Chapter 11: Blood in the Bathwater
The eastern sky bruised into the violet of a fading bruise as the Savanaclaw cut through the grey dawn swell. Leona stood at the helm, the worn wood cool under his palms, his eyes on the jagged line of the Siren’s Crags. They were close now. He could taste the change in the air—thicker, colder, laced with the mineral scent of shattered rock and deeper, older things. Rook’s storm-smell was right; a squall brewed on the horizon, a bank of angry cloud devouring the pale morning light.
Beside him, Vil was a study in silence. He’d cleaned up, his hair a pale, braided crown, his borrowed clothes—a simple linen shirt and trousers of Leona’s—hanging loose on his frame. He looked human. He looked like a prisoner, or a passenger. Only his eyes gave him away; they held the distant, assessing chill of the deep water, fixed on the approaching cliffs.
“Nervous?” Leona asked, not taking his eyes off the sea.
“I don’t get nervous. I prepare.” Vil’s voice was flat.
“You prepare by staring holes in my horizon?” Leona’s smirk was a thin, sharp thing. He glanced at Vil’s profile, the morning light carving his features into something both beautiful and brittle. “The crew’s antsy. They see those rocks and think of picked-clean bones.”
“Let them.” Vil finally turned his head, his amethyst eyes catching the weak sun. “Their fear is a seasoning. It makes the bait smell more authentic.”
Leona grunted, a sound of reluctant agreement. His first mate, Jack, approached, his footsteps heavy on the deck. “Captain. The cove you marked is just behind the headland. Sheltered water. Good place to drop anchor and… finalize the plan.” His eyes flickered to Vil, then away, his expression carefully neutral.
“Fine,” Leona said, shoving himself away from the helm. The wheel spun a quarter-turn on its own. “We’ll reconnoiter. Drop the hook there. I’m taking the jolly boat.”
Jack’s brow furrowed. “Sir? The weather—”
“Is holding for another hour. I need a quiet word with our consultant.” Leona’s gaze settled on Vil, a silent command in the green depths. “Alone.”
The cove was a slit of calmness carved into the cliff’s scowling face. It was exactly as Leona remembered from years-old charts: a crescent of black sand, water clear and deep green, sheltered from the building wind by towering walls of slick, grey rock. Their small rowboat ground onto the sand with a soft crunch.
Leona shipped the oars, the silence sudden and profound. The only sounds were the lap of water and the distant, mournful cry of gulls high above the crags. The air here was still and cool, smelling of wet stone and deep, secret places.
He stepped out into ankle-deep water. “Come on.”
Vil moved from the boat with his preternatural grace, his bare feet making no sound on the wet sand. He looked around, his posture uncoiling slightly from its defensive knot. “This is the place?”
“One of them.” Leona began pulling his shirt over his head, the linen sticking to his skin. He tossed it onto the gunwale. “Your audience chamber for tomorrow’s performance. Get the lay of the land.” His eyes locked onto Vil’s. “Or the water, in your case.”
Understanding flickered in Vil’s gaze, followed by a flare of something hotter, more immediate. The mission, the danger, the watching crew—all of it was a constant pressure. This was a pressure valve. He raised a hand, and a subtle, shimmering distortion danced over his skin.
The familiar, impossible shift began. His legs shimmered, fused, lengthened into the magnificent, powerful tail of lilac and silver. It was faster here, by the sea, as if the water called it forth. He slid into the deeper channel with a fluid roll, his head breaching the surface a moment later, hair plastered to his neck.
“The water is cold,” Vil stated, but he was looking at Leona, a challenge in his eyes. “You’ll last five minutes.”
“You underestimate my motivations.” Leona waded in after him, the chill biting his calves, his thighs. He kept going until the water hit his chest. Vil floated before him, half-submerged, a mythological dream made real in the gloomy cove light.
Leona reached for him, his hands finding the cool, smooth scales of Vil’s waist. He pulled him close. “You know what I want.”
Vil’s hands came up to frame Leona’s face. His touch was cooler than the water. “You want to drown,” he murmured, his voice taking on a melodic, resonant quality that vibrated in Leona’s bones.
“Not today.” Leona’s grin was all teeth. “I’ve got a ship to wreck tomorrow.”
For a long moment, Vil just studied him, his amethyst eyes searching Leona’s for doubt, for fear. He found only a lazy, impatient hunger. A slow, secret smile touched Vil’s lips. He leaned in, his mouth a breath away from Leona’s.
“Then breathe,” Vil whispered, and kissed him.
