Page 148 of A Sea of Fate and Starfire

I glared up at him, my mouth curling with disgust. Strength had abandoned my limbs. Left me a shaking wet ball of wet skin and bared teeth and oddly bent bones. I didn’t think I could stand even if I wanted to. From the other side of the table, Kazimir’s flailing legs had slowed, his breath a ragged lurch in and out.

I gulped air through the thinning tunnel to my lungs, my voice weakening into a dim rasp. “So much for allies.”

“I tried,” he said, as though I’d been the reason he’d failed.

“I didn’t realize”—I paused to stifle a cough—“it was an ultimatum.”

Aegir’s hand wrapped around his chin, sliding over his beard. “It wasn’t, really. I just needed to know if there was a chance. Between you and I. You drank Sidra’s blood only months ago, and look what you can do because of it. A child of the moon…I haven’t seen such power since, well…” He clicked his tongue, softly. “Since Thaan.”

“What are you going to do, then, Aegir? Force yourself on me?” I spat the words at him like poison darts, but horror climbed inside the cavern of my stomach at the thought. The walls of the apartment pulsed. Squeezed.

Aegir had the decency to look affronted by the suggestion, stretching his neck away from me like he might catch a disease by the idea alone. “Of course not. I want you for your power, Maren. Your blood. Not your body. Not your love. Power is something I can take. Something that won’t deny me when I claim it. Now stand up.”

I scoffed, anger and disgust grinding anything soft from the edge of my voice. “You said we were friends.” Please hurry.

He didn’t answer.

Kye.

Silence.

“I also said I’d do anything to kill Thaan. Give anything. Take anything. Stand, if you want an honorable death. If not, you’ll be coming with me to Venusia.”

I laughed weakly. Mockingly. “Whatever your code of honor is, I don’t believe in it.”

Kye!

He shook his head, disappointment in his archer-green eyes, as though, even now, I was a disgrace, a mark against his pride. “Maren of Leihani,” he said, fixing his cloak over the black whorls across his shoulders, “your first breath of Naiad air was taken in the Venus Sea. Taken without permission, sanction, or introduction. Your body owes a service to Venusia. Therefore, I call to your blood.”

65

Kye

Kye! It rang across like a sob of panic, a frantic crack inside my head just as clean oxygen stole through my blood, rousing me awake. No—NO! Kye!

I’m here! I flung water furiously from my eyes, climbing onto the rocks at the bottom of the cliff. Where are you?

“Go,” Nori urged, reaching back to pull a low-conscious Hadrian above the surface. “We’ll catch up!”

Shrill inhales peppered behind me, the scuffle of boots and hands over ocean-worn stone as the other humans woke from their low-conscious state. I was already halfway up, sloppily grabbing at the hand-holds and small ridges I’d grown familiar with, water draining from my hair and clothes like translucent sheets of silk.

Are you in the guest apartment?

The stone pillars rose from beyond the ledge, windows illuminating the towers like columns of light. Except ours.

Our tower was dark.

Where are you? I shouted inside my own head, my leg halfway over the clifftop. Something small scuttled under the heather, thistles shaking as it bounded away. Dark clouds gathered over Laurier Palace that hadn’t been there when we’d left Evenstar, as though blown in by a sudden storm.

A storm with dark waves, a daggered tongue, and obsidian eyes that cut like glass.

Leihani!

Every moment she didn’t answer injected my blood with heart-shattering panic. It thundered in my ears as loudly as my boots pounding across rock and weeds and grass and flat stone. The guards under the arch both snapped their attention to the sound as I approached.

“Prince Nikolaos?” one of them asked, hand reaching for the sword at his hip. “What’s the trouble?”

I stopped only to grab the hilt before he did. His blade unsheathed with a metal rasp, his surprised eyes doubling in size. I turned and fled, leaving a trail of dripping water behind me.