Page 5 of The Withering Dawn (Wicked Tides)

“You’ll never be free,” Antonio said. “You’ll always be mine.”

I felt his fingers brush down the space between my shoulder blades and I shivered, that familiar sense of disgust gnawing at my gut like a vulture feeding on parts of me that were slowly rotting away. Hope. Affection. Happiness. They’d all been left for dead in the desert my soul had become.

“And your brother,” he continued. “He is mine, too. You know that, right? I will find him and I will show him what his defiance has done.”

I smelled the wine on his breath. He never smelled like anything else. Wine, sweat, and whatever perfume he used to try and cover it up. The smells together made me sick. Antonio rarely bathed and it was a nauseating thing to endure.

I heard the familiar sound of a knife sliding from a leather sheath and closed my eyes. I wouldn’t scream. I wouldn’t struggle. Not like the other boys did. He knew they were weak, but I would not let him see me squirm. The vultures hadn’t started feeding on my strength yet. That part of me was still standing firm, the only pillar in my soul fighting for my life when nothing else was.

I would never let him see me crumble.

I opened my eyes and saw the wooden ceiling of my ship above me, an unlit lantern swinging on a hook like a pendulum trying to put me back to sleep. My heart was racing and the gross feeling of dried sweat inside my clothes made me wince. I was filthy. I hadn’t thought about it until then. With Oliver’s death, my injury, and our new captive onboard, my mind had been in too many places at once to think about the layers of salt and grime on my skin.

A new captive…

Slowly, my eyes shifted and I saw the metal bars of the holding cell beside me. My arm was stretched out just enough for my hand to be between the bars and inside the cell. The woman was lying on her side with the thin blankets we’d given her covering her lower half. Her dainty hand was rested inside mine, her fingers curled around my thumb. My knuckles were so close to her lips that I could feel her breath feathering across them.

I was expecting her to open her eyes, but she did not. She remained motionless. Serene, almost. There were hints of color in her cheeks as if the small amount of sustenance we’d given her was already doing its job.

God, she could be human. I wished she was. Then, I would not have to contemplate what to do with her. I would clothe her, feed her, and take her to shore. I would make sure she had a place to go and I would send her on her way with a little bit of the treasure we’d taken off that ship. But a siren was another matter. They were violent, vengeful, manipulative beasts. They were a plague so deadly that hunters were in high demand, lest traders and fishermen be lost at sea every time they left port.

Glancing at our joined hands, I realized I’d been sleeping through the night, vulnerable to her hunger. She could have done countless vicious things to me in my drunken state, and instead, she’d fallen to sleep beside me and I was unharmed.

I didn’t know what to think.

Instead of ripping my hand from her grip in terror, I slowly pulled it out of the cell, easing myself away from her relaxed grip. I sat up, crouching in front of the bars to look at her for a moment, searching for something—anything—that would give away what a vile beast she was under it all. I intended to find something ugly about her. A tell. Something that told me her tender demeanor was a lie.

I found nothing. For the life of me, I could not see a single hint of malice.

Perhaps I really was too inexperienced to understand when a predator was luring me into its trap.

I stood upright, trying not to linger too long, and walked out of the hold. Cathal and a few others were gathered around, talking quietly. On the horizon, I could see thick, gray clouds swelling in the sky.

“There ye are,” Cathal said as I emerged. “Gettin’ friendly with our prisoner?”

I did not have time for his comments. I marched past him and the others, shrugging my coat off my shoulders as I headed to my cabin.

“Keep going east,” I said. “I’m going to take a bath.”

I disappeared into my quarters and swung the door closed behind me.

Alone, I stripped down naked and hung my clothes over a bed post. A bucket of rainwater sat in the corner and, knowing I could refill it if the rain on the horizon came our way, I dipped a soap bar into it and scrubbed it over a rag.

I could smell myself. The scent of sweat and stale air made my nose wrinkle with disgust and I began washing away the past few days of exertion, dirt, and blood. I scrubbed my arms. Legs. I cleaned every crevasse, the somewhat swollen flesh around my stitches, and the back of my neck and when I’d rubbed my skin raw, I hung the rag on the edge of the bucket and dunked my whole head into the water, massaging my scalp with my fingers. As I stood, I squeezed the excess water out of my hair and then flipped my head back. My hair hit my shoulders with a slap and immediately, a sense of relief poured over me. I felt lighter and more like myself as if pails of stones had been dropped from my back.

