Page 13 of Gemini Hunted
And since they’re not any more native to the Med than great white sharks, I’m pretty fucking certain that kraken isMordred the demon. Who’s clearly followed us from Avalon. Just like he threatened.
Never mind the fact that I never asked for his help. Or the fact that I explicitly ordered himnotto follow us back, forreasons.
He’s a complication I don’t want.
An ally I don’t trust.
At least twenty kinds of trouble I don’t need.
Clearly disregarding every single word I ever said to him, Mordred’s kraken and Cleo’s sea dragon collide in vicious combat. Now Malky the great white joins the fray with a pale flash of belly and a gunmetal thrash of fin. The shark twists away with a bloody hunk of Mordred’s tentacle dangling from his jaws.
Oh my God, gross.
It’sClash of the Titansdown here, for real.
A hasty sweep of my beam in all directions confirms what I already know. Nikolai Romanov is nowhere to be found.
The sonic boom that splits my brain is either the impact of Cleo’s agonized body colliding with the big stalagmite…
Or the sound of my strategy to win the Dean’s Challenge getting blown to smithereens.
Nikolai might be twice my age (and then some), but he’s clever and he’s quick. No way to know if he saw the Horn fall and dove after it… or if the damage to his own gear after that violent collision drove him to the surface.
Same way that need is driving me.
Buddy breathing is an emergency measure. Ronin and me, we can’t search like this. And we definitely can’t fight.
But the Horn… it could be right under me…
I’m breathing in another hit of Ronin’s dwindling air supply, panning the bottomless depths repeatedly with my flashlight, when Ronin makes the tough call for me.
With a single decisive twist, he unbuckles his weight belt—the gear that gives a diver ballast so we can stay submerged at depth—and lets it drop. Then, winding one leg around mine to keep us joined, he deftly unbuckles mine. As the heavy belt falls into the endless night, I wrestle the now useless oxygen tank off my shoulders and let it fall too. Then I throw my arms around Ronin’s neck.
Below us as we start to rise, the panorama of that deep-sea battle unfolds. Cleo is writhing in a sea of purple tentacles, spraying superheated steam in all directions, bleeding freely from the gaping tear in her neck where Ronin’s spear has been violently wrenched free.
But, damn, that girl’s holding her own.
Especially with Malcolm Uranus’ great white tearing savagely at the giant squid-like kraken from behind. The churning water around their writhing bodies is black with blood.
I don’t even know if demons can die. But Mordred is half Fae. And he’s losing a lotta blood—
The violent spectacle falls away beneath us. Now Ronin and I are racing for the surface. When Ronin gooses his regulator to inflate the buoyancy control device buckled around his torso, our natural buoyancy gets turbocharged.
Even though I can’t inflate mine without oxygen, we’re shooting from the depths like a submarine-launched ballistic missile. His fins and mine churn in tandem, both of us pushing out the expanding air from our throats in a steady yell to protect our fragile lungs from rupturing under the pressure of our too-rapid ascent.
Because we don’t have time to pause every ten feet to decompress and acclimate to the changing pressure, the way you’re supposed to do in a sitch like this, you feel me?
Still locked together, we burst to the surface.
A literal deluge of rain batters our heads and shoulders like pellets. God, that tropical storm is right on top of us.
The heavy seas throw us around like air-blown balls in a lottery draw. But Ronin’s inflated BCD functions as a life jacket to keep us both afloat. My flashlight picks out the rocky crags that thrust above the surface—deadly dangers that need to be avoided. Clinging tightly together in the vicious seas, while the wind howls around us and the rain lashes our limbs and streaks our visors, our situation is too chaotic and uncomfortable for speech.
I don’t even have the energy to spare for telepathy.
In grim silence, we ride the powerful surface current that sweeps us swiftly along the jagged coast of Icarus Island toward the extraction point.
Just like we planned.
