Tempest Unleashed (36 page)

It started with me seeing a long, dark tunnel in my mind’s eye. Then I was tumbling down it, flipping head over heels again and again and again.

When I came to a stop, I was disoriented, confused, my head spinning. At the same time, there was an overwhelming sense of danger. A powerful need for me to get my senses back and be on the lookout.

I shook my head, tried to stumble to my feet—I was still in human form—but before I could do much more than push to my knees, I was hit by a powerful blast of energy that sent me reeling all over again. This time, when I came to a stop, I was ready for the next attack and managed to roll out of the way of the energy surge.

As I lay there, panting, I glanced down at my hands and saw a scar in the center of my palm. A scar I didn’t have, but that my mother had had for as long as I could remember. It was as I stared at that odd, diamond-shaped scar, that I realized this wasn’t my fight. It was Cecily’s. In this moment, in this memory, I was not just watching my mother battle Tiamat. I was living the battle—as her.

The realization galvanized me, had me paying more attention as giant blasts of power slammed into the wall right above my head. I ducked and swerved, twisted and turned in an effort to get away from the sea witch—who definitely had the upper hand here. It was in all of this dodging that I got my first good look at the wall I had been plastered against more than once.

It wasn’t a rock wall at all. It was the side of a ship. On closer inspection—which I got when one of Tiamat’s blasts sent me careening face-first into it—I realized it was wooden. An old Spanish Galleon from back in the days when Christopher Columbus had landed on North America. But what it was doing in the Pacific was anyone’s guess, unless the Spaniards—or someone else—had attempted to navigate both oceans.

Something about the ship gave Cecily an idea. I didn’t know what it was, which was the oddest thing I’d ever experienced—it was like I was in her body, performing her actions, but using my brain. Even with all the magic I’d experienced since being under the ocean, I’d never dreamed such a thing was possible.

Before I’d recovered from that shock, Cecily was racing toward Tiamat, throwing another blast of energy at her with every foot of territory she covered. Soon, it was Tiamat who was on the run, Tiamat who was tripping and tumbling through the water.

It was no different than any of the other fights I had seen between my mother and the sea witch, at least until Cecily slammed Tiamat with enough power to light up a small city for a week. As Tiamat reeled, my mom took advantage of her distraction to dive straight toward the ocean floor. Once there, she burrowed her way under the sand and rocks until she’d created a deep tunnel of sorts that ran beneath the ocean floor and came up next to the old Spanish ship.

As I got my first good look at the ship—and the color of its wood—I realized that the desk Hailana was so proud of had come from this ship. This battle.

Tiamat, crazed with rage and pain, shot through the tunnel after Cecily. And that’s when I finally understood what my mother was doing.

Quick as a flash, she blasted through the outer wall of the galleon. Out came thousands upon thousands of gold coins. Manipulating every ounce of magic she had, Cecily used her energy to lift the gold up and funnel hundreds of pounds of it into the opening she had just created in the ocean floor. Then, before Tiamat could even realize what had happened, she whipped the remainder of the gold to the other side of the tunnel, blocked in that end too.

Tiamat was trapped—at least until she could tunnel through another portion of the ocean floor.

I kept wondering how this had managed to trap Tiamat for five hundred years when it had taken my mother only about ten minutes to dig the entire tunnel. But then Cecily seemed to get an infusion of power, an influx of energy that made her phosphorescence near blinding.

Malakai lending her his power?
I wondered, remembering the way Hailana’s Council had said my mother hadn’t done this alone. At that moment, Cecily stepped back and did exactly what I had done once before with her magic—pulled electricity from the water around her. She was able to channel so much that she didn’t just cause a big explosion like I had. She actually melted the coins.

Rivers of molten gold flowed from both ends of the tunnel, filling the entire thing and catching Tiamat in the burning metal. The monster screeched as she burned, but Cecily didn’t even pause. Creating a minicyclone much like the one I had spawned earlier on the beach, she created a tunnel right through the center of the melted gold, letting the frigid sea water flash freeze the stuff from the inside out. Tiamat, who had to be surrounded by water—who couldn’t function in any other conditions—ended up being almost totally encased in hardened gold. Barely able to move or breathe or function. The only thing keeping her alive at all was the small amount of sea water she had access to from the tunnel that had flash-frozen the gold.

It had been a miscalculation on Cecily’s part—she’d been trying to kill Tiamat not trap her. But that didn’t stop her from completing the job by fashioning a nearly unbreachable cage.

The miracle, I realized as I watched Cecily layer on more and more molten metal—silver as well as gold—wasn’t that my mother had managed to contain Tiamat for hundreds of years. It was that Tiamat had ever gotten out.

That alone warned me just how powerful she had become in those years trapped below the ocean floor. Which did not bode well for me. At all.

Chapter 30

Let’s go
, I told Mahina as I scooped up two of the pearls whose memories had already been expunged, just in case we needed something to trade with along the way.

Sure
, she agreed, though she was watching me with a frightened look on her face.

Did that last memory help you figure out what you need to do to stop her?
my friend asked as we made our way back out to the ocean.

You couldn’t see it?

No. I saw the others, but that one was weird. You just checked out, and except for a little bit of thrashing around, you didn’t move again until you opened your eyes. It scared the crap out of me.

I’m sorry. It was weird for me too. And no, I really didn’t get any great ideas from it. Unless there’s a bunch of gold lying around the Sahul Shelf.

Gold?

Yeah.
I told her what I’d seen.
Any ideas?

