“I desire war.”
“Is that your final word?” Fathom asks, releasing his Kala.
“It is, pup. Do you wish to challenge it?”
“I must.” Fathom lunges at his father, roaring with war. The prime blocks his attack and sends his son tumbling to the ground. He leaps to strike as well, but Fathom rolls out of the way and springs to his feet right off his back. Father and son trade blows that would kill an ordinary person.
“You have taken our great people and turned them into scavengers, and now you have thrown in with the very beasts that killed so many of us. You are the king of the dead,” Fathom says.
“King nonetheless,” his father roars as he lands a savage hand to his son’s face. Fathom’s cheek opens, and blood pours down his neck.
“This was how it was always going to end, traitor!” Minerva screeches. “The old heir must be removed to make room for the new one.”
The prime leaps onto his son, pressing his forearm against Fathom’s face. If he releases his blades, they will slice off his son’s head.
“It’s over, son!” he shouts. “I have beaten you. I’m sorry to see you go. I would have liked to watch your face when the humans surrender.”
There’s a shkkkkkt!
I scream.
The prime chuckles, and blood leaks out of his mouth.
“Finally, son, you understand what you are. You are Alpha. Take what you want. It is yours.”
He closes his eyes, and Fathom forces the body off of him. He pulls his own blade out of his father’s throat.
“I will earn what is mine,” he says.
Minerva backs into the water one step at a time. I expect her to say something insane, but she doesn’t. Instead, she sinks beneath the waves and is gone. The Rusalka follow, and soon their weapons disappear as well. The Alpha part and allow them to retreat; then they step out of the water to gather on the shore. There are thousands of them.
“I was told there would be a battle here, Fathom,” Flyer says.
“It appears the raging sea got here before we could,” Fathom explains, flashing me a smile.
Ghost joins us. He’s a happy sight, despite his grotesque appearance.
“It is good to see you, blob fish,” Ghost calls out to me. “I hear you have become quite average with your glove.”
I bristle at his insult, then remember he was the one who convinced the others that I could save everyone. I almost bust him but let him have his pride.
“Is it over, nephew?” Braken asks Fathom.
“Hopefully Minerva will take her foul brood to some dark corner of the ocean,” Fathom says. He kneels before his father, and I see that, despite the madness, Fathom still loved him.
“Flyer?” Arcade says. She steps to him tentatively.
He smiles as wide as the sky, then sees her hand. He gives it a serious look.
“Did you do this to impress me?” he jokes.
She smiles. I didn’t think she could. I didn’t think her face made that shape.
“We have much to discuss,” she says to him.
He cocks an eyebrow. “We do?”
“We do.”
Suddenly the ocean grows still. There is no tide, no waves—just eerie silence.
“Talking will have to wait,” Ghost says, pointing out to the water.
It’s then that it begins to churn and bubble. There’s an explosion, and something crashes onto the shore at our feet. It’s as big as a dog and made up entirely of tentacles. It charges right at me, using all of its hyperactive legs to drag itself forward.
“Undine!” Fathom shouts.
“Run!” I shout to the team, and everyone races inland.
The air fills with the shrill cries of the Undine. I don’t know which scares me more, the sound they make or how many I think there are behind us. I take a peek back and hate myself for it. I didn’t need to see the entire beach blanketed in sticky tentacles.
“We can’t outrun them!” Arcade shouts. “We have to fight.”
“Minerva has set them upon us. They will kill everything they touch!” Flyer shouts as he grabs Arcade by her good hand and pulls her onward.
The creatures spring into our numbers, attempting to cling to heads. One lands on the back of an older Triton, and I hear the sickening sound of its spike plunging into flesh. The Triton lets out a horrible cry and falls to the ground. I want to stop and help, but Riley snatches my arm and keeps me running.
In the distance, I spot the wrecked bus we walked through to get here. Soldiers are running through it in our direction. I shout and wave at them, hoping they’ll see what’s happening and run for their lives.
“They’re coming!” I shout to the soldiers. “Turn back!”
