Carefully, mindful of my delicate mental state, I reached out with my faculties to try and make sense of what I was feeling. It didn’t exactly feel like breathing. Water wasn’t rushing into my lungs, and they weren’t expanding or deflating, either. Instead, I felt a kind of… flow, a very gentle drift, and a light, pleasant tingle behind my ears.
Hesitantly, I reached out and stroked the tingly spot, and felt three ridges back there, as if the curve of my ear had been duplicated a few more times.
I looked at Donovan. “Have I got gills?”
“Yes.”
“Huh. Well, they definitely weren’t there before.”
“You finally accessed your power, Chosen. You are the One of Every Blood. You can move within all the realms effortlessly, so your magic will provide you with exactly what you need to adapt.”
“Took you long enough,” a voice below me snorted. “I thought you were going to thrash around like a puffed-up pufferfish all day.”
I spun around in the endless blue, awkwardly trying to get into the right position. Hyacinth and Cress floated below us. Cress’s face was also covered by a bubble of oxygen, but I could see her clearly, scowling.
For a second, I gaped at Hyacinth’s tail. It really was absolutely stunning, long and powerful, with shimmering reddish-orange scales morphing into an enviable flat stomach. Her breasts were only barely covered by her floating golden hair. She saw me looking and waved her tail smugly. “Bet you wish you had one of these, don’t you? You might have mer blood, but you’ll never be like me.”
I sighed. “Let’s just get this over with, shall we? Where is the sea witch’s lair?”
Hyacinth smirked. “This way. Follow me.” With a flick of her tail, she darted off, heading straight down, disappearing into the endless blue almost instantly.
“Hyacinth,” I called, using my “stop fucking around” voice. “If you want to escort us, you will need to make allowances for our pace.”
There was no response.
I sighed. “You don’t want to get in trouble for showing us the portal, do you?”
She darted back, her tail flicking powerfully behind her topropel her quickly through the water. “Ugh. Fine. Come on.”
Awkwardly, I spun my body so I faced downwards and kicked. Cress floated just in front of me, slicing through the water with more grace than I could summon. But then again, she was wearing her skin-tight battle leathers, which made her sleek like a seal, while I was still wearing my shirt and pencil skirt, which I’d hiked up around my thighs so I could kick my legs more freely.
I could feel Donovan behind me. Covering my six, I suppose he would say. He’d be getting an eyeful of my panties right now.
“This sucks,” Hyacinth moaned, barely moving her tail to propel herself downward. “How the hell can you possibly live like this? If I had to swim this slowly all the time, I think I’d die of boredom. I’d die of hunger, definitely. There’s no way you could catch anything going this slowly. I’d have to go vegan and eat seaweed for the rest of my days. Bleeack.” She faked a gag.
“Be kind, please, Hyacinth,” I reprimanded her gently. “We are doing our best.”
“I can feel the barnacles growing on me,” she moaned, scrubbing her shoulders with her hands. “I’m going to have to get someone to scrape them off.”
Shapes came into focus in front of me. I tuned out Hyacinth’s moaning as the seafloor came into view, first, a field of bright-green seaweed swaying gently in the tide, then, a rocky reef rose up. It was a glorious underwater garden, bright with all colors and shapes and sizes of coral—vivid pink rosettes rising up from rock, claws of bright-orange, long spikes of purple, big, bulbous round green protrusions, and a giant yellow thing that looked like a brain. Little fish zipped in front of us, hiding in the pudgy tentacles of fat anemones that lay between thecoral. A black-and-white striped angelfish, bristling with spikes, nudged into the reef, flat-shaped silver fish sparkled as they dashed left and right, and a giant grouper drifted by, mouthing stupidly, as if outraged at our mere presence.
My eyes boggled. It was an enchanting sight.
“Come on, slowpoke,” Hyacinth called. A smug smile pulled at her lips. “The sea witch’s lair is this way.”
She led us down further, where the seafloor dipped down between two reefs. The coral grew less bright, the colors more muted. The light dimmed, as we went down and down along the bare sandy seafloor. Soon, I realized we were being funneled into the bottom of a deep trench, the top seemed to get further and further away, and the light was rapidly disappearing.
A feeling of danger pricked my senses. I glanced behind me and caught Donovan’s eye. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”
“No,” he answered, his tone grim. “But we must get to the siren stone before my brother. Its power would be terrible in his hands. Be brave, Chosen. Cress and I will fight if we have to.”
A spiky figure loomed up ahead. As we got closer, I realized it was a skeleton of something huge—a whale, probably, bones picked completely clean.
“Well, this is not ominous at all, is it? It’s like something out of my nightmares.” I gazed around at the oddly prickly-looking walls of the trench, realizing that they were littered with smaller bones, too.
“Not far to go now, not far at all!” Hyacinth flicked her tail, propelling herself forward through the cracked bones of the giant whale, spinning elegantly around the ribs until she was on the other side. I swam through the enormous dead creature tentatively, using the rough bones to propelmyself forward. This giant skeleton felt like a warning. Danger. Keep out. Enter and die.
Hyacinth floated on the other side, waiting for us. She pressed her finger to her lips, indicating quiet, and waited for us to swim closer.
