The lake erupted in an explosion of vines. Currents darted like lightning bolts towards their targets, infiltrating their nostrils and mouths until their lungs started to overflow with water. I kept singing even as my body burned from the extensive use of magic; kept willing more and more liquid to flood the assassins’ respiratory systems while I tumbled those who were closest to the lake right into its lethal depths.
A headache began to throb in my temples, but I didn’t let go. I held them underwater, drowning those still on shore at the same time, their bodies convulsing in panicked struggles for breath.
The sight was horrifying. Unlike in the morass, where the victims were utterly passive, unaware of the destiny reaching for them with its dark claws, these men—they were aware of what was happening.
Tears streamed down my cheeks, the presence of death a putrid, vile perfume that clung not only to my skin, but my power. And, in effect, my core.
The weight of it was suffocating, yet whenever I called forth the vision of Santino, of his stunning, lazy smile, the curl of his silver hair, and the hunger that touched his eyes every time he looked at me as if I were the most exotic flower in existence, I knew that for him, I would brave this nightmare.
A thousand times, if it kept him alive.
The force of my own emotions nearly cost me my concentration, yet simultaneously fuelled the fire in my veins. I’d cared for someone in my past life, but compared to the gale that was my love for Santino, those feelings had been even less than a pale imitation.
What was burning inside me now was a force strong enough to overtake galaxies.
The assassins—they didn’t stand a chance.
With a final roll of magic, the melody turned into a scream, and my hold on the water broke. I hovered in the center of the lake, panting, and listened to the sudden calmness that had descended upon the land.
I stilled.
There was no pulse of human life lurking in the air any longer.
Not even Santino’s.
15
Nearly mindless with terror, I dragged myself onto the shore. The clothes I’d been too much in a rush to strip off earlier now clung to my skin, dripping water down the length of my tail. Sobbing, I shimmied out of the dress and threw it aside, then reached for one of the nearby corpses.
Bile burned at the back of my throat as I relieved the dead hitman of his fairly dry jacket, then ran the fabric across my scales, over and over, soaking up every drop I possibly could. Even bent as I was, the flat lay of the land continued to work against me, keeping the end of my fluke out of reach.
Furious, I bunched the jacket collar in my fist and swung the fabric like a whip, swatting the tip of the tail repeatedly until I was fairly certain there would be bruises on my feet once I switched back to human form. But at least it was working. Once there were no more droplets for me to wipe away, I flung the dead man’s jacket aside and waited.
A second passed, two, four—each of them feeling like an entire lifetime—then the familiar rush of magic engulfed me in its warmth. I shot up from the ground the instant the shimmering mist receded, and ran. My muscles cramped as I pushed them too far, too fast, but not even the searing pain exploding through my limbs could keep me from searching for Santino. If I had to crawl, I would, as long as I didn’t waste a single moment more waiting idly.
I skirted around the cabin and into the shadowed woods, following the trail of bodies as much as my own hope that while I had been drowning the rest of the men, Santino hadn’t wavered too far from his last known location. I kept it locked firmly in my mind, grateful for the keen sense of direction I had even as a human.
Yet with each step I took, my discomfort didn’t lessen. It grew.
Hot tears blurred the edges of my vision, disobeying my inner command to not fall apart. I stifled a sob and forced myself to look around.
All the assassins, now bleeding into the forest ground, sported gunshot wounds. I might have taken down half of them, but the rest—they were Santino’s work. The sheer number left me speechless. He’d faced all these men.
Armed, yes. But also alone.
The thought was a leaden weight in my stomach. He might had been confident in his abilities to the point where he’d convinced even me, but hearing about a certain number of attackers was far different from actually seeing them with my own eyes. Even in death, the assassins looked ruthless, their bodies honed into instruments of lethal speed and strength. I—I didn’t want to give my gloomy thoughts a voice, but I also couldn’t deny there was truth in the words they were whispering into my ear.
