Harley Merlin 16: Finch Merlin and the Blood Tie Read online

  As for me, I had a 250-pound bruiser crushing the air out of my already shrunken lungs. I strained to see the others, noticing that they weren’t faring much better. Luke had gotten pincered to the wall by two spears. He tossed them away with his Magneton abilities, but the guards just came back at him with fists. And Melody was struggling to hold her ground against a trio of leering sleazeballs. Nash and Huntress were caught in a circle of sentries, the feisty pup dodging between their magic and their spears. She lunged at a guard and managed to lock her jaws around his neck, only to get flung away by a lasso of Telekinesis. She hit the ground, and Nash leapt forward, covering her with his own body as the Chaos rained down.

  “Stand down!” Kaya shouted helplessly. The guards dragged her every which way as she fought tooth and nail, magicless and vulnerable. Those who were still loyal to her had been caught up in the mess, with Cuffs closing around necks like it was sales day at Tiffany’s.

  Even Erebus had snapped out of his amusement, likely after seeing the army of Sylphs. It was a protection he no longer had, now that the djinn had severed ties with him.

  The djinn! A memory hit me like a bolt to the skull. I’d sent a message to Harley via the djinn about Atlantis rising. That message would’ve gotten through by now. It didn’t help us much, considering the situation we were currently in, but maybe it could save the surface world from total domination by… well, maybe it’d be Ovid instead of Kaya now. Either way, if they could rally the magical world to defend themselves from the Atlantean onslaught, perhaps all this wouldn’t be in vain. Even if I didn’t live to see them take these schmucks down.

  Out of thin air, Erebus conjured an impressive sword.

  Where the hell was he hiding that? I didn’t want to know. If he intended to use that thing on Ovid’s hired hands, I was all for it. With his powers still limited, I guessed that he had to think carefully about when to use magic, in case it busted his body wide open. So he’d resorted to a good old-fashioned blade, for now. And he knew how to use it. Swiping the sword artfully, Erebus sent the guards scrambling to avoid a beheading.

  “I said, stand down!” Kaya howled, to no avail. They bowed to a different master now. The bruiser on top of me got off and wrenched me upward. He clapped a Cuff around my neck, rendering my magic useless.

  “They will not heed you, daughter.” Ovid gave it the full smarm treatment. “You thought me weak and unpopular, but I spent a lifetime nurturing relationships with loyalists. I do not need the favor of the entire population when that of a select few serves just as well for my present needs.”

  It’s like the old saying—who needs an army when an assassin will do the job just as well in half the time? One of O’Halloran’s, actually. Or perhaps it’d been his sidekick Diarmuid’s saying. It sounded more like the perpetually angry leprechaun than the calm and logical O’Halloran. I’d have given anything to have that hotheaded leprechaun here now.

  Kaya stumbled forward after a swipe to the back of her legs and crashed to the ground. She scowled up at her assailants. “I will pay you twice what my father can offer you.”

  Ovid tutted. “As if I would be so vulgar to offer them money. Oh no, dear daughter, I offered them the reward of eternal life—or a much longer life, at least, which will come to fruition by way of my loyal Necromancer.”

  “My assassin, you mean!” Kaya breathed heavily, her eyes wild as a spooked horse’s.

  “We have decided to let bygones be bygones. I have been thoroughly convinced that he never actually intended to kill you. He merely wished to appear heroic.” Ovid brushed her off as he cut a path to the throne. Apollo and Thebian had put up pretty good fights, spinning spears and clashing steel in the air, but it’d all come to nothing. There were too many mercenaries with their lives in Ovid’s hands—literally. Only Lux and Erebus still had a shot at avoiding a Cuff.

  Nash and Huntress were on the ground, alive but subdued. Melody and Luke stood side by side in matching Cuffs, a sword preventing them from holding hands in the face of this nail-biting new world order. Ovid wouldn’t just go back to the way things were. He had to make a statement in order to get the Atlanteans to support him after breaking all sorts of Atlantean and natural laws. And he could have an army of these treacherous worms hiding in the city, ready to strike if anyone dissented.

