Brave the Tempest (Cassandra Palmer 9)

“What?”

But then I noticed that my little red guide was waiting for me, just up ahead, where—­

“Oh my God!”

“It’s like shopping with a sugared-­up toddler,” someone said behind me, but I was already off, heading

for a large force field of the kind that subbed for window glass around here, but this wasn’t covering a window. It stretched from the bumpy floor to the rocky overhang of a ceiling, several stories up, and curved as if flowing around a corner. Only there was no bend here, just a wedge-­shaped protrusion out into the corridor, one that was filled with—­

No.

It couldn’t be.

I ran up and pushed a finger against the field, which bounced around like jelly. Or like what it was, a huge slab of water jutting out from the stone like an aquarium. But it wasn’t an aquarium, because inside weren’t fish but—­

“Oh my God!”

“Can you do something?” somebody asked.

“You’re the one who brought her here with no buildup. I told you—­”

I wasn’t listening. I was pressing my hands and face against the surface of the barrier, passionately wishing the kids were here to see this. We have to bring them, I thought, staring at a bunch of tiny yellow fish—­because there were fish in there, after all, zipping by in the light of more of those weird crystal formations. The crystals were blue and yellow this time, and spiking out from rocky promontories and occasionally the floor, sending what looked like sunlight filtered through water cascading everywhere. Enough that I could see flickers of silver tails, larger than any fish would have, flashing in and out of stalactite-­like formations in front of what appeared to be an extensive cave system.

But I didn’t care about the caves. I cared about—­

There! Right there!

I leaned in, trying to get a better look, sure I was seeing things. Because it couldn’t be what I thought it was. It couldn’t—­

My face suddenly slipped inside the wedge.

Oh, shit, I thought, and tried to back out. But before I could manage it, the rest of me was sucked in, too. Leaving me stunned from the sudden shock of cold water, like jumping into a November pool.

It was close to freezing, but the lack of air was more of a motivator. I started thrashing against the skin of the force field and panicking when it refused to let me through, before I remembered that I could just shift out. Spatial shifting was a perk of an office that desperately needed a few, and it had gotten me out of sticky situations in the past.

But not this one.

Because my power didn’t work.

And, okay, now I was panicking. And staring at ­Hilde’s horrified, slightly distorted face outside the force field, only she wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at something behind me.

I spun around in the water, almost dropping the damned book I’d been lugging around, because Saffy had said she knew someone who might be able to disenchant it. And then clutching it to my chest, because the whole not-­being-­able-­to-­breathe thing had just been complicated by the arrival of—­

Well, call them what they are, I thought, staring in awe in spite of everything.

Because they were mermaids.

Or mer-­something, I corrected, noticing the finely muscled torsos dipping low to thick, scale-­covered tails. Even with long, filmy hair that floated out behind them like smoke, huge colorless eyes, and weird, almost transparent filaments wafting from the sides of their necks and faces, they didn’t look remotely female. They were also vaguely blue, or maybe that was the light.

I couldn’t really tell and didn’t care because I was drowning, and because they currently had strange-­looking spears pointed at me menacingly.

One of them, wearing a neckpiece of glowing crystals in some kind of metal, struck out with his weapon and stabbed violently at my chest. Or, I realized a second later, at the huge bound volume I was holding in front of it. I didn’t think he’d missed, since he was all of a few yards away, and then I really didn’t when bright, yellow-­white glints of light started spearing outward from the book.

I would have dropped it, but I was afraid he’d miss and hit me. Because he was stabbing it again and again, causing cracks like lightning to run all over it and shedding more of that terrible light. To the point that I couldn’t look at it anymore, I couldn’t look at them, I couldn’t look at anything with my eyes scrunched up in pain.

Which is why I didn’t see what was coming.

But I heard it when a sound tore through the eerie quiet, like a hundred whales all deciding to signal at once. And I felt it when something slammed into me, hard as a fist. It was just a current under the water, but it threw me and the book I was still clutching back at the force field, pressing us against it so hard that I opened my mouth to scream before forgetting that I couldn’t, sure that every bone in my body was about to break.