37 Imogen
Imogen
Halla stood in the doorway, inert, for what felt like an eternity.
My head spun as I watched her, the edges of my vision moving with undulating shadows.
My limbs were cold, but my grip on the severing draught was choking.
When she finally moved, her steps were staggering and slow.
The orb light made her skin go sallow. That ghastly bolt of red fabric that ran down her middle rippled like flowing blood.
But I knew, even in my fading state, that Halla had not come for me.
Her wide, water-blue gaze was fixed on Eusia’s pool. Its surface still rippled with an ever-steady dripping from the tubes above. Through bleary eyes, I looked up at them. The light caught on the drops, making them glint like falling garnets.
Blood.
On the other side of the pool, Halla lowered to her knees.
She perched right on the edge, but I was less than a body’s length away.
Halla lifted her hand and dragged the small knife she held across the end of her finger.
She trembled as she squeezed her blood into the pool, but not from fear.
Breathless anticipation pulled at her. Her mouth hung open in all-consuming awe.
Halla spoke quickly and quietly as the crimson drops fell. “An offering of thanks. An offering to let you know that I am here. I am eager to be in your presence.”
The moment unspooled; both of our gazes locked onto the pool’s gently rippling surface. Slowly, as if the whole world had receded to a crawl, the surface began to bend and fizz as bubbles rose through it. The orb light brightened. Something round and slick cut slowly through the water.
Eusia.
Her head was smooth and small, and it lifted out of the greenish water with wide-open eyes.
They were just like the eyes of the nekgya I’d summoned.
Perfectly round. Shimmering and unblinking.
And as white as a sheet of ice. The loose skin beneath them and the high bones of her cheeks were dusted in iridescent scales; gill-like slits ringed her throat like a necklace.
Despite myself, I stared too. There was something mesmerizing about her unnaturalness. Something lovely in her grotesqueness. I couldn’t pull my gaze away from the disturbing beauty of her, and I understood with sudden and painful clarity how she’d been able to invoke such awe.
For a long moment she fixed her attention on a stupefied Halla, and then, as if I’d called her name, she turned in the water to look at me.
Her gaze felt like gravity, pressing me down, reeling me in. Her voice was as rich and lovely as ever, and just like before, when she spoke, I heard it inside my own head, as well as through the damp air.
“There you are, dearest,” she crooned. “Look at you. Just like your pretty mother.” Her terrible head inclined gently, a soft smile pulling at her thin lips. “You should have joined me by now.”
The cold crackling through my body spread. She’d gathered so much power, so much reverence—even small and spell-ruined as she was, she seemed inexorable. There would be no stopping her unless I did it now.
It was a fight, but I brought the severing draught clamped between my numb fingers toward my lips once more. “Hello, Eusia,” I said in a frail voice.
Her attention shot to the vial in my hand.
I thought I saw a spark of worry in her strange eyes.
She smiled fully, revealing the same bluish, pointed teeth that Rohana had.
“You did not come all this way only to let yourself die, did you?” Her attention roved over me, noting the way I’d curled on my side, the pool of blood that had grown around me.
She clicked her tongue. “All that Gods’ blood. What a waste.”
Behind Eusia, Halla gave her head a horror-struck shake. Her face crumpled with crestfallen disbelief. She was so overwrought, I felt certain she’d not even noticed Aleka’s body in the corner, or my wing lying beside me.
Halla spoke in a desperate whisper. “Please. She never let me near you. Mother never let me…” Her words caught on her tears as she rushed to cut a piece of flesh from her arm.
The motion was so quick, I’d nearly missed it.
“But no longer. I swear to you… I will happily serve you. Never again will she keep me from you.”
Eusia only stared at me, her attention fixed, as if Halla had not spoken at all.
“Get into the pool, Imogen,” she said. “I know how badly you wish to live. The desire for it rages through you like a storm. If you take that draught, you will perish. If you wait any longer to join me, you will die.” She floated toward me, those white ropy veins—just like the ones that had been in the pool on Anthemoessa—helped raise her out of the water, high enough for me to see the very start of the dark gash down the middle of her torso.
