She took a few strokes back from the door and eyed the upper levels of the palazzo. The windows had been boarded up. Everything—the carvings, the pediments, the fluted columns—was covered in silt. The whole place looked abandoned to anyone swimming by.
But Becca Quickfin wasn’t just anyone. She was bright and sharp-eyed, and almost immediately she saw that the lock under the door’s massive handle didn’t match the rest of the palazzo’s facade. Its keyhole wasn’t filled with silt. It wasn’t rusted or corroded. In fact, it looked new.
As Becca was pondering the lock, a movement to her left startled her. Her head snapped around. Her hand went for her dagger.
But there was nothing there. Nothing but the columns, the carvings, the impassive stone face.
Becca swam closer, peering at it. Was it her imagination, or had she seen its mouth twitch?
“You have to let me in. I need to see him,” she said.
The stone face said nothing.
“You moved. I saw you,” said Becca. Loudly. But the face maintained its silence.
“I need to speak with Marco!” she demanded. “Let. Me. In!”
And then everything happened at once.
A hand was clapped over Becca’s mouth. An arm snaked around her waist. She tried to scream but couldn’t. She heard the lock’s bolt turn, then the doors swung open. Her assailant shoved her inside with such force that she went tumbling through the water head over tail.
The door slammed behind her. The bolt shot into place.
Becca was alone in the dark.
“HELLO? IS THERE anyone here?” Becca called out, picking herself up off a cold stone floor.
She was inside the duca’s palazzo. The waters were so black, she could barely see her own hands in front of her. There was no light to use for an illuminata songspell, so she cast some waterfire instead. Her voice was shaky, and the spell produced only a tiny flame. It rose from the floor, revealing the high-ceilinged entry hall she now found herself in.
“Hello? Marco? Anybody?”
As the words left her lips, Becca felt vibrations in the murk. A split second later, something sliced through the water in front of her, silent and swift.
She glimpsed a black eye, a jagged row of teeth, a shimmer of gray.
It was a mako shark.
She whirled around and saw three more.
Becca knew that if the sharks wanted to attack, they would’ve done so by now. Instead, they seemed to be herding her. Bit by bit they nudged her down the long hallway and then upward, through a vertical passage. The water lightened as she rose, and a reflection of fire—airfire, the kind made by terragoggs—rippled on top of it.
She stopped, trying to see up through the water to what awaited her on the surface. As she did, she felt a tug on her left hand and gasped, afraid that it was one of the sharks. Looking down, she was surprised to find that a tiny orange octopus, no more than seven inches in diameter, had wrapped a short, stubby tentacle around her pinky finger. It had round eyes and tiny triangular fins on the top of its head that looked like ears.
“This way, mermaid!” the little creature squeaked, pointing with another tentacle.
“But the sharks—” Becca started to say.
“Oh, they won’t touch us. They’re afraid of me,” the octopus said. She raised one of her tentacles and flexed it, like a bodybuilder showing off a bicep.
Though she was still scared, it was all Becca could do not to burst into laughter. She followed the absurd little octopus up through the water toward a cavernous room that contained both water and air.
As Becca broke the surface, she found that she was floating in a very large indoor pool. Three of the pool’s sides were sheer, tiled walls, but the fourth ended in a shallow ledge. Beyond it was a room for humans. Its floor was carpeted. Shelves full of books lined the walls. Flames crackled in a large fireplace.
Floating by the ledge, all in a row, were ten mermen. They all held spearguns, and every single one of them was trained on Becca.
“Who are you and why are you here?” one of them asked. “Answer the question.”
“Those are two questions, actually,” Becca pointed out, removing her hood. “I’m here because I need the duca’s help. My name is Rebecca Quickfin, and I—”
“Becca?” a voice called out, one that she had longed to hear ever since they’d parted.
“Marco?” she called back, uncertainly. “Where are—”
Before she could even finish her sentence, Becca saw a blur on the edge of the pool. She heard a splash. And then a human surfaced.
A human with warm brown eyes and a beautiful smile. His brown hair, sopping wet, lay plastered across his forehead. Drops of water rolled down his handsome face.
“Marco!”
And then his arms were around her, and his lips were on hers. And there was no possible or impossible, no calculations or formulas or theories. There was only her heart, and the huge, wonderful, terrible feeling that filled it. Love.
A few seconds later, though, she remembered that they were not alone, and she hastily broke the kiss, embarrassed.