Page 156 of Feralheart

Eradin’s gaze found mine. She had my body’s strength. With what was left in the pearl, she could make it to the surface.

We both knew it.

No. She mouthed the word.

I would rather drown in the wrong skin than climb out of this lake over her body.

I had spent thirty years learning to need no one. It turned out I was always waiting for her.

I pulled the pearl from my mouth and held it between us.

Her eyes widened with understanding and something fiercer than fear.

She nodded.

Do it, I could swear I heard her say.

I let the last breath in this trial go. It rose off my fingers in a thin silver thread and floated toward a surface neither of us would ever reach.

Taking her hands, I pulled her in until there was no water left between us.

We’d go together, or not at all.

Our magic surged between us, the two colors finding each other and braiding into one cord of light where there had been two.

It shot away from us and slammed into the fracture Aristus had opened from the outside.

The dome disintegrated around us.

And something vast turned its attention on us. It didn’t strike. It appraised, a slow drag of attention along the braided cord of our magic, the same measuring I’d felt my whole life from across a council table. Whatever it found in us, it chose to keep.

For later.

Then it let us go.

The lake spat us out.

I came back into my own body on my hands and knees on cold sand, retching lake water onto a sandy cavern floor, real air tearing down my own throat and burning like the first breath after a lifetime under.

A rest cavern. Empty. No other riders had reached it yet. Aristus and Selira stood off to the side, dripping and alive.

Eradin knelt beside me, back in her own skin, her reddish-brown hair plastered to her face, her chest heaving. Blood ran down her arm from a wound I’d taken while I wore her body. My own ribs screamed from a slice she’d received while she wore me.

We’d traded those too.

She lifted her head, and we stared at each other.

There wasn’t a single thing left between us that the other hadn’t seen.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

ERADIN

Ibraced myself on my hands and knees, my legs shaking, trying to stop the tremor from crawling up my arms.

“Is it over?” I asked, seeing no one else around.

“I think so.”