LOGAN CHECKED THE COORDINATES GINGER HAD GIVEN HIM,
then looked overboard. Somewhere down there, beneath the island of Bermuda, Atlantis waited.
He dropped anchor, wondering how much damage that did to the reef, but if this all played out like Ginger had outlined, that would be the least of his worries.
Grabbing his scuba gear, Logan scanned the area. A perfect Bermuda day. Sunny with wispy clouds. Logan could see for miles. A pair of boats were well beyond shouting distance, and others farther past them. Windsurfers sailed near the shore, and that party cruise had been headed north. He’d rented the boat for the week, so it wasn’t expected back until then, and no curious Jet Skiers were around to take note of how long he’d be gone. His arrangements were either good subterfuge or suicide.
He hoped it wasn’t the latter.
One more look at the map and the coastline confirmed that he was at the right spot. Ginger had even mentioned the area off the bow where the greens of the shallows meshed with the blues of the deep in a ninety-degree angle.
Time to do this.
His ability to breathe under water had disappeared the day after he’d stepped back on land, so Logan had to don scuba gear. He made sure to include a knife—something he’d never again be in the sea without—then slid into
the temperate water around the island and hoped to God this worked.
And that Ceto wasn’t lying in wait for him.
Ginger hadn’t been able to find out any information on what had happened to the sea monster. Logan hoped that meant she’d been crushed beneath thousands of pounds of marble, coral, and statues, though he wouldn’t mind getting a shot at her.
A kaleidoscope of tropical fish surrounded him— small, large, darting, meandering, chasing each other all over the coral reef—and the sea was suddenly more alive than it’d looked from above. Sea fans, anemones, corals… They were just as colorful as the fish swim-ming among them.
Bermuda was beautiful; it only made sense that Atlantis would be here. Sense in a there-really-are-such-things-as-mermaids way.
Logan swam out to where green water met blue, won-dering how he was going to do this. Ginger had told him where Atlantis was but not how to get in. Bermuda was a cave-diving tourist destination; there had to be some trick to getting inside the submerged city, or Humans would have found it years ago.
Suddenly, the largest school of jacks he’d ever seen surrounded him, clumsier than he remembered ever seeing jacks. They bumped his shoulders, his head, his tank, his mask…
They were trying to tell him something.
Damn. If only he could breathe under water, he’d be able to understand.
But … Wait. Angel had said that every fish spoke English.
What’d he have to lose at this point other than his dignity? And since there was no one around to risk even that, he took a deep breath, then pulled the regulator from his mouth.
“I need to get to Atlantis,” came out as a series of bubbles and mumbles, but it was enough to catch a few of the fishes’ attention.
He tried again. “I’m looking for Angel, the mermaid.
She saved me from Ceto.”
Bubbles appeared from the fish. Answers to his questions?
Sadly, he couldn’t understand them, and whatever charades they started to do got lost as his mask fogged. Damn change in air pressure. People weren’t sup¬posed to speak under the sea, so why should the mask
be designed for it?
Cursing—which only fogged it up even more—Logan shoved the regulator back in his mouth and ripped off the mask. He was going to have to go to the surface to clear it.
Logan kicked his flippers to head up—
Only to be grabbed by something from below.