  Ovid climbed the steps to the now-empty throne and sank down, the picture of a satisfied old man after a long day. He even rubbed the armrests. The sight turned my stomach. Beside him, Kaya was hauled to her feet and held by guards, while Apollo and Thebian stared at her in dismay. I understood why. It’d been their job to protect her, and they’d failed miserably.

  “Now then, I suppose we ought to get to my first order of business.” Ovid straightened in his ill-gotten chair and looked over the room. “Bend the knee, or you will be executed. Oh, and before you ask, there will be no resurrection for those who do not pledge fealty.”

  Faustus chuckled, evidently having the time of his friggin’ life. “I pledge you my fealty, Your Majesty.” He knelt on one knee, presumably to set the tone. I hoped his knee locked so he’d be stranded down there forever. This stank to high heaven. That slippery squid had managed to coordinate this entire coup right under Kaya’s nose, though I supposed she’d had it so high in the air recently that she wouldn’t have smelled the rat.

  “I urge you not to keep me waiting.” Ovid interlocked his fingers and vibrated his leg slightly—a sign that he wasn’t entirely sure he would get what he wanted.

  I stayed sprawled on the ground, fearing that if I sat up, he’d take it as a sign of loyalty. He wasn’t getting that from me, even if I was pissed at his daughter. Lesser evils, and all that. Unfortunately, the other councilors weren’t on the same wavelength. Soon enough, the nobles bent to his will. Once it started, it was like a Mexican wave of kneelers. And Ovid drank it in.

  “I am pleased to see that there is still reason and sense to be found in the royal court.” Ovid let his fingers drift across the throne’s armrests. “Now you may stand and be assured of your continued existence, so that I can contend with my wayward daughter.”

  Tears streamed down Kaya’s face. “You cannot do this, Father. It is utterly abhorrent. This defies every law and tradition laid out by Ganymede herself.”

  “Did you not miss me?” Ovid didn’t even look at her.

  “I missed you with all my broken heart, but now… I fear my tears were misspent. You have betrayed me most hideously.” She shook her head slowly, all the pomp and circumstance drained from her body. She looked like a scared young woman who didn’t know where to turn. “And you have betrayed my mother. She awaits you, but you have abandoned her to an afterlife of solitude.”

  Ovid laughed coldly, and I sensed what was coming. “Oh, Kaya. So naïve. Do you still believe I actually loved her?”

  Kaya stared as if her soul had been ripped out of her. “You did. I know you did. As she loved you!”

  “You are mistaken, Kaya. I never loved her. I barely thought of her. The spell took care of matters for the first two hundred years or so, but after that… my goodness, I have never encountered a more ingratiating woman in all my days. All that charity work and munificence for the poor.” He shuddered dramatically. “Her death was a blessing. It meant I could dispense with the ruse that I had manufactured for so long and start anew. I need not pretend any longer. As for her solitude—let her have it. She ruined mine often enough.”

  You’re an actual monster. Even if that was how he really felt, he could’ve spared Kaya the truth. Yeah, he wanted her throne, but she was still his daughter—his flesh and blood. I glared at him from my spot on the floor while the room fell deathly silent. A few of Ovid’s men deigned to look sheepish. They probably hadn’t known that part, and though they were on Ovid’s existential payroll, I guessed they’d held some admiration for Queen Verity.

  Kaya lifted her hands to her face. Her shoulders shuddered with grief, and her heart wrenching sobs cut the heavy silence. Wit
h each second that passed, it got harder not to feel sorry for her. She’d been stubborn and idiotic, but no one deserved to hear that kind of unadulterated harshness from their dad.

  “First and foremost,” Ovid piped up again, “your marriage to Finch Merlin will be annulled. The love spell has already been broken, as we have heard, and that legally renders any royal marriage null and void. You are no longer under its influence, in the same manner as your former husband.”

  Erebus stopped fighting as he saw Kaya, crushed and weeping on the dais. He lowered his sword and stared at her with more emotion brimming in his black eyes than I’d ever seen. He’d said, not long ago, that he didn’t see the point in tears. Yet now he seemed pretty close to shedding some of his own. It made the guards even warier. None dared approach him, though he’d all but tossed aside his weapon.

