Chapter 24
Chapter
Twenty-Four
Everything hurts.
The roaring in my ears keeps time with the pounding of my temple. The taste of blood lingers in my mouth. I try to swallow it down, but my throat is dry. I can’t lift my head. When I open my eyes, there’s only darkness.
The roar fades into steady whine.
There’s something hard and cold beneath me. My neck aches. My jaw feels bruised. My right eye throbs. For some reason, my hands are behind my back. I try to adjust, and agony scorches through my ribcage.
A voice cuts through the whine, but I can’t make out what it’s saying.
I try to form words, but there’s something in my mouth. I can’t talk around it.
Panic pulls me out of the haze of pain. Clarity comes sharp and sudden as the slice of a knife. I can’t move. I can’t talk.
Thrashing does absolutely nothing. I can barely feel my legs. I flash back to that moment in the water, when I didn’t have legs anymore. But I can still flex my ankles, my feet, even if I can’t seem to move my legs or really feel them.
It’s fucking freezing. I thrash again and a loud splash rings out.
Someone says something. I tense. Who the fuck is here with me?
Then I remember. The voice over the phone. Duncan. The walk across campus with the hard barrel of a gun pressed into my ribs. The parking lot. The crowbar. Pain.
It’s with total and complete humiliation that I realize I’ve been kidnapped.
Terror floods my veins. Instinctively, I struggle, then stop when I smash my head against something. My teeth crack down on my tongue, and the taste of blood fills my mouth.
There’s a boot to my ribs. “Knock it off.” That familiar voice again. I want to throw up as soon as I hear it. “You trying to capsize us?”
Capsize? Oh, no.
Oh no oh no oh no.
We’re in a boat. That’s what the whining sound is: an engine.
I don’t like this. The rag in my mouth stifles a whimper of panic. I try to move my hands and find that I can only curl my fingers. My wrists feel like they’ve fused together.
Somebody tied me up. Based on the total lack of feeling in my limbs, I’ve been tied up for a while.
I force myself to take several deep breaths. My eyes are open, but it’s totally dark, which means they probably put a bag over my head. That’s what kidnappers do, right?
I hang onto this thought, because there’s another one I’ve been avoiding: I’ve been brought here to die. I don’t know how much I’m worth to this person, but I know that merfolk are rare. If Duncan’s fur and bones would equate to a million dollars, then I’m—
I’m probably gonna for a lot of money on the black market. Most likely in pieces.
I need to get the fuck out of here right now.
I flail. To my captors, it probably looks like I’m wriggling like a worm. Trussed up as I am, there’s not much else I can do. Pain lances through my chest, but I ignore it. I have to.
“Fuck’s sake,” says the voice and then I get kicked again.
The pain is agonizing. It jars my ribs. I feel like I’m getting cracked open, like my insides are about to be ripped out.
Bile rises in my throat and I start to panic. If I vomit with a rag in my mouth, will I suffocate? That’s gotta be a horrible way to die.
“Quit moving.” Someone slams my ribs again.
I scream. The gag can’t muffle it entirely. Later, I’ll feel a sense of smug satisfaction at this. Can’t shut me up, motherfuckers. But in the moment, I’m already regretting the decision, because now there’s a boot in my spine, pressing hard enough to rearrange my vertebrae.
“Careful,” mutters a voice. “We need him in one piece.”
That’s not reassuring. A whimper builds in my throat. Tears stream down my face.
I’m so fucking cold.
I struggle to sense the world around me.
I know better than to try and use my magic right now when I can’t see and I don’t know what’s going on, but maybe I can sort of…
feel things out? I breathe shallowly and try to connect with the water below.
But I can’t find anything. For the first time, the inescapable pull of the ocean is gone.
The motor cuts out. I stop trying to perceive the weather with my magic. Stop trying to build up a whirlpool around us, which I’m sure isn’t successful, and wouldn’t help me anyway. If we capsized and I actually managed to turn, my hands would still be bound. I’d probably drown.
But at least I’d die with some dignity, I think, squirming again.
Rough hands catch me by my shoulders. Another set of hands grasp my ankles, and I am hoisted into the air, carried for a distance, then dumped unceremoniously on a hard, uneven surface.
There’s a strange rustling sound before the bag is ripped away.
“Oh shit,” says a guy in a ski mask. “You really fucked up his face.”
Now that I can see again, it becomes incredibly clear that my eye is swollen shut on the same side as my throbbing temple. Oh. I probably should’ve known.
A dim lantern provides just enough light to make out the figures in front of me. One is short and stocky, the other is taller, leaner. There’s something familiar about him, but his face is covered by a mask and I can’t place his voice.
