My heart stutters as Iker immediately does as Isay—family over everything. “Let the old woman go!” he commands.
The guards comply. But I can’t watch her act. My heart can’t take it if she fails. She’s known as the Healer of Kings, but tonight she’ll have to save my prince.
As Hansa works, Anna’s magic tugs at the edges of my strength. Overhead, storm clouds gather. Pinned beneath my body, Anna’s suddenly laughing again. I want to slap her, but I don’t want to lose my grip. “Shut up!” I scream. “How could you? He loved you!Iloved you!”
She spits in my face. This person I no longer know. This person I don’t recognize. This person who tried to take Nik. This person who took my father.
The wind picks up, and lightning sizzles in my peripheral vision. Thunder crashes. Her magic rolls over us, and I do everything I can do to keep her down, my magic sparking in spurts as I bleed.
Now she’s laughing so hard that she’s crying.Actual tears.
They flee down her blood-splattered cheeks, wet and real. Terror claws at my heart as it struggles to work under the weight of the blood streaming out of my shoulder and chest.
No, she can’t be human. This person doesn’t deserve a soul. She can’t have won. Nik isn’t dead.
He can’t be.
Yet her tears are there. And with them, her eyes rolldramatically up to where I have her hands pinned to the sand. Where the knife is pinned—no.
No.
Screams sound from the sea lane. A mass of bodies rushes forth. The guards, too. All to a single body, prone on the beach. Knife sticking out from a strike dead center to the throat—the last of Annemette’s mermaid magic used to hit its target.
Not Nik.
His father. The king, dead on the sand.
It must only be royal blood that matters to the magic—Øldenburg blood, passed down from the witch-hunter king—because before him is Iker, pulling himself up from a crouch. He’d been just low enough that Anna’s blade missed. It was meant for him—the final player on the day Anna drowned, but the king would do.
The queen’s voice, shrill and high, echoes above the chaos as she sinks to the sand.“Kill them!”
The guards spring forth. Anna continues to laugh, her human legs kicking at mine. My blood has stained her dress, her skin, her hair. It only makes her laugh harder. So hard she doesn’t even try to escape—she’s reveling in it too much.
Over the noise—the laughing, the lockstep of the guards, the screaming townspeople, I hear it. The voice I’ve always known as well as my own.
“Evie.”
Nik.
He’s crawling toward me with Hansa’s aid. The look in her eyes tells me her healing cannot help—he’ll soon be dead, like his father. Nik knows it too, his voice shaking. “Evie, I love you. I’m sorry I didn’t say it until today. I’m sorry...”
“Tante, hold Anna still. Please. Don’t let her up.” Hansa’s magic is strong and she uses a binding spell like Anna used on me. One I never learned.
Still, only when I know Hansa has Anna pinned do I let go. Anna is screaming at me, struggling against Hansa’s magic, but I drown her out. My hands find Nik, and I bring his bleeding body to my chest. “I love you, too. And I won’t let this be the end.”
Confusion crosses his face. The skin there has lost its color. His breath comes in pants, his lungs struggling against my bodice. The blood from our wounds runs together, like finding like.
I shut my eyes, my mother’s words coming to me. I don’t need octopus ink. I don’t need gems or potions or charms. I just need the words and the will.
I am a witch. I am and I always will be. The magic is in me and it is enough—I suppose Annemette taught me that.
“I love you, Nik,” I repeat, and then I start my mother’s spell. The words coming like I’ve known them my whole life, and maybe I have.
“Líf. Dau∂i. Minn líf. Sei∂r. Minn bjo∂. Sei∂r. Sei∂r.”
My skin begins to burn, white hot, heat radiating from my bones outward, steam in the air. Tears come to my eyes, and I know they’re black—Mother’s eyes didn’t do that, but I’m my own kind of magic. They drip onto Nik’s skin as I begin to shake. My eyes roll back for a moment, and the last thing I see is color returning to his skin, his cheeks pinking like we’ve been together all day at sea.
I force my vision to clear. I need to see him. I need to.
