I had personal stakes in this case too. Not only would I stop whatever Anne was doing, but I would also save my lover. No matter the cost.
When I finally got up on deck, I’d expected to hear Crowley giving me guff about taking so damned long, but he wasn’t. He was staring straight ahead with a furious look on his face.
My heart sank when I realized why.
An endless sea of blue grains stared back at me. The bridge hadn’t been destroyed after all. We were here.
“Do you feel her?” Crowley asked, voice full of grit and gravel, as though he’d spent the entire night drinking.
I clenched my jaw. I hoped like hells that bastard never slept at night.
Beside me, I felt Hook nod. “Aye, mate, I feel her.”
He sounded tired to my ears but also not so heavily burdened, as though he’d freed himself of it already. Hook was ready to end it. But I wasn’t.
I never would be.
I reached for his hand and laced my fingers through his. He squeezed once, and when he tried to let go, I refused. I wasn’t letting this man die again. Not again.
Crowley reached into his jacket pocket and extracted not a golden key card but one even rarer.
I’d never actually seen a black diamond card before. In fact, I’d always thought them nothing more than tall tales. Diamonds, but especially black diamonds, were gems of great power and significance, favored by the highest practitioners of light magick because of the way diamonds refracted energy. With a black diamond card, it was said, transdimensional travel wasn’t only unnecessary, it was also an antiquated mode of travel.
Crowley looked at us. His face was hard, his eyes inscrutable. “When you are ready, Hook, you simply have to touch the card and think of her. Arielle, you must also be touching the card. Otherwise, you’ll be blasted someplace else entirely.”
I snarled when he said my name, wishing I could pound my fist through his face.
Which he must have known, because he suddenly lowered the card and looked at me. “Fucking say it then, fish,” he snapped. “Get it out of your system.”
Hook, without warning, shoved Crowley back on his heels. Crowley, who wasn’t wearing his glasses, glared at him with eyes gone fully red.
“You don’t talk to her like that… mate,” Hook snapped, and I knew that it wasn’t just because of me that he’d reacted as he had.
I had to get my emotions under control, for his sake. And though it galled me to admit it, so much of Hook surviving meant we had to have Crowley on our side. It wasn’t easy, but I had to figure out a way to tamp down my fury at not just Crowley, but also Draven, and even to a greater extent, Bo, for using us both as they had. At the end of the day, we weren’t friends, even if sometimes it might actually have felt that way.
Plastering on a tight smile, I shook my head. “I’m just fine, Special Agent Crowley.”
His eyes narrowed to slits. His jaw worked from side to side. I could see a thousand thoughts spin behind his mask, but I couldn’t decipher any of them.
“I’m sure by now that you know what’s about to happen. And I’m not going to apologize for this, Detective. But you should know, I’m not a fucking monster. No matter what you might think. And just for the damned record, you should also know I wanted no part of this godsdammed idea. But at the end of the day, you and I wear a badge, and that means we have to do whatever the fuck we have to do to make sure assholes like Bonny get stopped. So if you’re done acting like a petulant child, we’ve got a fucking job to do.” He scrubbed at his jaw with his fist.
I hadn’t felt like an arsehole before, but damned if I didn’t now. As much as I hated to admit it, we had no autonomy in our jobs. We were told by our superiors what was what, and whether we agreed or not, we had to do what we had to do.
“Fine.” I nodded hard once. “Agreed. We have a job. But… all I’m going to ask is this: don’t kill him. And don’t kill her.”
The muscle in his jaw twitched, and his large frame vibrated as though the wolf wanted out. “I can’t make you a promise like that, Detective. You know this.”
I shook my head. “Not good enough. You used us like bait. You didn’t even fecking warn me about it. You owe me, you bastard, and you know it.”
His pupils dilated, and the wolf peeked out for just a moment—wild, reckless hypnotic. I shivered.
His voice was a deep growling drawl as he said, “Call it even for all the years of shit you put me through. Now, if you’re quite done, we have a demented psychopath to take down. Can I trust you, Detective?”
