His emotions whirled, frenzied. His mind churned through solution after possible solution, and discarded all of them—but one.
The brilliant sunset—the sky ablaze with dazzling orange and red clouds—had given way to a cool dusk by the time approaching footsteps gently vibrated against the inflated lifeboat. His body aching, Kai raised himself up on one elbow as the surrounding shadows melted away from a familiar shape. “Grandfather,” he acknowledged with a slight incline of his head. “Where is Jacob?”
“Locked in one of the crew cabins.” Zamir squatted beside the lifeboat. “When did you switch? You used to call me my lord. Never grandfather, until recently.”
“We’re family.” Kai’s shoulders moved in a slow, painful shrug. “We don’t need to be reminded of our responsibilities to the Beltiamatu. It’s our first thought upon waking, our last before sleeping. But family matters, too. Before we were princes and kings of the Beltiamatu, we were—still are—Beltiamatu, with needs for connection, for love. That need doesn’t magically go away, and to deny it…” Kai shook his head. “Most, if not all, of our family’s terrible decision-making came out of a desperate need for love. Perhaps if we had allowed ourselves to love more freely, we might have made fewer mistakes.”
“And what about Naia?”
“I would have taken her for my mate, and let her live.” Kai turned his face away. “But it’s too late. She’s dying. I’m dying.” He shook his head then met Zamir’s eyes. “The Beltiamatu bloodline—millennia-long—ends here, with me.” The corner of his mouth tugged up into a smile. “Unless you count Jacob.”
Zamir growled, low in his throat.
“Or unless you do something about it.”
“Me?” Zamir asked.
“Your body may have started out as Jackson’s body, but it’s not human anymore. Aether transformed it into the body of the first commander, yet you have your eyes. The eyes that mark our bloodline.”
“Have you noticed that I don’t have a tail?” Zamir demanded.
“You’re you, Zamir, king of the Beltiamatu—whatever body you wear, whether or not you have a tail.” Kai’s expression tightened. “I don’t have much time, and I suspect my father won’t survive your anger, but even if he did, he may not be the right person to lead the Beltiamatu. Which leaves you. I know you didn’t want this,” Kai continued before Zamir could say anything. “You wanted to step back and leave the rule of the Beltiamatu to me, but plans change.” He sighed softly. “Ginny is right. We had a terrible form of government, where only one family was encouraged to do the thinking and the leading.”
“You could have changed it—”
“You’re right.” Kai nodded. “I would have, but I’m out of time.”
Zamir shook his head. “I have too much baggage.”
“So get rid of the baggage.”
“If there’s a way to cut off Nergal’s soul, I don’t know it.”
“Ginny has some ideas.”
Zamir’s eyes narrowed. “Ginny?”
“We talked a few hours ago, and she shared them with me.”
“She didn’t tell me.”
Kai shrugged. “Maybe you should ask her.”
“Tell me.”
But Kai shook his head. “Truth be told, I hardly understood it. Her voice anchored me through a transformation. It reminded me that I was still alive, still a part of the world. She talked and I listened, more to her voice than her words. But I know she spoke about you and Nergal.” He paused. “I heard enough to know it was important. Why don’t you ask her?”
Zamir scowled. “It’s too…complicated with Ginny.”
“Friendship isn’t complicated.”
“It is when she’s human.” Zamir shook his head. “She won’t back down. She just sticks around and argues with you, and if you don’t manage to convince her, she’ll do it her way.”
Kai laughed. “I think that you and I have been king and prince for too long. No one’s argues with us. More to the point, no one argues with you.”
“Except for you.” Zamir smiled faintly. “You did.”
“Only when I thought it mattered.” Kai shrugged. “And if it matters, then it’s worth listening to. Like Ginny. She doesn’t care or complain about what she eats or where she sleeps, but she chooses her battles with the shrewdness of a general. I’ve learned to listen to her. Sometimes I convince her; sometimes she convinces me. Most of the time, we just talk, and usually end up in a better place together.”
“You like her.”
