Chapter 11
Maren
The bizarre green light grew bigger and brighter as it approached from the depth below the glass floor.
Tap, tap.
Tap, tap.
The sound against the glass grew stronger.
“Get out of the room, Maren,” Kye said in a frighteningly quiet voice that made the fine hairs on the back of my neck stand on alert.
“Your Majesty!” the guards from the great hall screamed.
That was the warning Kye had brought them here for. But their presence proved unnecessary as high blasts of water shot from every pool in the palace. All at once, the place filled with so much noise, it’d raise the dead from their slumber.
The glass beneath my feet groaned like a beast. A tremor traveled up my shins, growing so strong, it rattled my teeth.
“Run, Maren!” Kye shouted.
Too late.
A giant claw emerged from the green light below. It smashed against the glass. The floor exploded upward in a spray of crystalline shrapnel. It threw me sideways, my shoulder painfully slamming against a wall.
“Maren!” Kye’s voice thundered under the glass ceiling.
As powerful as his roar was, however, another explosion of glass drowned it.
“Kye!” I couldn’t hear my own voice in the crashing chaos of glass and roaring water.
I climbed to my hands and knees, crouching on what little was left of the floor in the room. In the middle of our bedroom was now a gaping hole with large chunks of glass sinking through it.
Tentacles reached out from the black water below. Tipped with hard claws, they cut through the glass like icebreakers.
“Shit,” I cursed under my breath.
Strong language often made me feel braver, tougher than I really was. I preferred being angry over scared. But it wasn’t working right now. Showered with water and glass shards, I crawled on all fours along the wall toward the exit.
“Your Majesty!” a guard screamed from the hall.
There wasn’t just a warning in his voice this time but pure, undiluted panic.
Through the glass between us, I saw creatures surfacing in the pools in the great hall.
Some were dark, the color of mud, like the tentacles of the monster that attacked me a few days ago.
Others had the skin of translucent white, veined with pulsing bioluminescent blood that illuminated the space around them with that eerie, green glow.
A tentacle whipped around the guard’s ankle, then yanked, flinging him hard against the floor. His dropped sword clung to the glass, sliding away.
“Uhrg!” the guard gurgled, rotating to face the monster that had trapped him, dragging him into the dark water.
The female guard ran to his aid, her sword raised over her head, but another tentacle lashed across her legs, knocking her off her feet.
A tentacle thicker than my thigh lashed toward my face. The displaced air raked across my cheek, and I screeched, my stomach roiling with terror and disgust. I scurried out of the bedroom, scrambled to my feet, then froze, unsure where to run.
Everything around me descended into chaos of crashing glass and churning water.
“Up to the west tower, Maren!” Kye yelled to me, running to the spot where the male guard had disappeared into the pool.
Tower? What tower? What direction was west?
I pivoted around, trying to orient myself in the darkness streaked by moonlight and green glow from the monsters.
The female guard drove her sword upward.
The blade sank into the pale flesh of the creature attacking her, and it shrieked.
It was an ear-splitting sound, like metal tearing under metal.
Fluorescent green ichor sprayed across her chest and arms. It sizzled where it touched, leaving long, steaming streaks across the hard scales of her breast armor and the exposed skin on her arms. She screamed in agony, splashing some water on the burns.
A long, hard claw snapped, reaching for her from the dark depths of the nearest pool.
“Watch out!” Kye lunged for the claw.
He grabbed its tentacle, immediately turning it to glass, then broke it into pieces by crashing it over his knee.
“Fucking scum,” he cursed.
“Enric...” the woman panted, visibly shaken.
She thrust her hand out, pointing at the sloshing water that had closed over the other guard’s head moments ago.
Kye nodded, then tipped his head at me. “Get her up the west tower. Now.”
The floor cracked under my left foot.
“Move!” the woman yelled, running toward me across the hall.
The glass beneath my feet gave way, and I threw myself toward the stable ground in the hallway beyond the bedroom. I hit the glass hard. The breath left me in a visible cloud as the air suddenly chilled around me.
The woman sprinted, leaping over the cracks and fissures in the floor.
There were too many monsters this time. Kye’s turning one to glass didn’t appear to make a dent in the swarm of undulating tentacles under the glass.
The water seemed to boil with their movements.
The whole palace now looked like a giant nest of glowing, slithering water snakes.
