Fathom (Mermaids of Montana #3) - Elsa Jade Page 0,100

from the beat of the water.

The plasma spun higher through the vortex—threads of light fine as cotton candy thickening into torrents of lightning that licked toward the rim of the whirlpool.

Once the burning tide emerged, the Cretarni would have an irresistible target. And her body alone wasn’t enough to power the counterattack.

Freeing one fist from the whirlpool, she slammed her hand down on the buoy. The hollow clang was imperceptible against the howl of wind and water—but the reverberation reached down past her toes, following the tether that the boundary beast had brought to the surface.

Down, down, down.

Lights glimmered below her feet, and the upwelling water surged at her soles. Knowing what was coming, her heart squeezed harder, remembering how she’d felt to see her mother in Sunset Falls.

The Tritonans fighting for their home had no idea that all their mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers were coming to save them.

Following the tether to this point beneath the constellation of their enemy, the Abyssa rose from the lost deeps, its crystalline shimmer of lights brightening the waters like a dawn from below. The inverted funnel of the whirlpool began to widen as the pressure wave of the approaching bell forced the mouth wider. More of the sky opened up above her… A sky on fire with plasma arcs.

The spokes in the wheel of the Cretarni attack formation were brighter too, and not just with the coming sunrise. They were pumping massive amounts of energy along the cables until the fiber optics glared across the low orbit like ruthlessly straightened lightning bolts that never faded.

How could a crystalline jellyfish and a runaway fire-witch match that impending doom?

Not simply because she wanted to or because she had no choice, or even because she believed in herself, but because she had this power and she would use it—standing with her friends—to save them.

Or not standing with, exactly, but standing on…

The Abyssa crystal gently bumped her soles and she bent her knees to take the shock, and then she was rising through whirlpool. As the mouth widened, the silvery fire she’d called from waters wove into brilliant comets, spinning ever faster around the circle. The resonant light sang across every octave in a multitude of voices—all the Tritonans who’d given their memories and dreams to the crystal.

In the blaze of lightning and electron transfer, she lost sight of Sting. Had the outward swell of the wave carried him away?

He was strong, and of course he could breathe underwater, but she wished he was there. She didn’t need the crystal-clear light to finally know that he was what she wanted.

Higher the Abyssa crystal floated, and the whirlpool rose around it—an impossible bond.

Clinging with static electricity fingers, the whirlpool inverted over her in a conical point reaching for the stars. She found herself alone, balanced on the peak of the bell, the lightning-struck waters whirling around her. Disconnected from its power source in the geothermal vents connected to the heart of the planet, the Abyssa crystal would have only one shot—literally.

Through the narrowing aperture at the point of the spout, Lana sighted the Cretarni ship that held her stolen power. They could’ve taken that template for producing clean power and pure water and either joined the Tritonans or founded a new world of their own. But no, they wanted it to kill.

Righteous anger and infinite sorrow and reluctant empathy spun in her even faster than the whirlpool finger pointing at the enemy—all the mixed feelings of the Tritonesse in the Abyssa crystal, although Lana felt them all herself too.

It had come to this, here, now.

As the resident chorus of the lightning voices reached their apex, she pointed her finger to the targeted ship and said, “This ends now.”

For one heartbeat, the lightning and the chorus paused in pristine silence, and she caught a glimpse through the fire and water of Sting, looking small and far away in the furious sea, waiting.

The Abyssa crystal released its centuries of stored power in an ecstatic warrior cry, and the fiery comets blazed upward—

Just as the Cretarni ship fired.

Lethal plasma—scarlet as her blood, flames wrapped in an inferno sheathed in annihilation—arrowed down toward the point of the waterspout of violet and silver.

The Cretarni blast was even stronger than she’d feared, the fiery beam bright enough to eclipse the glow of her own lightning fire. If it reached the surface, it wouldn’t just burn the water, it could penetrate all the way to the Abyssa’s grotto, and if it followed the secret