Chapter 38 #4
Nia chuckled mirthlessly. “He was never really a father to me.”
Zanta nodded, and Nia’s gaze fell to the iron chest. “I’m sorry,” she said again, and it felt like it was for something else. But Nia didn’t explain further. She stepped out of the doorway, and they silently made their way back up to the debris-strewn deck.
Rowan, the Demon, and their small contingent of Siren crew members stood at the center of the deck. Zanta set the chest at their feet.
“So this is what Shaw wanted from you?” Rowan asked, nudging it with his boot.
The eyepatch was back over his eye, but he flipped it up to squint at the chest as if that would help him see more clearly, then glanced at Nia.
It was incredibly eerie to see that green stone in his eye socket when Stroud had been so obsessed with not being able to “use it” for whatever it was he’d thought it was supposed to do.
“What’s in it?” Fox asked.
“I guess we’ll find out.” Zanta held out her hand for the key. Henri hesitated, and Zanta suddenly realized that he too had known all along that she was the killer of his father. After the chest was opened, she owed him an apology.
The key was just as Zanta remembered, from the size down to the angular brass teeth. It was strung on a cord along with a strange square of gray leather. Henri rubbed a thumb over the square, reluctant to let it go. Then pressed it into Zanta’s offered palm.
As soon as the warm brass hit her skin, Zanta knew it was the one. Her heartbeat stuttered, then began to race as she knelt beside the chest. Nia knelt beside her, breath coming shallow and quick, like she was on the verge of tears.
They would have a proper talk after this, Zanta promised silently.
Zanta held her breath as she pushed aside a bit of iron filigree and inserted the key into the keyhole beneath.
It slid in easily, and Nia’s breath hitched.
She was hyperaware of the other woman by her side.
In this pivotal moment, the moment she’d been working toward since she drove that piece of the Silverfin through Silver Stroud’s heart.
Since he’d killed Emilie. All she could do was hope it had all been worth it.
She hesitated for just a moment, her fingers warming the metal.
Zanta didn’t know if she was ready to find out what the chest contained. What had been so important that it had driven Stroud to madness? That it had cost Emilie her life? That Shaw would now hunt her across the seas for it?
“Zanta?” Nia’s voice was quiet, almost reverent. Zanta looked over at her. Her cheeks were pink, lips slightly parted in anticipation. But she wasn’t looking back at Zanta, her eyes were riveted to the chest.
The lock gave no resistance as Zanta turned the key. The mechanism within clicked.
She reached for the iron lid, but it didn’t budge when she tried to raise it.
“No,” she breathed. She pushed harder. Then pried. Maybe it was just stuck. Rusted shut after being at sea for years and years. There had to be a way to open it. This was the key. It had to be. This was…
A small piece of the filigree popped open beneath her fingers, revealing a second, smaller keyhole.
No. It couldn’t be. She’d prodded and pried every inch of this box before, and this piece had never moved. This was supposed to be over. She was supposed to move on.
Nia leapt to her feet, fumbling with her clothes, hands shaking. But whatever she was looking for wasn’t forthcoming, and she began frantically stripping her clothes off right there on deck.
“What the fuck…”
Nia’s blouse fluttered to the deck. She unlaced her stays and pulled down her skirt, revealing a thin silver chain around her waist. And from that chain hung a tiny silver key.
What on earth? How had Zanta not noticed that before? How…
Nia failed to unclasp the key from the chain with shaking hands, so she simply ripped it off. She fell back to her knees in only her underthings and slid the key into the secondary lock. There was no hesitation; she twisted it.
The lid clicked open just a crack.
They both reached for the lid at the same time, and the disused hinges squealed as they opened it together. Zanta’s heart beat out of her chest.
Folded within the confines of the chest was a sheaf of gray leather, lightly speckled. Zanta frowned in confusion. This couldn’t be it. Maybe Silver Stroud’s treasure was beneath…
Nia let out a sob, and reached out a trembling hand. Her fingertips touched the leather so gently as if she couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Zanta had the sense that she was witnessing something private. Sacred.
