Heart of the Storm Page 2

  “If they have rum, I’ll come for a visit. I’ll wake you before we get into port.”

  “Encardo, do you have family in Panama?”

  “My wife and some grandbabies. Nicky and Ricardo are married. Why?”

  For a moment, I consider not telling him the truth. I really want to put it all behind me, get on land, and find my way back to New York. I want to be done with everything, but he’s been so nice. He deserves a chance.

  “There’s something out in that water,” I say. “Be ready to take the people you love and leave when it comes onshore. Do you believe I’m telling you the truth?”

  He stares at me for a long time, mulling my warning, then he nods and wishes me a good night. When the hatch is pulled close, I lock the door and listen to his boots stomping down the hall and up the steps. I don’t take another breath until I hear him above me.

  “I think we’re okay, now,” I whisper to myself, then crawl onto the bunk and curl myself into an embryo. How decadent it is to lie down, to pull a quilt over me for warmth, to fold the pillow in half to support my head, all the little labors of making myself comfortable. Everything is a miracle, even the yellow light bulb ticking on the ceiling. I’m so excited by the possibility of sleep I can barely lie still.

  With a flick of a switch, the room becomes a tomb. In my old room I needed it to be practically pitch-dark before I could sleep, but now I feel like I’m in a crevice at the bottom of the sea where horrible things scurry. My throat constricts. Panic wraps around my lungs and squeezes the air out of me. I open my mouth to scream but nothing exits. I sit up, frantically searching for the switch with clumsy fingers. Click. The room is aglow again, but I’m still shaking, my bones rattling in their joints. The dark is no longer my friend.

  Lyric, you cannot abandon us.

  “Where I’m going you can’t come,” I whisper.

  The voice wants to argue, but I push it out of my mind. Damn his expectations, his heroic plans to rally the world and prepare for a fight. I’m going to find the people I love, and we’re going to Denver, or somewhere else that’s high on a mountain where the bogeyman can’t ride in on the tide.

  Lyric. They will find you. You can’t hide.

  “I’m sure as hell going to try,” I cry, pressing my hands against my head to block out his pleas. I rock back and forth on the mattress until his voice fades and the creaking ship returns as my only soundtrack.

  “I thought I had this room to myself,” I whisper to no one. The emptiness feels awfully crowded.

  Chapter Two

  THREE MONTHS EARLIER

  FOR FIVE MINUTES, I WAS A FLAMING GODDESS OF FURY, a total badass powered by magic, science, and a little inner-city swagger. Basically, I was Beyoncé. So, when an invasion of brain-sucking sea monsters attacked, it was hardly a problem at all. A nightmare made out of tentacles and hunger crawled out of the ocean, and I didn’t even break a sweat. I was five foot eight inches of atomic power—​rocking a shaved head to boot. I saved the frickin’ world. I should have been allowed a victory lap or a ride off into the sunset with a dreamy prince or a hot nerd with potential. Instead, the last of the enemy showed up just as I burned out my batteries. I was exhausted, weak, and surrounded.

  Typical, right?

  Shocking plot twists come fast and furious in Coney Island, like the time I watched a race of sea people walk out of the ocean and set up camp near the boardwalk, or when I found out my mom was one of them and that I’m not 100 percent human, or when I was locked in a prison camp and forced to train a team of children to fight a war. I’ve learned to dodge some of the punches and absorb the rest, but this wasn’t fair. Having to watch those ugly bastards leap out of the ocean to drag me under was all kinds of wrong. If it happened in a book, the reader would be super pissed. People like a happy ending. Trust me, I was in the mood for one myself.

  The monsters were everywhere. There must have been dozens of them, behind me, in front, on either side—​even if I could have fought back, I doubt it would have made a difference. Hands clamped down on my limbs. Teeth gnashed and chattered in my face. Long black tongues licked greasy mouths. They dragged me toward the water, always back to the water.

