Chapter 9
I woke up swinging.
My fist connected with nothing but water. I was thrashing, fighting, swiping at empty blue space with both hands.
I stopped and held my right hand in front of my face.
Flexed the fingers. They moved. All of them, smoothly, painlessly, curling into a fist and opening again.
The swelling was gone. The bruising was gone.
The bones that Zayne had shattered under his boot were whole and straight, and I stared at them in the blue light and couldn’t process what I was seeing.
Then I remembered I was under water, probably as deep as anyone could possibly go on this planet.
I slapped my hand over my mouth, held my breath and waited to start choking and flailing.
But that never happened.
The water moved in and out of me in a rhythm I hadn’t been conscious of, easy and automatic, and I could feel it now that I was paying attention.
A pull on the right side of my neck, a fluttering like a valve opening and closing.
Water flowing in, something extracting what I needed from it, the rest flowing out.
My hand went to my throat and felt gills.
Three slits, parallel, running along the right side of my neck just below my jaw. The skin around them was smooth, new, tender to the touch. They flexed under my fingers in time with my breathing.
I floated in the dark water of an alien palace and I didn’t know what to feel.
My body had been altered, opened up and fitted with parts that didn’t belong to me, all without my consent.
Something fundamental about what I was had been changed while I was unconscious, and I should have been furious, I was furious, somewhere underneath, but I was alive and the pain that had lived in my body since Krackus was gone.
All of it. The grinding in my lower back and the stiffness in my knees were gone and what remained was a body that moved freely for the first time in my memory.
I didn’t know whether to scream or say thank you. I settled for floating in place and staring at my healed hand and feeling both at the same time.
The room came into focus around me as my eyes adjusted. And room was an understatement.
It was enormous. The walls were living coral, deep reds and purples, studded with formations that spiraled outward in fractal patterns.
Bioluminescent veins ran through the coral in branching networks, vibrating soft gold and blue, filling the space with a moving, layered radiance that made the room feel like the inside of a jewel.
The ceiling arched high overhead, encrusted with formations that dangled downward like chandeliers, dotted with tiny points of light.
The bed, if that was what it was, sat against the far wall. A massive shell hooked and open, easily large enough for three of me. Its interior was lined with something soft and pale, not fabric, something organic, yielding. Cushioning for something much larger than a human.
Heaped in corners, stacked against walls, spilling from alcoves were Pearls the size of my fist. Bars of gold tarnished green by salt water.
Gemstones in an array of colors, raw and uncut, shining faintly with their own light.
A chest, not unlike the one Ishka had thrown at the auction stage, sat open near the bed, overflowing with jewels that caught the light and fractured it into points of color.
And against one wall, tilted at an angle and half-embedded in coral growth was a massive mirror framed crusted with barnacles and mineral deposits that had fused it to the wall.
The glass itself was clear, impossibly clear for something submerged in salt water, and it reflected the room back at me in perfect detail. Including me.
I swam toward it. The motion was strange. My body moved through the water more easily than it should have. Did they use some sort of alien tech to make it easy for me to move around down here? I stopped in front of the mirror and looked at myself when I noticed I was as naked as the day I was born.
I stared at my face a little too hard trying to see if I spotted any other changes but aside from the gills and fixed limbs everything was the same.
Just an underfed-mining-colony skinny boy.
How did their kind get all of this?
Mining. Our world provides. Pearls grow in our depths. Jewels form in our stone.
He paused, and then:
And the vessels of the fools who land here to take what is not theirs.
I turned from the mirror. I didn’t land here on purpose. The thought came out maybe a little too defensive. I was betrayed by my bitch ass friends who threw me out of my ship…well the ship I nabbed. I didn’t come to take anything.
It matters not.
What did you do to me?
Would you rather have been a corpse at the bottom of my sea?
No.
After the betrayal, the pirates, the auction, after all of it, after lying in that cell telling myself I didn’t care if I lived or died, the answer was still no.
I didn’t want to be dead. I wanted to be angry about being alive, about being altered, about having pieces added to my body without permission. But I didn’t want to be dead.
I saw him in the mirror before I saw him in person.
A shape, filling the archway behind me. The tentacles arrived first, curling through the doorway, spreading outward, filling the space with slow deliberate movement.
Then the body. The armored plates, the dark blue-black skin, the breadth of him blocking the entrance entirely.
And the eyes. Those burning blue-violet eyes, reflected in the mirror, fixed on me.
I turned around.
He was bigger than I remembered. On the Sept, in the daylight, surrounded by a crowd, my brain had been too overloaded to properly see how goddamn big he was.
Here, in this room, in the glow of the coral, there was nothing else to measure him against except me.
And against me, Ishka was holy shit big.
His tentacles filled half the room, coiling and uncoiling in slow arcs. The spines on his head rose sharp and pale against the deep blue of the water.
He moved into the room slowly. I backed up until my shoulders hit the mirror, and then I had nowhere else to go.
He stopped. Too close.
I could see the faint grain of his skin where the armor plates didn’t quite meet, the slow pulse of pale blue light traveling down one drifting tentacle, close enough that the tip hovered an inch from my forearm.
The water moved against me as his body displaced it, a steady push that rocked me slightly forward.
I tilted my head back to meet his eyes. He looked down.
My face barely cleared the middle of his chest.
An entire market square had gone dead silent the moment he appeared. Now that same creature stood directly in front of me. Ancient, massive, and clearly wanting something from me and I was bare, gills fluttering and nothing between us but a few inches of water.
The heat pooled to my cock. Why the hell was I getting hard?!
I held still. He didn’t move either.
I… don’t understand what you want from me….
I think I knew or maybe I wanted…
One of his tentacles uncurled from somewhere behind him and drifted downward, the tip tracing a line through the water that brought it to my leg.
It touched the inside of my knee first, light, barely there, and then slid upward.
Along my inner thigh. Smooth cool skin and the faintest drag of a sucker, unhurried, mapping territory it had already decided belonged to it.
My breath snagged.
His eyes locked on mine. For the first time they weren’t just cold.
They were sharp. Hungry. Like he’d been holding back and wasn’t anymore.
I will show you.