Whole, she thought.Finally whole again.
The song was already building in her chest, ancient and powerful and ready to be sung.
Below, she heard Alessandro’s fire and Malachar’s screaming rage. Felt the building shake as magic clashed against magic. The lighthouse groaned, ancient stones protesting the forces being unleashed around them.
Marina didn’t hesitate. She ran back down the stairs, pelt clutched in her arms, and emerged into chaos.
Alessandro was in full dragon form now: massive, magnificent, scales gleaming gold and bronze in the firelight. He was thirty feet of power and fury, wings spread wide against the storming sky, fire pouring from his jaws in controlled bursts that kept Malachar pinned in place.
Malachar had dropped his human mask entirely, revealing something ancient and terrible beneath. His true form was shadowy and shifting, a creature of pure appetite that seemed to absorb the light around it. Claws like obsidian knives. Eyes like pits of endless hunger. A monster that had fed on suffering for centuries.
And Dante and Bea had arrived, chaos magic and dragon fire combining to contain the demon’s attempts to escape. Dante was partially shifted, scales covering his arms, fire licking at his fingers. Bea’s purple hair whipped in the magical wind she’d conjured, her hands tracing chaotic patterns in the air that seemed to bend reality around them.
Together, they formed a barrier. Together, they held the line.
But Marina could feel it; they couldn’t hold him forever. Malachar was ancient and powerful. He was weakened, yes, cut off from the curse that had fed him for so long. But he wasn’t beaten. Not yet.
“MARINA!” Alessandro’s voice boomed across the clifftop. “THE SONG! NOW!”
She understood.
They couldn’t defeat Malachar with force alone. But with the curse broken, with his power source destroyed, he would be weakened enough to finish.
The ingredients were assembled. Dragon’s blood already marked Alessandro’s scales where Malachar’s claws had struck. Dragon’s tears. She could see them, glittering on Alessandro’s face as he fought to protect her. He was crying, she realized. Real tears. Genuine grief for all the pain he’d caused, all the mistakes he’d made, all the ways he’d hurt her.
Real ones. The kind he’d never have allowed himself in any other room.
Dragon’s flame, pouring from his mouth in waves that scorched the earth — not claiming, but offering.
And selkie song. Offered in love.
Marina looked at Alessandro. Arrogant. Controlling. Impossible. Also: the man who had burned himself twice learning to operate her ancient KitchenAid mixer and who had started greeting Mrs. Thornberry by name without anyone telling him to.
She loved him.
Through the bond, his love reached her—not the polished, careful version he’d have preferred to present, but the messy, terrified, all-in kind. He was prepared to die for her. More importantly, he was prepared to be embarrassed for her, to be wrong for her, to keep showing up even when he didn’t know how.
Marina clutched her pelt and began to sing.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Marina’s song was not a gift.
It started that way: the gentle lullaby her grandmother had sung over her cradle, the melody that tasted like salt water and flour and Sunday mornings in a kitchen that no longer existed. Marina held her pelt against her chest, feeling the magic pulse through her, and opened her mouth to sing.
The first notes emerged soft and sweet, the way she’d always sung them. In her grandmother’s kitchen, with flour on her hands and the smell of baking bread filling the air. In her bakery, humming under her breath while she shaped croissants at three in the morning. Private melodies for private moments, never meant to be heard.
But this was no private moment.
Through the bond, she felt Alessandro’s fire rage against Malachar’s ancient power. His determination burned against her skin, underlaid with fear he was barely keeping in check. She could sense the curse-thread that connected him to centuries of stolen fortune, dark and pulsing with malevolent energy.
She sang to that darkness.
And the song transformed.
This was not the gentle lullaby anymore. This was something older, something that rose from the depths of selkie memory, from generations of her ancestors who had survived storms and hunters and the endless cruelty of those who would steal their pelts. This was a war-song. The kind that stripped the throat raw and didn’t care.
The selkie magic rose from Marina like a tide, carrying two centuries of accumulated grief: for her grandmother, for Alessandro’s family, for every victim of Malachar’s parasitic hunger. The melody called to the sea itself, and the sea answered.
