The Kiss That Saved Me (The Tidal Kiss Trilogy Book 2)

by Kristy Nicolle

  “I wonder if she’ll ever be controllable. She is a loose cannon. The imbecile cannot rule, it’s a joke. He’s running after her like a schoolboy. It’s a shame she doesn’t realise just how much power she has,” Saturnus muses, a sharp prick of anxiety seeds in my heart, the kind only the judgement of a brother can plant.

  “Let’s hope it stays that way,” I mutter, wondering now if it is such a wise move to acquaint her with her inherited Psiren darkness after all.

  “I have to go brother. There’s another demon approaching the city limits and The Knights are asking for my assistance. I must leave,” he looks over his shoulder, clearly distracted by something.

  “Very well. I’ll contact you again if the girl manages to yield answers,” I nod at him, reassuring him of my future success. He vanishes as a grey mist falls over his end of the looking glass. I turn away from the mirror’s reflective silver with a smile. I will have answers.

  CALLIE

  Pain, followed by pleasure, melding into a torrent of dark eyes, fingertips, and jagged, grazing teeth. A fight between two equally matched, hungry animals, clawing, biting, and scrapping for everything they can get. Vex is like a toy, a man-sized, sexually errant toy with the stamina of a prized black stallion. My fingertips spark electricity, coursing through the alabaster taught of his skin. He moans, hands behind his head…

  “You are… wild,” he pants, his compliment washing over me like warm water, this is the fifth time he’s passed these words in a matter of hours. I feel the power of his appreciation flow through me, out of my fingertips and into his neurons, causing him to climb to the height of ecstasy against any remaining will of his own.

  We had already destroyed the desk, wallpaper had been torn and scrunched in sweating, desperate palms, and the television had been smashed in the ferocious haze of seizing forbidden fruit. My pupils are fully dilated, light pouring in from the surrounding shadow and my lips throb, plumped and raw. I realise now that Titus is with me. I have his magic, his ability to manipulate electricity. I know now how he became so dark, because in watching Vex beneath my hands, it’s easy to picture myself making him bend to my whim, causing him pain, making him submit. I don’t love Vex, I just want him like a starving man wants meat, raw and succulent to taste. It’s easier that way. Easier than it had been with Orion. So maybe the whole soulmate thing had been a load of bull.

  Everything I had been afraid of, the darkness, the power, his touch, belongs to me now. He had given it to me along with the confidence to take control over another person, over my life, in a world where Gods and Goddesses seem to have the only power over the drift and tug of life and its final destination. The power isn’t like I had thought, it’s better, a drug stronger than any venom coursing through me, making me invincible.

  Maybe that makes me evil, maybe evil is just subjective; a word thought up by people who don’t have power and need to justify being so weak. Regardless, the power was an immovable part of me now.

  It’s mine.

  AZURE

  The back of my skull is still tender from where my brother thrust me backward into the wall outside the small council chambers. The look on his face, the anger there, pissed me off… and I can’t for the life of me work out why.

  I had been going over it in my mind for days... and I am done. I’m headed for the outskirts of the city, and this time I’m not coming back. I’m so tired of this crap, no wonder his soulmate had up and left him. He deserved it.

  I bite my lip, feeling my heart palpitate slightly.

  No. He didn’t. A tiny whisper, a tiny slither of something resembling what had once been my moral compass, has somehow navigated the inky waters of my mind, surfacing unexpectedly.

  Well, it doesn’t matter. I’m still going. I think to myself, allowing a reprieve in the pattern I had sought for comfort all these years, attack, recoil, retreat.

  I turn, reaching the outer limits of the bowl holding the city, looking back on it. The glimmer is all too familiar, the light seeping in from the surface too bright, but something about it holds my attention, not permitting me to look away. Her face wanders into my mind, like it always does at moments like this; Starlet. Her name a cursed prayer, carried on currents; those same currents that allowed my compass, long lost and broken, to surface once more.

