Page 160 of Cruel Tides

“Well, isn’t this a surprise? A puppet beseeching its master.” Queen Sagari’s lips puckered in thought, her tentacles toying with her crown as she weighed out his offer. “Fine,” she said, giving him a flippant wave. “Carry her to that dreadful mirror. The sooner it’s out of my sight, the better.”

Wait—dreadfulmirror?

The sea wizard’s neck lifted. “As you wish.”

His tentacles swept around me, and the next thing I knew, we were hovering in front of the mirror, the sea wizard’s body up against my back.

The queen’s immediate response was to turn away, and I wondered if it had something to do with her disdain for the mirror. As soon as her back was to us, I leaned over, hissing into his ear. “You said she was obsessed with it.”

His soft chuckle only fueled my anger. “Obsessed with bringing you here to look into it, yes.”

My stomach sank as one of his tentacles reached for the top of the woven kelp veil. But before I could witness the unveiling, his hands fell over my eyes.

“The hell are you?—?”

He shushed me with a finger. No, wait—that was definitely a tentacle pressed against my lips.Freaking sea wizard.

“Look straight ahead,” he instructed, his calm voice almost too low to register. “Take a breath. Don’t be frightened. The queen won’t risk looking at your reflection for fear of glimpsing what hides underneath her own glamours.”

“This mirror can see underneath glamours?” I whispered. But what did that have to do with me? I was a mermaid who didn’t even know how to glamour.

“Well?” the queen barked from somewhere behind us. “What does she see?”

The hands covering my eyes lifted, and I wasn’t ready for the awaiting vision in front of me.

The eyes staring back from inside the mirror were a bloodcurdling shade of white. A creature’s eyes. There were no irises at all, only haunting white and madness, with two minuscule black dots in their centers that shrank to the size of needlepoints as my eyes focused.

These weren’t even the eyes of the sea wizard; they were far worse. I couldn’t think—couldn’t breathe. Not while I was held captive by the reflection’s maddening glare.

“Well? What is it you see, child?” The queen’s voice was louder now, hysteria hinting at how crisply her tongue enunciated each syllable.

My throat wouldn’t move. There was a weight on the sides of my head, and I realized it was the sea wizard attempting to pull down my gaze, but I wasn’t ready—no, I couldn’t break the stare between me and this… creature.

It wasn’t me. It couldn’t be me.And yet…

“She demands an answer,” the smooth voice in my ear insisted. His hands moved, tilting down my chin.

His insistence finally broke my stare, but the horror waiting for me at the bottom of the mirror was even worse, and a single word ripped through my throat.

“No.”

Forget looking through glamours; this mirror was cursed—it had to be. Because the vision before me was not of me at all.

Sure, it was my shirt, my arms, my hair. But that dark horror—those eight spiraling appendages draped over the rocky floor where my tail should have hung—itwasn’t me.

Then I realized what I was holding, and the entire room seemed to blur.

My right hand shook as I clutched the object, knowing full well I was holding the shell the sea wizard had given me. Only in the mirror, it wasn’t a shell at all.

It was a knife.

I recognized it immediately—the same knife I’d stashed in my bikini top before venturing down to find King Eamon’s trident. I’d lost it when one of the cecaelian guards had tossed it down in the prison cell. Only I’d never lost it at all.

Because the sea wizard had shown up and handed my knife right back to me in the form of a magical shell that could cut through anything, and—oh,Poseidon help me—the room was spinning.

“Breathe,” the voice in my ear urged. His grip on me tightened as I felt my body go slack in his arms. “Breathe, Claira.”

But it wasn’t… I wasn’t… It…

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