Nalah Brown
Foolish. You are foolish, love-drunk mortal
For letting affection blind you.
I could hardly tell one person from the other. We were all covered in mud, blood, or soot. All a little crazed. Tired.
We fought our way toward the water, making a small space through which we could run to the boats. I leapt to the nearest one and released Dahlia as I reached for an oar.
“Come on!” Mullins barked, waving his hands at David and Meridan.
They jumped into the second boat with Gus and we began heading out toward the Weaver, but we all knew the battle wasn’t over. We were more vulnerable in small boats on the water than we were on land. Those without an oar guarded the sides, their blades and pistols drawn.
“Lyla,” Dahlia forced, her voice strained and broken.
Suddenly, something slammed against the underbelly of the boat, jostling us to the side.
“Row!” I shouted, putting every ounce of my strength into getting us back to the ship alive.
“Row!” Gus mimicked from the adjacent boat.
He fired into the water with a musket and fins whipped up with a violent splash in retaliation.
And that was when they began to leap. Bodies, long, lean, and gray in color, slithered up from the water like bounding eels, reaching and clawing at anyone they could touch.
Blades and guns were swinging. The men ducked low as we continued to push out toward the ship.
Blood rained down on us as those who were capable continued swinging their swords.
The alarm bells began to ring on the Weaver and men crowded the railing with their weapons drawn.
Harpoons whistled past us, too close for comfort, and pierced the water near the boat.
Not far from my ship, I could see another vessel that hadn’t been there before, its vivid figurehead reflecting moonlight off its gold finish, and from it, muzzle flashes peppered the air.
They were firing into the water, trying to cover our retreat.
But I didn’t have time to deduce whose it was. We had to get on the ship. That’s all I could think about. Get. On. The. Ship.
We drifted up to the side of the Weaver where the climbing nets had already been lowered.
“Climb! Climb!” men yelled. Gunfire filled my ears. Shouting. If I didn’t know better, I would have thought we were in a battle with the navy, but no. We were fighting monsters from the deep. Creatures that had no right to take lands where men once stood.
Through the side of the boat, a jagged spearhead splintered the wood, grazing my boot. When it pulled free, water sloshed in around our feet. Hands shot up, reaching and grabbing at us.
Meridan, bleeding from her leg, was hauled to her feet and draped over Mullins’ back. She wrapped her skinny limbs around him as he climbed the nets, roaring with exertion.
I spun to scoop Dahlia up in my arms, but in truth, I didn’t know how to get her up the nets without her legs to aid me.
“You must hang onto me,” I told her, crouching with my back to her so she could get a good grip around my neck.
When I felt that her hold was strong enough, I started climbing.
She was heavy. So heavy, I feared I would lose my strength and doom us both, but I gathered everything I had to get us onto the ship.
As we ascended, the beasts from below began to fill the boat.
Women, long and slim to the point of looking almost skeletal with slick, bald heads tore at the lines, heaving their serpentine lower halves behind them as they gave chase.
Nothing about them resembled any sirens I had ever seen.
Their eyes were overly large and had a strange, yellow glow behind the deep blackness.
Their teeth were sharp and their mouths opened far too wide, nearly tearing their cheeks as they screeched.
“Don’t leave!” came a voice from the creature’s crooked lips, the tone identical to Meridan’s.
“What the fuck!” Mullins yelped, horrified.
“Climb!” Gus yelled from only a couple of feet above us. I could hear the dread in his voice. He didn’t often express it, but on that night, in that pandemonium, it was obvious that he was afraid.
Dahlia shifted off of me and took hold of the nets, relieving me of her weight.
I maneuvered myself beneath her, pushing her upward as I climbed.
Below us, the sirens and the ravenous xhoth were gaining on us, shaking the nets.
They would have caught up to us with ease had they not started fighting each other over the spoils.
They turned their aggression on their neighbors, ripping and biting to climb over those nearest to them.
“Cap’n!” Gus shouted.
I didn’t look back. The railing was right there, just within reach. I shoved Dahlia toward it, shielding her body with my own. Gus, clinging to the railing, drew his pistol and fired toward my legs just as bony fingers wrapped around my foot.
The bald-headed siren released me… and turned its attention to Gus. It scurried toward him, wrapping him in long, gangling arms and a glistening black tail. I watched it rip him off the netting, using its weight to tear his fingers from the ropes.
“No!” I roared.
I reached out to grab him, my fingers barely grazing his shirt as he descended into the sea.
“Gus, no!”
Dahlia twisted out from between me and the net and dove after him, barely missing the boat beneath us. All the bodies that had flooded it slithered after her like she was a corpse being thrown into a shiver of hungry sharks.
“Dahlia!” Meridan screamed from above.