Kai smiled faintly. “Yes, but not in the same way you do.”
Zamir’s jaw dropped. He seemed to be groping for words, and Kai deliberately said nothing. Why make it easy? This final path from friendship to love was a path that the Beltiamatu royal family had never learned to handle gracefully, because death waited on the other side.
But it didn’t have to.
That was a choice they each had to make—a choice to step away from custom, from tradition, and embrace the uncertainty that came from the alternative.
If he had time…
Kai looked down at the iridescent scales on his shimmering tail. The diaphanous fins, as translucent as black chiffon, tingled—the prelude to mind-shattering pain.
Kai gripped the sides of the lifeboat, knuckles white, his breath coming in short heaves.
If he had known that he wouldn’t have time…
He would have chosen differently.
His next breath blended the passing seconds and minutes into a blur of incandescent pain. When it finally passed, he found himself leaning back against Zamir. His grandfather’s hands gripped his lower arms, holding him down, anchoring him.
The water in the lifeboat had turned murky with blood and shredded flesh. Patches of water and blood had splashed onto the ship’s deck too.
“Let’s get you cleaned up and to a bed,” Zamir said. The tightness in his voice belied the casualness of his words. “You can rest there for a few hours.”
Kai shook his head. “It’s too—when I transform back, it’s too…messy.”
Zamir’s grip tightened. “To hell with messy. You need to be comfortable.”
With his grandfather’s help—Kai was too weak to walk without support—he staggered down the narrow steps to the shower. After rinsing off the blood, Zamir helped Kai into one of the bunk beds in a cabin. It was neither the cabin nor the bed Kai usually used, though.
“We locked Jacob in the other cabin,” Zamir explained.
“Has he…?” Exhaustion faded Kai’s words away, but Zamir understood enough.
“He’s told us nothing.”
Kai drew a deep breath, forcing out the words in a pained whisper. “We have to stop Marduk.”
“He’s got a hell of a head start on us, and presumably, there are resources already lined up in Portland to take Marduk straight to the Blue Mountains. Unless we can get Jacob to recall the humans, we’ll have to fight through humans to get to Marduk.”
“The humans are not our enemies,” Kai said.
“I know, but they’re fighting for our enemies.”
“It doesn’t matter. We have to draw the line, even if they won’t. Marduk doesn’t care. He only wants to get the aether core back to Aldebaran. But we belong to the Earth, now, Grandfather. It’s ours. We were the first people on Earth, and we’re never going back to the stars. This planet is our home, and that means defending—protecting—all its people, Beltiamatu, humans, and even that lone Atlantean, Jacob. Whatever it takes, we have to get to the Tree of Life before Marduk does. We cannot let him destroy the Earth.”
“And Jacob? What should we do with him?”
Kai shook his head. “This isn’t about Beltiamatu versus the Atlanteans. That battle was fought thousands of years ago, and both sides lost. This is about the humans now. They number in the billions. The Earth belongs to them now. It’s their lives we have to save.” He stared at his grandfather’s unrelenting expression. “Isn’t that why we went to war with A
tlantis in the first place? To save the humans? Our obligation, our responsibility to them isn’t fulfilled until we end Marduk’s threat.” He drew a deep breath. “Even if it’s the last thing the Beltiamatu do.”
Chapter 23
The locked cabin door was the least of Jacob’s problems. It bought him privacy, space to think, to heal. The intercom, however, had been fascinating. It had not occurred to his captors that he could use it to eavesdrop on other rooms—the bridge, the deck, even the next door cabin. He easily identified Zamir’s deeper voice, and Kai’s much lighter tenor, audibly straining to be heard in air instead of water.
And the conversations—
Kai’s pronouncement of responsibility, of obligation, for human lives was the one thing Jacob would never have expected from Beltiamatu royalty.
They were selfish, self-absorbed creatures, who controlled the Dirga Tiamatu.
Yet, Kai had been consistent, his message unwavering.
