Page 43 of Wicked Tides #1

Vidar

Broken are the seekers of light

For light can never be captured

~ The Sun King

“Fire!” I hollered, standing at the railing.

Smalls expertly positioned the Rose, coming parallel to the Widow’s Smile.

When the first canon fired, it nearly missed.

I knew the range of my ship. Perhaps I was a bit overeager, but Collin and his men were not equipped for a battle at sea.

That much I knew. We were privateers, but his ship had been designed to hunt sirens.

To trap them. It was small and outfitted with nets and harpoons.

The Rose had once belonged to pirates before I liberated her.

She was designed to maim other vessels and for the first time since I acquired her, I was using her to do just that.

Collin had been an idiot to challenge me. On the sea, where no one was watching, I would tear him apart and leave the whispers of his demise to the fish as they ate his remains.

“Fire!” I shouted again .

Each hit dealt more damage than the last and the closer we came, the better I could see the deck where Collin’s men were scurrying about like chickens without heads.

The plan was simple. Dangerous, as usual, but simple. All Smalls had to do was get the ship close and I knew he understood how to do that. I’d taught him, after all. And before me, his father captained a similar ship in the Navy.

As we sailed closer, I could see someone on the deck.

Someone out of place. Under the moonlight, it wasn’t hard to see that it was Dahlia.

She was shimmying out of loosened ropes on the mast just as a canon ball tore it down above her head.

She darted to the side, a small dagger in hand, and began cutting through men, appearing behind them like a shadow only to slice them open.

A dozen of my men stood behind me, ducked low as Collin’s crew began firing blindly at us with muskets. The idiots.

“Hooks ready!” I ordered.

Four men stood and rushed to join me at the railing, tossing grappling hooks across the water and onto the rigging as Smalls drifted parallel to the Widow’s Smile.

With Dahlia distracting them from behind, my men began to swing across.

Once the hulls of the ships were nearly brushing, I leapt onto the railing and bounded across to the Widow.

I landed on top of a man as he scampered in confusion.

Drawing my cutlass, I ran him through. As soon as another charged me, my pistol was drawn.

One squeeze and the metal slug was between his eyes.

My vision skimmed the chaos for David and instead found Dahlia, blood dripping down her chin and soiling the front of her chemise.

Her eyes were black as obsidian and feral.

She met my gaze for a split second before she turned and sprinted down toward the lower level.

I intended to follow, but the battle distracted me.

Eighty men converged on that deck, painting the Widow’s Smile red.

I damned the laws and rules the moment Collin threatened me. The moment he took David with him. The moment he stole the girl.

When he took Dahlia …

I cut through men with a fury I had been keeping tethered inside me. One after another, Collin’s crew fell. They were tired. Poorly fed. They were unmotivated and uncivilized. Collin had created a crew from street rats and criminals and in battle, it showed.

The Widow’s Smile was beginning to drift off tilt. She was taking on water. Soon, she’d be another sacrifice to the hungry ocean. A relic on the bottom of the sea. Forgotten.

Seeing a gap in the masses, I took the chance to head toward the hold only to see David emerge on deck.

Herding him up from behind was Dahlia, the dagger still in her hand.

I half expected her to use it on him. To cut his throat in front of me would have been the perfect vengeance, but she didn’t.

Instead, she shoved him toward Mullins with force just as he was rushing past them.

Mullins quickly took him and started dragging him toward the Rose.

I marched toward them before I heard my name roared over the ruckus.

“Bone Heart!” Collin yelped.

I spun to see him with a pistol poised toward my head from across the deck. Just when the crowd shifted, he pulled the trigger. Fire lanced through my ear and I staggered, pressing a hand to the side of my bleeding head.

He’d missed.

I looked back up at him, my fingers tightening around my cutlass.

As I was moving toward him, he began frantically loading another slug into his pistol.

I wiped my bloodied hand on my shirt and shoved past stumbling combatants as the ship tilted further to one side.

The floor was uneven and soon, we would not even be able to balance on it.

But I only needed to kill one man. The rest could drown for all I cared.

As they leaped and fell into the water, I knew very well that they’d all perish there before long.

I was near Collin when Dahlia came out of the clusters like a wraith, jamming her knife into his stomach.

Her blow was met by the sound of his pistol firing again.

Dahlia twitched just before she wrapped her other arm around him and dragged herself and him over the side of the ship.

I rushed to the railing just as they hit the water and disappeared beneath the surface.

“Cap’n!” someone shouted.

I looked up at James waving his arm at me from the Rose. The Widow was sinking and David was safe on the other ship. But not the young girl.

