Prologue Aurelia #2
Sitting upon a glittering throne in the center of the garden—a throne painted with iridescent scales—he throws his head back with a riotous laugh, and his golden crown nearly topples from his golden hair until he throws a hand up to catch it.
The movement upsets the goblet in his other hand, but he only laughs louder as his wine spills across the floor.
His eyes glimmer with dark brown delight behind the blackened feathers of his raven mask.
The sycophants surrounding him follow suit, chortling and chuckling as the perfect little puppets they are.
Performing for their ghastly master. So caught up with being near the king, they don’t even notice me—not the Sel’s bone-white armor affixed to my breasts and hips, not the peach hair curling around my ears.
Not the sword in my hand dripping scarlet on their glistening marble floors.
Of course, they notice the screams.
Beside a bursting fountain of crystalline waters, a drunken courtier holding two goblets of berry wine stumbles into Argonia.
My sister doesn’t wait for an apology. She simply grips the man’s head between her hands and wrenches it from his neck.
Argonia’s biggest strength has always been her…
well, strength. Even if she weren’t a siren born of the Sel, she would be one of the deadliest weapons in the ocean.
In the world. And with the courtier’s head dangling from her fingers… it is a tad bit hard to miss.
Gore explodes around her in an instant, followed by the shrieks of panic and terror.
The human corpse thuds to the floor, and my sister turns, stabbing her nails through the cheek of a curvaceous woman, gouging white flesh with blackened nails.
Argonia kicks the woman in the chest as she pulls out her fingers.
Screaming, the woman careens backward into the fountain, cracking her skull on the stone and crumpling instantly.
Another dead as the water bleeds scarlet. My turn to laugh.
And I do—I laugh, and I curse that woman with the same breath, kicking out at another who streaks past in terror. Breaking her knee, still laughing as Argonia swoops down to break everything else.
They laughed when they murdered these merrow. They laughed when they painted themselves with my kin’s scales.
The king’s gaze locks on to mine through the sudden chaos. I lift the sword to my mouth and lick blood from the blade. His eyes narrow with unconcealed hatred. He shoves forward, shunting aside the sycophants who flee in all directions.
“Merrow,” he curses.
“Murderer,” I hiss.
Behind me, the screams rise, but my sisters do not sing.
My grip tightens on the stolen sword as Constane charges closer.
I do not sing either—not yet—because we want them to know, we want them to fear, just as the others did.
All those merrow above our heads. Before we take away their will, their lives, we want them to know they’ve lost. “You will pay for your crimes, Constane. You will suffer. My name is Aurelia of the Sel, and my sisters and I will finally bring you to your knees.”
“It’s King Constane.” He snatches a dagger from his back pocket, one as bejeweled as his trousers, and holds it in front of him in a weak show of defense. Too slow, too blundering from the wine. “And I don’t think you will, demon.”
He expects me to attack like my sisters, to duel him with this sword in my hand. Because of Argonia, he doesn’t yet realize that we do not need brute force or human weapons. We are sirens of the Sel, and our voices could demolish kingdoms.
The time has come for this kingdom. The time has come for this king.
So I open my mouth, and I sing.
My vocal cords coax out notes of death, horror, torment, and torture.
They climb higher with grief and loss and rage, the pain of such needless cruelty and evil.
I direct it all at the humans—the humans who laughed, who danced, who now flee and beg and weep on their knees for mercy.
They did not give the merrow mercy, however.
The woman across the garden still clutches brittle lavender hair between her fingers as she wrings them, pleading with Phylla to spare her.
I didn’t mean it. Please, please forgive me.
Phylla does not forgive. And I sing, and I sing, and I sing.
One by one, the humans begin to die.
My sisters join me now, our song throttling the glass ceiling.
Blood trickles down ears, from the corners of glossy lips, from eye sockets and nostrils onto opulent masks.
It smells like decay. Like vengeance. And I inhale deeply as I glare at the king before me, as I watch his jaw clench, his cheeks growing ruddy from the exertion of trying to remain in control.
Of trying not to succumb. My melody weaves faster, as haunting as the sound of crashing waves on a pitch-black night.
Others in the garden drop like rocks. My sisters sing them into plucking out their own eyes or ripping out their own teeth. The metallic scent of viscera thickens further, overpowering even the pansies and tulips. The lilies and anemones. It is not enough, however. None of this will ever be enough.
“Your family has made a legacy of slaughtering our people,” I sing darkly, stalking closer to the king, circling him as he falters and sways. I want to see the light leave his eyes. I want mine to be the last face he sees. “May the Fathoms fill your eternity with dread.”
King Constane finally collapses. Though he does not scream, his body quivers from the pressure building in his skull, and his hand begins to rise against his will. The dagger turns around in his palm. It faces his heart.
I lean closer, near-giddy with triumph.
“Goodbye, Constane.”
My voice carries, crooning louder and louder, as the dagger travels closer and closer to his flesh. And then—
And then Phylla’s song comes crashing to a halt.
In the midst of her melody, it just… stops, and my own song pitches off-key, my stomach plummeting as if I’ve missed a step.
Frowning, I glance to my left, but I don’t see her anymore.
Her blue hair has vanished amidst the crowd, and those nearest her have straightened with expressions of hysterical relief—bleeding and broken but no longer dying—as if they’ve been miraculously saved.
But that is impossible. There is no one here to save them.
No one can ignore a siren’s song. No one can defeat us.
Frown deepening—ignoring that sinking pit in my stomach—I whirl back to face the king, refocusing my gaze. Phylla is fine. She just ducked behind the fountain. My voice steadies once more, and Constane slices through the cotton swathing his broad chest. He slices through skin, drawing blood, and—
And Argonia’s song dies with a wet, gurgling scream. A scream so familiar, it could be my own.
No. My heart crashes through my feet, but I do not dare look away from King Constane again.
Not as he grins—he grins—and a single droplet of blood trickles from his mouth to his jaw.
Not as he wipes it away freely, my control over him slipping.
No, no, no. My chest tightens to the point of pain, and my mind screams the refusal, unable to comprehend what is happening because my sisters—
I stumble backward, horrified.
It can’t be true. It can’t be real.
They can’t be dead.
“Impossible,” I hiss, and even to my own ears, I sound half wild. Trapped.
When Constane laughs again in reply, I spin around to find Argonia in the crowd, to spot her red hair and ocean-blue eyes and the smirk that carves a dimple in her cheek, but she is—she is on the floor.
Why is she on the floor? Pressure burns behind my eyes as blood pours from her abdomen.
Her eyes gaze up, wide and unseeing, at the starless night.
“Impossible!” The word tears from my throat on a cry. I’m not singing any longer. My lungs feel as if they’re caving in, as if that hole in her abdomen is mine.
“No,” an unfamiliar male voice says calmly, carelessly. “Not for a warlock.”
He appears seconds before his weapon. White wings as tall and wide as the largest doorway splay behind him, tipped in molten gold, as his strange, ethereal gold-silver gaze fixes on mine.
He does not seem to have been controlled by our songs.
His hands are awash in red. The blood of my sisters. My heart shatters.
“Hello, Aurelia of the Sel. I am Warlock Arion Stone, and my voice is the last you shall ever hear.” He plunges a glass sword into my throat. “May your suffering be as great as your sisters’.”
One cut. That’s all it takes.
Sharp pain implodes through my bones, though I hardly feel it as I fall. I do not even care that I fall. All I see is the red on his hands. All I feel is sorrow.
My sisters my sisters my sisters.
The world darkens, and—the warlock is wrong.
The last voice I hear before I die is the king’s as he says, “String them up with the rest.”