Fathom (Mermaids of Montana #3) - Elsa Jade Page 0,98
meant to confuse the Cretarni targeting while the Tritonyri get our people into deeper, safer waters, but they don’t know the target is our water itself.” The growl in his voice roughened. “And that target is too vast to protect.”
Her gaze jumped frantically across the sky, marking the Cretarni ships. There had to be close to a hundred ships, some in atmosphere, some at low orbit. After centuries of war, the Cretarni had depleted their resources too, but they’d brought everything they had to this last fight.
“They didn’t have time to synthesize the fire-switch elements into weapons for every ship,” she said. “Would Cinek have kept it for himself or handed it off to a higher-ranking officer? I’m not sure I’d recognize his ship since I only saw it very briefly from the outside…”
While she’d been dying in space. She broke off the thought as Sting tightened his grip around her.
“I’ll never let you fall again,” he murmured in her ear.
Snuggling closer, she had to remind him, “Can’t fall in space or in the water.”
“But gravity, surface tension, and cohesion can bring objects closer together.”
She looked up at him. “Is that why we’re together?”
His dimple flashed. “That and electrical charges. Opposites attract, like water and fire.”
She cupped his cheek as if she could capture that mark of his smile. Had she ever really been afraid of his sharp teeth, or just wished he’d nibble her?
“There.” He pointed at a ring of ships with a larger vessel at the center. “We can’t see it from here, but they’ll be running cables to draw power from the smaller ships to the cannons of the larger one. They used that technique to calculate for refraction and gain better penetration through the water to reach our submerged ships.” His white-hot stare at the sky was furious enough to bring down ships on his own. “But I’ve never seen so many ringed at once. That’s not a safe distance, and any miscalculation could be a threat to all the ships in the configuration.”
“That was nice of them,” Lana murmured. “Shortsighted, but nice.”
He glanced at her. “Is this what you want? To take on this fight? It will hurt, body and soul. Some will die, at your hand and by your power. If you choose to dive, there’s a line right there that will take you back to that cavern. It’s deep and pure enough that you could survive there.”
Run and survive, alone. Yeah, she’d done that.
“I don’t want this,” she admitted. “Who would want war and pain and death? But the Cretarni made this weapon and used it against us, and they want the world to die rather than just let it go.” She shook her head, flinging back her hair. “Maybe I wasn’t always great about figuring out what I wanted, but I know what I don’t want here. We can’t let them destroy the waters.”
He kissed her. Maybe he didn’t have the pheromones for the breath of rising desire, and maybe she still hadn’t manifested the gills of her Tritona heritage that would let her breathe underwater, and yeah, maybe the sky and the water were burning all around them as their enemies amassed for the last assault, but in that heartbeat, their flaws and their failures meant nothing, and they could float only on their hope for what came next.
When she broke away with a gasp, the bits of scaled armor he’d given to her had brightened to an almost neon hue.
He smiled. “Your power is rising,” he whispered over the susurration of waves and the piercing whine of laser fire.
“It’s what I am.” It was what she’d always been, but she’d been too afraid to want. She wasn’t going to let that fear rule her anymore.
The kiss had left her pulse buzzing, but now she realized it was more than the kiss. “I feel it.” The water began to swirl around her, a slow counterclockwise churn that displaced the water, like the dimple in his cheek, so that they sank lower than the sea level, until it was only the two of them and the sky full of enemies. Her blood seemed to swirl the same way, but faster. Every nerve felt like a live wire, awaiting only a touch to spark and burst into flame.
But she’d never called on the power deliberately. She’d always held it back. “I don’t know what to do,” she confessed. “I should’ve tried harder. I should’ve believed—”
He kissed her again, stopping the flow of negative