As the wave set Kye down onto the platform, the wood turned to glass.
The crew had no idea what was happening to me, but Kye had guessed.
“Hold her!” he ordered.
The ropes of black pearls tightened in the god’s magic effort to push me off the ship. I strained against them and croaked, “Do...not...jump in...after me.”
The fucking god had turned me into something akin to a dog toy, tossing me back into the water again and again. If only I could stop Kye from playing this dangerous fetch game with the dark divine. Whatever happened to me, he couldn’t come to my rescue this time.
A shove of the sinister magic sent me overboard. My nails scraped against the wood as I lost the grip on the railing. Once again, I was plunged into the ocean.
Tails, tentacles, and claws surrounded me without touching me. They moved, undulating and waiting... Waiting for Kye, their true target, to follow me in.
“Don’t jump,”rushed through my head.“Do not.”
The nightmarish creatures suddenly shifted away from me with a new purpose in their mass. They gathered under the ship, rocking it side to side.
Screams and shouts came from above. I looked up as the ship tilted. Its side came rushing toward me.
“Watch out!” someone yelled.
Then the foolish, stubborn, beautiful siren king dove from the deck to me. His strong, lithe body arched through the air before entering the water at a perfect angle without a single splash. I might’ve taught him how to swim, but he was born a siren, and not even a curse could change the grace with which he moved both in and out of water.
The ship never stopped tilting. Its masts swayed sideways, coming dangerously low over the water. I stared at them going down as the ship turned on its side. I tried to swim, but I was too slow to get away in time.
“Faster, Maren!” Kye swam to my side in a few long, powerful strokes.
He lifted his hands and caught one of the yards on the main mast. Even his inhuman strength wasn’t enough to stop the shipfrom upturning, but it gave me a few moments I needed to swim away.
“Kye no!” I screamed as the ship turned over and the mast shoved Kye under with it.
In the blink of an eye, the wood turned to glass. A shimmering line swept through the entire hull. Its dark color disappeared. The hull and all the decks turned transparent, exposing the cargo inside the ship’s holds. The glass ropes snapped. The folded sails were smashed into shards as the masts snapped and broke in several places along their lengths.
I dove under, not to escape the devastation—there was no escaping the whirlwind of broken glass sinking into the ocean—but to find Kye.
“Please, please, don’t let it kill him.”The plea pounded in my mind as I swam through the shower of shards that had turned almost entirely invisible in water and nearly impossible to spot.
The glass scraped against the pearls covering my body. Some shards slid over my exposed skin too. But if they cut me, I didn’t feel it.
The elegant, radiant shapes of the sirens slipped under the upturned ship. The crew seemed to be working as a team to turn the ship upside up again.
The familiar tall and graceful figure of their king slipped around the remaining stump of the mast that had nearly crushed him. But he seemed unharmed.
Smoothly avoiding any contact with the other sirens, Kye slipped from under the hull of the ship, then kicked his feet to swim up to the surface. I followed him, gasping a breath the moment he did.
“Maren,” he grinned.
His hair was wet, but his face remained completely dry. The particles of water turned to fine glass dust at the contact with hisskin. The next layer of water then carried the dust away, washing it off and leaving him dry.
Behind us, the sirens finally succeeded in turning the ship upright. A few remained in the ocean, holding onto its hull. The rest returned to the ship to drain its holds of water. With its masts broken and its sails gone, it looked gorgeous anyway, sparkling in the rising sun as if made of crystal.
Kye and I were still in the water, still in the monsters’ domain.
Panic jolted me into action.
“We need to get out of the water, Kye. Now.”
Chapter 19
