Gavriall eyes the skull, then the door. His lips twist in a petulant scowl.
“Allow me to answer for you, warlock—no. There’s no fucking way aprincessfished us out of the water in hopes of stumbling upon some sort of treasure,” Zephyra says, shaking her head again. “We should kill her before she can gut us. We kill her; we jump into the ocean, make a swim for it, and hope other sea monsters don’t murder us before we make it to the ruins.”
“You’re forgetting our deal,” Vesper says.
Zephyra glowers. “Fine. We kill the princess. Then we fight you.Thenwe jump into the ocean, make a swim for it, and hope other sea monsters don’t murder us before we make it to the ruins.”
“We could fly—” Gavriall starts.
“Absolutely not,” Zephyra hisses, her hand moving to her stomach as if she’s going to vomit. “No more flying.”
The skull croons from the floor, “Pretty birds in the skies, arrows shot through pretty wings, each of you whispers lies, only one of you sings. Fall, you will. Fall, they must. Down, down, down—to turmoil and dust.”
“All right, last plan,” Zephyra repeats, “we stomp on that weird-ass skull, then we kill the princess, then we fight Vesper,thenwe make a swim for it.”
“Stomp on me and I’ll gnash teeth through your organs, girl,” the skull growls in a much darker tone than before.
“Why are we fighting the siren?” I ask.
Vesper glances at me coolly. “Afraid of your odds, warlock?”
I raise a hand, a single flame erupting in the center of my palm that simultaneously curdles death in my gut. I don’t let the pain or the weakness show on my face. “Not at all.”
“There’s an awful lot of talk of murder happening right now,”Gavriall says. “Very disconcerting when we’re traveling hundreds of feet in the air.”
Everyone ignores him.
Zephyra forces my arm back down to my side. “We are not attacking Vesper until she attacks us first.”
“Why?” Gavriall and I ask in unison.
“Because she is—shewasmy friend, and we have a princess and a ship of soldiers to worry about. Okay? So tell me how we handle that first. And then… then we’ll discuss Vesper.” She pleads silently for me to understand, to listen to her.
“We can’t kill the princess,” I say. “For one, Amaya is a daughter of Tempestas—God of Storms, Chaos, and Vengeance. If we kill his direct descendant, he’ll murder us where we stand. Then there’s the crew; the princess won’t be traveling with a pack of doe-eyed soldiers. She’ll have the best of the best flanking her. The strongest, the smartest, the fastest. Even still, let’s say we manage to explode the ship or use Vesper’s siren song and kill everyone—we are undoubtedly circling the skies of Tempest. We’ll fall down to another massacre. We’ll be surrounded on all sides. Gavriall is shit in combat. Vesper will be torn apart by the first person not enthralled by her song, and you won’t have your abilities to protect you.” She’ll be killed first. Her pink hair is unmistakable, and suddenly—the thought of Zephyra hanging, choking, dying isn’t pleasing at all. It makes me ill.
“What about you?” Zephyra asks.
“I am a warlock from a rival kingdom. They will rip the wings straight off my back the second they get the chance.”
Silence settles around us at that, absolute, and I glance between my three current allies. A criminal. A siren. And my mermaid. None of them can survive this. This trip has been doomed since the start. And Zephyra is right—we’ve been followed. Every step along the way, someone has found us. Gavriall, the cult, Vesper, Amaya. Either it’s a horrible coincidence or… the heart is real. And it’s close.
“We need her, Zephyra. If we’re going to retrieve the heart, there’s no way we can do this without her, her crew, her ship—”
“Wait,” Gavriall interrupts. “Do you… do you hear that?”
“No,” Zephyra and I say in unison.
Vesper tilts her head, and a moment—one brief breath—passes before her hand flies to her mouth. “Fuck.”
Her whispered curse permeates the silence, and the four of us understand at once. A chill racks my spine.
Vesper’s siren song has stopped.
We glance down at where Amaya was previously lapping at Vesper’s feet. Only, the princess isn’t there.
Now upright, brandishing two blades and no longer under the thrall of a siren’s song, Princess Amaya Frost lunges for Zephyra with bloodlust blazing in her storm-gray eyes.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
