Page 3 of A Sea of Vows and Silence (The Naiads of Juile #3)

Selena

T he screams came from one person.

But they pierced me from every direction.

Sound travels faster below the waves. Water particles are more densely packed than air. Tighter. Closer. It penetrates the skull from all sides, bypassing the eardrum and conducting sound waves directly across the occipital bone.

They were odd thoughts to have while wrestling for my life.

But they were the thoughts that ran through my mind as I listened to my sister’s screams.

We’d followed Thaan down to the pier. I want to marry your mother, he’d said. Will you help me ask?

No, Cebrinne had scoffed, tossing her blue-black hair in thinly veiled contempt.

But I’d always been the kind one. The patient one. The pleasing one.

I’d said yes.

Cebrinne followed us, glaring at the merchant sailors who sent eyes in our direction.

It didn’t matter if their glances yielded vague disinterest or fervent craving.

They all annoyed her. At sixteen, she wasn’t afraid to gnash her teeth and order them to turn their eyes.

If compassion and warmth were built in the fleshy shape of a man, Ceba would have said she liked the taste of blood between her jaws. She’d never been afraid to bite.

Thaan led us past the marina. I watched the line of his tall shoulders as he walked.

The back of his head, his salt-and-pepper hair.

Past the smaller docks. Past the beach the town flocked to when the sun drenched the market in sticky heat.

Cebrinne’s steps slowed. Mine did, too, my eyes wandering over the broken boats and smashed buoys.

Torn nets, snapped wood, abandoned chests with busted hinges.

The wasted equipment of the pier. Forgotten under layers of rust and algae and time.

Rotten and old, dim under the full moon.

Ceba’s hand grazed my arm. “Let’s go, Senna. I don’t like it here.”

I didn’t like it, either, and I let her pull me the opposite way. We turned to leave. And found the way back had been blocked.

I don’t know how so many of them appeared behind us without making a sound. They stood like statues carved from ancient marble, their eyes hard, their gazes cold. Their bodies almost naked. A jolt of electricity flashed down the back of my neck, my fine hair suddenly standing on end.

There were maybe thirty of them. Tall, beautiful. Dripping wet. Men and women. A trail of water followed them, betraying their steps. A fabric like thin silk stuck to their skin, plastered by water.

They hadn’t come from the town. They hadn’t come from the port.

They’d come from the sea.

Cebrinne’s fingers tightened over my arm. Her breath hitched. My pulse suddenly struck the walls of my ears, each beat a wicked whip through my head. We squeezed together, though Ceba stepped between me and them.

“Our mother isn’t coming, is she?” Cebrinne asked Thaan, though she didn’t face him. She faced the people from the sea.

He didn't answer her. Behind us, Thaan only commanded, “Get them in the water.”

They began to move, pushing us to the waves. A strangled whimper shredded my throat as my eyes darted from one face to the next, desperate for someone I recognized. A shop owner from town. A sailor from port. But I didn’t know any of these faces.

Cebrinne braced for them. Her muscles became lead, fists hardening to stone as she locked eyes with the one in the front. He aimed for her the way a red wolf aims for a hare, a lupine scowl warping the scar that ran the length of his cheek to his chin, eyes hungry as his pack flocked around us.

He tore her from me.

We tried to stay together. Our arms tangled; our bodies fused into one trembling animal. He may as well have ripped a piece of parchment in half.

Cebrinne fought for me. Clawing, snarling, grappling. I screamed as her hold left mine, my own hands feral for the grip of hers. But someone else had reached me as well, and I was thrust in the opposite direction.

I looked up, staring into the penetrating gaze of steel-gray eyes. “I’m sorry,” the owner of those eyes said. His fingers locked around my arms, holding me against him. He was something between a boy and a man, not much older than I was, but he was twice as strong.

I shoved at his bare chest, but I might have shoved against the cliffside rocks for all the good it did. “Let me go.” My voice didn’t sound right. It was ragged. Withered.

The boy’s eyes fell to the pebbled shore. His long hair streamed from his head like rough-spun threads of rusted gold and brown.

He didn’t let go.

Sea spray hit me sideways. A splash from behind my right shoulder, and I realized Cebrinne no longer stood near me.

Thaan watched coldly, arms crossed and back straight.

“Deimos will finish with the other one. Wait for him,” he said to the boy, inclining his head toward the waves in a silent order to enter.

The boy wrapped an arm around me, lifting me off my feet.

“No,” I said, arching to look back at Thaan. “No.”

But the boy held tight. He fell backwards into the surf, taking me with him. And the moon spun as gravity threw us upside-down.

The sea opened its maw, swallowing us in a cold gulp, ribbons of bubbles churning toward the surface as we sank. They carved patterns through the strands of pale light, fleeing between long black fingers of seaweed .

I wrestled against him, my lungs frantic at the absence of air, but it didn’t matter.

His arms chained my body, a bolt tight and secure around my limbs.

Everything tumbled away as we fell into the dark.

The sea hummed its rhythmic poems. I'd grown up loving the sea, but I was suddenly a stranger to the calm and soothing voice of the ocean.

The sea was a grave, its lullaby my tomb.

The people followed, one by one, into the water after us.

The moonlight glinted off their bodies. Twinkles of blue and silver, tiny flashes there and gone.

Something wrapped around my hips, forcing my kicking legs together.

The boy who held me settled his forehead against my temple, gray eyes soft. Pained.

Movement broke through the moonlight behind him, calling my attention deep below where Cebrinne floated face-up, staring numbly at the sky. Several of them held her in place. Not people. Things .

