“Rose.” My voice shook. “Come back to me, love.”
She sucked in a breath like she was drowning. The foreign words stopped.
“It remembers,” she gasped. “Oh, Saints, Bash, it remembers everything.”
“What does it say?”
“A lot of very unhelpful things about hubris and thresholds, but—” She broke off, staring past me. “There.”
The sea rose.
The Leviathan burst from the depths like an answer to a summons, water cascading from its body in sheets. It reared higher than before, exposing more of its enormous length. As it turned out, I saw it—the thing Rose was staring at.
Along its left side, just beneath the curve of its jaw, a jagged patch of scar tissue glowed brighter than the rest. The bioluminescence there was wrong—too bright, too sharp, as if barely healed.
“The Atlanteans tried,” Rose said, voice shaking. “They wounded it once. They couldn’t kill it, but they… they left a mark. A fault line.”
My mind raced. “We aim for that.”
“It’s not that simple.” Her fingers tightened around the shell. Sebastian Jr. dug his claws in stubbornly. “The shell says it’s not flesh. Not entirely. That place is where they bound it. Where the old magic was anchored. If we strike there while it’s listening—”
“Listening?”
“To me.” She swallowed. “To this.” She lifted the shell slightly. “We can unmake the binding. Kill the thing wearing it.”
“And if we miss?” I asked.
She met my eyes. “Then it eats us instead of chasing us to the ends of the world. Better for everyone else, don’t you think?”
I cursed under my breath. Saints help me, I had married a woman who could look down the throat of a legend and make jokes about efficiency.
“Val!” I shouted.
She was already halfway down the starboard gun line, checking flints and powder as the crew frantically loaded. She snapped her head up.
“What?”
“There’s a weak point—under the jaw, left side. You see that glowing scar?”
Val squinted, braced against the roll of the deck. For a heartbeat, the fury in her eyes was something almost holy.
“Oh, I see it,” she said. “Ugly bastard.”
“That’s where we aim,” I said. “Every shot, every spear, every bloody kitchen knife if you have to.”
Val grinned, savage and bright. “Now you’re speaking my language.”
The Leviathan roared. The sound was so loud my bones vibrated. The Wraith shook, lines snapping, a mast groaning dangerously. The creature moved closer, sliding through the water with terrifying grace. At this angle, its golden eye had a slit through it and was weeping fluid from it. Blackbeard.
I didn’t know if the damned cat was alive, but I would feed it all the treats it wanted for slowing the leviathan down.
“Oscar!” I shouted. “Keep us moving or we’re dead!”
“Trying!” he yelled back from the helm, jaw clenched. Inu stood beside him, steady as a shadow, one hand on his shoulder and the other on the hilt of her sword.
The ship surged forward, fighting the unnatural currents whipped up by the Leviathan’s movement.
Rose grabbed my sleeve. “I have to get closer.”
