Secrets of the Deep Read Online Free

while her friends circled his boat like sharks or leaped up like dolphins to cut her free.
    They weren’t very nice. Toying with him had become a sort of game to the younger set. They were as bad as his students! Their mockery had only made him more determined to take one alive. Ultimately, though, he’d had to abandon his quest after a whale had rammed his boat with its head.
    Whether it was a pet of theirs or just a friend, Dmitri could not say, but he’d learned his lesson. While the mer-brats had splashed about, laughing and jeering at him, he had gone limping back to shore with a hole in the side of his father’s boat. He’d never bothered them again.
    Shortly after that, Dmitri had opened his fake antiquities shop—and it was there that the mysterious Lord Wyvern had first contacted him.
    He still wasn’t sure what to make of the man. How could a British earl with no archeological background be so confident about where to find the ruins of Atlantis when he, a trained field researcher, had studied the question for a decade and still could not be sure whether to even start the search around the Pillars of Hercules or among the Caribbean islands?
    Ah well. Dmitri had no desire to question him, considering Wyvern was the one with all the money.
    The earl had sworn him to secrecy, then given him his instructions, and while Wyvern had returned to England for a while for reasons of his own, Dmitri had got to work making all the arrangements for their quest.
    As it turned out, they didn’t have to travel far at all. A stash of Atlantean artifacts had supposedly been hidden just off the coast of Greece in an undersea trench called the Calypso Deep.
    It was the deepest point in the Mediterranean, or more specifically, the section of the Mediterranean called the Ionian Sea.
    I hope he’s right, Dmitri thought, but he still had his doubts—especially about how Wyvern intended to retrieve the Atlantean goodies from such crushing depths, beyond the reach of man. Nobody knew how far the Calypso Deep stretched down into the earth. It couldn’t even be measured. It just kept going on down, down, down.
    But no matter. Dmitri had done the earl’s bidding anyway, carrying out all his instructions to the letter. First, he’d procured a fine yacht for the earl’s use. Next, on His Lordship’s behalf, he had leased the tiny, private island of Nisáki, barely bigger than a dessert plate.
    The uninhabited island was rocky and wild and pristine, home to nothing but seagulls and a few stray seals basking in the morning sun. High above them, its dramatic pinnacles bristled with spiky rock formations known by locals as the Cyclops’ Crown.
    Lonely little Nisáki had cliffs and caves, scrub brush and wild olive trees, and not much else. It was edged with rugged pebble beaches, like the cove where they now stood with a crescent-shaped bluff at their backs.
    Dmitri still wasn’t sure exactly what they were doing there. He glanced again discreetly at Wyvern, still waiting.
    As for the earl, he was acting like, well, like a sorcerer—albeit one dressed in finest London tailoring.
    Given that Dmitri believed in Atlantis and knew for a fact that the merfolk were real, it was perhaps not that great a leap for him to suppose that what people thought of as magic might turn out to be real, as well.
    Who could say? There were probably logical explanations for such things—answers as yet unknown to science. And since the only intelligent way to go through life was with an open mind, he kept his mouth shut and watched.
    Lord Wyvern lifted his hands over the rocks and boulders strewn along the shoreline and closed his eyes.
    As he began to mumble a chant, Dmitri was suddenly startled to notice for the first time that the earl had a physical deformity: the otherwise tall, princely man had six fingers on each hand.
    Dmitri grimaced as he stared at the abnormality, since Wyvern couldn’t see him, his eyes shut in deep concentration.
    Honestly! he