  I can see The Knights, floating as a unit on the city limits, Orion must have called them back after his return from seeing Callie again. I had heard rumours that demons were roaming these waters once more, but I figured, like I usually do in these types of life and death situations, that it’s really none of my business.

  I think back to Callie’s face, the contortion, the twist in her soul that had allowed Titus to step in. I understand that more than anyone.

  I frown slightly, rising and then sink to the sand, perching on the edge of the sandy slopes, surveying the city. The feeling I have toward Callie isn’t one I expected and it makes me wonder, as I look down over the mer, over their pitiful attempts at beating back the dark, why I don’t envy her, but rather find pity for her.

  I think back to the night Titus had turned me, made me what I am. It’s all so foggy, so grey and withered, like something rotting, that I can’t quite remember whether I had given anything like consent. I remember him shooting me up with venom from a Lionfish, something he always had on hand from Caedes. I wonder now if consent from my drugged lips would even count under those circumstances... I mean, I probably would have said yes to anything.

  It is perhaps the first time ever, that I have looked at what happened to me from my father’s view. I was taken from him. I didn’t swim away. It was something that happened to me, not something I had become by choice. All this time I always thought Titus had given me a gift, which is perhaps why Starlet thought that my leaving her was a choice. She had been in my head the whole time, seeing fragments of my degradation. That makes it all the worse.

  I run my fingers along my arms, shivering at the gentle friction of my long nails across the white of my skin. It’s true, I had loved Titus, but like with Callie, he had infected me. I hadn’t asked to be bitten, he had just done it. No questions, no asking. Just an act that had changed the course of my fate.

  I will never be the same. My lust for power, for darkness, is too great to ever leave me. I know that now. I wonder why I had returned here, why I hadn’t just become nomadic, been free, not bound to any one place.

  I find my eyes lingering on the tall, smooth glass spire of the Alcazar Oceania, my heart constricting. I let my defences drop, for just a moment, allowing myself to admit the truth. I had returned here, I had saved the mer in spite of myself, because the ties that bind me to her had never really fallen away. I have family here, family who desperately need a leader, someone strong to hold them together. My father is gone, that’s true, but this is my home.

  A thought that’s not quite guilty, but curious occurs to me. I wonder now if Atlas would still be swimming around in his throne room, muttering to himself and looking over the Kingdom if it hadn’t been for me. For my allegiance to a man whose heart was black as sin. I should have just killed Titus while his back was turned, or while he was passed out high. It would have been better for everyone. If nothing else, I know now that despite my being immortal, that does not mean I won’t one day be sand, drifting along the sea floor.

  The light from above sparkles, torturing me with the promise of atonement. It’s all just too taboo, the idea of being… good. The word feels sticky, like my tongue is covered in syrup at the mere thought of uttering it. Could I even be better? Be different? Or am I too far gone?

  I ask myself these questions, but I know that forgiving myself won’t be the problem, I love myself. In spite of the fact I probably shouldn’t. Self-loathing has never been a part of my character. I’m far too strong for that.

  I know now, as I sit and ponder, the reason that I can’t bring myself to leave and the reason I can’t quite bear to stay.

  I want to see forgiveness in her
eyes, because if she can still love me like a sister after all this time, then maybe I’m not so bad after all.

  I’ve been skulking in the doorway for hours. I don’t know what possessed me to do such a thing or to even come back. I should definitely have vanished into the deep, never to return. But I didn’t, and now I’m here.

  I’m most definitely turning out to be a giant masochist. I suppose Titus’ love of causing me pain has rubbed off and now I’m keeping up the habit, for old times’ sake.

  This is, as I now realise, an extremely bad idea and honestly all my fault. She has every right to be chronically pissed. I had broken almost every secret handshake and promise spoken in twin language that I possibly could have. I had shattered the oldest and most sacred bond in my life with neither spectacular grace, nor reason. I sigh, I am so bad at appearing humble. Centuries of feeling the power of the deep will do that to a person.

  Especially one as narcissistic as I.

