by Plum Pascal
ARIA
BOOK 3 OF THE
HAPPILY NEVER AFTER SERIES
by
Plum Pascal
HP Mallory
Copyright ©2020 by Plum Pascal
Published by HP Mallory
License Notes
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ALSO BY H.P. MALLORY:
Paranormal Series: (Writing as HP Mallory)
Lucy Westenra Series
Mists of Magic and Mayhem Series
Lily Harper Series
Dulcie O’Neil Series (over 1 million downloads of the series!)
Jolie Wilkins Series (New York Times bestselling series!)
Sinjin Sinclair Series
Peyton Clark Series
NuLife Series
Reverse Harem Series: (Writing as Plum Pascal)
Happily Never After Series
Sacred Oath Series
F My Life Series
TABLE OF CONTENTS:
ONE
TWO
THREE
FOUR
FIVE
SIX
SEVEN
EIGHT
NINE
TEN
ELEVEN
TWELVE
THIRTEEN
FOURTEEN
FIFTEEN
SIXTEEN
SEVENTEEN
EIGHTEEN
NINETEEN
TWENTY
TWENTY-ONE
TWENTY-TWO
TWENTY-THREE
EPILOGUE
About Aria:
Fairy Tale Princesses Like You’ve Never Seen Them Before…
10 Champions destined to defeat an evil that threatens to wipe out the land of Fantasia...
Snow White, Goldilocks, Rose Red, Sleeping Beauty, Tinkerbell, Cinderella, Bo Peep, Belle, The Little Mermaid, & Red Riding Hood
Book 3: Aria
A pirate wounded on the open water and left for dead…
A loyal friend and merman destined to keep her safe…
And a royal prince contracted to be her husband…
Finding a human cast adrift after a vicious battle with a kraken, Aria breaches her banishment to save the brave pirate, Captain Hook.
Though Aria knows she has no business involving herself in human affairs, she can’t help her attraction to the roguishly handsome pirate with a silver tongue, a body riddled with muscle, and a mouth made for sin.
Aria’s life is quickly uprooted when her aunt announces that in order for Aria to reclaim the throne from her cruel father, King Triton, she will need allies. And, in this case, allies = marriage to a man she doesn’t even know, Prince Andric.
Meanwhile Aria’s heart and body belongs to the legendary Captain Hook, a man who teaches Aria the meaning of desire.
The seas are violent, with new monsters creeping from the deeps to attack at every turn. Accompanied by her devoted friend and bodyguard, the incredibly handsome merman, Bastion, Aria must face the man who brought her to ruin and threatens to destroy everyone she loves.
Can Aria make it out of the battlefield with her life and loves intact? Or will her heart be just another casualty of war?
Find out in the third book in the Happily Never After Series!
10 Chosen Ones:
When a pall is cast upon the land,
Despair not, mortals,
For come forth heroes ten.
One in oceans deep,
One the flame shall keep,
One a fae,
One a cheat,
One shall poison grow,
One for death,
One for chaos,
One for control,
One shall pay a magic toll.
The Little Mermaid:
In the deeps where no light pierces,
A hero lies
And rises to do battle
Blotting out the fire of the skies.
ONE
ARIA
The kraken’s tentacles scythe the inky water and grip Bastion around the middle, sending him sailing a thousand feet downward, spiraling out of sight into the fathomless oblivion of the deep. The water foams, obscuring everything in my field of vision for a distressingly long moment, and the action displaces the sea enough, I can’t get nearer, no matter how hard I pump my tail.
“Bastion!”
The cry falls uselessly from my lips, bubbles into the blackness to be heard by almost no one.
This can’t be the end! Not the end of my dearest friend in all the world! Especially when he was protecting me…
The deep bellow of the behemoth vibrates every molecule of water for miles around. I’ll be shocked if the humans above can’t hear it.
Every muscle in my body burns with the effort to keep propelling myself downward, after Bastion. But there are just too many of them—too many krakens. Hopefully Aunt Opeia’s spells won’t lead us astray…
The krakens keep emerging in droves from the leagues-deep Rheaic Trench. They come filing out of the narrow gorge in numbers I’ve never seen before.
The rumors have to be true, then. My father must have lifted the edict that kept the grotesquerie contained, allowing them to wander free in an effort to isolate the land-dwelling kingdoms above.
The tentacle of a kraken lashes down toward me—each sucker bears down on my position, as large as boulders, as deadly to the touch as a manta’s sting. I’m saved from being knocked into the abyss by a muscled arm that brackets my waist and paddles upward with surprising strength. I glance down to find the teal luster of my aunt’s shimmering skin. I needn’t have looked, though; I’ve been counting on the strength of these arms for many, many years—since my banishment from Aspamia when I was a mere girl.
“Foolish child,” Aunt Opeia scolds me. “You know better! Never rush in!”
