Page 78 of No One Aboard

“Weak,” Nico said, and the air shifted.

Tia’s nod was slight, but he saw it. She had meant him to. It was an acknowledgment between them, one that perhaps spoke more about Tia and Nico than it did about Rylan, but her thoughts were irrefutable.

Rylan Cameron was weak.

Tia despised her own brain betraying her. She would diefor Rylan. But there was an ember inside her that had been fed by the confession, by Nico’s agreement.

Tia brushed her lips against his throat, savoring the shudder that ran through him. He ran a finger down the curve of her side, and her skin tingled in return. There seemed to be a thread between them, connecting her heart to his, and both had the power to pull.

It was exhilarating.

She kissed up to his mouth and braided her legs with his. “I think I know what you are,” she told him. His call sign. She finally knew it.

“Oh yeah? What’s that?”

She breathed in the ocean scent that clung to every inch of his skin and wondered if it were him or the sea that intoxicated her. She wondered if it mattered.

Nico de la Vega. A handsome sailor whose allegiance to the sea is unmatched by any love he has for land. Or those from it.

Seductive, beautiful, magnetic, especially when he opens his mouth.

Call sign...

She brought her lips to his ear, felt him shiver.

“Siren.”

Chapter 38

Rylan Cameron

Call sign: Minnow

Day 9 at Sea

It was Rylan’s turn to hide in the anchor locker. He half hoped someone would find him, that Tia would come and lock her arms around him and listen to him rant or cry, but she didn’t this time.

He longed for his sketchbook, but his hand still hadn’t recovered from his past few furious drawing sessions, and the last thing he needed was to walk through the boat and face somebody. Francis’s disgust, Lila’s disappointment, Alejandro’s blank stare... Rylan couldn’t bear any of it. And maybe seeing Tia would be the worst of all. Maybe looking at his sister would only make him replay the image of her, bloody and angry, a mallet in her hands and something killer in her eyes.

Not for the first time Rylan fantasized about a hole yawning beneath him and dropping him into the sea. His legs would sprout into a tail, gills would slit along his neck, and he’d be where he had always belonged: underwater. Over the years of plucking oysters from their shells and hunting shadows on the sandy floor, he would grow so pale and shimmery that humans would no longer recognize him as one of their own.

He must have been under the sea inside his head for hours. He invented himself anew, the boy with a tail with iridescent scales like the feathers of a hummingbird. His name and past would be discarded, cast out with the tide. The boy with the tail needed none of that. The boy with the tail only swam and fed and took everything he wanted without a sliver of fear.

Maybe he would swim down instead of out and he’d reach a black world where the water was so cold that time could not surpass it. In the depths he’d live forever, eyes stretching huge and teeth growing sharp. A fabled monster of the deep. Beautiful, undefeatable, and most importantly, unafraid.

And one day he might deign to visit the surface, flinch in startlement at the sun. He would peek out from his realm and wonder at the mysteries of the sky and land in the same way he once had for the sea.

Trancelike, Rylan followed his daydream. He climbed the ladder of the anchor locker. He surfaced on deck and blinked at the bright light snared in the clouds.

He’d decide then that the upper world indeed held nothing for him. How could it after centuries of living among luminescent fish and colored reeds? And he’d go back down, this time for the last time, never to be seen again.

Someone caught the hatch before he could close it.

Rylan nearly lost his hold on the ladder.

It was Francis.

“Make some room for your old man,” Francis said with none of the ferocity he’d had earlier that morning with the mallet in his hand.