A suicide mission. Santino must have known the chances of him walking away from this were next to nonexistent.
Shivering, I searched every body, frantically seeking that telling spill of silver hair. But each corpse I inspected only led me farther into the shade of the trees—and treacherously lifted my hopes.
Perhaps if he’d managed to take this many down…
If he’d been this far out, then it was possible I had simply failed to feel his presence despite my mermaid senses thrown out wide.
But if it were true and Santino had only slipped beyond my grasp, then there was a fair chance someone else had, too.
All of a sudden, I was painfully aware of how loud the thud of my bare feet was, how limited my human hearing.
I forced myself to slow down and ease my sharp intakes of breath. As much as I wanted to end this limbo of doubts one way or the other, I couldn’t risk getting shot now. Not before I knew.
So I padded from tree trunk to tree trunk, lightly hopping across mounds of branches and leaves that would reveal my location all too eagerly, and hoped my orientation in this dense, unfamiliar part of the woods wasn’t too far off. The distance to the cottage had grown to the point where I couldn’t even see the charming building or catch the glimmer of the lake behind it, but at least I could still feel the pulse of water rapping at the back of my mind. That way, even if I found myself going in circles, unable to rely on the guidance of the sun, I could double back and start anew.
The thought irked me to no end, but reality was something I needed to face, regardless of how defeated it made me feel.
I was no tracker. And on land, I was without power.
All I had was a heart-wringing wish to find the man I loved.
A branch snapped to my right. I swallowed a yelp and pressed my back against the rough bark of the nearest pine tree. I breathed through my nose, hearing the blood pound in my veins as vividly as I heard the footsteps. Their rustle was soft, but one thing was clear.
They were getting closer.
My gaze skimmed across the terrain, only there wasn’t even a single stream in sight I could tap into. Nothing. Not even a damned puddle.
Of course, there wouldn’t be.
Santino had brought me to this location for a very specific reason, and having flowing water in his backyard would ruin the safety I—we—sought. A silent, bitter laugh undulated in my chest.
Right now, safety seemed like nothing but a farfetched dream.
The steps grew closer, so close, in fact, that they overpowered the erratic thump of my heart. But I didn’t dare move. I couldn’t fight, and running would do me little good when I was barefoot and naked. The blood I would leave behind once the rocks or branches sliced my skin would create a trail almost laughably easy to follow. And it was only a matter of time before my muscles would bail on me.
I was out of options. I was useless and helpless, clinging to that diminishing hope that perhaps, if the gods were kind, the man would turn away. That a rogue snap of a branch or rustle of leaves would take him in the other direction.
But the only thing I heard in this graveyard of nature was him. And in that moment I knew that nothing would alter his course.
I closed my eyes. Acceptance stirred in my core as I prepared myself for the death that would follow, growing and spreading through my veins—but instead of the phantom talons of the underworld, a voice flowed through the air.
/>
“Liana?”
My knees buckled. I caught myself on the rough bark, thinking it must be some cruel trick of my mind, one last blow that would finish me—when the voice called out again. Trembling, I used the tree for support and came out of hiding.
A cry filled with fear, relief, and the now-shattered anguish ripped itself from my chest.
Santino.
Santino was standing on the soft forest ground, illuminated by a brilliant shaft of sunlight that filtered through the dense branches, his honed body unscratched. I sobbed and flung myself into his arms, the need to feel the warmth of him, the strong pulse in his chest beating against mine, a yearning so thunderous it snatched away every thought until only he remained.
Alive. Mine.
I raised my lips to his, eager to obliterate that last breath of distance between us… But a cool wave of realization slammed into me.
I staggered backwards. Santino was alive.
And he was naked.
