“This crew has been our salvation, Dahlia. I don’t want any of them to be broken. That’s… a very strange feeling.”
She hobbled off, doing her best to walk without a limp as she made her way toward Mullins. My gaze shifted to Vidar as he slid his thin cotton blouse back over his shoulders and jammed his shovel into the dirt, standing it beside him.
“I’m not going to bore us all with things about Gus that we all already know,” he spoke. “We all knew him in our own way and we’ll mourn him in our own way. The one thing I’m certain we all heard him say a hundred times, though, is that he hated the silence of the ocean. He hated the loneliness. He liked music. Laughter.” He walked to a crate full of dusty bottles and pulled one out, popping the cork off the mouth and pouring a swig over Gus’s resting place. “So, drink. Play. Dance on his bloody grave, for fuck’s sake.”
The men started hooting and laughing, moving in like sharks to a whale carcass to grab a bottle from the same crate. It didn’ttake long for the sweet smell of rum to fill the air. I skimmed the crowd and noticed Aeris’s hair standing out like a blood stain. She was standing next to her pirate captain wearing a teal dress that cinched around her petite frame. Our eyes met and she bravely held my stare before Vidar moved between us to steal Nazario’s attention. Aeris politely slipped away, catching her captain’s notice as she did. She gave him a reassuring smile, which didn’t seem to make him less concerned, but he did not pursue her.
I was surprised to see her making her way toward me. She navigated the camp like she was floating and came to stand by my side.
“You knew him well?” she asked.
“As well as I could have.”
“You’re sad for the loss, though.”
“Can you turn that off? That ability of yours.”
“You know about the Yri?”
“I know enough. I know that Yri could sense emotions and manipulate them.”
“I can’t manipulate anything. And the answer is no. I can’t stop feeling the things around me. It’s just always there.”
“That sounds torturous.”
She shrugged her shoulder. “It’s not. We’re built to feel. Just as you Kroans are built to kill.”
I took in a deep breath, watching as Mullins took out his fiddle and propped one foot on a barrel to begin playing at one of the campfires.
“I assume it was you who convinced your captain to come to Dornwich.”
“I didn’t convince him of anything. We often want the same things, he and I. And… neither of us wants to abandon the water. Nazario’s place is on the sea. As is mine, although I’m only just beginning to realize it. I did not exactly have much time to get to know the ocean growing up. And if a Kroan, of all people, can be so bold as to challenge her own kind then how can we run?”
“I heard you attempting to dissuade Vidar that night in the alley. What changed your mind about me?”
“I thought perhaps I was reading you all wrong. I felt your anger. Your bloodlust. I thought perhaps it was toward those around you, but I understand now that it’s not. I misread your intensity as a threat. I’m… trying to be better at knowing people. I’ve not had much practice. Sometimes it is overwhelming. Especially since you’re the first siren—the first Kroan—I’ve ever met. You give off quite a lot more emotion than anyone else, I’ve realized.”
“Do I?”
“Perhaps not the way others can see, but yes.”
I scrutinized her slender figure and imagined how easy it would be to break her with my bare hands. Yri had never been warriors. They were a peaceful, fragile race, incapable of taking up arms.
“You have an interesting talent, but you’d be useless in a fight,” I said.
“I am not as helpless as I appear,” she said calmly, staring at the small group of dancing men. “I have my uses.”
A long stretch of silence swelled between us as the music grew livelier, accompanied by someone beating on a tambourine and a few men clapping their hands to the upbeat rhythm. Meridan was sitting on a crate, watching the men do some kind of dance using only their feet to hop around in an unorganized circle of merriment. I knew she wanted to dance. She had become secretly fond of it.
“Is your friend alright? The Naros?” Aeris asked.
“She’ll be alright. She’s been hurt worse.”
“Was it those creatures?”
“The xhoth,” I said, turning to look at her. “Yes. You’ve seen them before?”
She nodded. “I was captive for a long time before Nazario found me. I was on a ship and the crew had pulled something out of the water during their journey. A monster from old stories.”