  But there was one glimmer of hope. I caught a streak of light in the corner of my eye. Its owner was a boy in a black jumpsuit like mine, with dark hair and eyes, his glowing fist encased in a silver metal glove. He streaked toward me like a comet. Riley was ripping the ocean apart. The glove gave him command of the water, and he sculpted it into something bigger and uglier than the monsters trying to kill me. A wave rose up, arrogant and eager to crush those beasts into mud. Riley wasn’t going to let them take me. He liked happy endings too. I’m not going to lie—​it was kind of sexy.

  The creatures knew what was coming. They let loose an indignant howl. None of them could do what Riley could, and they knew the smackdown was coming.

  Do it, Riley! Turn them into bags of bones! I thought, and as the swell crested higher and higher until it threatened to blot out the sun, it looked like that was exactly what was going to happen. The wave convulsed and boiled, eager to do its ugly work, but one of the creatures refused to accept its fate. It sprang at Riley, leaping an impossible distance, and caught him in the gut. The punch was so cruel and savage the world winced. Riley’s body folded in half and flailed backward. His glove’s once blazing power blinked out before he even hit the sand. He lay still and quiet.

  “Lyric!” A voice rose above the clamor, one I didn’t want to hear. Chloe shouldn’t have been there. I didn’t want her to see Riley’s body or watch what was about to happen to me. Chloe, run away! Just go! But she was as stubborn as me.

  “Why aren’t you fighting them?” she cried. My little freckle-faced friend expected a miracle. She believed I had a well of second winds, an unlimited supply of grit and determination, but she was wrong. Killing a ten-story sea monster and its million babies had taken a lot out of this girl.

  “Run!” I shouted, spending all that was left of my strength. She was startled by my tone, but it pierced her brain and she did what I asked. I watched her little feet kick up sand as she raced back toward the camp for help. I told myself the soldiers would take care of her, or the other kids. She’d grow up. She’d be fine. She’d manage. She was the strongest one of us.

  I felt a jerk, and I was back in the water, under the salty, gray Atlantic. A bone-chilling cold wrapped its hands around my lungs and squeezed. Swirling sand and pollution blinded me. Bellowing water punched my ears. Every sense was assaulted and overloaded. I felt myself slipping away into a blessed unconsciousness where I would not know when the monsters killed me, or what they would do to me afterward.

  Where was Fathom? I wondered. Why wasn’t he there to save me?

  In the murky soup there was only one face I recognized—​Minerva’s. She circled me, her eyes burning with a sick joy. Her already fragile mind had been pushed over the edge when Fathom killed her husband. Then she watched me destroy most of her monster army, decimating her plans to conquer humanity. Together, Fathom and I had taken everything from her. Now, it appeared, all she had left was revenge. She pulled back and slapped me with a hand like concrete, and then there was nothing but black.

  Let’s get something straight—​waking up underwater was all kinds of wrong. There was salty liquid invading my nose, swirling down my esophagus, and spilling into my gut. Panic took over, and I screamed. The creatures who had snatched me off the beach barely acknowledged me. They kept swimming and dragging me along.

  I’m not drowning, I told myself, over and over again. Intellectually, I understood that I was not fully human and I couldn’t drown. Seawater awakens my DNA, and my body adapts. My mother is a Sirena, one of the many tribes of the Alpha nation. My dad is human, so I’ve got only a few of mom’s genetic gifts. Luckily, they were enough to keep me alive. A burning sensation beneath my jawline told me the skin had separated to make room for my gills. The sea filtered through them, ­oxygen was rem
oved and fed to my bloodstream; water poured down my throat and into my gut, only to be pumped back out.

  Whether or not being alive was a good thing remained to be seen. Minerva and her monsters still had me, and I was still not strong enough to break free. I shouted at them, but they ignored me and kept swimming. I took some relief in the belief that they weren’t planning to eat me. Why would the Rusalka drag their food miles and miles into the ocean when they could just rip me apart?

  Unlike Sirena, the Rusalka are not beautiful. They don’t have the fish tails or the pretty faces. Rusalka are freakish, malformed goblins swept off the bottom of the ocean where even the light is afraid to go. Their skin resembles an eggplant with white undersides, and their frames are a collection of stringy limbs and bloated bellies. They’ve got more fangs than face. Their mouths chomp and gnash endlessly. They crack their own teeth into pieces that fall out like spittle. Their eyes are bulbous, black orbs as vacant as bottomless pools. Looking into them is like standing over an open manhole wondering how deep it goes. But by far their creepiest feature is the snakelike strand of flesh that dangles down from the tops of their heads and ends in front of their mouths. In the dark its shiny lure dances in the dark, beckoning to its prey. Come closer, just a tiny bit closer.

