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thought in disapproval. The aristocrats and royals of the world really needed to stop marrying their cousins, or this sort of thing was bound to happen.
    He couldn’t help thinking of the giant, Goliath, and his savage Nephilim brothers in the Bible. They, too, had been described as having six fingers, and like them, Wyvern was also unusually tall, maybe six foot six, though Dmitri would hardly call him a giant…
    And just as Dmitri was contemplating Goliath’s nemesis, the short, scrawny, teenaged future King David, flinging his little rocks from his famous slingshot, Lord Wyvern made the boulders in front of him fly up, defying gravity.
    Dmitri’s jaw dropped. Before his eyes, the levitating boulders began stacking themselves into roughly humanoid shapes with arms and legs and heads and came to life.
    He quite forgot to breathe for several moments. If it hadn’t been for his familiarity with mermaids, he would have fainted on the spot.
    One, two, three rock monsters towered over Wyvern, arrayed along the beach. His own army of giants, like huge, animated rock formations. They shuffled their massive feet, rolled their stiff granite shoulders, glanced back and forth at one another with glowing orange eyes. Dmitri barely dared blink, staring up at the three creatures. How…?
    His Lordship walked from one to the next, staring at each craggy boulder face and giving them their instructions in the same unknown tongue he had been speaking in since he’d started with the chanting.
    Druid language, maybe.
    But he finished in English. “Bring me the tools of my ancestors. Go!” With a large, swirling motion, he waved his weird hands toward the sea, as though directing gigantic marionettes.
    Golems. I think they’re called golems in the occult literature, Dmitri thought, finally managing to scrape the tatters of his wits back together as he stared. How could this be happening? He was open-minded, but this was a bit… much .
    Blank with shock, he watched the massive rock monsters pound slowly into the waves.
    Boom-boom! Boom-boom! went their footfalls.
    One by one, they marched into the water, disappeared up to their knees, then their waists, then their heads, and just kept walking out to sea.
    Lord Wyvern looked askance at him in satisfaction. “Believe in me now?” he murmured.
    Dmitri gulped and nearly fell down on his face. “Y-yes, my lord.” He swallowed hard and tried his best not to overreact. “A-at least now I know why you said we wouldn’t need a crane. Or…a field crew.”
    Wyvern’s grey eyes glittered as he nodded. “Precisely. When I need servitors,” he said, “I make my own.”
    “Th-that must be—very convenient for you, sir.”
    Wyvern laughed at his discomfiture, and it was only when he drew back his lips in feral humor that Dmitri noticed the earl’s other horrifying deformity.
    Double rows of teeth.
    And he stared while his heart pounded in time with the clamor: boom-boom, boom-boom…

 
     
    CHAPTER 2
    Deep Trouble
     
     
    “W hat on earth is that noise?” Sound travels great distances underwater, so Princess Sapphira of the Royal House of Nereus was as startled as her dolphins when the pounding started.
    The dolphins squeaked and chittered and bobbed their heads in annoyance at the reverberating echoes, then sped away to escape the noise, off to hunt sardines amid the pink clumps of staghorn coral.
    Sapphira stayed behind, staring with furrowed brow in the direction from which the ominous noise was coming.
    Boom-boom! Boom-boom!
    As Crown Princess of Poseidonia, she was instantly concerned, and decided to investigate.
    She didn’t have much else to do at the moment, anyway. The glorious spring afternoon had lured her to sneak away from the palace, escaping her studies once again.
    She figured that her tutor, Professor Pomodori, was so engrossed in writing his tome, A True History of the Mediterranean Sea Tribes, that he probably hadn’t even noticed she was gone.
    With a flick of