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

  My hand tightened on the dull end. My heart sped up. I sucked in air through my nose. My skin felt clammy and my mouth felt dry. I pressed the sharp end into her skin.

  She closed her eyes and waited.

  The blade trembled and I hesitated. A thin trickle of blood traced its way down her throat and I watched it, my vision blurring as tears welled in my eyes.

  Shaloris’s eyes snapped open. She moved, her one hand flying up toward mine and her body shifted to move her neck forward into the blade.

  “No,” I cried, realizing what she intended. I pulled the blade from her throat and threw it to the side, screaming. My head pounded from the force of the scream. “I’m not a murderer!”

  The blade struck the walls of the crystal, but there was no shattering crack. Instead there was the sound of a splash, then a trickle and then nothing.

  Shaloris’s eyes widened and both of us looked to where I’d thrown the blade. There was a splotch of wetness on the wall and several streams glinting wetly toward the floor. A small puddle oozed across the aqua floor.

  I stared at it, confused.

  There was a thud to our left. A dull sound, not the sound of breaking stone. A dark shape was moving out there, not just one, but two. There were several more thuds. A crack appeared in the wall, stretching from the floor and jaggedly running toward the ceiling. Particles and chunks of stone landed around us. Overhead the pointed ends of stalactites seemed to waver, threatening to fall and impale us.

  I bent and picked up a large chunk of aquamarine, staring at it. I looked at the wet spot on the floor and back at the stone in my hand.

  “Eumelia made this stone out of saltwater,” I murmured. My eyes narrowed. Speaking to the stone, I whispered, “Return to your original state.”

  The stone burst into water and splattered at our feet.

  Shaloris and I stared at one another. She shook her head. “You are running out of time.”

  Several more thuds against the wall to our left resounded through the space. I heard the very faint calling of my name.

  “There will be no murder here today,” I said to Shaloris. “Killing you will not end the curse, or Eumelia would have killed you rather than entomb you. This stone has been keeping you alive, just as it has kept alive the siren’s curse. We need to work together to end this, just as you and your sister together were responsible for creating it.”

  She cocked her head, her brows tightening.

  I closed my eyes and saw Eumelia, her face full of rage and her elemental powers coursing through her as she drew saltwater up through the earth and hardened it, making a coffin around her sister. Nike was wrong. I did not need to be stronger than the speaker of the curse; I needed to be stronger than the elemental who had built this crystal cage.

  I saw my mother walking into the Baltic, her face a white mask of suffering as she surrendered herself to sea, leaving me broken-hearted on the beach. I saw the faces of beautiful baby boys, small chubby fists clenching on empty air, searching for a mother’s comforting touch. I saw Antoni, looking out at a blue ocean stretching before him, thinking that his heart had drowned though his body still lived.

  Something moved inside me. Some huge thing, like an earthquake, but it felt good. A face rose unbidden in my mind. It was a face I loved but it was a face whose details had faded, the exactness of my memory telling lies as the years passed by. It had been a long time since I had looked upon this face and I didn’t understand why I was seeing it now, but my heart blossomed like a rose in the heat of a summer’s day.

  The face had a copper beard and laughing hazel eyes. My father, Nathan. I could almost feel his strong arms holding me, almost hear the beautiful tenor tone he used to sing to me with.

  A memory surfaced, like his face was only the tip of a very large moving landmass. It was a memory I had locked away, had no access to until this moment. I was too young to have the rights to this memory, even though it was mine.

  I was a baby, probably not much over a year old. I could hear my father calling for my mother from my crib. It was night. My mother did not answer. The older Targa knew why she was gone, but the baby Targa knew only the confusion and fear she’d picked up from hearing her father. My father came into my room and picked me up, swaddling me in a blanket. He cradled me against his chest, and his heart pounded and his breath hitched. He left with me, down the front steps and onto the sidewalk in front of the two-story house. The house where I’d been born on the bathroom floor.