  Rusalka, however, were not my biggest fear. Their boss struck terror in everyone. Despite being one of the most beautiful people I had ever seen, Minerva couldn’t hide the insanity that crept behind her eyes. As her husband’s greatest adviser, she was the voice that encouraged his doomed invasion. She was the giggling puppet master who pulled the strings of death and destruction. I couldn’t see her in the milky water, but I could hear her, rambling and bellowing, sharing her heartbreak with the entire Atlantic. I should have laughed at her grief. She’d tried to kill everyone I love at least once. She was tasting the tragedy she’d served to so many. My joy at her suffering should have filled tiny silver bubbles with giggles. I was too afraid to laugh at her. Her anguished shrieks felt dangerous, like a high fever, a contagious pathogen bent on invading my bloodstream and infecting my mind. Even the Rusalka kept their distance. They held their hands against their tiny ears, desperate to protect their feeble brains from her sickness.

  No, I didn’t dare laugh. I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to stop.

  When the White Tower corporation sent me back to Coney Island with the kids, they put us all in black jumpsuits with their stupid logo on the front. I hated them. It made me feel like a product, something you could pull off the shelf at the grocery store and run across the scanner. I guess that’s exactly what the children and I were to them. They sold us to the military as secret weapons against Alpha aggression. Like most people, they didn’t understand that the Alpha were not a threat. They were “other” and had to be destroyed.

  During those dark hours in the sea, I thanked heaven for that jumpsuit. It was insulated and kept me from freezing to death in those depths, but it didn’t protect my fingers, toes, or head. My hands and feet filled with concrete, and I’d lost all feeling in my pinky fingers. I was panicked about frostbite. My father, the cop, used to tell horror stories about homeless people who crawled under the boardwalk during blizzards to escape Coney Island’s relentless winter wind. He’d found so many with black and lifeless hands and feet, he started carrying extra hand warmers around and passing them out to anyone in need, but he still had to help countless victims into ambulances.

  It was so dark at those depths I couldn’t see the telltale sign from his warnings, the purple blossoms that form underneath the skin, and not knowing elevated my fears into something that threatened to strangle me. A choking vine of horror sprouted in my belly and grew up into my throat.

  The other symptom of frostbite is sleepiness, and my eyelids were like anchors. My father’s voice shouted at me to fight.

  Lyric! You have to stay awake. If you go to sleep, the oxygen levels in your blood will drop and brain damage will occur. You’ll go into a coma. You might never wake up.

  Tiny fireworks were popping in my eyes. Dreams were coagulating in my vision. Suddenly, I was at the YMCA pool learning to float on my back, then I was lying on our couch in our apartment staring at a water stain on the ceiling. I was playing Uno with my parents at our rickety kitchen table. I had a green “draw two” card, and I slapped it down on my mom. She scowled, and my father roared with laughter. Then I was on the beach with her and she was correcting my pigeon pose. Seagulls swooped and dove overhead. The sand became a classroom with windows covered in construction paper. I sat on the floor trying to teach a beautiful and difficult Alpha prince how to read Where the Wild Things Are. When he pulled me close, it felt as if I’d been waiting for his mouth my whole life. Our kisses were urgent, our breathing frantic.

  And then it vanished—​all of it. A slap to my face rocked me awake. The pain of the blow sizzled down my cheek and along my neck. Minerva clamped her hand on my jaw, and dug her nails into my skin. I tried to pull away, but she was too strong. She pushed her face into mine. Her corneas erupted. Her mouth twisted and screamed, but I couldn’t understand a word. The message, however, was loud and clear. She wasn’t going to let me die so easy.

  She barked at one of the Rusalka, and it swam to my side, roughly snatched my forearm, and pulled me upward. Higher and higher we went, until the black became gray, then blue, then yellow. We must have risen hundreds of feet in a matter of minutes. A normal person couldn’t have survived the sudden changes in pressure. I should have suffered the bends. My brain should have turned to jelly. I had my mother to thank again.

