Page 60 of Wicked Tides #1

Vidar

We all serve a dark god

Bound by lies and tyranny

~Dema Dumos

One of the women in the village was sewing me up with a bone needle and a thread while I stared across the room at my wounded men.

The mutineers had all been killed on the spot while Boil, Jesse, and James all rested on cots, recovering from their wounds.

Thankfully, they were minor. A couple of split lips and bruises, but we’d all gotten out of it unscathed, for the most part.

Gus came to sit beside me as the woman stitching up my shoulder knotted the string and severed it with a small knife.

I had been lucky. The slug went clean through my shoulder and left nothing behind.

It hurt like a bitch, but I had been hit worse.

Gus reached out to poke at a bruise on my temple.

“Fuck off,” I said with a groan, swatting his hand away.

“Quite a night,” he said. “Quite a week, actually. We haven’t buried this many men in years.”

“Uther, the bastard,” I said through my teeth .

“He lost his silentium.”

“On the island. He was the last in the boat.”

“You think one of them bitches snagged him and planted ideas?”

“I do. But he didn’t agree with leaving Dahlia and Meridan alive in the first place. How much of it was under her influence?”

“And the others?”

“Each of them spoke up when I let Dahlia out of the holding cell.” I glanced at Gus, searching his one good eye for truth. “You think all of this was a mistake?”

He sighed heavily. “I think I trust your decisions. Like I trusted your father’s.”

“My father’s got a lot of people killed.”

“And yours may do the same one day, but I’ve never stepped foot on a ship thinking there wasn’t a chance I’d die on it. We all make choices. I recall one of your choices being to save my old ass on that very island where your father died. We choose to sail those dark seas.”

“Full of dark fates,” I sighed.

Gus leaned over to look at the healer’s handiwork.

“Stitched you up good, she did. You lost a fair amount of blood.”

“Been here a couple days and already brought the storm with us.”

“These people are resilient.”

I nodded and searched the room for my coat and weapons. I found both lying across a stool and put them on.

“What are you doing?”

“We need to bury the men.”

“Smalls and the others are already on it. You need to let that shoulder heal.”

“Then I’ll go to the water.”

“I don’t think that’s smart.”

“Dahlia’s been gone for hours. If she’s dead, we’re about to be visited by something far worse.”

Even thinking that she might have perished in the water made me feel as if I’d been punched in the stomach .

“What are you going to do? Take a swim to find her? Last I checked, you don’t sprout fins and we humans don’t take that freezing water well.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“I’m not going with you. My joints are hating the cold as it is,” he threatened as I walked out of the cabin into the chilled, early morning air. “Mullins! Dammit, go with the cap’n.”

Mullins was just outside sitting with a few other crewmen around a fire.

He stood quickly when I walked outside, rubbing fatigue from his eyes.

My men were somber, sitting with the bodies of the mutineers.

They’d all been covered up with thin blankets and were ready to be buried.

No one liked to see their crewmates dead, especially by their own hands, but the sea tested men.

Sometimes they failed and they let the madness and chaos claim them.

“Where we going, cap’n?” Mullins asked.

“He’s going down to the water to find his precious siren.”

Mullins fumbled to grab his gun belt and jogged to match my pace. As we departed for the coast, I saw my men staring at me from all directions. One of the lingering stares was David’s and as we passed, he set down the bowl of food he was eating and quickly caught up to us.

“Stay here, David,” I ordered.

“Not likely.”

“We’re all glad you are alive,” Mullins said as we left the village. “But we all see it, you know.”

“See what?”

“That you care about that woman.”

I tossed him a glare and then grumbled my irritation. “Don’t matter if I care about her or not. She saved my life last night.”

“I’ll say,” David added, walking as if he’d regained some of his confidence over the past few days.

“True, that is,” Mullins added. “We all saw Uther go at you with his blade. The way she stabbed him.” He shivered. “Don’t think anyone’s going to try to touch you with her around. ”

The thought made my already spinning head spiral out of control. I had seen Dahlia drive her knife into Uther. It was the second time she’d come between me and someone trying to kill me.

When we exited the cave and came to the water’s edge, I noticed the silence first. The water was placid and so blue it seemed tampered with.

Up on a cliff, I spotted a villager with a bow and arrows strapped to his back.