Only instead of snake heads, almost every tentacle was tipped with a hook-like claw, strong enough to break the glass.
One thick, black appendage rose above me. Its tip curled like a question mark above my head, and I stilled, afraid to move.
Unlike the rest of them, the bulging veins along this tentacle glowed blue. But that wasn’t the thing that made me freeze in place, staring at it in horror.
The entire length of the tentacle was peppered with eyes. White eyeballs with pitch-black irises blinked and squinted, focusing on me with the disturbing attention of gun barrels aimed to shoot.
“There you are.” The familiar voice rushed through my mind like a flood of icy water. “I’ve been searching for you.”
I gasped, unsure where the voice had come from. The black-blue tentacle curving over me had no mouth, yet the words came out clearly in my mind. This monster had been searching for me.
And now, it had found its target.
Chill emanated from the creature. I pressed my back to the glass wall behind me, shaking from cold and terror.
“Maren!” Kye dashed toward me.
Leaping over a wide crack in the floor, he landed in a slide that took him almost directly to my side. His foot aimed at the grotesque blue tentacle with eyeballs. But it twitched, shrinking away before Kye’s foot could touch it.
The bizarre, terrifying creature spasmed. Water exploded into a gigantic splash around it. At least a dozen snake-like appendages shot out of the depths, shielding the seeing tentacle from Kye’s touch.
Kye swept his arm across them all, like a musician playing a giant harp. With a ripple of shimmer, the wall of wet, undulating tentacles turned into a rigid fence of glass. It crashed down into the pool, breaking into chunks that sank into the restless water.
“Take her up to the tower, Seraphine,” Kye ordered the woman again. “Keep her safe.”
A tentacle slapped around his ankle. It turned to glass immediately, but another one was right behind it, trying to wrap itself over the glass cuff formed around his leg. Kye kicked his leg, breaking out of the glass manacle and incapacitating the second tentacle.
“Enric?” Seraphine asked Kye while grabbing me under my arm.
“I freed him.” Kye replied quickly, sweeping a hand toward a cluster of tentacles in the great hall.
A sword slashed through the thick knot of them, spraying the green acid over the glass. The male guard stood on his knees, with the monsters drawing close around him.
“To the tower!” Kye snapped at us, taking off to help Enric.
Seraphine dragged me to the narrow strip of glass along the wall—all that remained of the floor in our old bedroom. Kye’s bed was gone, sunk into the ocean through the gaping hole in the floor in the place where it had stood.
My bed had tipped sideways, wedged between the wall and a huge slab of glass. The guard grabbed a bedsheet from it and threw it over my shoulders.
“Cover up,” she clipped brusquely.
“It’s not what it looks like,” I said in a pathetic attempt at an excuse.
Why did I even bother? What did it matter what she or anyone else thought about me here?
Besides, what I said was a complete and utter lie. Me being naked in the king’s bedroom was exactly what it looked like. We had shared an intimate experience, Kye and I, even if we hadn’t touched each other.
“I don’t care what you do with the king or what he does with you.” Seraphine shrugged. “You’re shivering cold. Glass splinters are flying everywhere. Cover your skin. The king wants you safe.”
I drew the sheet around me tightly, tying its ends into a knot over my breasts.
Seraphine brought me to a spiral staircase in the west part of the palace.
“Up. Quickly,” she ordered.
Clutching the sheet around my hips so as not to trip over its edge, I climbed the narrow stairs.
The staircase lacked railings, spiraling inside the narrow glass tube of the tower that leaned slightly to one side.
I crumpled the sheet in one hand, while guiding myself with my other hand splayed on the wall.
A loud crash snapped my attention back to the great hall.
Through the several glass walls separating us from it now, I saw a tall contraption of glass tentacles explode into pieces as large as a crate. They slammed down, smashing and breaking the delicate bridges of glass that connected the pools in the great hall.
“Keep moving,” Seraphine urged, but I didn’t shift from my spot.
Both palms pressed to the glass, I peered into the chaos of lights and shadows, searching for the tall, lithe figure of the siren king.
“We need to go, human.” Seraphine sounded impatient and pretty pissed too, probably because she’d rather be down there, fighting the monsters with Enric than babysitting a petulant “human” like me.
“Wait,” I insisted. “Do you see them?”