The Vast and Brutal Sea: A Vicious Deep novel (The Vicious Deep) (10 page)

The numbness on my skin returns. My eyes, still blurry at the corners, focus on Kurt.

He wades out of the stormy Coney Island surf, holding tightly to the barrel of the Trident of the Skies. He has no need to look for human clothes or hide the scales around his waist. The beach is trashed. Sand covers every inch of the boardwalk—or what’s left of the boardwalk—in small dunes. Boards are sliced into wet splinters. There’s a crack from the Aquarium entrance to the shore, where waves collapse and trickle down. I did that to my own home.

I did that to get rid of as many merrows as I could.

Kurt grabs a handful of sand and runs it through his fingers. I wonder what he’s thinking, if he’s wishing he could press the Rewind button. Then he dusts his hands, pulls on the yellow disaster tape, and runs up the boardwalk.

The sky is overcast with fat storm clouds. He crosses the street, and I know where he’s going—back to Lucine.

He ducks under an archway down the narrow alley that leads to the Second Circle, the velvet-draped speakeasy operated by vampire Madame Mercury and a sideshow freak. The movement to his side is so fast that I can’t see the hands that grab him until it’s too late. Kurt is pinned to the red brick wall.

It’s Marty McKay, the shapeshifter, with Frederik the High Vampire of New York. They’re joined by Penny and the landlocked from the Sea Court, along with members of the Thorne Hill Alliance. The Alliance exists to bring peace among the supernatural creatures in the city. As they surround Kurt, I guess this means to hell with the Alliance.

“You shouldn’t have come back,” Marty says. I’ve never heard him sound so serious, but hours before, he was moments from death and I helped save him. So yeah, almost dying will do that to a guy.

“Are you planning on killing me, vampire?” Kurt says.

“Why are you here?” Frederik’s voice is steely, controlled.

“This isn’t a stake,” Kurt says, his violet eyes not wavering from Frederik’s black ones. “But it will certainly end you.”

You’re bluffing!
I shout. Me, the ether, the friendly fucking ghost.

But they’ve all seen the power of our weapons and they give him room.

“Where’s Tristan?” Kurt says.

“Don’t you know?” Frederik answers, a tiny smile playing on his lips.

Kurt takes in the others, like he’s figuring out how best to take them on. But Kurt’s not a cold-blooded killer, and he’s going to want to avoid fighting them. “We’re still on the same side. The side that wants to destroy the sea witch.”

“Yeah,” Marty says, pacing uncomfortably and rubbing the spot on his chest where he was skewered hours ago. “Only you have to kill our friend on the way. Your kin, am I right?”

“The way of the seas has nothing to do with you,” Kurt says.

Frederik bares his fangs. “When your sea ways do this to our home, then you bet your sparkly ass that it concerns us.”

My ghost self is laughing.

“Then you’ve settled it,” Penny says, distraught. “You’re going to kill Tristan.”

Kurt looks at the group in front of him, then at the weapon in his hands. I can feel him trying to draw power from it and failing. But he doesn’t falter for too long or they’d notice.

“You say you love this land. You fight for it.” Kurt pauses. “Then gather your army because the sea witch wants to watch the world drown from her stolen throne. I will do everything I can to stop her.” Kurt walks past Frederik and says, “Do not stand in my way.”

Then Kurt barrels into the Second Circle, down the winding steps, along a green velvet corridor, and through a mahogany door. The golden tiles are wet, and Lucine, the split-tailed mermaid, is there. The eldest of the four remaining sea oracles. She swims happily in her golden pool because she’s been waiting for him.

Her red hair glistens, and her emerald eyes are beams looking up at him.

“My love. I knew you’d come back,” she says, taking his hands and pulling him closer to her. “Now we must hurry. We have much to do.”

I wake up with that painful numbness when your limbs fall asleep. Tiny clawed feet walk on my chest. It’s the lizard-bird. It opens its mouth and throws up on me.

“What the—”

It does it again, shutting me up with a caw. Then it walks over the mushy yellow vomit. The wound cools instantly.

“That’s disgusting.”

It yells at me and I remember—the Naga.

In her place is a girl about my age. She’s on her side, her arms limp and bloody. Dried blood is smeared around her wound, a black mark where my dagger cut her.

“She lied to me,” I say, searching for the memory of some hint, some mention that this would happen. That they sent me after a girl, not just a beast. “They all lied to me.”

