Fire (Pirate Cove Academy #3) - Rae Foxx Page 0,3

it all. I remembered my first hunch. “I think I know who it is. She’s been right there under our noses. It has to be her.”

I flicked my gaze up to see everyone gawking at me. “Who? Spit it out, Princess.”

Oh goody, Caspian was back to that again.

“It’s Raven. It all makes sense.”

I waited for them to see the truth of my words. Instead, Pearl’s laughter filled the room as she rolled her eyes and cocked out her hip. “Don’t be ridiculous, Zaniah. She’s just a lackey. We all know it.”

I huffed out a breath through my nose. “Is that right? Well to start, she’s got more power than me. Or more control of her powers. They’re these dark orbs of power with a golden center, the opposite of mine. She’s always presented as the leader of the Sirens in this place. She leads the meetings. Not to mention that she’s got enough control over Garrison that when she tells him to jump, he asks how high.”

“If she is the heir of the Under, the ruler of us all, why is she here at Pirate Cove Academy of all places?” Llyr sneered at me. I hated that face he made when he thought he was right. I just wanted to slap it off of him.

“I bet there’s some way to know for sure,” Kai offered, giving me a one-sided smile.

Caspian chuckled in that dark way that sent shivers down my spine. “Just give her the fucking head and see what the bitch does. I mean, if I were the next in line to be ruler of the seas and I found out the only person in my way had been beheaded, I would probably have a reaction. It’d be a dead giveaway.”

In all his assholery, the man was brilliant sometimes.

I stomped over to the head, silencing my emotions from what I was about to do. Bending down, I picked it up by the hair and replaced the crown on his head.

“Let’s go fucking see, shall we?”

2

Llyr thought it would be a good idea to put the head of our father in a bag, but since I didn’t really keep beheading bags around, we used a pillowcase instead. It has dolphins on it, so it was inspired really. My father was probably cursing us from whatever afterlife he watched us from. I could only hope we were making the right decision, that we were making him proud.

Oh well, I was cursing him for cheating on my mother and creating some kind of hellion with scales that I had to deal with. Maybe he didn’t deserve to be proud of us.

Also, we’d come up with a better plan. Instead of taking it right to the source, we were taking the head in all its drippy sponginess to Lord Garrison. He was excellent at delivering news to his boss.

“What are we really thinking with this? This is ridiculous. It’s the middle of the night. What are you going to do, just knock on the door, drop the head, yell ‘surprise’, and leave?”

I pushed the bag at Caspian, making him swerve to avoid it. “It’s the perfect plan. It’s the middle of the night. That alone is enough to jar His Roundness out of slumber. He won’t be aware or awake enough to school his reactions so we’ll get to see all of them, raw and real. He’s probably going to let something slip in his knee-jerk reaction. It’s not like he’s just going to come out and say that Raven is behind it all, but he may give us enough to draw that conclusion ourselves.”

“Oh! I can pretend to be a ghost and threaten him. Talk or your head will be next!” He made his hands into claws and got on his tiptoes. Apparently, that was what ghosts looked like to Sirens.

I groaned and rolled my eyes, reminding myself of the earlier crying as they stung, silently thanking him for almost making me smile through all of this. “That’s not the plan. We show him the head. He freaks the fuck out. We wait until he delivers the news to whoever is in charge. I’m betting on the red-lipped bitch myself. Then tomorrow, we watch Raven for her own reaction.”

Caspian crossed his arms over his chest. “I still don’t think it will work, but at least we’ll get a kick out of seeing Garrison’s face when we deliver that head. Can you do the thing you did to Llyr and me again? Roll