“Kid, you’re about two months late for that announcement!” one of them shouts back.
“Not the Rusalka,” I cry. “Something worse!”
One of the soldiers hoists his rocket launcher to his shoulder, aims, and fires. I watch the rocket’s wobbly path as it slams into the endless sea of tentacles. Fire and smoke rise from the charred carcasses, and bodies fly. The other soldier shouts at his radio for more troops when an Undine crashes into him. It’s then that I see the horrible spike they hide. It’s red and coarse, like coral, and it jabs into the back of the soldier’s skull. He screams, but the pain isn’t the worst thing that happens to him. Within seconds, the spike is sucking out everything inside him—blood and bone—until he’s nothing more than a bag of skin discarded onto the sand. The monster rolls onto the ground like it’s stuffed from a Thanksgiving dinner.
I hear a pop, and watch a black streak of smoke fly across the sky. Whatever the soldiers fired lands on the ground not far from us and explodes with a massive boom. I can feel the shock wave. The effect is devastating and grotesque. One rocket blasted a whole twenty yards in diameter, turning the octopus creatures into glop. I cheer when two more streak above, shaking the air as they go.
“The human weapons will not stop them,” Braken barks at us. “Distance is the only thing that will save us.”
My team makes its way around a semi truck just as four jets roar overhead. Each one drops a bomb, and a moment later it feels like I’m in the middle of an earthquake. My eardrums ring, and I’m thrown to the ground. Fathom falls as well. One horrible explosion follows another, shaking my bones. While the world is being ripped in two, I watch hundreds of soldiers racing past us, guns ready and aimed at the shoreline. They storm the beach and fire, their bullets tearing into the octopus creatures one by one.
Riley gets me to my feet, only for us to hear a horrible scream. I turn and look, spotting a soldier flailing about, trying to remove an Undine that has locked onto his head. It ends in the same nightmarish way as the last.
In the chaos I hear someone calling my name. Chloe races out of nowhere.
“Chloe, what are you doing here?”
“I didn’t want to go with them. I want to be with you!” she shouts.
I scoop her up in my arms.
“Hold on,” I beg her, and then we’re running again.
Soldiers race in the opposite direction. I watch one pull the pin from a hand grenade and hurl it as far as he can. It explodes, causing an orchestra of shrieks. Riley waves them on, giving the children time to catch up with us. An Undine lands on Priscilla’s head. She screams, but before it can drive its spike into her neck, Harrison grabs it and hefts it back into the horde.
“They’re flanking us!” a soldier shouts, pointing to the left, where I can see a wave of Undine scurrying ahead. To the right of us, they are doing the same thing. In seconds the beasts have completely surrounded us and are pressing in to finish the job.
An Undine leaps at us and locks onto Suzie’s head. She cries out in pain, and I realize it has her now. Another one comes and grabs Ryan, and Eric next, and they are gone.
One crashes into my head, knocking me to the ground. I can feel it squirming around, its suckers gluing to my skin as it gets in the righ
t position. I hear Chloe screaming and can feel Riley doing his best to pull it off. Fathom shouts my name, urging me to free myself, but it’s got me like a vise. I hear a sucking sound and then a crack, followed by several more, and a pain shoots into my skull. Suddenly the creature’s tentacles release me and it scurries away.
Riley helps me to my feet.
“What happened?” I say, reaching around to the back of my head.
Riley smiles. “The staples stopped it.”
I reach up and touch the wound and the clumsy staples Nurse Amy inserted to close it. I guess I owe her one.
An Undine crashes into Riley and latches tight to his head. I scream and try to help pull it off him as the red spike rears back to impale his spine. There’s a slice, and I see that Fathom has used his blades to cut the foul thing in half.
“We’re not going to make it!” someone shouts, and I brace for another attack, only the Undine have stopped their assault. Instead, they sit patiently, waiting quietly.
