40. Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty
“ R un!” she screams at us, before returning her focus to the magic she is still wielding.
Sable stiffens his back. He doesn’t want to leave his sister alone, and I don’t want him to either.
“I’ll protect her,” Grim emerges from the crowd, his axe raised and ready for combat. A red haze dances across his green eyes as he gives Sable a curt nod of reassurance.
“I’ll protect her with my life,” he adds, and finally, Sable gives him a nod. He would trust his First Man with his life, and with his sister’s life also, it seems.
As Grim turns from us, Sable rises to his feet, the muscles in his bicep straining at the unexpected weight of my tail.
His grip around my tail tightens as he turns and runs through the path that the crew of the Noctis has formed for us, lifting me high enough so that my tail doesn’t scrape against the splintered wood.
Nightglass moves in front with his cutlass raised, ready to strike, but no one dares to attack us.
Not anymore.
The wooden platforms beneath us shudder with each step, barely audible over the beating of my heart.
Gunfire cracks behind us, close enough that I can smell the gunpowder in the air, each shot barely missing us.
Wood splitters all around, but Sable does not hesitate.
His eyebrows are drawn tight, and even when his arms begin to shake, he doesn’t slow down.
Finally, the harbor rises ahead through the fog. Dark water shifts underneath the docks, and at the sight, something in my chest lightens. A deep, instinctive pull settles there. It is so strong that it almost hurts when I draw in a breath, my lungs instead of my gills, air instead of water.
He slows his pace the moment we reach the pier, his chest rising and falling fast with his heavy breathing. Behind us, the pirates handle the remaining guards, only a few remaining. Corals and shells are glinting in the light in the distance. Cailia. I don’t even have to guess.
My gaze lifts past him, towards the left of the pier.
There she is.
The Noctis, all patched up with pieces of driftwood.
The sight of her makes my heart feel full, and I realize that despite everything that has happened, she feels like home. I tighten my grip on Sable, my fingers pressing slightly into his shoulders.
With his chest rising and falling beneath his torn shirt, he carefully lowers me onto the deck. His obsidian gaze searches mine as he brushes a strand of my knotted hair from my cheek, his touch warm and rough against my dry skin.
“Are you ready?” he whispers.
Truth is, I don’t know if I am. That tiny stretch of wood separates me from who I was and whom I have become, and somehow, it feels so final that it grates at me. What does this mean for us?
My hand rises before I can think about it too much, and I let my fingers thread through his dark hair until it is buried in it.
“Not yet,” I whisper.
His breath catches as I lean forward and brush my lips against his.
Sable deepens the kiss and lets his hand slide along my side before settling against the length of my tail, where it curves between us.
His fingers spread wide there, following the shape of my scales, touching me as though this is not something strange or foreign to him.
Warmth follows the path of his touch, rising through my body in waves, and when his grip tightens, the intensity steals the breath from my lungs. We draw apart after a short moment, breathing heavily. His forehead comes to rest against mine, and I inhale his breath as if it were my own.
“You know,” he whispers, “you never had to use your song on me. I was always yours. And I will always be.”
“But your shadow…” I whisper, the words barely forming. “Is it—”
The sharp lines of his face soften as he begins to smile, and that faint dimple at the corner of his mouth appears.
“Look,” he says gently, and flicks his gaze past me toward the wood at his back.
I follow the movement of his eyes.
His shadow stretches across the dock behind him, bound to his body in a way that it never has been. It always flickered with a life of its own. Now it is calm, following the movement of his rising and falling chest, exactly as it should.
My breath falters. How can this possibly be, is it—
“I don’t understand,” I whisper.
His hand lifts to cup my face, his thumb brushing away a tear I had not felt falling.
“When the hunters captured you…when you screamed,” he says quietly, “it came back to me. You used your siren song, love. It hurt like hell, but it reattached. And I have never felt more whole.”
I stare at the shadow behind him as I let the words settle. The meaning of it unfolds piece by piece, until I realize what this means for him — for us .
He is free.
He is whole .
I did not fail him.
He presses his lips to my forehead. “I’ll explain everything later, but now we have to leave.”
“Sable!”
Cailia appears at the edge of the pier, making his shoulders sag in relief, and so do mine.
