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Cecaelia? Just the word struck a jolt of fear in me. But why?
“Poseidon help us. If they’re here, then they’ve already made it into the palace. We have to go,” he said suddenly, pulling me back. His arms were shaking, the twitch of his tail showing his reluctance to leave while knowing that other creatures might have infiltrated his kingdom. Was he torn between his duty as the Atlantic’s prince and the promise he’d made about not letting me get hurt? “Leave the lantern. I’ll swim blindly.”
He was going to swimblindly?We’d taken so many turns. How would he ever find his way back?
I spotted a waymark—the lone rudder of a ship sticking out of a bed of manatee grass—and grit my teeth. “To the left.”
Leander’s tail adjusted like he trusted my judgment, and I took a deep breath. Maybe he wouldn’t even question how I’d—
“You can see through the darkness?” he asked slowly. Hesitantly. Like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to learn my answer.
“… Possibly. But you weren’t supposed to notice that,” I said just as slowly, imitating the answer he’d given when I asked him about knowing the way to the palace.
His tail licked furiously through the water. I waited for him to speak until my heart couldn’t take his deafening silence a moment longer. “It isn’t normal, is it?”
He drew me close enough to nestle my forehead next to his neck and chuckled lightly. “Is anything about you normal?”
Well, he had a point there. I sighed softly, enjoying the feeling of his jaw pressing against me. “More to the left, and down a bit. There is a school of bass coming through.” Water tickled the insides of my nostrils as we dipped.
“We’ll talk to Barren when we get back,” he said when we straightened back out.
“Barren?Why?” I didn’t even want to think about what he’d do if he learned of my night vision. If seeing in the dark wasn’t normal, then he’d for sure think I was some kind of witch.
“Most cecaelia hail from the Indian Ocean,” Leander said grimly. “Barren’s had a run-in or two that I know of, not that he’ll want to talk about it. But if there’s a way to get by them, he’ll know.”
I pictured the angry scars cutting into Barren’s shoulder. The grooves and gashes that had healed in such a way you could feel a sting of pain just looking at them. One of those cecaelia tentacles looked strong. Maybe even strong enough to tear off a limb.
Leander had said “get by them,” but what if he had to fight to get his father’s trident back from one of those creatures? It was almost too much to think about.
My hands shook, so I wrapped them around his neck to steady myself. Fear wasn’t helpful right now. First, we had to make it back. Then I’d worry about what came next. “Up a bit. There are some rocks coming up.”
He took in a deep breath of relief. “Thanks, Claira. I can’t see whaleshit right now.”
My pulse fluttered. Maybe, just this once, it would be okay if I allowed myself to feel a tiny bit useful underwater.
Just this once.
29
Leander
“How long has it been?” Claira asked, her boots grinding through gravel. Tension bracketed her lips as she curved her steps into yet another nervous circle. “We’re gonna go crazy, waiting around like this.”
“Relax,” I said calmly, feeling anything but.
We’d been so close. Made it almost all the way back to the palace, only to find the kingdom infested with dark spawn. Crazy was nothing compared to the storm of panic—how fuckingdesperate—I felt.
But what good would it do to let my panic show? Especially in front of the one I swore to protect. Sure, we’d been right there, so close to the palace walls. But in that moment, I knew Claira’s safety was more important to me than a hundred fucking thrones.
But my father? He would never understand. Dangerous or not, I still needed to retrieve the trident before his rage overtook him. And I’d do it in a way that ensured Claira’s safety.
If such a way didn’t exist, I would have to make my own. Ripping throats out one by one sounded simple enough. I’d yet to meet a creature who could survive a fucking hole in their neck.
“If you didn’t want to wait, you could have said you were full.” I kept my expression controlled, my tone natural, using the mesmerizing way Claira’s hips swayed as a distraction. “First, you acted like you didn’t even want me to call Barren. Then you practically ripped the phone out of my hands when he mentioned he was making food.”
Her footsteps crunched into an abrupt stop, and she shot me a look over her shoulder. “It’s not my fault I’m starving.”
Itwasher fault she’d chosen to fill up on vegetation. But seeing as I didn’t have a death wish, I kept that thought well away from my tongue.
