Page 8 of Wicked Tides #1

Vidar

Their voice alone, you may not hear

But when bronze bells hum,

you know they’re near.

~A Bronze Bell Engraving

“Move your asses, boys! We don’t have all day!” I shouted.

My crew chuckled as they hauled supplies onto the boats to be taken to the ship. Sacks of beans. Jars of pickled vegetables. A fresh stock of hens and a few goats. The list was standard and therefore easy.

Gus stood leaned up against the dock’s wooden post where a small bronze bell hung over his head, lightly swinging as the foot traffic vibrated the flooring around it.

He had one hand tucked into his belt while his other held a pipe to his mouth.

Streams of white smoke puffed from his nostrils as he let his gaze roam over the docks, watching every person tying nets, gathering gear, or knotting their boats.

I followed the direction of his gaze to a boat packed with a dozen men rowing to shore from around the bend. I recognized the obnoxious purple color of Collin’s hat before I could recognize his face.

“Prick,” I said, taking a lean on the post next to Gus.

“Oy, would you look at that,” someone said. To my left was a fisherman holding a bundle of torn nets. He was missing teeth and his hair wasn’t far behind, but the drink was so potent on his breath that I doubted he cared about any of it. “Cap’n Collin is back.”

“Wonder if he’s seen any of them weird fish,” someone else said in passing, dragging barrels of crabs across the mud.

“Weird fish?” I spoke up.

“Aye,” the man with the nets replied. “Thought they was sirens at first. But I’ve never seen sirens move like they did. Almost thought they’d sink me boat the way they kept bumping ‘er hull.”

“You get a good look at one or are you just talking about your drunken stupor?” Gus asked.

The man laughed. “Who knows anymore? Ocean’s full of things my head will never be able to wrap around. I saw what I saw or I didn’t see what I saw, but in the moment, it sure felt real enough.”

He staggered away with his damaged netting and I took note of how the fibers of the ropes were shredded in multiple places like someone had taken a knife to it. Could have been sirens. Could have been rocks. Could have been anything, but it was enough for me to spare a thought.

“Madman, he is,” Gus said under his breath.

“Around here, madmen are mad until they’re not,” I said.

We both let out a mild chortle before turning our attention back on Collin.

An eerie silence passed between us as we watched the man and a fraction of his crew float up to the docks. It was then that I noticed why Gus was on edge when he was usually relaxed.

Crammed between two men sat a woman in a poorly fitted dress made of stained cotton. Long auburn hair was a stark contrast to her pale, almost bluish skin.

She wasn’t human .

And she was very much alive.

The woman’s body was as voluptuous as a Greek statue. Her clothes were loose and clearly not her own. Tiny wrists were bound with irons that had already made her bleed and around her face was a leather strap that covered her mouth and buckled in three places behind her head.

I glared, the pit of my stomach twisting with warning.

The woman sat stiffly, but when the men started to stand and shuffle off the boat, her head turned, eyes quietly observing.

She was absent worry or fear. I’d never met a siren who showed either of those emotions.

Collin himself with his expensive coat and embroidered hat with the stupid feather in the band, grabbed the woman by her arm and hauled her to her feet, forcing her off the boat.

She didn’t struggle or protest but rather kept her eyes blankly forward.

“What the fuck,” I muttered to myself, scrubbing a hand over my face.

“A living one on our shores,” Gus sighed a breath of smoke. “And to think I been tellin’ myself this whole time it would never stick.”

“We’ll be seeing a lot more of it pretty soon.”

“Don’t feel right.”

“No. No, it doesn’t.”

Collin walked toward us with the siren in tow, a smug look on his sun-chapped face. He took off his hat and tucked it under his arm, revealing brown hair tied into a low ponytail.

“Gentlemen,” he greeted, looking down his nose at a couple of my men as they carried a crate across his path.

Gus was better at pretending he liked someone when he didn’t and inclined his head at the man, taking another puff from his pipe.

“Collin,” he said, ignoring the siren he had by his side.

She looked obedient. Docile. But I knew better than to think a siren could be tamed or even beaten into submission. They feared nothing. Not even pain. I eyed her cautiously, but she continued to ignore everything and everyone around her.

“Getting ready for a hunt?” Collin said .

“Looks that way,” I returned, unable to take my eyes off the prisoner.

“Pretty, isn’t she?” Collin said, stroking a finger across her smooth cheek. Still, she was like a doll.

“I wouldn’t use that word, but she’s definitely eye-catching.”

