She grabbed my hand, and I flinched, expecting more pain and more fire. But I didn’t feel that. What I did feel was peace, comfort. It flowed through me like gentle rolling waves, and I shuddered as I leaned in toward her.
“He treated you like vermin,” she said softly, almost tenderly. “Give me your soul, and I vow to you that I will come back here for you. I am your mother, Arielle. I would never abandon you like he did. You must trust me.”
Trust. That one word was enough to make me have a violent reaction. I hissed and snatched my hand back.
The peace of moments ago vanished as I fully heard what she’d just said. I looked at the broken body of Bonny, the pirate I’d been chasing after for months, lying there, just a pathetic shell. But I’d known of Bonny’s legacy. She’d not become so feared for nothing. Her legend had been steeped in truths. She’d been bloodthirsty, absolutely ruthless, and cunning like a fox. Yet there she lay, nothing now, her legend unable to keep her from falling prey to the hands of something so lethal and dangerous that not even a siren like me or a shifter like Crowley could come against her.
I shook my head. “You think me a fool? All the lies you’ve spouted.” I chuckled darkly. “Even if you were my mother, I would never trust you.”
She hissed, and her snakes snapped at me, so close to my neck that I felt the wash of their breath tingle upon my flesh.
Then she grinned, and before I could even catch my bearings, Crowley was no longer dangling in the air, but she held him in front of her. She, a tiny insignificant-looking woman and he, a massive pedigree of man, but it was obvious who the more powerful of the two was.
Crowley was gritting his teeth, veins in his neck swollen and distended as he hacked and coughed, growling like a frenzied wolf as he tried to shake her off him. Her snakes were all pointed at him, staring him down. One word from their mistress, and they would attack.
“Give me your soul, Arielle, or he dies too.”
She couldn’t take it. For reasons that I couldn’t quite understand, I suddenly realized she couldn’t just steal my soul. Maybe it was part of her curse. I wasn’t sure. But she’d had no problem teaching Bonny how to steal souls. No, somehow it was just mine that she was unable to snatch without consent. I felt as if there were blanks here, as if I didn’t fully understand how she was doing what she was doing or even why. Already, I knew my father had lied to me. He’d told me the witch was nothing now, a mere shade, useless, pathetic. But he’d never told me that she’d swallowed time. He’d never said that.
So many lies. So many things I did not know. What was true and what wasn’t? I hadn’t a clue.
I placed my fist over my heart, feeling that darkness inside of me begin to stir once more.
Crowley laughed. His lips were swollen from the pressure she exerted on his windpipe, and I could see pink mixed in the spittle at the corners of his mouth. He was a shifter and harder to kill, but the witch wasn’t even breathing heavily.
“You’re a fool, witch, if you think Arielle would ever hand over her soul for me. You know nothing at all.”
“Ah, no, shifter,” the witch crooned as she dragged a black-tipped claw down the side of his cheek, her nail so sharp that a ribbon of blood was left in its wake. “It is you that is the fool. You believe my daughter heartless. A fish, you call her. Soulless. But she has a soul. She has a heart. Though I will eventually destroy it. She will give me her soul, or you will die.”
His laughter was full of incredulity. “Tell her, Arielle. Show her just how much you care. I dare you!” he taunted, eyes wide, veins throbbing.
He really did think I would hand him over to her. And sadly, he wasn’t totally wrong, because I wanted to. I really wanted to. I didn’t want to give her my soul and not just because it would hurt, but also because I understood the ramifications of what might be if I did.
My father’s kingdom would be in peril. My sisters… I shivered. That darkness in me, it was growing stronger, gaining ground. I felt its terrible hunger. But I felt something else in me too.
There was another soul in me, one that would stave off that darkness, at least for a little while. Because that soul had loved me enough to believe me good.
I looked at Crowley, and there must have been something in my eyes because he was no longer laughing. He was shaking his head.
“What are you—don’t be a godsdamned fool, Arielle! Don’t you fucking dare do this, fish! Don’t you dare.”