The sky fills with the loudest, shrillest roar I have ever heard. I look toward the ocean and see something that, despite all the impossible things I have seen, just should not be frickin’ possible. A tentacle as large as a plane rises out of the water. It’s almost as tall as an apartment building.
“The mother is here,” Arcade says.
Chapter Twenty-Three
WHEN IT SLAMS ONTO THE GROUND, it causes a shock wave that blasts us off our feet. As I stagger to stand, I help Chloe do the same.
“Hey, kiddo, talk to me,” I cry.
She’s groggy, but she mumbles that she’s okay.
Riley lies next to us, unconscious. In fact, all the children are down. Only Fathom and the rest of the Alpha seem to have suffered the calamity well. I move to see about the others, only the tiniest step kills me. I look down to see my ankle swelling. It’s almost twice its normal size.
Fathom puts his arm around my waist, and I drape one around his shoulder.
“You did well,” he says. It sounds a bit like surrender.
Another tentacle rises out of the water, then another, and another. Ten, twenty, a hundred more, join them, and together they drag a monstrosity onto the shore. I’ve never seen anything this big, short of a shopping center. It probably stands as tall as the Cyclone once did, and as wide as a city block, and it’s made up of legs and blubber.
I lift my hand and power my glove. I aim it toward the beast, but it seems silly and pointless, like I’m a mosquito trying to knock down a full-grown man. Still, I have to try. I focus, urging the water to push the monster back, but nothing works. Even when I bear down with every ounce of concentration I can muster, when heat sears my frontal lobe and blood pours freely from my nose, there is nothing I can conjure to stop it. I’m so tired, so broken, even holding my hand up feels like more than I can handle.
“Fight, Lyric!” I shout at myself. “You’re a wild thing. You’re a giant. You’re a raging sea!”
But my words are hollow. The monster towers over me, moving a fifty feet every second. The next tentacle falls hard and sends another shock wave into the ground.
We need to be stronger than the others, the water whispers. I’m so confused, I almost think it’s a hallucination, but the voice returns. We need you to be more.
“How?” I cry.
The water guides my thoughts until it finds the severed hand of a Rusalka. It’s encased in a glove.
There, the voice urges.
I will it to me. There’s a tiny splash, and it flies out of the water, crashing in the sand at my feet. There’s a click, and the metal slides off the dead flesh. I pick it up and realize it will fit my other hand.
The Undine mother continues her approach. I don’t know if this is a good idea. One glove might be frying my brain. Two might kill me, but I don’t have any choice. I slip it on and it clicks itself shut; then both my hands glow like suns, and—wow.
I am an erupting volcano, an avalanche, a supernova.
The voice in my head is no longer a whisper. It’s a shout, and it’s coming from everywhere—the sky, the wind, and the ocean. I can hear it in my blood and the blood of my friends. I can hear a storm in the ocean hundreds of miles away. I can hear the moisture in the air. It sings to me. It twists around me in beautiful colors and arcs, slipping through my clothes and fingers.
A figure steps out of the water and approaches me. At first I cannot make out her face, but she feels familiar. She’s tall and thin and wearing . . . a tube top?
“Tammy?”
She takes a drag of her cigarette.
Take care of my girl, she says, before shifting to Deshane, then just as quickly to Gabriel.
I was wrong about you, he says as he runs his hand though his bushy black hair. Suddenly, he transforms into Mr. Ervin, then Donovan Spangler. He gives himself a shake like a dog caught in the rain, and Mrs. Novakova is suddenly in front of me.
Nope, she says in her thick European accent. She morphs into David Doyle. Doyle looks down at himself as if unsure of whether or not he likes what he’s seeing. He sips from his coffee mug. I did what I thought was right, Lyric. Please forgive me.
“I do,” I say.
I watch him make one final change into a round-faced Latino boy with shaggy brown hair—a face I remember and love very, very much. He smiles at me, holds up his smartphone, and presses the record button.
“Shadow?”
I have to document this. His voice feels distant, yet right in my ears. No one is going to believe what you’re doing!