Dahlia would have brought her out of the hold if she had been down there. If she didn’t, it could only mean one thing.

I growled at the thought and quickly dove down into the water.

Men were frantically trying to find purchase and were being shot down as they clamored for the nets hanging over the side of the Rose.

I grabbed hold of one and climbed up out of the water but stopped to look back, waiting for Dahlia to surface.

I wondered how deep she would take Collin.

I wondered if she’d drown him, eat him, or slice him to pieces down there.

All around, men were thrashing in the water, realizing quickly that they were all about to die there.

If any managed to survive my wrath, perhaps I would take them into my crew, but it didn’t look promising for them.

I watched them fight each other to grab hold of anything they could until a dark shape burst from the waves, taking one of the men under quicker than I could process.

The air shifted. The water seemed to get colder. A thin fog suddenly rolled in like a beast coming to toy with its prey.

“Sons!” Meridan screamed from above.

I held fast to the netting as men were plucked from the surface and dragged beneath by shadowy hands. The chilling sound of clicking and shrieking filled the air, mingling with the blood-curdling screams of dying men.

“Cap’n!” Mullins yelled. “Climb!”

I stayed silent, watching when suddenly I saw her. She burst from the waves, her movements terribly off. She seemed desperate, using only one arm to push through the water. I absently reached for her.

“Here!” I called to her .

She moved toward me as fast as she was able, stretching out to take my hand. We were mere inches away when she was abruptly sucked down again

“Vidar!” James chided.

But I was not in my right mind. I sheathed my cutlass and I leaped off the netting into the water like all my years of honing my skills had vanished. I dove beneath the surface to see near darkness around me.

But it was far from silent. That deep, rhythmic clicking persisted loudly down there.

The muffled cries of men in agony filled the water.

The moonlight barely breached the surface, but one thing was visible.

Dahlia’s black fins were iridescent amongst the blackness.

The slight sheen of her lower body caught my eye and I swam toward her.

I found her struggling against the long, wiry limbs of her captor, the dagger still in her hand.

She was pushing desperately for the surface of the water.

It was the only reason she hadn’t been dragged deeper like the unlucky men around us.

I was a good swimmer, but no match for her kind in the water. I knew that. I did the only thing I could and I reached for her. She reached up, her hand finding mine in the madness. I kicked toward the surface as she thrashed to break free.

And as if we’d been sent a blessing from the heavens, another figure darted into the frenzy.

White in color and glowing like moonlit snow, Meridan swam by me and pulled my cutlass from my belt.

In a blink, she’d thrust it into the neck of the attacking son.

His clicking turned to high-pitched whining that nearly broke my eardrums

Quickly, Meridan hauled Dahlia and me to the surface and we pushed for the nets. Meridan’s legs emerged before she even got out of the water and she began scurrying up the netting.

“Climb!” my men were calling.

Dahlia, half-conscious, clung weakly to me as I lifted her from the water. I should have dropped her. It would have saved me. It would have saved my men.

But I didn’t .

I pulled Dahlia up and secured her in my arms as James and Mullins climbed partway down to aid us. Smalls was steering us away, pulling us from the sinking Widow and its debris.

I pushed Dahlia upward and as quickly as we were able, we passed her from man to man until she was onboard.

And by then, she was not moving at all. Meridan jumped over the railing beside me and rushed to her sister’s side.

She was lying on her back, her shirt clinging wetly to her form.

Billy came running up with a lantern, shedding some much-needed light on Dahlia only to reveal the blood gushing from her side.

She had been shot. I’d suspected it, but now I knew. She was clutching the wound, but it wasn’t her only one. She had holes in her hands. Tears in her clothes. Her long, black tail, at least twice as long as her body, sat limp and littered with deep abrasions.

Meridan hissed at anyone who tried to touch her, including me. She pulled Dahlia into her lap, pushing her wet hair off her face.

“I can help her,” I said.

“She doesn’t need your help! She needs the water.”

I gestured toward the infested ocean around us as my men continued to fire on attacking beasts, pulling up the nets with haste as the ship gained distance from the massacre.

“Be my guest.”

She gave me a glare that could cut skin and cradled Dahlia tighter.

“The island. There are caves,” Dahlia muttered.

“We’re going back to the island,” I confirmed. “Can you make it?”

Meridan took a breath and calmed herself enough to give me a tense nod.

“Will we be safe on the island?” I asked.

“The sons cannot stay long from water. Not like us. But no,” she said, looking up at me. “We will not be safe. Safety is a fantasy you humans cooked up in search of bliss.”

I shrugged. “I’ll take that over being on the sea right now. To port!”