I clenched my jaw, tuning out his hateful, ugly words. The witch smirked.
“Such a weak thing you are, my daughter. Yet I have hope for our future.”
I flinched, hugging my arms to my waist. “If… if I do this— ”
“Don’t!” Crowley said again. “Don’t do this, Arielle! You know what will happen if you— ”
His words instantly ceased when the witch breathed upon his cheek. He gasped, as his skin began to turn a shade of gray and the veins to black.
“You killed him!” I cried.
She shook her head. “I did not. I will not. Though he does not deserve to live. If you honor your word, I will honor mine and prove to you that I am not faithless like the man you call your father.”
I clenched my jaw, watching as Crowley slowly turned to stone before me. His eyes were glued to mine, and from them welled tracks of blood. My nostrils flared, and I squeezed my eyes shut.
“If I give you my soul, I die?”
“No. You simply become… human but more.” She laughed. “You don’t even know who you are, do you, Arielle? But I’m sure you’ve sensed it, that power in you, untapped, unclaimed. So much power.” She wet her lips, eyes alight with avarice and lust for said power.
I shivered. “What will you do?”
“I will merge our forms. I will make it painless, daughter. For you. Because I love you.”
Hearing something so evil speak of love was the stuff of nightmares. “Do I have your word that you will not steal Hook’s soul from me?”
She shrugged. “I don’t want it. And he wouldn’t want to be bonded to me, anyway. He only came to Anne because of his great desire for you. But once he found you, he betrayed her. He’d do the same to me. Keep him if you must. Though I’d suggest consuming his light and being done with it. Just me, though.”
“Give me your word. Bind it in magick. You cannot steal him from me.”
She laughed, looking perplexed but intrigued. “Fine, you silly child, I bind it in the very darkest of magicks. May I shatter into oblivion if I take him from you.”
The air quickened with her vow, and I breathed a sigh of relief. “So mote it be,” we both said at once. To break her vow would mean the end of her.
I bit down on my front teeth, saying nothing, thinking nothing.
With one last breath, I whispered, “Then do it.”
A wail like the souls of the dead rising from below screamed through the heavens. The witch flew at me, and I had no time to brace for impact. One second, I was me, and the next, I was not.
I felt her in me, breathing, moving, taking, siphoning. I screamed. It wasn’t painless. It wasn’t easy. But I’d known she’d lied. I’d been expecting it.
I felt her glee, her greedy ephemeral hands stealing more and more of me, the last bits of my light. For a siren to be soulless was to become a monster true.
But I had Hook in me. And his little light, it shone like a beacon, keeping me sane, clearing my mind of the pain, the lies, the questions. I only thought one thing.
She had eternity in her form. And if she could steal from me, then I could steal from her.
I let her drink until she was bloated. I let her become satiated, drunk on my power. And just before she began to separate, I found that spark of time. It was a golden glittering rod settled snugly in her dark soul, a mere sliver of eternity, and just as she tore herself free of me, I snatched it free of her.
She screamed, eyes widening, grabbing at her breast and whirling just as I sank the sliver into Hook’s soul. His warmt
h encased eternity.
“What have you done? ” she cried, clawing at her face, bleeding herself so profusely that thick rivers of it ran from her flesh to the blue sands beneath. Sands that were growing softer, turning from solid into liquid. They began to rise and wave and roll.
“You can’t take him from me, and now, witch, you can’t control time, either.”
“I’ll kill you,” she snarled.
I grinned. “You kill me. You kill him. And thus, you kill yourself. So go ahead. Do it if you must. And this all ends here.”
She smiled, but madness burned in her bright eyes. “You think you’ve bested me, little girl, but you have no idea what I can do. Anne was a good little girl, she got me all that I needed. And now, time or no, none of you can stop me. No one!”
I shook my head, thinking of all the items she’d stolen. The slipper, but also the ones that Crowley had mentioned on the ship, and I finally saw the bigger picture. The witch had thought of everything, and I was so stupid it had never once occurred to me that someone as dark and wicked as her could play the long game. But play it she had.