I took out a clean set of breeches and a fresh shirt from my trunk and discarded my dirty clothes in a cloth bag for cleaning. Hair damp and cold on my neck, I walked out of my cabin with my coat in hand and let out a deep breath as the fresh air cooled my skin. Cathal was coiling a rope around his forearm but paused when I came back out.

“Feel better?” he said, his tone a bit weighted since we dumped Oliver overboard.

I nodded. “Rain’s coming. I want everyone to bathe and then replenish the freshwater barrels.”

“Sure. Any port in particular we should aim for?”

“For now, no.”

“And our prisoner? Ye lookin’ to sell her?”

When the idea was said out loud again, my whole body tensed. I slipped on my coat and let out another long breath.

“Do you think we should?”

“Aleksi says the governor of Dornwich has a thing for tongues. He’s paying more for live sirens than dead ones these days. The governor of Treson Harbor is rumored to be following suit.”

I frowned at the thought.

“Suppose we have a big bounty on our hands,” I said, cringing internally at the statement. “Not that we need it. How much did we pull from that ship?”

“More than enough to keep us livin’ easy for a long while,” he gleamed. “The real treasure is the fact we stole it from Antonio.”

He was right. That was a thought I could revel in. We had plenty of gold to last, which meant selling her would just be an act of cruelty.

Cathal and I stood quietly for a moment, thoughts going unsaid between us. When we finally made eye contact again, I could see that he was feeling hesitant. So was I.

“She’s a bit thin, yeah?” he said, tossing the coiled ropes to the side. “You think she needs to eat someone to put some meat on her bones?”

“How should I know? We’re pirates, not hunters. We know so little about her kind.”

“Do you think hunters know how to care for them? Don’t they just behead them? Or bring them straight to shore and get paid?"

I pinched the bridge of my nose and looked up at the sails. The wind was getting stronger. We could reach a town or port in a week at that rate.

“We have a few days to think about everything,” I said. “Until then, we keep her fed. We’ll restock everything when we get to shore.”

Cathal nodded and continued his work as I headed down to the galley to grab a few basic food items. I took a couple slices of bread for myself as well as a stack of dried beef strips, a mug of bone broth, and water. I arrived in the hold where the woman was now curled in the back corner of the cell again, awake. I approached, setting the mug and a strip of beef right inside the bars. She eyed it, expressionless.

“You must eat more,” I said. “You’re far too thin.”

She pulled the blanket over her shoulders, but she didn’t move. Everything she did contradicted what I imagined sirens to be like. They were supposed to be fierce. Terrifying. Dangerous. This woman was none of those things. She was delicate and broken. But it added to the idea that she was trying to appeal to a part of me that wanted to show mercy and that didn’t escape me.

I stood, assuming she’d take the food once I left, and headed back to my cabin. Nikolas had taken the helm again and I nodded at him as I walked across the deck. He was barely older than Oliver had been and he loved nothing more than being at the wheel navigating the waters. Now that Oliver was gone, he was the youngest of us.

“Stay ahead of the storm if you can,” I ordered. “I’m going to see to the documents I could salvage off that damn ship.”

He nodded in reply.

I holed up in my cabin for the rest of the day, the papers and ledgers from the sunken ship spread across my oak desk. I didn’t have time to notice what I was taking with me when I raided the captain’s cabin, so it was all a bit of a puzzle. I was looking for travel routes. A cargo log. Anything that I could use. After an hour of sifting through seemingly pointless notes and records, I started to put some things together.

The ship was called the Perry Smith and it was old. It had gone through at least a dozen owners from what I could gather, but none of them seemed keen on keeping adequate records of their doings. Or at least, I didn’t manage to pick any up in my haste. Antonio himself wasn’t even mentioned and it tested my patience.

I did, however, have a leather journal in my possession, the pages of which had been stained and smeared from my plunge into the sea. To my luck, I could make out at least a few sections of writing. Much of it was the ramblings of a man with too many scattered thoughts in his head, but a few visible entries were coherent enough to make sense of.