It wasn’t a kiss of passion, but of transference. A seal. As their lips met, Leona felt a sudden, cool expansion in his lungs, not a drowning, but an unlocking. The sensation spread through his chest, a strange, vital clarity. Vil pulled back, his smile now a thing of sharp, beautiful triumph.
“One hour, Captain,” Vil said, his voice echoing strangely in the air. “Don’t waste it.” Then he grabbed Leona’s shoulders and pulled him under.
The world muted into a green-gold silence. Leona’s instinct was to fight, to kick towards the shattered light of the surface. But his lungs didn’t burn. He breathed in, and the cold, mineral-rich water filled him as easily as air. It felt shocking, unnatural, and incredibly, vibrantly alive.
He exhaled, and a stream of silver bubbles fountained from his lips. Vil watched him, suspended in the water, his hair a floating halo of gold and lavender. The siren’s tail gave a powerful, elegant undulation, stirring the sandy bottom.
Leona pushed forward, the water offering surprising resistance. He was clumsy, a land creature in a fluid world. Vil was a god here. He circled Leona slowly, a predator showing off its domain, every movement a liquid poem.
He closed the distance. Underwater, everything was amplified. The slide of Vil’s scales against his stomach, the fierce grip of his hands on Leona’s hips, the way the light danced in the violet depths of his eyes. There were no words here, just the silent, pressing weight of the cove and the impossible fact of Leona’s breath.
Vil’s kisses tasted of salt and wild magic. He pushed Leona back against a towering, barnacled rock, its surface rough and living under his shoulders. The cold stone, the enveloping chill of the water, the heat of Vil’s body against his—it was a sensory overload. Vil’s hands were everywhere, charting a frantic map.
Their coupling was a slow-motion battle against buoyancy and current. Vil used the water, used his powerful tail to pin Leona against the rock, to control the rhythm. It was not like the tub, all sloshing confinement. This was vast, deep, and terrifyingly open.
Leona’s hands found the place where skin became scale, fingers digging in for purchase. The world narrowed to the feeling of Vil moving around him, the sight of his face contorted in silent ecstasy, his hair drifting like sea grass. Bubbles escaped Vil’s lips, a wordless cry rendered in silver.
It was savage and beautiful, an intimacy that felt less like sex and more like a shared, secret defiance of nature. Leona was a guest in Vil’s world, breathing his magic, wrapped in his strength. The knowledge of it, of this temporary, borrowed power, coiled his pleasure tighter, sharper.
He came with a force that shuddered through him, a silent roar into the void. His own air—Vil’s gifted air—left him in a torrent of frantic bubbles. Vil followed, his body seizing in a violent, elegant convulsion that sent shockwaves through the water around them.
They hung there, tangled and still, for a long moment. Leona’s heart hammered against his ribs, a frantic drum in the aquatic quiet. Vil’s forehead rested against his collarbone, his gills—fine, fluttering slits along his neck that Leona hadn’t noticed before—flared gently.
Finally, Vil pushed them away from the rock. He guided Leona, whose limbs felt heavy and uncoordinated, back towards the sloping shelf of sand. They broke the surface together, gasping—though only Leona needed to. He choked, coughed, the transition back to real air harsh and grating.
He stumbled onto the sand, collapsing onto his back. The sky above was a swirling grey. Vil heaved himself onto the sand beside him, his tail still half in the water, scales glistening. They lay there side by side, breathing heavily, the only sound the wind starting to worry at the cliffs above.
The black sand was grit and cold beneath Leona’s back. His lungs still ached from the switchback between water-breathing and air. Beside him, Vil’s tail shifted weakly, a heavy, exhausted slide against the wet shore. The siren’s eyes were closed, his chest rising and falling in a rhythm that seemed almost human. A single, iridescent scale had come loose on his hip, glinting dully like a fallen star.
“An hour, you said,” Leona rasped, his voice raw. He turned his head on the sand to look at him. “Didn’t feel like it.”
“Time is different,” Vil murmured without opening his eyes. “Under. It stretches.”
Leona pushed himself up onto his elbows. The wind was picking up, skimming over the water and raising gooseflesh on his wet skin. The pleasant ache in his muscles was already warring with the cold. He looked down at Vil, at the absolute, spent stillness of him. The perfect composure was shattered. It was a victory more tangible than any charted treasure.
As if Leona was done yet.
He moved suddenly, a predator’s lunge fueled by lingering magic and pure, stubborn want. He rolled, pinning Vil’s torso to the sand, his weight straddling the wide, smooth transition where scales began. Vil’s eyes flew open, wide with startled shock.
“What are you—” Vil began, his protest cut short as Leona kissed him.
