Page 93 of Virelai's Hoard
Riley collapsed to the ground.
The chamber around Sable shuddered, and loud cracks echoed overhead. The walls started to collapse, the Heart of the Abyss pulsing into her hand, its color different from before. Wrong. Its whispers angry and twisted. Sable’s body was almost paralyzed with the sheer malice of it. How had Calla and Riley not felt it? The Heart wanted to destroy.
She couldn’t let them have it.
Gripping the Heart tighter, Sable took a last look around. At the collapsing ceiling, at Riley’s passed out body, at Calla stumbling to her feet, changed.
Then she ran.
Calla
The pain faded, but Calla’s breath didn’t steady. Her fingers curled against the sand, feeling too smooth, too foreign.
She flexed them. They moved like they were hers. But they weren’t.
Something inside her had shifted, like a wave crashing against the shore and pulling the sand beneath her feet.
Slowly, the rest of the world blinked into focus.
A heavy boulder fell into the water ahead with a loud splash–the cave was collapsing. And she was alone? She looked around, searching for Sable, for Riley–
No.
A collapsed body, near where the Heart of the Abyss had been. Calla stumbled to her, heart in her throat. Riley. It was Riley. She crouched down, checked her pulse–still alive. Dark marks like veins ran up her arms, beyond the sleeves of her shirt.
Calla looked up at the collapsing cave around them. Sable was gone. Just… gone. With the Heart.
No time. No choice.
Picking Riley up, Calla fled to the water by instinct. When a section of the ceiling collapsed right atop of their heads, she dove into the sea, and trusted it to see them back to the surface.
Epilogue
Calla
Calla sat by the edge of the bed, staring at the passed out figure invading her space. It had been half a day since they’d made it back on the Moonshadow, and Riley still hadn’t woken. Her breaths were so shallow that Calla felt compelled to check her pulse every few moments. Other compulsions battled within her, too, as alien as her webbed hands and too smooth fingers.
She’d barely let Haddock, or anyone, look at Riley before she’d taken her down to her cabin. To her bed. To tend to her herself. A few months ago, even a few bells ago, she would’ve been appalled at her own behavior.
But nothing was normal anymore.
The locked chest at the foot of her bed was empty. Her skin, the source of so much anguish and hatred, was gone. Mere confirmation of something she already knew.
Virelai’s Hoard was gone, too. Buried beneath the sea.
Calla hadn’t dared look in a mirror yet. She looked at Riley instead. Patch was sleeping soundly, curled up in the nape of her neck. Whatever had happened between the two of them, the rat had forgiven her.
Calla could not.
Being rid of her skin was what she’d wanted–but not like this. She could never step off the Moonshadow again looking likethis. She’d just wanted to be human, and now she was neither selkienor human, but something else. Something other. She’d seen it in the eyes of her crew. As soon as they hit land, most of them would leave. They could stomach her being a selkie when they looked at her human form and could pretend that was all she was, but now her nature would slap them in the face every time she walked amongst them. She’d wanted freedom, and now her prison was more suffocating than it had ever been.
And Riley, this reckless, infuriating woman, had nearly given her life for it. Had paid for something Calla didn’t even want. Instead of being grateful, Calla felt the sharp edge of resentment curling inside her stomach like a tide refusing to recede. At the same time, worry had her lungs in a chokehold. She’d tried to wash the marks out of Riley’s hands while she waited for her to wake up, but they stayed unchanged, like ink under the skin.
Riley’s fingers twitched in her hold, and Calla immediately let go of her hand. When had she taken it? What washappeningto her?
Jaw locked tight, she watched the woman in her bed stir, shift, her arm curling around Patch instinctively. Eventually, she opened her eyes.
“You’re awake.”
