Chapter 22
The water is heavy. Oppressive. Oblivion black. I can’t breathe.
My heart races with the desperate need for air. Thrashing, I dig my nails into whatever is dragging me down. Scramble through endless darkness for Deacon—
I can’t breathe I can’t breathe…
All I can think is now that the mermaids have seen the mark down my back, these captive, deceptively beautiful creatures are no better than a luminous and watery electric chair. Sacred, profane, and permanent. Landon and his hunters be damned—the Mer have taken my life into their own hands.
I scramble, tugging at the slimy tether as best I can. Fighting to tear it in two. But the lack of oxygen is affecting my muscles, and the water makes it impossible to build any momentum, and my lungs, my lungs, my lungs—
A slight, glowing form floats into my vision.
It takes a second for me to understand it’s the mermaid I fed a nightingale to.
The same spindly, fibrous ribbon that’s tied around my legs is tethered around her translucent middle, securing her to the unseeable bottom of the pond.
She studies me strangely, but I cannot hold still for her perusal. I need air.
Though I thrash for the surface, she stays in my line of sight, unveiling a small, gleaming blossom in her hand. The petals undulate as she motions for me to take it into my mouth.
My lungs ache. My vision spots—
I’m not strong enough to fight whatever is dragging me down…
Urgency forces me to grasp the flower and shove it into my mouth. My need for air disappears like a bubble burst. There, and then gone. My chest expands with the rich swell of breath.
“Not much time,” she says. I don’t hear the words from her lips, but from the black water that surrounds us. Somehow, this mermaid, with her delicate features and monster’s eyes, is speaking through the lagoon. “You must listen.”
I nod, willing her to hurry. The mermaid’s eyes dart around the depths.
If Deacon hasn’t been granted the same power to breathe that I have, he’s already drowned once if not twice, unable to die without silver, gasping for air, suffering.
Before, the thought of him being tortured might have thrilled me, but those scars…
“The band lights the attic.”
The words are said softly, but they rush like river water into my ears, against my skin. Panic strikes me. “I don’t know what that means,” I say, water welcome in my lungs as if I had gills.
But she remains silent, even as her eyes shine with concern. She’s waiting for me to put something together. My dark hair floats between us, and she moves it away with webbed fingers. It can’t be long until Landon’s hunters rip me from this mermaid’s grasp.
I think hard, wondering if this is a puzzle. A riddle of some kind. The band lights the attic…A band of men? A herd or flock? A strip of something? I think of what she must have seen before she pulled me under. What the entire forest saw.
“Is this about my syrabraxa?”
Her haunting eyes light. “The band lights the attic,” the lagoon repeats.
“Please,” I beg her. “Tell me what it means.”
And then the slimy strip releases me and the ability to breathe disappears. I hold out as long as I can, but she shakes her head, out of time. And I am out of air once more. I swim for the surface, limbs moving so fast my muscles burn, the fresh night air calling—
And I burst forth, gasping.
But the pool is empty.
Still. Liquid sable. A glimmering lotus drifts on a wave from my rattled splashes.
The mermaids are gone. Deacon, gone. Despite the water’s gentle temperature, my blood chills.
“Deacon?” I call. I spin around, scanning the glittering willows and softly lit blossoms. Nowhere this serene has ever felt so sinister. They killed him. I’m sure they did. “Deacon!” I don’t recognize my voice—I sound like I’m on the verge of tears.
The hunters haven’t moved from their darkened posts at the edge of the water. Four men, standing stick still. Arms clasped behind their backs.
“Deacon!” I scream, swimming for the edge of the pond. The closer I get, the more the scent of iron tinges the air. I sniff like a bloodhound, swimming toward the mossy bank where reeds sprout and bunches of luminous flowers sag.
The scent grows stronger. And the silence. No beating hearts.
My eyes cut up in horror. Now that I’m closer I can see it. All four Citadel hunters have gaping wounds in the leftmost center of their chests. Pierced through, like punch cards. And two of them are missing half of their clothes.
“Never imagined I’d hear you call my name like that.
” Deacon slips out from behind a tree as he zips up his pants.
He’s wearing the navy utility uniform of a Citadel hunter.
The sleeves are a little short and his feet are bare, but otherwise not a wet hair out of place.
Even the blood-soaked hands are Deacon at his usual.
“Or I guess I have imagined it, but in a hornier, more enthusiastic way…”
I grip the edge of the lagoon. He’s alive.
And I was…worried about him.
I’m rendered silent by the shock of it.
