Rising (27 page)

“Go away,
Mom,” Sara said. A moment later, she felt her pillow being tugged away. She held on for dear life.

“Sara, come on. You can’t want to go back to sleep on a beautiful morning like this.”

“Mom, please, it’s too early.” Sara felt herself slide across the mattress.

“Y
ou know how much I love to swim.” Her mom let go of the pillow. A moment later, she had her hands around Sara’s fin and began to pull. Sara reached out, grabbed the edge of the mattress, and held on. She knew her mom thought if she succeeded pulling her off the bed, she would relent.

Sara
wasn’t about to let her win this time. It wasn’t a matter of going back to sleep now. She couldn’t go back to sleep even if she tried. It was about exerting her independence. She was an adult. Her mom couldn’t order her around like a child.

Nicole yanked hard and S
ara’s fingertips burned but held. The mattress, however, didn’t have anything holding it in place and so it slid halfway off the box spring onto the floor.

“What the Hades are you doing to your daughter?”
Sara lifted her head and blew her hair out of her eyes. Xanthus stood in her doorway, wearing only a pair of shorts. His hair was tousled and his face had a shadow of whiskers—he looked utterly gorgeous.

Sara
was distracted when her mom jerked hard again. This time, Sara’s fingers gave way and she slid down the length of the mattress like a playground slide, landing at the bottom. Dang it.

“I’m getting her up,” Nicole said, speaking as if this situation was a daily occurrence. “Sara has always been difficult to rouse.”

Sara
yanked down her nightgown to make sure all her necessary parts were covered.

Xanthus shook his head
. A stream of complaints poured from his lips as he strode over, plucked her up off the floor, and carried her into the kitchen. At least Sara thought they were complaints. She couldn’t tell because he didn’t speak a word of English.

“Xanthus, my daughter shouldn’t be eating before going out swimming
. She might get a cramp.”

Xanthus
sat Sara in a chair and dragged his fingers through his hair. “You think Dagonians can’t swim after they eat?”

“Well, she
’s half-human. That may make all the difference.”

“
Nicole, Sara is not going swimming in the ocean and neither are you,” Xanthus said, exasperated. “Where do you think Gael went after he left? Do you think he’s staying in a hotel? No. He’s out there, in the ocean. You think he wouldn’t jump at the chance to come after you both? If you took Sara out into the water, he’d kill her without hesitation. While you’re here with me, he wouldn’t dare.”

“Oh
, well shoot. I really wanted to see my girl swim. I guess we’ll just have to take a dip in the swimming pool out back. It won’t be as much fun, but I guess it’ll do.” Nicole snatched up a glass of orange juice and took sip.

“In chlorinated water?”
Sara gasped, remembering her experience in the tub. Pool water had to be much worse. “No way, Mom.”

“
To tell you the truth, I could really use a swim right now.” Xanthus crossed his arms over his muscled chest, and eyed her hopefully.

“What?”
Sara’s voice rose an octave. “You can’t be serious.”

“Sara, all you need to do is hold your breath
,” Nicole said. “That’s what normal humans do.”

“But what if I forget?
”

“After what happened in the tub, do you think you could forget?” Xanthus
asked.

“Well no, I don’t think I’ll ever forget. But, doesn’t chlorine hurt your eyes?”

“I have goggles, baby,” Nicole said as she pranced down the hall toward her bedroom to change into her suit.

“Besides,” Xanthus
said, “you don’t have to put your face in the water if you don’t want to.”

“Oh
, yes she does. I’ve waited a lifetime to see my baby swim,” Nicole yelled from her room.

Sara
saw where this was going and she was fed up with it.

She
grasped the seat of her chair with her hands, reached her fin out, pressed it down onto the kitchen floor, and lifted her bottom off the chair. Pulling her hips forward, she lowered herself down to floor.

Once
she was sitting, she turned over, lay on her belly, and began to soldier crawl toward her room. She’d made it several feet when Xanthus stepped in front of her, squatted down, and silently commanded her attention.

