Fathom (Mermaids of Montana #3) - Elsa Jade Page 0,99

words. “You know,” he admonished her. “You’ve done it before. When you crashed the Diatom. When you blew me away. Once or twice. Every time you kiss me and set my blood on fire.”

His words lilted like a song she only half knew. Okay, but maybe if she didn’t know, she’d figure it out on the fly—or on the swim—just like everyone else who wasn’t a bioengineered killing machine. Taking a breath she nodded and let him ease her away until she was holding onto the buoy by herself.

The waters swirled faster, carrying him in a circle around her, and she closed her eyes against the dizziness.

And against the fear rising faster than the power.

Yes, she’d blown him away and even crashed one spaceship with her zaps. But downing an armada? Out of orbit? While they were shooting at her?

Or not at her, specifically, since they thought they’d taken what they needed from her and left her to float off into space shackled to a makeshift bomb. As far as Cinek and the rest of the Cretarni knew, she was a thin trickle of debris circling Earth.

The whirlpool had dragged her buoy and her deeper, as if she were drowning in the air. When she looked up, the only circle of sky visible contained that center ship—Cinek’s?—and its ring of battery ships. The finest tracery of lines, like the spokes of a wheel, connected the ships. Sting had said they wouldn’t be able to see those power cables, but…

Somewhere, beyond the horizon, the sun must be coming up, glinting on those lines.

Would the new day dawn on a new chance or the Last Tide?

No, that was too overwhelming for words. She was only in charge of this moment, with the power she had right now.

And she did have power. It sparked in the electrical bonds between her atoms, in the kinetic energy of her muscles, in her love for her friends somewhere just out of view and her mother on Earth far away.

In how much she wanted Sting as he spun through the vortex around her, somehow always facing her, there for her…

The first zap was small. Some free-floating fleck of mica in the spinning water was the imperfection that broke the flow of the rising power, and a spark—small as a firefly—arced across the funnel over her head with a faint but pure note of sound, almost lost in the cacophony of the whirlpool.

Her heart pounded, its cadence like a double kick drum off one of Marisol’s lady death metal albums. Abruptly, Lana remembered a trio of guys who frequented a shop where she’d worked briefly during her wandering that specialized in appropriating indigenous therapies for recreational purposes. They’d wanted the shop to carry CDs of their experimental music made with a resonant transformer. The shop owner had said the music sucked but sold them some mushrooms. Curious, before she’d left town, Lana had gone to their show.

In the dingy club, the transformer had been brighter than the beer signs, louder than the guitars, throwing wild sparks as the sound tech tried to control the tuning of the high voltage discharges.

In retrospect, she knew now why she’d been so intrigued: as a nul’ah-wys, she was basically the coil of a lightning machine.

As if rewarding her insight, a second silver-white zap shot across the whirlpool and climbed halfway up the funnel walls before fizzling out in a mournful descant.

But now she felt the rising power.

This was what the Abyssa had envisioned: not a cursed weapon to burn a world, but a living being to be a pathway for the power, a conduit for the waters to become a source of pure, endless opportunity.

If she could just control it before the Cretarni boiled the sea around her friends, the Tritonyri and Tritonesse below, and even the poor boundary beast.

Around her, the whirlpool had deepened until her vantage point in the still pool at the very bottom framed only the central Cretarni ship. Maybe Cinek was up there—now that he was done with his closed-world rule-breaking and innocent-Earther abducting—staring down at the unexpected hole in the sea, wondering.

Reaching out to either side, she trailed her fingertips in the whirling water. So cold, as if it had come from the bottom of the ocean. The lingering iridescent scales on her knuckles flared—

And violet-silver plasma crackled through the vertical waves in a discordant scream.

Her nerves blazed in answer. She plunged her hands into the turbulence, fisting against the icy cold and lightning burn, bruising

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