by Rosie Scott
One side of my mouth raised. “Wow, you're up to no good today.”
“You'll like it.”
“Oh, I probably would,” I agreed, trembling with a need for him. “But you were going to be quick, remember?”
He chuckled roughly, before his left hand trailed down one arm, taking it and lying it above my head on the bed. Then he did the same with the other, overlapping them at the wrists. He leaned over me, putting his weight on them.
“You found a way to secure me without ties. Congratulations,” I teased. “Now be quick, sexy. We have a meeting to go to.”
Cerin leaned down, letting his full lips fall to mine. His right arm moved down to his pants, where I heard a jingle. “Don't worry,” he murmured, pulling away from our kiss, “I'll be quick.”
He thrust forward, and I gasped in shock, both of my eyebrows dipping toward one another in confusion. A sharp, burning pain permeated through my gut, and my next exhale escaped my lips over a shudder. My mind scrambled for explanations, and Cerin only stared at me, his silver eyes cold and distant. I felt the hot stickiness of blood begin to pool over my stomach and into my belly button, and only then did I realize I'd been stabbed.
I was paralyzed with shock and grief. The man I loved was trying to murder me.
Ten
I could do nothing. It was as if time had stopped, and my mind refused to work. I stared at Cerin, feeling nothing but the utmost betrayal and heartbreak, but I could not defend myself. He still held down my wrists, but even if my palms were free for magic, I doubted I would have been able to hurt him. I loved him.
“Cerin...” my voice traveled over pebbles as I fought back sobs. I couldn't wrap my mind around this. I had loved this man for so long. I shared everything with him. He was part of the reason we were involved with this war to begin with. “Why?”
He twisted the dagger in my gut, and I gasped with another surge of pain. “Because you are a nuisance,” he seethed, pulling the blade out, before sinking it in my stomach again. A wave of heat flowed through me as my body reacted to trauma, and I struggled beneath his grip futilely.
“Cerin,” I gasped it, even as my eyes heated with tears, the saltwater spilling over and trailing down my cheek. I felt a trail of blood drip from my stomach and down my side, to the bed. I started to feel cold. “But I love you,” I sobbed, jerking at my wrists, attempting to free myself. He was much physically stronger than me.
Cerin said nothing. He pulled the dagger from me and stabbed again. My blood was everywhere. It was pooling and dribbling off my stomach, and it surrounded his hand. That ended up giving me an advantage, as his hand slipped from the handle, and the blade fell over my stomach. Distracted, his grip loosened on my wrists.
I tugged them out from under his hand, and immediately pushed at his torso. He swayed above me, but I wasn't strong enough to push him off entirely. Now that I was free, he grabbed at my throat with his left hand, even as he finally caught the dagger again with his right.
He laughed angrily. “Ooh, you're stronger than you look!” He wrinkled his nose up as he tightened his grip on my throat, settling for strangling me. I struggled to find the dagger, because I could not see it between us. I winced as it sliced by a finger in my flailing, before I grabbed at it, trembling with pain as the blade sunk deep into my palms.
My eyesight was shrinking, and a piercing sound rang like an alarm through my head as the circulation was cut off to my brain. Cerin let me have the dagger in my hands, because he knew he could kill me even quicker with both hands on my throat. He leaned over me, putting all of his weight over my neck. My head was pounding painfully with the lack of air, and my eyelids started to flutter. My disoriented brain screamed directions to the hands that held the dagger, and I turned it, the blade scraping by the thick skull ring Cerin had given me for my birthday. Ironically, his present helped to protect me, even if only for one slice. I thrust the weapon up toward Cerin's stomach.
I was losing strength. I wasn't even sure if the dagger had penetrated his armor enough to injure him. My eyesight blurred as he continued to choke me, his grunts echoing as I was slowly drained.
“Fucking die already!” He grunted. His rough voice sounded so far away. That voice that I loved. The voice that still gave me shivers...
Memories flashed before my eyes. Meeting Nyx. Seeing Cerin for the first time in years. My mother. Terran's face when he realized I would fight him in Sera. Bjorn's death. Cerin's face of pleasure the first time we'd made love in Nahara. Jakan and Anto embracing. Theron's death. Cerin.
