Two more times I bent energy to make light, until I had a light source in all four directions, north, south, east, and west, with me directly in the center. Then, and only then, did I let my concentration falter.
Turning in circles, I got my first good look at the room around me. What I saw had my eyes widening and my heart nearly pounding out of my chest.
Chapter 10
Swimming toward one end of the chamber, I blinked several times, certain that I wasn’t actually seeing what I thought I was. But the closer I got to the wall—which was elaborately carved with scene after scene of mermaids—the more certain I became that I was not imagining what was in front of me.
Someone had carved five shelves into the cave wall, whittling the sharp rocks into long, rounded platforms that ran the circumference of the room. And on four of the shelves, spaced equidistantly apart, were hundreds upon hundreds of pearls—in every shape, color, and size imaginable. The top shelf, which contained no pearls, held large pieces of sea glass instead, their ragged edges polished away by years under the surface.
Though the water in the cavern was ebbing and flowing with the cyclical, never-ending rhythm of the ocean, neither the pearls nor the glass moved so much as an inch. Instead, it was as if each one had been glued in place with something even endless exposure to salt water couldn’t wear away.
I’d never seen anything like it, couldn’t imagine who would have the patience—or the time—to painstakingly create the shelves, let alone collect this variety and range of pearls. With the different shapes and colors, I knew they had to have come from all over the Pacific, and maybe the Atlantic as well.
So what were they doing here? I wondered dazedly. And why would someone want me to see this so badly that they’d all but electrocuted me to get me here?
Not sure what else to do, I reached out a hand and touched a pearl directly in front of me. It was one of the biggest I’d ever seen, maybe fifteen or sixteen millimeters across, and it was the lustrous, shiny black of the Tahitian pearls my father used to give to my mother on special occasions.
To my surprise, it came away from the shelf easily, as if it had just been waiting for someone to pick it up. The moment my hand closed around it, however, pain shot through my head, so all-consuming and terrible that for long seconds I was convinced my mind was literally being ripped apart. It was like someone had shoved giant, poison-tipped claws straight into my brain and started shredding.
I stumbled back from the shelf, tried to drop the pearl as I clutched my head, but now that I was holding it, the same magic that had kept the pearl on the shelf for God only knew how long was also keeping it attached to my palm.
It burned wherever it touched, and I opened my fingers, tried to shake it loose, but nothing I did worked. Even scraping my palm against the side of the cave wouldn’t dislodge it—all it did was increase the blistering pain in my hand and the agony in my head, until the electric shocks of earlier seemed like mere tickles.
Uncontrollable tears poured down my face, blending with the salt water all around me. I didn’t know what to do, didn’t know how to make it stop. All I knew was that if something didn’t happen soon, I wasn’t going to survive. Already, I could feel my heart pumping so fast that I was sure it would burst.
With each second that passed, I grew more terrified, less able to function, and slowly I sank down to the cavern floor. I continued to struggle, to try to pry the pearl away from me, but nothing worked. The water around me turned red and I realized, distractedly, that my nose was bleeding.
Then I started to convulse, my body jerking in twenty different directions. Darkness beckoned. Instead of trying to resist it as I normally did, I rushed toward the blessed numbness of unconsciousness, embraced it with what little will I had left.
The second I stopped fighting, the convulsions ceased. My body went limp and the agony that had raked me for what seemed like forever dissipated. In its place was light, bursting behind my eyes in a dazzling rainbow array that stunned me in a way even the pain couldn’t. The colors spread out, widened, until they were all that I could see. And then it was like I was being sucked under, sucked through them as the cavern, the colors, the whole world, began to spin around me.
And then she was there. Cecily. My mother.
But not. She was younger than I remembered, younger than when I knew her. And about a million times more vulnerable. She was in human form, kneeling in the middle of Coral Straits in nothing but an emerald green bikini. Her body was covered in cuts and scratches and the water around her was bloody. So bloody that I couldn’t imagine how she’d survived—until I realized that she was not the only one injured.
On the ground in front of her were five merpeople—a man, a woman, two teenage boys, and a little girl. Though everything was a little grainy, out of focus, they all looked familiar to me, and as I looked back and forth between them and my mother, horrified knowledge filled me. I felt like I knew these people, because looking at them—especially the kids—was like looking at my mother. Like looking at me. Like looking at the unknown woman on the ocean floor, a huge, gaping hole where her heart used to be.
This was my mother’s family. My family. My grandparents and uncles and aunt. This scene, these deaths, were the reason I had no relatives down here, no one who cared about me besides Hailana, who had all the motherly instinct of a hammerhead shark. Of course, that was probably an insult to those sharks, even if they were known to eat their own young.
As I watched my mother stagger to her feet—bruised, bloody, broken—the pain came back. It wasn’t quite as excruciating this time, tempered as it was with knowledge and distance, and I realized what it was I was feeling. My mother’s pain and grief, so raw and acute that it had brought me to the brink of madness. Is that how she had felt, then, watching as her family lay murdered in front of her?
I thought of Moku, of Rio, of my father. Thought of what it had felt like to see Cecily ripped apart in front of me, and I knew that yes, that was exactly what I was feeling. What I had felt.
How had she borne all that anger and hatred and grief and pain without literally destroying herself? In those moments, when I’d been caught up in it, I had prayed for unconsciousness, prepared for death. Had thought either, both, would be better.
The pain was there again, a burning in my gills that made it nearly impossible to draw air. I wanted to put the pearl down, to throw it as far away from me as I could, but I didn’t move, didn’t even try to let go this time. I couldn’t, not when I knew there was still more to see, more to understand. This glimpse into my mother’s life was unprecedented and I wanted, needed, to know.
Cecily stumbled back from their bodies, turned, and limped across the ocean floor. It seemed strange to see her like that, so delicate, so human. Which didn’t make sense. Except for brief moments of my childhood and that last, terrible encounter with Tiamat, I had only ever seen my mother in her human form. So why, then, did it seem anathema to me? So strange and awkward?
Because I had spent so long thinking of her as mermaid? Spent so long resenting the choice she had made that I had forgotten how many ways we were alike?
I didn’t know the answer, wasn’t sure I wanted to, as my mother lurched back toward the palace. Toward Hailana.
When was this? My mother looked so young and vulnerable, but something about the expression on her face and the set of her shoulders told me she was a lot older than I had originally judged her to be. Mermaids aged at a different rate than humans, so their adolescence and young adulthood could last centuries—as long as they stayed in the water. Once they hit land and lived as humans, they aged at the same rate people did.