He was diligently scanning the water, but not likely for the same reason I was.

Another lookout stood further down the beach.

“They sent these men out to keep watch as soon as you went in to get stitched up,” Mullins said. He buckled his belt around his slender hips and chose a direction. “I’ll start patrolling down that way.”

I nodded as he headed down the rocky beach. David sighed and tied his coat tightly closed. Looking at him, I was reminded how young he was. I was barely younger than him when my life fell to pieces and though I tried to keep his together, I had failed.

Maybe there was no helping the course of things.

David headed in the opposite direction as Mullins without a word.

“David,” I said, catching him before he hiked too far away. He turned and I slid Lady Mary out of my belt, handing it to him. “Take this.”

“Lady Mary?” he said, wrapping his fingers around the hilt.

“You see one, you gut her.”

“What about you?”

“I’ve got my pistol.”

“I’ve got a pistol.”

“Just take it. Bronze is better for killin’ them. We’ll get you your own soon.”

He looked down at the cutlass. Lady Mary wasn’t pretty. She was full of nicks and she hadn’t gotten a good cleaning in some time, but she was sturdy. He ogled it as he walked away, but once more, he stopped before he was too far.

“I want her to be alright, you know,” he said.

“As foolish as it sounds, I do want her to survive. When I was about to drown on the Widow’s Smile, in that damn holding cell, I called out to the men and none of them stopped.

They was all trying to save themselves. Then she showed up.

Dragged me out of there and to the surface.

If she can do that, then I can wish for her safety, right? ”

The thought of Dahlia going down into the hold to fetch a boy she didn’t know was a puzzling one. She was a conundrum. From the day she freed me from that cage, she had been a giant mystery.

And I wanted to see her safe.

“Go,” I said, jerking my chin. “Keep an eye out and don’t let your guard down.”

David nodded and then finally slid my cutlass into his belt as he patrolled the other side of the beach.

The day dragged on with nothing to focus my attention on in the water.

In the distance, I caught the spray of a whale breaching the surface once or twice, but no sirens.

Not even the locals. It irked me a little that they hadn’t intervened when the damn Kroan waltzed onto land to attack, but we didn’t know them well enough to place any real blame.

Perhaps they were of a weaker, more cowardly sort.

The lookouts had switched shifts many hours into the afternoon and when the sun began to sink toward the horizon, Mullins returned from his trek, tired and hungry.

“Going back for some food,” he said. “I’ll grab us all a bite.”

He hesitated before leaving as if waiting for me to tell him I was finished searching for her, but I didn’t.

I was willing to camp at the water’s edge if I had to.

My shoulder was sore and I was tired, but I kept my eyes on the water.

I alternated between sitting and standing all day and leaned up against a large rock once Mullins left toward the village.

Down the beach, David strolled into view and gave me a nod, letting me know he was alright before he began another walk along the water.

It was all ridiculous. I wanted to reason that I was just volunteering to help the other lookouts in case another threat burst from the water, but I was there for far more selfish reasons and it was to see Dahlia returned.

Some nasty voice inside me told me she wouldn’t.

After all, other sirens were not her only threat in the water.

She still had the sons to contend with. I wanted to know what possessed her to leave like she did when she knew the dangers waiting for her, but I could not ask her if she was lost to us. If she did not come back.

The sound of steady wind was broken by water sloshing nearby. I stood and peered down the icy bank. It could have been anything. An animal. A siren. I wanted it to be Dahlia, though.

When I saw a hand jut out of the water, I narrowed my eyes, hoping. Then a head of black hair emerged and I started jogging in her direction, hand on my pistol in case it was not the siren I wanted to see.

But then that scar gleamed in the late afternoon light just right.

Dahlia clawed at the ground, dragging herself out of the sea with a strained grumble. My body wanted to grab hold of her and hoist her into my arms, but I tamed that impulse. It took every fiber of my self-control, but I did it.

“Did you get her?” I asked, trying to sound casual when really, my heart was racing.

She lifted her other arm out of the water and slung something on the ground at my feet like a heavy sack. When it rolled, I saw a woman’s gray face, jaw slack and eyes rolled back. Rigid torn flesh encircled the red crevice of her severed neck. I cocked my head at the trophy.

“You could have just said yes.”