Chapter 54 #2
“Shouldn’t you be doing something?” I shouted.
“I am,” he said, his tone maddeningly sincere. “I’m admiring the view.”
A scream split the deck, then another. The serpent’s long neck arched above us, jaws gaping wide. Rows of teeth gleamed, each one the length of a dagger. Its eyes fixed on me, unblinking, as if the whole sea narrowed to a single point.
“She thinks you’re beautiful,” Theron called, and before I could absorb the absurdity of that statement … it lunged.
My muscles seized as the jaws came for me like a closing gate of death.
Something slammed into me from the side, and I crashed into the deck, my breath crushed from my chest. For a heartbeat I lay stunned, the world tilting around me, until a shadow blocked the light.
I blinked up into Achilles’s blazing eyes.
His body shielded mine as he rolled us clear. Behind him, the serpent’s jaws snapped shut where I’d been standing, the railing exploding in a splintering blast of wood.
“Are you trying to die?” he growled into my ear.
My heart was hammering too fast to answer. His arms held me against him as though he might anchor me to life itself.
The ship pitched violently. A coil of the beast whipped upward and smashed into the mast. The great yard splintered with a deafening rupture, and the sail split down the middle, its canvas whipping loose into the wind.
Sailors shouted as the ropes snapped free, fragments of wood and sail raining across the deck.
Achilles rose, dragging me up with him. “Back,” he barked to the crew, his voice slicing through the panic as he held up his sword. “Form lines! Protect the queen!”
A coil snatched one of the soldiers mid-step.
I watched, paralyzed, as the man screamed, twisting in the beast’s grip.
And then he was gone, yanked into the water so hard the deck shuddered.
A plume of blood fanned out across the surface a moment later, darkening the already crimson waves to near black.
Archers yanked arrows to their strings and let them fly.
The shafts thudded uselessly against the monster’s scaled hide.
The beast reared higher, its jaws spreading wide as it snapped down on the railing.
The serpent roared as wood fell to the deck, a sound so immense that it vibrated through my ribs and made my teeth ache.
“Aim for its eyes!” Achilles’s voice cut through the din. His blade flashed as he pointed, commanding lines even as the serpent clamped its mouth around another writhing soldier. There was a crunch and a cry cut short, and the water below boiled redder still.
Theron, utterly unbothered, was still studying the serpent like it was a sculpture. “You know,” he called, “if someone had just asked, I could’ve told you not to bleed into the water. She loves that.”
My stomach twisted. Men were dying, torn apart in front of us, and he—he dared to sound amused.
Achilles whirled. “Do you ever shut your damned mouth?” he roared, his voice carrying over the screams and the crash of the serpent’s coils. “Or do you prefer to stand idle and taunt while men are slaughtered?”
Theron only smiled faintly, as if Achilles’s fury were nothing but background music to the performance.
The sea boiled as the serpent plunged, its massive body cutting a scar through the red water. Foam frothed crimson in its wake.
It struck again.
Achilles met it head-on. His blade cut deep into the beast’s jaw. The serpent shrieked, a sound that was just as piercing as its roar, and I cried out and covered my ears. Warmth slicked my palms, and I pulled them away to stare at the blood streaked across my skin. My ears were bleeding.
The monster reeled back, thrashing, blood gushing from the wound Achilles had left. For a moment, I thought he’d felled it—
Then the sea split anew and Achilles was tossed away from me to the other side of the deck.
Another head burst from the waves beside the first, its scales gleaming like black glass under the sky. Twin jaws yawned wide, two mouths on the same beast.
My knees buckled as the serpent whipped sideways, its second head snapping, and suddenly its eyes found me again. “Do something,” I screamed at Theron.
He moved toward the railing, his hair wild and his clothes now soaked. A glowing sigil bloomed in the air before him. “Honestly,” he said. “The fact that I have to do everything for you—”
His words cut off as the serpent’s twin heads lunged for me, mouths parting in a split of glistening fangs, wide enough to swallow me whole.
Something small shot across the deck. A blur, barely bigger than my hand, launched itself into the air with a shrill, haunting cry. For an instant I thought it was nothing more than a rat flushed from the hold … but then its silver-gray fur caught the light, a crimson tail streaming behind.
Roz?
Before I could grasp what I was seeing, it changed.
In the space of a heartbeat, its tiny body swelled, limbs unfurling in grotesque bursts, joints bending the wrong way.
Bark and stone plated its body as if the earth itself had sealed it in nightmare.
Spines jutted along its back, each one twitching.
Its eyes burned open, an icy, frostbite blue, unblinking as it soared forward.
My stomach dropped. Gods. Roz had just turned into the creature, the abomination that had found me in the Twisted Forest and had driven away the monsters circling me there.
I hadn’t been dreaming.
The beast slammed into the serpent mid-lunge, its claws gouging deep as the two tangled together, roar and shriek braided into one violent sound before they pitched over the ship’s side.