Chapter 40 The Cost #3
I’d thought losing Billy was the worst blow I would ever endure, but as Oscar crashed to his knees onto the ruined ship deck, I knew that such losses could not be measured or compared.
Inu. Brave, relentless, and stronger than most people would ever appreciate. I’d found her broken and tired, but the moment I offered her a position on my ship, she patched up her scars and became exactly what we needed.
There was no one who would ever fill the space she’d occupied.
“Someone take the helm!” I ordered because whatever happened next, Oscar was lost to this battle.
“Inu,” Rose whispered.
The shell pulsed. Sebastian Jr. clung tighter, as if bracing.
Sniffling and wiping at tears and salty sea, Rose brought it to her ear.
“It says—” Rose choked. “It says the binding is cracking. We’re close. We just— We have to break it all the way.”
“How?” I demanded. “Rose, how?”
I wanted to be done with this. I’d lost one of the best, and I was done losing people.
“Keep it listening,” she said, wiping at her eyes with an angry hand. “Keep hitting that scar. It has to choose between the song and the pain. The Atlanteans couldn’t keep both up. We can.”
“We’ll tear this bastard apart,” I growled.
“Bash,” she said softly. “The cost—”
“We’ll deal with the cost when it comes.” I lied. We were already drowning in it.
The Leviathan thrashed, tail slamming into the water hard enough to send waves higher than our masts. The Wraith rode them like a drunken gull, groaning.
“Reload!” Val shrieked. “Seas, damn you, faster!”
“Aft bilge is flooding!” someone screamed from below. “We’ve got children in the hold!”
Children.
Kit.
I spun, trying to spot him—and swore. The midships hatch was now a gushing fountain, water pouring up from below like the sea was taking the Wraith from the inside. The hatch cover had been torn loose, probably in the last wave.
Kit clung to the ladder just inside, half-submerged, eyes wild with terror. He hauled himself up and stumbled onto the deck just as another wave crashed over the bow and raced toward him like a living thing.
“Kit!” I shouted. “Move!”
He froze. Rabbit-still. Newgate had beaten into him the idea that running made you more of a target. Out here, stillness would kill him.
Val saw him too.
She abandoned the cannon she’d been re-priming and sprinted across the deck, boots slipping on the slick planks. The wave hit, driving her to her knees, but she didn’t stop. She kept low, pushing through the water.
The Leviathan’s head swung back toward us, drawn again to the shell’s song. Rose kept singing, voice raw, every word pulled from a place that had been cracked open by Inu’s death.
The glowing scar flared further. The creature climbed higher out of the water, drawn like a snake charmed by a flute.
Val reached Kit just as the deck tipped again. The boy’s feet went out from under him. He slid toward the broken rail at the bow—toward open air and the Leviathan’s rising maw below.
Without hesitation, Val threw herself forward, grabbing him around the middle and twisting so her body took the brunt as they slammed into the shattered rail. Wood bit into her back.
The Leviathan reared up, jaw opening directly in front of them.
“Val!” I shouted, heart, punching my ribs.
She looked back over her shoulder, eyes locking with mine across the chaos. There was no fear in them. Only decision.
“Get him out of here!” she roared.
With a grunt, she heaved Kit up and shoved him backward, hard enough that he tumbled into Emille’s arms as he slid by, both of them crashing into a tangle of ropes and barrels safely away from the rail.
The Leviathan lunged.
The move that would have swallowed Kit whole instead brought its scarred jaw within arm’s reach of Val.
She grinned up at it, feral and fearless.
“You picked the wrong ship,” she snarled.
In one fluid motion, she drew the long, wickedly barbed harpoon we kept lashed near the bow—a relic from another hunt, forged from dragon tree sap-hardened steel and tempered against a sea wraith’s bone.
She planted her feet against the ruined rail and, using the last tilt of the ship for momentum, drove the harpoon up with every ounce of strength in her body.
The point sank into the glowing scar.
For a heartbeat, nothing moved.
Then the world broke.
The Leviathan screamed. It was a sound beyond pain, beyond rage—a tearing, world-ending cry that made the sky itself seem to flinch. The glow along its body flared blindingly bright, then shattered—literally, the light breaking into shards that spun away like falling stars before winking out.
