In the Veins of the Drowning (The Siren Mage, #1)

by Kalie Cassidy

Far below, in the water, she waits. I wake and she fades. I sleep and she surges. Held in a decaying body, an ancient, familiar power hums through her veins. She is the clawed hand searching the waves. The tight fist around my gut. Always there in the water. Always there in my dreams. She is want, and I know her well.

It was as if something lurked within me and thought to come alive, twitching, writhing, taking shape. Pressing my eyes shut, I tried to focus past it. I bit back the urge to hum.

“Marriages are not performed as blood bonds on Seraf, Lach. She didn’t know.” “Marriages!” My gaze bounced between all three of them. “We’re married?”

Oh???

“That’s fine,” said Lachlan, clearly annoyed. “But you did. And you agreed. So now, in the eyes of the Great Gods, you’ve taken a fugitive wife, right before you’re supposed to meet your fiancée.”

OH?!?!???

I have no desire to be like you—” I jabbed a finger against his chest. “To scrape myself empty for others and call it noble.”

“Bound to you?” I thought of the scars on my hand. Of all the blood I’d been forced to give over the years. Of the words—Nemea’s ritual prayer. A trickle of cold, complete horror ran down my body. “You’re Eusia.”

Chills

“The bodies are reanimated by my power,” said the fairer nekgya in an identical voice to the first. In an identical voice to the one in my head. “And I am animated by yours, dear, generous girl. There you are. Just like your mother. I have waited so long.”

Bound to Eusia. To all the nekgya. That was why they didn’t hurt me. Because it was my power that ran through their decaying veins.

There is a crown. Ripped, ripped, ripped from the head. There is a bond. Cut, cut, cut from the blood. The queen lies drained of her divinity. The king sits wrecked and ravaged beneath her wing.

Theodore’s absence would bring me more than heartache. For awful things filled empty spaces. And it was in the darkest, deepest part of the sea that monsters were made.

“In the wake of the ruined, when the spirit rends, mend and loop and seal. In the veins of the drowning, when blood fills the throat, clear and wash and heal.”

Starved. Searching. It finally found me.