Page 19
Chapter nineteen
T hey were under attack! The dawn highlighted a backdrop of glistening shores extending from the Undine Isles, painting the sky in ribbons of violet and amber that stretched across the horizon like bruised fingers.
Raggon searched for his brother. The vivid colors swallowing the morning sky were nothing to the chaos erupting on the deck. Men shouted orders that were swallowed by the howling wind, their voices breaking with panic as they scrambled past him on the heaving deck.
“Morris!” Raggon called. He couldn’t find him in the din, either. Where had the man gone? “Tobias!” Dread tingled down his spine.
A terrifying blast of sea water cascaded over the sides with unnatural force. Raggon braced himself against the warm spray, grabbing the nearest coil of rope for support.
“All hands! Brace the port side!” The quartermaster’s voice cracked through the air before dissolving into a gurgle as he was swept overboard.
Tentacles, dripping with foul ooze and brine, clasped the ship on either side as if it would pull the frame apart as easily as the stuffing from a doll. Already he could hear the cracks from the wooden planks as they splintered, a sound as terrifying as bones breaking beneath a torturer’s mallet. His knees buckled, trying to keep his balance as the world shifted beneath him, the deck pitching violently with each monstrous squeeze.
“Circe’s fleet approaches!” a man screamed from the crow’s nest, his voice thin with terror before it abruptly silenced—the mast below him cracked like a twig. The sailor plummeted into the churning water below. Raggon shouted out, scrambling back from the shards, seeing the rigging tumble free from its confines, swinging with the force of a battering ram.
Circe’s ship had moved beside them with black sails billowing, the sea wings sleek and deadly against the brightening sky. The Land Witch no longer hunted them as a silent predator but had made her move against them. Scylla too, if he could believe what he was seeing! The worst that could happen was true—the two were working together. No longer plagued by Poseidon’s interference, she’d called the creatures of the deep against them!
That must mean the witch’s plan had backfired. He prayed it was so, anyway! Because he refused to retreat from his heart now.
A wave crashed over the side, drenching the deck and sending three men skidding across the slick surface. Letting out a shout, Raggon moved through the foam to reach them. His feet slipped out from under him, sending him flying straight into the jagged edge of a broken hatch.
The blinding agony was followed by the whip of a colossal tail, rising from the deep like a rising leviathan from the abyss. The horrifying glistening appendage shoved the starboard of the ship closer to the Undine Isles in one powerful sweep. And with a sickening crunch, their ship ground against the rocks, jarring his bones with its deadly crash. The impact threw Raggon from his precarious foothold and against the rail where his ribs collided painfully with the wood. He breathed in. Out. The world a dizzying blur before it snapped into place again.
The ship was stuck on the rocks… Oh, depths! Though he quickly grasped the implications. Circe couldn’t engage them without getting caught in the same treacherous reef. Was this done on purpose by these creatures, or just dumb luck?
Either way, he wouldn’t last long. The powers of the deep threw him easily about like a ragdoll caught in the teeth of a dog. Meanwhile, he couldn’t see Morris and Tobias anywhere. Not knowing who was enemy or friend, he turned to where he’d left Thessa in what he thought was safety in the hull of the ship. Screams echoed through the air, punctuated by the splintering of wood and the thunderous crash of waves against the stranded vessel.
He moved for her, disappearing through the space of existence, seeing the world warp around him in shades of translucent blue, and then a sound, a terrifying echo that gained clarity as he shifted back to his form. A roar like thunder rolling across a metal sky pierced his ears and sent him rolling over the deck.
The planks ripped apart from the first mate’s quarters, exploding outward in a hail of deadly splinters. Terrible black sinewy wings tore through the rising cloud of debris, snapping like canvas catching wind, followed by the scaled neck of an otherworldly being Raggon had only seen in the books of their ancient history.
A dragon! Its powerful twisting serpentine body shook free the pieces of his ship like sawdust from a carpenter’s table. This had to be one of Circe’s beasts!
So much for their marriage plans! The witch clearly wanted him dead.
His terrified men escaped the ship like cockroaches fleeing light, pouring out from the sides in a frenzied rush of bodies and panic. Screams echoed through the night air. Boats lowered into the water were quickly swallowed by the crashing waves.