It was a claiming, salt-heavy and demanding. Leona poured every bit of the cove’s cold, the sea’s strangeness, and his own relentless hunger into it. Vil’s hands came up, not to push him away, but to clutch at his back, fingers splaying against the chill-kissed skin. The kiss broke, leaving them both breathless.
“You’re insatiable,” Vil gasped, his voice cracking.
“You’re here,” Leona growled against his mouth.
His hand slid down Vil’s side, over the cool, intricate topography of scales, finding the same yielding seam he’d discovered in the copper tub. Vil arched off the sand with a sharp cry, his tail convulsing, sending a spray of black grains into the air. He was sensitive, profoundly so, every nerve seemingly exposed from their first joining.
Leona didn’t ask. He positioned himself and pushed back inside.
The sound Vil made was pure, shredded sensation. It was high and broken, swallowed by the rising wind. His body clamped around Leona, a tight, shuddering vise. Leona set a brutal, grinding pace, his own hips moving with a driven, piston-like rhythm. He grabbed Vil’s scaled hips, his fingers finding purchase on the slick, armored curves, using them as leverage to drive deeper.
“Look at you,” Leona breathed, his voice thick with awe and possession. Vil was a wreck beneath him. Tears, real and human, cut tracks through the salt and sand on his cheeks. His perfect hair was a tangled mess of gold and purple against the black sand. His lips, bruised and glistening, were parted in silent, gasping pleas.
He was completely overstimulated, every thrust a wave crashing into a shore already flooded. His responses were beyond his control—jerking tremors, punched-out whimpers, his claws digging half-moon crescents into the sand. The ethereal siren was gone. In his place was just this: a creature unraveling under his hands, beautiful in his ruin.
Leona felt his own end gathering, a tight, electric coil in his gut. He leaned down, capturing Vil’s mouth again, swallowing his sounds. The world narrowed to the friction of sand, the slap of skin on scale, the desperate cadence of their merged breathing. When release took him, it was a raw, voeless shout into Vil’s mouth, a final anchor thrown in a storm.
He collapsed partly on him, partly on the sand, spent. For a long time, there was only the wind and the violent hammering of his own heart. Gradually, he became aware of a change. The heavy, solid weight of Vil’s tail was gone. In its place were two long, pale human legs, trembling slightly.
Leona shifted his weight, rolling onto his back again. The sky was now fully the color of tarnished lead. “Storm’s coming.”
Vil didn’t speak for a full minute. He simply lay there, an arm thrown over his eyes. Finally, his voice, hoarse and threadbare, cut through the wind. “You are a beast.”
“You said that already.” Leona sat up, brushing sand from his arms. His body felt used, glorious, and profoundly cold.
“It bears repeating.” Vil lowered his arm. His eyes were red-rimmed, but the amethyst in them had banked to a softer, exhausted glow. He looked at Leona, a complex, unreadable expression on his face. “No one has ever… like that.”
Leona stood, his legs unsteady. He offered a hand down. “Told you I needed a bigger tub. Sand’s worse. Gets everywhere.”
A ghost of a smile touched Vil’s ruined lips. He took the hand, letting Leona haul him up. He swayed on his human feet, instinctively leaning into Leona’s solidity for a moment before straightening. “I feel like I’ve been dragged behind your ship for a league.”
“Compliment accepted.” Leona turned toward the jolly boat, then paused, looking back at the cove. The water was choppier now, dark and restless. Tomorrow, this place would be a stage for blood and deceit. Today, it held only their secret, already being washed away by the tide. “Can you walk?”
Vil took a testing step, wincing. “I can manage.” He began gathering his discarded clothes, moving with a stiffness that was entirely mortal. “Your crew will have questions.”
“Let them.” Leona pulled his own shirt on over his damp, sandy skin. It stuck unpleasantly. He watched Vil dress, the mundane act somehow more intimate than what they’d just done. “Jack knows better than to ask. The others… they’ll assume I was beating the truth out of you.”
Vil finished buttoning the borrowed shirt. He ran a hand through his tangled hair, a futile attempt at order. “A credible cover story.” He walked to the boat, his gait careful. “For a beast.”
Leona pushed the boat back into the shallows, the cold water biting his ankles. “Get in, princess. We’ve got a ship to prepare.”
Vil climbed in, settling on the bench with a soft sigh. As Leona rowed them back toward the Savanaclaw, its dark shape a stark cut against the storm-grey sky, neither spoke. The silence between them was no longer empty. It was crowded with the echoes of things they hadn’t said, and the dense, looming shadow of what they had to do.