Jacob Emry says this is the test. Philip failed the test. He let the monster infect him. He let the darkness in. I fear he set back many months of work, for now the monster has shed blood, tainting her soul and violently confusing everyone else’s.

Perhaps we are lost now. I do not…

The words smeared together and I flipped to another legible page.

We keep them so the world is saved. We keep them weak. Small. We keep them clean so we are clean. We are pure because their reach cannot go beyond these iron bars. Jacob has preached this many times and I believe our work here is valuable.

I moved to another legible entry.

The older one perished today. She ascends where her sisters will soon follow. The red-haired one looks at the body like she is empty and I fear I cannot save that one. She will die next. We have not fed her for many days. Any human flesh in her stomach is long gone now. She will die pure like the other one.

I read on, pulling a lit candle nearer as the sun began to sink behind the thickening clouds outside.

She spoke today. Her voice was so beautiful. So soft. So haunting. I almost touched her, but I resisted that madness. It is part of her charm. These she-demons are tainted with it. She tries to put her spell on me every day and… I was almost pained to watch the men cut her tongue again.

She screamed this time…

But we cannot allow anything to steer us off this path. God wants us to cleanse her. Her screams and her pleading eyes are a test and we will not falter. Not when we are so close to setting her soul free of that corrupted vessel that has imprisoned it. It is clear no amount of conditioning will make her into something she is not. A monster is a monster.

The rest of the passage was smeared, almost beyond my ability to read it.

Her name… she spoke it before we took her tongue again. Aeris. I dare say, I think this is the hardest test… feels wrong. It has given her an identity and I fear I will fail God by… but do I care…magics infecting my…

She must die. I think someone… She should have joined her friend by now, but she fights on. I don’t…

I flipped through the pages, too fixated on the rest of the entries to give up, but the water had taken so much of the ink away.

There were only a few lines left near the end of the journal, smudged but readable.

…It washed up in the nets, already dead. We don’t know what it is… rumors from towns… it is a vile thing. Possessed. Even Aeris fears it. She cowered from it when we dumped it in the… God help us.

From there, I could not make out more than a letter here and there. I wanted so much more, but it was something at the very least. A small bit of insight I didn’t have before.

Aeris. I spoke the name in my head as I closed the journal and slid it away from me. I didn’t even know who’d written those words. That name was lost to the damage done to the paper. All I knew was that someone was battling thoughts of hurting the woman I had locked just beneath my feet.

I related to him, whoever he was. I leaned back in my chair, twirling a thick, gold ring on my index fingers like I usually did when I was deep in thought.

Aeris, I thought again. The writer of the journal had one thing right. A name gave her an identity. She wasn’t just a woman in a cell. She was a woman with a name. A face. I imagined her writhing and screaming as men with blades forced open her jaw to slice out her tongue. How many times had it been done? How many times had she endured the mutilation?

And how much of it was Antonio involved with? He was certainly cruel enough that trafficking a siren woman and signing off on her torture was believable. But for all I knew, the twisted fucks on the Perry Smith were leasing the ship from him and he had nothing to do with the things they did with it. But then why were they flying his sigil?

I groaned softly and rubbed my fingers over my brows, massaging away a minor headache. We were heading toward land with a siren on board. We could make a good amount of money off of selling her, no doubt, but the idea was putrid, leaving a thick sludge behind every time it crossed my mind, especially considering we didn’t need the money. We’d gotten more than enough from the zealots. That, and no matter what she was, I couldn’t imagine surrendering her to someone else that would continue to mutilate her for the rest of her life.

My gut was telling me one thing and my head was telling me another. Both had served me well in the past and both had led me astray.

Perhaps I could let her go. I could open her cell and let her jump into the sea and never see her again, though I wasn’t sure why she didn’t choose to leave when I gave her the chance in the first place. I considered for a moment that she was scared of that monstrous thing that was in the hold with her and perhaps that was the reason she had not fled. In that case, perhaps I should be more cautious as we sailed further into hunting territory.

Night was creeping up on us again as I made my way out onto the deck. My men were furling the sails and it wasn’t hard to see why once I caught a glimpse of the sky. The clouds had grown angry and loomed like hungry giants above us. The wind was starting to make the ocean churn. The Amanacer was a sturdy ship. She was old and built to withstand the motion of the waves even on the worst days, so I wasn’t too worried about the weather. In fact, a little delay due to drifting for a while might be good considering my dilemma. It gave me more time to think.

