Chapter 6
Torrent
Icaught the siren just outside the underwater rift that lay out in the depths of the Pacific. She’d been traveling through the shadows that swirled around the ocean currents, but that suited me just fine. I could only talk to her in our shadow forms, since my physical shadowkind form couldn’t produce speech and my human form would have drowned down here.
I shot out my shadowy tentacles and snagged them around her essence, holding her tight when she tried to squirm away.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said in the strange voiceless way we spoke through the shadows. “I just want to talk for a minute.”
The siren shuddered, still trying to work her presence free. But I had twice as many limbs as she did, even if a few of them were no longer whole.
“I have nothing to say to you,” she spat at me.
I picked up more panic than anger in her ephemeral voice. Had she been compelled toward her destination? I’d sensed her leaving a small group of water-dwelling beings that’d clustered around the much vaster impression that I knew belonged to the leviathan.
“I want to know where you’re planning on going after you pass through that rift,” I said. “Are you simply going back to our home, or were you supposed to continue on to some other part of the mortal realm through another portal?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Because I don’t think you really want to be doing whatever that menace sent you to do. And maybe if you tell me, I can make sure you won’t have to.”
She snorted, but there was desperation to the sound. That convinced me even more that she was under the leviathan’s magical compulsion. I’d have to tread carefully with her—past minions we’d interrogated had ended their existences rather than allowing us to continue to question them.
But I had no means to really force her to answer. Quinn was leagues distant, and I wasn’t sure I could drag this being all the way to her unnoticed. We’d be in even deeper shit if I led more of our enemies back to the woman who was determined to save us all.
Possibly that lack of direct threat stopped the siren from attempting to harm herself. She thrashed in my grasp again to no avail. Then she went still for a moment. I felt more than saw her attention on me, studying me.
I didn’t know what she saw, but she seemed to decide it was worthwhile to offer up a small tidbit—probably the most she could without violating the commands on her. Whether it was an attempt to bargain for her freedom or in the genuine hopes that I could help, I couldn’t tell.
“There are many oceans in this world,” she said. “And mortals live alongside all of them. Pressure is more effective from more than one side.”
Uneasiness rippled through my amorphous body. She was heading to the Atlantic ocean then, I guessed—to carry out some destruction on the opposite coastline of this country? Many sirens could conjure sea squalls, a talent the more vicious among them used to put their sailor prey in a vulnerable position or punish those who eluded them.
She was the only being who’d headed toward this rift, but others had moved off from the apparent meeting in different directions. How many spots was the leviathan directing his minions to? How much destruction did he intend to carry out?
And what was the point of all this anyway?
I doubted the siren I held prisoner could have told me any of that even if she’d wanted to. I paused and said, in recognition of the covert way she’d replied to my first question, “It’s a shame when a disaster causes many of those mortals to die all at once.”
“Yes,” she said grimly, “it is. But sometimes it can’t be helped.”
“I wonder what possible reasons an ancient being might have for wanting that to happen. Hypothetically speaking.”
She sighed. “So do I.”
She didn’t know his plans any more than the other minions we’d captured did. Did any of the lackeys he’d drawn into his scheme have a clue, or were we kidding ourselves that we had a chance of undermining him this way?
Well, I knew more than I had before. And at least I could take a little comfort in the awareness that one siren could cause a lot less watery turmoil than the leviathan already was on this coast.
But it would be better if she didn’t go at all. I relaxed my grip slightly. “Can you delay? If you can manage a detour, I know someone who could?—”
Apparently not, or at least she didn’t trust me to have her well-being in mind. She twisted sharply and slapped hard against the newly damaged tip of one tentacle that still ached now and then even when it wasn’t being attacked. Agony speared through my limb, and the siren’s shadowy presence managed to wriggle free.
I lunged after her, but she’d already caught a current that sent her careening right through the rift.
I hesitated outside the portal to the shadow realm for a moment, debating giving further chase. But what was I going to do if I caught her? Kill her to prevent her from carrying out orders she didn’t want to follow anyway? Or rather, if I found her in the shadow realm, try to batter her essence into such a state that she couldn’t follow through with her mission, since shadowkind couldn’t die in our natural environment?
No. I didn’t want to torment a being who’d had no choice in the matter, and it hadn’t seemed as if she was a critical piece of the plan. The leviathan had hundreds of lackeys now. It was a waste to spend much time focusing on just one.
I turned away from the rift and moved on through the sea, letting myself solidify into physical form to make full use of my body and enjoy the caress of the water over my skin. I tasted every movement and flavor in the currents with my suckers, watchful for any other minions who’d headed this way. But I wasn’t sure there was much else to learn.
Before the siren, I’d caught a kelpie who’d known even less than she had and followed a school of shark-like lesser beings who’d disappeared into that same portal. They’d been too animalistic to offer any answers, so I hadn’t bothered trying to question them. The leviathan was definitely rallying his watery minions to a much greater extent than I’d encountered when I’d first gone searching for information on his activities several days ago.