The shell in Rose’s hands cracked.
She gasped as a line split down its side, light pouring from the wound. Sebastian Jr. scrambled away with an indignant squeal, launching himself to the safety of Rose’s shoulder.
The song cut off mid-syllable.
The binding, the shell had called it. The thing Atlanteans had woven into the Leviathan’s flesh to chain it.
Val had just ripped it open.
The Leviathan convulsed. Blood—dark, thick, almost black—gushed from around the harpoon buried in its jaw. It thrashed, slamming into the Wraith. The impact sent us airborne for a breath before gravity reasserted itself. Men and women were thrown like ragdolls. The already-damaged hull screamed.
Val lost her footing.
“Val!” Rose and I shouted together.
She clung to the harpoon embedded in the Leviathan, but the creature’s violent motion tore the weapon—and her—away from the ship.
She fell with it.
For a heartbeat, I saw her suspended against the dark sky and darker sea, hair whipping, eyes wide but not afraid. She wrapped her arms tighter around the haft of the harpoon, refusing to let go even as she and the dying Leviathan plunged together into the churning water.
Then the waves swallowed them both.
“Val!” Kit’s scream sliced through me. He broke free of Emille’s grip and lunged toward the rail, but the ship pitched hard, sending him sprawling again.
The Leviathan rolled in the water, massive body bucking and twisting. The light along its scars guttered and went out. Slowly, impossibly, the great bulk began to sink.
We’d done it.
We’d killed it.
The cost hit me like a fist. Inu is gone in a single bite. Val dragged beneath the waves with her killing blow still buried in the beast. Koinu somewhere below, Morwenna bleeding from the nose, Oscar shaking at the helm, Kit keening like his heart had been ripped from his chest.
Val. Fuck, Val.
She’d been there with me since that first trip to the Glass Sea when we made our fortune and made a name for the Sea Wraith. She’d never wavered in her loyalty. In many ways, she was my greatest friend. Now she lay at the bottom of the sea.
Even in this grief that clenched my heart until I was sure I would die, I knew she’d finally found it. Something worth leading for, something worth dying for. She loved Kit, and it was that love that led her to choose herself over him.
Rose swayed in my arms, the cracked shell smoking faintly.
“It’s done,” she whispered. Her voice sounded wrong. Empty. “The shell says it’s… quiet now. The deep. It feels… quieter.”
“Is that good?” I asked roughly.
“I don’t know.” Tears tracked down her cheeks, carving clean lines through the salt and grime. “It feels like a grave.”
The Wraith groaned. Whatever temporary reprieve we’d earned, the sea still wanted our ship. Water surged from the midships hatch. The deck canted alarmingly to port.
“Pumps!” I shouted. “Patch what you can! Move!”
The crew sprang into action, running on habit and adrenaline and a desperate refusal to die now, not after all that. Emille dragged Kit bodily away from the rail, clamping him against his chest as the boy thrashed and sobbed.
“She’s gone!” Kit wailed. “She saved me! She—she—”
“I know,” Emille said hoarsely. “I know, lad. Breathe.”
Oscar stumbled down from the helm, eyes red, face hollow. He looked like a man who’d been emptied from the inside.
“Inu…” he rasped.
Rose stepped out of my arms and went to him, reaching for his hand.
“I’m so sorry,” she said.
He stared at her for a long, terrible moment. For a heartbeat, I thought he’d pull away, find someone to blame harder than the sea. But this was Oscar. He’d always known we sailed on borrowed time.
He reached for Rose and buried his face into her neck, shoulders shaking.
Below us, the sea swallowed the last visible trace of the Leviathan. The surface was smoothed, unnaturally calm after such violence.
The Wraith floated, wounded but stubbornly alive.
For now.
I looked around at what remained of my crew. Fewer faces than there had been an hour ago. Too many wide eyes, too many shaking hands. The ghosts of two of the bravest among us are already settling into the spaces they’d left behind.
I thought of the epigraph Dilly had read aloud before Rosamund jumped into yet another doomed plan.
Among sailors, it is said that the sea keeps the dead, but the living pay the tithe.
The sea had claimed its due.
Now we had to find a way to live with what it had left us.