I rolled my shoulder back, testing my mobility. I was glad to know my wound wasn’t hindering me too much. It felt tight and sore, but generally better considering. Henry had done good work so I began helping my men secure the deck in case the winds picked up. Rain began to trickle down in a misty form, blowing diagonally across the ship and wetting my face.

It felt damn good. Like a splash of cold water in the morning, it woke up my body and pulled me from that dark pit of crowded thoughts that I’d been wading through for hours.

“Looks like it’ll be a rocky one!” Aleksi shouted as he rolled a barrel toward the railing to tie it off.

“Ye’ll open your stitches liftin’ that!” Cathal added as I hoisted a pile of thick, heavy ropes away from the mast to close in a crate.

“Ahh,” I brushed him off. “Then Henry will stitch me up again.”

A few other men continued to prepare the Amanacer for high winds, above and below deck. For the most part, my crew never needed instruction. They knew the ship as well as I did and they took care of her like she took care of them.

“So?” Cathal asked as the rain began to pick up. “Learn anything?”

I climbed the steps to the helm and took the wheel from Nikolas for the first time in the last three days.

“Zealots,” I said to him. “From what I could gather, they were not a merchant ship. They were fanatics following the word of God. In their own way,” I shrugged. “No sign of Antonio’s whereabouts.”

“And the woman?”

“They were trying to kill her. And they seemed willing to perish with her if they had to. Starving her to death, I suppose, was their way of making sure she died without the flesh of men in her stomach. A purification, I think.”

He grumbled, resting his hands on his hips. “I don’t like the religious types. Ye know, all of Harverton was full of ‘em.”

“And you disagree with what they were doing? Even if their prisoners were sirens?”

“Now that is a tricky question,” he said, waving his finger. “I’ve heard stories of sirens just like anyone else. Hell, even Denham talked about ‘em now and then. They’re stories until they’re not and every story terrified me. They’ll eat ye alive, people said. ‘Whether ye scream or cry, they’ll just keep chewing until ye die.’ I don’t remember the rest of the song.”

“Heard a man say sirens tore up his fishing nets once and nearly made him crash his ship in the rocks with their voice. Said it felt like being dragged on a rope across sharp stones. All free will is gone, but you stay conscious of your actions.”

Cathal shivered. “It’s not like us to sail in siren-infested waters. Never wanted anything to do with ‘em.”

“Neither did I. I chose the wrong ship to attack, my friend.”

“We don’t choose the ships. We chase them if they are dawning that damn flag.”

“Perhaps the chase is proving too unfavorable.”

Cathal combed his fingers back through his hair. “Thinking about Olly, are ye? The boy knew what he was getting into staying aboard this ship. Like all of us did.”

“Did he? We were all so much older when we made that choice.”

“Either way, it isn’t any fault of yers that he’s gone. Yer brother would have said the same thing. Ye know it.”

I nodded, thinking back on the day we all fled the same place together. The only thing on our minds the past sixteen years had been to find the man who’d ripped our lives out from under us. The man who wronged all of us and countless others that had not escaped his clutches.

“And if something happens with our unusual captive because I brought her onto the Amanacer? Should I take blame then?” I asked with a grin.

“That’s quite a strange situation, isn’t it?”

“I fear sometimes that my mercy will be my downfall.”

He slapped me on the shoulder. “Then ye’ll die with yer morals intact, which is more than most men can say.”

I dropped my head, more conflicted than I should have been.

“I know ye have a weak spot for caged things,” Cathal continued. “But she is not some child taken from her parents. She’s a siren. Do not let this twist ye up too tight.”

“Tell me if you saw a monster in her eyes when you spoke to her.”

“They’re deceiving,” he shrugged. “Perhaps the monster is wearing a very beautiful mask.”

“Or she is broken just like us and we are the monsters for thinking her evil.”

The way he looked at me when I said that was laced with confusion. I couldn’t tell if he saw weakness when I spoke or if he saw strength.

“Should I prepare myself for ye doing somethin’ stupid, cap’n?” he said, narrowing his blue eyes.

“You should always be prepared for me to do something stupid.”