Cruel Tides (Queen of Tridents #2)

12

Claira

P ressure squeezed my tail, the useless line of boney flesh and scales weighing me down. I fought back a scream as a sudden jolt of pain brought salt water into my lungs. White-hot clarity struck me as water worked its way through me, inside and out.

I’m going to die.

The force dragging me down was relentless, its jaws gripping, jerking, twisting like a starving wolf tearing into a hard-won meal. My body stretched with each desperate yank, the act pulling me tighter until I was sure the tension would rip me apart at the joints.

Leander still had hold of my wrists, fighting against the determined force dragging me down, but surely even he wasn’t strong enough to save me.

I was going to die down here, and it was my fault for getting in the water in the first place. I knew better, and yet…

Curse Leander’s smooth words and pretty face.

He couldn’t keep me safe now, not when he couldn’t even leave the boat. My life was in my own hands, and I needed to see what I was up against.

Darkness should have crowded my vision, but my eyelids opened under the murky water, and long-forgotten magic rippled beneath my irises, distorting and reshaping my sight.

The old magic flowed readily, and my senses sharpened, eagerly awakening after years of disuse. The effect was dizzying. Opaque lines and phantom shapes of unknown objects crowded my vision, and I strained to focus. It was almost too much stimulus for my brain to take in, but I needed to make sense of things if I wanted to escape.

Escape? Yeah, that didn’t seem likely.

Even with magical adrenaline pumping my perception into overdrive, my brain still couldn’t find the command that would control my tail. I had to think of something.

“I’M AN ANCHOR!” a deep voice roared, reverberating through the overhead water like the call of a horn. A splash of gold cut through the murk as the long slash of a tailfin moved through my vision.

A tailfin? Now that seemed really unlikely.

Ribbons of some dark material fell around me in a shower of debris, and it wasn’t until a scrap danced over my nose that I recognized them for what they were: shreds of denim.

Leander’s lengthy body had plunged into the water, and the ocean seemed to brighten with his arrival. Possessive arms curled over mine, locking me against an immovable wall of muscle, and a spine-chilling crack thundered through the water as the frontal spine of Leander’s golden tail whipped, striking my assailant flat on the side of the jaw.

The pressure against my tail gave way as the attacker’s mouth opened, revealing innumerable rows of jagged, spear-like teeth. Thrown off by the unexpected blow, the creature reared back, silently retreating into a dark bed of seagrass below. All I could see was the dark slash of a fin cutting a line through the water as it vanished into the shadows.

“ Fuck .” Leander scraped a hand across the underside of the boat, and the barnacles there roused under his fingertips, emitting a soft amber glow that projected down to the seafloor. Twirling and twinkling, a lone scale reflected the barnacle’s light back at me before disappearing into an overgrown bed of algae coating the seabed.

My scale.

Or at least it had been. I certainly wasn’t going to go looking to get it back.

Dread filled me, and I studied my tail in the light of the barnacles regardless. A red haze collected in the water next to the bigger gashes where my scales had been. Thankfully, it didn’t look like anything I couldn’t recover from when I got the heck out of here and transformed back.

I let in a shaky breath. Thank Poseidon the original mer tails had been crafted with magic, making them substantially more armored than the conventional fish I gutted each morning.

Leander didn’t seem to share my relief. A hiss whistled through his lips as he folded me up in his arms to further inspect my tail.

“That fucking fish is gonna pay,” he growled, but my brain hadn’t finished processing why he’d even transformed into a merman in the first place. Was the curse already broken? My heart beat faster at the thought.

If that were true, then they wouldn’t even need me. I could go home today and never have to go in the water again.

But what was it he yelled out as he transformed?

“You’re an anchor?” I said, testing the phrase. His only response was another growl, his eyes wild with fury as they scoured the seagrass. Well, okay then. That sure cleared things up.

“Want out. WANT OUT.”

A raspy voice suddenly invaded my mind, loud and invasive enough to suppress all my other thoughts.

“Want OUT.”

I winced—it wouldn’t stop. Scrunching my face, I pulled my hands to the sides of my ears, desperate to muffle the words bombarding my brain, though my efforts weren’t enough to silence it.

“Leander, I—I think…” Practically shouting, I fought to get the words out over the raucous scream knocking around my head. “I think it might—”

Every muscle in Leander’s body tensed, and my eyes shot back open.

Gray-brown skin peeked through the cover of the seagrass, the flesh dappled with a pattern of new and old scars. It disappeared again in a blink. My instincts gnawed at me. It wasn’t done with us yet.

The creature darted forward, parting willowy strands of seagrass as it went, its well-equipped mouth poised to strike at us again. When its monstrous torpedo of a body came into the light of the amber glow, I knew exactly what we were up against.

A bull shark.

One arm holding me up suddenly retreated, and my tail slid down Leander’s body like a wet sack of sand. His hand tightened into a fist. He drew his right shoulder back.

