Salt & the Sisters: A Mermaid Fantasy (The Siren's Curse Book 3) Page 11

  The sun was now at its peak and the temperatures had climbed an astonishing amount since daybreak. I’d stripped off my button-up shirt and stuffed it into my pack, leaving just a tank top and sports bra underneath the white tunic. I’d rolled up my shorts as high as I could without chafing my inner thighs, but my feet were baking inside my hiking boots.

  “So thirsty.” Antoni dropped his back pack and pulled the back of his tunic away from his skin, airing himself out. He dug in his bag and withdrew a canteen. “I’m not sweaty at all but I feel like I can’t get enough water,” he said between gulps.

  I knew exactly how he felt, and very likely it was even more keen for the Mer of our little group. It felt like I was spinning the top off my canteen every five minutes or refilling it.

  Looking back over my shoulder, I watched as Mom, Jozef, and Nike picked their way along behind us. Petra had gone ahead, navigating the rough terrain like she’d been doing it since she was a little kid. Antoni followed my gaze and let out a tired laugh as we watched Petra climb a fractured slab of red stone and hop over the side, light as a gazelle.

  “Is archaeology something that’s in her blood, or is she tireless because she’s the Euroklydon?” Emun asked as he walked past us, either determined to catch up with her or just showing off. He looked as cool as a cucumber under his white headscarf.

  “I don’t know.” I watched Petra sail on ahead of us, almost skimming over the tops and through the valleys of this strange world we found ourselves in. “She’s light as air, though.”

  She still hadn’t cracked and donned the cumbersome long tunic the rest of us wore to ward off the heat, as I had suspected she would eventually. She wore just a baseball cap, tank top, and shorts. Her skin was nutbrown already. I guessed she’d come from somewhere sunny.

  I scrunched up my toes inside my boots and grimaced at how sweaty my socks felt. I longed to take them off and let air flow through my toes. We’d agreed to stop for lunch at noon. There’d be shade then, and I’d have an opportunity to free my boiling soles from their prison.

  “Come on. We’re the youngest ones here.” I chuckled as I thought about just how true that was. “We can’t fall too far behind.”

  Antoni took a swig from his water bottle then leaned down and planted a kiss on my cheek. “Lead on, fearless one.”

  Thirteen

  We came to a long straightaway of flat sand. The gigantic ruins of a set of stone trusses cast thick, cool shadows, so we stopped for lunch.

  I headed directly for the shade, as did Mom, Nike, and Emun. Jozef and Antoni poked around the base of the ruin as Emun and I laid out a spread of cheese, meats, flatbread, apples, figs, and water. We hadn’t bothered bringing utensils or plates so we took turns rinsing the dust off our hands before making our own sandwiches and finding a spot in the shade to eat and rest.

  “It looks like it was once a church,” Antoni said before biting into his bulging flatbread. “Is that possible?”

  “A temple would be more likely.” Nike had seated herself on the ground next to my mother with her back against a dark red stone.

  “That’s what we’re looking for.” Mom took a bite and grimaced at the chewiness of the bread.

  “Only we’re looking for white stones, right?” I began unlacing my boots, relishing in the thought of springing free my overbaked toes.

  Nike nodded. “White, threaded with blue veins. That’s what Lusi told you, isn’t it?”

  Mom nodded and took another bite, chasing this one with a gulp of water.

  Peeling my sweaty socks off, I sighed with pleasure as I wriggled my toes in the open air.

  “That’s a great idea.” Antoni began to unlace his boots with one hand while feeding himself with the other.

  I luxuriated in the experience of filling my belly while my feet cooled. When I was finished eating, I lay back on the square rock I had claimed and looked up at the sky. It was peaceful here. There was only the sound of an occasional breeze and the spatter of sand against the ruins. No birds. No insects. I had never been in the desert before but I had expected…well, I didn’t know what. But I hadn’t expected this acute stillness. I rolled my head to the side to look at where Petra was sitting in her own contemplative silence against a stone not far from me.