  I don’t want to do this, but something inside me won’t let it drop. I’m afraid, for the first time in a long time, of her rejecting me. Of things never being repaired from how completely they had been decimated. I had risked it all for a relationship that was built on lies. I had allowed myself to be used for my power, and after watching Orion skulk around the Alcazar Oceania, I know that I can’t let my soulmate get away so easily.

  Things are screwed up, but nothing is too screwed up when it comes to family. Or so I’m hoping.

  “I can hear you out there you know. You sigh when you’re anxious.” I hear Star’s dullest tones move toward me and I smile.

  “How do you know that?” I move around the doorway into her chambers, the room has pink crystalline flooring, so pink in fact it reminds me of vomiting as a child after eating too much salmon. I pull a face, before realising she can see me, something which after so much time in the shadow I’m not used to. I smile, trying to seem breezy.

  Did I actually just say breezy? I guess I really am losing my edge.

  “I know that because it’s what I do when I’m anxious,” she’s sat at a vanity, near a stained glass window, the pattern on which is a wilting orchid. A metaphor of my life. It could have been so beautiful, but I lost my sunlight and died a magnificent death, plunging into rot and dirt instead.

  “I’m sorry… I didn’t mean to disturb...”

  “I think you hanging in my doorway is the least of our worries with regard to privacy, wouldn’t you? I mean you waltz through my head on a daily… no, make that hourly, basis.” She’s disdain filled. I move my charred scales left and right, swaying into the room. I sit down on the edge of her four-poster bed; the pink silk sheets look like liquid rose-petals. Beautiful and sweet, just like she once was. Before I destroyed her. “Make yourself at home, why don’t you?” she snaps. I flinch, not having let words touch me in a long time, this is going to be harder than I thought.

  “Look, I know I don’t deserve your kindness. I don’t want it even. I just want to apologise.” Her head snaps around and a look of shock rests between her perfectly arched brows. She looks at me, at the colour returning to my scales, the blue of my eyes that match hers. I can feel the power of the dark fading. It’s hard. But I know she can see it. She moves to open her lips, to retort in that bitchy way she uses as a defence.

  “You… want to apologise?” she whispers, her eyes suddenly brimming. Whoa.

  “Yes. I’ve been lost for a long time, I got poisoned by a snake. By Titus, but I shouldn’t have let it happen that way. You’re always going to be the most important person in my life. More important than any man,” the words I speak cut me deeply. I remember now why I didn’t want to do this. Vulnerability isn’t really my style. Starlet places the conch comb down on her vanity, crosses her hands in her lap, and looks attentive, unable to resist the pull we feel to each other.

  “You’re doing this now?”

  “Yes. Why? Is it a bad time? I can come back,” I find myself totally disarmed. I didn’t think my sense of timing would be the issue, I thought it had been that… you know, I had let her be captured and tortured…

  “Our father died… he wanted nothing more than to see us together again Azure… and all you can do is this… it’s too late,” she lets a tear fall and crystallise, and I wonder if it’s for what we’ve lost in each other, or what we’ve lost in our father.

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about father. I am. I just… life is too short, even when you’re immortal.” She nods at me and I shift uncomfortably on top of her mattress. “I know things will never be like they once were. I don’t want things to be the same, I want them to be better.”

  “How can things possibly be better, Azure? They’re falling apart! Orion can’t cope on his own, father’s gone, Shaniqua left. Saturnus is becoming angrier by the second about not being Crowned Ruler. To top it all, now the girl who I thought could save us all is gallivanting off somewhere with a tentacled mess of a man, claiming she ‘doesn’t need anyone’. Things are about one step away from imploding!” She pants, slightly out of breath from her rage and then something terrifying happens. She begins to sob, uncontrollably and in an unstoppable torrent of emotion that has been mounting since the day I left. She breaks. I don’t know what to do, but the only thing I can think of is to move from the mattress, dropping to the bend in my tailfin and reaching for her hands.

