Page 63 of Wicked Tides #1

Vida r

Dark seas, dark fate, to the ocean we go

With a heart full of vengeance and a tale of woe.

~ The Wolf Cub

Darkness was all around me, thick and stifling like the smoke of a giant fire. At first, it was almost a relief to be surrounded by absolutely nothing. No noise. No chaos. There was a time that I thought I thrived in chaos, but deep down, I knew I eventually would seek peace.

But that darkness wasn’t peace. Despite the emptiness it was trying to disguise itself as, it was full of strife.

I looked down at myself to find I was dressed in my captain’s attire.

My heavy boots. My cotton trousers and slouchy shirt full of sweat and blood stains.

I was even wearing my coat, which had once been a deep red but was now barely a dark brown.

There was… something in that darkness. Something unseen. I didn’t know how or why, but I knew in my gut that it was large. Formidable. Something of life and death. Of sanity and madness.

Terrifying .

A great beast made of nightmares and oblivion, hungry for flesh and souls. I could not see it. I could simply feel it and it reminded me what fear was.

A shuddering breath pierced the suffocating silence and I spun, realizing ripples beneath my feet as if I were standing on water.

And then I saw her. Dahlia was standing before me dressed in a thin, white dress through which I could see the silhouette of her slim yet strong form.

Her heartbeat flooded the strange, hollow expanse of that wretched place.

She was afraid. I was standing right in front of her and her eyes were looking somewhere beyond.

Somewhere that terrified her. As if invisible arms were wrapped tightly around her, she seemed unable to move.

“Dahlia,” I said.

She shivered at the sound of my voice, but still, she could not see me. I moved forward, reaching out to grab her shoulders and give her a little shake.

“Dahlia.”

She screwed her eyes shut and suddenly, like she’d been freed of her bonds, she let out a whimpering breath, and her muscles gave out beneath her.

I held her aloft until her eyes fluttered open and she finally looked up at me.

Her lips parted as if she was about to speak before a slew of shadowy figures appeared around us like a pack of rabid dogs in search of flesh.

Suddenly, Dahlia was ripped from my grasp and sucked into the darkness.

I reached for her, lunging forward only to feel my foot sink into the ground.

I was in an endless body of cold, dark water with no indication of which direction was up.

But there she was below me being pulled deeper into the void.

I reached for her but she was too far from me and drifting farther.

A flood of slimy hands rose up from the black to wrap her in their bony, webbed fingers.

Blood filled the water around us in thick, wafting clouds.

I swam as fast as I could, but I was getting nowhere.

And then everything changed again as if I was a rope swinging on a mast in high winds. I was flying from one disaster to the next and that time, I was in a prison cell. One I knew well because I’d been there before.

I was in Treson Harbor.

How I got there, I didn’t know, but I had been stripped down to nothing but my trousers. No boots. No coat. My body ached, slouched on the stone floor of a small cell, my wrists bound to chains that coiled at my sides.

A familiar laugh echoed through the hall and it made the sour taste of bile rise in my throat. Whitton walked into my cell, his fat body shrouded in streams of moonlight bleeding through a barred window. His outfit was as meticulous as ever with threads too perfect for his character.

“You were supposed to rid the seas of singing bitches,” he snorted. “Not rid it of the Widow’s Smile.” He clicked his tongue, pacing slowly. The sound of his heeled shoes on the stone floor made me want to cut off his feet. “All for the one woman you’ve been wanting to kill since you were a boy.”

I tested the chains on my wrists to find they only stretched enough for my arms to lift over my head.

Even if I wanted to, I would not be able to reach Whitten and wring his thick neck.

I slowly stood, glaring daggers at the bastard as I came to my full height over him.

He smirked, picking something out of his teeth with his fingernail.

The sound of him sucking it loudly off his finger made my eyes narrow to envision all the ways I’d break the bones of his face if only he took one more step toward me.

I’d always hated the man, but now, that hate had grown into a disease and seeing him again made me murderous.

Whitton took a lantern from the wall and chuckled as he crossed the hall outside my cell and ventured into the one across from me.

As the lantern light flooded the room, I noticed a body chained to the wall, hands raised above her lax and unconscious form.

My lips parted, but I refrained from saying her name in front of him.

Somehow, I felt as if he would be able to use it to do terrible things .

Just as Whitton lifted his slimy fingers to touch her cheek, more figures lurched from the shadows around him. Tall, hunched, and in a state of perpetual wetness, four xhoth closed in on Dahlia as if Whitton did not exist to them nor they to him.

I stepped forward, my heart beating against my sternum like a wild animal against the bars of a cage. My chains snapped with tension and Whitton whirled to look at me with a wheezing laugh.