  You really do love her, huh? The longer he spent with us mortals, the more like us he seemed to me. Perhaps he’d launched all those quips about star-crossed lovers at Ryann and me because he knew what it meant to be one half of a doomed pair. I glanced at Ryann, still protected behind the fluttering wall of Sylphs, but I didn’t feel nearly as happy as I should’ve to hear that I was a divorcée—or was it an annullee? I didn’t know the specifics. Don’t get me wrong; I didn’t want to be Kaya’s husband. But I wasn’t thrilled with the scenario in which I’d been freed.

  “In addition, you will be stripped of your title, as I am still alive and able to resume my position as king.” Ovid sank back in his throne. “You will no longer be queen of this nation.”

  Kaya wiped her nose on the back of her sleeve. “The law will not permit this.”

  “The law will change,” he countered sharply. “As king, I am the lawmaker. Faustus, if you would do the honors?”

  Faustus scurried toward Kaya like the vermin he was. He wrenched the crown from her head and walked to Ovid to place it on his head with utmost reverence. A silvered network of seaweed fronds, adorned with the twinkle of gems and sea glass, intertwined to form the headpiece. Kaya didn’t even flinch. She just stared at her father, a melee of emotions passing across her face: fury, misery, panic, and loss.

  “Back where it belongs.” Ovid stroked the metal fronds. “Now I would like to introduce you all to my new royal Necromancer—the man who will bring extended life to us, so that we may reign supreme wherever we go.”

  I almost didn’t turn when the doors opened. Honestly, I’d have done anything not to see Davin’s smirking, triumphant face. But it was like watching a train crash; I couldn’t look away. Davin strode in with two guards at his sides, but he wasn’t a prisoner anymore. Nope, he’d gotten himself a cushy new job raising zombies, so no Atlantean ever had to look death in the chops again. And he friggin’ knew he’d struck it lucky. He had his smug-o-meter turned up to eleven.

  “King Ovid, Your Majestic Excellency, what a pleasure to see you back upon that throne.” Davin held up his hands as if he were in his very own parade. “And what a pleasure it is to be free again.” He cast me a glance that said, “See. I told you I’d get out.” That parasite was like a ferret—if he found even the tiniest gap, he’d squirm his way out. Someone needed to kill the son of a bitch and keep him dead.

  “The pleasure is all mine,” Ovid replied, oozing sycophantic glee.

  With my attention back on the dais, I noticed Kaya looking my way. “My father is right about the spell. I no longer feel what I did, Finch,” she murmured. “It must have gone when you broke it. I… do not know how to explain it, but there is clarity where there was none before.”

  I nodded slowly. “I get that.”

  Her gaze moved to Erebus, who hadn’t taken his eyes off her. Then she looked at Ryann, then Nash, Huntress, Melody, and Luke. “I… am sorry, beyond words. I see now what I refused to see before: the avarice, the foolhardy ambition, the wretched stubbornness. I should have heeded you.” Fresh tears fell. “How cruelly the tide has turned. Oh… how stupid I have been. How foolishly, despicably senseless. I would ask your forgiveness, but you surely would find it impossible to grant after all I have done.”

  “The first step is admitting responsibility,” Nash said, his tone more fatherly than anything Ovid could’ve mustered. “Forgiveness is always possible if you’re genuine.”

  “How can you speak so softly to me after my wretchedness? Especially knowing that you were right, and I was wrong.” She gripped her dress in desperate fistfuls of silk. “I should have opened the gateway for you all and sent you back to the surface as envoys to seek assistance on our behalf. I made a grave error, as you warned. I should have listened!” She covered her face again, tears trickling through her fingers as sobs wracked her body.

  Pride comes before a fall… And she’d fallen hard. All it had taken was her father knocking her off her throne—starving her of power—for her to understand where we’d been coming from. And her sobs hit me deep—the primal sound of someone at their lowest ebb. Perhaps she had also realized what she’d have done to everyone on the surface world if she’d been allowed to go ahead with her plan. Only the worst kind of person would take pleasure in seeing her this way, and I didn’t. But her father… he was loving every minute.

  “Ironic, is it not, that you facilitated the future supremacy of our nation, and now you do not desire it?” Ovid landed another blow. “All you had to do was let me live another five hundred years, and I would have stayed by your side, a silent partner in all your endeavors.”