“Don’t scream,” someone says. I think it’s the stocky one, who bends to tear the gag from my mouth in a hail of saliva and blood. He stares down at it in revulsion. “Fucking hell, this thing is disgusting.”
I cough. Pain rips through my ribs and I choke on a scream. Blood drips down my chin.
“Look at you,” says the taller one, arms crossed, condescending. “Not so pretty anymore, huh?”
Nausea boils in the pit of my stomach.
“That’s OK,” he continues. “We don’t need you to be pretty.”
I blink my good eye rapidly, trying to force my vision to adjust. I can barely make out the moonlight glinting off the sea. The full moon is tomorrow. Will Duncan think of me when he’s alone in his room, bored and frustrated? Or has he already forgotten I exist?
Wait a minute, I realize, heart sinking. If the full moon is tomorrow…
They were never planning on taking Duncan. Worse, they aren’t banking on him coming after me. If they were, they would’ve waited until he didn’t have opposable thumbs.
The sensation starts to return to my legs. The ground under me is rocky, cold, wet, smooth, like the floor of a cave. Am I in a cave?
I glance over my shoulder. Perhaps twenty or thirty feet behind us, at the end of a long tunnel, there’s a boat. It’s painted white, limned in moonlight, bobbing up and down in the tide.
“Here’s how this is gonna go,” the shorter one says.
“I’m gonna untie your legs. You’re gonna be real good and not run off.
If you run, you’re gonna slip, and you’re gonna fall into the water, and you’re gonna drown.
Doesn’t matter what kind of freaky fish powers you have.
You’re not getting your hands free, you’re not gonna be able to navigate and you’re gonna die.
You stick with us, we’re just gonna take a little blood, maybe some scales. Got it?”
I nod slowly. None of this makes sense. I can finally feel the ocean with my magic, and it’s not close by. Not enough that I could just slip and fall in.
“Good,” he says. Then he bends over, right above my ankles and I’m horribly tempted to kick him in the face. To break his nose the same way he broke mine.
But he’s right about one thing—I don’t have the use of my arms, and I don’t have an escape plan. I could maybe start the boat’s motor with my teeth, but I don’t think I could unmoor it without using my hands. I definitely couldn’t do it quickly.
And there’s still alcohol coursing through my system. I can feel it in my movements, separate from the shock and agony. I’m still fucking drunk, which means I’m not as coordinated, not as fast as I would normally be. I have even less chance of pulling this off than usual.
So I let him untie my feet. Hatred pumps through me with every beat of my heart. I want to put my fist through his skull, but my hands are behind my back.
“There’s one other thing,” he says, pulling the ropes free, looping them over his wrist like he isn’t done with them yet. “If you run, we have to make our money back somehow. You know who we’re gonna go after, right?”
The expression on my face must not be enough, because the taller one grabs me by the collar of my shirt, hauls me up and off my ass. “Say it,” he snarls. If there weren’t a mask in the way, he would’ve spit on my face, I’m sure of it.
“Duncan,” I mumble.
He holds a hand to his ear. “I didn’t catch that.”
There’s something incredibly familiar about his voice, but I can’t figure out where I’ve heard it before. On television? Around town? On campus?
“Duncan,” I say. My voice trembles. My mouth hurts so bad. Pain radiates from my jaw to my teeth to my tongue, red hot.
“Right. Duncan Stirling. So you’re gonna do everything I say, aren’t you?”
“Uh-huh.” I nod. The motion hurts my head, but I can’t seem to stop until he grips my chin with his gloved hand and holds me still.
“Good. I knew you could handle this.” Then he yanks me to my feet, gripping my bicep with bruising force while I stumble like a baby deer. I can’t find my footing and nearly face plant into a rocky wall, but the shorter guy grabs me and shoves me upright. My ribs scream at the motion.
“Don’t ruin the goods,” he snaps.
The goods are already ruined. My face is broken, probably in more than one place. If I survive this, I’m going to be lucky to be described as ruggedly handsome. But I don’t dare dispute him. I can’t take any more pain.
We walk for a long time. The short one has produced a lantern, and it guides us through a long, rocky passage. The moonlight fades to a pinprick in the distance. With every step, I feel more lost.
It’s hard to breathe. My lungs refuse to expand. But when I try to slow down, I’m fiercely jabbed in the chest, and that makes everything worse.
Dark spots invade my line of sight. I start to wonder about internal bleeding. Then I stop wondering. At this point, it would be a blessing. Better to die here and now than experience whatever is in store for me.