Page 7 of Wicked Tides #1

Dahlia

I saw my corpse and from its

mouth came the hate of a thousand dead

~Ghosts of War

The storm seethed. The ship rocked. Men were screaming as we painted the deck with their hot blood.

One by one, we cut them open, spilling their soft insides on the floor.

The two on deck were first. I opened one’s throat with my knife, silencing him forever before he knew we were even there.

Meridan finished the other one quickly, covering his mouth with one hand to muffle his screams as her teeth tore a hole in his jugular.

She favored the taste of the freshest blood.

She looked up at me with blood-smeared lips. “The taste of hemsbane is faint. We can feed on them.”

I noded before I forced my way into the captain’s quarters and butchered the man sleeping there. I did not even stop to see what he looked like.

Kea and Voel were already slithering down into the bowels of the ship and soon, Meridan and I followed, picking off anyone we found on the way to the forecastle.

We killed as quietly as we could, certain we’d find a majority of the crew below deck.

Waking them all at once would be a chaotic bloodbath.

The bloodbath part I could deal with. The chaos I could do without.

I didn’t want anyone getting hurt.

On the way, we passed stacks and stacks of cargo tied down with rope nets.

Wooden boxes, barrels, and large rolls of furs, leather, and cloth were piled to the ceiling.

Sinking the ship after the slaughter would deprive the coastal towns of large amounts of trade goods.

A hint of something resembling happiness teased my thoughts.

We searched every room we passed, getting a feel for the kind of ship we were about to sabotage, but we couldn’t find anything important enough for a ship to be braving a storm and rocky shores to transport.

Up ahead, the cabin was filled with at least twenty men. I could smell their filth and hear their deep breathing. They were fast asleep and perfect for the killing. I turned my knife backward in my hand, preparing to stab each man in the heart, whether he was awake or not.

“Dahl,” Meridan whispered, grabbing my attention.

She was standing in the doorway of a dark room, her white eyes blinking with confusion.

“Should we…” she paused a moment. “Should we kill these ones, too?”

I furrowed my brows and peeked past her into the dark chamber. Stepping forward, I could smell a plethora of other bodies, but ale and foul breath weren’t prominent on the ones in the other room like they were on the crew.

I let my eyes adjust to the darkness and found two holding cells with wooden, barred gates.

Inside, I could see six forms. Two of them were young women, their round faces filled with innocence and youth.

Perhaps teenagers. The other four were children.

Young children. They’d all been stripped of any real clothing and I knew well enough that humans weren’t as tolerant of the frigid, harsh temperatures at sea.

In the back corners of the cells were thin blankets, all damp and filthy, for the girls to sleep on.

The group was huddled up close in a cluster as far from the bars as they could get.

I knew they couldn’t see us in the dark like I could see them.

Perhaps they saw Meridan’s glowing freckles and silvery hair, but me?

I was dull in the night with inky hair and dark eyes.

I could look upon them and know they weren’t looking back.

But that made it easy to see their fear. Their fatigue and sadness. The bruises on their skin and the cracks in their dry lips.

“Well?” Meridan asked.

Empathy for humans was hard to come by among my kind. They weren’t worth a thought, especially in my experience.

But they were kids. Young kids. I stared at them, finding it hard to imagine my blade sinking into their malnourished, weakened bodies.

Looking back, all three of my sisters were watching me, waiting for my decision. The fact they had to ask me what to do made it obvious that they had reservations as well.

But the last time I trusted my sympathies, it destroyed my life… and the lives of others.

I glanced back at the kids and watched their skinny limbs tremble in the dark.

I was a killer. I enjoyed killing men. Pirates. Hunters.

Children were different. At least, I wanted them to be.

Kea stepped up beside me, the glow of her deepwater skin illuminating one side of my face.

She was the same as Meridan and was easy to see in the dark.

One of the girls gasped, speaking in a language I didn’t understand.

The look of fascination on her girlish face was not what I expected to see at all. She pointed a shaking finger.

“Pasaio,” she said.

I cocked my head to the side with confusion, watching the other girls duck their heads and huddle closer together, whimpering softly.

