Fathom (Mermaids of Montana #3) - Elsa Jade Page 0,71
on long enough for Sting to find her.
Except…she’d told him to go away, that she had no intention of returning to Tritona. What if he’d finally believed her? What if he finally took her at her word and left? What if she was wrong about him coming for her?
Numb from more than the cold, she followed the Cretarni through the ship. Most of the soldiers stayed fanned out behind her, although she suspected their positioning—where crossfire with her in the middle might take out half their number—would’ve gotten them a stern talking-to from Coriolis, and Maelstrom would’ve had them drilling until they got it right.
Sting would just slaughter them. And for the first time, she probably wouldn’t argue with him about senseless violence. Unless she could somehow avoid it.
She glanced at the boss Cretarni at her side. “What is your name?”
The boss did not return her look. “Does it matter?”
Annoyance sparked in her. She was trying to save their lives, but if they weren’t going to at least try… “I want to be able to identify your body for the intergalactic council when they charge you posthumously with war crimes.”
“Tell them Cinek took you away. Tell them he still believed, just as they told him to.” This time he did glance at her with a backward twist of his feather-tufted ears, black pupils pinning to small dots, that she’d guessed was Cretarni anger. “Or tell them nothing. Enough of my people rot in the cursed waters of Cretarn, lost forever and unknown, that I think one more will not raise the sea level worth noticing.”
Her frustration drained away. “Then why? Why keep fighting when you acknowledge that it’s already over?” Like Sting, who had been bred and trained for war, and could not let it go.
The Cretarni grimaced again. “If those waters must be the unmarked grave of my people, then the Tritonans can die there too.” He bared his teeth, and she gulped back a little eep of alarm at the long canines dominating his mouth, three on either side and one in the middle like a vicious egg tooth. “All the poisons we sent into their waters and still they survive, like the siphoning parasites they are.”
She blanched. “You did that on purpose? You poisoned the waters just to kill them?”
“How else when they were otherwise impossible to find. Still they clung like the stink of their low tide, relentless as the waves that never stopped.”
She shook her head. “Until even those on land could no longer live there.” Anger and sorrow were as toxic as the worst the Cretarni had done. “Just as well you left,” she told him. “If you wouldn’t take care of what you had, you didn’t deserve it anyway. The intergalactic council will rule on behalf of the Tritonans because at least they are trying to fix it.”
“And what about you? What are you doing with what you’ve been given?”
Her bare feet stumbled on the decking as if the ship had fallen out beneath her. “I wasn’t given anything.” She wasn’t going to explain how she’d fled her home with nothing—more than once. “If I did have anything, you made sure I’m standing here without it now.” With a disgusted sweep of her hand across her pajamas, she wanted to stomp her foot but she knew she’d only hurt herself.
Unlike the Cretarni, it seemed, who’d hurt everyone.
“Just let me go, and then leave. Find a place where you are meant to be.” Unlike herself. Tears choked her.
“I will do as you command,” he said. “After you give me the power to end the Tritonans. Fire-witch.”
She froze. The Cretarni word he used was the same as before but her universal translator served up an alternative version since it had registered her confusion on the first round.
Light switch. Fire-witch. The power he wanted was her zaps. “What do you mean?” she stuttered. “I can’t give you what I don’t have.”
He peered at her. “We know you are fire-witch. We tracked the exodus ship to this planet and then we duped the Tritonans into pinning down the location. And we know you came from there.”
They had fake-revived the IDA, calling it the Intergenetic Data Agency to trick Marisol into funding the search for other descendants of the Atlantyri, crashed so long ago outside Yellowstone. Ridley and Maelstrom had managed to unlock the ship and collected samples of the heritage species the Tritonesse were using to repair Tritona’s damaged ecosystems. And Marisol and Coriolis had discussed how