Page 28 of Wicked Tides
Jack pulled back the hammers on his pistols and I slid my cutlass from my belt, trying to remember my training.
My father turned to another crewman. “Light a torch.”
Fire. The only way to communicate when the fog was thick. I watched as the crewman pulled one of three sticks from his cloth satchel and a fire steal from his pocket. The other men encircled him, weapons out. If someone were to attack, they’d go for the torch bearer first before he could light a flame that could be seen from the ship.
But then the silence was broken by a deep woman’s laugh that seemed to bleed from the wind itself. My father stepped in front of me and pulled out a pistol to fill his other hand.
“Come out, witch!” he challenged.
From the black rocks appeared the vague shape of a woman. She emerged from the dark stone itself like she was made of volcanic slate, but as she stepped down, her skin shifted and changed like an octopus shedding its camouflage. She became the color of the fog with deep shadows encircling her eyes and darkening the tips of her clawed fingers. She was nude with a dusting of silver across her skin that gave most sirens away. Long, hip-length tendrils of inky hair hung down her back and over her breasts. I watched her stalk down over the jagged rocks with bare feet as if she was floating.
She was as beautiful as a nightmare disguised as a dream. Tall, feminine, and shrouded in an icy chill that pierced right through my guts.
The womantskedher tongue, her black eyes unblinking as she slowly shook her head.
“What a cruel trick, Woelf,” she said, her voice seeming to dance all around me. “Hemsbane in the blood.” She glimpsed the body parts scattered on the beach. “Sacrifice a few worthless worms just to hunt us down.” Her lip curled into a wicked smirk when she looked at my father again. “But as you are willing to sacrifice your people, so am I willing to sacrifice mine.”
My father let out a chuckle just as the torch lit fire behind us. The bearer stood, clutching it in his hand and glaring at the fiendish woman before us. Her black eyes flitted toward the orange flame and her jaw hardened with irritation.
“What a filthy thing,” she hissed. Then her vision caught the glint of firelight on my father’s cutlass and her eyes narrowed. “Softscale. How I’ve missed you. Still with your poor sister’s blood in the metal, I assume?”
My father was past succumbing to the taunts of a siren’s words.
“And soon with yours as well, Reyna.”
“Please, Woelf,” she feigned fear. “Do not hurt us. We are just so starving. I beg you.”
Her words faded into laughter like she couldn’t keep it together. And then her gaze fell to me.
“A child. I’ve never liked the taste of them, but yours? I might be able to stomach it. Or perhaps I’ll let him watch while I gnaw your skin off your bones… and then I’ll be merciful and do him quickly.”
My father squeezed his sword but remained calm, standing his ground. I was determined to do the same, but I could not dismiss the fear wrenching my heart. Confidence was terrifying and Reyna had enough to make any man quiver in his boots.
“So? What were they?” Reyna continued, gesturing to the remains of the slaughtered men across the beach. “Volunteers? Murderers? Rapists? No worse than you, I suspect.”
“Spare me,” my father finally responded, raising his pistol toward Reyna’s head. She didn’t even flinch. “It doesn’t matter who they were.”
“I suppose it doesn’t. They died slowly either way. And the hemsbane did the trick…” Her smile flattened and her dark gaze seemed to get even darker. “But not to all of us. What a clever plan, shrewd Woelf.”
Suddenly, the alarm bell from the Mother’s Fang echoed through the night. The men looked back with alarm, but my father kept his eyes firmly on Reyna. Movement caught my eyes in the rocks as more bodies emerged from the black stone. Sirens, every of one them as frightening as the next. Their flesh changed in texture and color to match Reyna’s silvery-white hues. Hideous beasts. Black widows in slick, cold skin. And they were all there todevour us.
~ 12 ~
Vidar
On the frigid tide, their screams will flood
Their blade is a song and our blade is blood.
~A Pirate Shanty
I awoke to screams. Terrible, blood-curdling screams too high pitched to be coming from grown men who’d spent their lives becoming hard, unbroken killers.
The fight had been short. There were far too many wicked women for our small group of men to overcome. They’d outsmarted my father. Where most people thought they were nothing but bloodthirsty animals, hunters knew better. They’d caught on to my father’s tricks.
A crew of criminals had been promised freedom if they could get across the Aisle of the Black Water to the Broken Promises. They were given a ship and as much alcohol as they desired. I was sure they sailed with smiles on their faces and bellies full of rum, but their passage was cut off and they were lured into the bay as most merchants and smugglers were. Their body parts littered the inlet, their blood darkened by the hemsbane that had been added to every bottle of rum they’d been gifted.
Hemsbane. An herb parents put in babies’ milk. Harmless to humans in small doses, scentless to sirens, and yet lethal to their wretched insides. The first time a crew was sent to sea filled with hemsbane, the sirens were easy to track and easier to pick off. My father returned with six heads that day and other hunters with none.
