Tempest Unleashed (12 page)

I grinned, startled but also pretty impressed by my first attempt at making light.

Focusing, I did the same thing again, but this time I sent the light straight down twenty feet or so, until it hovered a few inches above the rocky bottom of the cave.

Two more times I bent energy to make light, until I had a light source in all four directions, north, south, east, and west, with me directly in the center. Then, and only then, did I let my concentration falter.

Turning in circles, I got my first good look at the room around me. What I saw had my eyes widening and my heart nearly pounding out of my chest.

Chapter 10

Swimming toward one end of the chamber, I blinked several times, certain that I wasn’t actually seeing what I thought I was. But the closer I got to the wall—which was elaborately carved with scene after scene of mermaids—the more certain I became that I was not imagining what was in front of me.

Someone had carved five shelves into the cave wall, whittling the sharp rocks into long, rounded platforms that ran the circumference of the room. And on four of the shelves, spaced equidistantly apart, were hundreds upon hundreds of pearls—in every shape, color, and size imaginable. The top shelf, which contained no pearls, held large pieces of sea glass instead, their ragged edges polished away by years under the surface.

Though the water in the cavern was ebbing and flowing with the cyclical, never-ending rhythm of the ocean, neither the pearls nor the glass moved so much as an inch. Instead, it was as if each one had been glued in place with something even endless exposure to salt water couldn’t wear away.

I’d never seen anything like it, couldn’t imagine who would have the patience—or the time—to painstakingly create the shelves, let alone collect this variety and range of pearls. With the different shapes and colors, I knew they had to have come from all over the Pacific, and maybe the Atlantic as well.

So what were they doing here? I wondered dazedly. And why would someone want me to see this so badly that they’d all but electrocuted me to get me here?

Not sure what else to do, I reached out a hand and touched a pearl directly in front of me. It was one of the biggest I’d ever seen, maybe fifteen or sixteen millimeters across, and it was the lustrous, shiny black of the Tahitian pearls my father used to give to my mother on special occasions.

To my surprise, it came away from the shelf easily, as if it had just been waiting for someone to pick it up. The moment my hand closed around it, however, pain shot through my head, so all-consuming and terrible that for long seconds I was convinced my mind was literally being ripped apart. It was like someone had shoved giant, poison-tipped claws straight into my brain and started shredding.

I stumbled back from the shelf, tried to drop the pearl as I clutched my head, but now that I was holding it, the same magic that had kept the pearl on the shelf for God only knew how long was also keeping it attached to my palm.

It burned wherever it touched, and I opened my fingers, tried to shake it loose, but nothing I did worked. Even scraping my palm against the side of the cave wouldn’t dislodge it—all it did was increase the blistering pain in my hand and the agony in my head, until the electric shocks of earlier seemed like mere tickles.

Uncontrollable tears poured down my face, blending with the salt water all around me. I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to make it stop. All I knew was that if something didn’t happen soon, I wasn’t going to survive. Already, I could feel my heart pumping so fast that I was sure it would burst.

With each second that passed, I grew more terrified, less able to function, and slowly I sank down to the cavern floor. I continued to struggle, to try to pry the pearl away from me, but nothing worked. The water around me turned red and I realized, distractedly, that my nose was bleeding.

Then I started to convulse, my body jerking in twenty different directions. Darkness beckoned. Instead of trying to resist it as I normally did, I rushed toward the blessed numbness of unconsciousness, embraced it with what little will I had left.

The second I stopped fighting, the convulsions ceased. My body went limp and the agony that had raked me for what seemed like forever dissipated. In its place was light, bursting behind my eyes in a dazzling rainbow array that stunned me in a way even the pain couldn’t. The colors spread out, widened, until they were all that I could see. And then it was like I was being sucked under, sucked through them as the cavern, the colors, the whole world, began to spin around me.

And then she was there. Cecily. My mother.

But not. She was younger than I remembered, younger than when I knew her. And about a million times more vulnerable. She was in human form, kneeling in the middle of Coral Straits in nothing but an emerald green bikini. Her body was covered in cuts and scratches and the water around her was bloody. So bloody that I couldn’t imagine how she’d survived—until I realized that she was not the only one injured.

On the ground in front of her were five merpeople—a man, a woman, two teenage boys, and a little girl. Though everything was a little grainy, out of focus, they all looked familiar to me, and as I looked back and forth between them and my mother, horrified knowledge filled me. I felt like I knew these people, because looking at them—especially the kids—was like looking at my mother. Like looking at me. Like looking at the unknown woman on the ocean floor, a huge, gaping hole where her heart used to be.

This was my mother’s family.
My
family. My grandparents and uncles and aunt. This scene, these deaths, were the reason I had no relatives down here, no one who cared about me besides Hailana, who had all the motherly instinct of a hammerhead shark. Of course, that was probably an insult to those sharks, even if they were known to eat their own young.

As I watched my mother stagger to her feet—bruised, bloody, broken—the pain came back. It wasn’t quite as excruciating this time, tempered as it was with knowledge and distance, and I realized what it was I was feeling. My mother’s pain and grief, so raw and acute that it had brought me to the brink of madness. Is that how she had felt, then, watching as her family lay murdered in front of her?

I thought of Moku, of Rio, of my father. Thought of what it had felt like to see Cecily ripped apart in front of me, and I knew that yes, that was exactly what I was feeling. What I
had
felt.