I stare at the girl on the ground and things start coming together. The reason why Isi was stalling. I lift my dagger, dirty with the girl’s blood. My wound, on the other hand, has stopped bleeding.

The dragon-bird flies in front of my face, batting wings urgently. I guess we’re friends again.

“I got it,” I shout.

I pick up the girl in my arms. Her breath is shallow but consistent. Her copper skin is cold. Her eyes flutter, her lips part. I tell her to be quiet, save it. She’s going to be fine. Because I can’t be the one to kill her. I just can’t.

I hurry back the way I came, slowing down at the patch of gnarled trees. The sky is lightening under the white and purple moons. How long were we out of it? I shake from exhaustion before the path looks familiar again.

A tendril of smoke swirls above the trees where the fire pit roared and the villagers danced. Some are asleep on the ground. Others are still talking and drinking. They’re oblivious to where I’ve been and what I’ve done.

“
Isi!
” I shout her name.

They come out of the river, out of their tents. Whispers become a loud buzz of questions.

Who
is
that?

Who
is
the
Land
Prince
holding?

No—it can’t be—

I’ve brought their wolf into the den.

Karel runs at me and Brendan tackles him. I make it to the dais, the bleeding Naga girl in my arms.

Brendan has Karel in a headlock. Dylan and Kai wrestle off two other guards who advance on me. Isi walks among her people. From the look in her eyes, she hasn’t been to sleep.

“Call them off!” I shout at her.

“What have you done?” Her face ages in seconds, like a thousand sorrows pulling at her life strings.

“Let’s get into that after you tell your warriors to stop.”

She lifts her hand, and with the wave of her fingertips, they stop fighting my friends. I shoot a warning glare at Brendan who begrudgingly lets go of Grumble. He falls on the ground and picks himself up, enraged and ready to take my cousin’s head off.

I match her stare. “You said a son of Triton had to break the curse of the Naga. You lied to me.”

“That is not so,” Isi says. “Everything we told you was true.”

“Oh sorry, was I supposed to fill in the blanks? The part where the Naga is a girl? I won’t kill her.”

Isi lifts her chin defiantly. “Even if we refuse to aid you?”

“I told you he was weak,” Karel growls.

I look at the shifty people. The scared faces of warriors. What is one girl, one beastie girl, compared to the lives of these people and the future of this tribe? Without their help, how will I awaken the Sleeping Giants?

I know what Kurt would do…

I know that is where we’re different.

“I will find another way,” I say.

“Very well.” Isi turns her back on me. The air shifts around us, rippling with water, and I know we are surrounded. “Take them.”

The River Clan warriors materialize around us. They wrap around Kai, disarming her and tying her arms behind her back. Brendan screams and tries to run to her, but Karel knocks my cousin on his back with one sucker punch. Dylan is buried under a fury of fists, but there are too many of them and I’m left holding a wounded girl.

I can make out Yara’s voice saying, “Mother, please.”

But the same warriors I’ve trained with now advance on me. They go for the Naga first, taking her away as an arm grabs my neck and squeezes. A fist pounds on my bruised ribs until the pain is too much and I’m pushed to my knees.

“These are the court’s great champions,” Karel says, spitting on the ground.

One by one, they tie us to the dais. My heart thumps in my ears. Everything feels still, muted, as if I’m underwater.

Isi takes my face and holds it in her hands. “You could have been happy here.”

She leaves a handful of warriors to guard us.

At first the villagers keep their distance. Then they come by with rotting fruit, and kids make it a game to see which hits on body parts will make us react. But we don’t react. Not even when the sky darkens and tiny bugs bite the sweet, rotting fruit off our flesh. Not even when I can hear a girl screaming from somewhere in the distance. Not even when Yara stands in front of me, unable to give me any comfort, to say she was sorry, that she didn’t want it to end this way.

And I think, who says it’s over?

“I’m going to strangle him,” Brendan says, keeping his eyes steady as a sniper’s gun on Karel. When the guards change shifts, Karel stays. He walks around the dais like a hawk.

“No one is strangling anyone,” I say.

“Really, Cousin,” Brendan says.

I test the leather ropes to see how strong they are, but there’s no getting out of them.

“They’re not going to let us go,” Dylan says. “Not until you slay the Naga. And even then, we don’t know how to get out.”

