Читать книгу Fire: The Mermaid Legacy Book Two - Natasha Hardy - Страница 12

I held his head for a while after the faint iridescent shade of purple I’d noticed under his skin had faded and his skin had turned milky-white and lifeless.

There was a pressing need to leave this place, to get to the kelp forest and the land beyond it…but I didn’t know what to do with Qinn. To leave him within the net for the fish to feed on was unthinkable but I didn’t know what I would do with his body once I’d somehow managed to get him free of it. In the end the voices we’d been so focused on a short while earlier drifted on the current, far closer than they had been before.

“I…I just got a waft of her fragrance again!”

“She’s close, very close!”

I left Qinn, his head lolling sickeningly in death in the ever-moving current, and pressed myself into a crevice in the coral.

Closing my eyes I focused on the image of the mottling that had raced up my arm earlier, hoping that whatever the reason for me being unable to heal Qinn was a momentary glitch.. I knew I would be captured if I couldn’t perfect the disguise.

When I opened my eyes again I couldn’t see the hand I knew I was staring at and when I glanced up every muscle in my body froze.

If I’d reached out I could have touched the one closest to me. He was powerfully built, the muscles of his torso and arms highlighted by the slight emerald tinge that covered his body. He was scanning the reef where I lay, his beautiful face hard with hatred and furious determination.

I recognised him as the leader of the Miengu, a group of fiercely aggressive Oceanids, warlike in their thinking and physically capable of massive destruction.

I could feel my hair waving backwards and forwards as it swirled in the current just inches from where he stood.

“I thought you said she was here.” He twisted to address an Oceanid I didn’t recognise. He was slight compared to the massive Miengu, his behaviour petulant and wheedling as he tried to explain my disappearance.

“She is…or was…”

“Which one is it?”

He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

The smaller Oceanid was inspecting Qinn’s body, tugging at the net and snickering to himself as each tug sent a flurry of flesh and blood into the water.

“Maybe the shark got her,” he said as he tugged, pointing at the gaping wound where Qinn’s abdomen had been.

Instantly a fierce hatred almost overwhelmed me. It would be easy to take the two of them out, an energy ball for each would wipe the mocking smirks off their faces.

The Miengu’s movements were blindingly fast and he had the smaller Oceanid in a vice-like unnatural grip in the time it took to blink my eyes.

“Perhaps you don’t understand the importance of finding this little girl…alive?” The words were hissed through clenched teeth. “Because that is what she is, a stupid little girl who has had only three days to learn to swim underwater and yet you…” He tightened his grip on the smaller Oceanid, forcing a stream of bubbles and a wheeze of pain out of him, “can’t seem to find her!”

“She could still be here,” the smaller Oceanid wheezed. “And she’s alone now so she’ll be much easier to find.”

The larger considered this for a few more moments, the thick bands of muscle on his arms continuing to squeeze the smaller Oceanid before releasing him as his skin took on the same ghostly pale blue tinge that now covered Qinn.

“What do you mean?”

“She could be at the surface or something…every time her scent disappears it’s as if she has left the water. Perhaps there’s a boat or something....”

His comment gave me much-needed insight into the potential power and threat of how the water spread my scent. It seemed that when I was in the disguise Qinn had taught me to use, or out of the water, I was undetectable.

As I watched the Miengu push himself off the ocean floor in a swirl of white sand and swim straight for the surface in an elegant wavelike motion, his arms taut at his side and his stomach muscles rippling as he moved, the kernel of an idea began to form. The smaller Oceanid followed hurriedly, scanning the blue expanse of water as he went.

I eased out of the crevice only able to maintain my disguise by allowing the current to move me at a painfully slow pace in forward and backward swells across the coral, and away from the other Oceanids and Qinn’s still trapped and lifeless body.

A cascade of dark rocks ornamented in living colour rose out of the sea bed and I managed to back my way into an opening in one of them, hoping against hope as I did so that there wasn’t a large and hungry predator waiting inside it.

