Page 2 of The Withering Dawn (Wicked Tides)

He opened my cell door. Maybe he didn’t know what I was, but he opened it, and I was unsure what to do. He and his men seemed more interested in the ship’s treasures than me.

And then that awful monster washed out from the corner it had been dumped in two days prior, reminding me of other horrors I didn’t want to face. I didn’t exactly want to be noticed when they were pulling the chests from the hold where I was being kept. Then again, I had no other way out. There was a time that I would have been content sinking to the bottom of the sea and being forgotten or even getting a bullet to the head to end it all quickly. Those times came and went. Other times I wanted freedom more than I wanted air.

But no matter what I wanted, it never came to fruition. And when the man opened my cell, my mind was a mess battling the thought of escape and the cold grip that fear had on me.

When the stranger spoke as if he cared whether I perished on that ship or not, I was taken aback and the confusion only got messier.

If he had any room for mercy in his heart, it was only because he thought I was a woman. But I wasn’t a woman. Not the kind that was used to mercy or even deserving of it, according to most.

The man was big, sturdy, and he had the earthiest shade of hazel-green eyes I’d ever seen. The tawny skin of his face was trimmed in a layer of stubble that traced his jaw and from his leather hat fell thick tresses of black hair in waves that hung past his shoulders. When he grabbed me, his grip was firm. My lack of food made me a bit weaker, but even so, I could tell it wouldn’t have mattered with him. He led me across the sinking ship and when my struggles irritated him enough, he scooped me up and began carrying me to another.

I didn’t want to go. Not really. But I didn’t know what else to do. I’d been lost for a long time, forced from one place to another with no say in the matter. Even if this man didn’t know who or what I was, there was a hint of kindness in his eyes. Perhaps, for once, my heart wasn’t deceiving me and he was not a monster like the others.

I could have argued with myself longer if Mikal didn’t shoot him and cause us to plummet into the water.

I writhed out of his arms, suddenly offered a chance at freedom for the first time in years. The open ocean was all around me, deep and dark and…

Uninviting. Wrong. Heavy and endless like a giant fissure trying to swallow me whole.

I swam from the stranger, suppressing the shift that would fuse my legs into one, long fin. I hadn’t shifted in so long; I was almost afraid of what it would feel like and what it would do to me. I was afraid of the giant world around me, too. Among the monsters that lurked beneath and the enemies that swam those waters and sailed the tides above, I was alone. Weakened. Unfamiliar with it all. Unfamiliar with myself.

I turned back, searching the murk for the man that had pulled me off that ship. The man who freed me from my prison. Perhaps he was cruel like all the others… or perhaps he wasn’t.

I cut through the water, the scent of his blood strong amongst the other odors permeating the sea. Gunpowder, wood, and whatever sparse amounts of food the men still had on that damned ship all clouded my senses, but his blood was unmistakable. I found him struggling against his injured shoulder and gripped his coat, trying to get him to the surface. When we breached, his men were quick to lower the nets for him to climb onto the other ship.

Again, part of me screamed to take my chance at freedom now that he was safe. I didn’t know if I would get another opportunity. Perhaps I’d made a mistake by saving him. Perhaps I was not good at reading people and this man was the cruelest of them all and had only opened my cell to lock me in another for his own entertainment.

But I couldn’t bring myself to think that.

When he coiled his arm around my waist and pulled me against him, I stiffened, my fingers itching to hold him. I looked up at him, shaking under his observant stare. He was unsettling because I could not see the same shameless cruelty behind his eyes and I feared it was a trick of my mind. Maybe I’d finally broken.

I should have just left, but the na?ve girl in me was clinging to him too hard as if I was being sucked into a mud pit and he was an outstretched branch. Like he was the only good in the world and I was desperate for a taste.

Then, the longer he looked at me, I could see it. The slow and subtle shift in his expression when realization started to set in. He saw my teeth. He saw my skin. He wasn’t a fool, he was a pirate and pirates knew the seas just as well as hunters did.

I swallowed, anticipating his blade sliding through my gut or the hot burst of a bullet through my skull.

“Have you a tongue, se?orita?” he said, an air of disappointment in his gaze now like I was a loved one that had lied to him.

He looked at me now like I was a snake coiled to bite.

I shook my head. They’d cut out my tongue two weeks ago to prevent me from using my voice against anyone. Not that my voice was potent enough to do much of anything. It likely wouldn’t have been effective at all even if I tried. My kind didn’t have a strong voice to begin with and I’d been missing my tongue for years. In just a few days, it would be back, but for the time being, I couldn’t form words.

The man sighed. “I’m feeling grateful. Swim away now. Disappear. You’re no longer in a cage.”

