Chapter Thirty-Nine #2
“Aye, but that won’t get you very far if you’re seconds away from having your throat slit or your body dragged to the bottom of the sea, now, will it?”
“Morrigan feathers.” I drop the hammer, reaching for the barrel and map instead. “From the gold ravens—Brona, do any other ships use them? Any that would be out here now?”
Brona’s eyes go distant, tendons straining along the backs of her hands as she stumbles into the railing and holds fast.
“Brona.”
An unearthly howl tears across the rising waves, chased by peals of thunder.
It could be one of those ancient creatures. Or a fluke of the storm.
We both know it’s not.
“Saoirse,” she whispers, rain plastering her curls to her cheeks. “If we’re wrong, we’re risking everyone on board.”
I glance across the deck to Etain’s sailors, and the captain helming the wheel. To Aisling and Callen, staring at the sky with bewildered awe on their faces as the silvery clouds turn a dark, melancholy violet ahead. To my hand, and the opalescent mark that once tethered me to Faolan.
If we’re wrong…
“Think of the reward, never the risk?”
Brona glances one last time at the map, then swears under her breath and marches over to the bell nailed against the cabin wall. She strikes it with three hard clangs.
“Full speed ahead! Hoist the mainsails, secure anything that could roll—move!”
In seconds, the ship lurches forward and we plunge into the mist, at the mercy of the Teeth once more.
As the first mottled black-and-white masses reach up from the ocean’s maw, white fire splits the clouds, sending rain tumbling down in earnest. It should be terrifying—should make me shudder and clutch the nearest solid object with fear.
But it awakens something instead. Wild and ferocious.
I remember these waters. Remember what it was like to climb the Teeth, collect the gills, dive deep into the wreckage, and emerge as a wolf.
So instead of cowering, I reach for Maccus’s hammer and walk to the cabin Aisling emerged from, shoving it into a corner inside.
I grab Faolan’s green coat, thrusting my arms through the sleeves and thanking the stars I’d changed into trousers before.
That done, I close and latch the door, then return to Brona’s side as she shouts commands at the captain, standing on her toes like she’s seconds from taking the wheel.
Thunder tears across the sky as the waves swell higher, crashing between the Teeth.
That’s when I see it.
Another ship with red sails, rammed up against the base of a pocked monolith, its hull split in three different places.
The waters teem unnaturally below.
I wasn’t lying when I’d said I’d seen oilliphéist before, but it was always from a distance. A flash of blue-green scales so close to the water’s color, I might’ve missed them if it weren’t for the gold fins. But even those migrations far off the cliffside were nothing compared to this.
Oilliphéist slither over one another like a hundred snakes competing for the same rat.
Blood churns with sea-foam, clinging to the creatures’ sharp, arrow-like heads as they snap at anything that dares dangle too close.
There are screams—bodies sliding down the broken deck, grasping for anything before they drop one after another into the writhing, glimmering mass.
“Pull up! Steady—we don’t want to hit those rocks!”
I grab on to a rope as another flurry of rain strikes, kissing the waves that soar up on either side of the ship, rocking us violently. For a moment I lose sight of the beasts—and then the deck tilts again, putting us closer to the shipwreck and the flurry of movement on board.
There are strangers, most of them in plain clothes, and then—
There.
Aidan hovers over the railing near the top of the Teeth, reaching for a handhold as the wood cracks beneath his heel.
I hear Brona’s gasp as I spot Lorcan at the same time, sheltering against the mast, one arm wrapped around it as a bloody Tavin clings to the other side.
Nessa has a sword in her hand and a rope around her waist, slinging it at one of the fanged creatures attempting to scale the slanted deck.
Kiara fights another off with her blade.
But I don’t see Faolan.
I don’t see him.
It’s as if the world stops moving, darkness bleeding in at the edges.
My heart skips a beat. Two. Distantly, I hear someone screaming. Think someone says my name. But I’m searching the waters, the shipwreck, grasping the soul bargain mark on my hand and waiting to feel anything that might tell me where Faolan is.
Nothing happens.
“Dammit!” I take hold of a rope and hover at the railing, reaching furiously for a plan.
And as the sea serpents slap the water with their tails, a wild idea takes hold: one sparked by the story Faolan once told me, about Róisín and the way she tackled the great oilliphéist. How it cursed her as it slipped into the sea, dying, and how its descendants learned to hate the taste of her blood.
It’s an absurd idea. Impulsive and stupid.
Exactly the sort he’d love.
Stomach pitching, boots driving into the deck, I race for Callen where they huddle with Aisling as a sailor chides them both. Without warning, I grab for the chain around Callen’s throat and break it, clutching Róisín’s talon in my hand.
“What are you—”
Gripping the dagger from my belt, I slash into the skin of my palm just above the relic and pray my blood might still work.
That begging might be enough.
“Please work.”
The soul mark flickers once. And across the water, I see a flash of similar light as well.
It’s enough.
“Saoirse?” Aisling’s confusion turns to panic as I pull myself up onto the rail. “Wait—Saoirse, stop!”
Staring at that place the light flashed, I close my fingers tight around the talon.
Tilt my face into the wind.
And let myself fall.