  “I thought the desert might have more life in it,” I said to her. “Maybe not a lot of life, but some at least.”

  She glanced at me with those pale, otherworldly eyes. “The desert is full of life.”

  “So the stillness here is unusual?”

  “Well, it’s been buried for thousands of years. Give it a few days and it’ll be teeming with activity.”

  A small insect with hard buzzing wings flew past, as if to illustrate her point. She looked up and watched it pass by. Smiling at me she said, “See?”

  I smiled back at her. “Thank you for being here.”

  She gave me the smallest of nods. “You’re welcome.”

  I found it difficult not to stare at her even as we took twenty minutes to rest and I came close to dozing there in the shade. I didn’t know if we called each other friends, but I hoped so. We were bound together by what we were and what we’d seen and done.

  As if he could read my mind, Antoni said quietly so only I could hear. “She came when you called.”

  I rolled my head the other way to look at him. He was lying on his side, his elbow crooked and his head resting in his hand. His turban was pushed back a little and the face covering dangled beside his cheek. His hazel eyes were on Petra and then cut to me. “But she wasn’t there when you made the vow with your friends. With Georjie and Saxony.”

  “No, she wasn’t there.”

  “There’s no one like her on Earth, you said.”

  I nodded, wondering what he was getting at. “She is the only one of her kind.”

  “The only Euroklydon. The most powerful elemental of all.”

  “Yes.”

  “And she came when you called.” A dimple appeared in his cheek. “And you can summon fire and earth, if you want to.”

  I blinked at him. “Yes. As they could summon me.”

  He shook his head. “I always knew you were special, Targa. But this takes special to a whole new level.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that.

  He leaned forward and kissed me tenderly. “I want you to know that I fell in love with you before I knew you were anyone but Targa, a sassy Canadian teenager.”

  So, that’s what he was driving at. I wondered if he was intimidated by my status. It was a thought that had never occurred to me before. Had I been worried that he loved me because I was powerful? I examined my feelings as he moved back and looked down at me through hooded eyes. No, I decided. I wasn’t worried about that. One time, I had worried that his affection for me was more thanks to my siren allure than any real attraction, but that worry had dropped off a while ago. Almost without me realizing it.

  I put a hand behind his neck and pulled him back down for another kiss. When he withdrew this time, I said, “I love you too.” I grinned. “Even if you’re just a mundane human with no superpowers.”

  He flicked my nose and laughed. “Brat.”

  I stood up and stretched, feeling rested and ready for the afternoon. Antoni got to his feet beside me. No one else made any move to get up. Jozef was still chewing slowly and reading from a small book he held open with one hand.

  I walked past the ruins of the temple and wandered farther down the broad way that stretched out in front of us. It was lined by destroyed city. Black, red, and white stones were scattered amidst dunes of sand. The shadow of a bird passed overhead and I looked up to watch it land on one of the highest mountains of rubble. It looked about, its little head snapping this way and that. Petra was right, before long the desert life would move in. With all the sand gone, the ruins would begin to decay at a much faster rate.

  Antoni walked alongside not far away, bare feet in the sand and now coated with dust. He knelt to examine a sma
ll broken statue—maybe something that once graced a front door, or the top of a building.

  Heat baked the desert floor, sending up waves of oven-hot air and giving the horizon the look of a mirage. Antoni and I stayed to the shadows––the only place we could handle standing barefoot.

  I wandered farther down the road, drawn by a ruin with what looked like mosaics. Hoping for some artwork, I went to it and knelt to examine what was indeed a mosaic.

  Brushing the dust and sand away revealed small black tiles arranged in the design of a snarling, two-headed dog. Atlantean words, which I now recognized from spending so much time looking at the images on the tablet, sat beneath the dog. The tile was perfectly level and compressed into the sand like a welcome mat. The vicious mouths of the dog’s heads told me all I needed to know about what the glyphs below the image meant.

  “Beware of dog,” I said with a chuckle. “Even thousands of years ago they had this warning.”

  Antoni came up behind me and looked over my shoulder. “And now you can buy the same thing in plastic for your house.”

