possession of the Immortals on his world. So, an Immortal traitor helped the enemy? An Immortal on Itara plotted with the Triscani to defeat the Itarans and betrayed the Lost King?

  The Crux, the Triscani victory, was caused by an Immortal? An Immortal who wanted to see his entire people suffer a centuries-long war?

  That was the only explanation that made any sense.
None of what he was currently experiencing could exist otherwise. Here, he was in the presence of three people who, in his own time, could not exist. The Earth was pristine and beautiful. The Triscani were still safely locked away in their dark worlds, and the Immortals from Itara dumped their trash, their worst criminals, twice a year and ignored Earth otherwise.

  If this were true, then he had travelled a hundred and fifty years into his own past. Somewhere on Itara, right now, he was a young man, laughing and running with his brothers and sisters at the palace. His human father and stepmother were still alive. The final battle had not happened. The Crux had not happened. The Lost King and his queen were not yet dead.

  If this was true, it changed everything.

  It would explain many things. The Triscani couldn’t have done it alone.

  He would have no more answers until he could speak to Mari alone. Triscani poison was specifically designed to torture half-bloods and Immortals, but it killed humans and their offspring. Sometimes, even their half-blood offspring, such as himself. The Timewalkers, the Seers, the Archivers, none of them were completely immune. But Mari was human, or so Tim claimed. She’d healed his stab wound, the bloody tear through his back and deep into his lung, taken the from his body poison and then been nearly killed by an overdose of salt. He had no idea how the poison would affect her long term, and that uncertainty gnawed at his insides like cancer every moment she slept. Some healers’ bodies had survived the poison, while their minds had not. But none that he’d ever heard of had actually absorbed the poison into their tissue like she had.

  And that was just the beginning. If what he suspected was true, if he had traveled through time to before the final battle at the Black Gate, then it was not too late. He could change Earth’s destiny. He could change his own.

  The future of humanity hung in the balance and yet a single woman consumed his every thought. He’d had a string of lovers over his life, friends all, but none of them had distracted him to the point where he could no longer think. He’d grown up in peace, but lived the last century fighting a war.

  Worry. Regret. Love. Life had beaten all three of those softer emotions from him decades ago. Now he paced the floor with a gnawing sense of unrest constantly squirming behind his sternum. Worry strained the muscles behind his eyes. His hands would not stop fidgeting, no matter how fiercely he ordered them to stay still. He could not stop moving. Thoughts of her consumed him, her hair, her eyes, and a thousand questions eating away at his brain cells until there was no logic left.

  Whatever this was, whatever these emotions, he did not like it. Whatever she had done to him, however she had healed him, he did not feel normal. Where his wound had been, a constant tingling nagged at him like an itch he could not scratch. His shoulder fired sparks of energy through his entire system until he felt like an old-fashioned Earth computer constantly being rebooted. His lungs burned as if he breathed acid instead of air. Just when he thought he’d gotten a grasp on it, a new wave would begin. The urge to return to her side was very nearly a compulsion. He didn’t want to touch her. He needed to touch her.

  Could this be a side effect of prolonged stasis? He’d never spent two years in the tube before, didn’t know anyone who’d willingly do what he’d done. Even folding deep space took a fraction of that time. Warriors could travel in stasis pods across galaxies and only be in stasis for a few weeks at most. Two years. What had happened to his family on Itara, to the world, during that time? Where was his deceitful brother and who had bought his loyalty now? Which House owned the traitor? An Itaran house? An enemy to his grandson, the current human king on Itara? Or one of Earth’s deadly Triad members? Although he doubted the last. In general, the Immortals who’d carved out their places on Earth didn’t want to rouse the Itaran Queen’s attention, or her justice. More questions. He needed answers. If Mari didn’t wake soon, he might go insane.

  Sarah sat in a rocking chair gently swaying back and forth, a mug of hot tea resting on her thigh. She had her head back and her eyes closed, but she frowned. “Something’s wrong with Katie-bug.”

  Tim was on his computer searching for data on crystals and the caves around Bermuda. The Timewalker’s mark on the back of his neck had shocked Raiden. One more surprise added to an increasingly long list. The soldier looked at his wife and nodded. “Yes, I know. I feel it, too.”

  “What are we going to do?”

  Tim turned back to his computer and started reading again. “Stay close. She’ll let us know if she needs us.”

  Raiden sat down on a small couch then stood back up. Who was Katie-bug? Did it matter? No. Not to him.

