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The prisoners! Dear lord, were some of the servants and crew of theElephantenstill alive?
I go toward the sounds, my heart in my throat and before I can even reach the door I’m overwhelmed by a revolting smell, simultaneously sour and sweet and rotted. With one hand on my nose and one on the handle I open it. In the faint light of the deck’s lantern I see a row of dead bodies propped up on the ground, chained to a beam above them. Excrement, blood, and gore fill the area and I start coughing violently, fighting the urge to vomit.
“Princess,” I hear a voice weakly say.
No. No, no one can still be alive.
But I did hear a moan and now I hear my title and as I step forward among the bodies, recognizing the gaunt and pale faces, their bodies seemingly drained of blood, I see Hodges. Hodges, Aerik’s manservant and the man who carried me from the sea all those years ago. Fitting that I would see him before I went back into its depths.
“Hodges?” I say softly, trying not to cry. If he wasn’t talking I would have thought he was dead.
He opens his eyes, completely red with blood. “Kill me, Your Highness. Make it swift and quick.”
I shake my head as panic seizes me. “No. I can’t do that. Tell me what they are doing to you in here? Why do they keep you?”
“One of the crew called them…” he licks his lips but he has no saliva to spare, “Mandurugo.”
“What does that mean?”
He just stares at me. “Please. Don’t make me beg for my end. Please.”
Hodges lets out a raspy weak breath and eyes the knife in the holster at my waist.
I can’t actually kill him, can I? I killed Aerik, yes, and I would do it again. But while Hodges was never overly kind to me, he was loyal and never cruel.
“I can’t suffer any longer,” he manages to add. “Let me go home to God.”
I find myself reaching for the knife and pulling it out, the blade trembling in my hand. Where had all my bravado gone? Earlier I had no problems killing Aerik, eating his heart, and asking the captain to touch me. Now I find myself feeling sick and weak at the idea of killing an innocent man. What happened to the Syren inside me?
Perhaps my humanity has decided to stick around.
“I will have my vengeance for you,” I tell him, holding the knife above his heart.
“Forget your vengeance,” he says. “You need only to escape. Be merciful, Princess Maren. Let me go. God will forgive us both.”
I take in a deep breath, hoping that whatever gods there are will indeed forgive me for this one, and plunge the knife down into his heart.
It sinks in to the hilt and kills him instantly and I feel the air calm with his passing.
But I don’t have time to mourn him or ponder the horrors that have happened in this hold. I have to save myself.
I leave the hold and run to the stairs and go up to the cannons at the gun deck. I pick one and swing my leg up over, straddling it, the metal cold on my inner thighs and not totally unpleasant.
I ignore the way my feminine urges keep springing up at inappropriate times and shift myself along the cannon barrel until I’m popping open the gun port at the end, fresh sea air meeting my face. I’m about to slide off into the sea that’s moving quickly below when I hear the crew start coming down the stairs and the voice of an unfamiliar woman.
I don’t want to stick around and find out who it belongs to.
I take in a deep breath and let go of the end of the cannon.
Wind rushes past me as I freefall, trying to move my body away from the edge of the giant ship so I don’t get sucked under the keel, which is much easier to do when you’re not wearing a weighty gown.
I hit the water feet-first, the impact rattling me, and immediately start swimming away from the ship as quick as I can. The water is cold at first but soon feels like a second skin and I’m swimming with my legs pressed together, hoping beyond hope that they’ll fuse together into a tail.
But before that might possibly happen, as I move through the dark water, I realize I’m actually breathing it in. It’s not coming through my nose or mouth, but mygills. I reach up to touch the side of my neck and the faint scars I once had there to symbolize them are now actual working gills.
I let out a cry of delight and look back at my legs. Even though my eyesight is excellent in the dark now, I still can’t make out every detail. What I do see is that my legs are just that—legs. There might be a pearlescent tinge to them that wasn’t there before, a faint impression of scales, but other than that they haven’t turned into a tail.
It doesn’t matter. I can swim fast with them together as one, and with working gills, I can stay under the water for as long as I like.
