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)
I snap my teeth at them hoping to scare them, but they’re made of nothing but bone and they’ll never die, no matter how hard my bite is. Thank goodness none of them seem to know I’m a mermaid or I’ll be put in the tank like my sister was.
“Look at what we have here,” one of the skeletons. “Captain Mahoney will love this.”
“Finally, a lady to join us for eternity in our curse,” says the other one. “Though she is a rather strange looking lady, isn’t she?”
“Her teeth are so pointy. Her nails too. Perhaps she’s French,” one jokes in his British accent.
Both of them start laughing at that.
I elbow one of them in the ribs, shattering the bone.
“Fucking bitch,” the skeleton growls, his hard grip tightening on my arm. “You’re a dead woman now.”
They drag me through the forest with more of their skeleton crew coming to get me. The Nightwind’s crew is small and I’ve grown accustomed to it, so I’ve forgotten how large a normal ship’s crew is. Even though Nightwind won the battle against the cursed crew, I suppose a lot of their bones came back together after all.
Finally, the canopy opens up and we come to a white beach and their ship just off shore. They take me along to the ship’s boat on the sugary sand and shove me inside it. I take a hard fall, my reflexes not as quick as I’d hoped, though that doesn’t stop me from scrambling to my feet and attempting to dive off.
But there’s ten of the crew now surrounding me and their boney hands grab my ankles and calves, pulling me back on the boat, my teeth clacking together so hard that one of them falls out.
A skeleton laughs and picks up the pointed tooth. “I got me self a souvenir. What are ye, part shark?”
I snarl at him, hoping that tooth comes back like it would when I was a full Syren. I’m still not sure how my body is working, it seems that my claws and teeth only come out when I’m enraged and ready to fight, and that my gills only detach from my neck when I’m underwater. Still, my vanity hopes that I didn’t lose an actual human tooth for good. Funny how you can worry about such frivolous things when your life is on the line.
All I know is that I can’t end up like those skeleton Syrens. Is it Nerissa that passes the curse onto me, or is it the crew themselves? Is it the ship?
The questions have me panicking and trying to battle my way through the crew on the boat every couple of seconds until a bunch of them have to sit on me to keep me in place and one ties ropes around my wrists and ankles, binding me the same way Ramsay once did.
Fortunately, I have something now that I didn’t then and that’s sharp teeth. I start gnawing away at the ropes, making progress so that I’m almost free by the time I’m hauled up on the deck of their ship like a freshly caught shark.
Until one of them notices what I’m doing and they run around trying to find a solution, which comes in the form of an actual rusted chain being shoved between my teeth and fastened at the back of my head like a gag.
I scream, the sound gargled by the chain but high enough still to make them cover their ears. Rust flakes off into my tongue, making my whole mouth salivate at the metallic taste and I start coughing hard.
No. This can’t be my fate, after every single thing I’ve been through.
I refuse to submit to it.
With a bellow I pull up from my lungs, I start fighting them the best that I can, thrashing around, smashing their bodies with mine until their bones break. I have a lot of meat on my bones and they have none.
This is all Ramsay’s fault, I decide. He could have just let me go instead of making me run.
But whether that thought is true or not it’s the last one that I have before something hits me over the head and the world goes dark.
I wake up to someone shaking my shoulder.
My eyes slowly flicker open, wincing at the bright light coming in through a window. Blood pumps noisily in my head, my brain feeling like it’s too big for my skull and my mouth is aching from being wedged open with the rusted chain.
I groan and try to move my head to see who’s shaking me, letting out a sharp gasp of pain when my head feels like it’s been shaken to pieces.
A kind smiling face looks down at me.
Sedge!
Except once I see past the familiar soft eyes and rounded chin, I realize that he’s already been inflicted by the curse. Parts of his face are peeling off, revealing jawbone and teeth underneath, and whatever skin is left is stretched tight across his face.