It wasn’t supposed to happen. That’s all I could think, over and over again. It wasn’t supposed to happen. Gus wasn’t supposed to die. It was me they wanted. Perhaps Vidar. Never Gus and yet they’d wrapped their limbs around him, gnawed at his flesh… and killed him.
“No,” I whispered.
We were halfway up the Storm Weaver and nearly to relative safety, but something, like a soft, taunting tap on my shoulder, beckoned me to turn my head and look back at the water.
It was calm, like nothing had happened, but I knew what lurked beneath its black exterior. And, from the darkness emerged a head, barely breaching the surface. Her eyes stared at me, silent and soulless. The rest of her face remained hidden beneath the water, but I knew. Her presence almost made the air colder.
And seeing her renewed a fire in me that had been teetering on the edge of burning out.
“Dahlia,” Vidar said.
I peeled back my lips with a snarl, maneuvering my heavy body toward the edge of the boat.
“Dahlia, no!” he shouted, but his words were mere noise.
I hadn’t been so murderous—so desperate for revenge—in some time and the familiar, bitter taste of it coated my soul. I dove into the water as Lyla ducked back down beneath the waves and I gave chase while the rational side of my brain told me I’d just given myself away to the dark like the idiot I apparently still was.
Lyla did not flee. Not like a frightened animal would. She pretended to, but I could almost feel her smiling behind the shadows of her face. I cut through the water toward her, nailsextended, teeth ripping through my gums. Twins or not, I was bigger than she was and I had quarreled with death and worse more times than she assumed. And that was what Lyla was. Death wrapped in gray flesh and fins and teeth.
I crashed into her, winding around her lithe body like a snake. She screamed. The sound was high pitched and awful and cut into my ears like glass. She let out another screech and struggled against my restraints. Sharp barbs on the sides of her tail dug into mine like the thorns on a rose, driving deeper the harder I squeezed, but I welcomed the pain that time.
At first, she didn’t try to fight, but when I jammed my nail-tipped fingers into her gills and began ripping at the tender flesh under her ribs, it was as if she finally realized what was happening. She began to fight—really fight—thrashing wildly. Her hands swiped at me in quick succession, cutting at my hips. When I coiled my arm around her neck, she twisted, trying to sink her teeth in, but I retaliated before she could, unhinging my jaw and clamping down on her shoulder. Her blood tasted so strongly of salt and something disgustingly bitter, like meat that had gone bad. When it hit my throat, it almost burned.
My vision went black for a moment and everything around me melted like flesh from a burning corpse. I saw blood-filled water around me. Towers devoured by the sea. Shadows backlit by an orange sun. There were screams, shrill and desperate, but I couldn’t tell where they were coming from. Everything was chaos and I was spinning through it, out of control, while a fleshy rope was coiling around my neck.
An umbilical cord.
Below me was endless blackness and above there was amber light pouring over half-exposed buildings built into looming obsidian cliffs. The blood was beginning to clear, the fleshy cord was cut, and that scream grew more despairing and more distant at the same time.
I drew back from Lyla, gasping as the taste of her lingered on my tongue. She was still struggling, but not nearly as violently. Holding her by the hair and neck, I swam for the surface, dragging her with me. There were still enemies in the water. Why they weren’t attacking was a mystery to me, but I had a hunch it had to do with Lyla and I needed to understand why. I needed to understand all of it.
I emerged from the water to see that Vidar had boarded the ship and was safe. Thank Lune. The nets had been pulled up, but as soon as he saw me, he and Mullins tossed a fishing net down into the water. Not the kind meant for actual fish, but monsters like myself. It was a hunter’s ship, after all. I dragged Lyla’s weakened body toward it, convinced she was only pretending to struggle at that point, and tangled us both in the woven ropes. The men heaved, tugging us up the side of the ship. There was something awful about being brought up like that, like I was just another siren captured and pulled from the waters by hunters, but perhaps it was very telling of where my allegiance was those days. It certainly was drifting further from the sea and all its twisted creatures every day.
Men surrounded us as we plopped over the railing, two sirens twisted around each other. When enough men had their bronze blades pointed at us, I released Lyla. She sucked in a ragged breath, rolling onto her stomach and hissing at the men like a wild beast in a snare. I felt my legs wanting to split my tail in two as control over my body started to return. I dragged myself away from the net as the men mobbed her, mounting her like they were wrestling an alligator. Two men grabbed her arms. Two others pressed their weight into her tail to keep her thrashing at bay, and Vidar stomped up to her, pulling his own belt out of the loops on his britches to thrust between her gnashing teeth. He buckled it hard and mercilessly around her head so none of her toxic tones could reach the ears of his men, despite that everyone wore a silentium.
With her arms secured behind her back and her mouth full of leather, the men dragged her toward the grate beneath-which theholding cell was unoccupied. When Lyla managed to twist around just enough to look at me, our eyes met for a split second and it felt like the devil’s whore was staring back, taunting what I foolishly thought was a victory.
Maybe it wasn’t. Maybe she wanted to get caught.
I didn’t fucking care now.
The sails of the Weaver grabbed the wind, hauling us all away from that haunted shore like a stag fleeing wolves. I felt my body wanting to change and focused on that desire until it was the only thing I could think about. It took everything to peel Lyla’s sticky webs from my will, but when I did, my legs ripped through the black, slick skin of my tail, splitting it down the middle.
By the time it was done and I could come back to myself, Vidar was standing over me, a blanket in his hand. He was panting and covered in blood. Gus’s blood. Remembering how his mangled corpse still lay in the boat made my heart sink. Feeling the first real hints of exhaustion seizing my limbs, I sat up on tired arms and hung my head. Vidar crouched beside me, wrapping the linen sheet around my beaten body and bloody legs, and lifted me off the filthy deck.
Neither of us spoke. The dull, aching weight of grief tugged at us both as he walked me toward his cabin—our cabin—and sat me down in his desk chair. I was shivering, but I wasn’t cold. Not on the outside. On the inside, something had changed. My soul had cracked and a sharp chill was working its way around my heart like Lyla’s cold fingers were still inside me, mocking.
“Look at me,” Vidar said, lifting my chin with his knuckle.
He moved my head from side to side as if searching for injuries. Then he spread the sheet he’d wrapped me in, running his hands over my legs. My arms. When he found the tear in my shirt where Lyla had driven her fingers into my ribs, he paused, lifting the fabric away to assess the damage. Before saying anything, he was at his trunk, pulling out rags and a bottle of alcohol. He set everything down on his desk and almost frustratingly pulled off hisjacket, dropping it on the floor. When he crouched down in front of me, I could see he was avoiding my eyes and it stung for some reason.
“Vidar,” I said.
He acted as if he didn’t hear me and pressed the alcohol soaked cloth over my wound.
“Vidar, I will heal.”
Still, he said nothing. He just kept working with more determined, focused strokes, cleaning the blood away. Outside, I knew Gus was still lying dead. When the image of him being swarmed by sirens flashed before me, I gripped the sides of the chair, nearly splintering the wood.