I stared at him, only now noting the touch of ash and fire that clung to his skin, so powerful and potent I knew the scent could never be human. But more importantly, I realized as my throat closed up, the scent was originating from him. By the gods…
“You—you’re a Perelesnyk…”
16
My instincts were roaring at me to run, but my legs refused to obey. Somewhere in the distance, I felt a part of me shatter, and I knew—I knew that if I were to crush those jagged pieces, there would be no coming back.
But did I even want to?
Santino inclined his head, his movements guarded, strained. He must have sensed how close I was to bolting. He probably smelled the fear on me, heard the thunderous pounding of my heart.
But what he couldn’t understand was that it wasn’t the fear of a natural predator that immobilized me.
It was the agonizing hurt of broken trust.
My life was nothing but a long list of betrayals. I was a fool for believing things could change. For thinking that, perhaps, this time the shadows wouldn’t swallow the small trickle of light I had nursed in my heart.
“Is Caz even real,” I managed to say, although my words were strangled, “or was it always just you?”
“He’s real,” he said quietly.
I blinked away a tear. “Why, Santino? Why didn’t you tell me?”
He ran a hand through his hair, the honed muscles of his body flexing with grace as he took a deep breath, then released it. Slowly. For the first time, I sensed power in the alluring scent of pine and Santino that enveloped me, indicating the dragon within was still lurking dangerously close to the surface.
“Come back to the house with me and I’ll tell—”
“No.” I rubbed the shivers from my arms, then crossed them in front of my chest, painfully aware of my nudity. My vulnerability. I was raw and hurting, but I suppressed the rising tide of tears and said, “Tell me now.”
Santino sucked in a breath—possibly scanning the air for any threats still lingering in the woods—then turned that brilliant, heartbreaking gaze on me. The silver bleeding into the blue was filled with shadows, eerily reminding me of my own darkness that surfaced every time the past rapped on the gates of my mind.
Those shards of love that still lurked were urging me to touch him, to scatter the glimpses of pain that weighed on his features—and my heart.
But in the end, I stood my ground.
“Unlike most of my brethren,” he began, “I don’t like advertising my true nature. The incubus, but even more so the dragon side of me, has attracted too many wrong people in the past. So I distanced myself from it.” Anger touched his eyes, but the tug on his lips bore a haunting resemblance to a sorrowful smile. “When you’ve been around for as long as I have, Liana, the past likes to cling to you like a disease, tainting your future before it even has the chance to grow. Being human—at least a close approximation of it—was safe. Safer.”
My fingers dug into the sides of my arms. I understood. Probably better than anyone. Yet his need to run away from times long gone was precisely what made this situation that much worse, what had cut open that ravine inside me, destroying the weak, but warm surety that I’d felt. Because we were alike.
“You don’t know how difficult it was to open up to you, Santino,” I whispered. “I was terrified that telling you I was a Rusalka turned mermaid would drive you away. I mean”—a choked laugh slipped from my lips—“who would want to be with someone like me? I’ve died, came back, killed…”
Back in the morass, everything about me had been lethal. While I could control my voice, deciding when it was used to lure and destroy, and when the magic stayed dormant, I had no such option where my sexuality was concerned. Any kind of intimacy with a Rusalka was deadly.
There was no going around it, no way to circumvent the poison such contact forced into the men’s hearts. Even a single kiss had the same damning strength. Disgusted by the death my body, my desire, brought, I held back as much as I could while the others mated freely, leaving nothing but corpses in the wake of their pleasure. A tear rolled down my cheek.
Not only a predator. A horror. And the world saw us as such.
“Even when I knew this new form wasn’t the cold killer I’d been shaped to be before, I feared…” I shivered, hating to give this ugliness voice, yet knowing I had to. “I feared I would repulse you, Santino. I was changed and hunted, and yet the thought of you disgusted by who I was—I knew that was the one blow I couldn’t survive.”
Santino stepped forward, his hand reaching for my cheek.
“Don’t,” I sobbed and inched back. “Please, don’t.”
His fingers clenched, but he let his arm fall down to his side. His gaze, however, remained a burning, silver caress that swept across my skin, as loving and fierce as any affection could be.
