by Jade Kerrion
Questions. More questions.
And no answers.
He reached under his pile of papers for his personal notebook. Instead of leather worn smooth by age, his hand touched the cool metal of his desk. His heartbeat stuttered. Where was it?
His tongue tangled around unuttered curse words. No one would have come in here. The crew knew well enough to steer clear, and Ondine cared nothing for his work.
Ashe.
Damn it!
The door slammed loudly behind him as he strode out onto the deck. She sat on the rail, bathed in moonlight, but there was nothing vulnerable or wistful about her as she stared at the ocean. Varun could easily imagine her thoughtful scowl. Alone, but not lonely, Ashe was formidable, less because of what she was—a Daughter of Air—than who she was—a person with an unclouded vision about exactly what she had to do.
She had also rifled through his personal belongings and stolen his notebook.
He strode up to her. A loud caw preceded the flutter of wings. Varun ducked instinctively, barely avoiding Jinn’s dive-bombing. The parrot landed on the rail and snickered low in its throat, like a movie villain. “What do you want?” it demanded.
Ashe’s fingers had not moved, and for a moment, Varun wondered if Ashe or Jinn had asked the question. It did not matter, he supposed. Ashe was telepathic, after all. She could probably communicate with Jinn without the sham of flicking her fingers each time.
Anger pressed hard against his chest. He could not quite keep it out of his tone, even though he took the precaution of lowering his voice. “You took my notebook.”
Ashe nodded.
“Why?”
Instead of replying, she asked, “Why did you write it down?”
“Because I’m a scientist. I record facts, data. I write it down to make sure my emotions don’t taint my later recollections of an event.”
“All events are tainted with emotions, although they may change with time.”
He hated the fact that she was right. “Don’t get philosophical on me. You know what I mean.”
“I know that you need your precious facts and data when you write your tell-all paper.”
His jaw dropped. “My what?”
“Your research paper. Peer-reviewed. Published in scientific journals.” She turned her head to glare at him. “Do you think I know nothing about human ways, Varun? Of the endless competition for money and for fame? How much more fame could you garner as the man who proves the existence of mermaids and finds the location of Atlantis?”
He stared at her, his throat tightening. “Is that what you think of me?”
“Where is Kai?”
“Kai?” Varun blinked at her, startled by the change in topic. “What do you mean—?” He caught himself as he finally understood her question. Outrage swelled. “You think I kidnapped him? And then lied to you about it? What do you take me for—some kind of monster?”
“Human.” She bit off the reply. “A perfectly normal, self-interested human.”
Her matter-of-fact answer cut off the air in his lungs. His mind staggered to form words. Did she really think so little of him? Why would she— Hell. Varun strove for calm beneath Ashe’s unrelenting gaze. He had to inhale a few times before his voice was steady enough to continue. “I don’t know where Kai is. The last I saw of him was at the escape pod before I went to find you.”
Ashe shrugged. The graceful, indifferent motion was like a stab straight into his heart. Jinn’s caw grated against his spine. “I want you to burn the notebook, and swear you’ll never keep physical records of me, and of anything associated with me.”
He ground his teeth. “I’ve never thought of publishing my findings. I’d be laughed out of academia. I’ve worked hard enough for my Ph.D. to not be dismissed out of hand as a crazy kook—like the rest of my family.”
Ashe’s smile was as cold and sharp as the edge of a blade. “But your family was right about mermaids.”
“It doesn’t change the fact that everyone on Kalymnos thinks they’re crazy. I don’t need crazy. I don’t need to wage an uphill battle against reputation when we have a crisis on our hands. This time, the ocean isn’t going to save itself. I need people to listen to me and focus on the problem—the dead spots in the ocean—not look at me and think I’m crazy because I’m going on and on about a highly cynical, supremely irritated, and ridiculously suspicious Daughter of Air!” He paused for a beat. “Even if I’m right.”
“Are you done complimenting me?” Jinn’s bland tone matched the coolness in Ashe’s eyes.
