Free Blue Abyss: Timewalker Chronicles, Book 3 (The Timewalker Chronicles) by Michele Callahan

equalize the pressure in her ears. Breathe in. Breathe out. Ignore the cold. Ignore the water invading her sinus cavities like chilled, wormy fingers. Ignore the alien feel of her body cavity filling with something it shouldn’t. Ignore it.
    Breathe, dummy. Just breathe.
    It could have been two minutes, it could have been ten, but she finally adapted to the water inside her lungs and could move without a major force of will. Now that she had the breathing conquered, and her panic pushed into a tiny locked box inside her mind, she looked down at the ocean floor below her and selected a nice, uninhabited stretch of sand. Raising her palm, she fired her new, handy-dandy blaster at nothing in particular.
    Sand burst from the bottom in a swirl of light so bright she had to cover her eyes and wait for it to clear.
    Able to blow shit up and kill bad guys?
    Check.
    She stared in wonder at her palm. No burn marks, no pain. Nothing. She felt like J looking at the Noisy Cricket blaster in Men In Black. Didn’t look like much, but it sure packed a punch. Darn aliens had all the good toys.
    And now it was hers.
    Time to go deep and kick some bug ass. If she spent any more time thinking, she was afraid she’d lose her nerve. No thinking. Thinking would only scare the crap out of her.
    She kicked off the line and adjusted her BCD to sink straight down along the anchor line. When she was close to the cave depth, she swam straight for the cave’s hidden entrance along the rock walls, mermaid style. She hauled the small rescue tank and BCD vest along behind her.
    She knew where the offshoot cave was this time, and laid her dive line as she went, swimming straight to it. The symbol was there. More proof that she wasn’t crazy, and that everything in her memories had actually happened. Those scary things were still down there. What were they doing, anyway? Staging Earth for an invasion? Studying human biology? Selling Earth’s resources? Creating creepy mutant babies?
    Kidnapping alien kings and waiting for an opportunity to wipe out Earth? That was what Celesina implied. But why? None of it made sense to her. But she knew one thing, those creatures were scary as hell and didn’t belong here. Even if she only got to take out two of them, Earth would be much better off.
    She stopped swimming and floated at zero buoyancy facing the underwater doorway. The flow of water and sound calmed her and she soaked in the rhythm of the water and the Earth, listened for the steady beat she’d been missing on Celestina’s ship.
    The slow pulse inside her head, the measured beat of Raiden’s heart, filled her mind like an echo. She counted to ten. Fifteen. Beat. Counted again. Relief made her smile and she opened her eyes. He was alive. The empty void filled. She could feel him again, sense that she was getting close.
    Mari approached the alien vampiric crystal, the one that required blood to open the door.
    Her blood.
    Beat. Silence. Counted to twenty this time.
    Too long between heartbeats. Too long.
    I’m coming Raiden. Hang on. Mari cut her finger, smeared blood on the crystal and wondered why her blood was a key in the first place? She wasn’t an alien. Celestina said she was descended from other Timewalkers. Perhaps that was why it worked? Or perhaps the Timewalkers had a traitor among their kind who didn’t expect anyone else to find this place?
    Once inside on the landing platform, the door closed behind her and the water drained away. She set the small rescue breather and mask on the floor. She doubled over to expel as much fluid from her lungs the she could, forcing herself to cough. But it wasn’t enough.
    She was drowning standing in open air. She tried to take a deep breath but it felt like her lungs exploded into a million tiny pieces. Her lung tissue did something no human’s should have been able to do, absorbed the fluid that remained and pushed it into her bloodstream.
    Every limb expanded like a water balloon before the water