Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 144411 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 722(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144411 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 722(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Dread shocks my system.
What if Nerissa led Edonia right here? What if this was all part of her master plan? What if there is no destiny but something that she controls?
I’m thinking that over in horror, refusing to feel betrayed, while I watch as the crew keep hacking away at the Kraken’s tentacles. It’s a massive beast the size of the ship, yet with the cannons firing into it from below and the strength of fight that the Brethren is showing, it seems to be giving up.
I run closer to the edge of the deck, stopping beside Matisse who gives me an up-and-down look of approval. “Thank you for the blood, by the way,” he says in his French accent. “You taste magnificent.”
I just shrug off the strange compliment while Thane yells, “It’s retreating!”
“Fill the sails!” Ramsay yells from the aft deck. “Let’s outrun the beast!”
“Aye!” the crew shouts as they start running to and fro.
“All thanks to Maren!” Sam says, stepping up on the crate beside the rail. She raises the nearly empty bottle of my blood in the air. “Thanks to your mermaid—”
A purple-black tentacle rises up from the other side, right behind Sam as she stands there at the edge. I open my mouth to yell her name but the tentacle curls back for a moment then strikes so fast that I choke on the sound.
The Kraken punches a hole straight through the middle of Sam, obliterating her heart.
“Sam!” I finally manage to scream. I run toward her, my cutlass raised, and start hacking away at the tentacle that is sticking straight through her body. I stab and slice and cut, tears rolling down as she falls off the crate and lands face first onto the deck.
The tentacle then retreats, with Sam’s heart still pulsing in the suctioned tip.
“No!” I scream, aware that the others are running toward me now, yelling for Sam, yelling for me, horror taking over the ship.
Then another tentacle appears, and as the one with Sam’s heart slides back into the sea, the other one goes straight for me.
I try to leap out of the way, but the tentacle is fast. It curls around me like a fishhook, the slimy suctions sticking painfully to my skin, then it raises me in the air and starts pulling me overboard.
I twist around, trying to free myself, and the last thing I see is the deck of the ship, Ramsay running to the tentacle with his sword raised, Thane kneeling on the deck beside Sam, and Sam lying there in a pool of her own blood, dead.
Then I’m pulled straight down into the ocean.
Straight to Edonia.
CHAPTER 38
Maren
The Kraken who has me moves quickly but it’s not alone. When I turn my head to look back at the surface, I see another one still battling with the ship, though it seems weakened from the fight.
It continues to swim down, taking me as a hostage, and at first all I see is the dark blue of the deep rising up to meet me, that infinite abyss that stretches on forever. It doesn’t take long before I spot the bottom, a dark red reef that reminds me of blood, and in the middle of the towering reef, in a circle of sand, is Edonia.
The Kraken’s grip on me tightens, as if it knows I’d try and squirm away. I try anyway, attempting to loosen myself from the suctions but they cling on to my skin so hard that I’m afraid they might tear my skin right off.
“Here she is,” Edonia calls out to me in her smooth, malevolent voice. “How I’ve been waiting for this day.”
I stop my struggling to gape at her as the Kraken delivers me, holding me out like a hard-won prize.
Edonia looks more or less as I remember, but even more powerful and menacing. She seems taller, her shoulders wider, and her white hair is longer, turned into pearlescent writhing eels that snap at the water. The red in her eyes is no longer a bright coral but dried blood, bordering on black, and they seem to take up her whole eye so there’s no white left in them.
She smiles at me and her teeth rival mine, sharp as knives.
I compose the look of awe on my face and give her nothing back.
“I know you’ve been waiting for this day too,” she says with a knowing tone. “My sweet ink-haired girl, I remember it like it was yesterday when you called upon me, only miles from here if you can believe it. So fresh, so young, so full of innocence. It’s hard to believe that you’re the same Syren at all, and it’s not because you have legs. You seem so much…older. And I know, twenty-six is not old, not down here in the deep, but up there…”