“But I can keep you, darling,” she whispered. “I can sustain you.”
“I… I saw how you sustained my… mother.” My voice died in my throat. I’d begun to shake.
I locked gazes with Eusia and was stunned to see such a wealth of emotion upon her face.
Even with the wrinkling bags of flesh beneath her pearly eyes, even with the scales, and teeth, and shrunken body—somehow, her feeling made her look so human.
It was all so clear upon her: Distress. Terror. Want.
I understood. I knew it all so well.
As a girl, I’d done all that I could to survive.
Denying myself, lying, hiding. Clipping away the parts of myself that were not acceptable, keeping myself pleasant and unassuming.
I hadn’t let myself hope for anything more then, so as not to break my own heart.
I’d thought an upbringing like that would have made me impervious to it, but since I’d left Seraf, since I’d met Theodore, hope had snuck through me like water through a tight crack.
Even now, when I saw no way out, I felt it pool in me, felt it spread.
For once, I thought I must be feeling as Theodore did. As if it was not madness to want something desperately, despite not knowing how to make it mine.
My words were air. “I do want…” My vision warped for a moment. I pulled the vial closer, until it was just inches from my lips. “I do want… to live. But… not like you have. Not alone, and trapped, and… and empty.”
“Trapped, am I?” Eusia gave a chuckle that echoed through my head.
“I am everywhere. I am in your mind, in your blood. I have populated the sea with thousands of Sirens, and I am within them all. I am not alone, Imogen, not when supplicants across the continent and through the archipelago offer up their praise and blood to me.” She rose higher above the lip of the pool, unblinking round eyes boring into me.
Her voice dropped to a whisper. “I was empty once. I was without, but through you and with my sister—through magic—I have been filled. You are too new, too inexperienced to understand. You have yearned for power, darling Imogen, for a way to survive, for a way to beat back every threat. You want love and quiet.” Halla inched closer.
“I can give it to you. I can take you outside of the confines of your broken body. I offer you stillness, peace. I can give you the adoration and devotion of an entire people. You cannot know the vastness of it, the elation—”
“I do not want that sort of love.”
She flinched, rippling the water in the pool, then came back toward me.
The upper part of her body draped over the stones in front of me, water pouring from the opening in her chest. Behind Eusia, Halla crawled closer, staring at her saint with adoration.
She lifted a hand to her mouth and whispered fervently, but I could not make out her words.
Eusia’s attention was fixed fully on me. “You want the God-king—his blood,” she said, and her placid voice sounded suddenly tight. “If you get in the pool, you can have him. You can have the blood of every God left in the realm.”
Somehow, despite my pain and the awful cold, I managed to move myself farther away. My remaining wing draped over my body. My hips touched the wall, and my grip tightened further around the severing draught. Pain made me quaver. “Don’t want it… Not like that.”
Eusia’s taloned hands curled, and I knew that if we were not blood-bound, she would have reached for me. She would have slashed at my skin and ripped at my hair, but as it was, she could not hurt me. She was powerless to take what she so desperately wanted.
She gave an impotent growl. “Imogen. I can give you dominion over the whole sea.”
I knew torment as well as I knew myself, and it was carved into her. Her horrific face bent with it, her hollow chest curled in from it. I gave her a slow, conquering smile. “It’s already mine.”
I raised the severing draught toward my lips and paused. Above, muffled by the wood and the distance and the blood that screamed in my dulled ears, I could hear new thuds and shouts. But I could not make out the words, could not make out to whom the voices belonged.
Eusia’s head tipped up at the sounds, before her attention shot back to me. “Halla. Dear Halla.” Panic drenched her words. “Bring Imogen to the pool.”
Halla’s face looked strangely ashen. “Yes,” she whispered. “Yes.” But when she rose to come toward me, she swayed steeply, catching herself against the wall.
Eusia’s head cocked as she watched Halla. White eyes narrowed and her body went preternaturally still. She spoke in a vehement hiss. “Who taught you that death spell, girl?”
