I WAIT FOR DEATH to come.
There’s a chance that when I die, I’ll return to my siren form. The corpse of the mighty Princes’ Bane, stuck inside a pirate’s ship. Perhaps, a sunken ship. Perhaps, where nobody but the mermaids will find me. My mother might even feign mourning at the loss of her heir, or simply command the Flesh-Eater to help make her a new one.
I’m feeling a bit too sorry for myself when Tallis Rycroft bursts through the door. His eyes scratch over the cold and empty cabin, and he rips a wooden plank masquerading as a shelf from the wall, its rusted nails snapping with the force.
His trousers are stained red from where Elian’s knife went in. Through the tear I can see thick black stitches crisscrossing his skin back into place. A rush job, but it seems to have done the trick. Elian must have missed any arteries.
Tallis’s knuckles are raw and scratched pink. When he charges across the room, it’s in a jagged limp. He spots the broken beam where Elian was and snarls, kicking the splinters at me.
I don’t flinch.
“Where is he?” he barks.
I cross one leg over the other and slump my shoulders indifferently. “You are going to have to be a little more specific.”
In two strides, Rycroft crosses the room and wraps his thick hands around my neck. He pulls me to my feet and growls.
“You tell me where he is,” Tallis hisses. “Or I’ll snap your pretty little neck.”
The weight of his hands around my throat reminds me of my mother’s hold. I want to cough and splutter, but there doesn’t seem to be enough air. There’s a fury without measure in my veins, pushing and pulling my insides until all that’s left is a deep pit of loathing.
I twist my lips into a snarl of my own. “You seem upset,” I say.
Tallis wrenches his hands from me. “They’re ripping my ship to shreds,” he seethes. “When I find that bastard, there aren’t words for what I’ll do. He’s declared war.”
“I think you did that when you attacked the Midasan prince and took him prisoner. If you think this is bad, imagine the entire might of the golden army devoted to hunting you down.”
Tallis narrows his eyes.
“What do they call it when someone attacks a member of one of the royal families? Ah, yes.” My smile could cut through flesh. “Treason of Humanity. Is it still the drowning they go for?”
Tallis’s face goes slack at the mention of it.
The last punishment was long before my time, but sirens still tell stories. Humans who took arms against royalty, breaking the pact of peace among the kingdoms. They were anchored into the ocean and left for my kind. But no siren attacked. Instead they watched the traitors lose their breath and clutch at their throats. Then, in their final moments, approached so that the humans could drown in fear. According to my mother, it was only when the humans’ hearts pumped for the final time that the sirens ripped them from their chests.
From the look on Tallis’s face, he’s heard the same nightmarish tales.
He draws his sword in a clumsy arc and presses the blade to my cheek. “What do you care?” Tallis whispers. “He left you here, didn’t he?”
He says it like I should feel betrayed, but nothing in the accusation stings. Elian left because I told him to and he would have stayed if I had asked. He would have died, perhaps, if I would have let him. But I didn’t. I salvaged some small part of myself that I forgot existed – a part I was so sure my mother had gutted from me – and I let him go.
“Could we continue this conversation after you kill me?” I ask.
Tallis strokes my cheek with his blade. Then, before I have time to flinch, he lifts the sword into the air and brings it swiftly down.
I look at my freed hands and the cleanly sliced rope falls to my feet.
“I like my women with a little fight,” Tallis purrs. “Let’s see how much of one you put up.”
I don’t waste time on a smile before I bear my nails to claws.
Whatever Tallis expects, it’s not for me to try to tear his heart out. Like a vulture, I swoop down and scratch until my arms feel heavy. His chest. His eyes. Anything I can get my hands on. When he pushes me off, I barely stay on the ground for a second before I’m on him again.
I’m an animal, slicing my teeth into his delicate human flesh. I can taste him in my mouth. Acrid. A strange mix of metal and water. I bite harder, until he tears me from his arm and a slice of his skin goes with me.
“You filthy whore!” he screams.
I wonder how much I resemble the Flesh-Eater now, with a piece of Rycroft inking the corner of my lips and a smile like the devil goddess who made us all. I swipe my tongue across my lips, snarling as his filthy blood clots in the edges of my teeth.
Tallis strides over to me, each footstep like thunder against the decrepit floorboards. When he reaches me, he hoists me up by the ruffles of my dress and smashes me into the wall. His legs pin mine in place, knees digging into my thighs.
He slams my face to the side with the heel of his palm and my cheek scrapes against a twisted nail. “I’m going to make you pay for that,” he says, breath warm in my ear.
“Sure you are.” I shift my hips into place, keeping my hands steady as I reach under the fabric of his cloak. “But first, I would appreciate it if you didn’t get your blood all over me.”
As soon as I feel the knife hilt under his clothes, I pull my hand back and then lurch it violently forward. My wrist twists to the left and Tallis blinks. When I lurch my hand upward, he swallows, a choked and ragged sound.
His hands drop from my clothes and he stumbles backward.
I slink down the wall and let out a breath.