S
he ignored him and crawled around his feet. “Sara? What are you doing?” he asked. There was a hint of amusement in his voice.

“I’m going back to bed.
You and my mom can do what you like, but I refuse to be a part of it.”

Sara was grateful that he didn’t try to stop her or try to help her to her room. S
he didn’t need either of them telling her what she could and couldn’t do. And she could darn well get to her room by herself.

She
crawled through her doorway, flicked her fin, and slammed the door shut. She turned her body around, reached up, and locked the doorknob for good measure.

“Where
’s Sara?” She heard her mother’s muffled voice ask.

“She
’s going back to bed,” Xanthus said.

“
Oh, no she isn’t. I didn’t go to all that effort getting her up just to have her go back to sleep. We are going swimming and that’s all there is to it.”

“
Nicole, just let her be,” Xanthus said.

“
What? It sounds like you’re telling me how to raise my own daughter.”

“Of
course not. She’s a grown woman. She has a mind of her own and is determined to use it. And if you don’t begin to understand and respect that, she’ll just disappear again and I can almost guarantee it’ll be longer before you see her again.”

Sara
sat on the floor next to her skewed mattress and listened.

“But
you
could make her see me. You’ll be her husband after all.”

“
Nicole, Sara does not like to be ordered around. If I ever tried to do that, she’d leave me too, which is not an option for me. I love your daughter and I’d rather lose my tail forever than lose her. If you’d just let her make her own decisions, you wouldn’t need to have anyone
make
her see you.”

“
But you don’t understand. I do this all for her own good. When she was little, she wouldn’t even come out of her room. She was so afraid of everyone and everything. If I hadn’t forced her, she would never have had the courage to leave the house. I did everything for her. I even gave up a perfectly wonderful husband in order to keep her.”

“
This perfectly wonderful husband wanted you to get rid of your own daughter?”

Oh great, here it comes
.

“
He knew Sara was unstable and he saw how my life was turned upside down because of her. Charles tried to convince me that I should have her cared for in an institution, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I had to protect her. It was because of Sara that Charles left me. So can’t you see how much I’ve sacrificed for her? I think I deserve some respect.”

A hand clamped down over
Sara’s mouth. “If I know my brother, this conversation is about to become a lot more heated. Too bad we’ll miss it.” The next thing Sara knew, Gael’s arm was tight around her waist and they were flying across the room. They flew through her open window toward the cliff. Sara’s stomach dropped as they dove down toward the water. She tried to scream, but Gael’s hand was pressed down too hard against her mouth. She tasted blood.

Sara
fought him with everything she had. Gael yanked hard on her head, and squeezed her waist so tightly it was difficult to breathe. “Stop fighting me or I’ll break your little neck, filthy cur. Don’t mistake me for my brother. I don’t have a merciful bone in my body.”

Sara stopped
struggling. She didn’t doubt that Gael would follow through on his threat.

Gael and Sara
moved fast through the murky waters. Sara couldn’t see much at first. The water churned with silt and bubbles from the battering waves above. She braced herself for impact just before she slammed into the side of a boulder. The water whooshed out of her lungs and Sara struggled to gulp in some oxygen. Gael turned her around to face him. “I wish I had time to play with you now, but my brother can be a bit unpredictable when it comes to a hunt. And from what I’ve seen, he’ll hunt you to the ends of the earth. That is if I’m lucky.”

Gael began to chant
. Sara didn’t know the words but the cadences were familiar. He was speaking Atlantian. A silver light appeared several feet away. It started small, the size of a pea, and then grew into a large, shimmering circle about six feet in diameter. Sara knew it was some kind of a door. She also knew that if she went through that door with Gael, she’d probably never see Xanthus again.

Sara
screamed, wailing high and loud. Gael’s eyes flew open wide in shock as he slapped his hands over his ears and roared. Sara continued to shriek as she saw a fist fly toward her. An explosion of pain knocked her head back and darkness engulfed her.

