She was. That strange, impossible human girl who'd looked at me with wonder instead of terror, who'd offered me a pearl like it was the most natural thing in the world, who sang to the empty sea every evening and didn't know we were listening. I touched the pouch at my hip where I kept her pearl. The gesture had become compulsive over the past days, a way of reassuring myself that she was real, that the connection between us was real, that I hadn't imagined the whole thing.
The pearl was smooth and warm against my fingers, even in this cold. It held her warmth somehow, her light. I'd never let it go. The trench opened before us like a wound in the ocean floor, darkness spilling up from its depths like blood from a cut. Bioluminescent creatures dotted the walls—anglerfish with their deadly lures, jellyfish trailing poisonous tendrils, things without names that had never seen the sun.
At the bottom, barely visible even to our enhanced eyes, a cave mouth glowing with sickly green light.
The sea witch's home.
We descended in silence, the pressure building around us, the cold intensifying with every stroke of our tails. By the time we reached the cave mouth, my muscles were aching and my gills were working hard to extract oxygen from water that seemed too thick, too heavy, too wrong.
The cave was worse. Bones littered the entrance, fish bones, whale bones, and others I didn't want to examine too closely. Shapes that might have been human. Shapes that might have been siren. The witch didn't discriminate in her collection.
"Visitors." The voice came from everywhere and nowhere, echoing off the cave walls, sliding into my ears like oil. "How delightful. It's been so long since anyone was brave enough—or foolish enough—to seek me out."
She emerged from the shadows like a nightmare taking form. Once, she might have been beautiful. There were echoes of it in the structure of her face, the grace of her movements. But time and dark magic had twisted her into something else entirely. Her skin was pale as death, mottled with patches of scales that shifted colors constantly—black to green to purple to colors that had no name. Her hair moved on its own, tentacles rather than strands, writhing around her head like a nest of eels.
Her eyes were the worst. Completely black, no whites, no iris—just endless darkness that seemed to swallow the light. When she smiled, her teeth were needle-sharp and far too numerous.
"Kaelan." She said my name like she was tasting it, her tongue—forked, I noticed now—flickering over her lips. "Pack leader of the eastern waters. And Vale, the beautiful one. The singer." Her black eyes fixed on him with unsettling intensity. "I've heard your voice carry across the currents. Such a lovely sound. I've often wondered what it would be like to own it."
Vale went rigid beside me, his hand drifting toward the knife at his hip. I moved slightly in front of him, putting myself between him and the witch.
"We're here to trade," I said, keeping my voice steady, controlled. "Not to give gifts."
The witch laughed, a sound like bones rattling in a current. "Trade. Yes, of course. That's what they all say." She drifted closer, her tentacle-hair reaching toward us, tasting the water around our bodies. "But what could you possibly have that I would want? You're not particularly old. Not particularly powerful. Your territory is pleasant but unremarkable." She circled us slowly, her black eyes cataloging, assessing. I forced myself to stay still, to not react when one of her tentacles brushed against my arm.
"Ah." She stopped suddenly, her head tilting at an angle that would have broken a normal creature's neck. "But you have a secret, don't you? Something new. Something... interesting." Her nostrils flared, and her smile widened. "I can smell it on you. Both of you. A scent that doesn't belong in the sea."
My hand went to my hip, covering the pouch that held the pearl. Covering the faint trace of her scent that still clung to it.
"Human," the witch breathed, her eyes going half-lidded with pleasure. "But not just any human. Oh, this is delicious. An omega." She laughed again, delighted now rather than mocking. "You've found a human omega. How wonderfully rare. How perfectly precious."
"She's ours." The words came out before I could stop them, sharp with possessiveness, rough with warning.
"Yours?" The witch's eyebrows rose, she had too many of them, I realized, layered above her eyes like the legs of a centipede. "Does she know that? Does she know what you are? What you've done?" Her smile turned cruel. "Does she know how many of her kind you've eaten, pack leader? How manyships you've sunk? How many sailors you've lured to their deaths with songs and smiles?"
I didn't flinch. Couldn't afford to. "That's not why we're here."
"No." She drifted back, her tentacle-hair settling around her shoulders like a living shawl. "You're here for the breathing potion. So you can take your precious human into the deep. Court her properly, like the romantic fools you are." She made a sound of disgust, but her eyes were bright with interest. "Sirens. Creatures of hunger and death, brought low by a soft little omega who doesn't even know she's being hunted."
"We're not hunting her." Vale's voice was sharp, defensive. "We would never hurt her."
"Wouldn't you?" The witch's gaze slid to him, assessing. "You've hurt so many others. What makes her different?"
"She's omega." I said it like it was obvious, because it was. "She's meant to be treasured. Protected. Loved." The words felt like broken glass in my mouth, because I knew what we'd seen. Her calloused hands. Her patched clothes. The exhaustion written in every line of her body.
"Yet she's working." The witch's voice was silk over steel, her too-many eyes gleaming with knowledge she shouldn't have. "On a fishing boat. Manual labor. Hiding what she is. Living like a servant."
My claws extended before I could stop them. The rage that surged through me was almost blinding. "You know nothing about?—"
"I know what the sea tells me." She cut me off, unbothered by my display. "I know she hauls ropes until her hands bleed. I know she scrubs decks on her knees. I know she goes hungry so others can eat." Her smile was sharp as a blade. "How does that sit with you, pack leader? Your precious omega, working herself to bone while you circle her ship like lovesick fools?"
It sat like poison. Like a hook in my gut. Every word she spoke was another slash across my heart, because we'd seen it, we'd seen her working, seen her exhaustion, seen the evidence of a life no omega should ever live—and we'd done nothing.
"We didn't know." Vale's voice was raw, barely above a whisper. "We didn't understand?—"
"You understand now." The witch's eyes glittered. "So what will you do about it?" I thought of the pearl in my pouch. The ribbons my pack brothers carried like sacred relics. The way my chest ached when I thought of her smile, her wave, the hope in her eyes when she looked at us.
"I'm learning," I said quietly. Something shifted in the witch's expression. Something that might have been surprise, or interest, or something older and sadder that I couldn't name.
