Page 30 of Wicked Tides
Only her voice was not the voice of a woman. It was the voice of a siren, slow, whispery, and melodic. Beautiful. Mind-warming and yet the thrill of danger coiled its bony fingers around it. It sang toward me, flooding my thoughts. My limbs. It repeated over and over, burning the world around me until the bone dagger and my father were all my eyes could focus on.
And without my necklace, those tones vibrated through me like the threads of a spider’s web.
Kill him.
My foot slid forward through the thick sand. My father watched me but made no motion to intervene. I bent to pick up the weapon and rose again to see my father drop to his knees on the ground.
Now I knew a broken man. Now I knew what it was like to die before your heart stopped beating.
“Don’t, boy!” Gus’s distant voice called out.
Iwantedto kill him. The more the voice came to me, the more my hands itched to see it done. It was a suggestion first… and then a need. Adesire. It tightened its grip until it was my will itself. I clutched the hilt of the dagger tight and moved forward, every bit of my vision focused solely on my father.
Kill him.
I drew closer to him. He was unmoving and kneeling in surrender. My hand twitched to cut a hole in his throat. No… his heart. My eyes trailed across his body in search of a place to cut.
“This will anger you beyond reason,” my father whispered, his voice only loud enough for me to hear. “This will turn your soul dark and your heart to bone. It will harden you, son.”
“He’s your father!” Gus said, his voice growing ever softer behind the nagging whispers saying to end it.
I inched closer, raising the tip of the bone knife to the divot beneath my father’s throat where the laces of his shirt were loose and revealed his sun-tanned skin.
“Use it,” he said through his teeth, staring up into my eyes. “Bronze and blood, my boy.”
Kill. Him.
The dagger slid forward, cutting through skin. Red pooled at its tip and I watched, my hands mine and yet someone else’s at the same time. I felt the blade scrape against bone as I dragged it upward, splitting my father’s throat up the middle. He rolled his head back and stared up at the clouded sky, eyes wide. His mouth filled instantly with blood and one gurgling breath splashed a warm stream of it across my chest.
My hand released the knife and in turn, the whispering tendrils tied to my will loosened their grip and silence overtook the beach. Not even the backdrop of wailing crewmen could be heard. The sky had darkened as if I’d been standing there for hours over my father’s corpse. The bone knife still stood upright in his neck, but his skin had turned pallid.
The greatest hunter on the tides had been reduced to a cold pile of flesh and bone by the hand of his only son. I glanced down at my red-stained fingers and recalled all that had transpired. A heavy knot mademy stomach turn and I nearly threw up. I was so outside myself that when two of the women took me by my arms and dragged me back to my little cage, I didn’t resist. I was almost a corpse myself, limp and spent and utterly in shock.
Vidar Woelfson had killed his father. That’s what they would say. I was a murderer. A stain on my family name. If I was not to be killed next, that is.
~ 13 ~
Vidar
Theireyes inspire a thirst
But your ears will betray you first
~A Warning from a Madman
Reyna was not done with me yet. I believed her only regret was not making my father watch.
Her song continued.
For three days, it festered in my head. In my soul. It twisted me into something not myself. Something empty and rotten. My boots had been taken. I wasn’t sure why. Maybe she didn’t want me hiding anything in them. A sharp stick. A stone I could use to beat someone over the head. I could think of a hundred things I could use against my enemies. I strolled barefoot, back and forth, carving and slicing and serving up pieces of flesh to the bitch and her sirens. It didn’t hurt as bad to do it while under the influence of her sickening lullaby, but at night, she forced me back into my tiny cage where she released me from her hold so I could recall everything my hands had done while my mind was being whipped into submission.
A submission my body was all too happy to accept.
They had not fed me over those few days. Perhaps they planned to starve me, force my labor, and leave me to the tide when they were finished getting fat on men I once knew.
Nightmares had never been so vivid. This was not just a bad dream. It was hell itself and Reyna was the devil. No, she was worse than the devil. She was something more primal. More inhuman.
My hands were crusted with salt and blood, my fingernails stuffed with the flesh of the dead. She didn’t force me to carve up my dad. Maybe she was saving that part for last just to make sure I was well and truly shattered.