  “Why are we here?” I asked when we broke the surface. It was warm there, and the sun was bright and hot. There was nothing in any direction worth looking at, just the bubbling swells and crashes of an anxious sea.

  “Can you understand me?” I asked.

  It blinked.

  “Do you have a name?”

  The creature said nothing, only stared at me with its empty eyes and waited for the warm water to melt my frozen body.

  The farther we swam, the warmer the ocean grew, so I assumed we were heading south, maybe toward Florida or even beyond to Central America or the Caribbean. We were swimming closer to the surface and moving into waters that were clearer and cleaner. I was seeing things there I’ve only seen on Discovery Channel—​turtles, and multicolored fish, and slowly prowling predators as big as my arm. They streaked past us in every direction, sometimes darting up to my face to inspect me, then shooting off like lightning.

  We swam above a coral reef that was alive and unspoiled by human hands. It was a vast bed of reds and oranges, a sanctuary to fish and flora for miles and miles. Lobsters scurried along its twisting tendrils like squirrels racing across the branches of an oak tree. Tiny blue fish peered out of crevices and stared as we passed by. Anemones waved their magenta tendrils left and right with the current. Everything was vibrant and alive. Back in seventh grade, Bex did a report on coral reefs. She built a model complete with little fish stickers and chunks of a kitchen sponge she cut up into tiny pieces. She was really proud of it before her mother’s boyfriend at the time came home drunk and fell asleep on top of the whole thing, crushing it flat. I helped Bex put it back together at the last minute, and I guess some of what she learned stuck with me. Coral reefs grow near coastlines, mostly in tropical areas of the world. It wasn’t a lot to go on, but it was a clue to where we were heading.

  Despite all the beauty, Minerva’s grief poisoned my surroundings. Her voice rang out as fresh and raw as the day her husband fell dead on the beach with his son standing over him. Now it was accompanied by prayer. I’d heard the Alpha version of worship before, back when Arcade, Bex, and I traveled across the country. The Triton girl sat for hours beneath the desert sky, shouting threats and demands at her god, the Great Abyss. There is no humbleness in the Alpha religion. They don’t bow their heads and kindly ask for help from heaven. They rail for justice and blood and promise that if it isn’t delivered, there will be h
ell to pay. Arcade was Fathom’s fiancée, promised to him as a child, and when she believed he was dead, she dared the Great Abyss to refuse her vengeance. She scared the crap out of Bex and me. We huddled in the car like frightened children while our friend brought down thunder and lighting around us, and Arcade was sane. Well, relatively sane. Minerva, on the other hand, was completely nuts. Her prayers stabbed my ears.

  We entered a part of the sea that was hauntingly deep. Massive mountains rose up to meet us. The valleys between them spread wide for miles and dropped into barren, empty bowls of blackness.

  The water was thick and metallic. It filtered through my gills, stinging the vulnerable flesh. My throat burned. My tongue swelled. It was a poisonous place, and it grew more toxic the closer we got to a glowing red light in the distance. I begged the Rusalka to turn around. Their gills were as raw as my own, but they didn’t listen to me. They dragged me onward, toward the massive mountain ahead of us, and its crown of fire.

  Within a day, we cowered at its feet. The red light was a burning furnace that breathed in and out, a greedy inhale that swallowed the entire ocean and an exhale to regurgitate it all. Fish and filth alike were sucked into the broken crater at its very top. No one had to tell me what I was seeing. This was the Great Abyss, but it was no god. I was never a good science student. I was never a good anything student, but I recognized a volcano. The Alpha deity was an active underwater vent. It was the source of light we had followed for days. It was the source of the tremors that rattled my bones.

  And I suddenly realized why Minerva brought me there. Both Arcade and Fathom told me criminals were tossed into the Great Abyss and never seen again. Their deaths must have been excruciating, burned alive as they were dragged deeper into the volcano’s boiling jaws. Minerva was going to feed me to her god. She was going to toss me in and let the Great Abyss swallow me whole.