  “Must be one of the oldest warnings in the world.” I got to my feet and brushed the sand off my hands.

  My eye fell on another mosaic barely visible in the rubble off the main path. Climbing over the rocks, I went for a closer look. This one was purely a decorative border running the edge of a building block. I traced the design with my finger, rubbing away the dust and revealing a dark blue tile.

  Pain blossomed on my fingers and I snatched my hand back with a gasp. I looked at my hand where I expected to see blistering, but there was no sign of damage.

  Antoni appeared at my side a moment after he’d heard me gasp. “What’s wrong?”

  I wiped my hand off quickly on my shorts. The pain seared enough to bring tears to my eyes. It was like some fine filament deep in my flesh had lit up like a candle.

  “I don’t know. Something burnt me.” I looked at the dark blue stone and gestured to it. “It happened when I touched that tile scrollwork.”

  Antoni frowned and bent down for a closer look. He rubbed his thumb over the tile and peered at it.

  “But that’s not aquamarine. It’s way too dark.” He looked at me, a question in his eyes.

  Still rubbing my hand on my shorts, I stood up. The pain had been intense but it was starting to pass. “You’re right. But it hurt me all the same. It’s okay now, doesn’t hurt as much as it did.”

  Turning away from the offending mosaic, I picked my way back to the throughway I had begun to think of as a road.

  “Ow!”

  The skin on the bottom of my feet lit with heat like someone was holding a torch to my soles. With a groan of agony, I leapt from the ruins and landed on a square of shade on the sand.

  “Targa!” Antoni followed me down and knelt beside me where I’d sat down, brushing vigorously at the soles of my feet.

  Antoni took to brushing my right foot while I worked at the left, the burning sensation so strong I was astounded that the skin was not melting away. Tears tracked down my cheeks. Antoni glanced at my face. His brow wrinkled and his eyes filled with worry. Getting an idea, he ran back to where we’d had lunch and grabbed one of the bottles of water. Sprinting back to where I sat, he was followed by Nike and Petra.

  Antoni slid like a baseball player into the dust beside me, spinning the top off the bottle at the same time. He dumped the water over my feet, rubbing as he did so.

  I took a shuddering breath as the pain eased. “Thank you.”

  “What happened?” Petra asked as she and Nike came to a stop and knelt beside me. Petra put her hand on my shoulder. “Are you okay?”

  I nodded, wiping at the moisture on my face and feeling a little silly at the tears that had come. “Something burned me. My hand and both my feet.”

  Nike looked sharply at Antoni’s bare feet, dusty in the sand. Her gaze cut sharply to his face. “But not you? You’re not hurt?”

  He shook his head. “She touched a dark blue tile.” He jerked his head. “Over there. And it burned her. On her way back to the road, her feet were burned as well.”

  Nike made a beeline for the mosaic Antoni directed her to and took a closer look while Petra helped me to my feet.

  “Best put your boots back on,” Petra said quietly. She eyed the terrain around us dubiously.

  Nike and Antoni returned, Nike’s expression was serious and her eyes were on me. “Those weren’t aquamarines,” she told me.

  I nodded. “I know, but they burned me all the same.”

  “No, they didn’t.”

  My head recoiled and I prepared a sharp retort. But before it could spring to my lips, she held out her hand. It was covered in dust, and in the sunlight it glimmered faintly.

  “It’s aquamarine dust. It wasn’t the tiles, it was residue.”

  The four of us stood in silent shock for a moment, staring at the faint blue dust in Nike’s palm.

  “So, what does that mean?” Petra looked from one of us to the other, confused. “I must be missing something.”

  I explained about the conundrum of the aquamarine gemstones, how they were a gift for every siren except for me.

  She listened quietly, nodding at intervals. “I wish I could add something helpful,” she said when I’d finished explaining. “All I can say is that I understand the power that stones can have. Stones are the catalyst that brought out my abilities.”

  Antoni looked back toward our lunch site.

  “What is it?” I asked, getting to my feet.

