Total pages in book: 46
Estimated words: 43197 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 216(@200wpm)___ 173(@250wpm)___ 144(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 43197 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 216(@200wpm)___ 173(@250wpm)___ 144(@300wpm)
Our own mother was holding Adan captive? But why? In my mind I mind traveled farther, winding in and out of the recesses of the cave, which were also littered with human skeletons, pitiful old rags of clothing and cast-off treasure. I followed the thin link that would lead me to my brother. It glowed in the darkness with a weak, flickering light.
Adan was sitting in his human form, sitting cross legged in the shadows in a coral encrusted iron cage. His green eyes were open but staring blankly ahead of him. I floated in front of him, wishing I had a real physical body that could somehow release him. I wondered why he didn’t just break free and then I saw that around his waist was an iron chain, securing him to the walls of the cave. I remembered that iron is the enemy of magic. All Fae creatures, like Fairies, Brownies, Elves, Selkies and the Mer People can be controlled and held captive by it.
I swam closer, floating in the water as near as I could without touching any of it.
“Kailar?” my brother’s voice sounded inside my head. “You’re alive, but why are you here? I was so terrified after what happened at Tybee when I last saw you. I had no doubt our mother wouldn’t rest until she had us both in her clutches.” The voice sounded distressed, and he looked that way too, but nothing else about Adan moved, not even his lips. Our mother must have had him under a spell. I was furious at the idea.
“You saved me,” I whispered back. “You lost your freedom by saving me. Why would you do such a thing? Adan, I didn’t even know who you were…who you were to me…that day. I thought my feelings were a figment of my imagination.” I wanted so badly to touch him, to hug him as twins should, but this was merely a mind game. I had to rescue him before I could hold him again.
“I didn’t know you either. I only knew I was drawn to the place where the kracken attacked you. Our bond led me to you. It was only later, as I wasted away in this stupid cell, that all my memories slowly started to return, and I realized who you were and just how powerful our connection is. Keion made me forget my family—made me forget you. Then he sent me away.”
“Trust me, I know,” I answered. I knew only too well the depths of their deception…and hated myself because I still loved Alyxsander. “As soon as I free you, we’ll make them pay.”
“No, Kailar. You can’t risk coming here in corporeal form. Our mother needs both of us for her sacrifice.”
“Her what?”
He kept talking like he hadn’t heard me. “We can never let that happen. Not only do we both die, but then she becomes more powerful than all the other creatures in the sea. And the waters of the ocean would become poisonous and far too deadly for any sea life to exist. She doesn’t come down here often but when she does, there’s only hate and the greed for power in her black eyes. You have to promise me you won’t try to rescue me.”
She’d be more powerful? The idea was frightening. A sea hag practiced dark magic and had control over the winds and the weather at sea. If anyone were so unwise as to offend one of the creatures, it would most certainly mean their doom. And our mother had always been extremely powerful.
But I still couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My twin honestly thought I would leave him in this hell? Never. “I’ll return for you Adan. You’ll never convince me not to. We will be together again and together, and we’ll destroy the hag.”
It was the whispering that alerted me to someone behind me. A low, sibilant sound, a little like the waves gently lapping on shore. I raised my head to see an old woman appearing behind me in the dark. She was squatting by a fire that had suddenly blinked into existence too inside the watery cave, though the fire was blue and magical and it burned sullenly, never reaching the shadows. The woman was scattering some sparkling loose jewels over the fire that hissed like sea snakes when the baubles hit the odd flames. It was her voice as she was chanting that I had heard in my head. I could barely make out the old woman’s hunched figure in the murky water inside the cave.
I must have cried out in alarm, because the woman at the fire turned her head to look at me, and I flinched back at the sight.
She looked like an ancient crone, her nose hooked toward her chin, her eyes bleached almost colorless, and her wild, white hair floating around her face, the strands looking for a moment like snakes before they resolved themselves into just long locks of white hair. No wait—as I watched her, the hair turned back into writhing snakes, and then she stood up. As she rose to her feet, her entire body dissolved into those snakes, then reformed itself into a beautiful woman, with long, emerald-green hair curling down her back. It was our mother, though I hadn’t seen her in a long time. She had pale green eyes and skin as white as leprosy, and her lips were as dark red and glistening as an infected sore. She glided through the water toward me.