Cerin.
...why?
BOOM!
The room came rushing back to me at the sound of the door hitting the opposite wall as it was kicked open. My head was pounding so fiercely it felt like it would explode. My eyes found the doorway, and the man who stood within it.
Cerin?
The necromancer stood in the doorway, a look of utter shock and horror on his face. There was a split second when he took in the state of the room. He immediately dipped down, his right hand grabbing the scythe he kept leaning against our bedroom wall.
Perhaps I was still dying, and my eyes were lying to me. Cerin was the one killing me. There weren't two of the same man. I looked back to my attacker, and despite my draining energy, my eyes widened.
It was no longer Cerin. Instead, it was Koby, but the man above me had never moved.
Shapeshifter? I thought, desperately. Koby glared at Cerin with a look of absolute hatred, his black eyes taking note of the scythe. He was off of me and on the other side of the bed in an instant, keeping his distance from the weapon. His body trembled with anticipation. He knew he had to pass Cerin to leave the cabin via its only door, but all he held was a dagger.
Cerin's eyes never left the Alderi, even as he reached back with a boot, kicking the bedroom door shut behind him, adding another hurdle to the other man's escape. My lover was a shaking mess, but he held the scythe with both hands, and took one step toward the bed.
Koby darted around the bed, rushing between the end of it and the wall. With a hoarse scream of effort, Cerin swung his scythe toward the man, tip to the wall, even though Koby had tried to duck to miss him.
Crrk!
It happened so quick. Cerin's swing had been accurate. The scythe sliced through the back half of Koby's neck, and the tip of the blade was now lodged in the thick cabin wall. The Alderi's eye twitched sporadically as the body lost its life. Blood poured down from the attempted decapitation, splattering audibly across the wooden floor.
Cerin heaved with breaths from his effort, and he let go of the scythe. The weapon stayed where it was, stuck in both the man's spine and the wall. Koby's body stayed upright but heavy, kept still by the support of the weapon.
Cerin paid no more mind to the attempted assassin. He collapsed beside the bed, his face wet with tears even as he refused to let his sobs roll forth. His hands were immediately over my stomach, white healing energy spreading out over my shredded flesh, warming the wound.
He said nothing, for the moment. I was left so flustered by everything that had happened that I could barely feel relief in knowing Cerin did not betray me. I lifted a palm to help him heal, before my befuddled mind reminded itself that healing would take energy I could not afford to lose.
Boot steps thundered down the hallway outside.
“Kai!” Nyx's voice rang out in concern. “Cerin? Kai? Where are you guys?”
“In our bedroom,” Cerin shouted back, his voice thick and hiccuping with emotion.
“Oh, no. Cerin, what's happened?” The boot steps skidded to a stop outside our door.
“Kai is nude, stay outside,” he warned. His hands shook over me as he continued to heal.
“Fuck that!” Nyx burst through the door, and her eyes immediately glared at all of the blood, which I knew was probably all over the place at this point. The mattress beneath me felt saturated with it. My best friend paid little attention to the assassin, and immediately came to my
side. “What the hell happened?” Her own voice tripped over itself as she reached toward my face, nervously finger-combing my hair.
“She was on the bed, naked. Koby was on top of her strangling her, and he must have stabbed her, too.” Cerin was rambling, and he cut himself short, attempting to re-focus on healing me.
Nyx met my eyes. “Kai, you can hear me, right?”
I nodded tiredly, my head still pounding from the confrontation.
“Why were you in here with Koby?” She asked.
“I wasn't,” I managed, my voice raspy. My throat felt sore and collapsed. “I took our plates back here because I thought they might be poisoned if we left them. Cerin followed me here.”
“Kai, I was on deck,” Cerin protested, frightened.
“But he looked like you,” I argued, before another tear escaped my eye. “He was wearing your armor and everything. He followed me here and wanted sex. I thought he was you. He felt like you. Tasted like you.” Another sob rolled through my body. I was confused, and now I felt violated. I'd thought I was with Cerin. “I'm sorry,” I offered.
