Siren's Fury

by Mary Weber

Myles sneers at her before peeling my hand away even as I continue to hold the blade inches from his stomach. “Seeing as you have just been found sneaking aboard an enemy airship after refusing to report that Eogan has been taken over by Draewulf—not to mention the fact that the little Elemental lost her powers—it seems to me neither of you are in the position for threatsss.” He straightens his cravat to match his impeccable suit and smooths his shiny black hair.

  I frown. How does he—?

  “Or did you forget that knowing things is my specialty, dear? Because I can assure you, having spent a portion of thisss week in treaty chambers with Eogan and King Sedric, I’m quite aware Eogan’s not the man I know and despise. And the tragic messss in your bedroom tonight gave the rest away—not to mention that if you still had your powers, we’d all be suffering your thunderousss wrath right now.” He reaches out to stroke my arm.

  I slap him away. “Treaty chambers? What are you talking about?”

  “Nym,” Rasha murmurs. “Ask him once we’re in the room.”

  The floor beneath us tilts to the side as the airship suddenly lists and bobs and voices rise from beyond the door. Rasha presses her hand to the wall, and I plant my leg against the baseboard. And watch Myles’s pasty face turn a nauseous color of green. After a moment of what appears to be him repeatedly swallowing, the airship balances out, and I shove my knife again toward his stomach, forcing him to retreat through the doorway he emerged from.

  Rasha follows us into the room, which is little bigger than a water closet and boasts a single cot, a covered window, and a mirror. “This is where you’ll stay and my maid will bunk with me,” she whispers in my ear.

  I nod. And keep my knife pointed at Myles. “What are you doing here? What have you done?”

  “I’m here because I’m part of the Bron delegation, of course. Thank you, by the way, for not outing me to King Sedric. Would’ve been horridly inconvenient for my plansss. And as lord protectorate, I did exactly what needed to be done the last few days. Sssimply ensured we all made it through without you causing trouble.”

  He lifts his shaky hand, as if to study his manicured fingernails, and in doing so reveals the bruising on his knuckles. Combined with the thin, healing scar across his jaw, they appear to be the only signs of injury from our tussle a week ago. “Couldn’t have you ruining anything before we made it out of Faelen, could I?”

  “We?”

  “I assumed you’d get aboard somehow, and I was right.” He runs his gaze down my tattooed arms.

  I glance at Rasha.

  “I didn’t tell him,” she says.

  “Let’s just say in this case I wasss . . . amusing myself to see if I was correct as well as ensuring your conscience didn’t kick in and send you running tail between those lovely legs to tattle on Draewulf to my pathetic cousin, King Sedric.”

  Rasha snorts.

  “You’re despicable,” I say.

  “Yesss, and your insults were much more attractive when you had actual powers to back them up.”

  My blade is back at his gut, but my retort is lost as more voices drift beyond the hallway. “Did you know Myles was in council chambers this week?” I mutter to Rasha.

  “No. I’ve been kept to the political sidelines as much as you while Faelen worked out its treaty with Bron.”

  “Not that it would’ve mattered.” Myles steps back and tips my knife blade away before moving over to settle against the wall opposite us. “She wants Draewulf alive as much as I do. Or should I say her dear queen mum will once the message isss delivered.”

  Rasha shoots him a withering look. “You are a sad little roach and you know nothing.”

  “We should report him,” I say.

  “If we do, he’ll tell King Sedric about Eogan.” Rasha’s eyes spark red. She sits stiffly on the single cot beside me.

  Myles grins. “Good. Ssso it’s all worked out then. We all get what we want and King Sedric’s none the wiser. Nice to think we had similar interestsss.”

  Is he jesting? “You’re a traitor who tried to kill my friends and betray your own king.”

  “Tsssk. I only threatened to kill them. And for the most part, those threats clearly didn’t work on you.”

  “Threatened? You fed that orange-haired politician to Adora’s warhorses.”

  “Well, that one, yesss. And you might’ve too if you’d known what he did in his private life.” His face twists as the airship lists and we all pitch forward.