I don’t think I could’ve lived with myself if she got hurt saving me.
Her dark cloak has been shredded by her own corals, but besides that, she appears unharmed.
Grim follows close behind her, slower, his posture uneven as he presses an arm against his blood-stained side.
When they reach us, she is breathing heavily, and blood begins to trickle down her nose. With the sleeve of her cloak, she quickly brushes it away, but by the way Sable tenses, I know that he saw it too.
“Cailia, are you okay?” he asks her, his body shifting as he seemingly fights the urge to get up and make sure of it himself.
His sister holds a hand up to stop him in his movement, right when Grim reaches her side.
“I’m okay, brother. Your first mate could use a little bit of stitching though, and a potion to heal him fully. Which brings me to...”
Her eyes shift from her brother toward me.
“Eryse.”
Cailia crouches down next to me, and despite the chaos, I notice that she actually used my real name. As soon as she’s turned away from Grim, her eyes darken, her expression suddenly serious.
“He will bleed out without the correct potion,” she whispers, only for me to hear. Her voice breaks toward the end, as if she were fighting tears.
My mouth opens, without anything coming out.
I glance over her shoulder, toward Grim, where the blood stain has turned into something much worse.
The shredded shirt reveals a large stretch of skin on the side of his stomach, where blood gushes out of a deep cut, dripping down his legs and onto the planks beneath him. So much blood.
Grim falters. Sable is at his side in no time, supporting him as he crumples to his knees, still fighting to stay upright. But the amount of blood he loses makes it impossible. With his arms underneath Grim’s, Sable helps him to lie down on the deck.
No.
Not Grim.
Not him, not here, not ever. He is the one who was always kind to me, who was the first to offer me a spot at the table. Most importantly, he is like a brother to Sable, whose face has now gone pale as he repeatedly tells him not to die, and that this is an order he better not refuse.
“What can I do?” I ask as I glance back to Cailia, who watches Grim with a deep frown line between her black eyes.
“Your scales,” she says as she turns back toward me. “I need a scale, only one, to make the potion—”
Before she finishes her sentence, I reach for the first scale I can find that looks loose, take a deep breath, and pluck it off, grimacing at the wet sound it makes.
Pain shoots through me, but it is a small price to pay for Grim’s life, so I swallow it down, push it from my mind.
All I want, all that counts, is for Grim to be okay.
“Here,” I hand it to her with a shaking hand. “Do you need more?”
Cailia’s eyes widen in shock as she stares at the scale for a brief moment, as though she hadn’t expected me to be so willing to part with it.
“Thank you,” she whispers, a tear slipping from the corner of her eye.
She takes the scale and curls her hand around it protectively, as if it were the most precious thing a person could touch.
More crew members arrive at the pier and gather around us, cursing under their breaths and asking how they can help.
Cailia orders Match to bring her saltwater, and Nightglass hurries onto the Noctis to gather more ingredients she needs for the potion.
When she has everything she needs, she gets to work.
With a stone, she grounds the scale into a fine, shimmering powder in a small wooden bowl, one of the many we have in the galley. Then she adds the salt water, seaweed, and—
She uses a knife to make a small cut in the palm of her hand, then presses her hand into a fist and lets the blood trickle into the bowl.
As she is doing so, her eyes roll back, the same way they did when she used her magic on the guards earlier.
I can feel it in the air, the magic, like a soft breeze against my scales, otherworldly and yet familiar, more familiar than when I felt it in her home when we first met.
Cailia whispers words in an ancient language that I don’t understand, the same phrase repeated over and over again, until she gasps for air, and her eyes roll forward again.
When the mixture in the bowl turns black and begins to glisten like obsidian, she sighs in relief, the tension almost fully leaving her body. She turns toward Grim, who is lying right next to her, and tears the fabric from around the wound, then lets the potion trickle onto his flesh.
“You know,” she says quietly without taking her eyes off Grim, “the sea was right after all.”
I frown, my gaze flicking to her face, searching for any elaboration in her face. “What do you mean?”
Her attention remains on Grim and on the wound that slowly stops bleeding. A gasp escapes my lips at the sight, and Cailia’s shoulders sag in relief.