Sea Spell (Waterfire Saga #4)(52)

And then there was nothing. Nothing at all.





BECCA, A HOOD PULLED up over her red hair, swam up to the door of the ancient palazzo. With a wary glance around, she lifted the heavy iron knocker and let it drop.

Tiny sand smelt, spooked by the sound, darted for cover, their bodies flashes of silver in the murk. Slender pipefish hid in clumps of seaweed. A squid vanished in a cloud of ink. The noise echoed loudly down the current. Becca winced, worried that she’d alerted an enemy to her presence. She waited, nervously flipping her tail fins, but no one answered.

“This must be the place,” she said to herself. Though it was well past midnight, lights from the human city above penetrated the dark water of the Lagoon deeply enough that Becca could see the whole of the palazzo’s ornate front. It matched Neela’s description.

Built of white marble, with a tall, Gothic doorway, the palazzo’s facade also boasted a carved relief of the goddess Neria, and a frieze of sea flowers, fish, and shells.

On either side of the heavy doors were stone faces with blind eyes and open mouths. Neela said the faces had spoken when she and Sera had been taken to the palazzo by the Praedatori. They were silent now.

Had she come all this way for nothing?

Her friends’ voices echoed in her head. They’d tried to talk her out of this.

“It’s too much of a long shot,” Neela had said.

“It’s way too dangerous,” Yazeed added.

“What if you get caught?” Desiderio asked.

And then Ling had spoken. “They’re right, Becs. It’s a pretty desperate plan, but it’s also all we’ve got.”

Becca had left the Darktide Shallows, and her friends, and had swum for days until she reached a goblin village. She’d found a mirror in the vacant home of a wealthy goblin family, and she’d swum through it into Vadus.

Rorrim Drol had spotted her there, but not before she’d gotten directions to a mirror in the Lagoon from one of his vitrina. She managed to escape Rorrim, and only moments ago, she’d swum out of that mirror and into a nearby mer dwelling. Luckily the mirror’s owner was not in the room at the time, and she was able to hurry out of an open window before she was discovered.

Becca had to get inside the palazzo. Rumors had been circulating that the Praedatori were finally regrouping. Some of them had been spotted in the Lagoon. There could only be one reason for that: their leader was back in Venice, and they were returning to his home—their old headquarters.

Marco had told Becca that he’d left his family’s palazzo because it was too dangerous for him to be there. She desperately hoped he’d come back. But even if he wasn’t there, maybe she could leave a message for him with one of the Praedatori, asking him to come to the Kargjord. The Black Fins had only the slimmest chance of rescuing Sera—and Marco was it.

Becca knocked once more now, but again no one answered.

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.