Cerin's forehead furrowed, though he focused only on my wound. “Gods,” he breathed, the word shaky and broken. “You could have died here today thinking I'd killed you.”
Nyx peered over toward the assassin, and her hands went still in my hair. “You're kidding me,” she murmured, before standing.
“What?” Cerin glanced back, before he went quiet.
“What's going on?” I pleaded. My stomach wound was mending, but the pain and trauma of my throat would likely last for awhile. I felt sick and exhausted.
“It was Koby. All three of us just saw that. Right?” I could not see Nyx or the body from over Cerin's head, though when the necromancer turned back to me to continue his healing, he looked frightened.
“Right,” he breathed, his tone defeated.
“Then why the fuck isn't this Koby?” Nyx stalked across the floor to the left of the bed, where she reached down and grabbed the dagger that had been used on me. She walked back to the corpse. “All right, this is pissing me off,” she grunted. I heard the dagger sink deep into flesh, before the wet release of more blood.
“What are you doing?” Cerin asked, watching as the skin of my stomach wounds finally closed.
“Testing a theory,” she replied. I heard a wet squelch, and then she announced, “Son of a bitch.”
Nyx walked back over to the side of the bed, both of her hands covered in blood. She held out her right hand between Cerin and I, and a single torn eyeball rolled around her palm. The iris was pure gold.
“That doesn't make any sense,” I argued.
“Sure, it makes sense,” she retorted. “The gods are after you, and this one somehow made it onto the ship.”
“How does that explain Koby?” I asked. “Does that mean Calder's in on this?”
“I don't fucking know,” Nyx replied, frustrated. We all quieted, then, because we heard the others coming to look for us.
A knock came at the door. Nyx glanced to me. I nodded toward the eyeball and put a finger before my lips. We couldn't fully trust anyone right now, until we learned how all of this had happened. And even if we could trust the rest of the crew, I didn't want them knowing I was a god, or that we had others like me after us.
“I'll handle this,” Nyx murmured, before she opened the door just enough to peek out of it.
“What's going on?” Jakan.
“A lot of pretty crazy shit. We need to talk. All of us.” Nyx hesitated. “But give us a minute.”
“Is Kai okay? Where's Cerin?”
“They're fine. Give us a few minutes.” Nyx closed the door abruptly, leaving the others outside without more answers. She leaned back against the door as added protection.
Cerin healed my hands, next. The defensive wounds took little time to mend compared to the deep stabs in my gut. And though I was healed, the trauma would keep me weak for days yet.
When I finally stood, the excess blood over my stomach drizzled slowly toward the floor. There was so much of it. Cerin helped me to stand, because I was dizzy and weak with the loss of blood. With a glance toward the scythe that still stuck out of the wall, I saw that whoever my attacker was took the form of an Alderi woman in death. She had been a goddess, I knew that now, but the Alderi form surprised me. I had not yet met a god who didn't look human.
Nyx brought my clothes over, helping me to dress as I stood. The blood seeped through the thin cloth. I knew that when I were to show myself to the others, I would look like a nightmare.
We left the room together moments later. I heard various friends and crew alike gasp when I walked through the doorway to the gun deck, where everyone waited. Calder stood at the edge of the room, alarm in his red eyes when he noticed the blood.
“Kai, what happened?” Jakan hurried over to me, visibly upset.
“We had an Alderi assassin on this ship,” Nyx announced to the room.
“That's impossible,” Calder argued, though he was perplexed. “Every inch of this ship is scoured before departure.” He glared at his crew, who all seemed to flinch under his gaze. “Was it not?”
“It was,” one sailor replied, defensively, her voice shaking with nerves. “We all did our jobs, like usual. We wrote everything on the log. Koby should have it.”
Calder's eyes jumped around the room. “Koby? Where is he?”
My heart pounded in my chest. “Are you sure you've been sailing with him for sixty years?” I asked him, weakly.
“What do you mean am I sure? That's been my life,” Calder spat back, before he reached up, grabbing at his bald head with a hand. “Hell. I'm sorry, Kai. I'm trying to stay calm. What are you asking?”