Raggon cried out, fighting to his feet. A mainmast teetered, the foundation snapping as a massive wing unfurled to show a scaled ruby underbelly catching fire in the rising sun. The mast crashed down. Barely having time to do much else, Raggon dodged out of the way. The rigging slapped against his arm, cutting through his cambric shirt and lacerating the skin beneath. Hissing at the white-hot sting, he pushed himself painfully to his feet, seeing that the dragon coiled between him and the cabin where he’d left the sleeping Thessa.
His heart dropped like a stone. Was it after her then?
“Hey!” he shouted at the creature. The thing’s head rotated, birdlike, to stare at him with eyes like molten gold, pupils contracting to slits against the brightening day. “That’s my mermaid!”
Rotating, the dragon let out another roar that sent Raggon back to his knees, the force of its horrific cry a physical blow to his chest. Apparently, the dragon wasn’t picky about his meals—prince, mermaid, dirty pirate.
A strange ticking noise behind its throat, like the opening of the dampers on a blacksmith’s forge, sent Raggon scrambling behind an overturned water barrel, seconds before a flame engulfed the deck, one so powerful that it consumed the air around it and extinguished itself, leaving only a blackened charred hole in its place.
Raggon choked, inhaling the acrid bitterness of burning pitch and scorched wood that sizzled with heat, the stench so strong he could taste it on his tongue.
Fluttering wings, smaller this time, soared through the remaining rigging. Sterling circled the dragon’s head, squawking in that grating voice that had become strangely familiar over the past days. “Blood! Need blood! What am I? Brother? What’s happening to me? Fire in my bones! Fire in my soul!”
Raggon uncovered his face, the air sticking in his throat when he stared up at the dragon and saw what remained of the Typhon’s Kiss clasped to its neck. The sea steel was a silver crescent that clung to the ridges of his scales, like a stubborn parasite, barely maintaining its hold.
It wouldn’t matter if it fell away now.
“Tobias,” he whispered, the name barely audible over the crackle of flames and splintering wood. Circe’s curse was complete.
Raggon stood frozen, numb with shock, guilt washing over him like the waves battering their ship. He couldn’t save his brother. Their royal blood had affected his transformation in a different way than it had the others. He’d taken on the raw, physical power that sylphs were rumored to share with the ancient skyborne. His brother was now a nightmare made flesh, everything terrible and imposing, everything that Tobias wasn’t.
Could Raggon find his brother’s soul somewhere within this hulking, leathery form?
Again, the parrot squawked, circling higher as the dragon’s massive head followed its flight. “See me and quake, ye scurvy dogs!” Sterling’s voice was oddly formal beneath its usual affectation. “I hold in me the blood of ancestors, their souls raised by the Sea Blessing! Fear me and bow before my power! The ancestors speak through me in all my terrible glory!”
“The ancestors?” Raggon fought to his feet. Had taking on this form connected Tobias to the souls he’d raised by playing his royal Sylphorian instrument just last night? But how? These powers only belonged to the first of the sylphs. Legends told of Undine calling forth any being that had ever touched water—mortal or immortal—and hearing their whispers across time and tide.
Raggon’s throat was raw from smoke, and still he shouted upward at the daunting creature made of his brother: “Do you speak for Undine?” He clung to the last of his desperate hope. If there was still a way to save his brother from this awful fate, he would! “Can you communicate with her spirit?”
Sterling swooped down, perching on a broken spar just out of the dragon’s reach. “What do ye ask of Undine, Seafoam Prince?”
Scarcely believing that he was having this conversation with Sterling, and with the stink of sulfur rising up from the smoke against the planks, Raggon steadied himself. “Where’s her blade? Tobias, do you know where we can find it?”
“Where the water pours forth from the heart is where ye’ll find it!” Sterling flapped his wings vigorously. “Never shall ye make it there, Sylphorian Prince. Dragon’s hunger grows! Dragon wants flesh!”
A great inhale erupted from the dragon, the sound of that horrible damper opening in its throat again. Raggon listened with mounting dread as a strange whistling wind traveled the length of its body. Tobias was getting ready to engulf his brother in flames.
“Beast! Is this yours?”
Raggon swung on his heel to see Thessa standing in the shattered doorway of the cabin, her copper-red hair flying wildly in the wind like flames against the brightening sky. She wore that same oversized linen shirt, the edges flapping around her knees, and a silk banyan she’d hastily dragged on—an elegant dressing gown that swept around her calves, something Maddox had likely traded from a merchant ship. The luxurious garment was crimson with golden dragons embroidered along the sleeves. A terrible mockery of what stood before them. In her hands, she held something familiar—the birthday gift that Tobias had given his brother.
