Chapter Nine Zephyra
CHAPTER NINE
ZEPHYRA
Arion doesn’t die easily.
Annoyingly, he fights. Hard. The warlock’s hands clamp around my wrists, heated fingers digging into my skin as his wings try desperately—futilely—to beat and free him from my grasp. However, this isn’t the sky. This is the sea.
He has no power here.
I curl my tail around his broad waist to force him still.
He can’t move, no matter how hard he struggles.
“This is for knocking me out.” I slash my nails across his flesh, and the water reddens with the small spill of his blood.
“This is for locking me up.” I cut through his open black tunic, marring his right pectoral.
“And this is for delivering me to the noose.” Adrenaline pounds through my veins. It tastes like vengeance.
I hardly feel the water around us anymore, hardly feel the salt burning my skin and the cold caress of waves against my face. There is just me. Just Arion.
Just his death.
Years of suffering crash over me at once, and I take it all out on the stupid, arrogant warlock before me.
I own you now, Zephyra of the Syl.
No.
No one owns me. Not this man. Not the sorcerer. My life is mine. He cannot take it away from me. No one will ever take it away from me again. I throttle the warlock now, mindless with rage. “I belong to no one. I owe you nothing.”
He scrapes his own nails along my arms, still scrambling to kick me, to hurt me, to do anything that might buy him another minute on this earth.
His mouth opens on a furious growl—the sort that might set my hair on edge if I weren’t in complete control—but instead of exhaling his anger, he inhales sharply.
The sea begins to fill his lungs. And it burns.
It must burn. He must know he’s dying. I smile wide.
I want him to suffer.
“See you in the next life,” I whisper, before releasing him and letting those brutish wings drag him down, down, “but probably not even then.”
If I were able to do so without attracting unwanted attention, I’d use my magic and send him soaring through a whirlpool to the bottom of the Sel.
That delicious thrill of adrenaline reverberating through my veins begs me to twitch my finger, to pull on the connection merrow share with the goddess, and force him to sink faster.
But he is already drowning. Already gagging.
His wings are crooked now, bent and sagging.
The warlock is as good as dead, which means I need to run.
Or, rather, swim. A noose and a warlock are nothing compared with the High Sorcerer of the Four Seas.
My stomach roils at the thought of him, and an all-too-familiar panic sears up my spine as I glance behind me, checking for any flicker of his bronzed magic in the deep.
But the water is dark blue, the fish are small—sardines, not spies—and the light from the surface is so dim, it almost feels as though the Sel is entirely empty.
The sorcerer isn’t here. There’s a chance for me to swim away, to never be found—
A crimson streak catches my attention.
I look down. Blood drips from my chest and neck in familiar slender rivulets. I touch a finger to it and wince, confused. Because it’s—it’s my blood. It’s my blood staining the fucking waters.
My stomach plummets.
Panic tightens my throat, and I surge backward, away from it, but the crimson streak follows.
The strange cuts on my chest continue to bleed.
I stare down at them in desperation, my panic spiraling to pure, unadulterated terror.
How—why—goddess, how do I get away before he sends his armies after me?
He’s going to taste me. He’s going to know I’m here.
“I own you now, Zephyra of the Syl.” He looms before me, bronze eyes flashing hotter as he presses a hard finger to my lips.
His magic flares between us like a secret flame.
Bronze shackles click over my wrists. Fear roars in my ears as he presses closer still, his other hand roaming over my scales, up my waist. My palms continue to bleed from our bargain.
I’m not certain they’ll ever stop. “Your heart, your magic, and your soul belong to me. Now”—he licks his teeth before grinning a wicked smile and lifting my chin so his gaze snags mine—“kneel.”
Oh goddess, oh goddess, oh goddess.
I have to move. I have to swim. I have to—the thought dies as a wave of seawater explodes up and out of my throat.
Fuck.
My gut burns as I vomit ocean, unable to breathe.
Unable to think or even move as it forcefully expels from me.
Fuck fuck fuck. I scratch at my neck, my gills, spinning round and round in the rough current.
Searching for any obstructions or reasons as to why I, a mermaid, am drowning.
But—my tail whips back and forth in a near-delirious frenzy—there are none.
And I am. Bleeding. Drowning.
He’s going to find me.
I thrust my arms upward, desperate to burst through the surface, but my body is no longer functioning.
I’m no longer in control. I blink hard, my lungs aching from the continuous stream of salt searing through my esophagus.
No no no no—I begin to sink, unable to pull myself up as my body, my lungs, fill with water.
I open my mouth on a scream. Only bubbles pour out.
Just like—
Just like the warlock.
Lightning strikes in my mind then. A sickening crack as realization scorches through the fear, the pain. The warlock. I glance down, and sure enough—he still bleeds beneath me. Far beneath me, almost sinking out of sight now. He still drowns.
“Wake up!” Rough sand cuts into my feet, my ankles, as I hold Jacin to my chest. His lips are bloody.
His body is bloody. His green eyes are open, but unseeing.
“Wake up wake up wake up! Please. Please.” A sob wracks my frame, but I kiss those blue lips with every bit of magic remaining in me.
Again. Again. Jacin doesn’t wake up, however. And I can only weep harder.
