There were hands on him again.

  Not the calloused fists of a guard or the sharp grip of shackles—no, these were cold. Slick with seawater, firm with intent. They wrapped around his arms, dragging him over jagged stone, each scrape lighting fire along his side.

  Lark’s eyes fluttered open for a moment, then rolled shut again. The light was wrong.

  Not the oil-lit yellow of a brig. Not the moon’s silver glow. This was pale blue, half-drowned and glassy, like it filtered through layers of water even above the surface. He coughed, sputtered, choking on the brine in his lungs.

  The world came back in pieces. First, the burn of open wounds grated against the rocks. Then the chill of the sea-soaked air, sharp as knives. The sound of waves crashed in the distance, but closer—breath. Not his. Her breath.

  She dragged him up the shore with practiced strength, her pace steady even as his legs caught on stone, knees bloodied. A hole yawned ahead in the cliffs: a sea-cave blackened by tide and time, hungrily awaiting them both. He blinked the salt from his eyes.

  “Iris?” he rasped. His throat was raw. It tasted of copper and salt. “Is that—” The woman didn’t answer.

  His head lolled back as he tried to see her. Silver-white hair—yes. Pale skin. Yes. Eyes cast downward in shadow, but something about the tilt of her mouth, the smoothness of her jaw, screamed familiarity. Her tail, it was still wounded and bleeding, surely it should’ve healed by now?

  “I figured,” he murmured, reaching up with shaking fingers. “I thought you’d come…”

  Still no answer.

  The moment she crossed into the cave’s opening, his blood turned to ice. She hadn’t spoken. Not once. Not a hum, not a word of disappointment, of anger he’d expected.

  And her grip was wrong—too tight, too strong, too desperate. She dragged him like a prize.

  Lark’s heart stuttered in his chest. His heel caught a rocky outcrop, and he jolted. It wasn’t elegant. It wasn’t calculated. Just a surge of instinct. He ripped his arm from her clawed grip, and she staggered back with a sharp exhale.

  He scrambled, coughing, half-crawling up the rough, wet stone. Pain flared in his ribs—at least one broken—but panic screamed louder. He got to the top, the mouth of the cave.

  “Say something,” he demanded, voice hoarse. “Say my name.”

  The figure rose slowly below, her hair slicked over her face, dripping. Then she looked up. And Lark felt the bottom of the world fall out. It wasn’t Iris.

  Her eyes were wrong—glassy and hollow, all black, like a shark’s. Her skin, no longer the porcelain pale he’d first seen, darkened by the second to a murky, barnacle-speckled grey. Her lips twisted back—not in a smile, not in fury, but in something worse. Hunger.

  A low sound gurgled from her throat, a wet, visceral noise like stones scraping beneath a tide. Her jaw shifted. Lowered. Then—Cracked. Her mouth opened wide, then wider. Then too wide.

  Muscles tore. Flesh stretched. Her jaw unhinged in a grotesque display, long, jagged teeth glistening with strands of thick, stringy saliva. It dripped onto the rocks, steaming faintly where it landed.

  She lunged. Lark rolled.

  Her clawed hand raked across his shoulder, shredding the linen of his tunic and skin beneath. He gasped, rolled again, fumbled for a rock—anything—and hurled it at her face.

  It hit with a wet thud. She hissed and shook it off, crouching like a beast, saliva pouring down her chin as she scuttled sideways across the wall like a crab.

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  “Gods,” Lark panted. “No, no, no—”

  She launched again, this time grabbing his leg and biting. Pain exploded through his calf as teeth sank in. He yelped, eyes wide, kicked with the other foot, caught her in the chin hard enough to jolt her head back. She snarled, dragging him down again, trying to claw her way on top of him. He couldn’t beat her strength. But he could be slippery.

  He twisted, used his bloodied leg like bait, baited her to bite again—then slammed his knee into her throat when she lunged. She reeled, gagged, and he was moving again.

  Lark scrambled for the dark edge of the cave, half-blind, slipping on blood and algae. He had no weapons, no songs prepared, just a bell.

  His hand grazed his wrist. The bell. Small, silver, tied there with a strip of ribbon. The same he’d worn since Cecilia, both curse giver and his raiser, gave it back to him, since he began walking on two legs.

  His pulse roared in his ears. The siren snarled behind him, claws scraping over stone, fast and closing in.