The meaning was quite clear. I was going out on a limb, trusting that a man who’d given me no cause to ever trust him before would be my ally. But I wasn’t the only one. Hook and I were partners. I had faith in him implicitly, as he had in me.
Crowley was an island unto himself, and he knew it. By giving me that time with Hook, he’d given us our bond back. But he wasn’t part of that bond. We could just as easily turn on him.
I unholstered my weapon but kept the safety on and held it loosely by my side, my anger completely spent. “Let’s get her,” I simply said.
He looked at me for a heartbeat more then lifted the card and tipped it toward us. “Everyone hang on. Hook, keep your thoughts on Anne and only Anne. Got it?”
He nodded. “Aye. I’ve got it.”
Hook and I touched the card at the same time, and it was as if the vacuum of space suddenly picked us up and spit us out.
From one blink to the next, literally, we were standing deep in blue sands, and there standing before us was the infamous Anne Bonny herself.
I’d recognize the mane of fiery-red hair anywhere. Though I’d never personally seen her myself, she was said to be a legendary beauty and as fierce as she was gorgeous. Dressed in skintight leggings, boots, and a loose and billowing top, she looked like a pirate through and through. Her green eyes were shaded, and her face was set. No emotions could be seen on her face.
She shook her head and I frowned, because that hadn’t been at all what I’d expected to find when we got here.
“Anne Bonny, you’re under arrest for the…” Crowley began to give the spiel, but I was worried and confused.
I looked up at the gray sky above, which had not one cloud hanging in it. Black birds, at least a hundred of them, wheeled acrobatically above us. If they were shifters, and I couldn’t see why they wouldn’t be, we were not only outnumbered, but also outgunned.
So why weren’t they attacking? Why were they moving in that same kind of repetitive formation?
“What say you?” Crowley finished.
Finally, I looked back at Anne, and still she just stood there, looking at us, but there was emotion on her face, a look in her eyes that scared me to my very core.
My breathing began to come in short, sharp bursts. And carefully, so as not to draw attention to myself, I sidled in toward Hook’s side. Something was wrong. Something was very, very wrong. It had been too easy. Too damned easy.
“You should never have come back,” Anne said, voice so soft, sounding almost like a gentle breeze moving over waves. But she wasn’t talking to Crowley or me. Her gaze was on Hook’s alone.
I whipped my head around, looking at Hook with round, fearful eyes. His face was set, but I could see the curl of his hand from the corner of my vision.
Crowley growled, sounding more feral and like his wolf than like the man. “What have you done?” he asked. “What have you done, you flame-haired bitch!”
Tears were starting to form in her now large and glassy eyes.
I clutched at my throat, looking around us again. A chill wind had crept in from the north, and the sands were starting to roll as waves would.
“You woke her up,” I whispered, voice tight and broken.
“On the contrary, my dear, I was always the one pulling the strings .”
A voice, ancient, old, and full of pure evil, echoed all around us.
Crowley immediately backed up. Hook and I did the s
ame, pressing ourselves against one another. Crowley had a weapon in his hand, and my safety was off.
The birds continued their careless glide.
“Who… who are you?” I asked.
Anne began to sob. “I didn’t ken. He told me not to, but I didn’t believe him.” She was muttering the words, sobbing between her crazed laughter, and that sound was chilling, something I’d hear in my nightmares until the day I died.
“You know who I am, Arielle.” The female voice was lilting, full of terrible laughter, air, and pure venom.
I shivered. “I… I don’t know you.”
“Oh, but my darling, you do.”
Then she was there, a thing of macabre beauty, standing beside a visibly trembling Anne, dressed in a gown of diaphanous white, moth riddled and turned a dull yellow in spots. Her hair was nothing but streamers of hissing and snapping electric-blue sea snakes, her skin as pale as moonstone, her face so perfectly formed and beautiful.
She smirked with lips as red as the reddest rose.
“Hello, daughter. Miss me?”
My heart froze. My soul trembled inside of me, and I heard Crowley growl. I shook my head.
