Chapter Eleven
Tank
The ocean stretched out in every direction, endless and dark, and I couldn’t decide if I found it beautiful or terrifying.
Both, probably.
I leaned against the railing and let the salt air fill my lungs. I’d made the excuse of needing some air, and it wasn’t entirely a lie. The cabins below felt smaller every day, packed with too many people and too many problems, and my bear needed space the way other people needed water.
Nymeria was a beautiful place. I could admit that now, standing here with the wind pulling at my clothes and the sky painted in shades of grey and silver that I’d never seen back in the human world.
There was a wildness to this realm that called to something deep inside me.
Something older than the bear. Something that recognised this land as home even though I’d never set foot here before a few months ago.
I’d already realised that even when this was all over, we wouldn’t be leaving.
If we survived, that is. There would be too much to do.
Someone would need to make sure there wasn’t another tyrant waiting in the shadows to fill the void once Arik was gone.
Power vacuums attracted the worst kinds of people, and this realm had suffered enough.
Whole communities would need rebuilding.
The courts, or whatever came after them, would need protecting.
The Endless who were still out there, still enslaved, would need freeing.
That someone had to be us. I’d made my peace with that. I’d given up my sleuth to follow Alyssa, and I’d do it again without hesitation. Home wasn’t a place anymore. It was wherever she was. Wherever my pack was.
I looked down at my hands, resting on the worn wood of the railing. Slowly, deliberately, I let the shift come. My claws extended, thick and curved, gleaming dully in the overcast light. Then I pulled them back. Extended. Retracted. Smooth as breathing.
I’d never been this connected to the bear before.
The shift used to feel like opening a door, stepping through, becoming something else.
Now there was no door. No separation. Just me and the bear, sharing the same skin.
I could feel him constantly, a vast presence curled around the edges of my consciousness, watching the world through my eyes with ancient patience.
That’s because you kept me locked in the back of your mind, the bear rumbled.
I snorted. “And why did you always have to be such a dick about it? It’s not like I did it on purpose.”
I felt the bear shrug in the back of my consciousness. A strange sensation, like an itch between my shoulder blades. There’s nothing to do in the darkness apart from go insane.
Fair point. Not that I’d tell him that.
You just did.
I ignored him.
The atmosphere on the ship had changed since Rhidian’s funeral. Something had shifted in the people we’d rescued. I could hear the whispers even now, drifting up from the deck below where groups had gathered in clusters that hadn’t existed yesterday.
The freed Endless were fracturing. I couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
There were still those who wanted to leave. I understood that. They’d been enslaved, tortured, hollowed out and filled with someone else’s will. The desire to run as far from this fight as possible was not only understandable, it was probably the smartest option.
But there were fewer of them now.
Rhidian’s funeral had done something. The golden magic, the way the realm itself had seemed to mourn alongside Alyssa, the old ritual manifesting as if it had been waiting for someone worthy enough to call it forth.
It had shifted something in the people who’d witnessed it.
More of them were determined to stay. I’d overheard two men talking this morning, planning where they’d position themselves in a fight, discussing weapon preferences as if they’d already committed to whatever came next.
Yesterday, those same two men had been talking about which direction to run.
They were looking at Alyssa differently.
There was almost awe in their voices when they whispered about her.
The golden light. The way the magic had answered her call without her even trying.
I’d heard one woman telling another that she’d felt something during the ceremony.
A warmth in her chest. A flutter of power she’d thought was gone forever.
She’d been crying when she said it. Not from sadness, but from the shock of feeling something she’d been told would never come back.
But there was something else brewing too.
An animosity building in the background between those who wanted to fight and those who still wanted to flee.
I’d caught fragments of it on my way up to the deck.
A sharp comment about cowardice. A snapped retort about choosing to die for someone else’s war.
Two women staring each other down across the mess, one clutching a makeshift weapon, another clutching the railing like she was ready to jump overboard and swim.
Judgment from the determined. Anger that people weren’t willing to stand up for those still enslaved.
Accusations that anyone who left was as bad as Arik himself.
The ones who wanted to stay were starting to look at the ones who wanted to leave with something that went beyond disagreement.
It was contempt. And contempt was a short road to violence.
We needed to get to the Spring Court fast. It wouldn’t be long before the tension boiled over into actual fighting, and I didn’t much want to be stuck on a ship when that happened.
Nowhere to go. Nowhere to separate people.
Just a wooden box on the ocean full of traumatised people with opposing views on whether to run or fight.
I’d seen what happened when you trapped wounded animals together.
The bear had seen it too, and his instinct was straightforward: separate the threats before blood was spilled.
Especially with whatever beast that is in the water following us, the bear added casually.
My gaze snapped to the ocean.
At first, I saw nothing. Just waves and grey water and the endless stretch of horizon. Then my eyes caught it. A disturbance in the pattern. Subtle ripples moving against the current, cutting through the waves in a line that was too deliberate, too steady to be natural.
Something was moving beneath the surface. Something big.
Fuck.
I tracked the ripples, trying to gauge the size of whatever was down there.
The disturbance stretched at least thirty feet.
Maybe more. It was keeping pace with the ship easily, maintaining a consistent distance off the starboard side.
Not closing in. Not falling back. Just..
. following. Matching our speed with an effortlessness that suggested the ship’s pace was nowhere near its limits.
“How long?” I muttered to the bear.
Since dawn. Possibly before.
And he was only telling me now. Wonderful.
You didn’t ask.
I gripped the railing harder and watched the ripples.
The creature, whatever it was, seemed content to shadow us.
No aggressive movements. No attempts to close the distance.
But the fact that it was there at all, matching pace with a ship full of vulnerable people on open water, turned my stomach in ways I didn’t want to examine.
The bear, infuriatingly, seemed more curious than concerned.
Footsteps rang out on the deck behind me. I didn’t turn, but I recognised the gait. Steady, unhurried, the rolling walk of a man who’d spent more of his life on water than on land. Hadrian stepped up to the railing beside me.
“You see it then,” he said. Not a question.
“Hard to miss once you know where to look.” I kept my eyes on the water. “How long have you known something was shadowing us?”
Hadrian hummed, a low sound of acknowledgment as he watched the ripples with practiced caution.
His weathered hands gripped the railing, and I noticed he’d positioned himself so he could see both the water and the breadth of the deck.
An escape route. Instinct born from years of sailing these waters, knowing exactly what lived beneath them.
That kind of awareness didn’t come from nowhere. It came from experience. From loss.
“These waters were always filled with creatures of Nymeria,” he said after a moment. “Until recently. The waters have been quiet for a long time now. Still. Empty.” He paused, his jaw working like he was chewing on his next words. “Not sure if it’s a good sign that they’re back.”
“What is it?”
Hadrian laughed. A short, sharp sound with no real humour in it. “A reason not to go swimming.”
Then he walked away.
I stared after him, then back at the water.
The ripples continued their steady pace alongside the ship, unconcerned with whether or not I was watching.
As I stared, I caught the faintest suggestion of something beneath the surface.
A shadow, darker than the water around it, that seemed to go down a very long way.
The bear rumbled with something that might have been amusement. I like him.
“You would.”
I stayed at the railing for another minute, watching the thing in the water, before deciding I needed to tell the others.
The idea of going below deck with something that size lurking beneath us didn’t sit right.
Every instinct I had said to stay above the waterline, where I could see it coming, where I could fight if I needed to.
Not that I had any idea how you fought a sea creature from the deck of a ship.
My combat experience was entirely land-based, and the bear’s instinct when faced with deep water was to get out of it as fast as possible.
The bear laughed at me.