Rogue Wave (Waterfire Saga #2)(4)

It was dark inside the glass. She couldn’t see what awaited her. What if she got stuck? What if she found herself half in and half out, unable to move, with Opafago on the other side? She asked the creature to take her to a different mirror.

The silverfish reared, then slammed back down.

he demanded.



Serafina replied.

Maybe there was another way in and maybe there wasn’t, but it was clear that this was as far as the silverfish would go. She slid off his back and held out the beetles she’d promised him. He ate them from her hand, then dove back under the silver. Serafina was alone.

Atlantis had been a large island. In addition to Elysia, the capital, it had boasted many towns and villages—all of which had been destroyed. Sera knew she could spend ages looking for another way in and never find it. She took a deep breath, and then—hands together over her head like a diver—she swam carefully through the mirror, mindful of its sharp edges. She pulled her tail through and found herself on a rubble-strewn floor. She’d swum out of the mirror realm, but wasn’t sure what she’d swum into.

Only a thin ray of light, shining in through a crack above her, penetrated the gloom. She quietly sang an illuminata spell, pulled the ray to her, and expanded it to fill the space. As her eyes adjusted to the brightness, she saw she was in what was once a large and elegant room of a terragogg house. Two walls had collapsed; the other two still stood. Above her, giant wooden beams that had supported an upper floor slanted down from the upright walls. Debris, all of it overgrown, lay heavily across the beams.

Serafina investigated the space, looking for a way out, but found none. She sang a commoveo spell—again in a quiet voice, wary of alerting anyone or anything to her presence. She used the magic to push against large chunks of stone, but it was no use; it would take a dozen songcasters to budge them. She poked and prodded at the bricks and rubble, but only succeeded in dumping silt on her head.

That’s when she felt it—a vibration in the water. A strong one. Whatever was making it was big. She spun around. Three feet away from her was a large, angry moray. The eel drew herself up and hissed, baring her lethal teeth.

“Eel, please, you I trouble no give!” Serafina cried.

The terrible grammar that came out of her mouth shocked her. What shocked her even more was that her words were in Eelish—a language she didn’t speak.

“What are you doing here?” the eel asked, her voice low and threatening.

I understand her! Serafina thought. How is this possible? Ling’s the only mermaid I know who speaks Eelish.

She realized that she’d understood the silverfish, too. She’d spoken Rursus with him.

Then it hit her: the bloodbind.

When the five merls had mixed their blood and made their vow to work together to defeat Abbadon, some of Ling’s magic must have flowed into her. Had she gotten some of Ava’s, Neela’s, and Becca’s, too?

“I asked you a question, mermaid,” the eel snarled, moving closer.

“Now getting out. Trying,” Serafina quickly replied.

“How did you get in?”

“Through the looking grass.”

The eel’s expression changed from anger to confusion.

“Looking gas. Looking glass. Please, eel, show me the out.”

“There’s a tunnel,” the eel said. “But you won’t fit through it. You’ll have to go out the way you came in.”

“No! Can’t! Bad man there. Please, you eel, the out.”

“I’ll show you, but it won’t do you any good,” the eel said. She swam along the floor to the remains of a collapsed wall. Among the debris was a rock, roughly a foot and a half in diameter. “There,” she said, pointing behind the rock with her tail.

It was so murky in that part of the room that Serafina hadn’t seen the rock, never mind the tunnel behind it. Tugging on the rock now, she loosened it from the surrounding silt, then cast another commoveo to push it out of the way. She took her bag off her shoulder, knelt down, put a hand inside the narrow tunnel, and felt a slight current.

“How long?” she asked.

“Not very. Maybe two feet.”

“I me dig out,” Serafina said.

“Do what you need to do. Just get out of my house.”

Serafina started scooping handfuls of silt from the bottom of the tunnel. She’d enlarged it by a good six inches when she hit something hard and large. Unable to move it, she dug at the top of the tunnel instead, and then the sides, working silt, pebbles, and small rocks loose. She slowly made her way through the narrow passage on her back, blinking silt from her eyes, spitting grit out of her mouth, praying she didn’t loosen something major and bring an avalanche down on herself. When she finally reached the other side of the tunnel, she didn’t stop to look around, but quickly wriggled back into the eel’s house and grabbed her bag.

“Thank me,” she said.

“For what, exactly?” the eel asked.

“No, you. Thank you, eel,” Serafina said.

“Whatever. Just go,” said the eel.

Serafina pushed her bag into the tunnel. The she turned around and reversed into it herself, so that she could pull the rock she’d moved back into place. She didn’t want to leave the eel with a big hole in the side of her house. Shoving her bag ahead with her tail, she squeezed through the tunnel once more. When she finally came out the other side, she saw that she was in open water. Cautiously, she checked for any signs of movement, but saw none. The waters above her were bright. From the position of the sun’s rays slanting through them, she could tell that it was midday. She looked around and discovered that she was at the back of the terragogg house.