“Never seen one like her before,” he continued, taking a strand of her unusually reddish hair between his fingers. “Thought she’d pull in a lot of coin.”

At that, I saw the faintest flare in her nostrils.

She was hearing everything Collin was saying.

She was feeling it. She wasn’t scared, though.

The look in her inky eyes was enraged. She was a mountain, quiet and still, with a fountain of molten lava beneath.

I narrowed my eyes at her, glimpsing her bound hands to see her clenching her fists so hard she was drawing blood.

“I wish you luck,” Collin said. “The waters are growing sparse and yet somehow more dangerous.” He looked at me with a lazy sense of mocking. “But we all know how you like the storms, Bone Heart.”

I felt the woman’s gaze on me before I saw it.

The moment Collin said my name, something in her shifted.

Her eyes flicked toward me, dark as night and yet blazing with hate.

She knew my name. I smiled internally at the thought.

My name had spread far and wide throughout the deep and I enjoyed how it shook the spirits of her kind.

I glanced her way and for a second, our eyes met like a hammer against reddened steel.

There was the subtlest twitch in her jaw when she glimpsed my chest, which was absent of any jewelry save for a necklace with a few teeth hanging on it.

I sensed it.

Gus sensed it.

The only one too stupid to sense it was Collin.

The woman’s eyes widened like all the rage and hunger had burst inside her.

She shoved Collin away, her nails scraping into the fabric of his fancy coat.

He stumbled back and she reached up, snapping the leather gag off her face so quickly that no one could stop her.

Her focus zeroed in on me as she spoke in a tone that pierced straight to my soul.

Whether our language or theirs, any man could understand. The voice was one and many all at once. Whispers and seductive tones coiled together to sound as otherworldly as most sirens looked.

Kill them all, the voice said, doing its best to wrap me in its barbed embrace.

I could hear the tones. I could hear what they were trying to do to me, but they would fail. I didn’t wear a silentium like my crew, or any man who hunted the seas as I did. No, I learned long ago that a simple trinket could be snatched right off your neck.

The bronze bell hanging above my head started to hum, the undertones of that terrible voice of hers vibrating through the metal until the air was filled with a haunting moan akin to when the wind caught a groove in a cliff just right.

And at that very moment, my chest began to flutter with that same subtle vibration.

All eyes went to the bell when the hum began and then swept quickly back to the siren.

In a matter of seconds, my hand was on my blade.

I ripped it from my belt and took a wide step toward the woman as her words pounded against my ears.

My hand jutted out and clutched her slender neck, squeezing until her voice was cut off.

It took three steps for me to have her pinned against another post where I could run her through.

I held the tip of the sword to her chest, but before I could thrust it into her heart, I heard the hammer of a pistol cock.

I stopped, my eyes catching the metallic barrel only inches from my head.

Fucking Collin.

“Now, I went through a lot of trouble to get this one. You kill her and I kill you.”

I turned my glare on him, baring my teeth when I heard several other guns cock and blades unsheathe behind me.

I didn’t have to look back to know it was my crew.

The sound of them loading the boats had ceased altogether.

I half glanced over my shoulder to confirm and saw Mullins right beside me, jaw muscles pulsing as he pointed his pistol at the fancy cunt, Collin.

Collin’s throat bobbed as he swallowed and then he masked that nervousness with a sly smile.

“You break it, you buy it,” he said with a shrug.

“She still has a tongue,” I hissed.

“Of course, she does. Keeps it fresh.”

Collin slid his pistol into his belt and then replaced the gag over the woman’s mouth, shoving me away from her as soon as the buckles were secured again.

Then he gestured to one of his men with a rope.

The man—or boy—was too young to be on a hunting ship.

He hobbled forward with a limp and started wrapping the woman tightly in additional binds until she could no longer lift her arms. Then two other men took her by the shoulders and started forcefully leading her away from the docks.

“Happy hunting, boys,” he said, putting his hat back and tipping it mockingly.

I watched Collin go with his unenthused crew and siren prisoner, clutching the hilt of my cutlass so tight, my knuckles cramped.

Slowly, I heard my men putting their weapons away and turned to face them.

All eyes were on me, quietly asking how the fuck we were going to deliver living sirens if I couldn’t even hold myself back from killing someone else’s captive.

I was asking myself that question, too.

Gus was still leaning against the post puffing on his pipe only now his hand was resting on the butt of his pistol instead of in his belt.

Taking a deep breath, I brushed my hand over my hair and slid my cutlass into its sheath.

“Back to work,” I ordered.