“Brendan,” Kai says, fidgeting with her hands behind her back, “be a darling and distract Karel. I believe he’s still angry that you, how do you say, hooked up with his blue-haired mate.”

“I’d love to,” Brendan says. The moment he tries to stand up, he falls forward. Karel is on him in an instant and so is his backup.

“Leave,” Karel tells them. “This one is mine.”

“Kai,” I whisper, “what are you doing?”

Brendan is shouting obscenities at Karel, and he’s eating it up.

“Quiet,” she says. But I see what she’s done. She’s gotten her hand free from her bindings.

“Thank Poseidon for your tiny girl hands.”

“Really, Tristan…” she says, but she digs into the pocket of her dress and pulls out a familiar knife the size of an index finger. I won it from Rachel the red-headed demigoddess. Kai widens her eyes and signals for me to come closer. She whispers, “I must cut off your hands.”

“
What?
” I hiss.

Her shoulders shake as she silences her laugh. “Are you the only one allowed to laugh in the face of doom?”

“I think you mean danger.” I adjust my body so she can cut me loose.

“I like ‘doom’ better,” she whispers.

I can feel my restraints snap, but I keep my hands behind my back.

Karel kicks Brendan in the gut and my cousin doubles over. But he lifts his head, his red hair sweaty and matted over his smiling face, all, is that all you’ve got? I’m starting to think he likes getting beat up.

Karel doesn’t see me until Brendan’s eyes flick toward me. The river warrior spins around in time for my fist to meet his face.
Blam!
He’s out cold.

“We have to find the way out of here,” Dylan says, rubbing his wrists.

But we’re not alone anymore. The warriors return and so does Isi. Even if we make it to the outer ring and somehow find a way out, I’m not leaving the Naga. I can’t just hand her over to the people that wanted me to kill her. There has to be a reason I hesitated, something I’m missing.

So in the only way I can think to save my ass, my friends, and a strange beast girl, I say, “I wish to speak to the oracle.”

Brendan and Dylan hold on to Karel.

“You don’t have the nerve to hurt him,” Isi says to me.

“He’s hurt me a lot more than the Naga has,” I remind her. I look at Yara, stepping beside her mother. “Tell her, Yara. Isn’t that consistent with my human code?”

Yara nods once.

Isi looks like she’s going to strangle me. I’ve ruined her veiled paradise.

The oracle has come forth on her own. She is small and wide, and the veil over her face is drawn back around her shoulders. She is fluid, moving effortlessly from her tent to the platform. The bark lines of her face betray no emotion, but the air around her shifts like the moments before a thunderstorm.

The villagers start talking among themselves.

We
can’t let this be.

He’s cursed us again.

“Come with me.” The oracle places a hand on my arm. Instant warmth spreads through me. I remember laughing with my parents, swimming with my friends, lying on the beach with Layla.

The oracle sees me not following and says, “I will bring you to the girl.”

I start walking.

“Stay,” she says to everyone who tries to follow. Even Yara. My friends. Even Isi.

The river people part for us. I follow the oracle into the tent where I was first welcomed. A white flame burns in the center. I sweat the second I walk in.

The Naga is on the leather-clad floor, dressed in white. Her eyes are closed. Her jet black hair is fanned around her. Her nails elongate into claws as she shivers in her sleep. Then they retract into fingers.

“Did you heal her?” I sit beside the Naga girl.

The oracle nods. “When you cut her with Triton’s dagger, it allowed her to change into her human form.”

“But she’s fine, right?”

“This is the first time she’s been in her human form in centuries. The weapon hasn’t broken the curse. Only a true death will do this.”

That’s reassuring, I think. “What’s her name?”

“Amada.”

I nearly jump out of my skin when the Naga girl sits up. She brings her knees up to her chest and holds them with her arms. She looks from me to the oracle then back at me.

“You’re awake!” I sit yogi-style in front of her.

She jerks back. Well, I tried to shish-kebab her, so that’s a natural reaction.

“You’re Tristan Hart,” she says.

“How did you know?”

“I’ve dreamed of you.” Amada takes a wooden bowl from the oracle and smells it for a long time before drinking from it. “For so long, my dreams were black. Of screams and blood, and then I saw you, and I knew you would be the one I was waiting for. Thank you for not killing me.”

“It was you, wasn’t it?” I ask her. “You left me the berries. You caught the fish for me. You sent me the lizard-bird.”