“Am I dead?” I ask. Did the second glove really kill me?
He laughs.
No, you’re not dead. You are still kicking it.
“Is this real?”
He shrugs and looks around. Feels real to me.
“But . . . how are you here?”
Damn, Lyric, what’s with all the questions? I am here because you need me to be here. I’m what makes sense to you right now, a friendly face, you know?
“So you’re not really Shadow?”
I’m sort of everything. You’ll understand one day.
“Like God?”
He sighs. How about you just stick with Shadow? How’s Bex?
“She misses you.”
She admitted that? Things have changed.
I turn and look at my surroundings. The baby Undine surround me. The mama is on her way. My friends are struggling to survive. Chloe is in danger. But all of it is frozen and still.
“How is this happening?”
Here’s the thing, Lyric. Right now the gloves are giving your brain a reboot, so you’re kind of in a time-out. When it’s done, you’re going to be Lyric 2.0, a brand-new version.
“How new?” I worry.
New new. You’ll probably like it.
“Probably?”
He smiles. Probably, but you’ll need it. It’s just going to get harder from here, especially when you get to the big twist.
“What big twist?”
They’re not what you think they are. Actually, they’re not what they think they are. But, that’s all the spoilers you get. Well, friend, we’re almost done. I love you. Give my girl a hug for me. I miss her a lot. Tell her that Duck guy was a douche.
“Wait! Do you know what is going to happen next? Am I going to survive?”
He shrugs. I can’t wait to find out.
There’s a whoosh, and I’m yanked back to the here and now, watching a tentacle crash down from the sky, ready to crush us all. I reach up and touch it, and it freezes in midair, then shrivels and blackens and turns to dust. I realize that I just drained all the water out of it with a simple touch.
“Woah,” I say.
“Lyric!” Riley cries as he staggers to his feet. There’s blood leaking from a wound on his arm, and I know I can make it stop, so I do. I caress his hand, willing the blood to do as I ask, because the blood is made of water, as is every part of his body. I suddenly realize that the nosebleeds were just my growing control. My blood
was trying to help.
“How did you do that?” he asks.
“It’s complicated. Riley, get the others to safety. I’m going to end this right now,” I say as I focus the blood in my own body to repair my busted ankle.
“Lyric, you can’t fight that thing by yourself!” he cries.
“Actually, I can.”
I wave my hand over all the baby Undine, and like their mother’s tentacle, they shrivel and die.
“Lyric Walker?” Fathom says.
“Stay with my people,” I tell him.
I run through the Undine as they turn to dust around me. When I hit the shoreline, I dive in headfirst, feeling my gills and scales form. My gloves pulse with energy here in the depths. I feel even more control than I ever thought possible. I can sense things from miles away. I can feel a hurricane brewing, hear the currents racing past the continent, hear whale song hundreds of miles away. I can tell where the Rusalka are hiding and know that I could destroy them with just a thought. I decide to let them live. Let them crawl under rocks to escape me. The Undine mother is my only concern.
I shoot straight up out of the water, riding a spout that reaches fifty feet into the air. Once there, I let the moisture around me take over, and it keeps me suspended. The Undine mother knows something has happened that has tilted the scales, and I can smell its fear. It howls and wriggles with indignant anger.
There’s a shriek that forces my hands to my ears, an ancient cry that rips open the sky. The mother’s limbs swat like lightning, and one connects with me. I crash into the water, and the beast plunges down after me. It hits me again, and I’m flung onto the beach. I stagger to my feet, and it barrels over me, knocking me aside as it charges inland.
“No!” I shout, and a blast of energy shoots from my fingertips into the beast’s hide. A massive bubble inflates on its side. It grows and grows, and the monster shrieks and flails. Its limbs shrivel and break off as if I’m turning it to stone, and finally, with one horrible scream, it pops. The Undine explodes. A moment later, a horde of its babies appear and encircle their mother as she crumbles to dust. They are silent for a long moment, then turn and slither back toward the shoreline. Soon, they have all vanished into the surf.