We need to run in the opposite direction. Melting gold using just energy? Good luck with that.

It wasn’t just her regular energy. It was this electric thing—

What’s the difference?

I don’t know how to describe it. I guess you have to see it to understand.

I’d rather not, to be honest.
She shuddered.
Well, at least we know to go for the underbelly, right? That’s where she’s most vulnerable.

Yeah, because I can so see her giving us a shot at that.

Mahina stiffened.
I was only trying to help.

I know. I’m sorry. I wasn’t trying to be obnoxious. I’m just messed up.

Me too.
She smiled.
It’s okay.

I paused as we left the cave.
Now, which way is Australia from here again?

Still right.
She rolled her eyes, grinned.

Mahina talked as we swam, once again explaining the whole direction thing, and I let her drone on—mostly because I knew it gave her something to concentrate on besides where we were going and what we would do once we got there. Plus, the sound of her voice was kind of soothing. It kept me calm, which was important, since I pretty much felt like I could wig out at any second.

Australia was about a forty-hour swim from where we currently were—and that’s if we traveled full speed the entire time. Unfortunately, neither of us had slept in close to twenty-four hours and the last thing I’d had to eat were the pancakes I’d made Moku for breakfast back on land.

We needed food, needed to rest, but it wasn’t like the ocean had an all-you-can-eat buffet on every corner. Which meant I was either going to have to get over my squeamishness about killing a fish for food (sushi, anyone?) or we needed to find a sea-vegetable patch pretty quickly.

I was totally pulling for the latter.

Mahina, who was going through a vegetarian phase, was also on board with that plan, so as we swam we kept our eyes peeled for anything that might look like food. Closer to Coral Straits, we had huge fields of crops, but out this far it was pretty much every creature for itself.

I reminded myself I had more important things to worry about than the rumbling in my stomach. In less than forty-eight hours I would be going up against Tiamat, and this time, there would be no element of surprise on my part. She was expecting me and sure to be armed with Sabyn and a bunch of her other loyal subjects—including a sea monster or two.

Does it surprise you?
I asked Mahina abruptly.
That Sabyn turned traitor?
I was thinking of all of Kona’s warnings, of the way we’d fought over his concern for me. Knowing what I did now, I felt like such a fool. Why had I given Kona such a hard time?

I don’t know. I always got a creepy vibe from him, even when I was admiring his fine form, but I figured that was just because of the stories. Did I think he would sell us out to Tiamat? Not a chance.

I’m an idiot. I let him train me, even when it drove Kona around the bend. But, except for the first day when it seemed like he was trying to kill me—

Which he probably was.

Yeah, I know that now. Except for that, he wasn’t a bad trainer. He didn’t teach me any offensive stuff, but he taught me stuff about defense I’d had no idea about.

Yeah, probably so he’d know how to get around you later.

I sighed.
Yeah. Probably.

I ran a hand over my face, tried to ignore the bone-deep weariness that was invading my every cell. How was I going to save Kona? If it was just a matter of trading myself for him, I would do it in a heartbeat. He was so much more important to life down here than I was and besides, the idea of saving myself at
his
expense made me literally sick to my stomach.

But it wouldn’t be that easy. My brain flashed back to the last time Tiamat and I had squared off in a major battle. I had tried to outthink her then, had attempted to figure out what she had planned—for me and my mother. I’d failed, and my mother had been killed. I couldn’t handle the idea of failing again, of losing Kona the same way I’d lost Cecily.

Was I strong enough for this? I knew I didn’t have a choice—I was doing it. But was I really strong enough to take Tiamat on or was I just fooling myself? Was I leading Mahina into a slaughter?

Thank God I knew not to rely on anything Sabyn had taught me, but I still felt like those sessions with him left me vulnerable. He knew how I moved, how I thought, my favorite means of attack. Nothing quite like parading your weaknesses out in front of the enemy for him to scrutinize …

And thank God for Kona, who had warned me over and over again not to trust Sabyn. Not to mention the warning deep inside that had kept me from showing him the strongest of my powers. The fact that he didn’t know about the electricity thing might be the only advantage I had in this whole mess. Because while Sabyn might have learned my attack patterns, I’d also learned his.

Tempest, look!
Mahina pointed toward the ocean floor and then suddenly dived deep. Not sure what she’d spotted, but knowing her eyesight was better than mine due to all the years I’d spent on land, I followed her without question.

And nearly wept with joy when I realized she had found an undersea garden. After paying the admittance price—which ended up being one of the pearls I’d pulled out of my mother’s cave hours earlier—we raided the garden mercilessly.

As we ate, and rested our exhausted tails, I thought about all the things I didn’t know about Tiamat, all the things I didn’t know about life in the ocean overall. Part of me couldn’t believe I was doing this, risking everything in a fight that didn’t have to be mine. But at the same time, I couldn’t ignore what had happened to my mother. Couldn’t ignore what had happened to all those selkies and merpeople. Or what was happening to Kona right now.

Taking on Tiamat might not be the smart thing to do, but it was the right thing. As long as she was around, no one would be safe.

So
, I said to Mahina as casually as I could,
what am I going to be dealing with here?

She paused, a bunch of sea lettuce halfway to her mouth.
With Tiamat?

No, with the climate in Australia.
It was my turn to roll my eyes.
Of course with Tiamat. I’ve already met the Lusca
, I said, referring to the huge sea-monster thing that had ripped my mother apart almost a year ago.
But what other creatures does she have lying in wait?