Page 41 of Depths
The blast barely dazed the rebel.
Shite! I’d seen weak hedge witches in Evaness work more powerful magic. Was this the best Okeanos had to offer? I thought the undead Lizza was training them!I shouldn’t have let her go off to gather potion ingredients! She should be here training their useless asses!
But as soon as I had that scoffing thought, a whirlpool erupted beneath the shadowy mermen swarming my carriage, and I could hear their yelps—even from this distance—as twisting water sucked them down toward the cold sea floor. The carriage itself remained untouched, floating placidly in place.
So one of them knew at least enough to be useful.
Another blast of blue lightning zapped one of the assholes wrestling with Valdez. This zap was followed by a scream, and the man’s back arched before he shifted into a full-on shark. He’d already had a tail, but his skin wavered for a moment, growing a dark grey before it popped out into a fish shape twice as big as Valdez.
My heart shrunk to the size of a peanut, but the pirate didn’t seem fazed at all when the beast opened his mouth, serrated teeth glinting orange in the blasts of magic, white daggers decorated with splotches of orange and gold light. Sharp. Gleaming. Deadly.
The beast lunged. Valdez shocked me when he dodged and shifted into a pink dolphin.A pink dolphin?My mind didn’t even have time to process that pink dolphins were a thing of fairy tales. Valdez showed no fear, flipping and moving twice as quickly as the shark, getting underneath him and then attacking, his dolphin nose barreling right into the shark’s belly, slamming the bigger animal upward.
Another slash of blue lightning flared from my mage, flying through the water. Valdez was quick to retreat—hyper aware of his surroundings and far more agile than the predator. The lightning encased the shark for a moment, jolting so brightly that for a moment, I thought I saw the beast’s skull through his skin before he jerked his tail and swam swiftly away.
I breathed a sigh of relief, trying to push out of Felipe’s arms, but he wouldn’t let go. His strong arms pinned me in place, and I could feel the tension in his chest as he leaned forward and whispered, “It’s not over.” His head jerked in the direction of the sea witch.
The entirety of her eyes glowed a pale blue, and her fingernails grew to blue flames. Her dark lips moved.
And suddenly, the tail of the whale everyone rode turned to stone, sending the creature and everyone still strapped to him—nearly half the passengers—spiraling toward the depths. Screams erupted. Shouts. People fought to release the cords they’d used to tie themselves to their chairs so that the current couldn’t knock them over. The very cords that were supposed to keep them steady kept them trapped as they fell into deeper, darker, colder water. They plunged toward that space in the water that stripped the heat from your bones, where pressure pinched your heart.
The people of Okeanos called it the ebony way. Stray too far down the ebony way and there was no coming back.
Fury surged through me as people screamed and panicked, swimming up, jostling each other. Tears rimmed my eyes, and my throat swelled. I wanted to fight. I wanted to stop her. I reached down and grabbed at Felipe’s belt, searching for a potion. A knife. Something. Anything.
“What are you—”
“I need to help.”
“Wait.” His hands closed over mine. Pity dripped down his face like wax on a candlestick, unsightly.
Suddenly, one person shot up above tangle of the others, rising fast in a blur of bubbles. A slightly portly man, with stripes on his arms. Humberto.
A shark shifter in half-human form darted toward him, but in the blink of an eye, Humberto quadrupled in size, his fingers expanding, his head ballooning, his legs becoming as thick as tree trunks. My contestant grew as big as a great white shark. His massive hand reached out, and he flicked his middle finger … the attacking shark shifter flew backward, tumbling tail over head.
Humberto continued to grow. Bigger and bigger. His head became so massive it blocked out the sun. His hand was as big and flat as a wall as it swept out and knocked over a row of the half-shifted shark rebels, tumbling them and giving my guards the opportunity to rush forward and disarm them.
I watched in silent awe as Humberto reached out an arm as long as a ship, fingers extended like claws, and tried to pluck the hedge witch out from her gaggle of merguards. They raised their black arms, and a small magical shield arose—she must have been training some of them. The shield glowed green, but the weak magical dome cracked like a sugar sculpture under Humberto’s huge fingers. He plunged right through.
My breath hitched as I watched his fingers create a dusky shadow on either side of the hedge witch’s head. He was going to pinch her head, squish it like a grape! It was no worse than she deserved. The pads of his fingers brushed the edges of that wild blue-grey hair, touching the white coral horns.
Her milky eyes landed on mine, and my gut dropped. The threat on her face was easy to read.
Humberto’s fingers pinched together.
She vanished the second before his fingers mashed her flat. When his massive pointer and thumb separated, the hedge witch was gone, nothing but a flash of blue light and bubbles left in her wake.
Her disappearance lifted the spell weighing down the whale. The giant creature moaned as he came thrashing quickly back up toward us, the passengers who hadn’t been able to flee sat clutching the seats or one another during the wild ride. He breached the surface and took in a mighty breath, exposing all his riders to the sun for a moment. Then he ducked back beneath the waves, hovering far higher than before, reluctant to descend to where the rest of us waited. The beast had a sense of self-preservation.
Radford was the first of those passengers to swim off the whale and go around to his front. He put a hand on the beast’s great snout and petted him, muttering things I couldn’t hear. Comforting the creature.
My maids sobbed in relief as some of the guards swam over to unknot their straps, which had cinched tight in the fall. Half the male servants still aboard the whale were pale-faced and woozy. The other half simply stared out with thin lips and terrorized eyes. I couldn’t even make eye contact with most of my contestants. I’d failed them.
They’d expected a protector.
I wasn’t one.
Did that mean I wasn’t good enough to be a queen?
