Page 74 of Crashing Tides

“You’re pretty good at this for somebody with no brains,” I gasp, lifting my head to watch.

He pauses, rolls his eyes, lets out a laugh that zips down my dick and into my fucking spine.

There are little bruises on my thighs from yesterday. Every time I see them, my reaction is bone deep, a little desperate. He wants me.

He claimed me, a part of my brain insists, and that’s kind of a weird, feral thought. I should probably be afraid of it, but I’m not. I just want him to bite me again.

But right now, he’s maintaining a fast rhythm, and I’m trying not to lose it. The sheets bunch where I grasp them, still wrinkled from last night.

I’m rapidly losing focus. I hook my ankles around his shoulders, and he holds my hips hostage so that he controls the pace. And fine, maybe I want to be indignant, but I love that he’s so demanding, so I just cover his hand with mine and hold on for the ride.

Which is embarrassingly short, but I’ve been desperate for a while now and I can’t hold back any longer. It’s an orgasm that threatens to rip me in half, and when I’m finished, he packs me back into my jeans and flops on top of me with a smirk. “How was that?”

“Excellent. Ten out of ten. No notes.”

He cocks his head, considers this. “I can do better than ten out of ten,” he decides, and nips at my ear.

I wrap my arms around him, huff a laugh into his neck. “I’ll hold you to it.”

Chapter

Twenty-One

The next month is a whirlwind. I don’t see Duncan on the full moon, mostly because he’s convinced he’ll kill me. He’s probably right about that, but I also think he’s kind of embarrassed to shift in front of people. That’s fine. I can wait.

It’s hard to imagine that he’d actually kill me when he kisses me like the hero of a romance novel, all burning passion and eagerness, but I’m woefully ignorant about shifters. I don’t want to push it.

Besides, it’s midterms, which means that I’m so stressed that I feel like I could die. It’s so bad that sometimes I actually think I might.

In Prophecy and Prediction, I conjure endless images of blood—filling crystal goblets, spilling across stone floors, dribbling down walls, pouring like rain. It doesn’t matter what I’m supposed to see, the mirror and the marble only show me blood. Jordan laughs at me, but I’m more unsettled with each passing day. What if this means something? It can’t be anything good.

“Think of it as wine or Kool-Aid or something,” Jane suggests, when I share my worries with her one afternoon in the library. “Don’t let it freak you out. Divination just isn’t your thing.”

And that would be incredibly practical advice if it weren’t for the dreams.

I spend my nights haunted by faces in the ocean, hidden just beneath the surface. Human, or human enough, with wide, horrified eyes and mouths full of teeth, open mid-scream. I just know something terrible has happened to them, that they’re all dead or about to die. There’s nothing I can do to help. The surface of the ocean is like glass, and I can’t break through it. I can only pound my fists and shout until they drift away one by one.

Sometimes, I see glowing red eyes, peering out from the rotting wood of a shipwreck. Others, a pale figure in an endless, shadowed hallway. She looks kind of like my mom, but I can never get close enough to tell. I get the feeling she wants me to follow, but she’s too fast, disappearing as soon as I round the corner after her.

They’re just nightmares, I tell myself.

The thing is, I’ve never been prone to nightmares. These feel ominously real.

As we approach midterms, they ramp up in intensity, until I wake up one morning in Duncan’s bed, soaked in sweat. It’s two a.m., and I’m panting like I’ve just run a marathon.

Duncan lifts his head, opens one eye just a slit, and mumbles, “‘ominic?”

“It’s OK,” I tell him. “Go back to sleep. I just had a nightmare.”

But he’s blinking his long lashes and rolling to throw one arm over my chest in what I assume is meant to be a comforting gesture. “‘Bout what?”

“Dead people.”

“Ugh. Gross.”

I snort. “Among other things.”

“You OK?”