Page 10 of Brine and Bone
"Again," she whispered against his mouth.
And the beast obeyed.
CHAPTER 3
The scholars were coming.
The finest minds Caelith Mare possessed were already threading through the Bosphorus Passage. Ancients Thalos had summoned theinstanthe'd realized Kore was pregnant. When he'd seen the color dancing through her biolume, that it wasn'tjustNyxarion's mark inside her.
He'd summoned them in secret. To examine Kore, to catalog every last chromatophore. Document her every impossible, illicit breath, and measure the spread of every fin.
Because she didn't merely possess the Queen's Lightning—an Abyssair trait assumed extinct. She also wielded his own Chromatic Camouflage. A trait assumed exclusive to his Asterion bloodline, now in the dainty, mutant hands of a Siren.
ApregnantSiren.
One he'd bred himself, despite the cost.
Thalos rolled, belly-down, and swam a lazy circle through the sunlight. Opalescent scales catching the warmth, he flicked his tail. Eyes scanning the dark below, where his people worked.
Thalassari reef breakers. Toiling to erect an outpost of Caelith Mare in the poisoned tide.
It was an art, building the sweeping, elegant structures. Breaking the coral and coaxing it to grow new structures to suit the exacting demands of Caelith Mare architecture.
One he was utterly unequal to, for the ancestral seat of Thalassari power was luminous. Open to the tides. And even here, in the anoxic current, the Hollow Court would spawn beauty. Perfection. For as long as the matter of Kore's child remained unsettled, Thalos would remain. The Hollow Court would have a seat here, no matter how viciously the Black Sea resisted civilization or elegance.
Rolling again, Thalos basked in the fractured sunlight. Slipping through the glittering shafts, floating on his back in the warmest layer, he drifted. Arms folded behind his head. Drawing pendulous sweeps with his tail, aiming to keep himself suspended in the brightest shaft of light. Glacial-blue eyes slitted against the glare as he basked.
Behind him, the island rose against the surface. Stark. Black rock and barren scrub.
The place where Nyxarion had dragged a human woman onto shore and fucked her full of venom until she grew gills.
Where he'd won the Chain of Breath and let the beguiling little monster seduce him.
He should have killed her.
It would have been easier.
Fingers drifting to his ribs, Thalos smiled where no one could see it. Tracing the scars glittering on his skin.
Wounds Nerissa had closed. Singing her last song for him, she'd pulled him back from the abyss of death's current. Flushed the venom Nyxarion had pumped into him before he'd begun to fester and rot.
But he would keep the scars.
Ridged tissue marring his perfect form, marking the points where Nyxarion's barbed spines had punched through scale and bone. Impaling him, left to bleed before both courts.
But Nerissa's final song hadn't been a gift.
It was anexchange.
Return the Sirens to the sea, Sovereign.
The oath was heavy. A weight sealed in venom, written in blood.
Return the Sirens.
It was insanity.
Kore was an oddity. A curiosity.