  “Oh Star, please don’t cry.” The darkness within me is rising, condemning me for my pity out of habit. I remain strong, looking into the eyes of my sister, battling it back, for her.

  “You left me…” She snots, Goddess, she isn’t attractive when she cries.

  “I know… Shhh,” I coo her, and place my hand into her silky blonde locks, like time hasn’t passed, wiping her tears away. I am the eldest, if only by minutes, and I had always taken care of her. I had died first too, and I wonder in this moment how I ever chose the dark over my twin. She used to be so innocent, the girl who had been trapped in a convent for her visions, who had never been with a man. A girl for whom there was only me. Time has hardened her, as it has me, but underneath she is still the girl who cried with me, who held my hand at my brother’s funeral, who gave me a reason to keep going. I move up off the sand that is sweeping across the crystalline floor, moving my arms around her neck. She puts her arms into my dark hair and begins to weep diamonds down my spine.

  “He’s really gone… isn’t he?” My sister gasps, unable to catch her breath. I feel the truth of her words hit me, and in an unexpected moment of weakness I feel the loss take the sustenance from my lungs for the first time. I had been kidding myself if I thought I could outswim the tsunami of my grief at this destruction of familial bonds. I know that now. Together, my sister and I sink to the floor, sobbing, and holding onto each other for dear life after all this time.

  ORION

  There isn’t anything left to do but this. I need to get rid of all evidence she was ever here, ever filling the hole I had pushed her into, deforming her into something unrecognisable.

  It’s a tiny circle, a beautiful shackle that I can’t let go of; I clench it in my palm, scared to set it free. I know I need to do this; I know I need to cleave myself.

  I look out across the Occulta Mirum, the mer that move through the streets, The Knights on the outskirts, scouting weaker, lower level demons that have been slowly making a re-appearance. Something is coming, something powerful and it isn’t good. I see Saturnus moving in the streets below. Rat bastard. He can have the stupid crown. I don’t and have never wanted this.

  Now, as I stare down at the streets, rather than seeing happy mer, chatting, unaware as to the encroaching danger that seems to be building every day, I see their lives in the palms of my hands. My decisions are the ones keeping them safe or killing them.

  I had used Callie as a distraction and ruined my relationship in the process by putting too much onto her, because I can’t handle it. I hate how she always flees from me. I need someone far stronger than that to help me rule. I had
n’t listened when my father had wanted to teach me, I had always run too. I hadn’t even wanted to stay in the Alcazar Oceania for fear of him trapping me under the responsibility. I wonder now how I could have been so stupid. Had I honestly thought he was going to live for eternity?

  I suppose I couldn’t imagine a world without my father in it. So the answer to that was yes. I move backward slightly and sit in the throne. The seat is too wide for me, far too wide. I don’t fill it like I should. I think back to my father now, his silver hair, and gold eyes, the wisest of any man I had ever known. I should have listened to his advice, but there’s no bringing him back now. He is dead and I am in a giant royal mess.

  The crown sits on my head firmly, a burden I can’t seem to get rid of. The ring still in my palm, I look down at it. I want to hate Callie for what she’s put me through. I think of her, lying, splayed out with his hands crawling over her like parasites. NO. I mentally slap myself. I am not going there, and that’s that.

  I rise again from the throne, feeling my fin trail along the stained glass of the floor slightly, reluctant to take this next step. I release the ring, letting it float slightly in front of me before I push it away from me using the air in the surrounding water. I push it at such speed, never wanting to see it again. A silly human ritual. For a silly, too human girl. I watch it reach the panoramic glass window and shove it open with a larger blast of air, letting the ring and all my feelings wash out with the current. I stand and watch it zoom, exerting my will over this mini tide using the air within each water molecule to propel the memory of my love for her as far away as possible. The ring is a tiny, blue glimmer, like a star in the distance when I finally let the current drop. The ring is lost out there in the deep. Another piece of meaningless, worthless junk, sweeping across the ocean floor along with the ashes of a man whose place could never be filled. Let alone by me. The son who didn’t listen.