Hell, she was not even offended. Did she know how much she had injured him with her suspicions? “Damn it, Ashe. Friends don’t treat each other like this.”
Her eyebrows shot up, which only served to confirm that he wasn’t even in her category of friends.
She had saved him. He had—Varun ground his teeth—if not precisely saved her, he had at least tried to help her. They had survived harrowing, life-changing encounters together. Didn’t any of that count for something?
“How much of those three hundred years did you actually spend observing people?” he demanded.
“Enough of it.”
“Not nearly enough if you rifled through my belongings and took my notebook. Not nearly enough if you’re dismissing me out of hand, as if everything we went through together was nothing.”
She leaped to her feet. The wind screamed across the deck. Pain flickered through her eyes, and her fingers danced, fast and furious—he suspected, in lieu of striking out at him. Jinn cawed, his sharp tone reflecting Ashe’s outrage. “You endanger everything with your passion for truth and for facts. The world isn’t interested in facts. Your human world cares only for dominance. How many species and cultures have you all wiped out?”
A muscle ticked in Varun’s cheek. “That’s a low blow.”
“That’s a fact,” she retorted.
“I’m trying to save the ocean. My ocean that your people are destroying, on my planet.”
Her eyes widened as if he had struck her. “How dare you—?”
“Just stating the facts.” He flung the insult back in her face. “Humans have screwed up lots of times, but what’s happening now isn’t on us. It’s on you. Your compulsive drive to find a soul is what hurled us all to the edge of destruction. Your reckless interaction with humans is why your world risks discovery. This isn’t about me, Ashe. This is all on you!”
The ship reared on the edge of a wave, tossing in a storm that appeared out of nowhere. Varun’s heartbeat skittered. I’ve definitely pissed her off.
And he did not give a damn.
Until the wave lifted the ship high, tilting it sideways.
Varun slid across the deck. The world whooshed past him. Dimly, he saw the impossible—Ashe, standing straight and unmoving, in spite of the reckless waves. He tried to grab anything he could reach, but the angle of the ship was too acute and he was moving too quickly. His mind was an incoherent blur of near panic as he grabbed the ship rails—his last line of defense. His fingertips brushed against metal, but it was too slick, too wet to grasp.
He hit the water with a loud splash.
The relative calmness of being underwater momentarily replaced the turbulence of the wild waves, but he kicked hard and broke the surface. He stared at the Veritas as it bucked on another wave and was carried farther from him.
Well, shit. Varun started swimming.
A gust of wind—actually, it was a great deal stronger than anything that could have been called a gust—yanked him out of the water. He flailed against air, his heartbeat stuttering in his chest, as the wind carried him over the water and dumped him, ungraciously, on the ship’s deck.
He bit back the curse when he realized he was more angry than afraid.
He had never doubted, not for a moment, not even when he hit the water and surfaced to find the ship leaving him, that Ashe would ever leave him to drown.
If that wasn’t friendship—
He
raised his head and saw her walking away, her parrot perched on her shoulder.
Or maybe she just didn’t want any liability issues on her ship.
“Ashe.” Varun pushed to his feet. Water dripped off him. The raging storm warned him that she was still furious.
He had always wanted a woman whose moods he did not have to guess at. Well, now he had one. He simply had to gauge if the wind was a playful breeze or a goddamned hurricane. How hard could that be?
“Will you stop, please?” He extended his hand toward her. “I’m trying to apologize.”
The door of the bridge slammed shut behind Ashe, leaving him alone on the deck.
“What happened to you?”
Varun glanced over his shoulder. Ondine stood at the door of his cabin. She looked wan, but her eyes were alert and her expression dismayed.
