Chapter Thirty-Eight Arion #3
“Fucking bullshit,” she spits. “No, no. It’s right there.
The chest is right there. And our cord… we’re supposed to be bonded!
” A guttural scream as she clutches my wound.
“I am not going to let you die. I’ll… I’ll get the heart.
You’ll take it. We can… we can fix this.
Stop this. We’re supposed to be together—”
“You have to save yourself,” I say roughly. “You still have a chance to make it out alive. Take the heart, Zephyra. Take it for yourself. Free yourself, kill these assholes, and be… just be happy, Zephyra.”
“Arion—”
“You can do this. You’re stronger than the rest of us. You’ve survived so much.”
A crystalline sea-salt tear slips down her cheek.
Between one breath and the next, moonlight ripples from her flesh, and her tail appears, scales glittering. I touch her cheek. “You’re beautiful, Zephyra.”
“This isn’t how it should have happened. We—we should have had a chance.”
“Do not weep, littlest mermaid,” the Death Lord says, stroking her hair. “Our dearest warlock has caused so much suffering. It is simply his turn to reap the torment he has sown.”
She whirls at that, her gaze flickering with unadulterated vengeance.
Her chest heaves with vicious breaths. She flexes her hands, and for a beat—one small beat—I think she’ll do it.
Grab the bronze chest. Steal the heart. But Zephyra has never been as bad as she believes.
The world tried to make her that way, it tried to harden her into a villain, but even it couldn’t mold her to its will; she has never been predictable.
She will never do the expected.
Tail whipping beneath her, she lunges.
Her nails snag in the Death Lord’s robes, and its surprise sends them both sprawling backward as she tackles it to the floor.
Her snarl is inhuman; even the cultists hesitate at the sound of it, and Vesper—weaponless—seizes a strand of pearls from the altar table before looping it around the nearest cultist’s throat and pulling, pulling, until it tears at her hands.
Slicing her flesh to ribbons. She does not let go.
Amaya seizes the opportunity too, snatching up a handful of smoking incense and stabbing it into the eye of another cultist’s mask.
Her scream rends the temple. “Kill it, Zephyra!”
I watch in awe, in reverence, as my mermaid tears at the Death Lord’s robes, prying off its mask, clawing and clawing and clawing.
“You are no different from any of them,” she seethes.
“You think magic makes you better? These phony fucking masks? Robes and darkness and ice? You are just a man. A lowly, pathetic, shell of a man.” She cries harder now, as though she plans to drown the world.
“You cannot kill us,” the Death Lord hisses. “We will devour you.”
She stares into its fathomless face, that hideous abyss, and doesn’t so much as flinch. Her voice hardens. “No, I don’t think you will.”
A preternatural gust—sweet as strawberries—blows through the temple. The ocean outside, beyond, grows louder. Roiling waves and tumultuous currents. Zephyra’s lip curls.
“Scream,” she breathes. “Scream for me, coward.”
A cataclysmic jet of seawater shoots from her hands, straight into the Death Lord’s face.
Into the Death Lord’s lungs. It shrieks, bucking beneath her with barbaric savagery, fighting and resisting that which it fears most. She doesn’t relent.
Zephyra’s grasp might as well be divine, and she floods its body with enough water to fill a ravine. It gurgles on salt. Chokes on brine.
“Scream.” Her voice rises, strengthens, until it seems to reverberate through the entire temple, and Mortem’s statue—it actually cracks.
Right down the middle. Right between his wings.
Even the cultists back away in fear now, abandoning their master to its fate.
The Death Lord does not—cannot—make a sound as Zephyra’s current hauls it into the air.
“I said scream.” The water crushes it against Vila’s tail, and the Death Lord no longer fights.
Its body has gone limp, jerking and twitching as it drowns before our very eyes. Before Vila’s.
“Holy shit,” Gavriall whispers.
Kneeling before the bronze chest, eyes widened in equal parts horror and awe, Vesper gazes up at Zephyra. “Shut up, Gavriall.”
For once, he listens, and when the Death Lord dies, it dies in silence, folding into itself until nothing remains but a robe and a mask.
Zephyra doesn’t hesitate to level her current at the other cultists, who vanish on a gust of frigid air.
Their robes clatter, frozen, to the temple floor.
With a harsh breath from Zephyra, the current ebbs, and she wipes trembling hands on her scales before glancing at me.
At Gavriall. At Amaya and Vesper and finally, at the chest in Vesper’s arms.
“Give me the box.” Zephyra’s voice hitches with those myriad emotions. “I’m not letting him die.”
Distantly, I realize she should be bleeding too. Dying. The thought is very far away, however, and fading fast. The bond must have broken. At least she’ll be safe.
“Zephyra,” Vesper says softly, and sadness fills her gaze.
“No.” Zephyra shakes her head vehemently, her tail flicking.
“I’m through with people dying because of me.
This is… this is all my fault. I can’t get out of my own fucking way.
First Jacin, and then Eos, and now… no.” She shakes her head again.
“Not Arion too. I’m using Mortem’s heart, and I’m putting an end to this. To all of this.”
“Unfortunately,” a sickeningly dark voice says. “I don’t think that’s your choice to make.”
Zephyra stills at that voice. The entire temple stills as an unfamiliar man prowls up the steps, his shadow leaching all color from the room until everything turns bronze.
I don’t look at him, however. I look only at Zephyra; she lurches backward, her face blanching. Her heart pounding so hard, it echoes through the room. Only one man could ever elicit this reaction, this terror, this horror, and—I want to beat the absolute fucking shit out of him.
The man smiles as if he knows before he rips the harpoon from my chest.