“Wait!” I gasped, but Leander had already lunged forward, his fist bashing the shark in the very center of its vulnerable nose. The voice in my head turned into a garbled moan as the shark sank away from us—only this time, I knew it wouldn’t be retaliating any time soon.

“It’s hurt!” I called out, my voice raw with outrage. I pushed away from Leander’s chest to get a better look as it sank to the rocky seafloor.

“Yeah,” Leander said, shaking out his hand. A ridiculously satisfied grin widened his lips. “I punched it.”

“That’s not what I mean!” I said, shooing the hand away when it went back for my tail. I wasn’t a child anymore. I didn’t need to be carried.

Okay, well, maybe I did.

But he didn’t have to hold me with both arms , effortlessly floating there with his workable tail like swimming was the simplest thing in the world. It was insulting. I could just as easily use my own strength to hang on to an arm or shoulder and drag through the water behind him.

“It was trying to tell us something! Didn’t you hear the screaming?”

Leander’s golden eyebrows rose like he was considering the question. “No? Sharks don’t talk. Whales and dolphins? Yeah, sure. And you can’t get seabirds to shut up, apparently. But a shark? They’re not smart enough.”

I shook my head, the act sending my hair flowing out around me. “Well, I guess this one is particularly savvy, ’cause I for sure heard a voice in my head. It kept repeating, ‘want out, want out.’ I could hardly even think, it was so freaking loud.” I pantomimed my head exploding, but Leander still looked skeptical.

Gnawing at my lip, I wondered what to do. He was right that most fish weren’t smart enough to communicate, but now and then, I would come across a fish that would give me some sort of signal, projecting some word or feeling directly into my head. Then I’d sneak it to the side of the boat and release it back into the ocean before anyone could notice.

I figured if a fish was intelligent enough to communicate, the least I could do was give it an extra shot at life. Maybe find a smart little fishy spouse I’d released earlier, and then when I was in my nineties, the ocean would be filled with big-brained, super mutant—

“You’re serious?” Leander’s eyes searched mine, the flecks of gold dotting his irises practically glowing underneath the waves. “Sharks don’t talk, Claira.”

Irritation hit me, and I suddenly couldn’t blame the shark for keeping Leander out of the loop. Shark-me wouldn’t have wanted to chat with someone so obviously closed-minded, either. “Well, feel free to not believe me. But if that bull shark really wanted to eat me, you know I’d be dead right now. I… I think it just wanted some help or something, and I’m going to try to help it.”

Leander’s chest vibrated as he threw his head back, not even bothering to conceal his amusement. “You’re going to help a shark?”

Using his annoying chuckle as kindling for my fury, I wove my arms around his neck and pulled until I was mere inches away from his face. His grin hardened to steel as my chin leveled with his.

“Take me back to the boat.”

Disappointment draped over his lips, his gaze trailing over my face. “But your swimming lesson.”

“Take me back to the—”

The entire ocean churned around us as Leander hooked an arm around my waist, shooting us to the surface with one powerful flick of his tail. I sputtered out a breath of half water, half air as wind crashed over me. Leander’s head popped up next to mine, but disarranged hair blanketed my face, and I could barely see through it. By the time I wiped the wet strands out of my eyes, he was grinning again.

“Thanks for the warning,” I grumbled. Taking hold of the side of the hull, I silently prayed I’d be able to reach inside without making a complete fool of myself. Even without a working tail, I wasn’t completely useless. Not when I still had my arms—a memo Leander clearly hadn’t received. Even though we’d made it back to the boat, his hands never left my waist.

Summoning the strength won from years of casting and lifting nets, I hoisted myself up, balancing my stomach on the rail. The support of Leander’s hands shifted, and his palms spread, covering the crest of my scaled rear. I couldn’t stop my eyes from rolling. “Gee, thanks Lee. I really think that’s helping.”

“You’re welcome,” he chuckled, and gave my rear an encouraging little push forward. “Take all the time you need. I’m enjoying the water.”

“Yeah, I’m sure it’s the water you’re enjoying,” I mumbled, stretching to reach for one of my boots. The tip of my finger snagged a lace, and I used it to pull the boot over, watching the knife as it fell out onto the deck. “Just what I needed.”

“What’s that?” Leander called, and I answered by turning around, waving the knife through the air for him to see.

“I told you I was going to help it,” I said, satisfied with my cleverness. By the looks of the scars I’d seen earlier, the shark had gotten tangled up in a net at some point. Maybe that’s what it was trying to tell me. Honestly, with all the strange lines moving around my vision, I hadn’t gotten the best look, but what else could it possibly “want out” of?

“Are you sure you’re not making sushi?”

“And what would you know about sushi?” I snorted. Sturdy arms caught me as I scooted back off the boat’s ledge. “I thought King Eamon had you guys living off a diet of nut cream . I saw your food supply. It’s pretty pathetic.”

I folded my arms, holding the knife close to my chest so it wouldn’t cut either of us. One firm nod, and Leander’s head sank, drawing us back under the surface.