Before she could say anything, Nia snatched the sheaf of leather and the brass key with its square of matching leather attached. It came alive in her hands, rippling like silk as it unfolded. Then Nia was sprinting across the deck on bare feet. She reached the rail.
“Nia!”
Zanta’s shout didn’t slow her. She didn’t even look back. She leaped over the side of the ship, her elated laugh turning into a joyous bark as she spun in midair, wrapping the pelt around her naked body and transforming.
It was not Nia’s body that entered the water, but a sleek gray seal. It disappeared beneath the waves with barely a splash.
They all stood stunned for a moment, unable to comprehend what they’d just witnessed.
Then Zanta’s feet were moving. She, Henri, and Logan reached the rail just in time to see the seal leap out of the water, jewel-like droplets flicking from her tail fins. Her discarded underthings floating beside the hull.
All Zanta could do was stare open-mouthed as she disappeared from view.
That seal was Nia. And Nia was…Zanta couldn’t wrap her head around it. Didn’t have the words for it. Nia was…
She was gone.
“We have to go after her!” Henri shouted.
He looked ready to strip off his boots and jump in if they didn’t immediately agree.
Zanta felt the same urge rise up in her.
Nia would come back, wouldn’t she? Was she even in her right mind in that form?
Zanta’s mind felt full and empty at once, trying desperately to grasp the situation.
She stared at the spot Nia had disappeared, not even ripples remained to mark her passage.
“Rowan.” Henri whirled, searching out his captain. “We’re going after her. Right?”
“I—What is she?” Rowan seemed as stunned as the rest of them, but the Demon remained calm as ever. As if he’d been expecting this. He rested a hand on Rowan’s shoulder, and Rowan’s mouth snapped shut, some of the tension releasing from his shoulders.
“She is a Selkie, and of course we are going after her.” The Demon’s tone brooked no argument. His word, final.
Henri froze, blinking in surprise. Even Zanta knew the Deep Water Demon was not one for sentiment. Zanta had always wondered what a man like Rowan saw in him. The Demon was a man of violence, a man who never did anything unless it benefited him.
No one moved. The Demon tilted his head.
“Well?”
A stunned veil lifted from them all. The Kraken crew members rushed to prepare their ship to sail, but Zanta remained frozen. Her heart felt like it had replaced the pelt, locked in the iron box. She wanted to go after Nia more than anything, but the Monsoon, her beloved home, was too broken.
Rowan appeared at her side. “It will take too long if we have to tow the Monsoon,” he said, sympathetic lines marring his brow.
“I know.” But she couldn’t abandon it, not for anything. Not even hopelessness. Not even Nia. She couldn’t meet Rowan’s eye.
“You want to come with us to find her though.”
“I can’t leave the Monsoon to drift. I’ll never find it again.” Like she was adrift, caught between her life and the woman she cared for above all else.
Rowan grimaced, and she remembered that he’d left the Siren behind. For her.
“We’ll tow you to the next rock spire and secure the Monsoon. After that, you can come with us or…we’ll come back for you if we can.”
Zanta nodded, and Rowan squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. “We’ll find her.”
She shouldn’t rely on his kindness. She couldn’t trust whatever motive the Demon had for agreeing to this so readily. But she had no choice.
Her feet carried her back to the iron chest, the driving force behind the last five years of her life. Now empty. She had wanted Emilie’s death to mean something, even though in the back of her mind she always knew that whatever the chest contained, it wouldn’t be enough.
The chest was not empty. Zanta picked up a battered leather journal from where it sat alone at the bottom of the chest, and felt Henri lingering at her elbow. She thrust the journal at him, leather grain smooth against her fingertips.
“Here. It must’ve been your father’s.” The man she’d killed.
Henri didn’t reach for it. “Keep it. I don’t want to know.”
She tucked it close to her chest. “I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t matter. As long as we find Nia. Nothing else matters.” Someone called him from the Kraken, and he was gone.
Zanta looked down at the empty chest. Silver Stroud had always said it would bring his daughter back to him. But it had taken her away from Zanta, just as it had taken Emilie.
Zanta passed her hands over the worn leather, the cover’s corners curled up with brine, the silver clasp tarnished. It protested as she undid it, the spine creaking as she opened the journal of the man she’d murdered.