Where under Olympus was the cab? Xanthus held the blind slat up enough to peer outside the front window.

“Xanthus, I need an outside opinion.” Nicole
’s shout came from her bedroom.

Xanthus narrowed his eyes at the empty street. He sighed, turned away
, and tromped down the hall to her bedroom, once again.

Nicole held up two hangers with silky blouses draped off them. Well, this
was better than the bikinis she’d shown him last time. Where in Hades was Sara? Shouldn’t
she
be helping her mother with her thousand selections?

“You’re a man
,” Nicole said.

Obviously.

“Which one do you think is sexier?” She did a little wiggle and cocked one eyebrow.

“Sexier?” Xanthus cast a glance toward Sara’s room.

“Yes, as a man. Which one would you rather see me in?”

“Nicole, don’t you think Sara…”

“Oh, Sara
never
gives her opinion,” Nicole interrupted. “Besides, she knows next to nothing about fashion.”

“And I do?”

“You can tell me which you’d rather see me in.”

He sighed. “They both look nice.”

“Oh, no. You’re not getting off that easy. Choose. I want to know which one you think looks better.” One by one, she held them up to her chest.

They
were both pretty—silky, bright, feminine. One was yellow and the other green. He liked yellow. It reminded him of the sun. “The yellow one looks nice,” he said, venturing a suggestion.

Nicole scrunched up her face. “You’re kidding.” She held the yellow blouse up to inspect it closer. She turned back to him with an expression that suggested he was insane.
“The yellow one? Really? You
have
to be kidding.”

Xanthus threw up his hands in defeat. “You asked.”

“Well, next time I won’t.”

Xanthus stomped from the room. “Five
minutes, Nicole,” he said, “and we’re leaving. You’d better pack faster.”

“With the help I’m
getting, it’s probably going to take me an hour.”

Xanthus stepped up to Sara’s door and knocked. “Sara, it’s time we get going. Your mom is
nearly done packing. We’re heading to the mainland and your mom is going to Maui to visit a friend.” He hoped Sara wouldn’t argue about leaving with him. He wasn’t about to leave her again. Still, he had an important mission to accomplish.

Xa
nthus waited for Sara to answer. He was met with silence. Why wasn’t she answering him?

“Getting the silent
treatment, huh?” Nicole asked. “She does that all the time.”

S
he’d never done that to Xanthus before. Uneasiness clenched his gut. What if something was wrong?

He tried the knob
. Locked. “Sara, you need to answer me.”

He waited for a minute and still there was no response.

“Sara, answer me or I’m breaking down the door.”

S
till no answer.

Fear seized him. Something was very wrong.
Xanthus shoved his shoulder into the door and the frame splintered. Inside the room, he saw the disheveled mess from before, but what he didn’t see was worse than a knife to the chest. Sara was gone. The curtains billowed from her open window.

“Sara!”
Xanthus’s anguished cry rent the air as he raced to the window. He looked out toward the sea. He could still smell her sweet scent but he also smelled the sick odor of his brother.

How could he
have been such a fool? He’d thought Gael wouldn’t dare touch her while he claimed her, but once again, he was wrong about his brother. And Sara might die because of it.

***

A tremendous pounding in her skull was the first thing Sara was aware of. She felt weightless, almost like she was having an out-of-body experience. She was underwater. Memories flooded her mind. She threw her head back in a panic, slamming it into something hard. Her pounding head now felt like it was about to explode. She reached back to inspect the damage—it felt like she’d split her head open. Her fingers brushed a small lump. Okay, maybe she’d live, for now.

She tried to figure out where she was
, but all she could see was pitch blackness.

She
couldn’t believe what had happened. She’d been kidnapped, taken from her own bedroom, with Xanthus right in the next room. Everything had happened so fast her head was reeling. Or was that just her killer headache?

Sara
tried her best to see something, anything at all, as she reached out into the darkness. Her hands bumped into something hard and she lightly touched it. It was a metal bar. She kept searching with her hands and felt more metal bars all around her. She was in some kind of cage.