How had she borne all that anger and hatred and grief and pain without literally destroying herself? In those moments, when I’d been caught up in it, I had prayed for unconsciousness, prepared for death. Had thought either, both, would be better.

The pain was there again, a burning in my gills that made it nearly impossible to draw air. I wanted to put the pearl down, to throw it as far away from me as I could, but I didn’t move, didn’t even try to let go this time. I couldn’t, not when I knew there was still more to see, more to understand. This glimpse into my mother’s life was unprecedented and I wanted,
needed
, to know.

Cecily stumbled back from their bodies, turned, and limped across the ocean floor. It seemed strange to see her like that, so delicate, so human. Which didn’t make sense. Except for brief moments of my childhood and that last, terrible encounter with Tiamat, I had only ever seen my mother in her human form. So why, then, did it seem anathema to me? So strange and awkward?

Because I had spent so long thinking of her as mermaid? Spent so long resenting the choice she had made that I had forgotten how many ways we were alike?

I didn’t know the answer, wasn’t sure I wanted to, as my mother lurched back toward the palace. Toward Hailana.

When was this? My mother looked so young and vulnerable, but something about the expression on her face and the set of her shoulders told me she was a lot older than I had originally judged her to be. Mermaids aged at a different rate than humans, so their adolescence and young adulthood could last centuries—as long as they stayed in the water. Once they hit land and lived as humans, they aged at the same rate people did.

Then Hailana was there, holding her arms open to my mother. She looked tired, worn out, and I could see that she was injured too, though not as severely as Cecily. I have to admit, it surprised me a little to see the blood on Hailana’s temple and shoulder. For as long as I’d known her she’d seemed so invulnerable, so indomitable, that it was hard to imagine she could actually bleed.

The knowledge that she was, indeed, mortal was nowhere near as reassuring as it should have been.

What was even more unexpected, though, was that my mother—Hailana’s self-professed best friend—walked right by her like she wasn’t even there. For one brief moment, Hailana’s face registered shock and then she was rushing after Cecily, grabbing on to her.

Cecily flinched away, and I could see clearly now the livid bruises on her arm. I couldn’t tell if Hailana had given them to her or if she had received them in whatever battle had gone down.

When Hailana reached for her again, tried to put herself in Cecily’s path, my mother shoved the merQueen as hard as she could. Hailana hit the floor and then my mother was lurching painfully across the sea bed. Moving as quickly as she could away from the queen.

She paused once, and I knew it was because Hailana had said something to her. I would have given anything to know what it was—what the two of them were saying to each other—but the sound effects of this memory (or whatever it was) couldn’t breach the walls of telepathic communication between them.

Then my mother started moving, and again I wondered why she didn’t shift—it would be so much easier for her to move with a tail, especially if she wasn’t used to human legs. Then I remembered what the healer had told me about shifting, about how I had been stuck with my tail until I healed up a little more, no matter how much I longed for the comfort of my legs.

The memory changed then, became less sharp, more confused. The pain was still there, but it was different. More bearable, less all-encompassing.

Cecily was being tossed from wave to wave, current to current, and as I watched, everything took on an even blurrier feel, as if the camera that had recorded these memories was just a little out of focus. She was numb, I realized, recognizing the feeling from some of what I’d been through. Completely disconnected from what happened to her family, from what was happening to her now. The pain I felt, like a hard punch blunted with cotton, was her physical reaction, her body’s response to its injuries. The white-hot agony I’d felt before had been my glimpse into her emotional devastation.

My stomach clenched as I watched her, sometimes swimming, sometimes floating unconscious. Though I saw only small sections of time, I got the impression that her disoriented flight lasted a long while. And then things changed again, grew clear and crisp like the razor-sharp edge of a scalpel.

Cecily, in human form, was lying facedown on a beach. Hair matted, body bruised and scabbed over, bikini top missing. I narrowed my eyes, tried to look more closely, but couldn’t figure out where she was. It was too tropical to be home, but we’d been to a lot of different beaches in my life—it could be anywhere from American Samoa to Tahiti.

Then I saw my father—or at least a much younger version of him—shooting a barrel, and I knew. She was in Hawaii. This is where they met. I’d heard the story a hundred times through the years, but neither of my parents had ever portrayed it as happening quite like this.

My father spotted her as he came into shore, ran to her. Checked for a pulse. Then carried her to his car.

My heart hurt a little, watching them, realizing that nothing was ever quite what I expected it to be. It was like the ocean changed everything, twisted it, until what was left was barely recognizable. Like my mother and, I was very afraid, like me as well.

The pearl grew dim, its fire weakening against my palm. There was one last scene, though. My mom in a hospital bed with my father beside her. He was spooning green Jell-O into her mouth and cracking jokes. Though I couldn’t hear what he was saying, I recognized the look on his face and the smile on my mother’s that said she was more amused than she wanted to admit.

I hoped to see more, to know more, but the pearl turned cold—one second before it floated from my hand like I’d never had trouble shaking it loose.

As I sat there on the jagged rocks that made up the bottom of the cave, I didn’t know how to feel. For seven years now, I’d resented my mother and the choices she’d made. The choices I’d had to make because of who she was and what her genetics had made me.

And now, having watched all of that, I still resented her. This time, however, I felt guilty about those emotions. My mother’s life, her choices, had not been as easy for her as I’d always imagined they were. And maybe in time, that knowledge—I looked around the cavern at the many, many pearls on the shelves—and all the knowledge that was to come, would somehow change my feelings.