Then I see her, the veiled oracle. She stares at me from the distance. I feel caught, so I freeze. But she lifts the veil over her face, uncovering those endless black eyes. She turns away, like she understands what I’m doing. Like she’s sending me along when the others were pulling me back. I face the forest again and step onto the path.
In the dark, there isn’t a path.
I trip and bang into the black tree trunks like a pinball. Each time we’ve come into the forest, Grumble has been careful to lead me west. So I go east. On the way here, the first time when Yara blindfolded us, I smelled the temperature shift, the dew in the air, and the sweet bioluminescent blooms. The water is a thin stream with glass lizards clinging to the rocks. Lights pop up like tiny eyes blinking. Wings flap, tongues hiss, and beaks caw in a chattering that would rival Times Square.
And then it stops, leaving my loud steps bumping in the dark. I see the mouth of a cave, and by the way my skin crawls, I know this is the Naga’s home. Fireflies hover above the entrance, and the purple moon is a fat bulb behind the silhouettes of branches that remind me of bones. My heart races as adrenaline rushes through me. The sweet stink of decaying flesh is too familiar, and I take a step back.
Rule number six: There is no going back.
I think about calling the beast out. Throwing some rocks in there like I’m Romeo and she’s a hairy Juliet. That plan still ends with someone getting stabbed.
I don’t hear the groan behind me until the Naga leaps at me and I run right into the cave.
Rule number seven: Don’t run into caves.
There is no exit that I can see. The creature is bigger than I remember. Its snout snarls hot breath.
Rule number eight: Don’t get bitten.
The B flat of the dragon-bird rings out from the cave ceiling. It swoops down and tries to peck at my hand.
“No one said anything about a tag team,” I say.
I’ve made a mistake in coming here. Maybe Isi was right. Maybe she wasn’t stalling. Maybe I’m just not ready.
I turn around to face the Naga and she moves back, crouched down to the ground. I see her eyes glowing in the dark. The rough reptilian skin. The powerful claws. The seaserpent tail undulating behind it. The Naga opens her mouth and roars, a great scream that carries the lives the beast has taken. The force pushes me against the wall. I roll to the side and pull myself up, shaking the headache away.
I jump on the boulders, using them as a ladder to get to a flat platform where the cave expands like a great dome. I can’t see the Naga, but I can hear the talons scratching the stone as she climbs. Nobody said she could do that.
I picture those talons digging inside me, swirling my guts around like a cherry in a cocktail. She jumps at me and I roll to the side, a move I learned from watching Dylan. It takes a lot of patience to wait for the perfect moment to get out of the way, knowing that if it’s too soon, she’ll have time to recover. If it’s too late, then she gets me. It feels like an out-of-body experience, but that’s what Karel taught me, wasn’t it? To push all of my doubts out of my head. Doubts gets me killed.
The Naga lands in the empty space I just occupied.
“Sorry, beastie—but I need your head.” I don’t sound as confident as I would’ve liked.
I jump on her back, grabbing the rough ridges of her neck like reins. I dig my knees into her furry flanks and raise my dagger over her head.
But the Naga lurches and throws me off, and I fall hard on my side. A hot, burning sensation hits my side where something feels broken. My dagger is gone. Panic shoots through me as the Naga breaks into a sprint. No matter how many walls I’ve climbed, how many pull-ups I’ve done, watching this thing run at me still freezes my joints. It’s massive, with a mouth open to swallow me. But it’s the thing that stands between the Sleeping Giants and me, so I push myself to move.
The Naga lands to my side, talons digging into the rock. I see something glint behind her. My dagger! I take a stone the size of a football and slam it into her face. She whimpers and covers her eyes. The dragon-bird swoops down as I run for my weapon. It draws blood from my forearm. I slide on the ground and take my dagger. The Naga shakes her head, a rumble stirring deep inside her belly. She’s pissed.
Know what? So am I.
I roll out my shoulders, the adrenaline dulling the pain in my ribs.
