Fathom (Mermaids of Montana #3) - Elsa Jade Page 0,93
me when you had the chance?”
The momentary flicker of those silver lenses told her he wasn’t ready to reveal his true eyes. “You didn’t want to be abducted.”
She glowered at him. “You pretend you don’t understand words when is suits you.”
“I know what want means.” Despite his shielded eyes, a light flickered behind, turning them to storm clouds.
She held her ground—such as it was. “So you would have left me on Earth?”
“Isn’t that what you told me you wanted?”
For so long, she’d felt constrained by the strange zaps that had flashed like distant lightning through her life. And when it got worse, she’d given up on wanting anything except to survive. Now, she was finally free of the power she’d never asked for, and she still couldn’t say what she wanted?
There was nothing left to blame.
She took the deepest breath of her life. “I want—”
The runabout rocked hard, tossing her into Sting’s thick shoulder. An instant too late, the proximity alarm blared.
He’d caught her with one long arm, and now he shoved her back into her seat, locking the restraint harness fast. “Remember whatever you were about to say.”
Another smash, and the runabout spun completely on all axes. She would’ve thrown up but she was too terrified.
As the small ship settled, listing sideways, she asked, “Did we lose power?”
“Partly. We were hit.”
“By what?”
He boosted the echolocation on the runabout— Just as a gigantic blob coalesced in a ghostly afterimage an instant before slamming into them again.
She held back a shriek. “You call yourself a monster? That is a monster!”
“Boundary beast.” Sting started reducing the last of their power. “It patrols the edges of the Abyssa’s realm. It seems vexed.”
“Oh, you think?” She eyed the dimming screens. “How will we see it?”
“We can’t stop it anyway. Making ourselves less of a threat might calm it.”
She sucked in a snarky response. But really, how could she get any smaller?
The hiss like her annoyed breath kept going, and she glanced over her shoulder to follow the noise. “Uh, Sting?”
“I would’ve taken you,” he announced. “I didn’t want to leave you on Earth. I wanted to claim you for my own. But according to the Intergalactic Dating Agency handbook—”
Her heart pounded. “Wait, hold that thought. We’re sinking.”
He followed her gaze. “Beast must’ve gotten a fang into our armor.”
Of course it had fangs. What sort of self-respecting boundary beast didn’t have fangs?
“Can we repair the damage before a breach?”
He shook his head. “Not without welding that will anger the beast.” Despite the threat of another lethal jolt, he got up from his seat and went to stick his hand in the widening spray of water. This time, she was not pleased to see his dimples. “We’ll have to swim.”
“Swim?” She couldn’t help the squeak in her voice. “It’s way too deep and dark. And oh by the way, there’s a boundary beast out there.”
As he gazed at her, the shield over his eyes flicked away, and she was left staring at his unmasked eyes. “This is what I am,” he quietly. “Will you come with me?”
She stared down at the wet, webbed hand he held out to her through the ever-widening spray of seawater. He’d reduced the ship’s power to almost nil, and in the remaining pale glow, the mist wasn’t a rainbow, but a luminous moonbow of silver and pearl.
So this had always been her choice: to resign herself to sinking or just dive in.
She slipped her hand into his.
In moments, he’d checked her external gill, reduced their datpad output to almost zero so as not to rile the beast more, and hustled her out the airlock. She didn’t even have time to ask if the pressure at this depth would instantly crush her. She could only hope that her e-suit, her Tritonan ancestry, and the plentitude of snacks from Thomas would make her dense enough to resist crushing.
They ejected into Tritona’s sea.
It was cold, so cold. And dark, so dark. For a panicked heartbeat, she was drifting in space again, only this time there were no stars.
Except… As her eyes adjusted even after the relative dimness of the runabout, tiny sparkles of light bloomed in the void. She’d seen bioluminescence before, of course, both on Earth and Tritona, but this was something else, something so eerie and otherworldly and hauntingly beautiful that she knew she’d never forget it no matter how much longer she lived.
The “stars” floated through the void, seemingly random and not constrained by any laws of celestial mechanics, but powered