  He’d already taken a hot shower, which had been heavenly. Since he and Tim were roughly the same size, he had reluctantly borrowed some of Tim’s clothing, a pair of jeans, a soft shirt made of cotton. The sleeves weren’t long enough to hide his blades, so he’d cut holes in the jean pockets and slid them along the outside of his thighs. The nanobots anchored the blades to his flesh like magnetic locks where they’d still be within easy reach. Sarah had offered to dye his hair. He’d refused so she’d handed him a covering for his head she’d called a “ball cap” for when they left the house. She said he looked like a walking anime character, whatever that was supposed to mean.

  His royal black uniform and insignia were gone, his hair and his shoes all that remained of his prior life. Mari had called him a rock star, so he’d used Tim’s computer and looked up what that meant. Something called Google had simply left him more confused. The rock star appeared to be someone with long, stringy hair who wore paint around their eyes and screamed into a microphone while playing a guitar.

  He’d concluded that she must have been out of her mind at the time. Which made him even more worried about possible side effects of the poison.

  It had been well over an hour now. Mari had not moved. He sat down again. Stood back up. Walked to the kitchen. Walked back. Sarah had made him a dish she called chicken noodle soup. The brew was like a rock in his stomach after not eating for two years. He had managed to choke down a small amount. His mother’s Immortal blood would keep him alive whether he ate or not. But thanks to Mari, he felt surprisingly healthy. If he could just ignore the strange energy coursing through him.

  He could take it no longer. Tim flashed a knowing grin at him, but Raiden ignored the smug bastard and walked back to the bedroom to check on her for what had to be the hundredth time. She looked like a sleeping goddess, too beautiful to be real. Everything in this world was too striking to exist, the pink sand, the blue ocean, and the clear skies. These were not things from the scarred, darkened Earth that he remembered from his many trips here during the last century of war.

  He sat down on the edge of the bed next to her and could not resist taking her hand in his own. Instantly the tingling in his body intensified into a fireball of heat that rocketed into his shoulder, down his spine and straight to his groin.

  She gasped, and something dark and painful lifted inside him when her eyes fluttered open. Their gazes locked. She squeezed his hand. “Raiden. It wasn’t just another dream.”

  “No. It’s not a dream. We’re in Bermuda, at Tim and Sarah’s home. They claim Sarah is a Timewalker, like you.”

  Mari’s gaze strayed to inspect the soft pastels of the bedroom and Raiden felt the loss of her gaze viscerally.

  “You look exactly like I remember.” Pain slashed behind Mari’s eyes when she returned her gaze to him. A shiver raced over her body. Whatever thoughts plagued her, they were far from pleasant. “I saw you many times in my dreams. It’s what drove me to the caves.”

  Whatever Mari’s dreams may have been, they may have aided her in finding him, but they also led her straight to the Triscani cave, to his enemies. He squeezed her hand. “You said the Triscani had already killed you once, Mari. What did you mean?”

  Her warm gaze shifted to stare at their joined hands. “When I found their cave the first time, they killed me. One of them shaped their hand into shards
of black crystal and shoved it straight through my chest to my heart.”

  Raiden was confused. “Then how…?”

  “Celestina. She pulled me out of there and took me onto her ship. She’s the one that told me about your ship. Then she sent me back through time to do it all again, without getting killed.”

  Raiden leaned forward, unable to resist tucking a stray lock of black hair behind her ear. He had fought many battles. He’d come face-to-face with the Triscani less than a dozen times over a century of war, and each time they had nearly killed him, would have if not for his mother’s lineage and his dark gift. Mari, a mere human, had faced them twice. “How did you survive? Why did you go back down there?”

  “I had to. You were still there. And I have this.” Her hand began to glow in the center of her palm. The Angel’s Fire, a gift of legend indeed, and one so rare, it could only be bestowed by the most powerful of the Immortals, by a Mater Mortis, a Mother of Death within the Circle of Judgment. How did Mari get it and why hadn’t it killed her? She was no Immortal. Where was Celestina and why had the Seer risked Mari’s life so callously? What ship had the Seer taken Mari to? Did Celestina have access to a ship that could take him home? Back to the future? And if he tried to return now, would he return to the same life he left? Did he even want to? And even if Celestina could try to send him home, he couldn’t trust her. The Seer was a fool. Only a fool would risk the life of such a powerful healer. Any sane being would claim Mari, and if they couldn’t win her loyalty, imprison her.

  “Why, Mari? Why did you come looking for me?”

  “I don't know.” Mari looked away from him, and he knew by the way she bit her lip and avoided his gaze that was a lie. “All I know is Celestina saved me and told me to save you. She said that if I didn’t, the future she saw in her visions was too terrible to be born.”

  A Mater Mortis must have gifted Mari with the Angel’s Fire, and Celestina was the most infamous Seer on Itara. By the gods, what had he stumbled into? “I don’t understand. This should not be happening. How did you get the Angel’s Fire, Mari? Who gifted you with such a powerful weapon? Are you a descendant of the Queen’s First Circle?”