  “And,” he adds in a shaky tone, “your words sound a bit fickle for someone who hunted down every favor house in Faelen in the past week and threatened the owners with injury.”

  How does he know? I didn’t tell any—

  “Now”—he saunters a foot forward—“as lord protectorate I can order you to turn over those knives you’re holding, or I can be civil and tell you that the Bron guards will be bothered enough when I tell them you’re on this ship as my personal guest. But when they find you have weapons? Even my influence won’t prevent their wrath. They’ll see it as a threat to their new King Eogan.”

  I actually laugh. “Not a chance in hulls you’re taking these. Especially since you’ve not answered what you’re really doing here.”

  He spreads his hands out and looks insulted. “Why, achieving safety for all, same as you.”

  “He’s here because he wants to rule the Hidden Lands,” Rasha says from the cot.

  Ignoring her, Myles holds out a hand for my blades. “I’ll stow them away until we reach Bron.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  A loud thump overhead echoes through the room. Myles jumps, and Rasha gets up. “Nym, I’m going to make sure the other rooms along the hall are all empty, but then I should go. Whatever else the little roach intends to say or do . . .” She glares at Myles and her eyes are back to blazing illumination. “I can already see. And it’s all idiotic. I suggest we push him off the ship once we’re over the ocean.”

  The ceiling bumps again. I nod. “I believe he was just leaving as well.”

  She reaches out her hand to squeeze mine, but suddenly her gaze is softening and her pupils grow brighter. “Nym . . .” She studies me. “For what it’s worth, I’m sorry for the way things are. I’m sorry about Eogan.”

  I shrug and return her squeeze and say nothing.

  “Before I go, is there anything I can do?”

  I shake my head. I don’t want her pity. I consider jesting, “Hey, I’m no longer a curse or a slave—so it’s not all bad, yes?” Only right now, I’d give anything to have both those things back if it meant saving Eogan.

  “You’ve done enough,” I murmur. “I just need to hide and think a bit.”

  From his spot, Myles clears his throat. As if even he knows I’m lying.

  “Shut up,” I snap at him.

  “Just stay in this room, okay?” Rasha says, turning to glare again at Myles. Then with one last compassionate glance at me, she sashays the four feet to the door.

  Myles sniffs. “Whichever god decided to curse the world with that woman—”

  I lunge for him.

  He dodges from the room and, before I reach the door, jerks it shut behind him. Leaving me standing in front of it, shaking and half contemplating going after him or working my way through the entire airship with my knives.

  Not that I’d get far.

  With one last curse, I click the lock on the door before slipping over to plop down on the tiny metal cot that is little bigger than a coffin.

  After a moment I lie back and pull the thin covers over my head like a lid.

  CHAPTER 7

  I HAVE NO IDEA HOW LONG I STAY IN THAT POSITION curled beneath the blankets. But I can feel it when they begin loading the other passengers onto the ship. Muffled voices and footsteps emerge and fade in the passageway right outside my door. I hold my breath and scoot against the wall as much as possible, but no one ever touches the lock or handle, and soon the sounds are taken over by a low humming that grows into odd vi
brations. The tremors are so strong they seep into the walls and cot and every inch of air until my bones are rattling with them. At some point there’s a jolt and my stomach flips as the world around me feels like it’s lifting.

  I ignore it and just lie there. Until eventually my mind drifts to what Eogan is doing right now—what Eogan is thinking right now.

  Whether he is aware of Draewulf overtaking him.

  With that question comes an emotion I am not prepared to face, so I roll over and simply imagine I am dead. That my heart can’t feel, my chest can’t move, my mind can’t think past anything but the numb, numb, numb until the humming has created its own sort of buzzing silence. Except after a while it’s that silence that’s screaming the loudest. In my bones. My blood. In the not knowing if Eogan is dying in this second or the next or the next. Not knowing if he’s even aware, if he can feel what’s going on, or if he’s in pain. All I know is I can’t do a blasted thing at this moment, and it feels more fragile and vulnerable than I ever imagined.