Gods, I almost wanted him to be colder. I wanted to hate him for letting me stagger through all that hurt alone while he had held on to his own darkness, the image he had presented only emphasizing my own stain. But the apologetic, tender presence stirred tendrils of forgiveness, whispering to give him a chance.
“I understand why you hadn’t told me back when I, too, was trying to pass as human,” I confessed. “But after that night at Moon Bay, after I laid myself bare for you…”
“I wanted to, piccola,” he whispered. “Not at first, not right then, but by the time we walked back to my apartment… Gods, I wanted to.” He groaned, his hand tangling in his hair. “I was a coward, Liana. I was selfish in my desire to keep you by my side. When you opened up to me, trusted me to keep you safe… I am aware of the stories, of the Rusalkas’ fears. What we had was still so fragile, I was afraid that even a glimpse at my true nature would have had you walking out the door. I thought that with time, when you would have…accepted…me, I would be able to reveal everything. And it wouldn’t make you run away.”
Tears prickled at my eyes, a gentle weight waiting to fall. Santino was right. But only partially.
I had no doubts I would have been frightened out of my mind if he had told me he was a Perelesnyk that day. With the bloody history our two species shared, he knew that it was more than just a story, fueling my fears. It had become instinct to us, to flee from the one predator we couldn’t hope to best.
So as reluctant as I was to admit it, I understood his motives. But for all the truth his words carried, they failed to encompass something vital.
I had already loved Santino then.
Even if I had been afraid to accept the deeper meaning, passing what I felt for him as some foolish infatuation, I knew with certainty that bond would have overpowered any other emotions that revelation might have stirred.
But it was futile now, wasn’t it? Neither of us could change the past, and no amount of wishful thinking would erase his actions. Instead of taking a chance, instead of taking that leap of faith I’d made with him, Santino had chosen to lie. He had chosen to let me torment myself as I showed him my wounds, every gr
im shred of the darkness I was running from…
We were kindred spirits, hunted and haunted by time that would forever snap at our heels. And Santino decided to bury it.
He’d made himself out to be some chivalrous human who didn’t balk at threats he was by no means equipped to handle. A bitter laugh spilled from my chest.
“I can’t believe I worried about you. All this time, I felt guilty for dragging you into this mess—for being so reckless and selfish to risk your life just because you were the one person that made me feel safe. But you never were in any danger, were you?” I shook my head at the fire—and admission—burning in his eyes. “I ran out after you today to protect you, Santino. I didn’t care if I died, I didn’t care about how afraid I was or how terrified the thought of facing all those assassins made me. As long as my actions would keep you alive, whatever fate I was to greet wasn’t important…”
“Piccola…”
“Damn you,” I hissed, the tears now rolling freely down my cheeks. “Damn you, Santino, for making me think the bastards had gunned you down while I couldn’t even move from the lake while my tail dried. Damn you for making me rush through the woods, scanning every crumpled, bloodied body, every dead face, and dreading that it would be your dull eyes staring back at me. You have—”
My voice broke and shivers took hold of my flesh, ravaging and raving until I shuddered so wildly my knees buckled. Santino reached out and drew me into his arms, ensconcing me in the warmth of his presence even as I struggled to break free. But his grip was unyielding. And eventually, I couldn’t hold my ground any longer.
I sagged into his arms, buried my head against his chest, and sobbed, my tears trailing down his heated skin.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered into the bed of my damp hair as he placed a gentle kiss on my head. “I am so, so sorry, Liana. I didn’t know—”
“That I loved you?”
I met the silver of his gaze, sniffling as I fought back a cry. Santino closed his eyes and muttered something under his breath in Italian, then exhaled. But when he looked at me again, there was a darkness flickering across his features, tinted with a kind of guarded sorrow I couldn’t comprehend.
Sirens and Scales Page 83
