Chapter 9
It was the perfume that hit him first.
Thick.
Layered and complex.
A cocktail of pheromones so dense it stained the water with the bouquet of a Siren for a dozen meters in every direction.
Drawing it across his palate, Thalos' fins shivered as he drank it down. Luxuriating in her chemical signature as it filtered through his gills.
Tasting what Nyx had done.
Venom.
Fresh, humming just under her skin.
Kore's blood was saturated with it.
Ripe.
Teeth flashing, Thalos' smile grew wide. Predatory.
So predictable.
Suspended in the dark waters, Nyxarion exited the riptide with a flick of his tail. Entering the mid-ground with Kore crushed tight to his chest. One massive arm banded across her back. Tail churning slow circles through the current.
Gills fluttering, Kore panted against him. Fingers curled into dainty, pathetic little claws where she clutched at Nyxarion's shoulder. Those grotesque legs wrapped around his hips in a way Thalos couldn’t help but track.
And as he watched, greedy, drinking her in, she shuddered. Biolume rippling across her skin with enticing light as her hips rolled.
Thalos looked.
Shameless.
The snarl that erupted from Nyxarion's chest was heavy enough to push him back. Subsonic. A pressure wave that vibrated the current and landed in Thalos' ribs.
It was a threat. A claim.
Something furious and possessive.
But they were here.
Nyxarion had brought her to him.
Grin widening, flashing teeth, Thalos said, "Korrides," in a tone reserved for lesser members of his own court. As if he were in Caelith Mare, and not an interloper in the Black Sea.
"Asterion," the other returned, spines flaring as if to mock Thalos with the deadly points that had nearly ended him.
Unperturbed, Thalos flicked his tail. "I confess, I wasn't entirely certain you would accept my offer.
Pride can be such a… cumbersome thing, no?
" But his eyes dropped back to Kore. To the way her thighs clenched around Nyx's waist. Drinking in the color bleeding from gold to molten amber, tracking the way her sunset scales danced with enticing violet and indigo.
"But then," Thalos added, fins spreading to balance in the current, "she has quite the appetite for things she just cannot find in the Deep… "
Grip tightening, Nyxarion clutched his bride closer to his chest. Possessive instinct flaring to life. Poisoning the current with the stink of Abyssari venom already spilled.
Lips parting, Thalos sent the black waters over his gills. Tasting it. Savoring the flavor of a Siren flirting with a breeding heat, no matter the child already growing inside her womb.
A tiny, keening sound bubbled up from Kore's lips, then. And as he watched, mesmerized, the Siren writhed against Nyx's grip. Seeing every tiny instance of her chromatophores ripple across her scales.
Abyssari blues and indigos… right alongside Thalassari gold and red.
"There she is," Thalos murmured, voice a quiet, hushed little burr. "Our wretched little mutant."
Chest expanding, fins spread wide to display his spines, Nyxarion's gills flared wide and bright. Exposing the crimson flash of his filaments.
It was a warning.
Deadly.
Grinning, Thalos didn't react or posture.
He merely held his position. And said, "Tell me, Korrides," in a quiet croon, polar blue gaze lifting to meet those that were molten silver.
"Did it feel good?" he asked, tail sweeping through the current with a lazy flick.
"Trying to wash me out? Knowing that even as you bred her, I was already inside? "
The response, when it came, was exactly what Thalos expected.
It was an ancient thing, absent language. A flash of teeth bared in a rictus of aggression that said everything he couldn't. Pupils blown, fathomless, flat disks that swallowed the liquid silver, Nyx's scales lifted. Venting the heat of his fury.
But he didn't deny it.
Couldn't.
Thalos grinned.
Moving in a slow, deliberate circle, Thalos began to glide around them.
Testing.
Pressing at the boundaries the Abyssari king dared not breach. Not with the delicate creature twisting in his arms. Leaking slick.
He slipped through the current, orbiting the other male and his captive, gravid female. Forcing Nyx to spin in place, Thalos drifted closer without putting himself at risk of those spines.
Each one a translucent spike leaking a cloud of violet venom.
The scars marring his otherwise flawless skin ached with the memory. The memory of how hot Abyssari venom burned. The wet crunch when he'd been impaled, the ribbons of ichor staining the Black Sea with Asterion blood.
Still…
He circled closer.
Pressing Nyxarion, voice low, rippling with companionable, dulcet tones, he said, "It's the competition, isn't it?
" Fluke lifting, Thalos claimed another slow revolution.
Opalescent scales caught the Siren's sunset biolume and tossed it back in fractured prisms. "Ancient," he murmured, tracking Nyxarion's lethal dorsal spines.
