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“We have incoming, sir!” William’s voice carried an edge of panic as he leaned out and hollered down to me.
I scanned the choppy water around the skiff but saw nothing. “Location!” I shouted back up.
“Starboard quarter, roughly five hundred yards out!”
I plunged the wooden paddles into the water and heaved backward. As I drew closer to the area where William was pointing, an eerie, ivory glow formed deep beneath the surface.
“Goddammit, Anya,” I muttered under my breath, trying to get control of the adrenaline coursing through me. My only saving grace was that I hadn’t seen any sign of the nocturnal sirens that usually prowled those waters.
Then, as if I’d conjured them with the thought, a heart-wrenching wail sounded in the not-too-far distance. Then another. And another.
The clock was ticking.
28
NEVER
Déjà vu. It was that feeling you got when you were pretty sure you’d seen or done or heard something before and it was happening all over again. Like that movieGroundhog Day,with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell, except what I was experiencing wasn’t an endless loop of the same colorful local holiday set to playful music.
Chilly saltwater crushed in around me, filling my ears and nose, threatening to breach the lock I had on my lips if I opened them so much as a crack. The magical glow receded with the current, leaving me swirling in the darkness of the sea, flailing with fatigued arms and legs to find a surface that refused to reveal itself.
My boots were too heavy, dragging me down just like they had when I’d first arrived in this wretched place. I remembered the feeling all too well.
I scissor kicked with as much force as I could manage, trying to propel myself in what I thought was an upward direction as I fought to strip out of the leather death shroud of my jacket.
The sea had other ideas.
It was rougher than before, tossing me about like I weighed nothing, meant nothing, was nothing.
My last breath burned dangerously in my lungs, and I squeezed my eyes shut for just a beat. I absolutely would not panic. Would not. Would not fucking panic.
When I opened them again, a brilliant yellow flicker of movement was streaking through the water, coming straight for me. My oxygen-deprived brain tried to convince myself it was help coming, that the calvary was on the way. I almost believed it too, until I remembered precisely which creatures prowled the waters at night in this stupid realm.
Siren. No, wait… the single yellow streak split into three distinct forms.
Make that sirens, as in plural. Awesome.
That was the moment the panic got the better of me and I did what any sane person would do. I screamed. The tang of liquid salt and seaweed filled my mouth, shoving into me faster than I could scream it out, filling the void left by my moment of weakness. I flailed backward but they were coming too fast.
This is how I die?
I’d really been hoping to at least make it to thirty. Just another three years and I would have owned that shit. And forty, well, that was my stretch goal. Dying at twenty-seven was such a cliché. It was the expiration date reserved for overdosing rock stars and tragically suicidal starlets.
Not me.
The saltwater finally stopped stinging my lungs as it replaced the last of the air, and a weird calm washed over me. If I was lucky, the universe would let me die before I felt the siren’s teeth tear into my flesh.
That’s it, Never, keep thinking those happy thoughts.
Then everything started the inevitable slow fade to black. The water turned cloudy around me, filling with an inky darkness as a soothing warmth wrapped around my body like a glove. And before I knew it, I was flying.
It wasn’t at all what I’d expected my death to feel like.
“Never, can you hear me?” Hook’s worried face filled my vision. “Stay with me.” His voice was like gravity, pulling me in until the burning orange rings around his blown pupils were all I could see. Until those deep black pools swallowed me whole.
My body shook. He was telling me to look at him, begging me to stay.
Goddess, how I wanted to, but when I tried to speak, pain bloomed in my chest, a searing, crushing torment that dragged me deeper into the darkness.
