Page 94 of Drown Me Gently

He wanted Ulric.

Auren thought of Ulric’s hands, large enough to protect him but gentle as a spring tide. He thought of the kisses. Of the whispered confessions. Of how alive Ulric made him feel. That love still existed. It wasn’t gone. And that love had power.

Somewhere deep in Auren’s blood, his magic slept. Coiled. Hidden. Waiting patiently for the sea god’s call on his thirtieth birthday.

But Auren didn’t care about Poseidon’s will. He didn’t care about any god that stood in his way. Fuck them. This magic, this power, it was his. And it was time to come out.

“Get out,” Auren growled. “Come out. Now!”

He reached inside himself—not gently, not with coaxing, but like a man ripping open his own chest. He seized the slippery, ancient thing that pulsed inside him. It didn’t want to be touched. But Auren didn’t care.

“You cannot hide anymore,” he said through gritted teeth. “You don’t get to stay quiet while he’s gone.”

He clawed at his chest, imagining his own will reaching into his blood, digging out divine power from his veins. It splashed around, trying to escape him, like a fish in a barrel. But Auren seized around its belly, squeezing with brutal strength, demanding it submit to him.

He pulled the whale bone clasp from his tangled hair—Ulric’s gift. The runes etched into its curve shimmered with echoes of magic.

Auren stabbed it into the center of the lifeless sandy shape.

“Bring him back!” Auren yelled, then shoved his unwilling magic into the bone clasp.

All of it. He wouldn’t leave even a single drop.

It was like trying to force a large bony fish through a small hole. It squirmed and resisted, pushing at the edges, fighting him.

“I said GO!”

The black grains began to sizzle.

The magic began to mold. To bend and twist through his veins, syphoning into the whale bone in his grip. It turned from a bony fish into something softer. Something easily molded by Auren’s will. Like an octopus, capable of forcing its bulk through even the smallest opening.

“That’s it— you obey me.”

Auren poured everything into it—every ounce of grief, fury, love. Every kiss. Every memory. Every whispered promise.

“I am the prince of the sea,” Auren hissed. “And I will not bow to anyone. Not a god. Not magic. Not death.”

The sand flared hot.

Then molten.

Like melting glass, it shifted, rippling under his will. It resisted. It fought.

But Auren didn’t stop.

His hands shook from the force of channeling, gripping the whale bone like it was his only tether to his realm. His blood hummed, a current surging from his chest to his fingertips. The sand began to shape. Stretch. Elongate.

It was taking form.

A shape he knew in his bones.

Ulric’s.

All nine tentacles curled outward like the petals of a great bloom, reaching for him. The body rose from the earth—man and monster in glass, hardening in the sunlight.

Auren didn’t breathe as the molten sand twisted into Ulric’s face. That jaw… those eyes.

The whalebone burned white hot in his hands, scorching his skin. The overload of magic spilled out in blasts of light and energy.