“Merrow life debts do not work like that, my dear mermaid,” a strange merman says from the sea.
He watches me from the shallows, his bronze hair like flames atop the cerulean sea.
I’ve never seen him before, but right now I cannot care who he is or why he is here.
The merman tilts his head and adds, “One cannot give life once it has already been claimed. One can only save a life before. Of course, I could bring him back if you’d like—for a price. ”
The memory pummels me in a cruel, relentless assault, wrenching tears from my eyes as I remember the worst day of my life with near-perfect clarity. Merrow life debts. Bargains.
A sorcerer who broke every promise he ever made.
Shit.
I have no reason to believe that rotten bastard now. Except I’m drowning. I’m drowning, and so is the fucking warlock who just cut me free from my noose. He saved my life. He saved a merrow’s life seconds before Mortem could claim it. Which means—
If Arion dies, I die too.
My tail thrashes through the water with an exhausting amount of effort.
I chase after the warlock—after his sinking body and sagging wings—while salt water floods my mouth, burning my ears and nose as my heartbeat slows to a lethal rhythm.
Beat. I stretch out my hand. Beat. My fingers barely graze his.
Beat. I leverage my nails, wrapping them around his index finger before pulling myself closer, closer, even as I cut his skin and blood trickles between us.
And suddenly—both confirmation and damnation—my own index finger sizzles.
Sharp pain slices a thin line across the top. My blood spills the same as his.
Just as it did when I carved up his chest.
I wrap a hand around his and yank him upward.
Stupid warlock. If I can just get us out of here, if I can just tow us to the surface, I can undo this.
I can repay his life debt and kill him then.
But his wings are too heavy, his body is too muscular, and I am not exactly at my strongest right now.
My vision blackens one time too many today, and my heart rate slows further.
Fuck the consequences.
With my right hand wrapped firmly around Arion’s wrist, I use my left hand to bend the water.
Bend it, not move through it. Merrow are made up of a million particles of water—a million particles of the goddess herself.
And though time and war have eroded our seas and split our powers into four, I can still use what remains inside me of my home, of the Syl.
I am not a siren. I am not a fervor or opacus either.
I am an aecorian. I can manipulate the water to do my bidding.
My skin crackles with tantalizing electricity, and my bones submit to the magic building within. I swirl my wrist, and water ribbons tangle with my fingers as the Sel begins to churn.
I smile in spite of myself. In spite of, unfortunately, still dying.
Arion’s body crests toward the surface with newborn waves, dragging his massive, feathery wings behind him. If we make it out of this—and I can break the life debt—maybe I’ll strangle him with them.
Faster, I command the waters, faster.
My magic lifts him higher still, a platform of water pushing his body up, up, up. I follow quickly, my tail propelling me after him with brutal force. But before I can break us through the surface, before I can save us, kelp lashes out from somewhere below and ropes around my wrists.
Clams leap from the sandy depths and snap at my tail. A fin skims the surface, a mere mile away. Sharp, gray, nefarious—and headed straight for me.
My heart falls through my stomach. Darkness does more than claim my vision.
The sorcerer has found me.
Tears prick my eyes, and that hideous fear returns as the shark darts closer.
This cannot be happening. A faraway part of my mind refuses to accept it, the same part that agreed to the warlock’s wretched deal.
A mistake. Always the same mistake, and I—I was supposed to have more time.
I was supposed to get away, make a home for myself, be happy.
Just for once. Just for one year, one month, even one day.
I only ever wanted to be free. The kelp tightens like shackles, and I retch as it drags me deeper below.
I hope Arion and I drown first.
Death is preferable to what is coming for me now.
“Zephyra,” a strong, shuddering voice pulses through the Sel. “Zephyra, my dear, it is time to come home.” An icy phantom touch caresses my face, and I open my mouth on a silent scream.
His voice. His touch.
“I love you, Zephyra.”
No, no, no.
The shark plunges ahead. The clams nip and snap, and sharp pain slices me to my core with each bite. The kelp holds me prisoner. I can’t use my magic. I can’t focus. I can’t… I can’t…
Arion awakens with a roar, as sudden as a thunderstorm, and he shoots a hand downward—toward me—and latches on to my kelp-wrapped wrists. His wings don’t sag anymore; they have begun to undulate while his magic electrifies the current around us. With a rough tug, he hauls me upward, into his arms.
“Time to come home,” that menacing voice echoes through the waters.
But Arion either doesn’t hear it or he doesn’t care about the looming threat.
The greatest threat. He doesn’t care about the clams and kelp and shark either.
Something dangerous builds inside him, beats hard against my side.
His gaze flashes murder as he tears the kelp away, as he boils the clams from the inside out, incinerating them, shell and all.
It isn’t enough. The sorcerer is still coming. I can almost feel him now, stalking ever closer, gliding through the waters like a wraith. “Run fast, Zephyra,” he croons. “I so love a chase.”
Before I can do just that, before I can screw my head on straight and flee, a burst of terrible power unleashes from the warlock’s chest. He shoots us up on a jet stream of roiling water and sends us falling across the sky like shooting stars.
“You’re fucking welcome,” he growls as we careen toward a limestone ruin. I scream in his arms, fastening my hands around his neck, and he seems to take pleasure in driving us straight into the earth.