Olympic Cove 2-Breaker Zone (37 page)

A grim Kasos got in front of him. “Councilor,
I’ve indulged you enough,” the triton said. “If the Nereid isn’t here, I can’t
let you go knocking on random doors in the hopes of finding her.”

“He has a point, though,” Col said.
“Most shopkeepers I know live over or under their shops. And it does look like
someone lives up there.”

“I’ll just knock and ask if they know
where Heather is,” Liam promised. The entrance to the second floor was probably
out back. He ducked into a narrow gangway next to the building, intent on
finding a door.

Just as he reached a tiny greenspace
walled in by a tall wooden fence, there was a loud crackling noise and gasps of
pain behind him. He turned and saw Kasos and Col writhing on the ground,
slender wires embedded in their chests. The wires led to small devices held by
the two humans Nick’s ex-lover had hired. One of them grinned at him, revealing
a snaggled set of teeth.

“Mr. Whitfield wants to talk to you,” he
said in a thick accent.

Enraged, Liam pulled his knife and
dropped into a defensive crouch. Before he could lunge, however, the other
human pulled out another device and pointed it at him. Silver glints shot
through the air, puncturing his chest and shoulder. Agony exploded through him.
He fell to the ground, knife tumbling from his nerveless fingers.

“Excellent.”

Dazed with pain, he looked up and saw
Barnard Whitfield. The human smiled, crouching at his side. “Leave the others.
Bring him to the yacht,” he ordered, pulling a slender tube out of his jacket
and touching it to the mer’s neck.

There was a sting; then black clouds
rolled in from the edges of Liam’s vision and he was gone.

****

Head ringing like a struck buoy, Kasos
forced himself onto his hands. He looked down at the silvery darts with their
wire tails sticking out of his chest and tore them loose with a growl.

Col was still on his back, groaning.
“What was that?”

“A weapon,” Kasos said shortly, levering
himself onto one hip.
“Fucking humans.”
With an effort
of will, he pushed himself to his feet. He remembered the humans (three, there
were three of them, the two in dark clothing and a third in something pale)
dragging a limp Liam past them and out of the narrow passageway while they lay
there stunned.

Grimacing, he leaned down and hauled Col
to a sitting position. “They took Liam.”

“Li?”
The mer shook
his head. “Why?”

“I don’t know, but I’m going to find
out. One of them said something about a yacht.” Kasos yanked Col to a standing
position. “Do you know if this place has a marina?”

“I—yes.
I saw one south
of the beach.”

“Let’s go.”

Moving stiffly, they jogged back out
onto the street and headed for the ocean. By the time they reached the network
of floating piers that serviced a variety of human ships, the last orange of
the setting sun was just fading from the western sky. Kasos swore as he spotted
a largish ship moving out from its dock, heading for open water. The stern of
the ship bore the English words
My Pet.

It had to be the ship belonging to the
humans who had kidnapped Liam.
And our
tridents are locked in a cache, chaos take it all.

No
help for it.
He
exchanged a silent look with Col. The mer nodded grimly. In unison, they
stepped to the edge of the pier and dove into the water.

Chapter Thirteen

Nick blinked hard, trying to ignore the
tension headache that was knotting his scalp muscles and sending darts of pain
across his temples. Between his ability to scan Claire’s body and her divine
power, they’d been able to force some of the venom up and out of her wound.
He’d rooted around in the room, finally finding an old ceramic container. He
used it to scoop up the venom as best he could, trying to keep it from floating
free in the water and possibly infecting one of the mermaids.

Or me.
He wasn’t sure if Poseidon’s other gift
could overcome the Nereid’s poison, especially as it had almost turned Bythos
into Thetis’s creature. And there was still too much of it remaining in
Claire’s body.

On the other side of the bars, the sea
goddess sagged in exhaustion. Her skin color was shading to grey, and her
shoulder had swollen alarmingly around the deep bite. More worryingly, the
whites of her eyes were beginning to darken. “I feel so strange,” she said, her
voice slurred.
“So hot.”

Nick felt a creeping sense of dread.
Without an immune system, she shouldn’t have the ability to run a fever. “Mind
if I check?”

She shrugged, and he reached through the
bars, laying a hand over her forehead. It was burning. “You aren’t normally
this hot?”

“No. And I’m getting hungry.”

He pulled his hand back quickly. If the
venom was mutating her cells as he suspected
,
that
could cause the internal temperature rise and the hunger.
Pythia?

Yes?

I want to see
her shoulder again at high magnification.

The image bloomed in his mind. He could
see the path the venom had carved through healthy tissue, turning it grey-green
and mottled. Suddenly a pinpoint flash of light appeared, dying away almost
instantly.
What the hell?

I’ve never seen anything like that
before.

Neither have I. Bump
up the magnification ten times.

The image expanded. More flashes of
light burst across his eyes, flickering like microscopic lightning bugs.
Shutting out all external stimuli, he shrank his awareness, concentrating it on
smaller and smaller increments of the dark stuff.
Slabs of
infected tissue.
A lunar landscape of flesh covered with gouges and
ridges. A single
cell,
strained and darkened. Things
crawling inside the cell—

Wait.
Nick stilled,
zooming in on one of the crawling things. It looked like a cross between a crab
and a very elaborate hexbug.
What the
hell are those?

I have no idea
,
Pythia admitted.
It’s far too small to be a
microbe, and I sense no organs.