H
ow would Xanthus ever find her? And would Gael kill her? Should she tell Gael that she and Xanthus were getting married? Would he have second thoughts about killing the fiancée of his brother? No, if that were going to help, Xanthus would have told him yesterday. Instead, he’d told Gael that he was going to kill her.

T
elling Gael about her relationship with Xanthus was out of the question. She might die, but Sara didn’t want to put Xanthus put on a hit list too.

From the corner of
her eyes, a blue glow materialized, illuminating the outline of a jagged entrance to the room she was in. The swelling illumination began to fill the room. As the light increased, she saw that she wasn’t in a room at all, but a very large cave.

And s
he wasn’t alone.

There was another cage beside
hers. A shadow moved around, circling the cage, a shadow in the shape of a monstrous shark. Sara’s heart began to race.

The shadow of the shark got larger and larger until
it slammed into the bars. Sara shrieked as the impact threw the side of the cage into her shoulder. The rocking cage pounded against the cave floor. All the while, the light continued to increase. Sara searched her surroundings, rubbing her aching shoulder. Her cage and the shark’s were connected. Thank heavens metals bars separated them or she’d be shark food.

Sara
moved back, trying to get some distance between herself and the creature. There wasn’t much room to work with. Her own tiny cage was about three feet wide and six feet vertical. She remained upright, plastered against the bars. The shark’s cage was much bigger than her own, probably about four times as big as her apartment. It allowed the shark to circle around as he stared her down with his black eyes.

“Frightening isn’t
he, human?” Gael’s amused voice came like a mist through the mouth of the cave opening. A moment later, his smiling face appeared. He wore a necklace with an orb that glowed blue, bright enough to illuminate the entire cave. Sara saw that the opening he came through led not to the outside, but to a rocky tunnel.

Sara
darted a glance back to the shark. It was the biggest shark she’d ever seen. The colossal shark charged toward Gael. Once again, he hit the metal bars and both their cages shook. Sara’s body trembled as she gulped in breaths of water.

Gael
’s eyes widened in shock as he snarled out a slew of foreign words. Xanthus had taught Sara some Atlantian, but from the sound of it, he wouldn’t be teaching her any of these words. She had a feeling they were very foul.

“
Amintah is a bit agitated. As well he should be. He hasn’t eaten in a very long time. I can see his frustration with having a meal so close and not being able to have even a nibble.”

“What are you going to do with me?”
Sara did her best to sound brave, but her voice cracked.

“I’m going to have some fun with
you, my retched, little cur.”

“You aren’t going to
…” She couldn’t say it. She didn’t even want to think it.

“You wish. I put on a good show for my brother yesterday when I said I would like to mate with you. But I’d sooner mate with a sea cow than a filthy
human. Not when I have plenty of willing Dagonian females. But I saw what I needed to see. He may have
said
he was going to kill you, but I know my brother. He thought he could fool me, but he’s the fool, a fool who is in love with a human.

“And
he’s given me the means to take him down. Before all this is over, he’ll be exposed for the human lover he is. He’ll lose everything—his status, his respect, and ultimately his life.

“But first, I must attend to Amintah.” He gestured to
ward the shark. “He’s very hungry. Why don’t we give him a bite?”

Sara’s
eyes widened and she clung to the back of her cage. She looked toward the vicious shark. Scars crisscrossed his back. Then she saw two metal rings that looked like handcuffs connected to the bars that kept her separated from the shark. It wasn’t hard to figure out what those were used for.

Gael reached out, grabbed
her right elbow, and yanked her grip away from the bar. She clawed and twisted with all her might. “Please, no. Please don’t do this.”

Gael may not have been as big or muscular as Xanthus, but he was still much stronger than
she was. Sara was helpless as he put her hand through the metal ring and locked it in place, closing it tightly around her wrist.

“Please, don’t do
this, Gael. I never did
anything
to you. Why are you doing this to me?”

