“Come on. What do you say you let me go?” The mermaid’s voice takes on a sweeter note. I wait for a dooming melody to follow, a song to coax me into her submission. But it doesn’t. There is a warbling hitch to her voice. Her breaths are shallow and inconsistent. She doesn’t sound like a siren right now. She only sounds afraid. “You won’t ever have to see me again,” she offers even more pathetically. I imagine her blinking those wide turquoise eyes, plumping up her lower lip. Begging like the filthy coward she is.
Instead of answering her, I keep my eyes trained upon the pages. I read, and I read, and I read. To no avail. All the while, she has started ripping off bits of her cot to throw at me. My wings bat away most of the harmless missiles, but the odd one or two lands against my neck. They feel wet.
“That’s my spit,” she announces when I reach up to brush them off.
I shut my eyes on a smooth exhale, trying my best to remember the meditation practices taught to us by the elders. However, my blood has begun to boil with repressed magic. With an ache to spend it and damn myself further. Herspitis on my neck, and if anyone else dared such a thing, they’d be viscera on that filthy cell floor.
When my hands tighten on the book in front of me, she adds with a snarl, “You missed a piece behind your ear.”
Heart. Mortem. Death.
I hear rather than see her hands clench before she pelts another chunk of mattress at the back of my head. “Have it your way. I can do this all night.”
Heart. Mortem. Death.
But I can’t push her voice from my mind. I can’t ignore the need in my chest.
During the Trials, a warlock does not simply undergo torment for mere discipline’s sake. We become magic. Magic becomes us. It winds itself into the fabric of our bodies, our bones, our blood. It becomes irrevocable, compulsive, and necessary to our survival; I need to expend it as much as I need to release my next breath. If I don’t, the magic will consume everything.
Such is the pact of a warlock.
When she hisses from her cell—and the next piece of wet mattress grazes my cheek—I snap the most recent tome in half and throw it behind me. Torn pages soar through the air like plucked feathers. “The king permitted me to torture you as I see fit. If you cannot be silent, I will have no problem silencing you myself.”
There is a sharp pause, and then she snarls again. “If the king told you to lick plum jam from between his toes, would you immediately fall to your knees?”
A muscle feathers in my jaw.Breathe. Focus on the wellspring of magic inside. Draw energy from it. Draw strength from your center.“I prefer strawberry.”
She snarls again, and the bars of her cell shake as though she’s throttling them.Tryingto throttle them. But she is too weak to escape. Too pathetic. “I refuse to spend my last moments on this earth talking to a fuckingwarlock.”
“No one is making you speak, demon.”
She sucks in a harsh breath. Her desperation only seems to grow by the second. “Isn’t Mortia supposed to be a just and righteous kingdom? I… I demand a trial. I demand afuckingtrial with yourfuckingking, youfucking asshole. I’m—I’m not even a mermaid!”
The dam inside my chest breaks on her lie. Frustration and magic explode out of it, hot enough, it feels as if I’m simmering in my own flesh. Between one breath and the next, I appear inches from the merrow’s cell. Inches from her face. She startles with a frightened yelp, tripping backward and landing on her newly torn cot.
I stand there, muscles taut beneath my black tunic, wings splayed wide, and glare down at her. Pink hair falls in haphazard waves to her waist, and her ocean-blue eyes spark with a vicious mixture of fear andrage. Her pert nose twitches. Her full lips twist into a frown.Every single emotion she experiences plays out like a song across her face. Anger, desperation, terror. She can’t hide them; I’m not even sure she’s trying. I tilt my head, examining her as one might examine a foreign substance on their shoe.
Perhaps that isn’t a fair comparison.
Perhaps she’s beautiful beneath that shroud of emotions. Perhaps if she weren’t a demon of the deep, I’d admire the soft curve of her hips and the sun-kissed gleam of her golden skin. As it is, however, she is a monster.
And she’ll be dead within the hour.
I crouch to her eye level, wrapping my hands around the bars. Bending them with magic. Her eyes dart to the new opening, and she licks her lips—a nervous gesture.
“Your attempts to flee are pointless. You are trapped. You will die,” I growl, tearing my gaze from her mouth. “And you will die because you are a treacherous merrow washed up on enemy shores. Your people slaughtered ours days ago, and I found you boasting in the alleys of Crestfall, declaring you partook in their murderous deception. If you stood trial, you would be found guilty, and you would hang. As you deserve.”
“I’m not trying to flee,” she declares on another ragged breath, though she can’t stop staring at the gap in the bars.
“How many exits are in this room?”
“Four,” she says instinctually. Her gaze shifts to mine, and her eyes narrow. “Including the window above my cell.”
I look over her head, twenty feet above us, at the cloudy blue glass. It’s a completely asinine observation. “You would need wings to reach that.”
“Lucky you have wings, then.”
“And you think you could hitch a ride on me?”