  My father called my mother, eyes flashing down one side of the street and then the other. He called louder. A voice yelled at him from some upper window but he ignored it.

  Then there was my mother’s voice, behind us and down the street. He spun around and I felt him sag to the street in relief. Footsteps running on the sidewalk grew loud, but not the sound of shoes, the slapping sounds of bare feet…bare, wet feet.

  I felt two warm droplets on my face and didn’t know what they were then, but I knew what they were now. I was well acquainted with tears, but they’d always been siren tears––my mother’s tears.

  These ones were my father’s tears.

  All this flashed through my mind in an instant, as Shaloris looked expectantly up into my face and the crystal crumbled and groaned around us.

  Tears of a man who believed himself abandoned, and tears of a baby too young to understand. The memory of those tears on my face rushed in on me, swept over me, like a wave breaking against the stones.

  Never again and no one, my mind whispered.

  My father’s tears. Tears born of the fear of loss, fear of abandonment, and the sick feeling of helplessness. Tears of saltwater.

  I swayed on my feet and nearly came to my knees as another realization struck me like the whump of a strong wind. This was why I had been born and given the powers I’d been given. This was why my father was my father and my mother was my mother and all that was between them resulted in me. I still didn’t fully understand, but I felt its truth as surely as fire gives heat.

  “Never again and no one,” I whispered fiercely, opening my eyes and looking at Shaloris.

  Shaloris’s brows pinched in confusion, her eyes locked on my face.

  Salt held us captive, and salt held the secret to our release.

  Thrusting my arms out to the sides, my hands reaching out toward the crystal walls, I cried out, tears now streaming down my face.

  My ears filled with the sound of rain as bucketloads of saltwater crashed over my head and poured over my body. My eyes closed tightly in reflex and my hair plastered to my face. My clothes pulled at my frame from the force and weight of the water raining down over us. I forced my eyes open and even through the saltwater running over them, I could see the woman in front of me, her face, and the sudden understanding that crossed it as her gaze clashed with mine.

  “I revoke the curse!” she cried out.

  I could see through her. Her being had turned to smoke and the rain poured through the memory of her. Her hair and clothes were wet, even though droplets fell right through her. I saw one pass right between her eyes.

  The ghost’s lips formed a half-phrase…

  “Thank—”

  The ghost of Shaloris dissolved like a light mist under the heat of a burning sun. Her image blurred, drifted, and was gone.

  Soaking wet and covered in gooseflesh, I blinked and looked around.

  Several meters away, my mother and Antoni stood completely drenched, frozen in a caricature of postures. Antoni held a mallet in his hands, the same one we’d used to pound the pegs in when we erected our tents for the night. My mother held a pick-axe, the kind used for digging through compacted stone. Her hair was plastered to her head and her clothes were stuck to her body. Antoni wiped the water from his eyes and blinked at me in happy surprise.

  Beyond them, Nike was seated on a rock and Petra knelt nearby, holding the lid from a thermos. They both stared at me, also frozen.

  Emun stood at the edge of the rubble pile
, holding a small, brass-headed hammer. He too was staring in stillness.

  “Targa!” My mother was the first to move. She dropped her pick axe and ran forward. She threw her arms around me with a slap of wet clothes. A moment later, Antoni threw his arms around both of us and I was crushed in a soggy bear hug.

  “What the hell just happened?” Jozef’s voice echoed in the cavern. “One second I’m giving the two-headed pup a drink and the next moment he’s gone! Where’s the crystal? Why is the floor all wet?”

  Antoni and my mom released me, Mom took my face and held my forehead to her own.

  “I thought I’d lost you.”

  “It’s over,” I replied, holding her by the shoulders.

  The moment we released one another, Antoni swooped in for another hug.

  The three of us moved to join the dry members of our little search party.

  “I don’t understand,” Petra said, getting to her feet.

  She handed Nike the thermos lid and the sorceress took it. She was smiling at me over the lip of the cup but she looked exhausted.

  “What happened to you?” I asked the white-haired siren.

