Secrets of the Deep (39 page)

“Archie, do something!” Nixie finally exclaimed.

“But
what
, is the question. I can’t get hold of it; it’s spinning too fast!”

“So, what then, we’re all going to drown?” Dani yelled over another clap of thunder.

“Of course not! Don’t worry. I’ve got everything under control.”

“That’s what the Atlanteans said, too, I’d wager.” Jake stalked over to Dani to make sure she stayed safe.

“Sapphira, walk me through it again, how you turned it off last time.” Archie looked at her through his rain-splashed glasses.

“I’m not telling you,” she said, folding her arms across her chest and turning away with her nose into the air. “You’d just accuse me of lying. Humph!”

“Sapphira!” Jake cried.

“Oh, very well. I just held on to it, got spun around till I was half-silly in the head, and kept punching buttons all the time.”

“These little lights?”

“Yes.”

“At random, I suppose?” he asked with a disapproving glance over the tops of his rain-blurred spectacles.

“Sorry!” she said sarcastically.

“Well, somebody do something!” Nixie bellowed.

“Hold on. What the devil’s that?” Jake’s heart skipped a beat as he slowly pointed out to sea.

The others turned to look. A dark funnel of spinning water dropped down from the darkest part of the thundercloud and reached toward the sea like a giant elephant’s trunk—or a titan-sized snake.

“I say!” Archie cried in delight. “It’s a waterspout! A very rare weather phenomenon—like a tornado, only made of water rather than wind—”

“Archie!” Nixie shouted before he could launch into a meteorology lesson, but he turned to her and threw up his hands.

“What do you want me to do, Nix? I can’t grab the blasted thing! It’s moving too fast!”

“Maybe I can hold it still for you.” Jake closed his eyes, stilled his mind despite his fear of the water twister barreling down on them, and summoned up his telekinesis.

After a deep, slow breath or two, he flicked his eyes open and lifted his hand, aiming his palm at the disk.

He ignored the wind and waterspout and fear of Armageddon and focused all his concentration on stopping the orb’s spinning.

It fought him, but Jake used all his stubborn will to slow its motion. The lights protested, angrily flicking off and on like they were communicating a message to him in response, but the whine gradually dropped back in pitch.

He wasn’t nearly done yet. He turned his palm upward and spread his fingers as though he were holding a ball; turning his hand, he focused his mind on trying to make the disk spin in the opposite direction.

The counterpressure was enough to bring it to a halt; he kept concentrating hard as Archie snapped into motion. Stepping forward, the boy genius shoved his rain-covered spectacles up onto his head, grasped the edges of the disk, and began reversing every twist and turn he’d made with the sections.

Isabelle started to read them off to him, but he interrupted: “Shh! I’ve got it. I memorized the sequence as I did it.”

To Jake’s relief, within just two or three reverse turns, the piercing hum quit, the wind puttered out, and the rain stopped.

Jake released his mental hold on the orb, since Archie’s altering the shape had clearly deactivated it, though the lights still flicked angrily. He dropped his hands to his side, his chest heaving.

For another tense moment, Archie continued the sequence of reverse twists and turns while the waves went on churning. The clouds still roiled overhead, but when Jake glanced out to sea, he was glad to spot the towering waterspout already dissipating.

Dani sent him a grateful look.

He nodded in answer, feeling surprisingly drained. That thing had been giving off more power than had been readily apparent.

“Well!” Archie said, his hand trembling visibly as he set the orb—a sphere once more—on the table in between the camera and the barometer so it wouldn’t roll away. “That was…exciting.”

“Never a dull moment with you lot.” Nixie shook her head and turned away to squeeze the rain out of her hair.

The young scientist looked around at all his observers. “Everyone all right?”

Before anyone could answer, Maddox came marching out onto the sand with fury in his dark eyes.

“Give it to me,” he ordered, putting out his hand.

Archie’s eyes widened and he obeyed, as startled as they all were to see the small trickles of drying blood that had leaked from the older boy’s ears.

“Maddox?” Isabelle stepped forward in alarm, lifting her goggles onto her forehead. “Are you all right?”

He cast her a seething look, then took the orb and pivoted, heading back toward the stone steps that led up to the villa.

“Where are you going?” Jake called.