The silence held until the jolly boat bumped against the Savanaclaw’s scarred hull. Rough hands hauled them up. Jack’s nostrils flared slightly at the scent of salt, sand, and spent desire clinging to them, but he said nothing. Rook merely smiled, that infuriating, knowing curve of lips, and commented on the building squall.
The next hours were a taut wire of preparation. Leona laid the final plan out in the galley, his voice a bored monotone that belied the intricate violence of it. Vil would take position in the cove at first light. His song would be a lure, not for shipwreck, but for distraction—a beautiful, tragic siren caught in the shallows, an irresistible prize for the slavers of the Crags.
“They’ll send a party. A small boat. They always do,” Leona said, tracing a route on the map with a dirty fingernail. “While they’re fixated on the pretty catch, we come around the southern spur. Their ship will be skeleton-crewed. We board her here, at the stern. Fast and quiet.”
“And the boarding party they send for me?” Vil asked. He was picking at a biscuit, his expression detached.
“My problem,” Leona said, meeting his gaze. The memory of black sand and desperate breaths hung between them. “You just keep singing until you see our signal flare. Then you dive. They’ll assume you escaped. You swim out to the deep channel, and Rook picks you up in the cutter.”
“A simple dance,” Vil said, his tone flat.
“The simple ones are best.” Leona pushed back from the table. “Get some sleep. If you can.”
Sleep was a fugitive that night. The storm cracked open around midnight, throwing the ship against its anchor chains. In the captain’s quarters, stripped of its earlier intimacy, Leona and Vil lay in separate berths. The darkness was filled with the symphony of groaning wood and shrieking wind.
“This noise is unbearable,” Vil said into the black.
“It’s just weather.”
“It sounds like the ocean is being torn apart.”
“Maybe it is.” Leona turned onto his side, facing the vague shape of Vil across the room. He could barely see him. “Having second thoughts?”
A long pause. “No. But I am revising my assessment of your mental stability. Only a lunatic plans a naval engagement in this.”
Leona’s grin was invisible. “Go to sleep, princess.”
Dawn arrived not with light, but with a grim, weeping grey. The storm had exhausted itself into a cold, persistent drizzle. The Siren’s Crags loomed through the mist, jagged teeth ready to gnaw the sky. The air smelled of wet rock and something else—a faint, briny rot.
From the deck, they could see the slaver ship. It was a hulking, vile thing called the Bloody Melody, anchored in the lee of the largest crag. Even at a distance, the signs were clear: the modified nets, the too-many portholes barred with iron, the small, pale faces that sometimes flashed at the rails before being yanked back.
Hybrid children. Laborers.
Leona’s jaw tightened. He felt nothing for the slavers. But the sight crystallized the filth they were dealing with.
“Places,” he said, his voice carrying flatly over the damp deck. He caught Vil’s arm as he moved to the rail where the cutter waited. His fingers dug in, not quite gentle. “Sing pretty. Dive faster.”
Vil held his gaze, the amethyst in his eyes hard as gemstones. “Try not to get yourself killed. I’d hate to have given you a sea-breath for nothing.”
Then he was over the side, vanishing into the mist and the choppy water. Leona watched the empty spot for a second too long before turning to Jack. “Take us around. Now.”
The plan unfolded with a clockwork precision that surprised even Leona. The Savanaclaw, silent as a ghost ship, slipped behind the southern spur. Through his spyglass, Leona watched the drama on the cove’s black sand. Vil was a masterpiece. He’d dragged himself partially ashore, his tail glamoured to look injured, a faint, captivating melody weaving through the drizzle. It was a song of vulnerability, of beautiful distress.
Right on cue, a boat detached from the Bloody Melody, oars cutting the water with greedy haste. Six men. Leona counted. Then he shifted his glass to the slaver ship. Activity, but minimal. The bait was taken.
“Go,” he breathed.
The Savanaclaw shot from her hiding place. Grappling hooks flew, biting into the Bloody Melody’s ornate, filthy rail. Leona was the first over the side, cutlass in one hand, pistol in the other. The fight on deck was brief, brutal, and intensely satisfying. The skeleton crew—mostly drunkards and bullies left behind—were cut down before they could fully comprehend the attack.
Leona signalled to Jack. A red flare arced into the grey sky, its pop muffled by the mist. Done. Dive.
He allowed himself one glance toward the cove. He saw the boarding party reaching the sand, saw them staggering, enthralled by Vil’s song even now. Then he saw a shimmer, a flash of lavender, as Vil’s form vanished into the water. A perfect retreat.