“I do it for the sheer enjoyment of it
,” he said with a smile.

Sara
yanked and pulled with all her strength, trying to free her hand. The metal cut painfully into her skin. It was no use—her hand was exposed inside the shark’s cage. And the shark kept circling.

A few moments later,
the shark moved in. Sara sucked in water, closed her eyes, and braced for the attack. Something sandpapery brushed over her knuckles and a jolt of fear nearly stopped her heart. Then she felt nothing. She was shaking hard when she chanced a peek. The shark continued to circle.

S
he yanked her hand again, trying her best to pull it out.

A moment
later, the shark moved in again. Sara closed her eyes and braced herself. Like before, his rough skin scraped over her knuckles.

“Oh Hades,
Amintah,” Gael said. “Just bite her hand off already.” Without warning, the shark turned his attention to Gael, charging him and slamming into the side of the cage. “Amintah, what is wrong with you?” Gael shouted.

T
he shark turned away and continued to circle. Gael shook his head and scowled. He swam forward and pulled out a knife. “This will get him going.” He reached in and slashed the blade across Sara’s fingers, cutting deep, bringing instant pain as she cried out. “There’s no way he can resist you now.”

T
he shark’s gaping mouth appeared in an instant. Gael jerked his arm back just in time to miss the snapping teeth. When the shark couldn’t clamp down on Gael’s arm, it bit down on a bar. The shark shook the cage violently, jerking Sara’s wrist painfully against the band and slamming the metal cage against the rocky floor over and over again. Silt clouded the water.

T
he shark resumed circling the cage.

Gael
gaped at the creature, his eyes following his movement. Once again, Gael looked hopeful when the shark moved in toward Sara. This time she didn’t close her eyes, didn’t cringe away. Amintah kept his eye on her and for a third time, brushed his body under her outstretched hand. Sara’s fear of being exposed to attack had melted away. She was far from being an expert on shark behavior, but she suddenly felt calm. This monstrous shark was not going to hurt her. He was giving her a message. She now understood it perfectly. She had nothing to fear from him.

Gael shouted,
enraged.

Sara’s
ears stung as Gael let loose a string of profanity. She didn’t understand a word of it, but it was upsetting nonetheless. He raced over, unlocked her door, and ripped the cage open, cursing at her the entire time.

“I guess I’ll just have to
take care of you myself.” When Gael released her hand, he fisted her hair in his grasp and yanked her out the door. Sara heard the shark slamming into the metal bars as they entered the tunnel. She wished Gael had opened Amintah’s door, too.

S
ara couldn’t believe this Dagonian was Xanthus’s brother. She felt her hair being ripped out by the roots. Xanthus and his brother couldn’t be more different. Xanthus was a protector, his brother, Gael, was a soulless, evil monster.

“Why are you doing this to me? Why aren’t you just killing me
?”

“The best things in life are to be savored. And I am going to enjoy watching you die. Triton thinks my brother is a great warrior, but look at him. He didn’t have the heart to kill an abomination. By the gods, he fell in love with the abomination.

“
The law demands your death regardless of how my brother feels about it. He may think he’s above the law, but he’s not. And I’m only too happy to rectify the situation. Once it is known what he has done, it will mean his death also.”

While he spoke,
Gael pulled her through the tunnel’s twists and turns, not hesitating a bit when they came to forks in the maze. The light increased as they moved. It was blinding as they entered open waters and Gael swished to a stop.

“Now I’m going to explain what will happen.” He pulled
Sara up close. She smelled an odor emanating from him and it wasn’t pleasant. It made her stomach churn.

“You
see, I still can’t have anyone think I inflicted injuries on you for my own entertainment, and they can’t know I was the one who killed you. They’d never believe that you posed any kind of a physical threat to me, so they’d expect me to bring you in alive. If we were still on the surface, it wouldn’t matter what I did to you. But down here, it does. However, if I did bring you in alive, they would rob me of your kill by executing you themselves. I have no intention of letting them have that honor.