Chapter Ten Arion
CHAPTER TEN
ARION
Before the Merrow Wars, shore-palaces were places of refuge and peace.
Crafted of mollusks and limestone and shells, enormous towers nestle on small islands and shallow coasts between the four kingdoms and four seas, where humankind used to craft treaties and trade goods from all over the world.
After the wars, however, they became abominations of wreckage.
Towers of shame and regret left to rot before a riotous, bloody sea.
Today, Mortia’s shore-palace is where I’ll kill a mermaid with my bare hands.
The second my boots touch the stone, I dump the demon onto the ground, place a hand on my chest, and heal my lungs and stomach from the inside out—evaporating every ounce of salt water and bile remaining.
She almost drowned me. I grind my teeth to keep from snarling, thankful my reservoir of magic managed to mostly replenish itself in the moments I lost consciousness.
I am going to slaughter her.
Zephyra clings to the earth, her turquoise tail wrapped around a jagged boulder as her bare chest heaves and pink hair sticks to her face, her neck, her spine.
Wild waves batter against the craggy island, showering her in violent explosions of seawater.
She doesn’t move, however, sticking to the boulder as her arms tremble.
“If… you… ever,” she begins in a hiss of fury, “pick me up… and fly me again, I will feed your eyeballs to a gull.”
I stalk forward, unable to hide the unbridled anger in my hard, heavy steps.
My wings dodge a vicious wave—keeping dry after I evaporated the moisture from each individual feather—before splaying wide and casting a great shadow over her.
She peers up at me, lifting her chin from the rock with a distant look in her vivid blue-green gaze. The remnants of panic.
I saw her expression just before I pulled her from the sea. It had been twisted with a terror unlike any I’ve seen since… since my youth.
“Birdman swallowed by gulls,” she murmurs against a ragged breath. “Beautiful irony, don’t you think?”
My wings bristle—the right wing nearly swats her, but she spins away at the last moment. Her back to the boulder, her nails biting painfully into the rock, she glares at me. “I know you can speak, birdman. You had no problem ordering me around earlier.”
I examine her with narrowed eyes. Her heart pounds loudly beneath her rib cage.
Scales—hundreds if not thousands—sparkle below her navel, the end of her tail lashing in the surf while water cascades over the rest of her scarred flesh.
A serpent slithered straight from the Fathoms to haunt me.
Her slender waist gives way to ample curves, but she doesn’t shy away from her exposed body, doesn’t pick at the scraps of the tunic now tangled around her scales.
Her hair covers most of her breasts, and she sets a delicate hand on her stomach as a dry heave overpowers her.
She’s vulnerable.
“Well?” she spits, dragging that same hand across a lush mouth.
My eyes flick back to hers.
“I am debating the best way to kill you.” Though I may not be puking like a graceless beast, my voice has turned rougher, deeper, from the last ten minutes of torture.
My throat still burns with the sea. It lends an ominous note to the threat.
“Maybe I’ll split you open at the spine.
Or impale your throat like the others. Or maybe I’ll choke the life from you slowly, just as you intended for me. ”
She lunges without warning, gnashing her teeth as if to bite my leg, but my wings react faster still.
They carry me just out of reach before dropping me on the other side of her.
A growl reverberates deep in my chest at her stupidity, her recklessness.
She doesn’t yet seem to understand her new circumstances—that she might be a monster, but I am so much worse.
Before she can lift her chin, I crouch behind her, clamping my fingers around her throat and wrenching her head back toward mine. Her eyes burn hotter at my proprietary hold, brighter, completely indignant instead of afraid.
“You should beg for mercy,” I murmur in her ear.
Because she held me like this, under the sea, as water flooded my lungs.
She wrapped her tail around me in a sick embrace.
It thumps against my side now, brutal as a hammer, but I don’t surrender, instead staring down at her with a threat of violence.
She doesn’t yet understand, but she will.
I saved her life. I rescued her from whatever just fucking attacked us, and I flew her here to safety. She belongs to me.
Instead, she just laughs, a melodious tinkling that carries itself on a cool breeze, and my jaw hardens.
“You think you’re the first man to threaten me?”
No. I don’t. “I think I hold your life in my hands right now.”