“How very unsurprising of Triton.” She smirked. “Let me guess—I’m a monster. Nightmare wrapped in dark beauty. Am I close? A soul-sucking creature who only wishes to destroy and maim? Tell me when to stop, darling.”
I shook my head. “Who are you? What do you want with us? Why are you here? And how are you even here? You were naught but a shade— ”
“Wrong!” she screeched, and the sands lifted up beneath us, making us all cry out as we tossed out our arms to steady ourselves. Her face had contorted into a vision of death, going from taut and beautiful to something sharp and deadly and full of hollows. Her skin no longer gleamed like moonstone but was a desiccated husk stretched over gaunt bones. “That bastard has only ever lied about me! I was so much more than just a shade. He couldn’t control me because he wasn’t strong enough to do it. Bet he didn’t tell you that, now, did he? He had to trick me here. And so here I’ve sat, for an eternity, every day growing just a little bit stronger. A little bit more”—she glanced down at herself—“corporeal. Until the day I saw a girl who didn’t have enough. Enough money. Enough power. Never enough.”
She placed her hand on Anne’s shoulder.
Anne began to openly sob, and I shook my head, disturbed to my soul by what I was seeing. We’d all been so wrong. Anne had never been in charge at all. She’d merely been a puppet in all of it.
I stepped in closer toward Hook.
The witch’s eyes glanced between us. A knowing light filled her gaze as her thin lips curved upward just slightly. “So I made her deal, did I not, fair Anne?”
The pirate, who’d always been known as one of the most vicious and brutal to ever sail the hundred realms, dropped to her knees. Her wails were pathetic and pitiful, and I saw that her skin was also beginning to look more like a husk, just like the witch’s.
Hook grunted, grabbing hold of his chest. My heart jumped. I stared between him and the witch. Her grin only stretched wider.
“Don’t do this,” I pleaded, knowing it was entirely in vain. I’d thought Crowley my adversary, but I’d been so fecking wrong, about everything.
Crowley moved in slightly closer to my side, his weapon trained on the witch and unwavering. But I knew, as I was sure he did, that if it was truly the great darkness, our weapons were all but useless against her.
“I was given no choice, you see. He fooled me. And I thought myself so in love that I did not realize it in time. And now I hate him.”
My ears pricked at the confession, and it took me a second to realize she wasn’t talking about Hook, or even anyone else I’d had on my radar, but someone else entirely.
“Wh-who?” I stuttered, needing to be sure my hunch was correct.
Her laugh was full of hate. “You know who. Your seed bearer. He told me he loved me.”
I flinched and shook my head. She sounded like a mad child. “You’re lying.”
She tossed her head back, and the snakes upon her head hissed in agitation. “Oh, am I? Why do you think he hated you so, Arielle? Why do you think that he banished you as he did? So good to his other daughters, wasn’t he? So kind. So loving. But every time he saw you, he cursed your name. Wanted to kill you, didn’t he? But he couldn’t. Just like with me, he wasn’t quite strong enough. Though he made you think he was, didn’t he?”
She glanced at Hook meaningfully. My blood ran cold through my veins. Darkness was spreading through my vision, and a strange roaring sounded in my ears.
“Don’t listen to this crackpot, Detective,” Crowley hissed. “She lies. She— ”
Her eyes hooked to his, and they were pools of inky darkness. Suddenly, I heard a croaking sound, and he was being lifted off his feet, held in the air, gasping and clawing at his neck, weapon lost as his skin turned a dark shade of red.
“Stop!” I screamed and flung out my arms, one against Crowley’s thigh, one at her. “Stop! What are you doing? What is this? What is this ?”
She smirked and knelt beside Anne, who looked alone and lost and empty already. Then without a word of warning, she punched her hand through Anne’s chest and ripped out her bloody, still-beating heart.
Hook roared then instantly dropped to the ground, silent, so deathly silent.
“No!” I shook my head, blinded by fear and panic that clawed away at my insides like a poison. I didn’t think, only reacted.
Song spilled out of my throat—the siren song. He wasn’t dead yet. I could still reach him. I could still reach him.
