Page 26 of Wicked Tides #1

Vidar

Only when we wake do dreams become fantasy.

~Unknown

Having Dahlia in the holding cell was bad enough without her sister there, too. Merilyn, I believed her name to be. I slept like shit the first night she was on my ship. Her presence alone had inspired the demons inside me to wake.

But none of that mattered in the grand scheme of things.

The bigger picture had expanded. It wasn’t just about killing sirens.

Overnight, it had become about this new threat.

The “xhoth.” They didn’t discriminate and my lack of knowledge about them, their tactics, their needs, and their motivation had me on edge.

Fuck Whitton’s request for tongues and warm bodies to sell.

Fuck his love for money and lack of understanding.

Something in the ocean was shifting and it wasn’t going to obediently remain contained. Evil didn’t work that way.

Everything was a mess and it only got messier when the second siren showed up alongside my ship.

The same woman who’d freed me on the island.

I knew she wouldn’t give up Dahlia so easily, so I wasn’t surprised.

Disappointed, but not surprised. I hadn’t spoken to many sirens long enough to judge, but I wanted to say she was pretty level-headed for her kind.

She read the situation and understood we needed each other to kill those beasts.

What she didn’t read was my inability to trust her and how determined I was to get to Dahlia.

For eighteen years, I went over a thousand scenarios in which we would see each other again.

I imagined coming across her face in a pile of heads dumped by hunters.

I imagined fighting her to the death. I thought of dying at her hands.

Of being dragged to the depths in her claws.

I imagined her slaughtering my entire crew before I could stop her.

I knew she wanted to. She longed to take her revenge on me.

I wasn’t foolish enough to think that seeing another crew of good men sliced to pieces and skinned alive in front of me was out of the realm of possibilities.

Dahlia had been my worst nightmare and my loudest demon since the day she called my name in anger on that black sand beach. After the day I killed her people in front of her as her mother had done to mine. And now that nightmare was on my ship and in the flesh, longing to rip me apart.

Could I blame her for hating me? No. Just like she had no right to blame me for what I did.

I wanted to think she knew how illogical it was just like I did, but neither of us could control the endless circle we were stuck in.

Momentum had locked us in motion, constantly chasing the other in hopes of ending the torment only to add more debris to our path.

Gus escorted one of the older girls into my chamber and I could tell by the way she hugged herself with her arms and lowered her head that she was thinking it was for much different reasons than it was.

It was not the girl whose life I’d threatened, but this one had seen the whole scenario play out.

They all feared me now. Was it worth it to get a reaction out of Dahlia?

Maybe. There was no point in regretting it after the fact .

Gus could speak the girls’ language. Not well, but even a few words helped us communicate with them.

From what we could tell, they were from far up north.

It was a place very few ships sailed to.

The ice in the water made it near impossible to move through the narrow channels and the cold was unforgiving.

So why the hell did the Cornwallis have the girls on their ship? It was a question I couldn’t begin to answer and one that left a cold and uneasy chill in my blood.

On the table in front of me was a map. It was well-used and many of the words were too faded for anyone to read, but I knew it too well to care about smudged islands and stained corners. To my left, Uther was looking over the same maps. When it came to navigating, he was one of the best.

Gus said something to the girl and she nodded timidly, glancing at the map.

I saw her eyes searching and trying to understand it, but it was clear after some time that she wasn’t accustomed to reading any sort of charts.

Her brows worked with concentration before she glanced between Gus and me and shook her head.

“She can’t read no map,” Gus grunted. “Doubt she’s ever sailed this far from home to have a reason to.”

I scrubbed my face with my hands and grumbled with frustration.

“Can’t get them home if we don’t know where that is.”

“Sailin’ them home seems risky,” Uther said. “Even in the warm months.”

“I’d still like to know where they’re from.”

“Could look at the maps from the Cornwallis,” Gus suggested.

I cocked my head at him. “We don’t have those maps.”

He huffed a laugh. “Mullins swiped a few. You know he’s teaching himself to navigate. He’s got a whole stack stuffed in his personal chest.”