I kept the disguise despite the gloom of the cave, watching warily as they returned from their search of the surface, the bigger Oceanid continuing to roughly motivate the smaller to find me.

“You don’t honestly think she’ll co-operate when you do find her?” The slighter one floated above the larger as they searched, scanning the reef constantly, his chest moving as if he were breathing but without the regularity that ordinary breathing produces.

“She won’t have a choice.” The Miengu was irritating the sea creatures, sending bursts of brightly coloured fish and irritated crustaceans swirling into the water. “Neith isn’t planning on giving her an option to co-operate or not, that’s why she’s too scared to just attack him straight on, she knows he is more powerful.”

His statement made me angry, mainly because what he was saying was true and I hated the cowardly choices I’d made so far in Merrick’s rescue mission.

I knew, of course, that the plan we’d made was supposed to be the most logical, the most objective, but hiding here in the cave helplessly with Qinn dead, I wasn’t so sure any more.

“If she is so powerful why didn’t she free her friend from the net?”

The Miengu stopped and straightened. His back was to me but I could see the tension in the thick muscle that ran down his spine as he considered the other’s question.

“Perhaps she didn’t try,” he replied.

“No, her fragrance is all around there.”

They dropped out of sight and I had to use all of my strength and concentration to maintain the disguise and zone in on listening to their voices at the same time.

“Do you see here?” It was the smaller Oceanid’s voice.

A grunt in reply.

“And here and here. This is all her.”

They were quiet for a while.

“I knew this Oceanid.” The Miengu this time. “His name was Qinn, he was in the pod with us for a while, his talent was disguise.”

“It doesn’t look like it helped him much.” A snicker that was quickly cut short with a gurgle of pain.

“He was a good man.”

They swam back into view, the Miengu scanning the reef methodically as he did so.

“She has probably learnt how to disguise herself from Qinn.”

“She can do that?”

A grunt.

“I’m going to report what we’ve found and get some help. You wait here and be alert. She’s still here, I’m sure of it.”

He left without another glance, disappearing quickly into the darkening blue.

I watched the smaller Oceanid as he drifted lazily over the coral, seemingly disinterested in the task he’d been assigned.

As I planned my escape, to dart out in disguise and gradually allow the current to drift me away, I wondered how many more Oceanids like Qinn would die before Merrick was rescued. I hadn’t known Qinn well but my inability to save him had come as a sharp shock to me. What if Sabrina, or Maya, or any number of Oceanids all followed me to Neith’s lair only to die…

Every muscle in my body tensed as the Oceanid swam purposefully towards my cave. He stuck his head into the opening, his eyes darting around the space, a confused expression on his face.

I had drawn back my fist and was about to hit him, making my escape a clear possibility, when he darted out of the cave and swam swiftly away.

I’d managed to move only a few metres out of the cave when he returned to exactly the spot I’d been in, ruffling the coral and sea creatures I’d been imitating to check for a normal response.

This close I could see the faint yellowish sheen that shone just under his skin and watched as irritation replaced his puzzled expression. I allowed myself to drift in the ever-moving backwards and forwards motion of the current, emptying my mind of every thought and pushing back the fear that threatened to blossom around me in the telling water.

He floated upwards into the middle of the blue, his eyes scanning the reef intently.

He was clearly waiting for his partner to return from Neith. And then it hit me, the obvious plan I’d missed. With Qinn’s gifting of disguise, I’d easily be able to follow them into Neith’s lair and then once inside I could free Merrick.

I waited for a long time.

The water darkened, the pale blue fading to a rich navy from the sea floor up. I hoped he wasn’t talented with great sight as well as the ability to track scent so effectively. Merrick had explained the Oceanids’ talents as being single-faceted, with each Oceanid inheriting their talent from their forebears.

As the reef became enrobed in night I wrapped strands of sea weed around my body, allowing me to rest and wait and watch.