"That primal urge to fight for breeding rights.
To flood her with enough of your seed to drown out my claim entirely.
" Thalos' radius tightened by another half-meter.
His words seduction as much as challenge.
"Every knot you set inside her, each and every time you hold her down and pump her full?
It isn't worship, Korrides. It's war. Against me. "
Jaw working, the tendons in Nyxarion's neck stood out as something shifted behind silver eyes.
Homicidal, enraged… acceptance.
A guttural sound rattled the tide, then. Subsonic. Something not heard, but felt. Issued from deep inside that barrel chest as Nyxarion's spines flicked once, twice more, then flattened.
Because he understood now.
That every savage, desperate coupling in the heretical reef he'd built to contain her wasn't devotion to a bride he meant to cherish… but another attempt to defeat his rival.
And it had felt divine.
It was written just there, in the hard set of Nyx's jaw. In the way his chest heaved, his grip growing tight where Kore was pinned to his chest. Drunk on his venom. Writhing. Tiny sounds peeping through her lips.
"Rewriting her, stroke by stroke?" Thalos murmured, rolling as he slid through the water. "Flooding her after I've touched what you claimed? There's no ecstasy in the ocean that compares," he drawled, daring to enter Nyxarion's kill radius. "Is there?"
Before Nyx could respond, Kore keened.
The toxin in her veins surging, she uttered a sound that spiked through Thalos' skull with more precision than even Cymareth might boast.
Siren song.
Scales blazing gold-to-violet in rolling waves, her fingers curled into flimsy little claws against Nyxarion's shoulders.
"Please," she gasped, gills flaring. Dainty fins spread. "Please, I need it… I can't… it hurts," she hissed, staggered and stuttering. Desperate.
And from below, deep in the bottom of the trench, Vorynthar pulsed. A deep, arterial throb of light radiated up from the dark. Blurred by the great distance, it was a golden hum of light that had no business existing in this once sterile sea.
The water grew thick with the scent of a Siren.
Slick.
Electric and bright.
Citrus and ozone.
But beneath it? Something sweeter. A thing that hooked into the hindbrain and pulled.
Going still, Thalos stopped circling.
Polar eyes wide as the pupils yawned and swallowed the glacial blue, Thalos looked. At her. Seeing not the marvel in the Deep, but Vorynthar’s living heart. And then, helplessly, the chromatophores along his spine fired in a cascade of silver and violent gold that he couldn't suppress.
Gaze dropping to Kore's belly, hidden under Nyxarion's burly forearm, he drank it in. The biolume pulsing in colors that belonged to both and neither.
Gold bleeding into violet.
Cyan fractured by silver.
A spectrum of living colors not seen since the Accord of Nisyros had been signed—perhaps not even before that. Because even before the Accord that was older than both of them, creating a Siren was not a thing done by two males at once.
And certainly not by two kings.
Nerissa's face surfaced behind Thalos' eyes.
Not the way she'd looked in life—a Virelii who defined elegance, her chromatophores always perfectly controlled in that maddening way of the ancients.
No.
Thalos was doomed to remember her the way she'd looked at the end.
Fins shredded.
Scales dull and cloudy. Milky and growing a mossy film.
Her body draped across his chest while the venom she'd poured into healing his wounds ate her alive from within, and her mouth moved against his ear with the last breath she'd ever draw.
Bring them back, Sovereign. Swear it.
He had. Pledging his life to Nerissa's final gift without hesitation. Not because he was dying.
Because he understood.
Because he'd tasted a Siren. Her power. The ungainly, delicate thing with her grotesque, alien legs and delicate fins. The Queen's Lightning humming in her veins. And his own Chromatic Camouflage.
Gifts from the Shallows and the Deep.
Both present in her strange physiology.
"You see it, don't you?" Thalos whispered, lit by the ambient glow from Vorynthar far below. "What we've done inside her. Together."
But Nyx wasn't looking at him.
The Sovereign King of Vorynthar was looking into the dark. As if he could see the cathedral of black coral from this great distance.
He couldn't.
But he didn't need to see the sweeping, fledgling arches and towers to see that the reef glowed in sunset colors. Patterns that mirrored the chromatic display rippling across Kore's dainty, pregnant belly.
Her colors.
Not his.
The heretical reef Nyxarion had built from his own blood now wore his bride's signature brighter than his own.
Watching Nyxarion process that, Thalos was still. Quiet.
And then Nyx nodded.
Once.
A single dip of his chin, the muscles along his jaw bunched tight as Nyxarion acknowledged Thalos' claim.