Chapter 19
He leaped from where he was hiding high above on the mizzenmast beam, a victorious grin on his face.
At his manipulation, the metal claws of the grappling hook he had used to swing across the gap between the two ships floated in the air.
He twitched his finger and it zipped away to secure itself on one of the End’s masts, ready to provide him a quick escape.
“Calinia’s constant meddling has become quite the annoyance, so if you just came quietly, that would be amazing.” His eyes glinted gold.
Remaining still, I mentally reached for the ocean's melody over the railing behind me and shot him a glare. “I can't believe you would hurt one of your own. Calinia is on your side, she just doesn’t want you to trample over people like me for your revenge!”
“She’ll live. She’s just knocked out,” he spat, throwing a glance through the gunsmoke towards where the crew, Ash, and Reiven fought off the pirates, and kept them away from Calinia’s downed body.
“Besides, I can’t have her fiddling with time to allow you to escape.
As much as I’d love to kill her and the Timebreaker, my priority right now is the Song of the Void, and if I have to drag you to Captain Tynedall’s ship to torture it out of you, by the Spirits—”
I interrupted him by hurling a stream of seawater right in his face.
He went frighteningly still. He didn’t even sputter or cough. Shaddan blinked the water out of his eyes and slowly, ever so slowly, drew his spear out of its sheath. “Did you really just splash me in the face, Siren?” He almost sounded impressed beneath the top layer of indignation.
Seeing him dripping wet was almost as satisfying as it had been the first time I splashed Reiven, although the aura of imminent danger was overpowering.
I desperately wanted to back away, but I pinned my feet in place and drew five more streams of water up out of the ocean.
They swirled in the surrounding air, snapping and lashing like wet whips, ready at my silent order to throw themselves at the Druinn general.
I assumed a fighting stance that probably looked far clumsier than Shaddan’s. “I’ll splash you again if you don’t leave now.”
“I almost think war was preferable to this,” Shaddan grumbled.
My torrents of water streaked towards him.
Little splashes wouldn’t be enough to get me away from him, but if I just threw enough power into the streams, maybe I could at least push him back far enough for me to retreat.
I summoned all my energy and urged the five streams of water into a single, devastating jettison.
Shaddan didn't dodge it. He planted his feet, and his spear whirled in the air before him, spinning in a circle so fast that when my surge of water hit it, it didn't even reach him.
The spear sent droplets scattering about until he merely had a light layer of mist coating his already glistening, dark skin.
The separated water returned to me in its original five streams, like snakes impatient to strike the death blow to my adversary.
Before I went for another attack, I studied him. The ease with which he flourished his spear around him was enough to send a spike of worry into my heart. But more than his plain strength and skill, the determination that burned in his eyes made him an insurmountable foe.
“Shaddan,” I said. “I am not your enemy.”
He cocked his head and pointed the blunt end of his spear at me. “I know you aren't, Siren.”
“Then we don't have to do this.”
“If only that were true.”
It was his turn to go on the offensive. Shaddan moved with the unfettered, devastating power of a hurricane. He leaped to the side to dodge another oncoming stream of water, and his spear shot towards me. It swung itself at my head like a club, going for a knockout blow rather than a deadly one.
I ducked under it and threw a jettison at his weapon to push it away. It came for me again, and this time it sliced through the air towards my midsection. I barely managed to gather the water in a protective wall in time to catch his weapon and slow it down enough for me to prance out of the way.
Shouts and gunshots still erupted from the ongoing battle on the other side of the deck. The pirate numbers seemed to dwindle, but Vaetrik could still cross over and join the fray if he desired. I shuddered at the thought and caught another of Shaddan's attacks with a freshly formed water barrier.
He was relentless, but so was I. For every one of his blows I blocked, I flung a jet of water he'd dodge cleanly.
He inched closer with each new attack. There was nowhere for me to run.
He kept me blocked off from the door that led belowdecks, and my only other option would be to flee into the throng of pirates between Rei and Ash and I.
“Zephra!” Reiven shouted over the din. There must have been enough of a break in the fight for him to notice I hadn't made it below.
Shaddan grimaced. “Time's up, Siren.” He extended his hand towards me and made a fist. Agony drove through my body, punishing me simply for remaining standing while his magic threatened to break the Druinnic collar off me.