  When Kaya spoke, her words were barely audible. “I did what I thought was right.”

  “And where has that gotten you?” Ovid leaned over the side of the throne to really hammer his point home. “You commanded me as though I were your inferior, and you decided you would be mistress of my life and my death. I had enough of that from your mother. Now you must face the consequences and watch your plans come to fruition by my hands. Atlantis will rise and conquer the surface world, but it shall be under my rule. A far preferable scenario, as I at least have some military expertise. You are a mere child, Kaya, lacking the experience to execute such an endeavor.”

  “What would you know about running a military operation? Your army doesn’t know its ass from its elbows when it comes to war.” Nash’s eyes were steely. His voice could’ve turned flesh to stone. I’d never heard him speak that way before. “People will die. Innocent people. Here and up there. You’ll have that blood on your hands for the rest of your extended life. Believe me, it doesn’t wash clean.”

  What did you go through when you were in the Magical Marines? He didn’t talk about it often, if ever. But he wore a haunted look that spoke for him, sending an icy jolt right through me.

  “I have no qualms about getting my hands dirty, nor doing what I must for my city’s survival.” Ovid lifted his chin, his mouth curling in a scowl.

  “Then I hope the screams of everyone who dies because of you will keep you awake until your last day.” Nash’s words dripped with venom.

  Ovid’s leg started jiggling again. “And I hope you find comfort in our prison for the rest of your days. That goes for all of you.” He glowered at Apollo, Thebian, Ryann, Luke, Melody, Nash, Huntress, and me. The troublemakers. “As for you, daughter, you will spend the rest of your life locked in your chambers—or until I decide to forgive you, after you have proven yourself worthy of that generosity.”

  Kaya didn’t reply. She just knelt there, a total wreck of her former self.

  I realized that Ovid hadn’t addressed Erebus during his damning sentence. Curious, I peered to where the Child of Darkness had been standing. Only… he wasn’t there anymore. And the guards who’d been trying to get him under control had been too fixated on their king to notice that he’d vanished.

  What the—? I shot a look at Lux, who released her Sylphs. I suspected it took a lot of energy to keep them floating around. Energy that she didn’t have down here, not without triggering the expulsion spell. I waited until she looked my way and mouthed, “Where is he?”


  She looked around and gave a frustrated sigh. “Oh, that jerk. He’s bolted again.”

  Typical Erebus. When the going got tough, he got going. And I had a horrible feeling that he wasn’t coming back. Maybe, for the first time in over a year, I was about to find out what life was like without him there to dole out crumbs of help. Wasn’t that what I’d asked for? I mean, I’d dealt with some enormous challenges on my own, in the past, but these were… well, much bigger than me. These were Atlantean problems. I’d already needed Erebus to break the love spell. What if I needed him to come through for us again?

  “Be careful what you wish for,” I whispered under my breath.

  Twenty-Three

  Finch

  “I get what they mean about the ocean making folks nutty this far down.” I stared out at the endless darkness beyond the glass of the cell walls. Ovid’s hired cronies had marched us down here after the throne room mayhem. We had no idea what time it was; there weren’t any clocks down here. Another way to drive the prisoners batty. Although, at least they’d taken the Cuffs off our necks this time. We weren’t in the kindergarten cells now. Nope, we’d gone up a level—or down a level, geographically—to the high-security, all-glass lockups. Why bother with Cuffs when the guards could shoot us out into the deep ocean if we misbehaved? And, given the intensity of the hexes on this cell, it made any additional restraints seem like overkill.

  Nash laid his head back against the glass. “Or maybe it’s knowing you’re stuck here that messes with people’s minds.”

  Luke held an exhausted, teary Melody against him. This night echoed our first one in Atlantis, with everyone taking up their preferred corner of the cell. Except that Erebus had vamoosed, leaving us to figure a way out on our own.

  “Is anyone else wondering what we got out of this?” I crossed to the other side of the cell and peered at the guards. Did they know what was going on with their freshly resurrected king? “We damn near killed ourselves trying to get Kaya to listen, only to get knives in our backs and a cell to call home for the next… well, forever.”