Chapter 2

 

Joni Campbell… she was the Druidess who’d helped me and Ashley, along with the Shaman, Roger, after we were attacked as children. At some point she moved away. Disappeared mysteriously after that. Roger didn’t like to talk about it. She had been the love of his life, until she left him for another dude, before Roger started seeing Ashley.

“Joni? How the hell did you… and a tail?”

“We’ll have time to become reacquainted later,” Joni said. “For now, take out those sharks!”

I nodded. I couldn’t believe it. This girl, along with Roger, had basically saved my life. To think she somehow ended up joining this underwater legion of wyrmriders? And I thought my life had taken a few strange twists and turns.

I gripped Beli and squeezed the trigger. I missed. Beli was an intelligent elemental, a dragon spirit of a sort. You’d think he’d make sure he always hit the target… but apparently, when summoned as a soul weapon, it’s my skill, not his will, that makes for a hit or a miss.

“I have an idea,” I shouted, probably a bit too loudly, into Joni’s ear. “Just get us a little closer.”

I willed Beli to reform as a blade—the red, white, and green energies that represented the elementals that combined to form Beli danced around the blade, making the water around me glow with a luminescent splendor.

A group of sharks approached. They moved together with intention, as if guided by another’s will. Whoever this Anne Bonny character was, she had to have some serious magical multitasking abilities to keep this many zombie sharks on point.

As we approached, I slid down the side of the sea serpent that Joni was riding, held onto Joni’s tail with one hand, and extended my blade with the other.

It sliced through the sharks one by one with a fury as we torpedoed our way past them. “Gimme a hell yeah!” I shouted.

Joni looked down at me, rolling her eyes.

I shrugged. Pauli teleported onto my shoulders. “Dude, not the best time.”

“You asked for a hell yeah,” Pauli said. “So, hell yeah!”

With a flip of her tail, Joni flung Pauli and me together back onto the wyrm she was riding. “We have to get out of here.”

“What? We’re kicking zombie shark ass down here!”

“For now, but the numbers are too many.”

I looked across the water at the second wyrmrider—a host of sharks had swarmed around him.

“Take us over there,” I shouted to Joni. “We can help him!”

Joni nodded, pulled on her reins, and her wyrm turned violently, almost throwing me from its back in the process.

We crashed into a crowd of swarming sharks, and I slashed at as many as I could. But when the black cloud of dissipated sharks cleared, red filled the water.

“Evan!” Joni shouted into the blood-filled waters.

There was no response. Joni flicked her wrist, and the wyrm exhaled forcefully into the blood, clearing the waters.

Lying on the seafloor was a bitten wyrm, and the severed torso of the second wyrmrider.

We didn’t have time to linger. I swung my blade down on another shark as it approached my position.

Joni directed her wyrm down toward the corpse of her companion. “Annabelle, I need you to strike the bodies.”

“But they’re dead. There’s nothing I can…”

“They were bitten. If you don’t, they’ll be turned.”

I nodded. Zombie sharks were bad enough. But a zombie sea dragon? I shuddered at the thought as I quickly sliced my blade into the other wyrm’s body, and then struck the severed torso of the one Joni had called Evan for good measure—though without his head attached, I wasn’t entirely sure it was necessary.

“Like I said,” Joni continued, “we have to get out of here.”

“But wait, where’s Agwe?” I asked.

Joni looked around and shrugged. “Protocol dictates that once we arrive, he’ll use our cover to flee to safety. He should be back in Fomoria.”

“Fomoria?” I asked.

“The Vilokan of the Sea,” Joni explained. “But for my people, for the Druids, it’s always been Fomoria.”

I clung to Joni’s waist as I did my best hold myself on the wyrm. Pauli had managed to wrap himself around my waist and curled his tail around one of the saddle straps for good measure. Pauli was good for a lot of things—but I never in my wildest dreams thought he’d be doubling for a seatbelt on an underwater sea dragon.

I could feel the water pull on my hair as we practically darted through the water. Bright lights illuminated what looked like a massive city ahead—the Vilokan of the Sea or, as Joni called it, Fomoria.

As we drew nearer to the underwater city, I gasped—which produced the odd sensation of salt water rapidly filling my lungs. The city was breathtaking, even when approaching it from afar. A giant translucent dome of some sort encapsulated the entire place. It looked like a snow globe, though the dome was tinted with a blue hue. We tend to think of the ocean as blue—but that’s only because it reflects the sky. In waters this deep everything is basically dark. The dome that surrounded the city produced a light that illuminated the sea for miles around it. It was bright and magical. It gave the city light, most surely, but it also likely doubled as a wall. I suppose if you’re protecting an underwater city from potential intruders, a simple wall wouldn’t do much good since invaders could simply swim over it.

Inside the dome stood massive spires, glistening like the pearl that also formed Joni’s helmet. These weren’t like any buildings you’d see on land, not in New Orleans or any other city. These were massive columns, twisted, and pointed on the top. They gave this underwater city what I’d normally call a stunning skyline—but being God knows how many leagues under the sea, there was no skyline, technically speaking.

As we approached the city, a part of the shell opened as if some kind of intelligence within it had detected our presence and was welcoming us in.

The city was even more beautiful from the inside than from the outside. Like Vilokan—or what was once Vilokan—the city had narrow paths. There were no streets, however, since in this city people were not limited to horizontal travel. They could move up and down through the city’s waters with as much ease as they could pass between them. The spires had open balconies appearing in random positions—at least they seemed random from my perspective—up and down their length.

Joni’s wyrm slithered between the spires as we approached a larger collection of towers—an underwater castle of sorts. The wyrm settled in the water on the edge of a giant platform—not a balcony exactly, but a large horizontal floor that was elevated about twenty feet above the seafloor. Joni dismounted the wyrm, and I followed suit. Before I could follow her, a giant Merman stuck a giant trident in my way.

“None but La Sirene may pass.”

“Excuse me?”

Joni turned. “Please excuse me, Annabelle. I’ll send for you tomorrow. I am sure you have questions, and Admiral Agwe would surely prefer I answer them on his behalf.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Admiral?”

Joni nodded. “When a wyrmrider falls, the duty to inform his next of kin falls to me. It is a sacred duty that I must see to immediately. Until then, Titus here will see you to your quarters.”

I looked at Titus, up and down. His massive mer-tail was, admittedly, intimidating. Though that was even less impressive than his chiseled six-pack and his massive arms. He wasn’t the sort of Merman I imagined other Merfolk tended to fuck with.