Page 4 of The Withering Dawn
To my surprise, the woman climbed over after me and fell to her knees, her small dress doing even less now to cover her seemingly frail body. I raised my head to look at her and then propped myself up on my elbow, utterly confused as to why she was there when the open ocean was all around us.
“Who is this?” Cathal said.
“I don’t know,” I answered.
“What do you want us to do with her? She looks starved half to death.”
I stared at the woman for a while, waiting for her eyes to say something, but her expression was flat, drained off all discernableemotion. There was so much innocence in the way she presented herself, but I knew the stories. I knew what her kind was capable of.
“Put her in the hold,” I sighed.
He opened my cell door. Maybe he didn’t know what I was, but he opened it, and I was unsure what to do. He and his men seemed more interested in the ship’s treasures than me.
And then that awful monster washed out from the corner it had been dumped in two days prior, reminding me of other horrors I didn’t want to face. I didn’t exactly want to be noticed when they were pulling the chests from the hold where I was being kept. Then again, I had no other way out. There was a time that I would have been content sinking to the bottom of the sea and being forgotten or even getting a bullet to the head to end it all quickly. Those times came and went. Other times I wanted freedom more than I wanted air.
But no matter what I wanted, it never came to fruition. And when the man opened my cell, my mind was a mess battling the thought of escape and the cold grip that fear had on me.
When the stranger spoke as if he cared whether I perished on that ship or not, I was taken aback and the confusion only got messier.
If he had any room for mercy in his heart, it was only because he thought I was a woman. But I wasn’t a woman. Not the kind that was used to mercy or even deserving of it, according to most.
The man was big, sturdy, and he had the earthiest shade of hazel-green eyes I’d ever seen. The tawny skin of his face was trimmed in a layer of stubble that traced his jaw and from his leather hat fell thick tresses of black hair in waves that hung past his shoulders. When he grabbed me, his grip was firm. My lack of food made me a bit weaker, but even so, I could tell it wouldn’t have mattered with him. He led me across the sinking ship and when my struggles irritated him enough, he scooped me up and began carrying me to another.
I didn’t want to go. Not really. But I didn’t know what else to do. I’d been lost for a long time, forced from one place to another with no say in the matter. Even if this man didn’t know who or what I was, there was a hint of kindness in his eyes. Perhaps, for once, my heart wasn’t deceiving me and he was not a monster like the others.
I could have argued with myself longer if Mikal didn’t shoot him and cause us to plummet into the water.
I writhed out of his arms, suddenly offered a chance at freedom for the first time in years. The open ocean was all around me, deep and dark and…
Uninviting. Wrong. Heavy and endless like a giant fissure trying to swallow me whole.
I swam from the stranger, suppressing the shift that would fuse my legs into one, long fin. I hadn’t shifted in so long; I was almost afraid of what it would feel like and what it would do to me. I was afraid of the giant world around me, too. Among the monsters that lurked beneath and the enemies that swam those waters and sailed the tides above, I was alone. Weakened. Unfamiliar with it all. Unfamiliar with myself.
I turned back, searching the murk for the man that had pulled me off that ship. The man who freed me from my prison. Perhaps he was cruel like all the others… or perhaps he wasn’t.
I cut through the water, the scent of his blood strong amongst the other odors permeating the sea. Gunpowder, wood, and whatever sparse amounts of food the men still had on that damned ship all clouded my senses, but his blood was unmistakable. I found him struggling against his injured shoulder and gripped his coat, trying to get him to the surface. When we breached, his men were quick to lower the nets for him to climb onto the other ship.
Again, part of me screamed to take my chance at freedom now that he was safe. I didn’t know if I would get another opportunity. Perhaps I’d made a mistake by saving him. Perhaps I was not good at reading people and this man was the cruelest of them all and had only opened my cell to lock me in another for his own entertainment.
But I couldn’t bring myself to think that.
When he coiled his arm around my waist and pulled me against him, I stiffened, my fingers itching to hold him. I looked up at him, shaking under his observant stare. He was unsettling because I could not see the same shameless cruelty behind his eyes and I feared it was a trick of my mind. Maybe I’d finally broken.
I should have just left, but the naïve girl in me was clinging to him too hard as if I was being sucked into a mud pit and he was an outstretched branch. Like he was the only good in the world and I was desperate for a taste.
Then, the longer he looked at me, I could see it. The slow and subtle shift in his expression when realization started to set in. He saw my teeth. He saw my skin. He wasn’t a fool, he was a pirate and pirates knew the seas just as well as hunters did.
I swallowed, anticipating his blade sliding through my gut or the hot burst of a bullet through my skull.
“Have you a tongue, señorita?” he said, an air of disappointment in his gaze now like I was a loved one that had lied to him.
He looked at me now like I was a snake coiled to bite.
I shook my head. They’d cut out my tongue two weeks ago to prevent me from using my voice against anyone. Not that my voice was potent enough to do much of anything. It likely wouldn’t havebeen effective at all even if I tried. My kind didn’t have a strong voice to begin with and I’d been missing my tongue for years. In just a few days, it would be back, but for the time being, I couldn’t form words.
The man sighed. “I’m feeling grateful. Swim away now. Disappear. You’re no longer in a cage.”
I gave it some thought and yet still, the dark, deep ocean around us was a less comfortable thought than getting on the ship with him and his men. I’d been a prisoner far longer than I’d known freedom.