“They’re from the ice,” Kea said. “Much further north. There’s a clan there. ”

“The Maruhk,” I muttered. “I know.”

“They sometimes deliver fish and seal carcasses to the locals and the locals sacrifice willing villagers once a year in thanks. At least, that’s what I’ve heard.”

I scoffed. “Cooperation? Between humans and us? Another rumor spread by hopeful lips.”

Kea shrugged. “They’re only rumors. But she just called us sea angels, so perhaps they’re based on something true. Not that we can ask those coldfins about it. They never show their face outside the frozen waters.”

“How do you know what she’s saying?”

“There was a sister in my clan who was a northerner. Those frigid waters aren’t much different from deephome.”

No one ventured far enough north to see the Maruhk.

Some clans didn’t even think they existed anymore, but hearing Kea confirm it piqued my curiosity.

To live in waters so cold and covered in ice seemed impossible, but the furs and leather stacked on that ship suggested the crew was coming from somewhere where fur and leather were abundant.

A northern tribe that relied on it to survive the cold seemed logical.

Believing sirens could have any sort of honest relationship with humans, however, seemed too strange.

“Well, we can’t kill them,” Meridan said. All eyes fell on her. She looked almost ashamed to have spoken up. “They’re just children. Cold, frightened children.”

Her words strengthened my resolve. I needed her there to say what I wanted to.

“They’re human, ” Voel said. Her gaze snapped toward me. “I’ll do it if no one else wants to.”

“We’re not killing them,” I said.

“Dahlia—"

“We’re not killing children,” I repeated, staring at Meridan’s face where my own naivety reflected back like I was staring at myself eighteen years ago.

But maybe I liked it. Maybe I missed her .

Those girls reminded me of the thing I could have been, but I never got the chance. I was born, and innocence ran away screaming.

“So? What do we do with them?” Voel asked.

I slowly walked toward the bars and crouched down in front of the girls. They could see me now. Barely, but it was enough. I wasn’t even sure they would understand my next words, but perhaps I was saying it for me more than them.

I held a finger to my lips and smiled softly.

“Cover your ears now, darlings,” I whispered. “It will be over so much sooner than I’d like.”

It took a moment for the girls to understand. It wasn’t until I lifted my palms to my ears to demonstrate that they knew what I was saying. It was one of the older girls that got it first and she started to help the younger ones so each of them was cupping their hands over their ears.

Kea was already gone. Voel was close behind her.

I turned and looked over my shoulder, my smile turning into a grimace.

Meridan had a disgusted look about her and turned to join her sisters.

I let the vision of the children in the cell fuel me when I heard the first blood-curdling scream from the sleeping quarters.

I marched after my sisters and found Kea straddling a man in his hammock, driving her knife into his chest over and over again until she was painted red.

Voel was dragging a man back by his ankle after he’d tried to run away.

Meridan was just leaping onto a man as he was sitting up, her teeth gnawing a large chunk of flesh right off his face.

His teeth were uncovered once his cheek was torn away and he let out a gurgling shriek.

The coppery scent of blood filled the room and the beautiful song of death vibrated in my bones.

I took a deep breath and clutched the handle of my dagger, cutting off a man’s escape as he tried to flee the room.

My knife swept across his throat faster than he could figure out I had one.

Hot blood sprayed my face and I reached out with my other hand to grasp his wiry hair, keeping him upright as he bled.

He looked at me with wide eyes, clutching at his open throat as I licked my tongue over my bloodied lips .

He tasted foul. Sour. Full of drink and rancid food. And the hint of old hemsbane was bitter.

His eyes glazed over with shock and then slowly lost their luster entirely as death gripped him.

When he fell, his shirt stretched to the side, revealing a barely healed mark on his left pectoral where I expected to see a bronze pendant. It was sloppy but recognizable. I’d seen the same crescent symbol with a slash through it a thousand times before.

“What are you looking at?” Voel asked, striding toward me, a strip of torn flesh in one hand.

“I don’t think we’re the first sisters to have visited this ship,” I said.