Page 15 of Wicked Tides #1

Vidar

On the frigid tide, their screams will flood

Their blade is a song and our blade is blood.

~A Pirate Shanty

I awoke to screams. Terrible, blood-curdling screams too high pitched to be coming from grown men who’d spent their lives becoming hard, unbroken killers.

The fight had been short. There were far too many wicked women for our small group of men to overcome. They’d outsmarted my father. Where most people thought they were nothing but bloodthirsty animals, hunters knew better. They’d caught on to my father’s tricks.

A crew of criminals had been promised freedom if they could get across the Aisle of the Black Water to the Broken Promises.

They were given a ship and as much alcohol as they desired.

I was sure they sailed with smiles on their faces and bellies full of rum, but their passage was cut off and they were lured into the bay as most merchants and smugglers were.

Their body parts littered the inlet, their blood darkened by the hemsbane that had been added to every bottle of rum they’d been gifted .

Hemsbane. An herb parents put in babies’ milk.

Harmless to humans in small doses, scentless to sirens, and yet lethal to their wretched insides.

The first time a crew was sent to sea filled with hemsbane, the sirens were easy to track and easier to pick off.

My father returned with six heads that day and other hunters with none.

But his tricks had failed him this time.

The men of the Mother’s Fang weren’t dead.

We’d been taken across the island to a small cove with those same jagged black rocks.

Only I’d been stuffed in a cage. I was cramped, my knees to my chest, and my father was folded into one the same size.

He was further up the beach where the water barely licked the bottom of his confines.

The bars of both cages were rough with rust and barnacles, which scraped at my clothes and skin.

The icy water just barely touched me every time it crept up the sand.

The men were not so lucky. Gus and Matty were pinned by the palms to a couple of old, wooden stumps. Reyna had teased my father by plucking Gus’s eye out with her nail and popping it between her teeth right in front of him.

Never had I heard Gus scream like that.

Four of the men had been tied to stakes lodged in the rocks, their legs severed below the knees. They lay against the tide far enough for swarms of bloodthirsty fish and crabs to gnaw at their torn flesh. Two of them were fortunate enough to have died quickly, but not Jack.

Reyna and two of her sirens stood and watched from the rocks, unmoved by the horrendous display. I studied each of their devilish faces. If I did not get a chance to kill them in life, I’d search for them in death, but I would never forget.

I glanced at my father again who stared at his wailing crewmen as if he’d been frozen in time.

I could see his jaw clenching and his fists squeezing the bars of his tiny cage, but otherwise, he did nothing.

His men were dying slow and agonizing deaths, which the sirens likely wouldn’t ease, and they wanted him to watch.

I could only imagine the plan they had for me if making him suffer was their goal .

But I would endure, soundlessly if it was in my power.

My father’s tortured eyes turned to me and there was a moment when all of his emotions transferred to me. What he couldn’t show. What he wanted to tell me. I felt it all in my soul and it nearly made me retch. My first hunt with him and the legendary crew of the Mother’s Fang had been overrun.

Touching my chest, I noticed my necklace was gone. Of course, it was.

I skimmed the faces of the sirens once more, a voice deep inside telling me I was not going to die on that beach.

Not easily, anyway. I glared daggers at Reyna, taking in every tiny detail of her venomous features until she caught me staring.

Her head cocked to one side, the corner of her thin lips rising into a smile.

I would kill her. Today. Tomorrow. In hell if I had to.

Reyna stood from her stony seat and stepped down the sharp rocks until she reached the sand, her eyes remaining on me. I dared not look away like some pathetic dog. I stared, my nostrils flaring to take in the stink of that bloodied beach.

“What a brave, stupid child you have, Woelf,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “It is a shame you brought him on this day of all days.”

She held a hand out to her side as if to summon something and from the black rocks emerged another figure I hadn’t noticed before.

She unveiled herself from the stone and appeared almost like a specter in the mist. A girl, barely older than me, with long, raven tresses covering near nonexistent breasts.

Her eyes seemed too big for her small face and her limbs were long and thin, disproportionate to the rest of her.

I’d never seen a child siren before. I had never even heard hunters talk about them. They were illusive and coveted by their ferocious mothers. Her black eyes lightened until they were a bright and unnatural gray and she used them to stare at me like she thought I was as unusual as she was .

In the girl’s hand was a white dagger carved to a sharp point and etched with designs.

She placed it in Reyna’s hand and then slowly backed away.

The ferocity and hatred that made the other sirens ugly had not yet tainted her soft features, but one day it would.

I imagined my face looked much the same until that very moment when I knew I was going to die along with my father and his men.

Reyna tsked in my direction and the girl walked obediently toward my cage, picking up my cutlass from the sand nearby to break the latch holding me inside. It was as if the women had found the cages on the sea floor. They didn’t even have keys for them.

As soon as I moved, the girl backed away, her expression going rigid like all the others.