I knew Mullins collected any parchment with words and charts on them. To hear that he’d swiped some from the Cornwallis was a relief because I did not want to circle back to that ghost ship.

“Get him for me,” I said .

Gus walked to the door, cracked it open, and called for Mullins. He must have been on deck because he was in my cabin in a blink, eager to help.

“Whatever you took from the Cornwallis,” I said. “Bring it here.”

He nodded and left to retrieve what I wanted.

He was back shortly after with an armful of rolled maps and leather-bound papers.

He dumped them onto the table and all three of us started to sift through it all, looking for something useful when the girl stepped forward from the corner.

I had almost forgotten she was still there.

I watched her eyes zero in on a drawing that had fallen out of one of the leather folders.

Then she pointed at it, saying words I didn’t understand.

On the parchment was a sketch of a mountain with an odd flat top and a large cave opening in the front that looked like a massive beast with a crooked yawn. I picked up the paper to read the sloppy writing on the bottom.

“God’s Throat,” I read.

The girl kept talking and nodding like I was on to something, but I couldn’t understand a damn thing she said.

“Says she’s seen that before,” Gus said, rubbing his brow. “At least that’s what I think she said.”

I took one of the maps from the Cornwallis and unrolled it over the one I already had out, searching for that landmark.

Or the name. Or even an “X” of some kind that would mark where we needed to go.

The girl was the first to pinpoint a place to look.

In the upper corner of the map was a scribble of words and symbols that didn’t fit the rest of the continents and islands.

Among the hand-drawn map additions was a shape vaguely resembling the sketch on the paper.

“Think that’s where they’re from?” Mullins asked.

“Toluuk,” the girl said, pointing excitedly.

“Toluuk?” I asked.

She spewed more words and then nodded, victorious.

“That’s about as far north as you can get before the water is just pure ice,” Gus pointed out. “I’ve heard of tribes living up there, but that place don’t treat ships too nice. In the warm months, they come south to trade. At least, that’s what Yutu told me.”

“Yutu? That strange kid you knew as a boy?”

“That’s the one. Taught me his language, he did. His dad and mine used to fish together. Maybe that’s how the Cornwallis got to them. Maybe they were at one of the ports.”

I sighed loudly, staring at the maps again. “The Rose can sail that,” I said, hanging my thumbs on my belt.

“Think it’s worth the trouble? Getting these girls home, I mean. Could just bring ‘em inland, make sure they find work. See to it they don’t end up on the streets or in a whore house. We’d be doing them a favor.”

I shook my head, reflecting on what a shithole the coastal towns were becoming.

“With the supplies we took off the Cornwallis, we can make that trip if we make a good trade. Port Devlin, perhaps.”

“What if their home is gone?” Mullins brought up. “What if they raided it and killed everyone?”

I glanced at the girl, watching her lean over the map with renewed excitement.

“That’s not the face of a girl who saw her home burn. And I wouldn’t bet on the Cornwallis doing anything so risky. That ship was manned by cunts and beggars.”

“Don’t matter how they got them. Is there a reason you want to risk taking them that far north?”

“The reason is that we’re out here looking for sirens to sell. I’m not showing up in our town with a ship full of young girls instead. No one’s getting their oily hands on them.”

“We’ve got two of the bitches on board,” Uther added. “That’s more than enough to see to it we get our pockets filled. And like Gus said, we can make sure the girls get honest work. The young ones can go to the convent until—”

“I said no. ”

The world was ugly enough. Dragging people from a faraway tribe into the twisted bullshit that was our violent reality was a sin I wasn’t keen to add to my long list of offenses.

I wasn’t a kind man by any means. Maybe I wasn’t even a good one, but traveling north would benefit me in two ways.

It would give me time to think and it would clear my conscience a bit.

I deserved that. We all did. One good act wouldn’t grant me passage to heaven, but maybe I’d feel better for a day.

And the days of travel could give me insight into what else was plaguing the ocean as of late. It would give me time with her.