  “I was just wondering why Mira wasn’t here like a shot from a gun.” He jerked a thumb and gave a crooked if worried smile. “I get it now. She and Jozef are napping.”

  I nodded, relieved that Mom had missed this little drama.

  “So, at the risk of repeating myself,” Petra said, looking at Nike, who was rubbing the dust off her hand. “What does it mean?”

  “It means we’re close,” Nike replied. “We’d better get moving. Antoni, you’d better carry her back to her boots so it doesn’t happen again.”

  Antoni reached to pick me up.

  “No, no it’s okay. I can walk back.”

  Nike gave me a look of warning.

  “I insist.” I began the walk back to where Jozef and my Mom lay reclined in the shade. “I made it here without being burnt, I can make it back. And no one is to tell my Mom what happened. She’ll only worry.”

  Nike and Petra agreed, but Antoni frowned.

  “I don’t like that,” Antoni said. “She deserves to know. You shouldn’t hide something like that from her.”

  I stopped Antoni and let Petra and Nike move on without us. Putting a hand on his chest I looked up into his eyes, almost pleading.

  “Don’t say anything to her. I need you to promise.”

  “Targa. No.” It was a reproach.

  “You must. If she knew, she could call the whole thing off.”

  Antoni frowned and the muscles in his jaw clenched as he ground his teeth. “Maybe we should.”

  I shook my head vehemently. “We’ve come this far, and there’s too much at stake. Nothing can jeopardize what we’re doing here. Please. Promise me?”

  For a moment our gazes clashed and the unspoken passed between us. I had the power to make Antoni forget what he’d seen here. I had the power to force a promise from him. I had made myself a promise that I would never again use my voice on Antoni, but I’d never told him that.

  “I won’t tell her,” he said, finally.

  “Thank you.” I turned for camp again.

  “But, I don’t like it.”

  “Noted.”

  Fourteen

  It wasn’t long after we started moving again that I felt it.

  I was walking ahead of the group with Emun at my side. We’d been making our way down the broad old road in companionable silence. I put a hand on his forearm.

  He stopped walking and looked at me. “What is it?”

  Closing my eyes, I tuned i
n to a sensation that was not dissimilar to feeling your skin warm up on a hot day. It was like a heat lamp set on low was shining on only one side of my face. I opened my eyes and looked up, scanning the sky.

  Emun followed my gaze. “You’re freaking me out a little, baby sister,” he said through the pale covering over his mouth, but not without humor.

  The sun was to our left, and yes, it was warm. But the warm sensation was on my right and it was different––a little sharper. It was the presence of gems, it had to be. Only the gems could inspire that strange kind of heat. I began to climb over the rubble toward the crooked white pillars in the distance—the direction of the heat.

  Mom, Jozef, and Antoni caught up to Emun and I heard Antoni ask where I was going.

  “I’m not sure, but she’s got an idea. We should follow.” I heard Emun’s shoes scuff over the stones as he climbed to follow me.

  Soon the entire party was climbing and crawling among the rubble after me. As I gained ground, a better view of Atlantis spread out before us. From here it looked like it went on forever rather than being contained to a small circular depression in a vast wasteland. To the north was a darker line on the horizon, a rough and fuzzy skyline. These were the mountains Plato had written about in his description. For centuries, all treasure-hunters and archaeologists had had to go by was the account Plato gave in his dialogues called Critias and Timaeus. The Richat Structure fit his portrayal of the ancient city exactly, but the account had long ago been relegated to the world of fiction. And yet, here the city was, under my feet.

  Following the feeling of heat on my skin––which I neglected to mention in case it alarmed my mom––we arrowed slowly through Atlantis toward the white ruin.

  Antoni had replaced Emun at my side, as Emun had slowed and joined Nike and Petra. I could hear the low murmur of conversation from them. Mom and Jozef traveled even more slowly as Jozef stopped to take photos and make notes in a small notebook he kept in his chest pocket.

  “You seem like you know where you’re going,” Antoni commented as he crested the same boulder I had stopped on, now looking down into a slight dip in the cityscape before us.