I gave it some thought and yet still, the dark, deep ocean around us was a less comfortable thought than getting on the ship with him and his men. I’d been a prisoner far longer than I’d known freedom.

I was stuck between two dark and unknown paths, each capable of eating me alive. I thought I didn’t care too much about dying, but maybe I did.

Maybe when he picked me up like my life meant something, even if I wasn’t what he thought I was, a spark of light ignited somewhere in the dark recesses of my withering soul. It was warm. Unfamiliar.

I hadn’t felt warm in a long time.

I shook my head at him, silently refusing to leave.

With a grunt, he started to ascend the nets like he didn’t believe me. I watched him for a bit, waiting for my brain to come to its senses. It didn’t.

So, I started to climb, too.

I chided myself for being the dumbest siren that ever lived, going from one human prison to another. But I was not like others. I wasn’t like others in so many ways and like a dog on a leash, I followed the man up that netting and onto his ship, facing whatever fate he would decide for me.

When he told his men to put me in the hold, I wasn’t surprised. I was, after all, a monster. A monster with nothing. With no one. A monster without her claws or even her will to fight. I was led down into the hold where I was locked behind bars again, soaking wet, defeated, and somehow still glad that I pulled that man from the water.

Ashamed, tired, and feeling increasingly numb to the world, I curled up on the floor and closed my eyes, turning inward like I always did until the world disappeared and I was in the secluded silence of my mind.

I woke to the sound of a man clearing his throat. I quickly sat up and leaned against the wall in the corner, curling my knees to my chest when I spotted a middle-aged man sitting on the bench against the opposite wall with a notepad in his lap. He had a pair of small glasses balanced on the tip of his prominent nose and a premature gray streak of hair in his otherwise brown ponytail.

Something about him unsettled me. He had a slimy air about him and a faint stench that tickled my nose like food about to turn.

“Ah,” he said, his eyes sweeping over me like I was an artifact behind a glass pane. “Awake. Wonderful. Can you stand?”

He got up from the bench and approached the bars, waving a charcoal pencil at me.

“I’d like to get a good look at you from all angles. If you could just—”

Heavy boots stomped down into the hold, drawing both our eyes.

“What the fuck ye doin’?” a gruff voice said.

On the steps stood a man with a stout stature and a scruffy face. He wore a scarf around his head that covered shaggy, copper hair and he was holding a pile of cloth in his hand and a flattened pillow. But his eyes were fixed on the man with the glasses.

“Forgot ye have a patient, did ye, Henry? Cap’n’s needin’ a couple more stitches.”

“Right. Just wanted to pop in and see our new prisoner while he wandered about trying to get things in order.”

He tucked his notepad under his arm, pushed up his glasses, and walked toward the stairs, tossing me one last glance, but he didn’t meet my eyes. Instead, his gaze licked over my body in a way that made my skin tighten around me.

The other man tapped the bars as if to get my attention and tossed the cloth items into my cell.

“Cap’n asked me to bring this to ye,” he said.

I reached for what I could now tell was a set of sheets. I would have said thank you if I had a tongue, but I doubted it would matter. I only needed another day or two. I could feel it. My tongue was half the length it was supposed to be and felt awkward in my mouth. The regeneration was always stranger than the emptiness when it was severed in the first place. You’d think I would be used to all stages of my tongue’s regrowth, but I wasn’t.

If I was back on the Perry Smith, they’d be sharpening their blade for my next trimming or fixing a leather gag between my teeth.

But they were all dead now and I was glad for it.

“Told me to bring this as well,” the man said, holding up a metal cup. “It’s nothin’ fancy, but judgin’ by how skinny ye look, no bread or meat would do ye any good. It’s just a bit of bone broth.”

He put it on the ground and slid it through the bars, keeping a bit of distance. I knew the man from the water was their captain. They had all been shouting it when they thought he was going to die. I wondered if he had told them what I was. There was no other reason this man would be so cautious. I was so frail looking that if I were human, I’d practically be dead.

I took a deep breath and slowly reached for the cup. It was warm. The contents indeed was nothing fancy. Just some broth with particles floating in it from whatever stew or soup it had been scooped from, but it was much more than I was used to. I raised it to my lips and took a sip. The way it felt in my mouth was like sunshine on cold skin. I felt the color in my flesh returning. I felt my blood moving. I took another sip and then gulped the whole cup down eagerly, careless that it barely had any taste.

Then I placed the cup on the floor next to the bars again and wiped my lips with the back of my hand, draping the blanket over my almost bare legs.

“I’ll, uh… I’ll bring ye another,” the man said, staring at me like I was going to do some kind of trick. “You’ll need a little more on your bones no matter what the cap’n decides to do with ye.”

Then he turned and strode up the steps, leaving me alone again.