The only way for me to protect Kye was to stay away from him.
“Kye...” I kicked harder, scooping the water with my hands faster to catch up to him. “We can’t stay together. The god...”
He glanced over his shoulder at me.
“No one will take you away from me,” he said resolutely. “Not the monsters. Not my fucking uncle. And not the damn god.”
Something brushed my leg, sending my heart racing with panic.
“They’re here again!” I squeaked, kicking my foot. “And they want you. Your blood... Or your magic. Your throne?”
I didn’t know exactly what Arnon and Dorelea’s goal was, but I knew now that they needed Kye for it. They made a deal with a real fucking god to capture the man who’d been made practically invincible by the very same curse that tormented him.
“We can’t stay together,” I tried to explain it all to Kye, while fighting the waves swimming. “He’ll find you through me.”
“Let him come,” Kye replied grimly but determinedly.
The wooden hull of the ship rose in front of us. Lifting his hand, Kye snapped his fingers. I glanced up to find the midnight-blue face of the ship’s captain looking at us over the ornate railing on the starboard side.
Someone jumped overboard and into the water next to us.
“Your Majesty,” the male siren greeted the king while gracefully gliding closer to us through the water.
He wasn’t swimming. He didn’t need to. The siren magic made the water move at his command without any visible effort on his part.
“We’ll need to board,” Kye said quickly. “We’ll be sailing off to Sarnala right now. Let the captain know.”
The siren nodded, then raised an arm. The water swelled around us, gently hugging me around my hips and torso. At the same time, a swirl of dark tentacles cut through it, making the water glow in its wake.
“They’re here!” I yanked on the beaded cord that connected me to Kye to get his attention.
“Lift her on deck,” Kye ordered the sailor, then dropped his end of the pearl cord.
“No! You have to be first,” I protested fervently, even as the wave built up, lifting me toward the main deck of the ship.
“I’ll be right behind you, my butterfly,” he assured me, then shot his arm out and grabbed a tentacle. It froze mid-wiggle and turned to glass in a loose loop around his wrist.
As soon as the water released me and my feet touched the warm deck boards, I ran to the ship’s captain.
“Get him out, please!” I gripped the man’s arm. “He isn’t invincible. They can trap him. Theywilltake him.”
The god would wrap Kye in monsters’ tentacles to cocoon him. As Kye turned all the monster flesh around him to glass, he would entomb himself in a glass coffin of his own making. Thenthe god would drag him down to the bottomless Abyss to use him in any way he wished.
“Please bring the king up here!” I demanded, my voice raw with panic, my throat tight and sore.
The captain nodded to the sailor below. The water rose around Kye, lifting him too.
“Come on, come on, come on,” I chanted under my breath, gripping the railing so hard, my nails dug into the wood.
Dark tentacles rose after Kye, snaking over the surface and slithering through the waves. There were so many now, it looked like a sinister forest of undulating seaweed had suddenly sprouted from the waves.
A chill spiraled around my torso. The black pearls moved against each other with a wet noise from the slime between them as they jerked me against the railing.
“Oh, God, no! Not now.” I curled my fingers around the wood in a death grip.
“Maren? What’s happening?” Kye demanded as the water carried him over the railing toward the deck.
He snapped his fingers at the sleepy sailors who had gathered on the main deck. Two of them dragged the wooden platform from the other side of the deck where it’d been placed last night in anticipation of the king’s boarding in a more conventional way, from the shore, not from the ocean.