“You may be Vidar Bone Heart, but even you cannot break iron chains.”

He stepped away from Dahlia and hung the lantern on a wall hook as the sons put their hands all over her body.

He looked me right in the eyes as he said, “I only want the tongue. Her body is yours.”

The sons hissed, their oversized eyes glowing in the darkness.

One of them wrenched Dahlia’s head back so hard, she was awoken by the force.

Disoriented and only half-conscious, she gradually took in her surroundings.

Her eyes widened with dread when she saw the xhoth hovering over her, their fingers exploring every inch of her.

The thin shift she wore did little to shield against their touch.

Dahlia squirmed, testing the metal binds around her wrists. She bore her teeth, kicking and struggling only for one of the monsters to grab hold of her jaw and force her head back even further. The same beast reached deep into her mouth as she writhed in protest.

“No!” I bellowed just as he pulled back his hand and I heard a terrible, wet ripping sound.

Dahlia’s noises turned to strained, agonized screams as the xhoth turned with her torn tongue in his grasp, dripping with hot blood. Whitton held out his hand and the xhoth dropped the strip of raw, bleeding meat into his palm.

“Whitton, you bastard! You know not the pain I will inflict on you,” I roared.

The xhoth returned their attention to a coughing, whimpering Dahlia as Whitton turned feral and bit into the raw tongue like an animal, covering his mouth with her blood.

Dahlia screamed, gurgling as blood filled her hollow mouth.

The beasts ripped her from the wall and threw her to the ground before me.

A red pool formed beneath her mouth when she rolled to her stomach to spit it up.

“We break body,” one xhoth said, his voice just as unnerving and grotesque as I remembered it.

“Then father break mind,” another said.

In the corner, Whitton was now crouched over his gory meal, tearing the tongue to shreds between his blunt teeth.

“What the fuck?” I rasped.

Dahlia was crawling forward, blood continuously gushing from her mouth.

I tried to get to her, but my irons kept me back and I couldn’t help shouting in desperation.

Two of the xhoth grabbed hold of her ankles and dragged her back so that another one could rip into her dress.

He tore it right down the middle and sunk on top of her, pinning her body to the floor as she screamed.

A coward would have turned away. I was no coward.

I pulled on my chains until my wrists were bloody and ground to the bone.

Until I’d stripped the skin from my hands, but still I could not get to her.

I watched as they violated her. Sadistically.

Aggressively. It was only when Whitton appeared in front of me, his face covered in blood and pieces of Dahlia’s shorn tongue between his teeth.

He had but a tiny piece left and he quickly grasped my hair, shoving the bite down my throat with a stream of boisterous, infuriating laughter spilling from his mouth.

The moment I felt it slide down into my stomach, my mind imploded with fury and madness.

I tugged once more on my binds and felt my arms break free.

I rushed at Whitton and took hold of his fat throat, digging into him with my fingers until his flesh gave.

Blood spurted from his neck as I drove him up against the wall.

I slammed his head back. Once. Twice. Again and again, I smashed his skull into the stone until it no longer made a thumping sound, but a noise akin to tossing a slab of meat onto a stone cutting table.

His body slumped against me and I stepped away with disgust, my vision red .

Pivoting, I saw Dahlia straddling one of the hissing beasts. The others lay dead around her, their insides on the outside as she continually jammed a sharp piece of metal into the corps’s chest. She was covered in blood. In dirt. In soot. She was an animal.

I moved toward her, grabbing her arms before she could bring the shard down on the xhoth again. She jerked around to look at me, her eyes red and swollen, but she did not truly see me. She was panting, her face awash with blood.

And then realization dawned and she quickly got to her feet to embrace me. I would have embraced her back. In that hellish place, I wanted to.

Only she couldn’t. The darkness swallowed us and tore us apart like the current of the ocean on a stormy day. Then everything fell quiet and still as if I’d returned to that nothingness from which it all began.

Dahlia’s screams faded into a dense silence and the pain on my skinned wrists ebbed, leaving me feeling empty and weightless…

until I opened my eyes and saw the wooden thatches of my hut above me.

A thin layer of sticky sweat made my shirt cling to my chest as I rose up from my bedding to find I had returned to what now seemed a forgiving reality.

Taking in a few deep breaths, I came to my senses. The horrors in the dream faded and what I felt for Dahlia there transformed. She was in my head, just as Meridan said she had been many times. How many times had she invaded my sleep without me knowing? How much of what I was feeling was by design?

I pressed the heels of my palms into my eyes and groaned.

I had been a fool.