There was a distant humming coming from the shell, and I knew if I listened too long, I would belong to it. A wiser womanwould have walked away and left what should be forgotten be forgotten.
Still… I stepped closer.
The whispers tightened around my mind, threading themselves into my thoughts. A pulse radiated from the shell, brushing my fingertips. It felt alive. Like the knowledge within was a permanent and tangible thing. I wanted to hold it, to hear everything it had to say, to be infinite.
Something inside it moved.
I froze.
Another shift. A scraping. And then—slowly, majestically, with all the menace of a king disturbed from sleep—
A tiny crab crawled out of the conch’s mouth.
It paused. Turned. Fixed me with beady black eyes full of scorn and the unmistakable disdain of someone judging my life choices.
“Oh,” I whispered. “You are…unexpected.”
The crab clicked its claw at me. Twice. Offended.
“Well, aren’t you just Bash in miniature with your grumpiness,” I muttered. “Sebastian Junior, it is.”
Sebastian Jr. raised his claw as if to object, then reconsidered, scuttling into the conch’s rim like a sentry defending its home.
Whatever amusement the unlikely creature created in me was quickly lost beneath the weight of something heavy–something wrong.
I swallowed.
Because the whispers had changed.
They weren’t calling to me anymore.
They were warning.
The seabed trembled.
I realized that the reason I couldn’t guess how high the cathedral went was that it wasn’t a ceiling, but the dome. Waterpressed harder against the dome above, as though some vast shape brushed against it from the outside.
A shadow passed over Atlantis—large enough to blot out everything.
Sebastian Jr. fled into the spiral of the conch, disappearing with a tiny, horrified squeak.
I knew what lurked above, and knowing that this peculiar creature that had no business existing in a legendary shell was terrified of it should have had me running back to the wraith and begging Edmonds for mercy.
Instead, I was a stubborn creature who didn’t know when to quit.
So I reached out, and my fingers closed around the Abyssal Conch.
The world cracked open.
A roar surged up from the abyss, so deep it rattled the bones of the drowned.
The Leviathan was awake.
And it was angry.
Chapter thirty-eight
The Leviathan
