Help.
The next scream slams against my spine, sending me tumbling forward through the underbrush. Low lying branches sting my cheeks as the desperate cries wind around my heart, pulling me toward the edge of the forest. The lagoon’s starry water had been still when I stood here with Jamie, but now, it rages. Giant waves crash against the black sand, the water churning and frothing like it’s been pulled by the same desperate sounds I have.
Dreaded understanding settles in the pit of my stomach as I peer between the trees. A siren lays sprawled on the sand only a few feet from the tree line, her once beautiful hair now matted with blood, spread around her head like a grotesque halo. Naked from the waist up, hideous gashes of varying depths litter her chest and stomach. So many, it’s impossible to know the original color of her skin as now, it’s a deep crimson, stained by her own blood.
Parts of her abdomen and arms have been pierced through with fishing hooks, their rusted metal pulling her skin in unnaturally taut angles. Nausea and sorrow barrel up my throat at the condition of her tail. It must have been beautiful once, but now, it’s raw and bleeding. Thousands of scales litter the sandbeside her, their prismatic color still reflecting the stars above, as the siren’s keening sobs echo through the night.
More horrific than even the state of her, is the raucous scene carrying on around her brutalized body.
At least twenty children scamper in circles, their screams of delight clashing with her screams of terror. A large bonfire burns off to the side, its smoke curling up into the night sky, as a few of the children chase each other near the flames. Others pluck up the siren’s scales and plaster them to their cheeks with taunting laughter. Some run their fingers through her blood, wiping it across their foreheads like gruesome war paint. A girl, who appears to be no more than seven, her cherubic cheeks flushed with pleasure, tosses sand into the siren’s wounds, while two boys near eighteen tug at her hair, yanking her ever closer to the fire.
As horrifying as the depravity is, it isn’t what floods my mouth with bile; isn’t what chills me to the marrow of my bones. It’s theirlaughter.
Cackling, hollow, insane.
The sound rattles painfully against my ears, turning my veins to ice. I thought the king’s eyes were the worst abyss of madness I’d ever see, but the children’s laughter is far worse. Deeper. Maniacal.
There is nothing light, nothing good. Only unending black.
How could something so pure become so malevolently twisted?
The siren screams again, the heartbreaking lament bringing tears to my eyes. The children only laugh harder, the sound so discordant with her misery that I finally realize who they are.
The Strayed.
I trap the scream building in my throat behind my lips and begin to back away, my mind racing with everything I’ve been told of them. Adira warned me that the King of Carrion was notthe worst monster in Letum, and now, I see the stark truth of her words. As horrible as Niko is, there is reason in his violence. Everything he’s done has been in service of a clear goal: keeping me.
Butthis—this is brutality for the sake of it.
Adira’s other warning races through me as one of the children digs a small knife into the siren’s eye.It’s better to be dead than be captured by a Strayed.
I duck silently back into the shadows, pulling the gladius from where it hangs at my hip. Terror pulses through me, its sickly film miring my limbs with heaviness as I turn back the way I came and run.
Sticks and stones tear at the bottoms of my feet, but I don’t dare slow as the siren’s keening call grows fainter. Though I’m nearly silent as I race toward where I left the carriage, I don’t make it more than a few yards before something wraps around both my ankles and jerks me to the ground.
I scramble at the dirt, pulling frantically at the rope that’s snared me like an animal. But it’s no use, as at least ten pairs of gleaming eyes appear from the depths of the trees.
A boy steps forward from the shadows. He appears to be the oldest of the group, maybe somewhere near nineteen. Tall and lean, his face is handsome and youthful, his black hair tumbling over his forehead mischievously as he saunters toward me. He wears only a torn pair of pants, leaving his feet and chest both bare, but for various belts crossed over his body, each one laden with a multitude of weapons. A shudder of dread ripples through my chest when he smiles. It isn’t kind like Sam’s or even arrogant like the king’s: it’s manic. Rotten.
But even the depthless evil of his smile doesn’t scare me as much as his first words. With a wild glint in his eyes, he says, “So nice of you to finally join us, Willa Darling. We’ve been waitingages.”
Chapter fourteen
“They’re getting bolder since Willa’s arrival,” Sam muses, surveying the five sleeping bodies around us.
I jostle one of them lightly with the toe of my boot, a blonde I’ve never seen before. I tell myself this doesn’t mean anything—there are thousands of Strayed living in the underground tunnels of the Hollows, it’s not like I’d be familiar with all of them. But his foreign appearance unsettles me nonetheless, because it’s a stark reminder of what will happen if they ever get their hands on Willa.
More depravity. More death.
In the two centuries since their king’s death, the Strayed have been festering quietly beneath the earth, an evil I’ve never had the strength to entirely eradicate. It’s a delicate balance—using enough of my power to scare them back into their holes, while not destroying myself in the process—one that is on the verge of collapsing entirely. Before Willa, just the threat of my magic was enough to keep them at bay, but now, they’ve glimpsed a way to return to their former glory.
Using Willa to overthrow me.
I scrape my fingers roughly through my hair, releasing a breath through my teeth. The throbbing in my head has risen to an untenable degree and my muscles are so fatigued, it’s a miracle I’m still on my feet. It’s been so long since I’ve been forced to use so much magic in a such a short amount of time, and after the events in Caelum harbor, and Willa’s beast afterward, I’d been hardly fit to do more than collapse on my bed and sleep away the pain.
But then Adira sent the signal that the Strayed were inmyforest, far too close to the precious children hidden in the Grove, and I couldn’t let it stand. I hesitate to think what would have happened if Sam hadn’t been with me this time, able to knock them out cold with his power—what would have happened if I’d been forced to use my magic again.
“What do you want me to do with them?” he asks, gazing down at the little girl nearest him. I turn away at the devastation reflecting in his eyes, swallowing down a similar ball of emotion in my own throat.
