Page 12 of The Hunted

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!”