“I know where it is.”
“Of course you do. Hurry up, Marlowe. Your baby sister’s getting weally hungwy.”
The baby voice she fakes is so cloying I want to gag. I end the call and tear off my clothes, springing from the top of the porch steps and transforming into a horse in mid-air.
My hooves spit gravel as I race down the driveway. I thunder along the beach path, snarling deep in my throat. The night breeze streams through my mane in a way that I’d usually enjoy, but my heart is shredded and swollen, bleeding streams of fear and anger, and I can’t focus on anything except Rick.
Valeria must have gotten to him before he reached the safety of the Crescent Cove wards. Which means she intercepted him as he was driving into town this morning. He wasn’t at the diner all day. And since our relationship isn’t public yet, no one would have thought to call me to ask where he was. Did they close the diner, or did they manage without him somehow?
Why am I thinking about diner logistics? It doesn’t matter in the least, not when Rick is in my sister’s clutches. She said he’s alive, but she didn’t say what condition he’s in. She used to love teasing and torturing her victims before she ate them. Sometimes she didn’t have the time, but whenever the opportunity presented itself, she always preferred to play before feasting.
I shouldn’t have let him stay overnight outside the wards. But I knew I could protect him. If she’d attacked while he was in my house, she wouldn’t have stood a chance. That’s why she waited until he left. She probably did some damsel-in-distress routine on the beach road, and he fell for it.
I should have warned him, or he should have been smarter, orsomething.
No use fretting over what I should have done. This is the reality now. Rick is Valeria’s hostage, and I suspect I know the price she has put on his life.
Even if I say I’ll return to the herd, Valeria won’t take my word for it. She’s trying to force me into a glashtyn vow, the unbreakable oath of our people. There’s actual magical weight to such a vow, and if it’s broken, the oathbreaker becomes a regular horse—not a kelpie, not a human, just a normal horse who grazes and shits and snorts.
I love horses more than most people, but I don’t want to be one permanently. If Valeria forces this vow, I’ll have to keep it. Which means I’ll be giving up Rick either way. But at least he’ll be alive, even if I never get to see him again, even if I spend the rest of my life being rutted by the lead stallion of our herd and supervising a bitchy collection of desperate house-mares.
How did things go so wrong?
My flying hooves devour the sand until the ground becomes too rocky for running. I climb the slope, racing through the moonlit, wind-torn seagrass at the top of the bluff and galloping past the lighthouse.
I slow down, picking my way through rocks, patchy grass, and tough, salt-bitten shrubs, toward the inlet Valeria mentioned. I can’t afford to snap my foreleg here—it would take too long to heal. Val might lose her patience and decide Rick would be better as a meal than a hostage.
Finally I descend to the rocky lip of the inlet, decorated with tufts of tall grass. A few long-dead beech trees stand like leafless sentinels nearby. They’re blasted bare and white, the skeletons of their former selves.
Rick is chained to one of them, his arms wrapped backward around the trunk in what looks like a painful position. The rough metal of the chain digs into his barechest so tightly that I can smell the raw flesh and the seeping blood.
He’s just wearing his boxers, and his entire body is covered in bruises and cuts from my sister’s hooves. Blood has dribbled from his lips into the scruff of his jaw. His head hangs forward, tousled hair falling over his face. He looks like he’s on the point of passing out. My bright kelpie eyes can see as well in darkness as daylight, and I can tell that his tanned skin has a red flush to it, thanks to the sun exposure he got today. If he survives the night, he’ll have a nasty sunburn.
My sister is in kelpie form, swimming in the water, her neck arched with pleasure at the sensation of the cold liquid. She probably smelled me a while ago, but she pretends not to notice until I’m standing right at the brink of the inlet. Then she tosses her head and whinnies a greeting.
I’m tempted to spring toward Rick and break his chains with my hooves. But Valeria is closer to Rick than I am. She could slit his throat in a second and spill his life’s blood on the stone. So I don’t move.
Val submerges herself from muzzle to tail, and when she rises again she’s human. Water streams in glittering rivulets from her dark hair and pale shoulders. Her rose-red eyes are hooded, glowing, and her teeth are still sharp. The scarlet strands in her hair illuminate the surface of the water in bloody light.
“Thanks for coming, Marlowe,” she croons. “I’m sure you’ve already figured out what I want, but just in case you’re a little slow today, I’ll spell it out for you. We’ve got a couple of options here. You swear the glashtyn vowto return hometonight, help us with Mother, and take her place after the lykewake. Then I’ll let sweet Maverick go. Or we can both eat him. He’s quite delicious. Meaty in just the right way.”
Rick lifts his head with a groan and starts to speak, but he coughs instead.
“Don’t try it, lover-boy,” Valeria warns him. “I’ll have to punish you again.” She smirks and glances back at me. “We’ve had so much fun today, Rick and I. Not as much as we could have had, though. I did try to persuade him to let me come on that nice-looking dick of his, but he wasn’t interested.” Her lips form a pout. “He should be flattered. I don’t usually fuck my food.”
I switch to human form and pace slowly along the rocks, gradually closing the distance between Rick and me. “Did you touch him without his consent?”
“Other than chaining him and beating him up a bit?” She laughs. “Ibarelytouched him. Just took a little feel, you know, to see what he had to offer.”
I laugh too, but the sound that comes out of me is hard as stone, icy as the ocean depths. “I’m going to kill you.”
Her eyes flash viciously brighter. “You’re not in any position to be making threats. Don’t go any closer to him, Lowe. You think I don’t see what you’re doing? Stop right there, or I’ll tear out his jugular.”
I halt where I am. Valeria leaps out of the water and catches Rick’s throat in her hand, forcing his head up. He releases a pained gasp and grits his teeth.
“You know my price,” Val says. “Make the vow, or he dies.”
She angles her head, baring her long, pointed teeth. Her eyes flick up to meet mine as her jaws move closer to Rick’s neck.
