I’m still not quite cold enough for the ocean that birthed me.
“Give it to me so we can get on with it,” the Sea Queen says impatiently.
I frown. “Give it to you,” I repeat.
The queen holds out her hand. “I don’t have all day.”
It takes me a moment to realize that she means the heart of the prince I killed.
“But . . .” I shake my head. “But it’s mine.”
What an incredible child I’ve become.
The Sea Queen’s lips curl. “You will give it to me,” she says. “Right now.”
Seeing the look on her face, I turn and swim for my bedroom without another word. There the prince’s heart lies buried alongside seventeen others. Carefully, I dig through the freshly placed shingle and pull the heart out of the floor. It’s crusted in sand and blood and still feels warm in my hands. I don’t stop to think about the pain the loss will bring before I swim back to my mother and present it to her.
The Sea Queen strikes out a tentacle and snatches the heart from my open palm. For a while she stares into my eyes, gauging my every reaction. Savoring the moment. And then she squeezes.
The heart explodes into a gruesome mass of blood and flesh. Tiny particles float like ocean lint. Some dissolve. Others fall like feathers to the ocean bed. Shots plunge through my chest, slamming into me like whirlpools as the heart’s magic is taken from me. The jolts are so strong that my fins catch on a nearby seashell and rip. My blood gushes alongside the prince’s.
Siren blood is nothing like human blood. Firstly, because it is cold. Secondly, because it burns. Human blood flows and drips and pools, but siren blood blisters and bubbles and melts through skin.
I fall to the floor and claw the sand so deeply that my finger stabs a rock and it cleaves my nail clean off. I am breathless, heaving in great gasps of water and then choking it back up moments later. I think I might be drowning, and I almost laugh at the thought.
Once a siren steals a human heart, we become bonded to it. It’s an ancient kind of magic that cannot be easily broken. By taking the heart, we absorb its power, stealing whatever youth and life the human had left and binding it to us. The Adékarosin prince’s heart is being ripped from me, and any power it held leaks into the ocean before my eyes. Into nothingness.
Shaking, I rise. My limbs feel as heavy as iron and my fins throb. The glorious red seaweed that covers my breasts is still coiled around me, but the strands have loosened and hang limply over my stomach. Kahlia turns away, to keep my mother from seeing the anguish on her face.
“Wonderful,” says the queen. “Time for the punishment.”
Now I do laugh. My throat feels scratchy, and even that action, the sound of my voice so wrought with magic, takes energy from me. I feel weaker than I ever have.
“That wasn’t punishment?” I spit. “Ripping the power from me like that?”
“It was the perfect punishment,” says the Sea Queen. “I don’t think I could have thought of a better lesson to teach you.”
“Then what else is there?”
She smiles with ivory fangs. “Kahlia’s punishment,” she says. “Per your request.”
I feel the heaviness in my chest again. I recognize the dreadful gleam in my mother’s eyes, as it’s a look I’ve inherited. One I hate seeing on anyone else, because I know exactly what it means.
“I’m sure I can think of something fitting.” The queen runs a tongue across her fangs. “Something to teach you a valuable lesson about the power of patience.”
I fight the urge to sneer, knowing no good will come of it. “Don’t keep me in suspense.”
The Sea Queen leers down at me. “You always did enjoy pain,” she says.
This is as much of a compliment as I’m going to get, so I smile in a way that is sickeningly pleasant and say,“Pain doesn’t always hurt.”
The Sea Queen shoots me a contemptuous look. “Is that so?” Her eyebrows twitch upward and my arrogance falters somewhat. “If that’s how you feel, then I have no choice but to decree that for your birthday, you will have the chance to inflict all of the pain you like when you steal your next heart.”
I eye her warily. “I don’t understand.”
“Only,” the queen continues, “instead of the princes you are so adept at trapping, you will add a new kind of trophy to your collection.” Her voice is as wicked as mine has ever been. “Your eighteenth heart will belong to a sailor. And at the ceremony of your birth, with our entire kingdom present, you will present this to them, as you have done with all of your trophies.”
I stare at my mother, biting my tongue so hard that my teeth almost meet.
She doesn’t want to punish me. She wants to humiliate me. Show a kingdom whose fear and loyalty I’ve earned that I’m no different from them. That I don’t stand out. That I’m not worthy to take her crown.
I’ve spent my life trying to be just what my mother wanted – the worst of us all – in an effort to show that I’m worthy of the trident. I became the Princes’ Bane, a title that defines me throughout the world. For the kingdom – for my mother – I am ruthless. And that ruthlessness makes each and every sea creature certain I can reign. Now my mother wants to take that from me. Not just my name, but the faith of the ocean. If I’m not the Princes’ Bane, then I’m nothing. Just a princess inheriting a crown instead of earning it.
6
Elian
“I DON’T REMEMBER THE last time I saw you like that.”
“Like what?”
“Put together.”
“Put together,” I repeat, adjusting my collar.
“Handsome,” says Madrid.
I arch an eyebrow. “Am I not normally handsome?”
“You’re not normally clean,” she says. “And your hair isn’t normally so—”
“Put together?”
Madrid rolls up her shirtsleeves. “Princely.”
I smirk and look in the mirror. My hair is neatly slicked back from my face, every speck of dirt scrubbed away so that there isn’t an ounce of the ocean left on me. I’m wearing a white dress shirt with a high-button collar and a dark gold jacket that feels like silk against my skin. Probably because it is silk. My family crest sits uncomfortably on my thumb, and of every piece of gold on me, that seems to shine the brightest.
“You look the same,” I tell Madrid. “Only without the mud smears.”
She punches me in the shoulder and ties her midnight hair away from her face with a bandana, revealing the Kléftesis tattoo on her cheek. It’s a brand for children taken by the slave ships and forced to be murderers for hire. When I found her, Madrid had just bought her freedom with the barrel of a gun.
By the doorway, Kye and Torik wait. Just as Madrid, they look no different. Torik with his shorts unraveling at the shin, and Kye with sharp cheeks and a smile made for trickery. Their faces are cleaner, but nothing else has changed. They’re incapable of being anything other than what they are. I envy that.