  How ironic considering a week ago I was more powerful than any of us could’ve imagined.

  That realization alone should make me bitter-laugh, but instead my mind won’t stop replaying those moments at the Keep when I could’ve chosen differently. I could’ve anticipated Colin stepping in front of me. I could’ve forced Eogan to let me shield him until Draewulf was dead. Or I could’ve let Faelen get attacked longer and fought Draewulf myself.

  And tonight . . .

  Tonight I could’ve caught on quicker and reacted before Draewulf stole the one thing that has always been mine even when I detested it.

  I roll over and listen to the ache and sputter of my heart beating the refrain that despite all the “could haves,” this world is a pit of hulls.

  I scratch at my wrist.

  It’s not until I scratch it again that I notice the old itch beneath my skin creeping in along my arm.

  I scrub my fingernails over it, but no matter how hard I claw, the blasted feeling keeps coming back. Like this slow drip, drip, drip of poisonweed in my bones.

  Until soon it won’t stop and it’s burning, scalding its way into my flesh with its hunger to carve an injury into my skin. Go away, go away, go away, I try to tell it, until I’m swearing and then I’m choking, and suddenly it’s like this dam inside me erupts through the hate and fury and fear, and brings with it a blasted hurricane of grief.

  Abruptly there are tears. And they aren’t just clogging up my throat—they’re spilling onto my cheeks, dripping onto my arms and hands and down to soak into my blanket. And I’ve no idea what to do with them or how to stop them.

  I just know that eventually, mercifully, I succumb to a measure of sleep.

  I’m aware of this because when I wake, the room is considerably brighter and my body’s been sobbing long enough to become sore and empty except for that throbbing near my heart.

  I sit up and find my way through the dim to my door and out to the hall where two Faelen guards jump to attention. Neither seems surprised at my emergence.

  “The water closet?” I mutter.

  One opens a door directly across from my room and positions himself in front of it once I’ve entered.

  After I’ve used the bowl and finished washing my hands, I lean against the water basin and breathe in, and, after a minute, look up to find a tiny mirrored reflection of a girl with sunken eyes and a face so gray I barely recognize it.

  Nice. Even my appearance looks lost.

  I turn to go, but abruptly that thought hits and nearly splays me out against the wall.

  I am lost.

  I can’t remember anything about me. I can’t remember what I’m supposed to be aside from what Draewulf has taken.

  I grip the bowl. Shaking. Horrified as the entirety of that realization sets in. I don’t know who I am.

  I reach down and pull out one of my knives from its sheath. Desperate for some way to feel the burn deep enough to reach my soul and remind me of who I’m supposed to be. To erase that blasted itch that just won’t cease.

  I rinse it off with soap and water and press it against my left arm, beneath the tattooed bluebird, and begin to create a short, shallow line meant to be a branch for it to land on. To find her feet on.

  I wait for the pain. The relief.

  But even my old habits betray me as a sick feeling settles in my stomach that there is no rush, no horror. I utter a gargled laugh. There’s nothing other than a few drops of blood and a dull sense of a scratched itch too easily appeased. I resheathe the blade and brace against the wall as the airship dips down. The nausea grows worse as the only emotion washing over me is a sense of gut-wrenching shame, that after all my newfound resolution two days ago, I have let myself down. Let Colin down. Eogan.

  Litches. I blink hard and shut away the memory of his reaction the first time he saw me with a fresh self-inflicted wound.

  When the airship steadies, I shred one of the drying cloths and bandage it around the shallow scratch. Then listen a moment as voices surge outside the room. It’s Myles from the sound of it. I disengage the lock and edge it open, then peer out into the hall where the two Faelen guards and Myles are speaking.

  Myles looks ill as he turns to me. “Ah, I’ve jussst come from explaining to the Faelen delegates that I have brought you along as a guest.” He holds out a shaky hand. “Your knives, if you don’t mind.”

  “Go to hulls, Myles.”

  “You certainly could’ve sent me there if you so desired.” He studies my puffy eyes with a look of humored arrogance. “I’d like to think you chose not to because you couldn’t bear the thought of never ssseeing me again.”