“You won’t win,” I whispered, because that’s what I did. I denied the obvious. But this time, I meant it. This time I would stop at nothing to make sure she never got her happily ever after.
“Ahhh! ” She screamed so violently that whatever last bits of tensile strength had remained in what had once been sand became no more.
I sank into the waters, and my legs did not turn. She’d stolen the siren from me. I had no tail. I was human. But I had two men I had to save. Struggling to keep my head above the tempestuous waves, I very quickly shucked off my jacket, no longer even thinking about the witch. I rolled my sleeves, trapping them with air, creating a floatation device that I quickly tied off at the bottom so no air could escape. Then I swam.
I might no longer be a siren, but my body knew how to cut through the water. I struggled with my inability to breathe under the waves, but I was strong still, and I moved like a missile.
I found Hook first, sinking with his arms floating above him. I rushed us to the surface and wrapped the makeshift float around his waist.
Then I went for Crowley.
He was a massive weight of dense muscle and stone. He’d landed on the bottom. Thank the gods, the bottom was only ten feet down. I wrapped my arms around his waist, kicked off the sand with all my might, and rocketed to the surface. When my head parted the waters, I gasped for air, my chest heaving. I looked around, praying, hoping, and wishing for an island—anything that I could swim us toward.
Crowley was heavy, even in the water. His body was nearly all stone. The witch was gone, which surprised me. I’d expected her to kill us. But clearly, she wasn’t done with me yet. That, or she simply no longer cared one way or another whether we lived or died, and it was looking very likely that any of us would make it out of Nowhere alive.
So I switched course, and I swam for Hook, backstroking with Crowley’s massive weight resting on my chest. The waters had finally stopped rocking so violently and were nearly smooth by the time I reached Hook’s lifeless bobbing body.
I was gasping when I finally got to him, my muscles so tired that it was a struggle just to remain afloat.
I tried to access the sliver of time in Hook’s soul, but his soul would not release it to me as the witch’s had so easily done. I’d hoped to turn back time, that maybe by some miracle I could have taken us to the point before we’d ever even left Grimm.
“Bloody hells!” I snapped. “Can nothing be easy?”
Then I thought of Crowley’s time card and frantically reached my hand into his coat pocket. If that was still there, then we might still be saved. But just as I’d feared, the card was gone, no doubt sucked into the raging waters when he’d been dragged into it.
“Argh !” I screamed, releasing all the pent-up fear, anger, and worry that felt as though it was choking me. Once I’d exhausted myself even further, I knew I could not afford to do that. I was the only one who could save us, which meant I had to find focus, had to not give in to the panic and fecking think.
Above me, the sky grew thick and angry with storm clouds. Lightning streaked the darkness and rain dumped down in buckets from the heavens. The birds were all gone. Hatter’s vision had come to life.
I shook my head. I was a siren stripped of her powers. I’d consumed the soul of one male and was now struggling to keep the stony frame of another from sinking into the sands below.
I shook my head again, this was probably the lowest I’d ever been in my life.
“Crowley, if you can hear me, please, please say something. Please just say something.”
The sky was furious, rumbling and flashing, as though an angry god were tearing it in two.
There was a soft coughing grunt. I gasped and glanced down at him, my heart hammering in my chest. How could he still be alive? His eyes shifted, and he looked at me.
A gentle smile touched my mouth. “I will save us. Okay. I will. I won’t let you die.”
He coughed weakly, and I knew I’d just lied to him. Because I was almost one hundred percent certain that none of us were getting out of here.
But I hugged my arms to his body and continued to lie to him, whispering to him softly until he no longer looked at me, until he’d even stopped breathing. I didn’t know if he’d died or if he’d merely turned to stone. But he was not flesh and blood anymore. And I don’t know how long we’d been floating, but my skin was wrinkled and itching.
It would be so easy to close my eyes. I was so tired, and the sky still screamed at me.