“Yeah, turns out fish are better at catching us than we are at catching them these days. We’ve had to adjust a bit.” Mimicking the size of a betta fish with a pinch of two fingers, he shrugged. “But I guess the tides have turned yet again.” He tucked my head under his chin, and we suddenly dipped. Turning a tight spiral in the water, my eyes reeled as the ocean swirled around us. As we came out of a loop, a golden tailfin fanned in front of me, the ends of its webs playfully tickling my cheeks.

“I’m glad,” I said, and I really meant it. For a second there, Leander almost had me believing I might be the key to, well, something . That maybe I wasn’t completely useless as a mermaid after all. But deep down, I knew there was no way the ocean would choose me to break its curse. Not when I already had a curse of my own.

“Yeah,” he said, the word airy, as if his mind was leagues away. “Let’s hurry back so we can let the others know.”

The closer we got to where the shark lay, the tighter Leander’s arms wrapped over my shoulders. When we were a tail’s length from the bottom of the harbor, we spun to a sudden stop.

He tapped a finger against the center of my lips, and I nodded, easily understanding his meaning. I wasn’t stupid enough to startle a knocked-out shark.

My intuition had been right—there was a net tangled around its belly. Deep lines of scar tissue ran across its back like an intricate maze. I held out my knife.

Okay, maybe I was a little stupid.

But the shark had called out to me for a reason, and if I could help, why not try? Moving the knife into my right hand, I reached up and tapped Leander on the side of the jaw. We inched forward.

This is fine , I thought, silently gulping as I leaned in to get a better look at what I was getting myself into. Shadows were around us, and I squinted, trying to make sense of the weird opaque lines my magical vision picked out in the dark. Looking through the darkness had seemed so much simpler when I was still a child.

Leander’s streaming breath tickled my ear as he leaned in and pressed his palm down on a mossy rock. When his hand moved away, the rock looked practically radioactive, a green glow covering its surface.

Show off.

But the light helped, and I sucked in a hiss when I fully saw what horrors one old net could do to a mighty bull shark. There was no telling how long the net had been tangled around it, the ropes even wrapping around the entirety of one pectoral fin. Thank Poseidon the shark’s gills were mostly unaffected.

Worrying at my lip, I brandished the knife, wondering where to begin. I tested the net in a few places, but the twine was wound so tightly it looked nearly impossible to cut without risking further injury to the shark.

That is, if you weren’t someone who had spent half their life driving blades into the sides of fish. The knife felt like an extension of my hand, and I worked its tip into a deep groove, careful of the puckered scar tissue growing around it. When the first strand cut loose, my pulse quickened, and I moved on to the next.

I went to work, slicing and pulling, working my way up across the shark’s back as Leander anchored my hips, saving me from drifting away. When I made it to the front of its pectoral fin, its eye slowly opened, the dark circle focusing as it caught the movement of my knife. I froze.

How long had it been awake?

“You’re going to be okay,” I whispered, bracing for a response to force its way into my head, but the shark only stared in silence. My knife hurried for the next thread.

“You think maybe this is just a little bit reckless?” a velvet murmur breathed against my ear, and I couldn’t really argue—Leander had a point.

But agony and hopelessness had melded with the shark’s projected words, its raw desperation striking as if it were my own. With just a glimpse of its pain nearly incapacitating me, there was no way I could return to the surface knowing I’d left it to suffer.

Particularly deep weaves sank into the skin under the shark’s fin, and I held my breath as my blade slid into the lines covering its sensitive belly. This was the last section. It was almost free.

The shark seemed to sense it too, and when eagerness drove its tail to flick back and forth, Leander was already pulling me away. My knife caught the very last strand just as he yanked me back, and the shark thrashed in triumph. Its fins reawakened in a mad frenzy, churning up sand from the seabed as it shook off the last section of netting.

“I knew you couldn’t trust a shark,” Leander spat, drifting away from the cloud as it spread. The dark plague of sand extinguished even the rock’s magic glow. “Stay alert.”

Loose grit stung my eyes, but I fought not to blink. Leander veered off, heading for the surface, and an overwhelming sense of relief eased through me.

“OUT.”

The shark’s enormous body rounded out of the cloud, and its snout moved like the needle of a compass before settling in our direction.

“Fuck,” Leander cursed under his breath. He scooped up my tail.

“Wait, it’s trying to tell me something!”

“Whaleshit it is . ” His tail seemed to double its effort. “What’s it going to tell you? ‘Thanks for saving me. You both look delicious’? It’s a shark, Claira, not a dolphin calf!”

We were almost to the surface, but I craned my head over his shoulder, looking back at the shark as it trailed in our wake.

“You’re welcome! Stay safe out there,” I called out. Leander nudged my head back under his chin with a tired sigh. But I’d already seen proof that the shark understood me. With just those simple words, the shark had stalled its chase, slipping silently into the murky underbelly of the harbor.