No beast is going to eat me. It’s just bones and flesh, same as every merrow I’ve gutted.
I find the spark inside me that needs this more than anything. The part that’s been burned and cut open. The bits that had never seen the face of real evil until I watched her take away the people I love.
I hold on to that spark.
The Naga sees the change. She gets up on her hind legs and scratches at the space between us, landing with heavy thuds. She makes the walls tremble. Pieces of the cave come down. The B flat of the dragon-bird echoes. It cries and cries as I charge at the Naga.
She runs at me.
My thighs burn as I run, run, run, and jump. I swipe, and the black stone of Triton’s dagger pulses with a dark light. The ancient symbols light up like they’re on fire.
I punch the Naga’s exposed long neck and she cries out. I hit her cheek with the hilt of my dagger and she slumps forward, dazed. When I hit her, I cringe. This is why I’m here. This is what I’ve been training for, but I can’t shake the feeling that hurting her is wrong. I shouldn’t do this. But if I don’t, I won’t get the clan’s help and then I’ll never see Layla again.
The Naga recovers, growling at me. Something is different. It’s her eyes. I see something so human in the swirl of her eyes, black and brown like melting stone. Something familiar.
The moment of hesitation is going to cost me. The Naga reaches out her claw. I move out of its reach and strike with my dagger, too late. I skim to the right. The blade digs into the flank of her skin until the resistance stops and I’m slicing through air.
At the same time, her talons dig into my chest.
Warm blood trickles from my wound. A numb prickle blooms around the cuts.
A scream.
A groan.
We fall into each other.
Prickly numbness spreads through me. My vision goes blurry.
Beneath the rapid pulse of my heart in my eardrums is the cry of the dragon-bird, like a child after its mother. I roll over and I see her. The Naga, eyes wide open. Mouth drawing in shaky breaths. But the beast’s face is changing. Fingers, slender human fingers touching the blackening skin around the cut beneath her ribs. She turns on her side, changing the way the river people do. She closes her eyes—the eyes, lips, face of a teenage girl.
Bloody and cut open and pressed against me so I can feel the cold sweat of her skin. She tries to lift her head but can’t, raven hair spilling on the ground.
Sharp pain snakes all over my body and gathers in my head.
When I close my eyes, she says, “Thank you.”
The numbness on my skin returns. My eyes, still blurry at the corners, focus on Kurt.
He wades out of the stormy Coney Island surf, holding tightly to the barrel of the Trident of the Skies. He has no need to look for human clothes or hide the scales around his waist. The beach is trashed. Sand covers every inch of the boardwalk—or what’s left of the boardwalk—in small dunes. Boards are sliced into wet splinters. There’s a crack from the Aquarium entrance to the shore, where waves collapse and trickle down. I did that to my own home.
I did that to get rid of as many merrows as I could.
Kurt grabs a handful of sand and runs it through his fingers. I wonder what he’s thinking, if he’s wishing he could press the Rewind button. Then he dusts his hands, pulls on the yellow disaster tape, and runs up the boardwalk.
The sky is overcast with fat storm clouds. He crosses the street, and I know where he’s going—back to Lucine.
He ducks under an archway down the narrow alley that leads to the Second Circle, the velvet-draped speakeasy operated by vampire Madame Mercury and a sideshow freak. The movement to his side is so fast that I can’t see the hands that grab him until it’s too late. Kurt is pinned to the red brick wall.
It’s Marty McKay, the shapeshifter, with Frederik the High Vampire of New York. They’re joined by Penny and the landlocked from the Sea Court, along with members of the Thorne Hill Alliance. The Alliance exists to bring peace among the supernatural creatures in the city. As they surround Kurt, I guess this means to hell with the Alliance.
“You shouldn’t have come back,” Marty says. I’ve never heard him sound so serious, but hours before, he was moments from death and I helped save him. So yeah, almost dying will do that to a guy.