I crawled out of my confines onto the wet sand, finding my limbs were stiff and in pain.

The girl kept my cutlass in her hand like the weapon had always been hers and reclaimed a place on the rocks.

As I stood, Reyna walked casually to my father and used the bone dagger to pry open his cage as well.

I was no threat to her in my condition and she knew it.

She looked almost bored as she stepped away, tossing the bone dagger on the sand before she sat herself on a perfect ledge against the rocks.

For a while, my father didn’t move, but when he finally did, he was groaning and grunting with pain as he pried himself out of the cage.

He stood, his coat soggy and heavy with wet sand, and rolled his broad shoulders back.

The child in me wanted to rush toward him and hug him and beg him to tell me it was going to be ok.

The man in me knew it wouldn’t be and there was no time to weep.

I glimpsed the dagger on the sand and then Reyna. Were I faster, I could use it and take her out, but the other sirens weren’t just there for looks. I was certain they were her guard. They were quicker than men. Stronger. She left the dagger there for a reason and I didn’t want to accept it.

“Quite a first hunt, isn’t it, my boy?” my father said.

I glanced up at him, fists balled tightly by my sides.

He feigned bravery in front of me, but the redness in his puffy eyes was yet another sign that inside, he was a storm of regret and fear.

The great Ethelwoelf was defeated and yet there he stood.

I didn’t know a man could be defeated before he died, but he was.

I saw it and it stabbed me right through my chest.

We took a long moment to stare at each other. Words escaped us, but we didn’t need them. Everything we needed to say was in our eyes, silent and yet somehow understood.

One of us was going to die. The other had a chance. A slim one, but a chance nonetheless.

In my head, I could hear what my father would say to me if he could speak.

Don’t be scared. Every man here chose to hunt. They’re dead men and you’re not. Be brave and be ruthless.

I’d grown up on his speeches enough to know what was going through his head. I nodded at him once and he returned a slow blink as if accepting what was to come. He was a mountain before a storm, unyielding and unbothered.

“Kill him,” Reyna said.

Only her voice was not the voice of a woman.

It was the voice of a siren, slow, whispery, and melodic.

Beautiful. Mind-warming and yet the thrill of danger coiled its bony fingers around it.

It sang toward me, flooding my thoughts.

My limbs. It repeated over and over, burning the world around me until the bone dagger and my father were all my eyes could focus on.

And without my necklace, those tones vibrated through me like the threads of a spider’s web.

Kill him.

My foot slid forward through the thick sand. My father watched me but made no motion to intervene. I bent to pick up the weapon and rose again to see my father drop to his knees on the ground.

Now I knew a broken man. Now I knew what it was like to die before your heart stopped beating.

“Don’t, boy!” Gus’s distant voice called out.

I wanted to kill him. The more the voice came to me, the more my hands itched to see it done.

It was a suggestion first… and then a need.

A desire. It tightened its grip until it was my will itself.

I clutched the hilt of the dagger tight and moved forward, every bit of my vision focused solely on my father.

Kill him.

I drew closer to him. He was unmoving and kneeling in surrender. My hand twitched to cut a hole in his throat. No… his heart. My eyes trailed across his body in search of a place to cut.

“This will anger you beyond reason,” my father whispered, his voice only loud enough for me to hear. “This will turn your soul dark and your heart to bone. It will harden you, son.”

“He’s your father!” Gus said, his voice growing ever softer behind the nagging whispers saying to end it.

I inched closer, raising the tip of the bone knife to the divot beneath my father’s throat where the laces of his shirt were loose and revealed his sun-tanned skin.

“Use it,” he said through his teeth, staring up into my eyes. “Bronze and blood, my boy.”

Kill. Him.

The dagger slid forward, cutting through skin.

Red pooled at its tip and I watched, my hands mine and yet someone else’s at the same time.

I felt the blade scrape against bone as I dragged it upward, splitting my father’s throat up the middle.

He rolled his head back and stared up at the clouded sky, eyes wide.

His mouth filled instantly with blood and one gurgling breath splashed a warm stream of it across my chest.

My hand released the knife and in turn, the whispering tendrils tied to my will loosened their grip and silence overtook the beach.

Not even the backdrop of wailing crewmen could be heard.

The sky had darkened as if I’d been standing there for hours over my father’s corpse.

The bone knife still stood upright in his neck, but his skin had turned pallid.

The greatest hunter on the tides had been reduced to a cold pile of flesh and bone by the hand of his only son.

I glanced down at my red-stained fingers and recalled all that had transpired.

A heavy knot made my stomach turn and I nearly threw up.

I was so outside myself that when two of the women took me by my arms and dragged me back to my little cage, I didn’t resist. I was almost a corpse myself, limp and spent and utterly in shock.

Vidar Woelfson had killed his father. That’s what they would say. I was a murderer. A stain on my family name. If I was not to be killed next, that is.