Maybe there wasn’t anything else to learn. It’d been hours now. I should check in with the others, let them know what I’d discovered and see if any of them had big ideas about what to do about it or how it might fit into the leviathan’s larger intentions. Or if they’d encountered something more informative in their own search.
The span of ocean near the L.A. coast, where the water closer to the surface was churning and heaving, had nearly emptied of mortal creatures. The disturbance and maybe the leviathan’s presence in general had driven most of them off. They might not have been able to tell what kind of threat he posed, but they had their own instincts. They knew danger when they saw it.
As I swam onward, a twang of discomfort reverberated through my gut. I’d roamed all over the mortal world, partying and indulging in every possible vice, when my physical body had been undamaged, but I’d spent a lot of time enjoying the seas in my monstrous form as well. Even after my beating, after I’d started working for Rollick, I’d come out to these waters regularly to claim this one small bit of enjoyment I still could.
But I’d never sensed anything was amiss in the expanse I’d soaked in so often. The leviathan had been traveling all around the globe, stirring up catastrophes, and I hadn’t caught wind of the wrongness that was growing in the part of this world where I most naturally fit in.
Before, I’d been too caught up in my selfish pleasures to care. And after, I’d still mostly dwelled on what mattered to me—avoiding any more blows to my ego, impressing the boss I’d dedicated myself to so I had some sense of achievement and purpose. That had been selfish in its own ways too.
Would the leviathan and the behemoth have managed to get so far in their plans if I’d cared more about the world I’d derived so much enjoyment from? If I’d been inclined to do something about any strangeness I noticed rather than dismissing it as irrelevant?
Would I even be sticking my neck out now, doing everything I could to stop whatever new catastrophe the fiend was planning, if Quinn’s life and safety weren’t at stake? That was a kind of selfishness too. I wanted her to survive because I wanted her in my life, with all the joy she’d woken up in me.
The uncomfortable thoughts followed me all the way up the coast. Finally, I tasted the shifting traces of minerals and organic matter that told me I was nearing the spot where I’d left the rest of the group behind. Hopefully they hadn’t needed to depart in a hurry because of some new threat, but I could make it to our agreed-upon backup meeting spot if they had. It’d just make for a longer journey.
As I came closer to the shore, I noticed another creature that wasn’t quite mortal slinking through the shallows. Was it a shifter of some kind in its mortal-like animal form or a lesser being? The vibe it gave off made me think it was more purposeful than a thoughtless creature would be.
I eased closer, following its movements, and lashed out in an attempt to snatch at it. But the fishy body dipped and dodged before darting through my grasp with its slippery scales. I whirled to chase after it only to find it lunging at me, transformed into something now human shaped and sized but with fins jutting from its forearms.
Fear flashed through me. I had to stop this thing before it stopped me. It might have already spotted the others—it might mean to report their location to its master. No normal being would have gone on the attack with me like that when I still had a huge advantage of size.
I snatched at his limbs, and he sank spindly teeth into one of my tentacles. With a grunt, I shook him off. Seeming to decide he’d made a miscalculation, he leapt away from me, back into fish form.
But I couldn’t let him leave either.
If I could capture him—if I could bring him to Quinn—I might have brought back real answers after all.
I hurtled after him with swishes of my tentacles. I could move faster than his small body, no matter how he veered one way and another in an attempt to lose me. I closed in on him, my tentacles braced to lash out?—
Some instinct or a thread of sorcery in the fish shifter’s brain must have told him there was no escape. Instead of racing onward, he jerked downward without warning—and speared his skull on a sharp spire of bone protruding from a half-crumbled skeleton on the sea floor.
I stared at his sagging body for a minute as his smoky essence flowed into the water, my chest tight. Then I returned to the shore empty-handed.
At least, if he had been a spy, he wouldn’t be reporting to anyone now. Small comforts.
I passed from the water into the thin shadows that draped the shoreline beneath the clouded sky, knowing I’d move faster that way once I was on dry land. All the same, my heart felt heavier than usual as I flitted across the terrain, feeling for impressions of any of my companions nearby.
I heard Quinn first—a gasp that echoed through me with a jolt of desire. I knew that sound so well. As I veered toward the spot it’d come from, the dragon shifter’s eager growl reached my ears next. I glided around a stretch of larger rocks toward a hollow shadowed by looming boulders and a few trees, and spotted the two of them entwined on a sheltered patch of sand.
I’d thought I was beyond jealousy when it came to Quinn and the beings I trusted my life with. But seeing Lance swipe his tongue along her jaw as he traced his claws over the bared skin around her waist woke up an emotion that wrenched at me.
In the back of my mind, I could hear him announcing his love for her in that brashly confident way he had. Completely certain of the depth of his emotions and what label he could put on them.
She’d said it back to him before… and she’d said it to me too. But I hadn’t been able to answer her with a similar declaration of my own. What did love mean to a shadowkind? How could I say that what I felt matched the devotion she’d shown me, as much as I adored her?
So maybe I didn’t really deserve her the way the others did. After all, what had I done to prove my worth as a partner beyond offering the same indulgences I’d once treasured?
But how could I change who I’d been for centuries in a way that would transform me into someone who’d truly earned my spot by her side?