Maddox stopped and turned around. “To climb Mount Etna, where I shall be throwing this cursed thing into the volcano! I should have done it the first day we found out what it was.”

“Maddox, you can’t just destroy it!” Archie protested, hurriedly trying to dry his glasses on his wet lab coat.

“Well, you can’t control it! I never should’ve let you do this. This blasted artifact already wiped out one civilization. I’m not about to let it drown ours, too.” He set off again.

“But Maddox, what about my people?” Sapphira cried, taking a few steps toward him. “What do you think Davy Jones might do to my father and my homeland if worse comes to worst?”

“Your father is a king with an army. Let him use it,” he said. “I am not letting this fall into the wrong hands.”

Archie tried to reason with him, which Jake could have told him was a bad idea. “Maddox, I’m sorry your ears were hurt in my experiment—”

“I’m fine!” Maddox barked.

Archie flinched. “It’s just that you
cannot
throw that into the volcano.”

“The lava will destroy it,” Maddox said.

“Or you could blow up half the continent of Europe!” Archie retorted.

Maddox eyed him in suspicion. “What do you mean?”

“The fact is, I have no idea how those unknown metals will react when exposed to that kind of heat!”

Maddox glanced uncertainly at the orb. “They’ll melt.”

Archie pressed his fingers to his thumb as he lifted his hand. “And release
what
? Must I explain everything to you people? The chemical reaction could give off a burst of energy that could destabilize the whole magma chamber, setting off a chain reaction, causing Etna and other volcanos in the region to erupt—because many of them are connected by magma tunnels underground. For you to speak of just lobbing it willy-nilly into a volcano is both…i-i-incredibly stupid and irresponsible!” he sputtered.

“No, what
you
just did was stupid and irresponsible!” Maddox bellowed back. “But what else would I expect from someone with freakish intelligence and no bloody common sense!”

“How dare you?” Archie shouted.

Jake had never seen his easygoing cousin so incensed. Likewise, stoic Maddox hadn’t lost his temper since the day he’d held Jake headfirst over a pile of dragon dung. How had this escalated so quickly?

The girls all looked to Jake to do something; he stepped forward, knowing it was time to intervene.

“Maddox, I really think we should listen to Archie on this,” he said in as soothing a tone as he could find. “He usually knows what he’s talking about.”

“I would remind you that he’s twelve. Playing around with an unknown device of possibly demonic origins that could destroy the world. But suit yourselves,” Maddox said indignantly, nostrils flared. “Who am I to second-guess the genius? Here you are, wünderkind, if you’re so smart. Catch!”

He tossed the orb to Archie, who barely managed to catch it before Maddox pivoted and stalked away.

“Maddox—” Isabelle started, but he waved her off, leaving the beach without a backward glance.

A long, hideous silence followed.

Dani cast Jake a wide-eyed look that said,
That was ugly.

He nodded in discreet agreement, but could only conclude that both of his male friends had reacted that way because they were embarrassed. Archie had pretty much botched the orb experiment in front of everyone, including Nixie, and Maddox had left the scene of danger because of his own intense pain, something Guardians were never supposed to do.

All this, on top of the strain that everyone was feeling, being homesick and under threat from two terrible directions—the Dark Druids and Davy Jones.

Sapphira and Lil exchanged a glance, both looking like they wished they could’ve escape the awkwardness of witnessing friends fight.

Isabelle lowered her gaze and pulled off her lab coat, obviously feeling caught in the middle.

Nobody spoke as Archie stiffly put all his pieces of scientific equipment back into a large wooden box. “I’d better take these things inside.”

“Here.” Isabelle closed her notebook and tucked it into the box, giving her little brother a tender look. As an empath, she no doubt had an even clearer understanding of what he was feeling right now.

But Archie avoided her gaze, as though he much preferred to be left alone at the moment.

“Good job, Arch,” Jake offered. “It was a valid experiment. It needed to be done. We had to know what we were dealing with.”

Archie just looked at him, then handed him the orb. “You take it.”

Startled, Jake cradled it carefully. Then Archie nodded as though washing his hands of the whole thing, and walked off carrying his box.

Isabelle let out a sigh and glanced at Jake.