Yes, of course, I know better. I’ve been navigating the frigid depths for over fifteen years. Stealth and caution are the only things that keep one alive when the grotesquerie roam the black waters. But this is Bastion we’re talking about. My steadfast friend. The only companion who followed me from the Aspamian reef to this remote wasteland. If he dies, I’ll never forgive myself.
Opeia’s face softens just a mite as she takes in my panicked expression. “Bastion’s strong. He’ll emerge, you’ll see.”
But that brief exchange is all we have time for. Because the kraken has spied us again. It’s in motion, and we only escape its crushing weight and the deadly poison of its suckers by a margin of inches. The one advantage we have over the beast is speed. Krakens are fifty feet long, on average, and at least five hundred pounds. It makes their movements clumsy, and their reaction time dismal. We’d be swimming circles around this one—an unusually large specimen that’s closer to sixty feet long—if we hadn’t been at this for hours already.
I’m more concerned about the flocks of anglerfish swarming up toward us. The bluntnose, frilled, and goblin sharks move as quickly as any barracuda, as quick as or quicker than a merperson. The barreleye and the monkfish are terrif
ying and they can swim even faster after they’ve had a taste of merflesh, which they have. Three of Opeia’s finest warriors have already lost their lives to stop the grotesquerie.
It wasn’t enough.
In my periphery, I can see one of the kraken—a small one, probably an adolescent, given how stubby the tentacles are—break away from the horde and begin swimming for the surface. The glimmer of light above is like the pinprick of a distant star, wavering and far beyond my reach. If I’m spotted outside the trenches, news will get back to my father. And there will be a reckoning for it.
But I can’t risk letting the kraken reach the shore. Even the smallest of kraken are able to destroy port towns and lay waste to human fleets. And that’s exactly what my father wants—destruction and devastation. I’ve committed the last decade and a half to defying my father’s will.
“I’m taking the small one,” I say to Opeia, wriggling free of her arms as we come to a spinning stop yards away from the enormous beast before us. “It can’t be allowed to reach Delorood. Tell Bastion to come after me if he...”
I trail off, refusing to conclude the thought.
Bastion will live!
He has to. I can’t live without my unwavering and fiercely protective friend.
There’s a flinching around Opeia’s eyes. She knows what I’m risking by going to the surface. She knows I’ll be in danger—and it’s not retribution from the krakens she’s worried about. The worst thing I can fear from the grotesquerie is death. At my father’s hands, however, I’ll face imprisonment and torture, at the very least. Perhaps he’ll set his flesh-eaters on me slowly, allowing them to devour me from the tail up. It’s one of the more gruesome punishments I’ve seen—the victim left to propel themselves away from the devouring teeth of some hideous creature with only their human-like arms until they inevitably die either of exhaustion or their eaten to death.
Or my father, Triton, could have me raped, the way he’d done with the captured princess from the glacial southern waters, Princess Avicia. The princess was chained and used by any male who cared to, until her belly grew great with child. Then Triton killed the babe before her eyes, causing her eventual decline into madness.
Yes, my father is a monster.
And Bastion, Opeia and I are risking a lot for the humans who’ve traditionally hunted us. Sold us as curious sideshow attractions. Mounted our stuffed bodies on the prows of their ships like macabre war trophies. In other circumstances, Opeia would tell me not to go.
But we don’t have a choice. The grotesquerie can’t be allowed to prevail, they can’t be allowed to populate the waters any more than they already have. We must stop them here and now.
I won’t give my father his way.
Opeia must be thinking along the same lines, because she inclines her head just a fraction in that way that means she’s considering something. I know she loves me, in her way. Me, her brother’s eldest child, her first niece. Opeia was exiled for having an opinion that differed from the King’s, just as I had been.
That’s about all we have in common.
“Go, child. I will hold off the rest,” she says.
She claps her hands together quickly and when she spreads them again, golden energy undulates between her palms, seething like agitated gulper eels.
I break away from her then, pumping my tail as hard as I can and slice a path upward through the dark, sailing past the spiny and blackened merfolk that abide in the deeps.
Triton has never liked them, has always shunned them for their ugliness. He banned any of them from setting tail in Aspamian territory. Until Opeia arrived, the dark mer were nomadic, constantly living in fear of the giant squids, the kraken, the sharks, and the other monstrous deep-dwellers. Opeia had given them protection with her sorcery, promised them prosperity if they followed her.
And she’d kept her promises, for the most part. It isn’t her fault Triton had the gall to sever the spells that bound these monsters, the grotesquerie, to the depths.
My muscles ache and my eyes begin to burn furiously as I ascend, lagging behind the adolescent kraken by a few miles. I’m not going to reach it before it crests the waves. The color of the water shifts from black to navy, from navy to sapphire, and finally a lovely teal as the light of the moon above filters through the water, illuminating the field of open sea that drapes the gulf. At any other time, I might sing at the sight.
