Page 11 of She Who Was Once the Sea

I turned my back on her and began marching away again.

"And what if you run out of time?" she asked, just before I was out of earshot.

With a sigh, I turned to face her again. "I won’t."

Her pale eyebrows rose. "If you spend the entire night searching for one group of random men, you very well might."

"Then I run out of time!" I shouted, throwing my arms into the air and causing enough of a scene that the passersby began staring without even attempting to hide it. I pursed my lips before continuing. "It’s not like my situation can get any worse, can it?"

"Becoming permanently encased in stone because you didn’t take the time to properly… hydrate… is quite a bit worse, Marella." She glanced over her shoulder at the fountain in the square, where our other sisters were now fully awake.

Notably, our father was not. He hadn’t woken from the stone in over a decade, when, one moonless night, he’d decided to go hunting for the witch. The hunt had consumed his mind, and he’d run out of time to do any actual hunting before sunrise, leaving him parched and tired upon his return.

He didn’t drink any blood that night. And he never pulled himself free from the stone again. More than one of the others had already succumbed to the same fate. If we didn’t feed while we were freed, we would never wake up again.

Ordina stared pointedly at his figure in the streetlights. "I don’t think I could bear the thought of losing another of us. We’re already so few."

I released a long, slow breath. "I won’t run out of time, Ordina," I said finally, forcing gentleness into my tone.

She still looked skeptical.

"If I feel like it’s becoming a risk, I promise I’ll pull the first random schmuck I find into an alley with me." I winked at her. "You know how much they all love the alleys."

Finally, she smiled halfheartedly. "You could let me come with you."

Taking one step back, I shook my head. "You know I always hunt alone."

"Yes." She bit her lip. "But it would be nice to actually spend time together. We haven’t really spoken in… well, years."

I chewed on the inside of my cheek to prevent myself from snapping again; the air was balmy, but the nights were already growing shorter, as we’d passed the summer solstice. If Ordina truly cared about my ability to complete the task and return to the square before daybreak, then she needed to let me go.

"Next month," I promised hastily, already regretting it. "We’ll hunt together. I promise. I’ll take you to all my favorite seedy bars, and we’ll feast on as many lowlifes as you can hope to encounter in one night."

Her eyes softened ever so slightly. "Promise?"

"Promise."

And this time, when I turned on my heel to walk away, she didn’t try to stop me. By the time I’d reached the edge of the square and began slipping into the shadows of a narrow street, she’d already disappeared in the other direction, as had the rest of my sisters.

As the night activity picked up around us, I drifted into the city like a wraith, letting my tongue drag across my canines.

The most key component of the witch’s curse, the part that hurt the most, was that water had become toxic to us. We could touch it while encased in stone, let it flow over us as part of the fountain, but when we awoke, we could not drink nor touch it for long periods of time. If we tried, the results were… painful.

But we still needed it to survive.

And unfortunately for the humans milling around me like ants, there was only one reliable source of water readily and consistently available to us:

Blood.

The witch’s curse had turned us into the monsters the Fratelli made us out to be centuries ago. But I’d long since stopped caring about the morality of our plight.

On nights like tonight, I loved being a monster. I just needed to find the right prey.

As a general rule, I never took blood from someone innocent. Or, at least not from someone who had not done wrong in my vicinity. I was well aware that drunken nights in foreign cities led people to decisions they’d otherwise never make. It was an unfortunate twist of fate that they chose to do those things in my presence.

Either way, I never simply grabbed random people off the street. They didn’t always die from our feedings, but it happened often enough that I felt the need to operate under some guise of a moral code; this helped me feel like the good kind of monster.

Mostly, at least.