And it was clear he had nothing more to lose. Kai was dying—and Jacob had done more than his fair share of hurrying Kai along that path—yet Kai’s final message was of reconciliation, of protecting those less able to protect themselves.
Jacob lay on the top bunk bed and stared at the ceiling of the cramped cabin. He drew a deep breath as the green stain in his vision faded into a pale hue.
The whirlwind of hate that buffeted his thoughts and reactions slowed.
What if he had been wrong?
What if the Beltiamatu were not the threat he had imagined?
What if Kai were right—that the war between the Beltiamatu and Atlantis had ended millennia ago, and that both sides had lost?
Jacob was the last of the Atlanteans, but filling human heads with dreams of Atlantis and pretenses of being special had not made humans any more Atlantean than not having a tail made Kai any less of a Beltiamatu or any less of a prince.
Jacob had wanted allies in his cause.
Instead he had created victims.
Collateral damage.
His breath caught.
The greenish tint vanished entirely as the rush of blood pounded a migraine through his skull. Guilt and shame united into a crushing weight upon his chest.
The intercom faded into silence as the conversation in the next cabin gave way to Kai’s shallow, erratic breaths.
Zamir must have left the room.
Jacob slapped off the intercom. His back hunched against the tension stretched across his shoulders. What if—?
Sound scraped outside the door. Someone was removing the metal bar jammed under the handle. The door opened, and Zamir strode into the cabin.
Jacob forced himself to look at Zamir—not as an enemy he had been trying to kill for weeks, but as a person. Zamir’s features were too angular to be considered handsome by human standards, but he looked like a warrior, even a predator. He looked every bit like a king—a king who had been brooding over a problem for too long, and was now angry, having arrived at a conclusion he did not like.
“What do you want?” Zamir asked.
Jacob’s eyes narrowed. He had not expected the conversation to start that way. Where were the demands? The lofty moral stakes? Kai would have come in seeking common ground and shared goals. The young mer-prince still believed, on some level, that he and Jacob were more alike than different, but not Zamir.
Not the mer-king.
Zamir had hundreds of years more to be grounded in his unyielding ways, and far less time to grow out of them.
No sweet talk. No building rapport.
Straight to the point.
What did he want?
Jacob drew a deep breath. Without Ondine’s hate—Nergal’s hate—entangling his emotions and filtering his perspective, what did he want?
What had he wanted—truly wanted—when he was only Jacob Hayes, before he launched on a full-out war against the Beltiamatu?
It seemed so long ago.
He hardly even recalled the man he used to be.
Man. Not Atlantean.
Man. A child of the Earth.
“I want security for Earth,” Jacob said quietly. “When the underwater volcano exploded near Kalymnos, I knew what others didn’t. I knew it was the Dirga Tiamatu. I knew—or at least I believed—that the Beltiamatu were once again encroaching on land, that the explosion was the prelude to war.”
Zamir’s lip tugged into an ironic, bitter smile. “It was the end of the Beltiamatu’s ability to wage war on any meaningful scale. That explosion destroyed the mer-capital, Shulim. It wiped out more than ninety percent of the Beltiamatu people, most of them sickened with disease.”
Jacob’s jaw dropped. “What?”
“I directed the Dirga Tiamatu at Kalymnos. Kai, unbeknownst to me, retargeted it at Shulim. He did the right thing. The Beltiamatu had become, under my leadership, a scourge to the oceans. There was no way back. Only death could end it. Kai was the ruler my people needed; the ruler I’d failed to be.”
No, it couldn’t be.
Jacob’s thoughts stuttered, his ideals shattering upon the truth.
He had been waging war not against a vast, merciless empire, but against shattered survivors led by a dying prince. Jacob drew a deep breath and barely managed to form the words. “What are your people doing now?”
Zamir shrugged but the motion was graceless with irony and despair. “I don’t know.” The admission was painfully torn from him. “They need the aether core if they are ever to rebuild the empire, but Kai needs that aether core in him to stabilize his transformations, to live. It appears that I must choose between my kingdom and my heir, but my kingdom, without my heir, will not thrive the way it could and should, and my heir, without my kingdom, would have no purpose to serve.”
