The tip of my blade suddenly appears, pressed into the side of my face, near my left eye.
Blood, that’s what I’ll call her.
After all, she wants mine, changed her mind that quickly from being the mute bystander to holding my own weapon against my skin.
Slowly, my blade creeps downward, creating a dull pain from the steel etching into my flesh.
“Don’t mess his face up too badly,” Nesrine muses, her voice already one I recognize from her big-ass mouth. “We don’t want his blood staining our floors.”
She doesn’t stop, transfixed on my face; looking for distress, to see how human I am. I ball my hands into fists to keep from headbutting her pretty little face. Any sign of violence on my end and it will quicken my death.
“Enjoying yourself?” I provoke, feeling my skin ripping open.
Nothing.
Not a flicker of amusement or even a slight smirk to announce her contentment. It’s only then that it slowly starts to sink in, this isn’t a normal capture.
I won’t be held a prisoner for information about who I am and what I can do for them.
I’m here to quench their thirst for humans.
“He has to die,” my eldest sister, Atarah, decides, pacing in front of the long table in our dining room. “He’s too much of a liability.”
Nesrine scoffs, flipping her raven hair over her shoulder. “Liability to whom?”
“To us,” Atarah snaps. “To her.” She points at me, almost convicting. Almost forgetting that I’m more powerful than her and all my sisters combined.
What doesn’t work in my favor is being the youngest of seven daughters, and being treated as such while I’m the one who's given up the most for them.
“Davina can take care of herself,” Nesrine counters. “We need to know how he got through the veil.”
“There’s only one way,” Isolde decrees, strumming her fingers on the polished wood table. All eyes fall on her as she pushes her black-rimmed glasses over the bridge of her nose. “He’s a siren.”
Some of my sisters laugh, one of them scoffs, to me—she’s right.
The spell that was cast down around this island was so only our people could walk on it freely without restraints of water. A protective veil which made the island invisible to anyone that wasn’t a siren.
“Unless someone forgot to put the veil back up,” Brylee alludes, leisurely bringing her attention to Kali. “Someone has been forgetful as of late.”
“I have not,” Kali snaps, her amber eyes turning into slits. “And even if I did, Davina always covers for me.” Now I’m under six pairs of eyes, and I narrow mine.
I double-check the veil over two dozen times a day, and it hasn’t needed covering in days.
Unless the Viking has been here for days.
I try to think back on when I last had to secure Kali’s inattentiveness, but it’s hard when the days blend together. Each day on Merindah, our island, seems like a lifetime, and it was never supposed to be or feel like this.
It was presumed to be heaven, an escape from being under the sea. To experience what it felt like to have the sand under our feet and the sun beaming on our faces.
That’s how it started until we learned the price we had to pay for it.
“Regardless,” Atarah counters. “He’s a waste of time and space. A waste of food, which we are limited to in the first place.”
“Regardless,” Nesrine opposes back. “We need information, to know for sure how he got past the veil and to make sure no one else does. Especially since Davina is here alone.”
“We can take turns staying with her,” Brylee offers. “I mean, we kinda do anyway.”
“No.” I don’t say the words out loud, but they hear them. They hear them because I chose for them to.
One of the sacrifices I’ve made to allow my sisters to be free from this island.
“Davina,” Atarah soothes gently like a motherly figure, a position she’s taken up since ours was murdered. “It’s too dangerous with him here. He’s a Viking.”
Nesrine begins to fan herself with a smirk. “And holy mother of the sea, he’s handsome.”
“I’m fine.” I counter.
“But—”
“She’s not going to let you kill the man,” Nesrine voices, with a slice of her hand through the air. “I’m sure she has ideas of her own.” She peers over her shoulder at me, the corners of her lips curving into a devious smirk.
“I’m sure it’s not what you’re thinking,” I rebuke.
Nesrine shrugs. “You’re loss, little one.”
“Do you have a plan?” Brylee asks as the sea breeze blows through the window and picks up her blue hair, wrapping it around her forehead.
There’s only one that I have in mind, and I prefer to do it when my sisters leave the island, but knowing them, one will stay.
“I’d like to question him,” I convey. “He might have some—”
“He isn’t going to speak,” Atarah retorts.
“You don’t know that,” I quip.
Actually, I do.
The man looks like he’d rather be tortured to death than respond to anything I’d want to ask him.
I don’t mind having my sisters tear into him. In fact, it may give him a reality check of the dangers he ensued when he brought it upon himself to come here. And my fear is that I know why he came.
“Your Majesties.” We turn to look at one of our enforcers, Sullivan, standing a few feet back. “Captain Tobias Nathaniel is here to see you.”
He’s bombarded with simultaneous demands, ordering him to make him leave, to bring him inside the castle, what did he bring this time—the same sort of chaos that always brews when you have seven women trying to make a decision and never agreeing on one thing.
Except once—when we all decided to go to the sea witch, Taysa, and obtain this island as our own.
Sullivan looks at me, knowing I’ll end up having the final say anyway. I’ve already upset half my sisters today by not wanting to make any rash decisions on getting rid of the Viking, so I let them hash it up amongst themselves.
I shrug at him, my sisters still arguing over my friend that keeps coming back to the island to either barter off things he brings with him or try to win over Atarah, who hates him with every fiber of her being.
When in actuality, it’s a front.
He’s just here to spend time with me, and he’s the exemption to our rule—well mine under severe feuding with most of my sisters. Rohana and Kali don’t mind him because he saved us that night from the Hunters. The rest of my relations are a mix of irritation, concern, and laid-back.
We don’t let pirates near Merindah, they don’t get that far before we kill them. Or as Nesrine likes to call it, “play with them.”
But Tobias Nathaniel is different—he’s fearless, stupid, and my best friend.
Which leads to an ongoing issue with Atarah and Brylee because he too can pass through the veil with no understanding of why. And the not knowing leaves us all a little restless.
He’s not a siren, Brylee practically drowned him one year to see if it’d spark any traits or tendencies within him. Other than him coughing up water for a few minutes and almost dying in the process, he failed the test.