He raises a curious brow. “Vivienne?”
But I can’t find my voice. I’m reeling. I’m relieved that this deviant I have wanted to…craved to kill is not only alive, but alive and killing? Hunters?
“Hey.” His tone is no longer teasing. “Stop that.”
And yet I don’t even feel the need to lambast him for what he’s done. I know why he did it. Those Citadel hunters might not have hurt him once they learned of his deal with the Elders, but…They would have hurt me. Killed me.
In fact, horror hits me like a sucker punch as I realize their deaths are on my conscience.
Had I not wasted valuable time in the lagoon ogling my boyfriend’s brother’s naked body—his horrendous scars and slick hair and scattered tattoos—I wouldn’t have missed the window in which Dawnmere’s wing fragment was concealing my scar.
I could have proven I wasn’t an aeon. I did this.
Deacon prowls to the edge of the pool and crouches down, bringing his finger beneath my chin and tipping my gaze up to meet his. Genuine concern skims beneath the anger in his eyes. “What the hell did they do to you?”
“I’m fine,” I say slowly, pulling my face from his hand. I am putting together the strangest pieces in my mind. If I weren’t still in this bizarre pond, I imagine there’d be more panic involved. Perhaps this entire pool is liquid valium. “I’m just in shock, I think.”
Deacon blows out a long breath. “Well. Be in shock later. We have to move before your buddy Landon realizes his men never brought you to the Citadel and sends reinforcements.”
Deacon offers a hand to pull me out and I scowl. We both know how naked I am.
“Clothes first,” I tell him. “And turn around.”
He doesn’t argue, instead dropping a pair of dark hunter pants and a matching jacket on the wet marsh and making a show of turning his back to me.
I climb quickly from the lagoon, and only then do I remember it’s not yet dawn and the middle of winter.
The shivering overtakes me instantly and I curse, low and chattered.
The clothes are too big for my frame and not the most comfortable without any panties or shoes, but I make do.
“Here,” Deacon adds, once I’m decent. In his too-big palm are both of my silver daggers, sizzling quietly on his skin.
“They were on Lieutenant Douchebag over there.” Deacon gestures at one of Landon’s underling hunters propped up on the far left.
“Along with our phones. Real heartless if you ask me.” He can barely contain his grin.
“You’re despicable.”
Deacon’s sigh is pure relief. “There she is.”
We make for the tree line without another word. He’s right, Landon and the Citadel will be after us as soon as they realize we escaped the mermaids. And it’s worse than anything I could have planned for. So much worse. They know they were right. That the High Thane implanted a syrabraxa into me.
“How did you get free of them?” he asks as we run, branches zipping past. “I swam down to the bottom, but…” I can’t see his face, but he sounds like whatever he’d found was pretty unpleasant. “By the time I threatened the last hunter, you’d popped back up, gasping for air.”
“The Mer just…let me go.”
“Why?”
I don’t tell him of the sacrificial nightingale or that the mermaids appear to be captives of the Elders, tethered to the depths of the lagoon, like he’d implied when we first entered the forest. I don’t tell him of the need I saw in that mermaid’s eyes when she told me “The band lights the attic…” “Something to do with that light show my back put on.”
Deacon nods like he thought the same.
We weave through the trees, my wet hair becoming stiff with ice, my teeth chattering. I can’t feel my toes. “Is your mysterious blood deal with the Elders that you won’t tell me about going to be off now that you killed four of their men?”
We leap over a log, and furry critters skitter out into the snow. “They won’t know it was me,” he muses, not even winded. “No souls taken…used your blades to do it—”
“You framed me for murder?”
“I’m sorry, you told me you had a plan. Remember that? Remember ‘I have a plan, Deacon’?”
“Fine. All right.” I can’t even be angry. I know why he pinned the deaths on me. He doesn’t want war any more than he wants an apocalypse. And I’m already a fugitive. The reality hits me like a semitruck. “I can’t stay at Harker.”
Deacon slows his pace and I do the same. Something growls in the bushes at my side, and Deacon guides me away and toward a thicker copse of gnarled trees. “You’re not going to like what I have to say.”
“I never like any of the things you have to say.”
But his face is grave. No-nonsense, fuck-around-and find-out Deacon. One of my least favorites.
“What’s that look?” I cannot imagine how things could get any worse, but that’s usually the kind of thought people have before things get infinitely worse, so…
Deacon looks at me like he’s about to tell me the plane’s going down. “You need to move into Fever Dream.”