Was that—
“Is someone here?” Coral asked.
“Someone is here with Poe.”
Because that’s what she could hear. Her sister, but something—someone—else, too. That was the only reason why Arelle decided to chase the sound. Poe was out there in the orchard, and she didn’t know what was happening to her. But something was. It would have to be for her sister to let out high-pitch shrieks like that.
“Arelle!”
Coral’s terrified shout echoed behind her, but Arelle kept moving forward through the waterway. She didn’t think she had time to stop and explain but she shouldn’t need to. Coral was just as capable of hearing the same thing she was. She could have told her sister to stay back, but instinct kept her swimming as fast as she could to get to the source of Poe’s screeching.
The noise became louder to Arelle’s right, and when she had the chance, she slipped between an opening in the waterways for another canal. She hadn’t expected to be so close to the source of the noise, but when she broke the surface of the water … it was there that she found it.
A mess.
Chaos.
It all happened so fast, and she didn’t have the time to react, even if she had been able to take in the sight before her. Of her sister’s hands wrapped tightly around the throat of a landwalker—a man—where she had him pinned to the ground. Maybe it was the shock of his position, but her sister was substantially smaller than the man, yet she didn’t give him an inch. The woman a few feet away edged closer, hands out to grab … something. The man, or her sister, Arelle didn’t know.
It was the shriek the woman let loose, the violent familiar call of their people that had Arelle snapping back in the water. The violet eyes of the woman flashed before she sprang forward, barreling into the side of Poe and sending her older sister toppling off the man.
Arelle’s heart jumped into her throat. “Poe!”
“Help her!” Coral screeched.
She would have.
Except Arelle didn’t have time.
The slapping, flailing arms and legs of her naked sister and the other woman—who had eyes like them and sounded like they did—tangled together before they slipped off the embankment and into the canal. Under the water they went, and Arelle followed just as fast.
But not before looking up.
Straight at the landwalker.
She took a second; a single deep breath.
He had hair like the darkest skies.
Eyes so blue.
A sea of blue.
Even in his terror, scrambling to the side of the embankment with blood dribbling from his busted mouth, the strong lines of his face seared into her mind’s eye. He was, by far, one of the most handsome men she had ever seen in her life.
She didn’t stop to appreciate it, but even under the water, she could still see his face. Even as she rushed through the murky water to find her sister and help Poe, she still saw the landwalker in her mind.
The fight between the woman and Poe continued under the water with no sign of stopping when Arelle finally got the two in her sights. It was Coral rushing in beside her that stopped her from going any closer. She pushed her sister back, the warning hissing from her lips under the water, “Stay back.”
Arelle looked over her shoulder in just enough time to see Poe push away from the woman whose cloak and green dress had tangled around her legs and arms. And then everything changed.
Just as fast as before.
Just as shocking.
The woman dragged in water, her mouth opening to suck in like she was going to breathe, and her body changed. Those legs swirled with water, her eyes widening in fear as the familiar tail and fin of their kind took its place. The straps that had held sandals to her feet drifted to the floor of the canal, but Arelle was stuck staring at something else.
Her tail.
It was wrong.
Ruined.
The tips gone—jagged where it should have been sharp. A good chunk on either side of the woman’s tail was entirely missing.
How?
Who did that to her?
The landwalkers?
The sound that escaped Arelle matched the confusion that spilled from Coral.
“What’s wrong with her? Why is she dressed like that? Help her.”
In the water, Coral’s fearful questions came out as a high pitch in her fear. Her words slammed into Arelle one after another in their mother tongue. Poe floated backward, her own tail back in place of the legs she had been fighting with on the land. Her face was the same mask of shock that her sisters wore.
Of course, they’d heard the stories. Yes, they knew what their people said.
None of them had ever seen it firsthand, though. None of the sisters knew for sure that the warnings were true. That when the landwalkers were successful in their hunts of the merpeople, they kept them like slaves. Mutilated them to keep them from running, amongst many other horror stories that she didn’t even like to think about.
“Help her!” Coral cried. “Look at her neck! She can’t breathe like that, Arelle!”
What?
Arelle did, horrified by the way the woman clawed at the heavy, thick band of metal encasing her throat. With her hair spilling out of the style it had been before she’d fallen into the water, it was hard to tell if that collar-like device went all the way around her throat, but given how white her face turned as she opened her mouth and tried to breathe …
It did go all around.
So tight, in fact, she couldn’t breathe.
And like the landwalkers, without her gills able to expel the water from her lungs, she would drown.
Die.
“Help her!”
“We have to get out of here,” Poe snapped, turning fast away from the woman who couldn’t swim well with her tail mutilated like it was, and still couldn’t breathe.
Arelle couldn’t move.
“Poe—”
“We have to leave!”
“But …” Coral swam around Arelle’s side, edging closer to the still-struggling woman whose violet eyes—eyes so much like theirs that it hurt—looked between her sisters. “We should help her, Poe.”
“Let her die.”
“Poe!”
Arelle reached for Coral, ready to drag their younger sister back and away from the … well, she couldn’t quite call the helpless mermaid woman dangerous, could she? Not like she was. “Poe is right, we have to leave, Coral.”
“No.”
Poe had already turned to go down the canal. Arelle looked that way, peering through the dark murkiness of the water to call for her sister to wait.
“Help me … to the sea … take me into the sea.”
The words slithered through the water like an eel slipping along the sea floor. The merwoman’s voice so faint and painful that it made her flinch. And yet, she used their language, her pleas enough to make Arelle hesitate.
A second too long.
Long enough for Coral to grab the blade sharpened from the strongest of sea stones that Arelle kept strapped to her hip with a piece of leather wrapped in seaweed to keep it safe. Her little sister slipped out of her reach, heading for the merwoman just ten feet away in the water.
“Coral!”
It happened so fast.
Too fast.
Coral reached for the woman, only wanting to help because that’s who she was … sweet and curious and so foolish. Not at all scared, though she should be. Except when she extended that blade, ready to cut the contraption from the woman’s throat, purple exploded in the water.