Nick focused closer, extenuating his
senses until just the finest, most delicate tendril brushed across the crawling
monster and sank in.

And then hundreds of glowing spheres
danced in his mind, each one held in place by shimmering shells of energy
whirling around each sphere. He focused on a single sphere and found six tiny
sparks spinning around it on different levels. With a shock, he realized he had
gone down to the atomic level.

He was looking at an individual carbon
atom.

Oh, my God. I
think this is nanotech.

Nanotech?

Nanotechnology, creating molecule-sized structures
and machines out of atoms.
Research on it
is still in the early stages, but supposedly it can be used to build really
tiny computers or create electronics that can’t exist on a macro scale.

The snake absorbed that.
This
nanotech, it would be very useful in medicine, yes?

Nick remembered papers by researchers
who wanted to build tiny robotic systems that would live inside the human body,
killing foreign cells and repairing damage as it happened.
It would be like having your own personal doctor in your bloodstream.

Or personal poisoner,
Pythia said
grimly.
If this is what infecting Claire, we need to stop them.

Yeah, working on that.
From what he’d
read, electrical or magnetic pulses had no real effect on carbon-based
nanotech. Chemical destruction was a possibility, but even if they had time to
figure out what would work he had no access to the necessary materials.

He pulled back, long enough to view the
nanite. It was surprisingly elegant for something so simple, a teardrop-shaped
body and six ridged legs crawling deftly through the cell’s interior soup. It
attached itself to a ropy strand, moving along it like a zipper pull.

Holy shit.
I
think it’s editing her DNA.

Her cellular
code?
That would explain how Thetis can force her victims
into those horrible new shapes.

Yeah, but how
the hell did a Greek sea goddess learn how to use nanotech?

I suggest you ask her the next time you
speak,
Pythia said tartly.
Do you know how to disable the creatures?

Not with what I
have here.
He
had a bad feeling it would take a research lab with a dedicated programming
team to figure out how to shut down the things.
She needs to keep forcing out as much of the venom as she can.

He pulled back his focus, opening his
eyes. The goddess gazed sadly at him through the bars. “You can’t stop it, can
you?” she asked softly.

“I—” He pressed his lips together,
hating the sense of powerlessness. “This is something I’ve never dealt with
before. I don’t think I can stop it.”

Claire’s head dropped forward, and she
took a shuddering breath. “So be it. Then kill me.”

Nick recoiled. “What?”

“Kill me.” Her head came back up, and
her eyes were huge in the dim cabin. “Don’t let Thetis turn me into one of her
creatures. Be merciful and put me beyond her reach.”

You can’t do that, Nick.

Goddamn it,
Pythia, I wasn’t planning on it
.

No, that’s not what I meant. Claire is a
goddess—a minor one, true, but fully divine.
And as such,
immortal.
Even if you ran her through, she would heal. Cut off her head,
and the pieces would rejoin. You cannot kill a goddess.

He shook his head, horrified at the
snake’s words.

“Why not?”
Misunderstanding
his gesture, Claire’s expression changed, becoming a mix of pleading and anger.
“I’m asking you to do this. To leave me to Thetis’s mercy would be far crueler
than killing me.”

“No, you don’t understand. I
can’t
kill you. You’re immortal.”

Her grip on the bar tightened. “There
must be something you can do,” she said. “For Gaia’s sake, human, don’t leave
me like this!”

Nick, there is nothing you can do. But
there is something she can do.
Sadness permeated Pythia’s words.
It is
... difficult. But I believe it is the only thing that will save her from
Thetis’s predation.

Death was something every doctor fought
as long as possible. But Nick had seen too many patients turned into
vegetables, dependent on life support, to believe that extreme measures always
had to be employed. And Claire genuinely was looking at a fate worse than
death.
What is it?

The snake made a small, grieved noise.
She
can give up her essence and return to Gaia.

****

As the day
waned
the dim blue light from the surface leached away, leaving the reef bathed in
darkness. Aidan stuck to the patches of sea grass, watching flickers of
phosphorescence through the wreck’s portholes.

What he’d learned wasn’t encouraging.
All entrances to the ship were guarded by patrolling ilkothelloi. He’d seen at
least one shift changeover, and there were no gaps in the security. Trying to
sneak on board and find Nick was going to be impossible.

A soft wash of movement at his back had
him spinning, trident at the ready.

“Good to see you’re not just sitting
around with a fluke up your ass,” the grizzled merman who swam up with Moira at
his side said.
“Or dead.
That would have been really
annoying, since I plan on putting your tail on disciplinary rounds for not
reporting in.”

“Captain.”
Aidan relaxed
when he saw the other rangers fanning out around the older mer. As a veteran
ranger and leader of the Bright Water station for the last twenty years,
Fergus’s sense of sarcasm was just as famed as his bravery. “Gods, I’m glad to
see you. I didn’t know if Lady Eine would let you leave the grotto.”

Fergus snorted. “Someone cross-wired two
incoming power
lines,
and it blew up a transformer.
Stupid, but hardly an attack.”
He stroked Moira’s spotted
head. “Then this little girl came squirting into the station like a shark was
on her tail. I figured you wouldn’t have sent her with your neckband if you
weren’t seriously in the shit.”

“That’s an understatement, sir.”
Quickly, Aidan explained about Nick’s kidnapping and who he suspected was
behind it.