Before I could formulate a response, Persephone snarled. She flung out a hand, and frost raced across the rail Oliver leaned against. He drew back with a shout of his own.
Cultists ran at us from both directions. I fell in against Persephone’s back, jabbing wildly with my harpoon. I didn’t make contact, but they slowed their approach and began to circle warily.
There came a loud blast, accompanied by screaming. Before I could make out what had happened, one of the men in front of me drew a gun. An instant later, it exploded in his hand. Hot fragments whizzed past, and he stumbled away before I could more than glimpse the mangled flesh which was all that remained of his forearm.
“The ketoi is a sorceress!” Oliver roared. “Put your guns away, you fools. She’s setting fire to the powder in them!”
Oh no—Oliver was a sorcerer himself. “Librarians, do the same! Now that he has the idea—”
My warning came too late for one man. His rifle burst into flinders, and he fell back over the rail, into the heaving sea.
With the librarians distracting the cultists, some of the ketoi had managed to climb aboard. But once there, they staggered in circles, dazed by the song. One male spotted Persephone; he seemed to try to struggle through the haze cast over him by the song, his hand lifting in her direction.
A robed cultist stepped up behind him and ran him through with a blade.
“No!” Persephone screamed. “Stone Biter!”
She tore free from my grasp and sprang to the bridge, clawing her way up and onto it. Her eyes blazed with fury and anguish, and she didn’t even seem to feel the pain of her wound through her rage.
Oliver laughed, a chilling, mad sound. “Now you know how it feels to lose someone you love, creature.” Then he thrust out his hand and began to chant.
An invisible force seemed to punch into Persephone. She cried out, and blood appeared on the bandage swaddling her midriff.
No. A cry of my own escaped me. I wanted her to flee, to dive over the side, to get away from Oliver and his madness, from the siren and her song of despair.
Persephone didn’t, of course. She raised her head, her tentacles coiled and ready to sting, even as she pressed one hand against her wound. Her legs shook as she took another step toward Oliver.
He laughed. “Now you die.”
A second chant, and this time the invisible blow sent Persephone to her knees…before she collapsed altogether. Still. Unmoving.
Oliver drew a wicked knife from within his robes. “I’m not going to make the same mistake twice,” he said. “Let’s see you recover from having your throat cut ear to ear.”
Chapter 10
Every instinct begged me to freeze in place. To hide. To flee. To close my eyes and wait for someone to do something, anything, to save us.
But the librarians were locked in their own desperate struggle. The ketoi were still rendered helpless before the siren’s song. There was no one else.
Just me.
I ran to the harpoon cannon and shoved the dead man from it. His body hit the deck with a sound like wet laundry. Pulling out the locking pin, I pivoted the cannon around and pointed it up, toward the bridge roof.
Lightning danced across the sky, and the waves howled. Oliver bent low, but the siren stood before me, her hands uplifted, her terrible song of despair magically amplified to ring out across the waves, down into the depths. Into the very minds of the ketoi.
I could try to hit Oliver and risk striking Persephone instead. Or I could aim for Joanna, and free the ketoi from the slaughter raining down on them.
There was no time left. No time to dither, to fret, to fail to act.
I pulled the trigger on the harpoon cannon.
The sound nearly deafened me. The heavy iron head, packed with explosives, punched through Joanna’s chest and out the other side, to slam through the smokestack behind her.
The explosion ripped apart the funnel, sending fragments of hot metal in every direction. I dropped to the deck, covering my head as smoke and ash rolled over the ship in a wave. Sparks fell all around, stinging my hands.
I lifted my head cautiously, blinking smoke from my eyes. Persephone lay a few feet away, having been thrown clear by the blast. The siren’s limp form, threaded through with the whale line, lay nearby. The bone mask had fallen from her face and rolled between them.
Bile stung the back of my throat, but I couldn’t think about what I’d done. About the weight of killing a woman. Instead, I shoved it aside and ran for Persephone.
A heavy hand grabbed my arm before I made it three steps. Oliver slammed me to the deck. I tried to roll away, but he was too fast, and I found myself pinned beneath him.
“How dare you?” he snarled. Smoke from the explosion stained his face, and blood trickled from a shallow cut on his forehead. “I thought you were still the Maggie I always knew, the sweet girl who loved her family, who would never speak an ill word or hurt anyone.”