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My heart leaps into my throat.
He misses nothing, his cruel smile broadening. “Yes. I have heard you like to avoid the water. It’s a pity, then, that it will be your only job until you reconsider my generous offer.”
I want to plead with him, but I know it will only have one outcome. So, I swallow down my words and blink back tears. I can’t show him how much it scares me. “I am nothing to you,” I hear myself whisper.
“Youarenothing,” he spits, then storms off in the opposite direction we came.
I waver, needing someone to catch me. To console me. But the ocean is all I can think about and those dark, murky waves with a monster beneath. It is worse than a lashing or losing my hands. So much so that I almost do reconsider becoming Malachi’s pet just to appease his fickle mood.
I’m shaking hard when I return to my workstation.
No one watches as I pack my few things up and bring them back to my tent. It feels as if the ground is going to fall out from beneath me at any moment and the water will rise up to swallow me whole. I am trapped on this island under Malachi’s unyielding hand until my body gives out, one way or another.
In one fell swoop, I am terrified of my future. I never hoped for much, but I didn’t expectthisto be my reality, tossed from one merciless master to the next. Then into the apathetic sea, which would just as gladly see me crushed against the rocks.
This is a death sentence.
Does Malachi know what he has done? Any chance of life has been dashed, and I have to hope that the waves will be kinder than the dark elves.
There is no true freedom for a human on Protheka.
7
LAIKEN
Penny slipped from my grasp so easily in the cove.
A violent urge provoked me to pursue her, but I mastered it. The feeling is alien to me. I am a creature of habit, and I know how to hunt. And sometimes it is best to wait for my prey to return. But Penny is not an urchin tethered to the sea. She has the land to flee to, and that is not my territory. It enrages me that I cannot reach her, that I cannot bind her in my grasp and keep her for my own.
“She ismine,” comes the errant chord on a rush of bubbles.
But is she?
On land, she was able to get the better of me, albeit briefly. But in the sea, she would have no recourse but to submit to my charge, her slow limbs unable to conquer the relentless waves like mine can. The fury of this setback has me bolting to a disturbance on the water’s surface. A fishing boat pesters my hunting grounds with its nets.
I smash into the thing, rocking it dangerously to one side.
Screams and shouts rise up above the water’s surface, muffled by the divide. Their world is not mine, but they certainly seem to think so. Humans and their pathetic weapons, of spears and knives. One falls into the water on the first rock, encouraging me to strike again, harder this time. When several more bodies plunk into the water, weighed down by their heavy clothes, I snatch one up and squeeze the air out of him.
He tries to gasp, but his eyes bulge and something inside of him breaks.
I let his limp body drift away as I snatch up another and rend its head from its miserable shoulders. They are not my Penny, with their roughened flesh and weathered faces. Silent terror stretches over a younger male’s face, and it reminds me of how she looked at me when I revealed myself to her. I see her fear and horror.
More rage comes as I squeeze the bubbles from him until his eyes go sightless. I shake him for good measure, but he does not fight back any longer. Ihatehim for the reminder, even as his body drifts to the bottom of the sea.
My snarl roils deep in my chest, the bodies of fishermen floating around me.
None survived to warn the others on the island that death awaits them. The silence is a beautiful thing, but it leaves me to my thoughts, which I despise.She hated me.Even after we kept each other’s company, she feared my face and body.
I cannot change what I am.
And she was repulsed.
Self-loathing rises up, but it is quickly smothered by a different sound. A familiar one. One I did not expect to hear again so soon.
“No, stop!”
I swim in the direction of the sound, my senses keen on the next utterance.
