She got to her feet. Water streaming off her, shaking, her face raw from crying and rain. She turned to Malrick.
"My mother's bracelet is in the water behind me," she said. "You brought it here to break me. It didn't work."
"You're barely standing."
"I'm standing. That's enough." She raised her hands. The wind obeyed instantly, a focused column of pressurized air that slammed into Malrick and drove him backward across the rocks. He stumbled, fell, got up again. The composure was gone entirely now.
"The resonance works both ways," she said. Her voice was steady. Low, clear, cutting through the storm. "You amplified my frequency. But I know my own signature better than any artifact does."
She did something with her hands. A rotation, a compression. The air pressure around Malrick changed, tightening into a ring, the wind pressing inward. His coat flattened against his body.
"Stop this," Malrick said.
"You wanted to see what a stormcaller could do when she stopped being afraid." The wind pressed closer. "You're looking at it."
The storm over the lake was settling. She was pulling the energy back, not by suppressing it but by redirecting it, channeling the chaotic discharge into the focused ring around Malrick. The lake surface smoothed from chaos to heavy chop.
Lights appeared on the path above the shoreline. Lanterns, moving fast. Emmett came down the bank first, his broad frame visible in the light, followed by two of his people. He took in the scene without breaking stride. Isla standing in the shallows, hands raised. Rafe beside her, barefoot, shirtless, still breathing hard from the shift, from his confession. And Malrick, pinned in a ring of compressed air on the rocks.
"Malrick Sloane," Emmett said. "You're being detained by the Hollow Oak Council on suspicion of sabotage, fraud, magical interference, and endangerment of a protected resident."
His men were already moving. Malrick didn't resist. He didn't have the air for it.
Isla lowered her hands. The wind ring dissolved. She swayed, caught herself, and Rafe was there, his arm around her waist, holding her steady.
He was exhausted, raw, tear-streaked, shaking. But standing.
"You shifted," she said.
"I did."
"You're naked."
"I am."
Her mouth trembled. Almost a smile, fighting through the wreckage of the hardest night of her life.
"Take me home," she said.
34
ISLA
It’d been two days since the storms had left their mark. Mud in the drainage channels, a waterline on the lakeside structures that Rowan's crews were already scrubbing back, a leaning fence post near the bakery that nobody had gotten around to fixing yet. But the buildings stood. The dock stoo as well as the Ashvane. Isla spent the first day sleeping. Fourteen hours, straight through, the deepest rest she'd had since arriving in Hollow Oak. She woke with sunlight on the quilt, her hands dry and warm. The cottage was quiet. As she walked through, she saw Rafe had left a note on the kitchen table in handwriting that was somehow both precise and terrible at the same time.
Went to the dock. Coffee's in the pot. Don't lift anything heavy.
She stood in her kitchen smiling at a piece of paper like a woman who'd lost her mind.
The second day she walked to Corin's meadow. She didn't practice. She sat on the stone wall at the orchard edge with a jar of his honey and a spoon and watched Chloe tend the clover while the bees hummed their low, steady song. Corin appeared after an hour and leaned on the fence.
"How are you feeling?" he asked.
"Like I ran a marathon I didn’t properly train for."
"You won it, though."
"I survived it. That might be the same thing."