He shrugged and shook his head, then held up the orb. “What are we going to do with this thing before it gets us killed? Ladies? Any ideas at all?”

Sapphira shrugged. “I think we’re stuck with it.”

At least the sun had come out again, and the sea’s midday calm was restored.

“It is quite a pickle,” Nixie remarked as she leaned against the empty table. “It’s too dangerous to keep it, and even more dangerous to try to destroy it.”

“Can’t we just hide it?” Dani asked.

“That doesn’t seem to work,” Sapphira said with a wry glance at Jake. “Someone always seems to find it.”

“Maybe we could throw it back into Calypso Deep,” Nixie suggested. “It did all right there for a very long time. Jones already searched the canyon and didn’t find it. Why would he look there again?”

Jake shook his head. “Too risky. Speaking as a former thief, people always hide their valuables in the same two or three places. A pirate like him is going to know that. He’ll search the canyon again if he has to.”

“And don’t forget this Lord Wyvern fellow,” Dani reminded them. “He could send the rock monsters back down to check for any artifacts they might’ve missed the first time around if he’s greedy.”

“Good point,” Nixie conceded.

“Speaking of Davy Jones,” Sapphira said, “I don’t want to alarm anyone, but am I the only one who’s noticed the full moon starts two nights from now? Remember, according to legend, when the full moon rises, he and his shark men can come up on land. We’ll have to be ready.”

Isabelle frowned. “But surely we have no reason to think he knows where we are. We’ve all stayed out of the water, just like your Commander Tyndaris told us to.”

“Well, except for when Jake rode the dolphin from the beach at Nisáki to the boat,” Dani pointed out.

“Aw, that was only for a few minutes. Let’s not be too paranoid,” Jake said. “For now, let’s just figure out what to do with this orb. Come on, girls, think.”

They all stood racking their brains, with no sound but the whisper of the once-again gentle breeze and the lapping of the waves. A gull screeched somewhere, but no one offered any answers.

“I wish I’d never seen it,” Sapphira said softly.

Nixie used her wand to work a spell that dried her clothes and hair instantly. She offered to do the same for Jake and the mermaids, but when she turned to Dani, the redhead suddenly gasped.

“I’ve got it!” Dani cried. “My new hatbox—!”

They all looked at her, baffled.

“Huh?” Jake asked.

“Nixie,” Dani said in excitement, “remember that spell you did on the edge of the Seaweed Forest, when you made yourself invisible? Well, why don’t we put the orb in my new hatbox for safekeeping? We’ll hide it away somewhere in a closet so it just blends in, plus you can turn the orb invisible. That way, if anyone even finds the box, all they’ll be able to see is the hat inside. The orb would still be invisible.”

“Brilliant.” Jake gazed at her in dreamy pride.

Dani turned bright pink.

“Well,” Nixie said, “technically there are ways to track unseen magic in a building if somebody’s really determined. But…for the time being, I think that sounds like it could work.”

“I agree,” Sapphira said, nodding.

Lil heaved a sigh of relief.

Isabelle threw her arm fondly across Dani shoulders. “It’s like Archie says: a simple solution is always the most elegant.”

“Hear, hear,” said Jake.

“I should go and check on him,” Nixie murmured, glancing toward the house.

“Invisibility spell first,” Jake advised.

“Right. To the hatbox!” she said.

“Follow me,” Dani replied, beckoning to the black-clad witch. “The rest of you stay, though. The fewer of us who know exactly where it is, the better. See you soon.” Dani sent Jake a little parting smile that made his heart clench.

Nixie joined her, and the two girls hurried back up to the villa. Jake watched Dani reach down and scoop her dog up into her arms when Teddy came running halfway down the beach steps to meet her.

Isabelle and the mermaids trailed the pair. “Aren’t you coming, coz?”

“Aye,” Jake said absently, but before he followed the girls, he cast the sea a wary glance over his shoulder. Surely that brief dolphin ride wasn’t enough to have led the Lord of the Locker straight to them.

Was it?

# # #

“Capitaine! Capitaine!”
a distant voice shouted.

“Well, sounds like we have news,” Davy Jones taunted his captives. The three glowering mermen remained in their cages nearby: King Nereus, Tyndaris the warrior, and old Pomodori.