Misdirection, Elian said. Be too quick for them to notice.
I look at Tallis. His demon eyes and bone-gray skin. The look of fear and surprise that rolls over him like a sea storm. And the knife – his own knife – spearing his gut. It wasn’t hard to lift. Apparently, it’s difficult to notice someone stealing a weapon from your waistband when they also happen to be tearing their teeth through your skin.
The blade is so deep that the handle barely surfaces through his shirt. It takes a moment before he falls. Seconds of him frowning and gasping before his head finally hits the floor.
I stand over his body and swallow. There’s a hollowness in my chest, and the rush that usually comes with death is replaced by a deep pit that sits beside my erratically beating heart. This is the first kill I’ve made since becoming human, and somehow I thought it wouldn’t matter, but there’s blood all over me and Tallis’s face is slack and I don’t know why but I’m shaking.
I look down at him and all I can see is Crestell, dying over the sound of Kahlia’s cries. My hands so wet with her blood, a promise begged between us.
Become the queen we need you to be.
I close my eyes and wait for the moment to pass. Hope that it will, or else I might just go crazy in this cabin. It doesn’t make sense for me to think of her now; it’s not like Tallis is the first kill I’ve made since. I squeeze my fists and feel the blood cloy under my nails. But Crestell was the start of it, the one my mother used to pull me over to her edge. As a human I could pretend I had some kind of a clean slate if I wanted to. At least for a little while. But not now. Not anymore. I’m a killer in every life.
I open my eyes and when I look back down, Tallis is Tallis again, and my aunt’s face returns to a memory. I sigh in relief and then squint as something shines in the corner of my eye. In the growing sun, I catch the string of metal around Tallis’s neck. The light blinks from it, like a tiny star fighting to stay ablaze. Unsteadily, I crouch down beside the pirate’s body and pull back his collar.
The Págese necklace is still latched around him. The key to freeing the eye. I smile and twist the clasp free, careful, as though I might wake the sleeping pirate, and then pocket the stolen artifact.
When the door to the cabin crashes open, I jolt. My shoulders tense, fingernails ready to become weapons once more.
Elian doesn’t even glance at Tallis Rycroft.
He crosses the room toward me, eyes bright and so green and flickering with relief. His hair is swept in every direction, ruffling across his forehead, streaking his face. His shirt is torn, but I breathe a sigh when I see there are no new injuries. Just dirt and the splatters of gunpowder. I don’t think about whether I’m relieved because I still need him if I’m going to overthrow my mother or whether it’s something else entirely.
Elian’s knife is secured in his belt, the magic of it still so strong to me, and in his hand is a sword – his sword – gold and ash glimmering against the shattered glass. When he reaches me, he throws it to the floor and braces my shoulders. His smile is like nothing I have ever seen.
I say the first thing I can think of, mirroring his words to me from Eidýllio. “I’m pretty sure I got rid of you already.”
Elian’s cheeks dimple and he casts a look over his shoulder. Kye, Madrid, and Torik are gathered in a tightly grouped line behind him. They came. Not just for their captain, but for the stowaway. The strange girl they found floating in the middle of the ocean. They came for me.
When he turns back to me, his eyes flicker over my face. His lips tense to a thin line as he notices the scrapes burning into my cheek. The blood that covers me, so much of it my own and so much of it not mine at all.
“What are you doing here?” I ask.
He shrugs. “What I do best.”
“Getting on my last nerve?”
“Saving you,” he replies, picking up his sword. “This is the second time. Not that I’m counting.”
It’s the third, actually, if we count how he pushed me from Rycroft’s path on the deck of the ship. Elian may not be counting, but I am.
“I can’t believe you came back for me,” I say.
I don’t bother to keep the gratitude from my voice.
Elian taps his belt, where his knife sits happily. “I actually came back for this,” he says. “Rescuing you was mostly an afterthought.”
I level a glare. “I don’t need rescuing.”
For the first time, Elian glances down to the body sprawled across the decaying floor. It’s like he only just realizes that the leader of the infamous Xaprár, kidnapper of pirates and princes alike, is bleeding out by his feet.
“Remind me not to get on your bad side,” Elian says.
“Too late.”
He grins. He’s still grinning when I see Rycroft’s head rise from the floorboards. The pirate’s hand is at his waist in barely any time at all, and when he lifts it into the air, I’m surprised to see that the pistol is as black as squid ink. Just as Elian turns his head – as his crew lurches forward in panic – a shot fires out.
It’s not the first time I’ve heard a gun fired, but the sound seems louder. It shudders through my bones and drums in beat with my heart. Everything is a rush of sounds. The smell of gunpowder and the awful scream of warning that shoots from Kye’s lips. And then Elian. The way his smile drops when he notices the dread in my eyes. Three life debts.
It’s almost a reflex when I push him out of the bullet’s path.
There is an instant quiet that blankets the room. A fragment of a second when the world seems to have lost all sound. And then I feel it. The pain of scorching metal tearing through my human skin.