It was over in a flash, right after I let out a scream.
The collar still burned on my throat. But whatever he did gave him more than enough time to strike the back of my head with the shaft of his spear.
My vision blurred. I couldn't keep my feet under me.
Shaddan raced up to me and caught me as I fell, throwing me over his shoulder as he whirled back to the End.
Reiven and Ash, and even Captain Larsel and Lyneca were shouting my name. It took my fogged mind a moment to realize Shaddan was about to swing us over to Vaetrik's ship, but my arms and legs were too weakened from the residual pain to fight against him.
“Wait…Please, Shaddan,” I moaned. All I got in answer was a rush of salty wind caressing my skin. Shaddan set me on my feet on the Ocean’s End’s main deck, right before Vaetrik himself, who sneered at me while I wobbled and shrank back against the Druinn general.
A gunshot rang out like a thunderclap. Shaddan raised his hand and stopped a bullet midair before it could penetrate his skull, raising an eyebrow across the water at Captain Larsel’s smoking pistol.
“Return her to us, you bloody pirates!” she bellowed.
Reiven and Ashkade were talking to each other so fast I couldn’t even try to read their lips, nor could I remotely hear them. Ash’s face was even paler than usual.
I halfway turned away from them, back to Vaetrik, but the next moment I was lying on the deck with an aching jaw.
White stars flitted across my vision at the impact of my head against the solid wood.
Getting up would only mean another blow, another humiliation, so I just lay still, digging my nails into the deck and curling up into a ball.
“That damn collar is still on her,” Vaetrik growled.
“I told you, you won’t have to worry about it for much longer…Don’t fucking shoot him again, Captain,” Shaddan replied.
The rest of Vaetrik’s pirate crew cocked their pistols and lifted their cutlasses at the source of the thud behind me, but Vaetrik raised his hand to stay their weapons. A triumphant smile spread across his face.
I lifted my head and my heart dropped like a stone in a pond.
Reiven released the rope he had used to alight on the ship railing, lazily pointing his sword at the pirates. He raised his free hand to his earring. “Do it, kid.”
I closed my eyes, but it couldn’t have been longer than a few seconds.
And when I opened them again—the sky was dark.
It had been just after sunrise a moment ago.
But now stars sparkled in the sky, taunting me with their gentle glow.
And as for the Maiden of Blue, she had disappeared.
There wasn’t even a glimpse of her creamy sails on the horizon.
Vaetrik and Shaddan caught on a moment faster than I did. “Fucking Timebreaker,” Shaddan muttered.
My breath caught in my throat as I stared up at Reiven, now alone on a ship full of pirates who would kill him without a thought.
The only thing keeping him alive was the lethal binding between us, and Vaetrik would only torture him until he figured out that Reiven couldn’t release it.
Rei wasn’t a fool. He had to know that. But his face was set with determination and the complete lack of fear that was so characteristic of him. It bordered on madness.
“Rei…no,” I whispered.
“Sorry, Blue,” he said softly, tossing his cutlass overboard to splash into the inky waves below. “You’re stuck with me.” He raised his hands in surrender as Vaetrik nodded for some of his men to seize Reiven and bind his arms.
“Please, please just bring him back,” I whispered, staring blankly through the iron bars that caged me in the hold.
Vaetrik had redecorated the space since he first kidnapped me six years ago.
It had been nothing but storage then, filled with barrels of rum and crates of supplies.
He had kept me chained to the wall for the entire trip across the sea to Arvensis, though now he didn't chain me in that way. I was simply stuck in a cage.
I hadn't moved from my spot huddled on the floor in the back corner of my cell closest to Reiven's beside me.
The manacles they used on him whenever they finally dragged him back dangled from the ceiling, breaking the crushing silence with metallic clinking.
I wasn't exactly sure what they were doing when they took him for hours every day, but the lantern flickering on a barrel outside my cell allowed me to see the blood drying on his clothes, the bruises on his face.
He was usually too exhausted and in pain to talk much before passing out.
Meanwhile, I sat here uselessly, frustrated at my inability to do anything to help him, and thoroughly confused at Vaetrik's new obsession with torturing him.