“So, your people are truly gone?”
“Most of them are. A few isolated colonies remain.” Zamir met Jacob’s eyes. “Hence it falls upon me, personally, to end the threat of Atlantis, one way or another.”
By killing me, before Kai makes peace with me? Jacob inhaled sharply. The wall pressed against his back, reminding him that he had no place to escape.
Zamir did not close the distance, but his presence filled the room. “I must ask you again, Jacob, prince of Atlantis, what do you want?”
“I…” Jacob’s mind twisted around what he now knew. And he realized how little he knew. “On the deck, you and Ginny spoke of a field of aether. It’s where we were headed. He swore he would take me to a place where aether was in abundance. That I would have no need of the aether core within Badur.”
“He didn’t lie, but neither did he tell you the truth. There is a massive field of aether in the mountains of Oregon. And there is no way to extract it.”
“There is always a way to get to something.”
“Perhaps,” Zamir conceded with a humorless smile. “But not with any methods known to man.”
“So why would Marduk go there?”
“We hoped you would know.”
Jacob shook his head. “I don’t.”
“Ginny believes that there is something in those mountains that will allow Marduk to leave the Earth. The expulsion of energy will cause the aether fields to ignite.” He paused. “And destroy the Earth.”
Jacob inhaled sharply. “Do you believe it?”
Zamir hesitated before speaking. “I believe we are dealing with energy sources we don’t fully understand. The aether cores that Badur and Ginny carry are nothing—mere wisps of energy—compared to the vast acres in Oregon, but one of those small cores powered the Beltiamatu empire for millennia, and would have done so for thousands more years. If Kai had not taken the aether core from Shulim before it was destroyed, the devastation would have extended for hundreds of miles and wiped out all of the Greek islands and most of the Mediterranean countries. That’s from a palm-sized ball of aether. Extrapolate that amount of aether into thousands of acres, then ignite it…”
“It would destroy the northern hemisphere, at the very least, and possibly much,
much more,” Jacob breathed out the words. “Where is Marduk’s ship?”
“Somewhere in the Oregon mountains, but that’s not good enough. I need to know exactly where.” Zamir smiled faintly, the curve of his lips without humor. “And so, Jacob, I have a request to make of you. I hear that you are a master of hypnosis. Will you be able to draw Arman out? We need answers from him.”
Chapter 24
The mist swilling around Arman’s feet subsided into the crimson patterned floor of the Dalkhu Libbu—the Demon’s Heart—as it was known in the Illojim tongue. The odd feeling of dislocation—of being someplace else, of being someone else—faded as he found himself back where he belonged, in the cavernous space of the Illojim starship. The Dalkhu Libbu was not like the Tiamat, which had been molded around the bones of the great galactic dragon, or the other starships made simply from rare stores of adamantine and orichalcum. The Dalkhu Libbu was a demon’s heart, carved out from his chest by Inanna, the younger daughter of An, a talented and incorrigible troublemaker.
Her unique ability to weave invisible threads of dark energy into living, pulsating aether cores made her the greatest mage of her age, indeed the greatest mage of any age. The Illojim planet of Aldebaran, powered by aether, raced across millennia of technological advancement in mere years. The universe transformed to Inanna’s whims. She danced across space, making and un-making as she chose.
But the one thing she had not been able to control were her father’s people. Empowered, or so they thought, by aether, they rebelled against An’s rule. A coup overthrew the royal family. The king was murdered. His children and his servants fled into exile onboard the Dalkhu Libbu, the Tiamat, and a handful of other starships. Inanna had taken with her all her possessions.
Including all the aether she had ever created.
She turned her back on Aldebaran, and the planet plunged into darkness, free falling toward death. The Tiamat, captained by one of her most trusted servants, Marduk, carried her priceless aether. They crossed galaxies, until finally, from the bridge of the Dalkhu Libbu, Arman gazed at the small blue-green rotating orb that Inanna had selected for their new home.
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