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“It shouldn’t be able to, but I’m…” Kye bites his lip. “I’m weak, Ner. From Lamia breaking me all those years ago.”
“I’m telling you this isn’t your fault,” Fiona says. “Please, listen to me. We wouldn’t have even been there if it wasn’t for me.”
“No,” he says. “I–”
He looks between the two of us like he’s worried we’ll finish his sentence for him. Because we all know what he’s thinking: that we had a chance to prevent something like this with an Elixir Ceremony, and that we were too broken to go through with it.
“I need to think,” he says shortly. “I’m glad you’re okay, Ner. And…both of you, actually.”
“Kye, wait,” Fiona says as he gets up, catching his hand.
“I’m not angry,” he says, looking her in the eye with one hazel iris and one blue. Gods, he’s beautiful. “I just need a second, okay? Take care of him for me.”
And then he leans down and kisses her on the cheek, drawing a puff of breath from her lungs before leaving.
Fiona sighs and turns toward me, tears glimmering at the corners of her eyes. I rarely see her cry anymore, when she seemed to do so all the time when she first arrived; it’s easy to forget how young she is, and how frightened she was when she first got here.
Not here—to the Naiad.
Everythinghas changed.
“I just want him back,” she says quietly. “But every stupid choice I make seems to push him farther away.”
I reach out of the pool to stroke my fingers through her hair, and my head swims a little. I definitely had a harder bump than I realized. “Give him time,” I whisper.
“We don’thavetime,” she says. “When we launched off of that planet…I know you hit your head, but it was so scary, Nereus. I thought he was gone for a second. Like, reallygone. And I know Lamia can do the same thing to him, and that Xanthos is still out there, and who knows how many other magisters could be coming after us…”
“We’ll find a way to fix this,” I say, even though I really have no idea what ‘this’ is—our family, Kye’s mind, or this situation with the Hyperborean Empire. “And we’re sheltered here on…wait, where are we?”
Fiona huffs out a laugh, shaking her head. “You sounded so confident up until that moment. You almost had me fooled.”
“Iwastrained in diplomacy,” I chuckle. “But tell me—where are we?”
“Kye had to put us down on Scylla,” she says. “We were trying to make it seem like the ship was destroyed.”
“Did it work?”
“Well, we’ve been here for about an hour and they haven’t come after us yet,” she says.
“And the others are alright?”
She nods. “We all made it out unscathed, thanks to Ryker. He went crazy or something.”
“Skoll bloodlust,” I say. “I didn’t think he was capable of it. It’s a recessive gene that isn’t common in Skoll born off of their homeworld.”
“Well, it was a little scary,” she says. “But we all made it out. I have to be grateful for it.”
The silence hangs between us, a million things going unsaid. It was initially my recommendation that we negotiate with the Hyperboreans…and now it seems that I made a terrible mistake. Plus, we’re crashed on Scylla with no way to contact Cressida, who might be in danger thanks to Xanthos’ alliance with Calypso.
“Come here,” I say, reaching for Fiona.
She doesn’t put up any resistance; she simply falls into my arms, gliding through the water until her legs are wrapped around my waist. She’s only wearing a green slip that billows around her, and I duck my head to smell the floral scent of her hair as it spirals across the water’s surface.
I slide my tentacles around her legs, her waist, her hips.
Fiona sighs. “I know it’s going to get worse. But I just…I can’t imagine losing any of you. And every time I talk to Cressida, or eventhinkabout what happened on Homeworld, all I can imagine is how she lost Damarion. I think before all that, I just figured you all were immortal gods who would get along just fine…”
I snort. “That’s quite the compliment.”