  “It was tiring, trying to hold back your mother,” she replied.

  I glanced at my mom, and she had enough grace to look sheepish.

  “I heard you scream…” She didn’t have to finish. I knew what had happened next. That’s what all the thudding and thumping had been.

  “The gemstones are gone.” Jozef held out the sack that used to hold them. It was dripping.

  Nike nodded. “All of them. Mine and Sybellen’s, too. They became water at the same time as the crystal did.”

  “Can you tell us what happened in there?” Petra rested a hand on Nike’s shoulder. “Now that your mom seems to have gotten control of herself again.”

  “Let’s get out of this cave,” I said, feeling like if I ever went underground again it would be too soon. “I’ll tell you everything.”

  It took us about an hour to get out of the temple and set up camp. We were glad Petra was along—she was a human GPS and led us out without any wrong turns.

  Once we were settled around the fire with food, and Antoni had radioed Ivan to report the mission accomplished and we’d be back the following afternoon, all eyes turned to me.

  “So, who was she, Targa?” Nike asked, pouring some water into the lid of her metal water bottle. “Was she a siren?”

  I shook my head. “She was Atlantean, actually. You were almost right about the curse, almost. But not quite.”

  Nike cocked a slender eyebrow over the cup at me as she drank.

  The words came easily as the sun drifted down and disappeared below the horizon. I explained how the curse was the responsibility of a pair of half-sisters who had been torn apart by sibling rivalry and greed. I added what details about the Atlantean culture, society, and city I could recall, especially for Petra’s sake, but everyone seemed to sit on the edge of their seat, breathless to hear more.

  “I don’t understand how you can know all that…all that detail,” Petra said when I stopped to cool my throat with a drink of water. “She must have been a hell of a storyteller.”

  I laughed, realizing that I had taken for granted that Shaloris had used magic to show me her memories, just the ones I needed to understand.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t explain very well at the beginning. Shaloris was a sorceress. She was able to use her magic to take me into the past, show me her life, her memories, I even picked up her understanding in some places. What she knew, I knew.” I looked at Mom, sitting there with Jozef, their fingers entwined and light from the fire dancing over their faces.

  “Like the Hall of Anamna,” she said.

  “Trippy.” Petra let herself slide off the rock she’d been sitting on to settle on the sand. “All that knowledge passed in fifteen minutes.”

  My eyes stretched wide with shock. They felt as big as doorknobs. “That’s it?” I gaped at my Mom, then Nike, then Antoni.

  “Yeah, but after ten minutes your Mom couldn’t wait any longer,” Nike added, with a sly smile sent in Mom’s direction.

  “We didn’t know what was going on there. There was no sound, no movement in what felt like forever,” Mom explained. “I thought you were dying, or that it was all a big mistake.” Her eyes flicked to Nike and I wondered just how fiery their disagreement outside the crystal had gotten.

  “So you tried to break me out?”

  “As far as I was concerned, we’d tried it your way and it wasn’t reaping any rewards…”

  “Not yet anyway,” Nike injected.

  “And you,” I looked at Antoni where he was sitting beside me with his chin on his hand and his elbows on his knees. “You had a tool in your hand as well.”

  Antoni straighted and his eyes darted around the group guiltily. “So did Emun!”

  “Hey if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em,” Emun said lazily and without any of the embarrassment coloring Antoni’s cheeks.

  Everyone laughed.

  “Plus you’re my sister, and it didn’t feel right. It may have been only fifteen minutes, but it felt like hours you were inside that thing.”

  The crystal had nearly fallen down around my ears and stalactites could easily have nailed Shaloris or me to the floor, or both of us. But my family didn’t know that, all they’d wanted was to get me back, so I let it go. It had all turned out for good in the end.

  “So the pup…” Jozef said, speaking for the first time since we’d settled around the campfire for story time.

  “Epison,” I said, nodding. “That was his name. He was alive because his master was alive. His was an Atlantean breed that obviously went extinct when Atlantis was destroyed. His name meant ‘survivor.’”