“Sun bird,” she says.

“Come here, Land Prince.” The oracle sits beside us with fistfuls of a green paste that looks an awful lot like my neighbor’s dog shit. She slabs the goopy stuff on my face. “You’re more bruised than goddess fruit left out in the sun.”

“Oh, is that what happens?” I wince when she presses her thumb on my cheekbone.

Then her fingers touch the scab on my chest in the shape of the Naga’s claws.

“I’m sorry,” Amada says.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t know you. They didn’t tell me. They lied to me about everything.”

The crackle of the fire is strong. When I breathe deeply, the heat burns my insides, but it feels so good.

Amada looks down at her human fingers. “It’s not all lies. I’ve taken lives. Sometimes the beast would take over and I wouldn’t have a human thought for so long. Sometimes I’d stay in my caves so I wouldn’t hurt them when they tried to hunt for me.”

I kick the wooden bowl in front of me. I was played like a cheap toy. I yell at the oracle before I can think better of it. “
Why
did
you
keep
this
from
me?
”

“Isi didn’t think you would do it if you knew the truth,” the old woman says.

“Am I so predictable?”

She shakes her head. “Your heart is still open to the world around you.”

“That’s me,” I say, but it hurts more than I’d like to admit. “The open-hearted guy. Kurt isn’t worried about doing the right thing, is he? And Nieve didn’t create an army of merrows to save the world.”

“That is why you will always be greater than them.” She steps over me with another wooden cup full of stinky liquid. “My daughter was weak. She could not bear seeing Amada as she was. It is a great strain, losing your children. Watching them suffer.”

Amada keeps her eyes trained on the tent flaps, her shoulders hunched as if she’s ready to attack anyone who might intrude. Or maybe she wants to run back to the outer ring.

“The Chief is your kid?” I didn’t know oracles could have kids.

“We can,” she says, reading my thoughts. “Not all of us. Not Chrysilla in her shell. Not Alethea, as you saw her die in Eternity. The oracles and the kings of the sea have always had a close relationship. The first oracles created the trident with their blood.

“We consult with kings during times of war. We shift, as we must. But I will always remain here because, unlike my sisters, I would not advise the kings. I tire of their tempers, their eagerness for destruction. My people still believe the Vale of Tears is a curse. But I believe it is a blessing. Drink.”

“What is it?”

She doesn’t answer, but I chug it. The bitterroot liquid dries my mouth, like chewing on cotton balls.

“Amada too.”

I pass it to Amada who makes a face but drinks it anyway.

The oracle brings out a glass arrowhead and slices the palm of her hand. Her blood pools at the center. She brings it down to my chest.

She nicks Amada’s hand. Amada gasps, and for a moment her claws come out. She cradles the hand to her chest.

“
What
are
you
doing?
” I shout.

But the oracle pushes me back on the floor. She holds her hand out to Amada and waits for her to comply. Amada looks at me for encouragement, so I just smile. The oracle guides Amada’s bleeding finger in a circle around the oracle’s print on my chest.

“To raise the Sleeping Giants,” the oracle says, “you must see what they are capable of. For that, you need strength. She is your connection to this plane.”

“Is that why I feel like I’ve known her before?” The room gets hotter, like I’ll melt right out of my skin.

“I believe you were brought together for this purpose.”

In my drowsiness, I laugh. “I’m fuzzy on my feelings about fate.”

The oracle holds my stare. “I fear fate is often mistaken for lack of choice. Our world, the human world, the worlds we can’t see are made up of threads, like the web of a spider. Everyone you meet is a thread in your web of life, and you are a thread in the web of the world. Your cousin Brendan led you here. Your friends protect you with their lives. You sought the Naga but chose not to slay her, despite the stories Isi told you. I have dozens of prophecies in my head, but I chose to believe in you.”

I lick the dryness from my lips. “He’s connected to me too, isn’t he? Kurt. And Nieve. Can they see me, the way I see them? In dreams?”

The Tree Mother touches my forehead with the back of her hand. Fever sweat rolls down my face. “Not here. But when you go back, I believe they will. First, you must be here and now. You must see the creatures you are going to raise.”

The oracle places Amada’s hand in mine. And as we lie side by side in the sweltering tent, I close my eyes.

“What happens after I see?”

I hold Amada’s hand like an anchor to this place. She squeezes back.

“Then you must find the seal and destroy it.”