“Got a little wet in the storm.” He tugged his shirt over his shoulders and tossed it into the pile of laundry. Varun left out the part about falling into the ocean. That little incident was between him and Ashe. Besides, he could not explain it to Ondine without causing more issues. Ondine’s generalized anxiety about the unrelenting storms had escalated into borderline paranoia over things she couldn’t fully describe, let alone explain. But instead of lashing out at Ashe—who seemed to be her favorite target—Ondine retreated, recoiling into herself, spending most of her time in the cabin.
It was so unlike her that Varun was starting to feel anxious.
Her face devoid of her usually heavy layers of makeup, Ondine leaned her head against the doorframe, but there was nothing casual about the stiffness of her stance. “You were out on the deck?”
He nodded.
She glanced at her watch. “With the captain?”
Varun grimaced. Apparently, he was not the only person who had noticed that Ashe tended to spend most of her night out on the deck. “She was there,” he conceded.
“She still have her hooks in you?” Ondine asked, her voice waspish.
He shook his head. “There is nothing between us.”
“I’ve seen the way she looks at you.” Ondine’s immediate reply, however, lacked her usual vehemence, as if it had been simply easier to argue over old familiar lines than to branch into new territory.
He suppressed the irritated sigh. If there was anything worse than deciphering the emotions of one woman, it was diagnosing the conflict between two of them. Varun spread his hands. “Look, I’m just here to do oceanography research, and she’s just the captain of the ship. She’s a necessary evil at this point. Let’s not piss her off—” Easier said than done. “—get the job done, and then just go home.”
“To decent food and a real bed.”
Varun thought the food on board the Veritas more than decent, but had to agree with Ondine about the bed. The Veritas was a research vessel, not a luxury yacht. The cabins were, at best, basic, and the mattresses scarcely comfortable enough for one. They were certainly not wide enough for two. Getting back on land as soon as possible was a priority, if Varun were to have anything left to salvage of his relationship with Ondine.
If he wanted to salvage it. Their relationship had been in a downward spiral for a long time, and the crisis of the past few days only further accentuated the emotional distance between them. Doubt tightened a knot in the pit of his stomach. “How is your leg?” he asked, noticing that she still favored it.
“It aches when I put any weight on it, but Corey says it’s getting better.” Ondine hesitated. “Varun, what happened that day, on the beach, when we were attacked?”
His thoughts raced. “What do you think happened?”
“There were faces, bodies in the wave, and then when the wave crashed, I thought I saw…” She shook her head. A furrow appeared between her eyes. “But it couldn’t have been. It was probably just the water pulling back.”
“What did you think you saw?”
“Tails, like mermaids.” Her smile was wry, self-mocking. “You probably think I’m crazy.”
“I—”
Ondine yanked her fingers through her auburn hair. “Of course you would. You’re a scientist. But…that’s what I thought I saw, just for an instant. Then the water pulled all the way back and they were standing, on legs. No fish tails.” She laughed, but the sound shook. “I should have listened to Corey when he told me not to wash down my seasickness medicine with a glass of wine. No more predinner cocktails for me.”
“Probably not.” Varun tried not to sound too relieved that Ondine had talked herself out of what she had seen, and what he had known for a fact. They had been attacked by merfolk wielding poisoned spears.
Probably best not to tell Ondine that they were on their way to the ruins of Atlantis, either. Not when he was still trying to wrap his mind around Ashe’s world—where daggers were cursed and myths were real. Where air sylphs battled mermaids, and sirens preened on rocks. Where aliens from space took up residence in the sea and built massive underwater cities and weapons that drew energy from the Earth’s core.
Did Ashe really think he could put any of that into a scientific paper for peer-review?
The sheer unbelievability of Ashe’s world protected her.
That—and the fact that Shulim was destroyed and the merfolk scattered.
Who the hell was going to believe him?
And why the hell didn’t Ashe?
Chapter 9
The cluster of islets in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean appeared out of nowhere, a jagged reef upon an endlessly smooth sheet of blue. The crew of the Veritas, Varun among them, had gathered on the bridge to stare out of the window. Ondine, too, defied seasickness to catch her first glimpse of the island.