Never seeing her look braver, with just a touch of that stubbornness that drove him out of his mind, she madly wound the contraption, her slender fingers working the mechanism until the wind whistler exploded into the air with a shrieking, gurgling symphony.
The copper gyrated, rising above the remaining mast, jerking wildly, tubes and bells spinning as it emitted its cacophony of whale song and storm wind, cutting through the roar of flames and splintering wood.
The dragon stilled; its massive head cocked to one side. Its eyes flickered, the molten gold fading to a familiar human brown.
“His eyes!” Raggon breathed. Hope surged in his chest like a wave. They’d changed when they saw the contraption. Was his brother’s love of invention the way to reach his humanity? “They changed when he heard the wind whistler!”
The parrot cried out, swooping between them. “Pretty magic! Bring me more, bring me more! It sings to my bones!”
Raggon watched the dragon carefully as it stepped closer to the coppery whistler, its massive nostrils flaring as it sniffed the contraption.
For a moment, the very air seemed to hold its breath. Then, with a violent crash that shook what remained of the ship, a thick black tentacle shot from the water and swatted the remaining mast. The massive wooden pole tumbled through the air, spinning directly toward Raggon.
He crouched low, watching it come, and dissipated into seafoam just as the massive timber crashed through where he had stood. The helm shattered in his place. Raggon materialized again near the rail, but another writhing black tentacle swatted the deck like he was nothing more than a fly, splintering wood in all directions.
The glistening black appendage came for him again. Too late, before he could shift. The great gaping maw of the dragon lunged forward and bit down on the tentacle, just a hand’s breadth away from Raggon’s arm. A wet, sickening crunch exploded through the air.
A scream, unearthly and piercing, followed from somewhere beneath the waves, and the dragon tossed the oozing, severed limb off the side of the ship. With a newfound playfulness that was terrifying to behold, the beast hopped across the broken deck, catching more of the flailing limbs as they reached for the ship, tearing them with savage glee. Tobias’s pupils had once again narrowed to the golden slits of a beast.
Thessa grabbed Raggon’s arm, her fingers digging into his skin. “We have to get out of here!”
Sterling fluttered above them, his feathers ruffled. “Go, go! Abandon ship, ye fools! Save yourselves or walk with the dead!”
Raggon couldn’t move, his eyes on his brother. How could he leave him like this? Everything in his soul screamed against surrendering him to this monstrous prison. The dragon’s tail whipped through the air, clearing the deck of debris. More tentacles surged from the water, encircling what remained of the ship. The deck cracked beneath them with a sound like the world splitting apart.
Grabbing Thessa’s arms, not knowing how to protect her, or how to protect himself, he held her against him as they fell into the blackness. The waves crashed over them with crushing force, stealing his breath, the tropical temperatures smothering his skin and filling his nose and mouth with salt water.
He scrambled for pieces of driftwood, feeling Thessa crash into him. She was here! The girl was born for the sea, but she no longer had the power of her fins to keep her afloat. He cried out her name, shouting out anything to keep her with him. “Hold on!”
The powerful currents of Undine’s Isle dragged them closer to the shining shores of the Serpent’s Coil, the full brightness of morning now illuminating the towering palms with knife-edged fronds and twisted mangroves that loomed over the beach like silent sentinels.
Scylla had full control of the sea now—Poseidon was dying, his power extinguished like the stars had that dawn, and yet… something had pulled their ship onto the rocks and away from Circe’s grasp!
A massive dark shadow swooped past them across the morning sun, a silhouette of such magnificence and horror that Raggon’s breath was ripped from him. Tobias! The dragon moved toward the island like a bird returning to its nest, powerful wings beating against the morning sky. In its claws, it carried a familiar glittering contraption—the wind whistler.
The sight of his brother reduced to a dumb beast made Raggon’s stomach sink with despair and terror. How could his heart not drag him into the depths with the heaviness of his loss?
Thessa crying out his name made him turn. She grasped the driftwood. He clawed against the splintered edge, forcing his head over the waves. If they made it to shore, they’d be weaker than drowned kittens.
How would they be any good against Circe and her venomous sister then?