It’s been so long since I’ve seen the skies and the celestial spheres that light it. Burning sunlight or placid moonlight, I don’t care. Being beneath the wavering illumination is a bliss all its own.
I don’t have long to enjoy it, however. To my horror, I see the kraken propelling itself ever nearer to a large and dark shape that bobs along the surface. A ship. A merchant vessel, most likely, and a prime target for Triton’s new attack beasts. I have to slow the kraken, reroute its attention. Perhaps doing so will give the sailors time to abandon their ship. The kraken’s eyes aren’t adapted for the surface, so smaller vessels might go unnoticed.
I’m not a sorceress. Not like Aunt Opeia. My magic comes in stops and starts, and spells rarely ever turn out the way I plan them. She’s tried to teach me, but there’s only one spell I’m truly good at—and now I rely on that exact spell.
Drawing in as much air as I can through my gills, I puff up like a blowfish until the magic thrums like a drumbeat in my chest. Then, I release it in a protracted wail of sound.
The water around us vibrates, the trailing bubbles left in the kraken’s wake jumping in time to the sound. As I hoped, my magic stops the kraken dead in the water for a second as the noise scrambles conscious thought. Siren’s song is a potent weapon when wielded competently, and a ticket to instant madness if done incorrectly.
The kraken immediately pauses and then just simply floats there, immobile from the tones of my song, just as I intended. But, mere seconds later, the kraken shakes off my song as I blink at it in shock. Siren’s song should have immobilized it for at least eight or so minutes—at the very least! Enough time for me to alert the men in the ship. But how is it moving now? After only a few seconds…
I swim as close as I dare while its enormous squid-like head begins to breach the surface, sending churning foam across the tops of the waves. It’s rising half a mile away from the ship.
I surface closer to the side of the ship, noting its size and beautiful construction. When my tailfin brushes the sealed wooden siding, a jolt runs up my spine and tingles at the base of my neck.
Sorcery.
The ship has been enchanted. Heavily enchanted, judging by my body’s reaction—my skin hasn’t buzzed so much since I had the misfortune to fall into a deep cave network teeming with electric eels.
My body recoils on principle, though curiosity niggles in the back of my mind. Human magic is rare, most practitioners having been driven from their homes by their foolish rulers many moons ago. This enchantment must be by fae design. But the last Opeia had heard, Septimus of the Unseelie court had either banished or killed most of the fae. So who enchanted this vessel?
Again, I don’t have much time to ponder the mystery. The kraken is almost wholly above water now. To my relief, I see a man leaning over the side of the ship, helping mortals into small dinghies. The boats should escape the kraken’s notice. I hope so anyway.
But it’s not the dinghies that keep my attention for long.
No, I can’t stop staring at the captain.
I’m fascinated by his face, which is quite clear in the moonlight. I have no concept of what humans consider beautiful—for all I know, he’s as homely as they come. But to me? He’s fascinating. An exotic beauty, skin as tan as I’ve ever seen on a human. Most of them look pale, almost sickly, with their veins standing out like stringy blue lines underneath their skin. And the skin itself usually appears too thin, like it might tear open such as kelp does under the slightest pressure.
But not this man. His skin is tanned almost brown, like he’s been kissed by Sol
himself. He radiates good health. His long, dark hair is pushed into a tail at the nape of his neck, beneath one of those ridiculous floppy things humans wear on their heads. He’s got scrubby growth on his chin and cheeks, something I’ve never seen on a merman. Is it some sort of moss? Algae? A growth he tolerates? I can’t imagine it’s comfortable.
His upper body reminds me of Bastion’s. Large biceps that appear through a fairly thin covering, which is rolled up around his arms. Clothing, I believe it’s called? His chest is broad and his shoulders broader. His neck reveals thick, corded muscle and I can see the swell of his large thighs through the covering of fabric he wears above them. He is strong, capable.
I can’t see his eyes or read his expression, but it must be something to behold. The white-haired youth in the boat looks stricken when the man casually draws a long blade and severs the ties that keep the boats tethered to the ship. The boat falls, without fanfare, into the water close to me. There is another boat soon to follow.
None of the occupants take note of me when I paddle nearer, trying to get a better look at the man. I notice, with interest, that the captain doesn’t find his place within the row boats, but he cuts the ropes that hold them to the side of the ship and then gives the inhabitants a brief wave as they clearly reject his decision, calling out to him.
The captain of the ship is clearly sacrificing himself. Staying to steer the enchanted ship away from the crew he’s released into the ocean. And the kraken continues to follow the ship, paying no attention to the small dinghies that float away.
Then, to my astonishment, the ship begins to lift from the water, trailing drizzles of icy spray from its sides as it takes to the air. At first I wonder if the kraken has somehow taken ahold of it? Maybe it’s airborne owing to the fact that the Kraken’s tentacles have held it aloft? But, no, the ship appears to be lifting of its own accord—no doubt owing to the fae magic surrounding it. The magical sigils shine as the magic ripples over the wood.
