But then, he knew they wouldn’t. She had warned them that they wouldn’t. That he would always…always have to keep fighting…
Over two hundred years… Killian sunk further into the couch. It had been that long since he’d seen her… His heart ached as his mother’s face flashed into his mind. He looked so much like her… In fact, Killian looked like a copy of her when he changed his form to female—not that he did it often. Usually, he only did it when the ache of missing her got to be too much… He had no photos to remember her by…
“Flee!”
Her desperate pleading echoed in his head as his heart clenched again, and the memories of the last time he’d seen her came to the surface.
“Mother…I miss you…”
Killian flinchedas a scream that spoke of nothing but pain broke the tension in the water around him. His whole body ached to swim to the woman who had made the noise. To go to his mother as she once again was forced to carry a burden she should not!
But his tail remained stagnant, just floating there, listening to all of the noises coming from the room beyond the openentryway in front of him, even as the screams turned to weak crying.
Killian needed to move…
“Move,” he rasped softly, while his fear became almost a binding around his chest. “Move,” he pleaded to himself, as tears fell from his eyes, forming piles of pearls on the sandstone floor underneath his tail, some getting swept away with the gentle tide. A tide much too gentle for the emotional turmoil inside of him.
Still, he found he couldn’t budge, even though he desperately wanted to. She shouldn’t have been in there alone with the doctors… She deserved to be with those who loved her, not the callous, uncaring Sirens that were currently around her, who didn’t care if she lived or died.
While it was something he wished to be true every single day of his life, Killian wasn’t his mother’s only child. Yet, while he floated there in anguish, listening to her suffering, his siblings swam about, living their lives, as if what was happening to her didn’t matter! And the man, the demon who he refused to call his father, who had yet again put her in this danger, was nowhere in sight!
No, the bastard who kept putting her into the same situation over and over again, was waiting in another room at the far end of the palace, so he wouldn’t be disturbed by her. By the great Goddess Ceto, he hated him.
When the smell of blood filled the water, Killian finally managed to move. His heart was racing in fear as he swam desperately forward, crying out when he saw her. She screamed right as he entered, and a baby’s cry followed.
With ombrédark-teal and purplish-gray hair floating around her head, his mother’s heart-shaped face and jaw seemed too sharp, her cheeks too shallow. Her thicker bottom lip was bleeding from having been bitten, and her pearlescentskin looked almost colorless. She lay unmoving with her eyes closed in the large carved sandstone bed, her gills fluttering swiftly with each shallow breath she took.
His mother was completely nude, and there wasn’t a scale in sight, as she had changed form so legs had taken the place of her tail. But Killian could only assume that to be true based on prior births, because a cloud of blood obscured her lower half, flowing too freely for the water to filter it away. The denseness of that cloud had his stomach dropping in fear.
Without thought of the consequences, Killian surged forward when the doctors tried to leave just seconds later, without even checking on her, pinning the closest Siren within reach to the wall by the throat. “YOU WILL HELP HER!” he roared, for the first time using the power of his voice on another Siren—even though he was not sure if it would work.
The man sputtered, “Pr-Prince Killian, I?—”
“I don’t give a damn what orders you have,” he said with a laugh, the sound harsh as he glanced to the others who had frozen at his actions. “If you leave this room and my mother dies, you all will follow her. It may not be today, it may not be anytime soon, but I swear to Ceto, with every fucking molecule of water in my body, I will make sure you join her!”
His hand clenched on the man’s throat as the water started to swirl, the temperature around him dropping dangerously, before finally, one of the men blurted, “We’ll help her. We’ll help!”
Killian eyed them for barely a moment, before nodding and releasing his hold on the Siren. Wading backwards, he came to a stop in the entryway, preparing to block their path in case they tried to leave again. Killian wrapped his arms around himself, gripping his bare sides tightly as he tried to stop the trembling.
But the man who carried his father’s new spawn paused, while the other two went to the exhausted woman in the bed, and held out the child.
Killian’s gaze flicked down, barely registering the infant for any longer than it took to note that the little boy had no mark that would designate it as being capable of giving birth, before coldly saying, “I have no interest in touching it.”
And he didn’t, because eventually, they would become just like his other siblings…heartless. He, like all the others had, would view him just as all of his kind did, as simply another vessel to be used. He didn’t know what he’d do if a child ever came that had the same mark that was on the left side of his hip. But it hadn’t happened so far, so he refused to think on it.
Grimacing, the Siren looked like he wanted to argue, but ended up resting the baby on the bed as he joined the others.
Killian’s hands clenched further on his sides when surgical tools came out, his anger twisting inside him. These parasites had been about to leave his mother here to die, when they knew they could help her. That was how little they cared about her life. How little his FATHER cared about her life. And that was the reality. Because that bastard had ordered them to bring the fucking child before him, so it could be examined, and its usefulness could be determined, before the doctors would have been given leave to tend to the woman who had just pushed the infant from her body.
And Killian knew this to be true, even without asking for what their orders had been, because he’d seen it happen…again and again. Each time, he stayed to care for her, and each time, the damage had been worse, but this time…it wasn’t like the others… There was more blood… More screaming…
It had been too soon since she’d birthed the last child… There had been no breaks, no rest, no time to heal.
Something he had practically shouted at his siblings, at his bloody sperm donor, but they hadn’t cared. They’d tried to placate him, called his feelings silly, and said his words were nonsense, that this was how it was supposed to be. The same shit he had heard again and again over his thirteen-and-a-half years of life. Words he’d, at one time, before he’d woken up and broken free of the brainwashing, taken seriously.
Killian knew that to them it wasn’t nonsense, because just like his father's previous wives, his siblings knew she would eventually not make it… And to them, that was normal, and acceptable. But Killian wasn’t sure how to mentally accept that, or if he even could. He also wasn’t sure he could ever forgive his family for so willingly accepting it all.
Killian stiffened when the doctor swam back and looked towards him.