Halla froze, leaning fully against the wall. She sucked in a breath. “I didn’t…”
“Do not lie to me. I wrote that spell once. Hundreds of years ago.” Eusia surged from the pool, thick water running down her fused and scaled lower half. “I feel it in the air. Who taught you—”
Halla looked to me and lowered her chin.
“I did.” I tipped the severing draught into my mouth. I fought to swallow it down, gasping as it quickly clogged in my throat.
Eusia screamed. “Imogen, no.”
Shaking, I pushed myself up onto one hip. My head spun, vision flickering. “We are… different, Eusia. I have all the power you’ve ever… craved. But I will give it away… to keep… the realm safe… from you.”
Eusia whirled to Halla. “Halla. Bring her here.”
But Halla had fallen to her knees. Her robe spilled around her like melting flesh as the spell she’d performed—the death spell—finally came for its due. She arched; her hands flew to her eyes.
I kept my attention on Eusia. “Do you recall… Rohana’s prophecy?
” I coughed and sucked in a shallow breath.
“There is a bond… cut, cut, cut…” The words slurred, but I thought of the bonds I’d severed.
“Three cuts. My bond with Theo. Your bond with my mother.” I pulled in a painful, shallow breath. “And now… ours.”
To the side of the pool, Halla writhed and whimpered in a thready voice. The skin around her eyes was a bright, angry red, and still she dragged herself closer to me, as if she could stop what was already done.
I held Eusia’s gaze as she tried to get closer, arms scraping over the floor, mouth in an awful grimace. She was so small, so horrid, that I wanted to flinch at the sight of her raving and clambering toward me, but I didn’t move.
There was nothing more to fear.
I watched her fight as the draught sliced through me.
My eyes and lips felt sticky with the first purge of black blood.
Just like last time, the draught thickened and spread.
It forced its way to the spot in my stomach where our bond resided.
Peace flowed alongside the choking pain because I was certain it was working.
It was ripping the bond we shared apart at its seams, and if it didn’t remove her from my blood entirely… I would soon be gone.
A breath fell through my lips. My tensed muscles eased, easing me into the floor.
As Eusia mumbled a string of begging words, she gave a sudden jolt. Those thick white veins lifted her out of the water, then dropped her back in, as if flinching in discomfort. “Halla… who…” Eusia’s face contorted. “Whom did you curse?”
Halla huddled against the wall, her fingers wound into her hair at the scalp. I knew how it burned. “I cursed—” Her voice was still frayed from the spell. She coughed. “My mother.”
I watched the following moments in disjointed shock.
A deep howling cry rose up from Eusia’s hollow chest. Thudding, yelling from up above.
Eusia squirmed and splashed in the water as if she tried to grasp for some invisible tether.
Her sobs were horrific before she went suddenly rigid.
Then she went limp. Her face, too, pulled taut, then slackened.
Halla scrambled toward her, the word no spilling from her mouth again and again.
Just before she reached Eusia’s side, the orb light above us winked out.
Halla’s scream was a nightmarish echo in the dark.
In my chest, the severing draught spread further. There was a new emptiness in my stomach. Then came that familiar sensation of drowning—the burn, the panic.
A crash. Thuds from up above again. Shouts. Pain and muck in my throat.
“Imogen!”
My consciousness churned like black water. Theodore. I was grateful to hear his voice once more. A sweet memory playing through my mind.
I closed my eyes. Mingled with Halla’s cries, I heard splashing. More crashing and drumming and then there was a beam of light against my eyelids.
Like the sun, I thought, despite the way I shook with cold.
“Immy.”
He sounded so close. I forced my eyes open, but I could see hardly anything at all. The blurred shape of Halla cradling Eusia’s small, finned body. Debris rained down from above them.
Everything was fading, but I fought, I fought to look. The light in the pool chamber was growing inexplicably brighter, its rays reaching down into the darkness like a hand. With the last of my strength, I forced my gaze to it, up, up.
Even brimming with poison, on the brink of consciousness, I knew the shape of him.
He was just a shadow outlined by flickering torchlight, and his voice was naught but a pained rasp.
Sounds were going soft, but he spoke my name again.
How grateful I was, for even as the whole world slipped away, he’d manage to make me feel a spark of bright, eternal hope.