“Last I checked, the entire Kingdom of Mortia is after both of us. And you need me, remember? You just saved me. Again,” she spits, as if it’s an insult. “I doubt you’ll kill me now.”
I did need her. As she fell at the end of that rope, I needed salvation.
But that was before the fucking mermaid tried to drown me. Who knows when she’ll try again? When, not if. All Zephyra of the Syl has proved in the last two hours is her shifting, deceptive nature. And perhaps I’ve been foolish too—foolish to ever think a merrow could help me.
I release her so quickly, she has no choice but to fall forward, knocking into the boulder with a pathetic groan.
A phantom blade erupts from my fingertips then, razor-thin smoke, and presses to the delicate skin of her throat.
Struggling to keep my voice even, I say, “Tell me the location of Abysses—the exact location this time, or I’ll slit your throat here and now. ”
She scoffs, eyes glittering with malevolence, but wisely does not move. “As if you won’t kill me the instant I tell you.”
“A risk you’ll have to take.”
The phantom blade presses deeper for emphasis, drawing a thin red line of blood.
Now she does push up from the boulder on a sharp breath, her tail curling beneath her to keep her upright, as the blade grudgingly moves with her. Eyes narrowing, she touches the small scarlet mark.
Seconds pass as she stares at the blood on her finger—and then she laughs again. My teeth clench so hard, they might crack.
“You really are stupid,” she says.
I reach forward to grab her—to snap her neck and silence her for good, Mortem’s heart be damned—when my wings bristle.
They register the sting of pain before I do, curling around my body with strange fervor, as if to—as if to look at something.
My brow furrows at that stinging pain. At the trickle of warm liquid that follows.
Still staring at Zephyra, I lift a hand to it in a sickening mirror image, and my finger comes away with blood.
I stare at it.
She stares at me.
What. The. Fuck. Lip curling, I smear away the trickery—or rather, try to smear it away, but the cut on my throat remains. I can still feel it there, a dull burning, and when another drop of blood trickles from Zephyra’s, another trickles from mine as well.
My gaze snaps to her face, searching. Thinking. But—no. My jaw hardens. No matter what magic she might possess, I’m not letting this fucking mermaid get the best of me. “Do you really think a bit of blood is enough to hinder a warlock?”
“I think you might want to pay attention to why you’re bleeding.” She glances between our throats, our matching wounds. “If you kill me, you’ll only be damning yourself.”
“Liar.” Magic sizzles in my veins—a riot of lightning beneath my skin—and I release it with a short breath, slicing her once more, this time on her right hand. She seethes. And so do I.
Because my right hand—it bleeds in time with hers.
Fuck.
“Do you know what it means to save the life of a merrow?” She tilts her head, and damp waves cascade over her shoulders, over her breasts, down to the narrow of her waist, as her gaze burns with unbridled condescension. “Do you know what it means to steal from your beloved Mortem?”
I don’t respond. I can’t—because I don’t have a single fucking clue what she’s talking about, and not knowing… it’s unacceptable. It only makes me want to kill her more.
“Of course you don’t. Humankind destroyed most of the knowledge we shared with you.
” She waves a hand to the shore-palace. The tower is no more than a half-demolished limestone staircase now, and the open remnants of a broken building, like an eggshell cracked and stomped on.
But it has nothing to do with Zephyra or her people.
“Merrow are linked to the waves, the seas, the tides of the moon, the pull of water in every living being. Life. Our magic is linked to life. Saving a mermaid gifts you the magic running through their veins. Just a bit of it, and just until the debt is repaid—but it’s enough to link you.
To… to link us.” She inhales deeply, and any remaining humor vanishes as she frowns.
“You saved my life, Arion, and now…” She swallows hard, her hands curling upon the rock.
“Now I am in your debt. Your blood is my blood. We are as one until the debt is repaid and I save your life.”
Already my head is shaking. “Bullshit.” Because she’s lying. She has to be lying. “I’ve never read anything, never heard—”
“Rescued any merrow from sudden death lately? How about the rest of your brethren?” She hisses the word, then picks up a rock and hurls it at me. My wing bats it away easily before ruffling in indignation. “If you’d just let me save you from drowning, this wouldn’t still be happening—”
“If I’d left it up to you, we’d be sliding through a shark’s intestines right now. You were helpless, and useless, and you’re lucky I had enough magic to save us.”