Total pages in book: 154
Estimated words: 144411 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 722(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 144411 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 722(@200wpm)___ 578(@250wpm)___ 481(@300wpm)
“Maren,” I manage to say. “You don’t remember me do you?”
“Oh she does,” Edonia says smugly, watching the whole thing. “She’s not completely deranged. I just told her that you murdered her mother, so she’s particularly angry. Her rage is a blessed thing.”
“Her mother!?” I exclaim, staring up into Maren’s eyes. They’re all white now, the blue faded, and I don’t even know if I see her soul in there. “Maren, I didn’t kill your mother.” What in god’s good name is she even talking about?
“Something you’d have a hard time keeping track of, I have no doubt,” Edonia says mildly.
“Maren,” I repeat, her claws now touching my shirt and tearing through the fibers, millimeters away from piercing my chest. “I swear to god I didn’t kill your mother.”
But when I stare in those eyes I know she doesn’t hear me. Because I’m realizing her soul, that ferociously stunning complicated soul that I’ve grown to love, it isn’t there. It’s as if this isn’t her at all. All she is, is her rage personified.
“What have you done with her!?” I cry out, turning my head to look at Edonia as I sink deeper into the sand. “This isn’t my Maren.”
“It’s just the shell of her, but that’s all a man wants from a woman anyway,” she says, and she touches the bottle around her neck, the purple smoke swirling inside of it. “I’m keeping her soul safe, right here.”
I look back to Maren in horror. Her body is being used to kill me while her soul is in Edonia’s necklace, perhaps watching the whole thing.
“No,” I tell her, pleading. “No, don’t do this. Maren, luv, princess, I know you can hear me.”
But her claws are now piercing my skin, stinging me, the blood rising up in the water and Edonia is laughing and laughing, about to watch my heart get ripped out and eaten right in front of me by the woman I love.
And then Edonia’s laughter stops.
Maren keeps digging her claws in me, not tiring in the least, but I turn my head as the sand starts to spill over my neck and look to the sea witch.
There’s another sea witch behind her, holding the book in her hands.
“What are you doing here?” Edonia cries out when she sees her.
“Righting some wrongs,” Nerissa says to her and then opens the book and begins to read in Latin.
Edonia cries out, “No!” and lunges for the book, but a pack of barracudas come out from behind Nerissa and fire into Edonia like bullets, peppering her body with sharp stabs of their mouths, keeping her at bay.
“Maren animam tuam liberabo!” Nerissa shouts hastily, snapping her fingers.
Edonia lets out a panicked scream, trying to grab her necklace but one of the barracudas snatches it in its mouth and it dangles from its jagged teeth as it brings it over to Nerissa.
With Maren still trying to kill me—I can feel her claws wrapping around my heart, ready to rip it out—Nerissa quickly takes the necklace and uncorks the tiny bottle, the purple smoke turning to liquid and leaving the vessel, heading straight for Maren.
“Hang on Bones!” Nerissa yells at me.
“Not as easy as you think,” I manage to say, gasping in agony as I feel the tips of Maren’s claws graze the wall of my heart.
I’m not prepared to meet my end.
CHAPTER 40
Maren
I’m about to rip Ramsay’s heart out.
I had watched the scene unfurl from the captivity of Edonia’s bottle, trapped for what was supposed to be an eternity, unable to do a damn thing about it. I watched as Ramsay showed up, swimming out of the reef like a knight in shining armor, his broadsword at his side, stark determination on his handsome face, and I’d never felt more in love with him than I was in that moment. I knew the things that Edonia told me about him killing my mother could have been true. I knew that Ramsay has had a ruthless past when it comes to killing people, Syrens or otherwise. But at that moment, none of that mattered. I loved him, truly, madly, deeply.
But the body of the creature I was, the one that Edonia controlled, was fueled by my rage and for the first time in my life, I became separate from that inferno that always bubbled inside me. I was able to watch my rage as something else, something I couldn’t control, and I realized that it should never be separated. My rage is a part of who I am, not something to bury and not something to blindly let loose either. It’s something to make peace with, a part of being human.
And yet in those moments, all I wanted to was to rein it in. It looked like the mindless killer that Edonia created, the product of my own rage unfettered, was about to pull Ramsay’s heart out of his chest and eat it.