“Neverspeak that name to me again,” he growls, his fury sputtering between us. She’s the one who left him, betraying him, his family, and the secrets of the mermaids. I hope Anna is really listening to him now.
As his nostrils flare, I look him dead in the eyes. “LikeAnnemette, Alia has four days to make the boy love her and live, or fail and die. Either way, you’ll never see her again.”
“I can destroy you!”
I bare my teeth. “Ah, but you haven’t. Even with all the power you steal, you still need me.” My voice gains strength with each word. He’s desperate. He can’t retrieve Alia on his own. There is an element of my magic he will never master. “I can bring Alia back, but I will need something from you in return. I have my price.”
The sea king’s lips drop open. I have him backed into a corner, and he knows it. My ask is simple, and only he can do it. He can’t give me my life back, my lost time, or Nik—may he rest in the tide—but he can unchain me from my lair. The words are on my tongue, ready, when something nasty ticks across his handsome features.
“You have your price, Witch, but you forget your place.”
His teeth click together, and the blue of his eyes goes cold. It’s then that the wet, hard certainty of my mistake reveals itself to me. This man won’t kill me, but for the abundance of magic that he is, heavy and unwieldy, he can hurt me so badly, I will wish I were dead.
The power within him—amplified, multiplied, looted from land and sea—expands, bursts outward, like a living bomb. A sea mine of magic, aimed straight at me.
“Morna, herfiligr kvennali∂!”
Waste away, wretched woman!
The words hit my ears with a force of magic I’ve never felt, slamming into me with the power of the sun falling out of the sky and barreling toward the earth, bringing enough light to dissolve all of us the instant before impact.
And then my world, already so dark, fades to complete, flat black.
2
Runa
ISHOULD’VE KNOWNIWOULD LOSE HER THIS WAY.
To him.
The boy. That stupid boy. With his stupid dark hair and sparkling eyes and regal blood.
The one she saved in the height of summer, during a ferocious storm when she’d been stalking him yet again. Living in the wake of his ship, hoping for a glimpse of him with his brothers, with their cheekbones and songs and dogs. As if they’d been created from her heart’s desires and plunked onto the earth, just close enough for her to want, just far enough—different enough—to escape her.
Always fascinated with humans, Alia.
Always fascinated with what she shouldn’t have. Riding the edge of what was acceptable down below—testing our father’s kingly patience and personal leniency. Rescuingthat boy and then all but bragging about it by lugging into her garden that stupid statue that went down with him.
I was there when she first saw him above. Her eyes shone with immediate curiosity. We’d turned fifteen at the same time—twins so alike and yet more like two sides of the same coin. We had gone to the surface together, but the fascination with the world above was hers alone.
Once she learned his name, it wouldn’t leave her lips.
Niklas.
Now she’s gone to him, I’m sure of it.
It’s been a day since I’ve seen her, the longest we’ve ever been apart. I have no choice but to believe I’ve lost her tohim, because the alternative—that she’s dead or dying somewhere and my heart has yet to realize it—is too painful.
Not that it feels fantastic knowing that my twin left me, our family, our world for aboy.
A stupid human prince of a boy who doesn’t even know her name.
“Oh, Alia. How could you do this to yourself?” I mumble into the morning tide, mermaid tail swishing hard, fists balled tightly at my sides, nails digging crescents into my palms. “How could you do it tous?”
The magic to become human has been banned forever by our father’s own hand. He invented it himself, after he brought home his first queen, but the last time it was done, it nearly brought our people to ruin. Four days, one knife,and the truth about life beneath the sea spilling from the lips of one of our own, nearly exposing and endangering us, if Annemette had lived.
So, here I am, closer to land now than I’ve ever been, swimming in the shadows of a new morning, staring at the place I know in my gut Alia will be.