  “Maybe I thought I had killed you.” But even as the words snap harsh, my undertone betrays me. We both know I could’ve killed him at that cave. I only left him alive because I couldn’t bear the thought of adding another murder to my name.

  With a click of Myles’s fingers, both guards head down to the far end of the hall. He follows them with his eyes until they’re a good distance, then he shifts his gaze back on me. “Oh my dear, you’ve a sharp wit but you’re quite the wretched liar.” He reaches a finger out to trace one of my memorial tattoos without actual touching it. “Perhaps that’s why you can see through my abilitiesss.”

  I snort. “That or your abilities are more pathetic than you think.”

  His hand is instantly clamped on my arm, crushing my tattoos. My vision fades and then flares and suddenly I’m outside the cave where I left him and there’s a bolcrane tearing through the forest into the clearing. The screams of the men it’s killing are loud and real and just as haunting as my dreams ever since. The image shifts and Eogan is in front of me. The real Eogan—his eyes holding my gaze a moment before dropping to my lips. And then his mouth is brushing over mine just as another picture takes its place of Eogan’s throat being slit. I gasp and push back.

  “Pathetic? I think not,” Myles says. “Which leaves me pondering why you didn’t tell King Sedric of my ulterior allegiances. Fear perhapsss? Affection?”

  “It doesn’t matter.” I blink away my fury as the vision fades and Myles’s face and the hall come back into focus. There’s not a bleeding chance I’m going to tell him the simple truth—that after a couple days, I really did fear the bolcranes had finished him off. And with everyone being so busy making good with Bron this past week, Rasha and I had been little more than ignored.

  Tromping noises clomp from whatever room is above us.

  He lifts up his fingers and flexes them into a fist. “Such a shame about your own abilitiesss. To no longer feel that power coursing through your blood—tell me, does the loss of it ache? Does it hurt to know you could’ve taken me up on my offer at the cave?” His fingers flutter over me again, this time brushing the skin on my neck and shoulders, sending an image into my head of what Myles and I could become together. Standing hand in hand over the five kingdoms. Powerful. Beautiful. Perfect. With Draewulf dead at our feet.

  He l
eans close. “Too bad you don’t know how to get them back. Especially since they might’ve allowed you to save lover boy.”

  I pull out both knives and jab for him, but suddenly the guards are there grabbing my arms.

  “Ah, there we are. Now that wasssn’t so hard.” He takes one blade, then the other, and sticks them in his belt.

  I hate him for it.

  Next thing I know the airship pitches hard and he looks like he’s going to vomit all over the lot of us.

  “Excuse me,” I say, and cross the four feet to my room and close the door. And wait for Myles’s disgusting voice to fade down the corridor until only the airship’s humming fills the air. Then pull the covers back over my head while I face the fact that, no matter how much I wish it, I am not dead.

  CHAPTER 8

  SCRITCH-SCRITCH.

  Scritch.

  Scritch.

  The annoying sound overhead interrupts my space like every other whirring, clunking noise on this metal ship. Except this one is followed by a thump that’s more suggestive of rats in the walls than gears turning. Or maybe I’m just going crazy from being stuck in here for an entire blasted day.

  Scritch-scritch-scritch.

  I yank the covers from my head and glare through the dim at the ceiling as it tilts slightly to the left with the bobbing of the ship. They’ve got to be jesting. Where are the ferret-cats to take care of their vermin?

  I’m just climbing from the bed to pound on the wall and scare the fool things off when a small utterance of, “Busted hulls,” slips through the thick, flat bars of a small metal square covering an air vent six feet up the wall in front of me.

  I raise a brow and reach for my blades before remembering Lord Myles, the blasted oaf, took them. Too late—the metal square is moving, pushing out. It wobbles, then drops with a thunk to the red-carpeted floor, and a black head pops out from the resulting hole that is too tiny for a normal person to fit through. What in—?

  Wide, dark eyes blink at me, then frown.

  I frown back. “Can I help you?”