to my chest, because the whole not-being-able-to-breathe thing had just been complicated by the arrival of—
Well, call them what they are, I thought, staring in awe in spite of everything.
Because they were mermaids.
Or mer-something, I corrected, noticing the finely muscled torsos dipping low to thick, scale-covered tails. Even with long, filmy hair that floated out behind them like smoke, huge colorless eyes, and weird, almost transparent filaments wafting from the sides of their necks and faces, they didn’t look remotely female. They were also vaguely blue, or maybe that was the light.
I couldn’t really tell and didn’t care because I was drowning, and because they currently had strange-looking spears pointed at me menacingly.
One of them, wearing a neckpiece of glowing crystals in some kind of metal, struck out with his weapon and stabbed violently at my chest. Or, I realized a second later, at the huge bound volume I was holding in front of it. I didn’t think he’d missed, since he was all of a few yards away, and then I really didn’t when bright, yellow-white glints of light started spearing outward from the book.
I would have dropped it, but I was afraid he’d miss and hit me. Because he was stabbing it again and again, causing cracks like lightning to run all over it and shedding more of that terrible light. To the point that I couldn’t look at it anymore, I couldn’t look at them, I couldn’t look at anything with my eyes scrunched up in pain.
Which is why I didn’t see what was coming.
But I heard it when a sound tore through the eerie quiet, like a hundred whales all deciding to signal at once. And I felt it when something slammed into me, hard as a fist. It was just a current under the water, but it threw me and the book I was still clutching back at the force field, pressing us against it so hard that I opened my mouth to scream before forgetting that I couldn’t, sure that every bone in my body was about to break.
But the field broke first.
Suddenly, I was hitting the ground outside along with what felt like half an ocean’s worth of water, leaving me gasping and heaving and coughing until I thought my lungs would come up. Which is why it took me a moment to notice several things: the field was back in place, and half a dozen mermen were on the other side, staring at me with their huge, colorless eyes. Hilde and Saffy were standing in front of me, trying to give me a chance to recover while holding back what looked like a mass stampede of people. And the book—
Was going insane.
I finally gasped in some air and scrambled back a few paces, getting my feet under me in the process. And getting away from where the tome was writhing and jumping and spilling a searchlight’s worth of radiance everywhere. It was strobing the faces of the panicked people flowing around us, who were running away from—
What the hell were they running away from?
I couldn’t see with all that light in my eyes, and with taller people and things flowing around me. And it was so loud in here, with people screaming and the loudspeaker blaring and my ears still half full of water, that I also couldn’t hear what Saffy was yelling at me. Until my ears popped and her voice got through.
“—of here! Did you hear me?” she screamed, grabbing and shaking me.
“No,” I said, and threw up some more water.
But then the light shifted and the crowd parted for a second, and I was able to see past her shoulder. More specifically, I was able to see a bunch of light fey pouring through one of the portals down the hall, a big one. Along with what looked like—
“What the hell is that?” I yelled.
“Time to go!” Saffy said, a wand in either fist.
But there was no time to go. No time to process the few dozen impossible things that had just happened and were still happening, because one of said things was about to run us down. The silver-haired light fey soldiers streaming out of the portal were attacking people with the weird spears they liked to use, which could deliver anything from cattle-prod-like encouragement to fry-you-where-you-stand bolts, but that wasn’t the main problem.
No, the main problem was the elephant-like thing that a bunch of them were riding, and that had just torn its way through the portal.