Page 6 of A Sea of Fate and Starfire

He sighed softly, taking my hand in his and gently drawing a line across the fleshy pad of my palm. A sharp slice followed, blood peering through the fresh sear. “Go on,” he said. “Swear it.”

“Take me to the bottom of Brána Do Podsvetia now so that I may reach Perpetuum within three days,” I whispered, watching a single drop of my precious siren blood scour the curve of my hand and drip to the floorless expanse below. “If I fail to cross, I will become your wraithling. If I succeed, I will still forfeit my soul to you the day I die.”

The hot sear of my blood never came. Instead, a faint light floated from my throat as I said the last word, pulled by a lazy invisible string. It flexed and curled the way his shadows moved, though it was no larger than a finger bone, and when it reached his outstretched hand, it sank into the grooves of his palm.

Darkness’s sad eyes wavered before mine, thinning into the black. Smoke curled around me, tucking me in. “Hold onto me,” he said, lifting me in his arms. He stepped, and the world blurred. Light and shadow, shapes and wind, water and fire and rock and rain. He stepped through the world, and emerged under the pale winter sun, bleak red cliffs hanging over a wide channel.

His skin seared and burned, silver ichor dripping like pearls from his body. His shadows withered and coiled in pain, and he flexed his jaw, bearing the sun’s burn to carry me. Pulling Kye’s knife from its sheath, I sliced a silk swatch from my dress as he placed my feet onto the cliff ledge, pressing it to his deepest wound. Darkness hissed, either in pain or insult, I couldn’t tell.

His hands folded into the empty air, shadows swallowing him away with a crack. And I was suddenly alone. I glanced around, shaking off the eeriness of his disappearance, and the icy flat of a hand slapped me sideways. Not a hand—a wave.

“DARKNESS,” I bellowed into the cold. But he’d left.

Abandoned me exactly where I asked him to. Surrounded by eerie depths. By black night and jagged stone, sharp and porous, lit only by the blue glow from my stone, stealing across cliffside walls. Water shifted over my feet, striking me from behind, its riptide as angry as fingers clawing me in.

“Swim fast,” he said, voice echoing inside my thoughts.

The words sent a jolt through my bones. Three days. The timer had reignited, the passing seconds like sand slipping through the throat of an hourglass. Fingers trembling, I shoved knife and soiled swatch back into the sheath and dove, choking as water filled my mouth. Cold, unforgiving water. Black and chilled. My arms stroked without my commanding them to, and a weight sank around me, full-bodied and heavy.

Pounding returned to my head, either from my heart or the underwater sounds of sea. Until I found a vein of dreamy warmth sliding along the icy water, letting myself slip inside it to the deep chasm of the channel.

There, in the dark, I felt the water stir as softly as a breath blown over a candle flame.

Click. Click. Click.

3

Maren

Flukes swished as I propelled myself out of the snap of claws, my pulse screaming for me to move. I swam to the wall of the cavern and pushed off, sending water in every direction to throw the Abyssi off as I spun to see it for the first time. Then held myself still.

The blue glow of my stone reflected off the sharp cavern walls. Over the bony process of a long leg wrapped tight with skin.

No meat. No muscle. As large as my father’s house in Leihani.

She remained frozen, waiting to sense my movement. The monster that had once struck a bargain to Darkness to heal her broken heart. Her legs converged to an impossibly thin body, skeletal and starved. She didn’t possess eyes, but enormous pincers tapped together, the sound cracking through the water.

Click, click, click.

Throat tight, I reached for Kye’s sword, letting the tendons in my fingers tighten inch by tiny inch.

And she sprang toward me.

Fear—pulsing, choking, climbing inside me.

But a determined wave knocked the fear back, one I hadn’t had the last time I faced the Abyssi.

Mihauna burn me, she was fast. Too fast. I was ready, though her speed still shocked me. A hooked foot caught the flukes of my tail as I darted away, and I gritted my teeth against the burn. Arm up. Hand out. Palm straight. I sent a hard whorl of water away from myself as I pressed against the sharp wall.

The Abyssi crouched low, knees angled high above her headless mouth. She crawled up the wall, crossing the ceiling over my head in a spidery sprint. Making her way to me.

Water spiraled from my hand, my call landing directly behind it. The Abyssi turned in an instant, arms impaling empty water. Fingers still wrapped around Kye’s pommel, I pulled the sword from its home.

Metal whispered through the salty sea. The Abyssi pivoted. Leapt. Shot over me.

And I slashed.

I expected her to run from the bite of steel that cleaved her front leg.