The plan had worked.
Almost.
One of the slavers, a wiry man with eyes yellowed by malice, hadn’t been staring at the empty water. He’d been watching Leona. He’d seen the captain’s glance, the slight hesitation, the direction of his concern. As Leona turned back to secure the ship, the man scrambled to the rail and screamed toward the cove.
“THE SIREEN! THE SIREEN IS WITH THEM! GRAB IT!”
Leona’s blood went cold. He fired his pistol. The wiry man dropped. But the damage was done.
Out in the cove, the boarding party, now alerted, didn’t stare dumbly at the water. They acted. Two produced odd, weighted nets from their boat—nets woven with thin, cruel lines of cold iron, a metal that hissed against magic. They threw them into the churning spot where Vil had vanished.
A struggle churned the water. Then, a net rose, dragged by four men. Inside, tangled and thrashing, was Vil. His human form had been forced by the iron’s bite, the glamour shredded. He was just a man in soaked linen, wrapped in a net that smoked where it touched his skin.
Leona watched, frozen at the rail, as they hauled Vil, cursing and fighting, into their boat. Their captain, a bloated brute with a face like a hammer, backhanded Vil into stillness. Then he looked up, directly at Leona on the captured deck of the Bloody Melody. He grinned, a gap-toothed, understanding smile.
He had Leona’s measure. He’d found the weakness.
“Captain!” Jack yelled, pointing to the water. The cutter with Rook was approaching, but it was too far. The slavers’ boat was already rowing hard back to the crag, not to their ship, but toward a hidden, fortified cave mouth at the waterline.
The brute on the boat cupped his hands around his mouth. His voice boomed across the water. “KINGSCHOLAR! YOU WANT YOUR PRETTY FISH BACK?” He shook the limp form in the net. “YOU COME AND BARTER! ALONE! YOU BRING ANY OF YOUR DOGS…” He drew a knife and pressed it to Vil’s throat. “AND I START FILLETING!”
Leona’s hands gripped the rail so hard the wood splintered. Rage, cold and absolute, washed through him. It was immediately followed by the chilling, tactical calculus. This was the trap within the trap.
Jack was at his side, his face grim. “We can storm the cave. We have their ship. We have the leverage.”
“They’ll kill him the second they see more than one of us,” Leona said, his voice terrifyingly calm. His mind was already racing ahead, discarding options. The cave was a known fortification. Dozens of men. Dozens of… others.
Rook scrambled aboard from the cutter, his usual smile gone. “They have taken him into the lower caverns. The holding pens are there.” His voice dropped. “There are many sirens there, Captain. In… various conditions. And their get.”
The full picture clicked into place, vile and complete. The Siren’s Crags. Not just a name. A factory. They didn’t just capture sirens. They bred them. They farmed them. The hybrid children on deck were the workforce. The sirens below were the livestock.
The brute’s voice echoed again. “ONE HOUR, KINGSCHOLAR! THEN WE START THE AUCTION! PLENTY HERE’D PAY FOR A TASTE OF THIS ONE!”
Leona closed his eyes. He saw the black sand. Heard the silent scream of bubbles. Felt the trusting, desperate clutch of fingers on his back.
When he opened them, the green was hard, crystalline, devoid of all hesitation.
“Jack.”
“Captain?”
“Round up every slaver we captured. Every one on this ship. Alive or barely. Gather all the powder charges we brought for scuttling. Take them to the main cave entrance. The big one above the waterline.”
Jack paled. “Sir? That entrance… our reports say that’s where they keep the…”
“The sirens. I know.” Leona’s face was a stone mask. “And sixty of the worst scum this side of the hells. Maybe eighty.” He finally turned from the rail, his gaze sweeping over his horrified crew. “We’re going to collapse it. Bury it all.”
Rook stepped forward, his eyes wide. “Captain… Vil is in the lower caverns. The water-access ones. That blast… the shockwave through the rock, the collapse… it could flood them. It could kill everyone down there. Including him.”
Leona looked toward the hidden cave where they’d taken Vil. A muscle twitched in his jaw.
“I know.” The words were quiet, final. “He made a deal with a pirate. He should have read the finer print.”
He looked at Jack, his eyes utterly devoid of guilt. The sirens below were already in a living hell. The slavers were vermin. The numbers made sense. Sacrifice the already-lost to complete the primary objective: annihilation of the Bloody Melody and its core enterprise. It was the ruthless, correct choice.
It was the choice Vil had once faced on his rocks.
“Get the charges set,” Leona said, turning his back on the cave where Vil was held. “We bury this place. All of it.”