“Are you planning on killing me, vampire?” Kurt says.
“Why are you here?” Frederik’s voice is steely, controlled.
“This isn’t a stake,” Kurt says, his violet eyes not wavering from Frederik’s black ones. “But it will certainly end you.”
You’re bluffing! I shout. Me, the ether, the friendly fucking ghost.
But they’ve all seen the power of our weapons and they give him room.
“Where’s Tristan?” Kurt says.
“Don’t you know?” Frederik answers, a tiny smile playing on his lips.
Kurt takes in the others, like he’s figuring out how best to take them on. But Kurt’s not a cold-blooded killer, and he’s going to want to avoid fighting them. “We’re still on the same side. The side that wants to destroy the sea witch.”
“Yeah,” Marty says, pacing uncomfortably and rubbing the spot on his chest where he was skewered hours ago. “Only you have to kill our friend on the way. Your kin, am I right?”
“The way of the seas has nothing to do with you,” Kurt says.
Frederik bares his fangs. “When your sea ways do this to our home, then you bet your sparkly ass that it concerns us.”
My ghost self is laughing.
“Then you’ve settled it,” Penny says, distraught. “You’re going to kill Tristan.”
Kurt looks at the group in front of him, then at the weapon in his hands. I can feel him trying to draw power from it and failing. But he doesn’t falter for too long or they’d notice.
“You say you love this land. You fight for it.” Kurt pauses. “Then gather your army because the sea witch wants to watch the world drown from her stolen throne. I will do everything I can to stop her.” Kurt walks past Frederik and says, “Do not stand in my way.”
Then Kurt barrels into the Second Circle, down the winding steps, along a green velvet corridor, and through a mahogany door. The golden tiles are wet, and Lucine, the split-tailed mermaid, is there. The eldest of the four remaining sea oracles. She swims happily in her golden pool because she’s been waiting for him.
Her red hair glistens, and her emerald eyes are beams looking up at him.
“My love. I knew you’d come back,” she says, taking his hands and pulling him closer to her. “Now we must hurry. We have much to do.”
I wake up with that painful numbness when your limbs fall asleep. Tiny clawed feet walk on my chest. It’s the lizard-bird. It opens its mouth and throws up on me.
“What the—”
It does it again, shutting me up with a caw. Then it walks over the mushy yellow vomit. The wound cools instantly.
“That’s disgusting.”
It yells at me and I remember—the Naga.
In her place is a girl about my age. She’s on her side, her arms limp and bloody. Dried blood is smeared around her wound, a black mark where my dagger cut her.
“She lied to me,” I say, searching for the memory of some hint, some mention that this would happen. That they sent me after a girl, not just a beast. “They all lied to me.”
I stare at the girl on the ground and things start coming together. The reason why Isi was stalling. I lift my dagger, dirty with the girl’s blood. My wound, on the other hand, has stopped bleeding.
The dragon-bird flies in front of my face, batting wings urgently. I guess we’re friends again.
“I got it,” I shout.
I pick up the girl in my arms. Her breath is shallow but consistent. Her copper skin is cold. Her eyes flutter, her lips part. I tell her to be quiet, save it. She’s going to be fine. Because I can’t be the one to kill her. I just can’t.
I hurry back the way I came, slowing down at the patch of gnarled trees. The sky is lightening under the white and purple moons. How long were we out of it? I shake from exhaustion before the path looks familiar again.
A tendril of smoke swirls above the trees where the fire pit roared and the villagers danced. Some are asleep on the ground. Others are still talking and drinking. They’re oblivious to where I’ve been and what I’ve done.
“Isi!” I shout her name.
They come out of the river, out of their tents. Whispers become a loud buzz of questions.
Who is that?
Who is the Land Prince holding?
No—it can’t be—
I’ve brought their wolf into the den.
Karel runs at me and Brendan tackles him. I make it to the dais, the bleeding Naga girl in my arms.