But I didn’t sing to Hook. I sang to Anne—Anne, who held my lover’s soul inside of her unmoving, bloody, and broken form.
Hundreds of souls came ghosting out of her, wailing and crying as they vanished back into the oblivion of the veil.
The witch laughed. “Go ahead, little siren witch. Find your male. Find him, child. I will not fight you on this.”
Her words made no sense, and I didn’t care. I simply sang to Hook’s soul, and though he fought like the devil to return to the land of the dead, my powers were too great for him to ignore. He was compelled to obey me, to come to me. His glowing blue orb floated like a beautiful dancing light into my hands, and I held him, rocking him and sobbing, kissing his light. He was safe. He was with me. He was safe.
“Safe,” I breathed and shuddered as I shoved his warmth into me, being filled with his humanity and feeling life as I so rarely knew it running through me like fire. I knew this was bad. I shouldn’t trap his soul in mine. There were consequences for this, but it was the only way to save him.
Crowley was kicking with his legs back and forth, growling deep in his chest, and when I looked up, I saw why he’d begun to grow more agitated. While I’d been occupied with saving Hook, the witch had glided toward his side, and her hands were on him.
“Get your fecking hands off him!” I screamed, shoving to my feet.
She shook her head, still laughing. “You still don’t get it, do you, child? You.” She pointed at me with a long-tipped claw. “None of you can stop me. I am too powerful now. I stole a sliver of eternity. I can fix this. I can reclaim what was once mine.”
Her inky eyes would be forever burned in my memory banks. I’d seen evil before, or at least, I thought I had. But I’d never stared into the beautiful face of it as I was now.
“I only lack one thing. You, Arielle. My very own flesh and blood.”
I hissed, “I am no daughter of yours. Mara was my mother.”
Again, she laughed. “Is that why you look so different from your sisters? Come on, Arielle. Deep down, you must have always known. Your craving for darkness, your hunger for souls—do you really think that was just your siren’s blood? Your sisters are sirens. Did they ever do as you did? Did they ever craft a throne of bones? No, my child. You are mine. The dirty little secret Triton was so very desperate to hide.”
“I am no
t a witch,” I said, feeling outside of myself as I said it.
She grinned. “Oh, but you are. Untrained, but my blood runs wild through your dark veins. You know…” She cocked her head, looking almost fondly at me. “I meant to kill you. I was banished from Undine, you see, a bloody curse I’ve been unable to break because I am no siren. I cannot enter. I need royal blood, and well, daughter, I’m sorry, but you were it. But you look so much like me before I met that faithless, feckless bastard,” she hissed, and her snakes writhed like an angry ball upon her head. Her black eyes found mine again.
I shook my head.
“Denying it doesn’t change the facts, Arielle. You are my daughter. And I will avenge what Triton’s done to me. But I won’t kill you. Now that I see you, now that I know who you are, I will do what your father could not. I would love you, cherish you. I will train you to become all that you should have been. Only give me your soul.”
I clutched at my chest. “No.”
Fires began to lick and burn around her form. She moved away from Crowley, and he was kicking, clawing at his face and neck, as though trying to break the invisible hold, grunting and groaning.
She stood in front of me, smelling of death and glaring at me with eyes that burned through my soul like hell’s flame.
“You don’t need it, Arielle. You are a witch. Embrace that side of you. Be your darkness. You can survive without it.”
I shuddered, squeezing my eyes shut. All that I’d learned, all I’d heard—I didn’t believe it. I couldn’t. Yet deep down, very deep down, I was starting to think it had to be true.
For the past few days, all I’d done was deny the obvious, and that strategy had been less than effective for me.
She reached for me. “Give me your soul, and we can finally gain our revenge.”
I felt the warmth of Hook’s soul, beautiful and big and lovely. I shook my head. He loved me because of my humanity, not because of my lack of it. “If you go back and undo this, then you undo me. Why would I ever allow that?”
She snorted. “I like you, Arielle. You are the only child I have ever borne. I think we are more alike than you could possibly imagine. All this time, fighting who you really are. The pain that must cause you. The agony you must feel. I could heal you, daughter.”
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