Devil and the Deep (The Ceruleans Book 4) - Julie Ann Walker Page 0,41

until the warm water covered everything but her face. With her ears submerged, the glug-glug of the liquid moving against the side of the structure was both muted and strangely amplified.

Blowing out a huge breath, she then sucked in as much air as she could. Sucked until her lungs couldn’t hold another drop. Sucked until her nose was filled with the distinctly ocean-y smell of the barnacles clinging to the side of the fort wall: fish and shells and algae and…death.

She hoped that last bit wasn’t portentous of anything as she dove beneath the surface, kicking hard to propel herself downward, her hands gently rubbing along the rough masonry in search of the opening. She wasn’t sure why she kept her eyes open in the stinging salt water. It’s not like she could see anything. But then, suddenly, she did. An inkier blackness within all the blackness, right before her probing fingers sank into a hollow.

Here goes, she thought as she pulled herself into the narrow tunnel. This one’s for the girls.

It was a mantra she repeated as she hauled herself along, finding handholds in the bricks and the slimy sea life that made its home in the craggy walls. Maddy didn’t begin to want to know what was slipping beneath her fingers. Nor did she want to contemplate the seconds ticking by.

Twenty feet? Really? It was beginning to feel more like two hundred.

Then again, time flies when you’re havin’ fun!

She redoubled her efforts, adding a few soft kicks to the work her arms were doing. She softly kicked because she didn’t want to smack into the walls of the fissure. The tunnel was tighter than a skeeter’s butthole—she couldn’t imagine how Mason and Bran were able to shoulder their way through—and no telling how stable the centuries’ old brickwork was. Lord knows, she didn’t want to trigger a cave-in. Also, she didn’t want to boot Bran in his handsome mug.

She couldn’t feel him. And she certainly couldn’t see him. But he said he’d be right behind her, and Bran was nothing if not a man of his word. It gave her the confidence, the calm to keep pushing ahead.

At least for a while.

Five seconds stretched to ten. Ten seconds quickly became twenty. The water inside the tunnel was cooler than that in the moat. It softly brushed against her cheeks and hair, slipping down the collar of her T-shirt to slide across her breasts and belly like intrusive, chilly hands.

Come on. Come on…

Where was the cistern? Why hadn’t she reached it? Surely she’d gone twenty feet by now. Surely!

Her lungs burned. Her heart rate spiked, trying to push oxygen that wasn’t there through her bloodstream.

Did I take a wrong turn? Could the tunnel have forked?

She kicked and pulled, kicked and pulled, her motions becoming more desperate as oxygen deprivation set in. All her instincts yelled at her. Turn back! But she fought them off, pushing, pulling, propelling herself forward. Ever forward.

Where’s Bran? I took a wrong turn! Somehow I—

Space…

Big, beautiful, wide-open space. She was free-floating in the cistern. Finally!

She kicked toward the surface with all her might. Her fingers became claws, tearing at the water. The beat of her heart was a ferocious roar in her ears. Her lungs spasmed, desperate to suck in air.

Uh-oh. Had she gotten mixed up in all that cool, wet blackness when she exited the fissure? Was she swimming down instead of up?

Oh Lord! Oh shit! Oh—

Her mouth opened in a silent scream. Briny water rushed in, triggering her gag reflex. Spots of light flashed in front of her unblinking eyes, but they weren’t bioluminescent sea creatures. They were hallucinations conjured up by her under-oxygenated brain as her synapses misfired.

She stopped to turn around. Surely she was swimming down. She had to be. She would have reached the surface by now! But before she could switch directions, a hard arm came around her middle.

In an instant she was propelled through the water. Bran’s muscled legs kicked. His free arm stroked. He was a human torpedo dragging her along for the ride. Good thing, because she was done.

Out of juice.

Out of air.

Out of time. And then…

“Uhhhhh!” They breached the surface just as her convulsing lungs overrode her willpower and forced her to suck in bright, brilliant oxygen…along with a fair amount of liquid.

She immediately folded in half, hacking and coughing and trying to clear the spray from her lungs. The sound of her struggle echoed through the cistern, bouncing around the brick walls. Bran slammed