The moment she disappeared beneath the water, my heart leapt into my throat.
I immediately began climbing back down the net as my men fired on the remaining beasts, chasing them back into the waves.
I dropped into the now empty boat but leaking, rage gripping me like a vice trying to drown me.
Mullins tossed the ropes down and I quickly started to secure them to the metal rings on the frame in hopes that Dahlia and Gus would resurface and we could be hauled out of the water together.
I could hear my men reloading guns and harpoons above me, screaming at each other to hurry, but nothing was surfacing. It was as if Dahlia had appeased the ravenous waters by surrendering herself to them and the monsters had fled.
“Come on,” I said to myself.
“Vidar,” Meridan said, tossing Lady Mary into the boat beside me.
I grabbed it, arming myself for any surprises.
The moon cast her blue light over the water around me just as plumes of red bubbled up from below.
It took everything not to leap in after Gus and Dahlia, despite knowing that I could do nothing for them if I did.
As good a swimmer as I was, I could not match those born in the water.
I swallowed, my pulse racing under my tingling skin.
Everything quieted as if we were reaching the eye of a violent storm and then finally, from the deceivingly calm water, came Dahlia with Gus in tow.
He was coughing weak, wet coughs, blood spurting from his mouth as she dragged him with her toward the boat.
“Here!” I beckoned, reaching out. “Come to me!”
She struggled to lift him toward me and I did everything to take his weight off her so she could climb in herself.
Once Gus was splayed out inside the boat, she rolled over the edge after him, tail and all.
She coiled around him in an almost protective manner as I crouched on the other side of his body. Only then did I see what had been done.
“Raise the boat!” someone shouted from above.
It wasn’t ideal to raise the boat with three bodies in it, but what choice was there?
We started to ascend as others began pulling the nets up in case another wave of ferocious fiends decided to continue the attack.
I forced myself to assess how serious Gus’s injuries were and felt my chest tighten.
The sirens’ nails had done their work. There were deep gashes in his stomach.
One in his neck was gushing. His cheek had been torn to the teeth and more than one bite had been taken out of him in various places.
Flesh was missing from his shoulder and his forearm.
I’d seen it all before. I’d seen worse… and yet this time, I barely had the stomach for it.
This was Gus.
I trembled, pressing a hand over a deep wound in his stomach.
If his insides spilled out, it would ruin everyone.
I slid my other hand gently beneath his head, lifting it so he would not choke on his blood.
His tan face had gone pale and his eye was frantic as if trying to figure out where the hell he was.
The patch that once covered his other had been lost in the tussle and I could see the vacant hole where his other eye had once been.
Already, the boat was filling with blood.
“Fuck,” he strained, “Thought I was dead there for a bit.”
“Nah, not yet,” I said, suddenly composing myself in the face of what I knew was coming. “Just scratched up is all.”
His expression mused over the morbid sarcasm before he brushed the jokes aside.
It wasn’t hard to understand the state of him.
I suspected he knew most of him was missing.
“Just scratched up, huh?” he said.
I feigned a poor smile to mimic the one he was trying to put on. “Just scratched up, Gus.”
“Liar.” His eye shifted to Dahlia and he forced the tiniest, gnarled grin. “Nice to die with a pretty f—face like yours lookin’ down at me. You take c—care of him. You’ve got a good soul. It’s a pretty one under all that hate, y’know? Protect him, ey?”
His eye turned back to me. My heart was hammering in my chest the more realization sank in. It was a slow, dull knife sliding deeper and deeper by the second, every moment more painful than the last.
“Th—thought I’d have more time to say something better bef—fore I died, but…
” He winced, coughing up a lungful of blood.
Then his hand moved from his stomach to clutch mine in a panicked motion like he was falling off a cliff and needed purchase.
“My boy,” he forced. “You’re… just a boy.
” I watched his eye glaze over, wandering far, far from that boat and into the void. “My b—boy.”
I squeezed his hand, my jaw tensing to conceal the roar of anger and despair swelling in my chest.
“Gus,” I said, adjusting myself closer to him in an attempt to get his attention back on me, but it was no use.
His jaw bobbed a couple times to claw at his last breaths.
His grip on my hand tightened for a blink and then his strength ebbed.
His fingers uncurled, letting his hand slide down beside him where it lay limply in pools of salt water and blood.
His breathing ceased. His eye froze, staring up into the dark sky.
The dead did not feel like the living. There was extra weight to a corpse that did not exist in life and I felt that weight in Gus when his heart stopped.
His muscles melted into submission. His jaw went slack and then there was…
nothing. What remained was a marred collection of flesh and bone with nothing inside. No soul. No light.
Nothing. In a blink… sweet Gus was gone.