Things with long tails and armored scales.

Built with compact muscle, reptilian and shining.

The one that had pulled Cebrinne in drifted just above her.

Deimos. He clenched her chin between his fingers, battling for control of her mouth.

The motion jerked her from her haze, and she thrust her face away, fighting to pull right and then left.

But there were too many of them anchoring her arms, her knees, her feet. Deimos pressed his mouth to hers.

Her chest deflated as she exhaled.

My sister’s captor broke away with a forceful push. Her screams echoed throughout the sea, and the people grabbed her, charging for the surface. I fought to follow. And then realized Deimos was heading for me.

Fear rippled through me in a violent cascade, every muscle and bone desperate for escape. Coming, coming—almost here. My heart thrashed in my chest, a surge of white pain as my blood whipped my veins.

I don’t know why, but I turned into the boy holding me. Burrowed my face into his neck, delving against his hard torso as his hair stroked my cheeks. Hiding my mouth and the single sob that erupted from my lungs .

The boy’s thumb slid over the curve of my shoulder, sweeping across my chin. Coaxing me to look up. I buried in tighter. My lungs threatened to burst, the oxygen within me stretched to its limit.

Hands grabbed at me from all angles, wrenching my hair back, caving in around my jaw.

Angling my face to the side. To Deimos. His mouth loomed inches from mine, that scar across his cheek a pale slash under the watery light.

Cebrinne’s screams continued from above, piercing the air somewhere overhead.

Screaming my name.

I writhed, muscles taut and somehow quivering at the same time. Deimos reached for me as he had for Cebrinne. But the boy holding me leaned forward, cupped my cheek against his hand, and breathed.

Seconds lengthened. Strands from the moon danced around me.

Screams separated and joined in the midst of the quiet, whirring ocean.

I’d always loved science. Loved the why and the how as much as the what .

And it occurred to me, then, how strange sound became underwater.

A thing chased but never caught. A thing felt but never touched.

Like shadow or time or gravity. Or raw, consuming fear.

The pad of a thumb drifted across my lower lip, tapping softly. Almost as though asking me to wake up. And steely eyes hovered just beyond, swerving in and out of the sound as it penetrated my skull from above. My gaze flickered to his. Waiting. Those eyes hesitated and then closed.

His mouth returned, smooth and soft and careful. Not a kiss. Yet his lips spread across mine in a gentle brush of skin. Warmth hummed under his touch. I stopped fighting just for a moment, pressing the air he’d given me back into his lungs.

A hand forced its way between our faces. The gray eyes ripped away from me, or perhaps I was ripped from him. Suddenly, he was gone, beyond my grasp, and I was dashed to the surface above where I broke the waves in a brutal gasp for air .

They passed me from one set of hands to the next.

I couldn’t focus on who held me. My legs had begun to twist and turn and stretch.

My toes curled, my knees flung themselves straight, contracting and loosening at once.

They changed in color, deepening to the rich hue of iron, shimmering violet at the edges.

Not legs. Not feet.

A tail. Like theirs.

Fire ripped through my body. A raw burn started in my bones, ringing through flesh and blood.

They deposited me along the pebbles and the shipyard waste on shore beside Cebrinne.

Her raven hair hung in limp waves, saturated with the sea.

Her turquoise eyes shone as brightly through the night as they ever had during the day, armored with the silent pledge of brutality.

She reached for me, bracing on a hip and a single elbow.

Her dress had been shucked away, leaving her in that sleeveless shift she usually wore underneath.

Mine had, too, though I couldn’t narrow in on the moment I’d lost it.

Waves of nausea broke over me, sending me heaving to the side as Cebrinne grasped my hand.

We wrung ourselves together, both of us trembling.

Cebrinne hissed and spat at the sea people as they walked by like a drenched, wild kitten, promising to scratch at anyone who came too close.

But for all their efforts to trap us during the minutes before, they ignored us now.

They dragged the boy with gray eyes behind them.

Blood trickled from his ear, an open cut gracing his cheekbone.

A tattoo ran the length of his back, wrapping both sides of his body to sit under the V of his abdomen.

He was perhaps twenty, slender but solid.

Hands bound behind him, something about his balance seemed strange.

They halted him before Thaan, grasping his shoulders and shoving him down to his knees at Thaan’s feet.

He flung away from them in a savage whip of his body then spat at the ground between Thaan’s legs .

Deimos’s fist connected with his jaw in a crack that split the whooshing tide. Unable to block the strike, the boy rocked sideways, landing on his shoulder.

Deimos dropped to lean over him, sending blows into the young man’s skull.

Cebrinne and I observed numbly, too drained and filled with agony to do anything but hold ourselves upright and stare.

I couldn’t even find the energy to be confused, though nothing made sense.

The sound of fists against flesh and bone invaded my ears, but I was too empty to try to rationalize why the young man was taking a beating.

Thaan didn’t flinch. He watched, bored, head tilted slightly to the side. The people watched as well, expressionless. As though deadened to the prospect of punishment. “Enough,” Thaan finally said.

Deimos leaned into his heels, shoving to his feet and backing away, leaving the boy to pant softly into the loose stone.

He slowly pushed himself back onto his knees, blood hanging in thready strands from his mouth, and cast a glance over his shoulder at me.

Then turned back to Thaan with a quiet, crazed laugh.

“Jealous at being played at your own game, Thaan?” he asked, flashing crimson teeth in a wide smile.

“It appears so, Pheolix,” Thaan said. “Another stay in the mines seems a worthy prize.”