I held out my hand, the one with the pearl and offered it to him.
He went completely still. Even more still than he'd been before, which shouldn't have been possible. Those dark eyes dropped to the pearl, then back to my face, and something shifted in his expression. Surprise, maybe. Confusion.
I couldn't hold my breath any longer. Black spots were dancing at the edges of my vision. But before I kicked for the surface, I did one more thing—I set the pearl drifting in the water between us. Watched it sink slowly toward him. Then I waved, a small, silly gesture that made me feel like an idiot even as I did it—and swam for the light above.
I broke the surface gasping, gulping air, my heart hammering against my ribs. For a long moment I just floatedthere, breathing, trying to convince myself that I hadn't just hallucinated from oxygen deprivation.
Then I looked down. The water below was empty. Blue and clear and utterly vacant. Deep, deep down, something glinted. Pale and round and luminous. Like a pearl, clutched in someone's hand.
I climbed back onto the ship in a daze.
My hands were shaking as I pulled on my dry clothes. My mind was racing, replaying those impossible moments over and over. The creature in the water. His dark eyes. The way he'd looked at me, not like prey, not like a threat, but like somethingunexpected.
Like I'd surprised him.
I touched my palm, where the pearl had sat moments ago. I could still feel the phantom weight of it, the cool smoothness. I'd given it away. Given it to a monster from a fairy tale, for no reason I could explain.
Stupid, I thought.Reckless. You're losing your mind.
I didn't feel crazy. I felt... alive. More alive than I had in months. Like something had cracked open inside me, and light was spilling through. I pulled my cap down low and went to find work that needed doing. There was always work on a ship. Always something to keep my hands busy and my mind distracted.
All through the evening, as I scrubbed decks and hauled rope and avoided Cort's watching eyes, I kept looking at the water.
Wondering if he was still down there.
Wondering if I'd ever see him again.
That night, I dreamed of dark eyes and obsidian scales, and when I woke, I was smiling.
Chapter Two
KAELAN
I couldn't stop touching it.
The pearl sat in my palm, small and luminous and impossible. I'd held a thousand pearls in my lifetime, pulled from oysters, collected from the seafloor, pried from the dead fingers of drowned sailors. Pearls were common. Pearls were nothing.
This one was everything.
I closed my fist around it, feeling the smooth coolness against my skin. Opened my hand. Looked at it again. Closed my fist. The motion was becoming compulsive, a tic I couldn't control, and that alone should have alarmed me. I was not a creature prone to compulsion. I was patient. Controlled. I had hunted these waters for more years than I cared to count, and I had learned long ago that survival meant stillness. Waiting. Watching. Striking only when the moment was perfect.
I had been about to strike when she appeared.
The human girl. Small and pale, with hair that drifted around her like copper-touched seaweed—long hair, longer than mosthumans kept it, floating in the water like something alive. She'd swum down from the ship above. I'd been tracking it for days, waiting for one of the crew to fall overboard, an easy meal. And she'd gone deeper than humans usually ventured. Brave or foolish, I hadn't yet decided.
It didn't matter. Food was food.
I'd positioned myself in the shadows, letting the darkness of the deep hide me. She wouldn't see me until it was too late. My claws had flexed, my body coiling to strike?—
Then she'd looked up. Directly at me. Her eyes were blue. Pale blue, like shallow water, like sky reflected on the surface. They should have gone wide with terror. She should have screamed bubbles, or thrashed, or frozen in that helpless way prey did when they finally understood their death was upon them.
She didn't. She looked at me like I was wonderful. I'd seen many expressions on human faces in the moments before I killed them. Fear, mostly. Sometimes anger, or denial, or desperate pleading. But never wonder. Never that soft, awed expression, like she was seeing something miraculous instead of monstrous.
It stopped me. Froze me in place more effectively than any net or harpoon. I hung suspended in the water, unable to move, unable to process what I was seeing. Then she'd given me the pearl.
Just held it out. Offered it to me freely, like a gift, like it was the most natural thing in the world. Her lungs had to be burning, humans couldn't hold their breath for long, but she'd taken the time to set the pearl drifting toward me before she swam away.
She'd waved at me. A small, shy gesture, utterly ridiculous. Like we were neighbors passing on a reef. I hadn't moved until long after she'd disappeared back to the surface. Hadn't beencapable of moving. The pearl had sunk slowly through the water, and I'd caught it on instinct, and now here I was.
