Page 87 of Of Song and Scepter
A merman slithers to the bars as I pass, reaching with knotted fingers to snatch at my fin. I avoid it, sinking down to his eye level. I wrap my hands around the slime-coated bars to anchor in place.
“Tell me where I can find the newcomer,” I whisper. “Abyssal siren, pale white skin.” The prisoner glares up at me with hollow eyes. He’s unlike any merman I’ve seen before—his skin is green as reedgrass. Small, withering leaves sprout along his scalp, hanging in unkempt strands. His splotchy tail curls limply on the floor of his cell. What is an Estuary merman doing here?
“A dozen cells that way,” he gurgles, nodding down the hall. “The one at the end.” He coughs loudly, spewing a cloud of brown bubbles. The force of his movement causes a dead leaf to fall from his scalp, floating aimlessly through the water.
“Thank you,” I say, but he doesn’t answer.
I count the cells as I approach, formulating my speech. I almost died trying to escape our blood oath, and I refuse to be her puppet any longer. She can spoil in here for all I care, I’ll tell her. I won’t kill her—that would be too easy. I’ll let her rot until tonight’s high tide, and when Tephra comes to claim her dues, I’ll be right here, watching.
Yeah, that’s good.
Odissa’s voice filters through the murk before I reach her cell. “I thought I smelled regret. Look who’s come to apologize.”
She hovers in a cage of metal and stone. Her silver tail treads the dirty water, like a spoon stirring sludge. Her hair is plucked clean of its adornments, hanging now in a long, knotted mess around her face. Her eyes are sunken and dark. The princess’s once-pretty face twists into Odissa’s signature scowl. Her neck and hands mottle with burned skin, oozing with thick white slime.
“I’m not here to apologize.”
Her voice manipulates to mimic my words from that breakfast. “She’s not the real princess, Soren.Bah! Traitor!” She lunges for the bars of her cage, fingers wrapping around the metal. Her knuckles pale with the pressure of her grip.
I hold my distance, floating just out of her reach. “You were going to hurt him. He needed to know.”
Odissa rolls her eyes. “I wasn’t. Not right away. I was going to suck him dry, slowly, over the long span of his life.”
“And then?”
“You betrayed me, Enna! We had a fucking deal, and you revealed me to the enemy.”
“I paid my price. And now, I’ll watch you pay yours.” I sink to the stone floor, settling in to wait for Tephra to come. “I’m free of you, Odissa.”
“I should have killed you.” Odissa sneers. “I should have slit your throat, just the same as I did to your fucking scum parents.”
“Parents?”
Odissa tips her head up, laughing with a cloud of dirty bubbles. “You never figured it out?”
My mind churns, reeling backward through time. “My mother hired you to kill my father?”
She flashes me a wicked smile. “No.”
I replay the sequence of events of that fateful day. Odissa infiltrated my father’s house and killed him with a knife to the throat. Instead of killing me, too, she took pity on me. Shedecided to take me home to meet my mermaid mother, the female who hired the death deal.
“Your cunt mother was running her trap at the tavern, bragging about how she secured a good life for her half-blood daughter. Lord Valomir’s littlest pet. She made it too easy.”
We found my mother dead in a cave. She’d been dead for days. Realization dawns with a sharp pain in my chest. “You killed her,” I whisper, unable to muster more volume.
“You had something I never did. Those looks—you can sneak into places I could never go. The perfect camouflage. I needed you. I needed a stupid little half-breed guppy, someone I could train. Someone I could break.” She says this like it’s obvious. And maybe it was, all along.
I hear her voice filtering through the haze of memory—“Once we get your first kill out of the way, you and I will be unstoppable. Just think of the things we could do together. We could dismantle the Abyssal Kingdom, siren by siren; make them grovel in the dark, make them bleed. Would you like that?”
This life she offered, I knew I would like it very much. The quiet, vulnerable guppy within me cowered with terror as my desire for vengeance grew. It expanded and flexed, stretching to fill every inch of me, suffocating my childish fear. My fingers tingled with new warmth.
“If I do this, I’d become a—”Murderer. Monster. The words stung as they cut through my young mind. And still, that feeling inside me stretched and purred, liking the sound of it. I wanted it. Desperately.
Odissa studies me through the bars of her dungeon cage, waiting for my reaction. My magic stirs in my stomach, a weak supply after days in a fever.
“You monster!”
Odissa smirks. “Yes. But there are worse things to be than deadly.” She’s quoting the same thing she said to me then.
