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)
“What are you doing?” Aerik says and I look over my shoulder to see him free from the cell and standing over me, blood running down the side of his head. “She’s dead. We’re free.”
I shake my head, glancing back down at her. Already the pink flush that she always had in her full cheeks is fading away.
She’s fading away.
Maybe she was gone before I even touched her.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone die before. Even when my mother would bring home sailors for us to eat, they were dead a long time before they got to the depths of Limonos.
But Daphne…she’s been like a mother to me, if not a friend. The only friend I’ve had these last ten years.
I can’t lose her. If I lose her, I lose the only good thing I had in my life above and I’m cursing myself for never telling her this. I’m cursing myself for never telling her the truth about me. Maybe she would have believed I was once a Syren, maybe she wouldn’t have, but it would have been nice to have someone know my secret, someone I trusted.
Now I’m truly alone.
“I can’t leave her, Aerik,” I say, the tears starting to burn under my eyes. “I can’t.”
“Then you’re on your own,” he says and staggers out of the room and into the rest of the ship.
I’m aware that there is chaos all around me. There are screams from above deck and below, shouts and more gunfire, muskets now, and guns on the top of the ship, and the cannons on this level going off again and again. There’s smoke and there’s the smell of burning and tar and though the ship has stopped shaking so violently, it’s still shuddering with each blast from the cannons.
And yet my world is all whittled down to just one thing: my lady-in-waiting.
Dead.
Aerik may have gone but it feels so wrong to leave her like this. I don’t know what death means right now. I don’t understand how she can just cease to be.
But she isn’t moving. She isn’t breathing.
She has ceased.
And if Aerik ends up escaping and I don’t, then I’m going to regret it forever. Daphne would want me to at least try.
It takes time for me to do something about it. I just can’t seem to move. Minutes stretch on and I’m holding my breath hoping, praying, wishing that she will open her eyes and come back to life. What if I walk away and then she comes out of it? What if I could have saved her but I didn’t? How can I just leave her like this?
But she doesn’t come back.
So I lean down and close her mouth and press my lips against hers, as is the custom in Limonos, and with tears streaming down my face, I get to my feet unsteadily. Syren’s have the ability to rejuvenate people with their kiss and though I never knew anyone who had done it, the elders said that a kiss could even bring a drowned sailor back to life.
But Daphne remains dead.
And have to flee. I’d say I’d wasted so much time already, but none of these last moments with Daphne could have been called a waste.
I turn and stumble out of the room, into smoke that obscures the cannons. The gun deck seems to be empty now, the cannons have ceased firing on all ends. I feel my way to the stairs and then up to the second level, looking for a window out, when I’m suddenly accosted by someone, hands taking a rough hold of my elbows.
“Where do you think you’re going, strumpet?” A tall bald-headed man has a hold of me. He’s built like a bear and his breath smells of beer and pennies. “Thinking you might escape during a little fight, did ye now?”
“Let me go!” I growl at him and try to get out of his grasp but it’s useless. His fingernails are sharp and they dig in hard enough to pierce my skin. I grit my teeth.
“No, I won’t be doing that. Let’s take a stroll, shall we?”
“Sterling!” someone yells from above. “Don’t leave your post!”
“The winds is in the sails!” Sterling yells back. “Can’t you see the ship will be in our shadow before long?”
Then he pulls me up the stairs to the top deck and the sun is so bright after all that time beneath that I can barely see. By the time they adjust, I expect to see bloodshed and mayhem on the deck.
Instead it’s a different scene entirely.
The enemy ship looks far behind the stern, so far that I can’t even tell what flag they’re flying. They aren’t retreating but instead the speed of the Nightwind has picked up several knots and we are leaving them in our wake, causing my heart to sink even further than it already had.