“Whoever this assassin was, she was a shapeshifter. She first appeared to me as Cerin, which is why I was alone with her. When Cerin burst in, she appeared as Koby. It was only after death that she showed her true form,” I explained.
Calder stared back at me. “Kai, I hate to inform you, but that's not how shapeshifting works. You cannot shapeshift into another person. Only an animal.”
“All three of us saw this,” Cerin protested.
“Then I don't know what the hell this assassin was, but she wasn't a shapeshifter,” Calder insisted.
“The fact remains that she looked like Koby to all three of us,” Nyx said. “Are you sure Koby wasn't hiding something from you?”
Calder started to visibly shake. “Koby has been my best friend for over a century. He hides nothing from me.” He pointed to his crew. “I want to know where he is by nightfall. I don't care what the fuck it takes. Search everywhere. Overturn barrels if you have to. Find him.”
The men and women surrounding him got up and started to disperse. The room was deathly silent as Cerin and Nyx led me to a chair, where I sat to rest. Calder stared at me with a distance.
“Why would you have an assassin after you?” He inquired, suspicious.
I hesitated. I could not tell him the truth. I couldn't be sure he was trustworthy. “Calder, I cannot tell you that.”
The captain blinked at me. Once, twice. “You will tell me what is happening or I'll have you thrown off the ship. You are putting my people in danger.”
“Try it and see how far you get,” Cerin retorted, standing from my side. “You have a lot of nerve. We are paying customers, and if you try to have her thrown off, I will kill you first.”
“You're paying customers?” Calder threw back his head and laughed heartily, though it had a sarcastic edge. “Are you? Are you? Fucking are you?” He screamed, before spinning and punching the wall with a fist. The outburst shocked all of us. A trickle of blood trailed down the wall from the broken skin of his hand. His heavy breathing echoed angrily off of the gun deck's walls. “I am out. In the middle of the ocean. Lost. My best friend is missing, and there has been an attempted assassination by an Alderi who has powers I've never heard of. And on top of it all,” he added, before he turned to face us again. “
On top of it all, you have swindled me out of my gold.” A nerve beside his right eye twitched as he glared at us. “You have no upper hand here. At the very least, you owe me an explanation.”
So he knew. At some point in the past weeks, he had found our contract, or had counted his gold and realized he had less than he should have.
“So we are lost,” Anto finally spoke, his voice the calmest in the room. “That is what you haven't been telling us.”
“Yes. We are lost.” Calder laughed dryly, before it turned into more of a sob of desperation. He collapsed to the floor, leaning back against the wall. “We are lost, and Koby is my navigator. And Koby is missing, and there has been someone on my ship who could take his form. Where are we?” He shrugged. “I don't fucking know.”
“If Koby is missing—” I started.
“No. No.” Calder stared up at me. “You tell me what's going on.”
The man was almost completely broken. I felt for him much the same as I felt for Jakan the year before. He was desperate, and I was overwhelmed with sympathy.
“Calder, I don't know if I can trust you. I was just nearly killed by someone who looked like your best friend.”
“You will trust me, or I will have my crew walk you all off this ship, I swear on my life.” Though it was a threat, his voice was tired as he spoke.
I glanced over at my friends. We were all out of options, and at our wit's end. We had little choice. We could defend ourselves from Calder and his crew, but none of us knew how to sail a ship, and we were lost in the middle of the ocean. We would starve to death if something didn't kill us first.
“A truce, then,” I offered. “I will explain if we can be alone with you, without your crew. I cannot trust anyone. It is a risk to tell even you.”
“You will tell me and Koby when they find him,” he counter-offered. “Anything I do, he does with me.”
I nodded slowly. “Fine.”
Calder stared at my shirt, which was so bloody that the wound area looked triple the size from through the garment, the blood having seeped through the fabric and traveled over its threads. “Come,” he said tiredly, standing. “Let's take her to the ward and have her cleaned up. You can have clothes from my quarters. They might be a little big, but they will work. Nyx, you know where to find them.”
