“What do we do?” she asked.
His voice shifted, cold and focused. “Stay here.”
Before either could protest, Reagan centred himself on a charm he had learned from his sister when they were young, replicating the gills of her familiar around his own neck, and dove.
The sea clamped tight around his ribs as he cut downward. Dusk filtered through the surface in streaks of copper and violet that barely reached the dim below. The spiders swarmed above the seabed, their membranous bodies keeping them suspended.
Reagan angled toward the rocks, letting jagged silhouettes swallow his descent. One spider drifted too close. He shot forward and aimed for the creature’s star-shaped core, holding it still in the murk. His mana traced the form, and Reagan split its slick carapace, spilling black ichor into the tide.
Too many for this. Claws rasped through the water.
Before the swarm could close in, he opened his palm and let his access spill. Spill and spill and spill ahead. Reagan summoned heat and aimed at the nearest cluster. The sea seethed only around the creatures, water churning and nearly boiling.
Legs curled inward. Chitin cracked. Bubbles roared upward like smoke rising from a forge.
The rest scattered, then rounded on him again.
He thrust both hands outward and seized the currents, slamming the creatures back into a single mass of flailing limbs as the boiling tide swallowed the rest.
They pressed in, mandibles clacking. He rolled back, feet scraping stone. He missed another skittering low, earning a slash along his arm. He caught its clammy leg, smashed it against the rock, and hurled a current that dragged more into the waiting boil.
The seabed lay empty. He was certain there was another cluster, but perhaps they scattered after feeling the heat. Reagan drove upward, bursting through the surface with a rough inhale.
Gills were horribly unintuitive.
“Flaunting much?” Finn said, grinning.
Jane surfaced beside him, breathless and pale.
Reagan’s chest burned from exertion, and blood streamed freely from the fresh gash along his forearm.
Perfect. The scent would draw every creature within reach.
“There are more,” Jane said, her voice tight as she pointed. Below, the seabed was beginning to stir, a knot of legs churning into view once more. “Why are they avoiding the elves?”
“My thought exactly,” he muttered, narrowing his eyes at the approaching swarm while calculating how to carve a clean path for the two of them.
Stupidly, he looked to see whether the elves were preparing to intervene. Iqbal could have broken the swarm with a single gesture. Instead, he lingered far ahead, smirking, and tapped his knuckles against his chest in farewell.
Reagan bared his teeth and dipped his chin. “We’re on our own. You two swing right. I will take left and draw them off.”
“There are too many,” Jane said as she fought to stay afloat.
“That wounds me,” Reagan said with false solemnity. “Do you really think I cannot handle a few oversized spiders?”
She didn’t laugh, wasn’t convinced at all, based on how her gaze fixed on the churning water.
“Go,” he said. “Finn, keep a look if any slip past me.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. The nearest group tasted the current of his blood and surged. Reagan tore the wound wider, let the water carry the scent, and drove himself into their path.
Chapter 31
Jane
We curved through the water to circle the creatures, my strokes harder and clumsier than they ought to be, all to keep close to Finn’s long limbs. He was painfully fast, and I knew he was slowing his pace for my sake.
Every nerve in my body urged me to look back, to find even the smallest glimpse of Reagan among the tangle of those dreadful things. I couldn’t call them animals. They looked like something born of a deranged union between a sea octopus and a land spider, only much larger and appallingly swift.