“Does it have a name?” Jackson asked as the Veritas approached its destination.
Ashe shook her head. Jinn squawked, “Not big enough to deserve a name.”
Ondine scowled. “Why are we here, then?”
Varun interjected. “I found some data that, extrapolated, resulted in these coordinates. It may be nothing, but I wanted to check it out, just in case.”
Jackson stared hard at Varun for a moment, then shrugged. “Can’t see what you hope to find here. It’s a big circle of rocks, about nine or ten nautical miles across, with a larger islet smack in the middle.”
Varun frowned. Did no one, except him, appreciate the striking symmetry of the island—the near-perfect circular pattern, broken only by rocks eroded by the sea, or possibly something much more destructive? The outer circle had probably been the circumference of Atlantis, a perfect ten miles across. The islet in the center must have been the middle of the city. “Are we going to take the speedboat the rest of the way?”
“We’ll probably have to,” Jackson said. “It’s going to be a tight fit for the Veritas. And there’s no telling if there are rocks beneath the surface. We could rip up the hull.”
Varun winced. “The ship will be a long ways away if we get into trouble on the island.”
Jackson rolled his eyes. “Hate to point it out to you, but the Veritas is a long ways away from anything. If we get into trouble, the issue won’t be the distance between the speedboat and the Veritas, but the Veritas and anything resembling civilization.”
The familiar, comforting rumble of the Veritas engines fell silent. Ashe tapped a few controls on the panel, then flicked her fingers. Jinn squawked, “The sea anchor’s in place. Mr. Jackson, you have the bridge.”
Jackson’s eyes flared wide. “You’re going ashore, captain?”
Ashe said nothing. The captain of the Veritas merely tilted her head.
Varun could have sworn that Jackson, who was at least two heads taller than Ashe and easily three times her weight, actually flinched.
The first mate cleared his throat. “With due respect, captain, you don’t know what’s out there.”
Actually, Varun suspected Ashe did know what was out there, but he could not easily contradict Jackson.
“If you’re going, I’m coming too,” Jackson sa
id. “I can stay in touch with the Veritas through the satellite radio. You need someone with you who can get the ship and the crew pulling in the same direction, in case of an emergency.”
In an emergency, Ashe would probably have no qualms screaming telepathically directly into her crew’s minds, but Varun had to admit that Jackson’s point was valid.
Jackson continued. “I’m great in a fight. You know I’m a good man to have at your back.”
Ashe’s eyes narrowed and her fingers shifted in the beginning of a response that Varun expected would be no, but in that moment, Ondine spoke up. “I’m going onshore too.”
Varun glanced at Ashe and had the pleasure of seeing her jaw drop.
Jinn screeched, “No.”
Ondine’s chin lifted. “My father chartered this boat.”
“Ship,” Jackson corrected.
“And you’re supposed to be responsible for it. If you’re going onshore and leaving this boat—”
The entire crew chimed in. “Ship.”
Ondine’s glare swept across the people in the room. “Then I’m coming too. I want to know what was so important that we had to come all this way out here.”
Varun cut in. “I told you the data—”
She turned on him. “If there’s data, then show me. Prove to me we’re not on some kind of fool’s errand in the middle of nowhere just because you want to stay on this ship.” She darted a sideways glance at Ashe. “I’m coming. I have an investment to protect.”
Varun stared at Ondine. Me?
Ashe’s eyes narrowed. Her fingers flicked. “Fine, come along. Jackson, you too.”
“Captain?” Jackson sounded surprised. Like Varun, he had probably expected Ashe to turn down both his and Ondine’s request.
“Load the speedboat with supplies for at least forty-eight hours.”
“Forty-eight hours?” Ondine echoed, her tone dismayed.
“We’re not coming back if you forget your cuticle scissors.” Jinn snickered. “We depart in an hour.”
The hour passed in a blur of activity. Varun packed some supplies, including specimen containers, but he suspected he would have found a gun far more useful.