  Lark yanked the bell to his lips, breath shallow. He didn’t remember the whole spell, just scraps of something a mage had taught him in half in jest one morning, she cast it to hush Lark’s lute playing. “It’s not just a silencing spell,” she’d said. “It rattles the inner ear. Disorients. Deafens.”

  A mage and healer, fierce and steady, she wasn’t his mother, but she’d saved him more than once. He pressed his lips to the bell and whispered the words.

  “Audientia fracta.” The bell rang. Not gently, not musically. It shrieked.

  The sound that tore from it was wrong—fractured, sharp as broken glass. Magic, raw and unrefined, burst outward like a pulse of force. The cave shook. Water shivered. The siren screamed. Not in hunger now—but in pain.

  She clawed at her ears, staggering, her glass-black eyes rolling as the sound warped her balance. Her jaw clacked shut, teeth gnashing in confusion. It wasn’t much, just a few seconds. But it was enough.

  He shook as his wet figure scraped the surface of the cave’s rocky mouth again. The tide surged in like a living beast, salt spray blasted through the cave opening, knocking the air from Lark’s lungs. A white blur surged past him.

  The siren snarled, turning toward the sound as the spell split off. And then, a scream. Iris, the real Iris.

  She collided with the beast in a blur of ivory and silver, nails shifting to claws, tail lashing. The cave lit with sudden bioluminescent glow, shining from her skin like moonlight made flesh. The feral siren hissed, tried to dodge, but Iris was faster. Stronger.

  They clashed like two storms. Flesh and fang. Stone splintered beneath the force of them. Lark watched, stunned, as Iris took a gash across her cheek and didn’t even flinch.

  “You fool!” she shouted over the shriek of the sea. Her voice was still velvet, but now it cracked with fury. “She would’ve torn you apart!”

  Lark tried to sit up. His leg pulsed red, mangled. “She looked like you,” he rasped. “She—she sounded—”

  “She was a mirror,” Iris snapped, eyes flashing silver. “They can mimic. How do you NOT know—”

  The feral siren lunged again, this time aiming for Iris’s throat, but she didn’t get far. Iris grabbed the creature mid-lunge, twisted, and slammed her into the cave wall hard enough to crack bone. The mimic let out a garbled, choking wail—but it wasn’t words. Just rage.

  Iris bared her fangs. And then, with one hand on the siren’s face, she whispered something in her native tongue, something Lark couldn’t make out.

  Her claws drove into the mimic’s skull. A sharp snap. A final gurgle, and the creature went still.

  Iris held her for a breath longer, then let her fall like driftwood to the rocks. The silence after was deafening.

  Lark tore his gaze away with a sickening feeling pooling in his gut, panting. Bleeding. His leg shook uncontrollably.

  Iris turned to him, eyes cold. Wet strands of her silver hair clung to her face, her shoulders heaving.

  “You almost died,” she said. Not softly. Not in grief. But accusation. Lark managed a faint, humorless laugh. “Wouldn’t be the first time this week.”

  She walked toward him, and he flinched. Not from fear, from shame. Her tail, harpooned and ripped the last time he saw, was replaced with scaled legs, webbed feet.

  “I thought it was you,” he muttered. “She looked like you. Moved like you. I was half-dead..”

  “You wanted to see me so badly you ignored every instinct you have,” Iris snapped, kneeling beside him. Her hands—gentler now—grabbed his chin, forcing his gaze. “You would’ve let her rip out your throat just because she wore my face. Foolish, stupid human.”

  “She wore your voice, too,” he choked. “I couldn’t tell the difference until it was too late.”

  She stilled. Then, softly: “That’s the danger of our kind.” He met her eyes. And for the first time, he saw what she had been hiding. Not from him, from herself. The grief of it, and the pain of killing her own.

  Iris swallowed thickly, then pulled back, wiping her bloodied hands on the stone.

  “She wasn’t feral when she was born,” she said, almost too quiet. “None of us are. But the hunger—it doesn’t let go. Some of us become hunters. Some of us lose.”

  “You didn’t want to kill her.”

  “No,” she said. “But I had to.”

  They sat there for a long while, the wind howling at the mouth of the cave. Rain started again, falling in cold sheets. The mimic’s body lay broken against the wall, slowly dissolving into brine and foam.

  “Iris,” Lark said quietly. “I’m sorry.”

  She stood, and he saw the tension in her spine. The restraint. “Don’t ever let it happen again.”

  He nodded.

  But his voice was thin when he replied, “I don’t think I’ll survive if it does.”