It isn’t enough. The sorcerer is still coming. I can almost feel him now, stalking ever closer, gliding through the waters like a wraith. “Run fast, Zephyra,” he croons.“I so love a chase.”
Before I can do just that, before I can screw my head on straight and flee, a burst of terrible power unleashes from the warlock’schest. He shoots us up on a jet stream of roiling water and sends us falling across the sky like shooting stars.
“You’re fucking welcome,” he growls as we careen toward a limestone ruin. I scream in his arms, fastening my hands around his neck, and he seems to take pleasure in driving us straight into the earth.
CHAPTER TEN
ARION
Before the Merrow Wars, shore-palaces were places of refuge and peace.
Crafted of mollusks and limestone and shells, enormous towers nestle on small islands and shallow coasts between the four kingdoms and four seas, where humankind used to craft treaties and trade goods from all over the world. After the wars, however, they became abominations of wreckage. Towers of shame and regret left to rot before a riotous, bloody sea.
Today, Mortia’s shore-palace is where I’ll kill a mermaid with my bare hands.
The second my boots touch the stone, I dump the demon onto the ground, place a hand on my chest, and heal my lungs and stomach from the inside out—evaporating every ounce of salt water and bile remaining.She almost drowned me.I grind my teeth to keep from snarling, thankful my reservoir of magic managed to mostly replenish itself in the moments I lost consciousness.
I am going to slaughter her.
Zephyra clings to the earth, her turquoise tail wrapped around a jagged boulder as her bare chest heaves and pink hair sticks to her face, her neck, her spine. Wild waves batter against the craggy island, showering her in violent explosions of seawater. She doesn’tmove, however, sticking to the boulder as her arms tremble. “If… you…ever,” she begins in a hiss of fury, “pick me up… andfly meagain, I will feed your eyeballs to a gull.”
I stalk forward, unable to hide the unbridled anger in my hard, heavy steps. My wings dodge a vicious wave—keeping dry after I evaporated the moisture from each individual feather—before splaying wide and casting a great shadow over her. She peers up at me, lifting her chin from the rock with a distant look in her vivid blue-green gaze. The remnants of panic.
I saw her expression just before I pulled her from the sea. It had been twisted with a terror unlike any I’ve seen since… since my youth.
“Birdman swallowed by gulls,” she murmurs against a ragged breath. “Beautiful irony, don’t you think?”
My wings bristle—the right wing nearly swats her, but she spins away at the last moment. Her back to the boulder, her nails biting painfully into the rock, she glares at me. “I know you can speak, birdman. You had no problem ordering me around earlier.”
I examine her with narrowed eyes. Her heart pounds loudly beneath her rib cage. Scales—hundreds if not thousands—sparkle below her navel, the end of her tail lashing in the surf while water cascades over the rest of her scarred flesh. A serpent slithered straight from the Fathoms to haunt me. Her slender waist gives way to ample curves, but she doesn’t shy away from her exposed body, doesn’t pick at the scraps of the tunic now tangled around her scales. Her hair covers most of her breasts, and she sets a delicate hand on her stomach as a dry heave overpowers her.
She’s vulnerable.
“Well?” she spits, dragging that same hand across a lush mouth.
My eyes flick back to hers.
“I am debating the best way to kill you.” Though I may not be puking like a graceless beast, my voice has turned rougher, deeper, from the last ten minutes of torture. My throat still burns with the sea. It lends an ominous note to the threat. “Maybe I’ll split you open at the spine. Or impale your throat like the others. Or maybe I’ll choke the life from you slowly, just as you intended for me.”
She lunges without warning, gnashing her teeth as if to bite my leg, but my wings react faster still. They carry me just out of reach before dropping me on the other side of her. A growl reverberates deep in my chest at her stupidity, her recklessness. She doesn’t yet seem to understand her new circumstances—that she might be a monster, but I am so much worse.
Before she can lift her chin, I crouch behind her, clamping my fingers around her throat and wrenching her head back toward mine. Her eyes burn hotter at my proprietary hold, brighter, completely indignant instead of afraid.
“You should beg for mercy,” I murmur in her ear. Because she held me like this, under the sea, as water flooded my lungs. She wrapped her tail around me in a sick embrace. It thumps against my side now, brutal as a hammer, but I don’t surrender, instead staring down at her with a threat of violence. She doesn’t yet understand, but shewill. I saved her life. I rescued her from whatever just fucking attacked us, and I flew her here to safety. She belongs tome.
Instead, she just laughs, a melodious tinkling that carries itself on a cool breeze, and my jaw hardens.
“You think you’re the first man to threaten me?”
No. I don’t.“I think I hold your life in my hands right now.”
“Last I checked, the entire Kingdom of Mortia is afterbothof us. And you need me, remember? You just saved me. Again,” she spits, as if it’s an insult. “I doubt you’ll kill me now.”
I did need her. As she fell at the end of that rope, I neededsalvation.
But that was before the fucking mermaid tried todrown me. Who knows when she’ll try again?When, notif. All Zephyra of the Syl has proved in the last two hours is her shifting, deceptive nature. And perhaps I’ve been foolish too—foolish to ever think amerrowcould help me.
I release her so quickly, she has no choice but to fall forward, knocking into the boulder with a pathetic groan. A phantom blade erupts from my fingertips then, razor-thin smoke, and presses to the delicate skin of her throat. Struggling to keep my voice even, I say, “Tell me the location of Abysses—the exact location this time, or I’ll slit your throat here and now.”
