Kahlia just needed to die first.
I moved closer to my cousin, clasping my hands behind my back so the Sea Queen couldn’t see how much they were shaking. I wondered if she could smell blood from the crescents I had stamped into my palms.
Kahlia cried as I approached, great howls of terror spilling from her tiny lips. I wasn’t sure what I planned to do as I got closer to her, but I knew I didn’t want to kill her. Take her hand and swim, I thought. Get as far away from the Sea Queen as we can. But I knew I wouldn’t do that, either, because my mother’s eyes were the ocean and she would see us wherever we hid. If I took Kahlia, we’d both be killed for treason. And so my choices were this: to take my cousin’s heart. Or to take her hand and let us die together.
“Stop,” Crestell said.
She swooped in front of Kahlia, creating a barrier between us. Her arms were spread wide in defense, fangs bared. For a moment I was sure she would attack, slicing her claws through me and putting an end to this madness once and for all.
“Take me,” she said.
I paled.
Crestell grabbed my hand – it looked tiny in hers, but nowhere near as delicate – and pressed it to her chest. “Take it,” she said.
My cousins gasped around us, their faces contorted in terror and grief. This was their choice: watch their mother die or see their sister killed. I stammered before my aunt, ready to scream and swim as far away as I could. But then Crestell shot a look to Kahlia, who trembled on the seabed. A worried, furtive glance, quick enough for my mother to miss. When her eyes returned to mine, they were filled with begging.
“Take it, Lira,” Crestell said. She swallowed and raised her chin. “This is the way things must be.”
“Yes,” my mother cooed from behind me. I didn’t have to turn to know there was a smile cutting across her face. “That would be quite the substitute.”
She placed a hand on my shoulder, her nails scraping over my skin, clamping me into place before she lowered her lips to my ear and let a whisper form between us.
“Lira,” my mother said so quiet that my fin curled. “Cure yourself and show me that you truly belong in the ocean.”
Defective.
“Any last words, sister?” the Sea Queen asked.
Crestell closed her eyes, but I knew it wasn’t to keep from crying. It was to seal the fury in so that it didn’t burnish her irises. She wanted to die a loyal subject and keep her daughters safe from my mother’s revenge. From me.
When Crestell opened her eyes again – one such a pure blue and the other a most miraculous shade of purple – she looked nowhere but at me.
“Lira,” she said. Her voice rasped. “Become the queen we need you to be.”
It wasn’t a promise I could make, because I wasn’t sure I was capable of being the kind of queen my mother’s kingdom needed. I had to be without emotion, spreading terror rather than feeling it, and as my breathing trembled, I just didn’t know if I had it in me.
“Won’t you promise?” Crestell asked.
I nodded, even though I thought it was a lie. And then I killed her.
That was the day I became my mother’s daughter. And the moment it happened was the moment I became the most monstrous of us all. The yearning to please her spread through me like a shadow, fighting against every urge I knew she’d perceive as weakness. Every flash of regret and sympathy that would lead her to believe I was impure.
Abnormal. Defective. And in a blink of an eye, the child I was became the creature I am.
I forced myself to think only of which princes would please my mother most: the fearless ágriosy, who tried for decades to find Diávolos under the misguided notion they could end our kind, or a prince of Mellontikós. Prophets and fortune-tellers who chose to keep themselves apart from the war, rarely daring to let a ship touch the water. I toyed with the thought of bringing them to my mother as further proof that I belonged by her side.
Over time, I forgot what it was like to be weak. Now that I’m trapped here in a body that is not my own, I suddenly remember. I’ve gone from being my mother’s least favorite weapon to a creature who can’t even defend herself. A monster without fangs or claws.
I run a hand over my bruised legs, paler than a shark’s underbelly.
My feet arch inward as an awful cold snakes through me and small bumps begin to prickle over my new skin. I don’t understand what it means, and I don’t understand how I could have gone from darting through the ocean to stumbling among humans.