“Enric?” Seraphine asked Kye while grabbing me under my arm.
“I freed him.” Kye replied quickly, sweeping a hand toward a cluster of tentacles in the great hall.
A sword slashed through the thick knot of them, spraying the green acid over the glass. The male guard stood on his knees, with the monsters drawing close around him.
“To the tower!” Kye snapped at us, taking off to help Enric.
Seraphine dragged me to the narrow strip of glass along the wall—all that remained of the floor in our old bedroom. Kye’s bed was gone, sunk into the ocean through the gaping hole in the floor in the place where it had stood.
My bed had tipped sideways, wedged between the wall and a huge slab of glass. The guard grabbed a bedsheet from it and threw it over my shoulders.
“Cover up,” she clipped brusquely.
“It’s not what it looks like,” I said in a pathetic attempt at an excuse.
Why did I even bother? What did it matter what she or anyone else thought about me here?
Besides, what I said was a complete and utter lie. Me being naked in the king’s bedroom was exactly what it looked like. We had shared an intimate experience, Kye and I, even if we hadn’t touched each other.
“I don’t care what you do with the king or what he does with you.” Seraphine shrugged. “You’re shivering cold. Glass splinters are flying everywhere. Cover your skin. The king wants you safe.”
I drew the sheet around me tightly, tying its ends into a knot over my breasts.
Seraphine brought me to a spiral staircase in the west part of the palace.
“Up. Quickly,” she ordered.
Clutching the sheet around my hips so as not to trip over its edge, I climbed the narrow stairs. The staircase lacked railings, spiraling inside the narrow glass tube of the tower that leaned slightly to one side. I crumpled the sheet in one hand, while guiding myself with my other hand splayed on the wall.
A loud crash snapped my attention back to the great hall.
Through the several glass walls separating us from it now, I saw a tall contraption of glass tentacles explode into pieces as large as a crate. They slammed down, smashing and breaking the delicate bridges of glass that connected the pools in the great hall.
“Keep moving,” Seraphine urged, but I didn’t shift from my spot.
Both palms pressed to the glass, I peered into the chaos of lights and shadows, searching for the tall, lithe figure of the siren king.
“We need to go, human.” Seraphine sounded impatient and pretty pissed too, probably because she’d rather be down there, fighting the monsters with Enric than babysitting a petulant “human” like me.
“Wait,” I insisted. “Do you see them?”
The great hall was unrecognizable. Piles of broken glass littered the little there was left of the floor. Huge chunks of it were sinking in the water. Light broke in prismatic shapes, adding to the undulating chaos and making it hard to see anything through the abstract mess.
Kye rose from a pile of glass, catching an attacking monster off guard. Apparently, touching them was no longer enough for him, because Kye punched the cluster of tentacles with all his might. Glass burst into an explosion of shards.
“Human, let’s go!” Seraphine yelled.
“It’s Maren,” I snapped back. “And no, I’m not going anywhere. I need to see him.”
If things went wrong for Kye, I couldn’t do anything to help him. I couldn’t run to his rescue. All I could do was stand here and watch, dying inside from worry and fear with every new tentacle reaching for him.
Yet I couldn’t leave, as if my stare alone could protect him somehow.
Seraphine cursed softly, but the staircase without a railing was too narrow for her to drag me up it by force. She stopped a few steps above me, looking out through the glass too.
I searched through the forest of tentacles for the blue one with the eyeballs but couldn’t find it. There seemed to be more glass than living flesh in the palace now. The shards and glass chunks of all shapes and sizes piled up high.
The pools were filled with broken glass too, the sheer amount of monsters in the water preventing it from sinking. The sharpedges of broken glass sliced through the tentacles, marring the glass with sizzling, steaming streaks of green goo.
