Lira’s hand curls around my neck and she slumps on the hilt of my knee. “You’ve got good reflexes,” she says, and smiles in a way that detonates through me.
I tighten my grip on her. “You don’t.”
The Sea Queen snarls and whips around in a flourish to address the rest of her subjects. Everything she does is a show, every threat disguised as a spectacle. She is a performer as much as she is a queen.
Around us, the war comes to a pause.
“See how these humans can turn even my most loyal against me,” the Sea Queen says in Midasan, so even my crew can understand. “My daughter has fallen prey to lies and charm. So much so that I have to sully myself with this language to even get her to listen to me. You see now how the humans can kill us with more than just spears and knives? This prince” – she points a finger at me like a loaded pistol – “must die at the hands of the siren he has bewitched. And so I will restore her to her former glory.” She turns to Lira with a serpentine smile and raises her trident in a toast. “Long live the Princes’ Bane.”
It happens in seconds.
The Sea Queen pushes her trident toward the sky, and when her arms can’t stretch any farther, it ascends without her. Hovering over her head, then spinning so rapidly that the glare from the ruby becomes a perpetual ray of sunlight, blinding us all. And then just as suddenly it stops.
Lira rips my arms from her and pushes me away. I fall back just in time for the light to shoot like a spear from the trident into her chest. And then explode.
Lira is on her knees and her arms burst like wings from her sides.
An inhuman scream rips free from her throat and suddenly Kye is beside me, hand clamping brutally around my wrist. It’s only then that I realize I’ve pitched forward. That I was about to run to her again. That even now, with his hand gripping me so tightly that my bones crunch, I can’t take my eyes off her. I can’t let her out of my sight.
The light comes in a blast, but once there’s no more scream left in her, it curls down her body. Lira convulses, stiff and shaking all at once. Her eyes roll back and then close, and I can practically hear her teeth grinding together.
Everyone stops. My crew pauses in horror. The sirens watch fervently.
Some let out songlike breaths in anticipation, jaws hanging hungrily open. Others watch on in uncertainty, their eyes narrowed to slits and their fangs clamped across the edges of their lips. The siren from earlier – Kahlia – watches Lira’s every shudder. When her cousin’s neck snaps back, she blanches.
All the while, the Sea Queen salivates.
Against the crushed ice, Lira’s legs sew together. The skin melts and mingles until scales erupt from her feet and medley up to her waist. It’s a color I’ve never seen before, flecked with so many shades of orange, it’s like caught sunlight. It blends flawlessly into her hips, just below the curve of her belly button.
Above that, her skin begins to brighten.
It starts along the curve of her ribs and then curls out like a tide. It’s not that she becomes paler – I don’t think that’s possible – but her skin starts to glisten. Liquid light dancing down her arms and across her chest. Rolling over the newly delicate arc of her collarbone. Her hair streams over her shoulders like pomegranate beads, and when she throws herself back, arms spread wide, the snow flurries into an angel around her.
Lira arches, relishing the cold on her body, opening the gills that run across her ribs with every shift. She curls onto her side, half-facing the water and half-facing me. There’s a moment where she lies like that – eyes still closed, nestled in snow that mirrors her skin, never looking less human – where I feel strangely at peace.
Then Lira opens her eyes, and I see that only one is the blue I remember. And the other is pure hellfire.
40
Lira
I HAD ALMOST FORGOTTEN my strength – my speed – but when I dart into the water, it surges back through me. I roar a hunter’s howl beneath the surface, and the cold gurgles down my throat and slashes through my gills. It may not be the ocean, but it’s enough. Water as wild as I am.
Elian is watching when I emerge. There’s so much written on his face and so much rushing through me that I can’t seem to decipher one emotion from the next or decide which belong to him and which to me. Seeing him now is like seeing him with new eyes.
He’s brighter, more vivid. Eyes reflecting every glint of the sun and skin no less than the burnished gold of his land. Every inch of him is a contrast, light and dark mixing and rolling into one until I can barely think of looking away.
I lay my arms against the snow and watch him like a hunter.
“Bring me his heart,” the Sea Queen says.
Her order hisses through the wind, and when I tear my gaze from Elian, I see her fingers tighten over the trident, where her share of Keto’s eyes waits to be reunited with its sister. I can hear it now. The call of the two halves as they hover so close to each other. It’s too steady to be a song and too wild to be a drumbeat. A heartbeat, then. Thumping mercilessly in my ears, as the stains of my blood coat one and the stains of my mother’s magic coat the other.
“Take it from him,” the Sea Queen hisses in our murderous tongue.
There is a note of desperation in her voice, birthed from the fact that she thinks Elian freed the eye from its hiding place. She fears what will happen if he tries to use the eye against her and if its magic will overpower that of the trident she has used to enslave our kind into slaughter.
Elian may not know it, but right now the Sea Queen thinks he is her match.
I crane my neck to the side and hold out a hand to beckon Elian forward. His eyes twitch, but he doesn’t come, and I would smile if I didn’t think the gesture would crack my newly stone-etched face. Instead I lean my head back and breathe in the wind, letting my hair drift onto the water.
Behind me, the sirens begin to chorus.
Their melodies reach out and take ahold of the humans. Delicate refrains that cause the crew to sway where they stand, losing all sense of danger. Threats become dreams and fears a fading memory, until their hearts begin to thrum in time to the deadly aria.
“It’s beautiful,” Madrid says, her body slack.
Elian watches his enchanted crew linger on the melody of the Sea Queen’s army, bewildered at their sudden change. When he turns back to face me, his jaw pulses, and just that look nearly turns this impossibly unfrozen body of water into a glacier.
I smile, part my lips, and let the music follow.
At the sound of my voice, Elian walks forward, and when I turn my humming to singing, he drops to his knees in front of me. He still has a plan for every letter that follows in the alphabet and though he plays the part well enough, I can sense his heart racing through each beat. His movements are slightly too rigid. Too prepared. And I can see the wildfire blazing in his eyes.