I thought of everything that had happened to get us here: chasing nothing but red herrings and imagining the big bad was Anne Bonny, when in truth, the big bad had been playing an infinite game of chess. I still didn’t even really know why or when or how. But floating on that endless sea with no land in sight and no hope of salvation on the horizon, I also knew it didn’t matter.
I wouldn’t be there to save Whiskers. Hatter would never find me. No one would. I’d sentenced him to the same kind of fate that…
I went still all over. Thinking of Hatter made me suddenly think of something else.
All of Hatter’s visions were true. All of them.
I’d seen myself standing over a doorway in the water.
A burst of energy I’d never known suddenly rushed through me as I jerked, looking left and right, listening for the roar of the falls, knowing it had to be here somewhere. It had to be. His visions were always right. Salvation was just around the corner.
But where was the music and the voices? This vision only felt half realized right now.
Then I thought of something so outlandish, so ridiculous that I would never have even bothered believing in it except that I literally had nothing else to believe in.
She’d called me her daughter, told me of the darkness within me, the flame of the witch that breathed in me, just as it did in her.
She’d left this place—with magick.
I hissed. Could I do that too?
I closed my eyes. I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn’t a witch. I’d never been trained to be one. But I’d been around enough of them, and always, they’d say, “It’s all in the fire. You find the fire, you find the source.”
I floated, and I thought of that fire, pictured it in my mind’s eye, falling into a hypnotic trance, thinking of its burn, its mystic draw, remembering Hatter’s burn, picturing it so completely in my mind.
But seconds ticked by, then minutes, and finally hours—and nothing. No fire. No burn.
With a cry, I slapped at the water. I was so tired. So damned tired. I looked at Crowley and at Hook. They were gone to me. I was alone. It might all be for nothing.
Then I felt the slinking of dark fingers spread through me, and I trembled.
The witch was an ancient evil. She wasn’t merely a black witch. She was a dark mage. Did that mean that maybe that darkness within me… that maybe, just maybe that wa
s my source?
But if I tapped into that, what would it do to me? Who would I become?
I looked at both men and squeezed my eyes shut. “Gods forgive me.”
And one last time, I cleared my thoughts, and this time I didn’t go looking for a fire that did not exist. Instead, I turned toward that yawning black and bottomless pool and said simply, “Come.”
The darkness crawled over me, latching onto my leg, my waist, my arms, my neck, before finally covering my head, and I knew I’d awakened something terrible, something monstrous.
I knew I should have been scared. But all I felt was… power. I laughed as it sparked through me, making me feel more alive than I had, maybe ever. So much power. The water began to sizzle around me.
I snapped my fingers. Then there it was—a doorway, lifting up from the waves beneath—and I grinned. All three of us were shoved up and out of the water and stood on a platform of solid ice.
I felt myself glowing, but my light wasn’t lambent blue, not anymore. It was black, as black as the glittering night.
“Anahita, come ,” I cried out, calling out to my sister with a voice that trembled like a demon’s.
I felt the shuddering of movement beneath the waves. I’d saved us.
But at what cost? The gods only knew…
TURN THE PAGE FOR A WITCH AND A FISH, BOOK 3
A WITCH AND A FISH
Welcome to a world of fantasy, fairy tales, and murder most foul...
Never should have been the end of my problems. I should be back on Grimm. With Hook. Hating Crowley. And working alongside my partner, the Hatter. But life rarely turns out how I expect. The Sea Witch, and oh, incidentally my mother, has told me I’m a witch. Not just any witch either, but one of the biggest bad. I wouldn’t believe her, except I can do magick now. Unfortunately I can’t do enough to escape the predicament I’m in. Hook’s dead. Crowley’s dead. And I’m alone in a realm that hates my guts. And there has been a murder. My sister’s, Aquata’s. The realm blames me. I didn’t do it, but I have no allies who’ll believe me. Worse yet, my father—their King—was injured in the attack and he’s now in a coma. I have days to prove my innocence before they toss me into the eternal pit of torment. Thankfully, I’ll discover that I’m not as alone as I once feared. But trusting this person might very well spell the death of me…
The Grimm Files Collection Boxed Set Page 52