  “Well, survive he did,” Jozef murmured. “Poor thing.”

  “Which makes me wonder,” Nike mused, “how do you suppose the original triton managed to get a piece of that crystal with a raging two-headed dog guarding it?”

  “Could be that he found a piece that was jutting through the earth above and broke it off the larger chunk. The crystal went straight up into the mud above it, so that’s a possibility,” Mom suggested.

  “Or he doesn’t have a problem with tritons,” said Emun, “we know he hated sirens but we didn’t try to see how he reacted to just me.”

  There was a murmur of agreement followed by a thoughtful silence.

  Then, Nike spoke. “You said that Shaloris told you that she’d tried to revoke the curse once before?”

  I nodded. “Why?”

  “Just theorizing that maybe that’s why the gemstones worked to protect us from the curse. Her attempt to revoke it was somehow infused into the piece the triton found.”

  Emun nodded but his eyes were half closed as he stared into the fire. “Good theory, makes sense.”

  There was another murmur of agreement and I fought the urge to break out laughing. We sounded like a bunch of amateur sleuths ruminating clumsily in the dark, pipes smoking as we muttered things like, ‘Oh come now Watson, do you really think…’ and, ‘Elementary, my dear,’ and, ‘You have seen but you have not observed.’ I got the giggles but quickly stifled them when Antoni shot me a wary glance, a half smile on his face.

  I realized that I was beyond exhausted. I got up and stretched, letting my movements speak for me.

  There was another murmur as everyone agreed it was time for bed. There were some popping bones and yawns as we moved about brushing our teeth, putting out the fire, and in general winding down.

  “You’ve got a big job ahead of you, bro,” Antoni said quietly as he and Emun stood side by side brushing their teeth, mouths encircled with foam.

  Emun made a questioning grunt and his brows shot up as his toothbrush froze.

  “Sounds like no one can increase the triton population except for you.” Antoni spat out his foam, rinsed his mouth, and tucked his toothbrush into his toiletries kit. He gave Emun a close-mouthed smile full of meaning an
d whacked him twice congenially on the shoulder.

  “Best get to work then, no dawdling.”

  Emun snorted and then bent over to prevent spilling toothpaste foam all over his chest.

  Calls of goodnight echoed in the dark and the desert fell into a relative peace and silence.

  On the flight back to Nouakchott, Petra pointed to the ground. “See that dust? Any bets that it’s someone heading to the Richat Structure to check out the new topography?”

  “You weren’t kidding when you said seventy-two hours,” said Jozef.

  In Nouakchott, Petra and I had a moment to chat as the others transferred bags from the chopper to the plane.

  “Thank you doesn’t begin to cover—” I began, but Petra waved me to silence.

  “Are you kidding? I got to walk through Atlantis! That is an archaeologist’s dream come true.”

  “Still, you put your life on hold to come and help me. If there is ever a time you need my help, I’ll be there when you call.”

  She nodded and pulled me into a hug. “We’re elemental sisters,” she said quietly beside my ear. “I’ll not be shy from now on, and neither should you.”

  Twenty-Seven

  We returned to Gibraltar to rest a few days before the longer journey back to Gdansk. Jozef wanted to pack a proper bag as it had been decided he’d be moving into the Novak manor until he and Mom decided what they were going to do next.

  “Do you feel different?” I asked Mom as we carried our bags inside the house and dropped them in the foyer. I had meant to ask her earlier, but between explaining the Shaloris and Eumelia story, getting ourselves sorted to travel, and sleeping on the flight from Mauritania to Gibraltar, as well as the ride back to Jozef’s house, there hadn’t been a good moment. Turned out the air-sickness was still there, but I felt less drained than I usually felt, so maybe the dissolution of the curse had lessened the extent of it.

  Her eyes widened and brows went up. “You don’t?”

  “Well, I’m not terrified of accidentally touching an aquamarine anymore, but otherwise…” I shrugged. “Not really, no.”