Brendan has Karel in a headlock. Dylan and Kai wrestle off two other guards who advance on me. Isi walks among her people. From the look in her eyes, she hasn’t been to sleep.
“Call them off!” I shout at her.
“What have you done?” Her face ages in seconds, like a thousand sorrows pulling at her life strings.
“Let’s get into that after you tell your warriors to stop.”
She lifts her hand, and with the wave of her fingertips, they stop fighting my friends. I shoot a warning glare at Brendan who begrudgingly lets go of Grumble. He falls on the ground and picks himself up, enraged and ready to take my cousin’s head off.
I match her stare. “You said a son of Triton had to break the curse of the Naga. You lied to me.”
“That is not so,” Isi says. “Everything we told you was true.”
“Oh sorry, was I supposed to fill in the blanks? The part where the Naga is a girl? I won’t kill her.”
Isi lifts her chin defiantly. “Even if we refuse to aid you?”
“I told you he was weak,” Karel growls.
I look at the shifty people. The scared faces of warriors. What is one girl, one beastie girl, compared to the lives of these people and the future of this tribe? Without their help, how will I awaken the Sleeping Giants?
I know what Kurt would do…
I know that is where we’re different.
“I will find another way,” I say.
“Very well.” Isi turns her back on me. The air shifts around us, rippling with water, and I know we are surrounded. “Take them.”
The River Clan warriors materialize around us. They wrap around Kai, disarming her and tying her arms behind her back. Brendan screams and tries to run to her, but Karel knocks my cousin on his back with one sucker punch. Dylan is buried under a fury of fists, but there are too many of them and I’m left holding a wounded girl.
I can make out Yara’s voice saying, “Mother, please.”
But the same warriors I’ve trained with now advance on me. They go for the Naga first, taking her away as an arm grabs my neck and squeezes. A fist pounds on my bruised ribs until the pain is too much and I’m pushed to my knees.
“These are the court’s great champions,” Karel says, spitting on the ground.
One by one, they tie us to the dais. My heart thumps in my ears. Everything feels still, muted, as if I’m underwater.
Isi takes my face and holds it in her hands. “You could have been happy here.”
She leaves a handful of warriors to guard us.
At first the villagers keep their distance. Then they come by with rotting fruit, and kids make it a game to see which hits on body parts will make us react. But we don’t react. Not even when the sky darkens and tiny bugs bite the sweet, rotting fruit off our flesh. Not even when I can hear a girl screaming from somewhere in the distance. Not even when Yara stands in front of me, unable to give me any comfort, to say she was sorry, that she didn’t want it to end this way.
And I think, who says it’s over?
“I’m going to strangle him,” Brendan says, keeping his eyes steady as a sniper’s gun on Karel. When the guards change shifts, Karel stays. He walks around the dais like a hawk.
“No one is strangling anyone,” I say.
“Really, Cousin,” Brendan says.
I test the leather ropes to see how strong they are, but there’s no getting out of them.
“They’re not going to let us go,” Dylan says. “Not until you slay the Naga. And even then, we don’t know how to get out.”
“Brendan,” Kai says, fidgeting with her hands behind her back, “be a darling and distract Karel. I believe he’s still angry that you, how do you say, hooked up with his blue-haired mate.”
“I’d love to,” Brendan says. The moment he tries to stand up, he falls forward. Karel is on him in an instant and so is his backup.
“Leave,” Karel tells them. “This one is mine.”
“Kai,” I whisper, “what are you doing?”
Brendan is shouting obscenities at Karel, and he’s eating it up.
“Quiet,” she says. But I see what she’s done. She’s gotten her hand free from her bindings.
“Thank Poseidon for your tiny girl hands.”
“Really, Tristan…” she says, but she digs into the pocket of her dress and pulls out a familiar knife the size of an index finger. I won it from Rachel the red-headed demigoddess. Kai widens her eyes and signals for me to come closer. She whispers, “I must cut off your hands.”
Vast and Brutal Sea Page 9