Page 22 of Trapped By Claws
I couldn't tear my gaze from Mama's panic-stricken face. Everything condensed to that single moment. My heart thundered in my ears as I watched helplessly. Bile filled my throat, my lips and face stinging from the sharp salt water striking me.
A yellow-and-green striped form snapped up around the boat as the wave crashed over. The passengers emerged, choking and gagging. A jellyfish straggled across the side. One of the sailors flipped it over the edge with an oar.
I dug my fingers into my cheek as I kept my hand over my mouth, staring, transfixed.
It was all right. A ragged breath trembled through me.
Mama was alive. He'd gotten to her in time. She was going to be all right.
When lightning flared across the sky once more, I saw that Corvin had retrieved the second boat as well and dragged both up onto the beach in his massive coils.
He bellowed something. Probably for them to stay. Then he lunged back into the water, his enormous body sliding beneath the choppy waves.
I cast my gaze over the sea for the rest of the sailors and the ship. The third boat had capsized. Four of the ten clung to the sides. One had already righted the longboat, gotten back in, and now fought to drag the others up. The others splashed and flailed in the water, shouting. Red whip-like lashes cut across their arms, and jellyfish stings tore over their trousers.
Corvin swept in.
The jellyfish immediately pulsed away from him, repelled. He wrapped around the boat, gathering up each of the survivors and depositing them in the vessel with devastatingly swift ease.
I hugged myself tight as I watched, shivering and chilling. With every passing minute, the storm worsened.
The noise deafened me.
A powerful gust nearly sent me staggering forward. Wincing, I forced myself back deeper into the stone nook.
TheSeaforger's Pridestruggled against the fury of the storm. The waves cracked and slammed against it with punishing force.
In another flash of lightning, I glimpsed Corvin leaping onto the main deck. He moved across the ship unaffected by the water and cold. As if he existed outside it, somehow. Perhaps it was fae magic or experience or both.
As soon as the rest of the sailors were in the last boat, some clutching bags and crates, Corvin wrapped around the longboat and dragged them through the raging sea to the beach.
My heart leaped as I glimpsed the beach. Mama was only a distant figure, standing out because of her moss-green shawl. I could see her ashen face when I closed my eyes. Hosvir would look after her, wouldn't he? She'd be all right. She was alive. That's what mattered.
The lion-sized hunting otters bounded around the dwarves as well, tugging at their sleeves and coats to pull them back from the beach and the lashing waves.
A loud, abrupt crack resounded through the air.
My attention snapped back to the ship.
Corvin circled it now, a great wound in the ship's side as if he had punched through it. As large as his eel form had been before, he became even larger now. Long enough to wrap around the entirety of the caravel. He struck at it again.
The dark reptilian forms below surged up. One seized the tentacled carving at the stern while the other seized thefigurehead. The ship bowed and bent for one dreadful moment, then snapped like kindling. Corvin pummeled it. He lashed at the masts and shredded the furled sails as the monstrous reptiles around him rent through the wood like paper.
My breath snagged in my throat.
No one could have survived that.
This was the fulfillment of the fae law of the sea.
This was the plan.
The plan if I had not made my bargain.
The cold cut and spiraled deeper within me. Nausea twisted in my stomach. Clutching the soaking shawl tighter about my shoulders, I struggled to comprehend it all. The carnage that might have existed here. That did exist when people crossed the boundary.
A sturdythudstruck the rock near me.
I looked up. Every muscle in my body tightened, a heaviness crushing down upon me.
