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Panicked, I shoved the handful of pearls at him, praying he would know what to do with them. Leander didn’t hesitate. His fist clasped mine, and warmth flooded our joined hands, the feverish energy swelling, pressure building, until the entire ocean burst into brilliant white.
Light.
I couldn’t be sure if the shriek in my ears had come from me or the cecaelia as white light scorched its mark over my eyes, searing me, destroying my vision in that one brilliant flash. The pearls dropped through my fingers as I threw Leander’s hand off, moving to guard my eyes much too late.
“Leander?” I cried, fighting the urge to claw the blind spots from my vision. The throbbing headache from earlier was nothing compared to this pain, thisburning. Would I ever be able to see again? “Barren? Kai?”
There was no answer except the sound of flesh ripping and snapping as butchery broke out around me. I dug into Barren, feeling his muscles strain and pull, combatting an enemy I couldn’t even see. Frantic, I counted the hands still holding on to me.One, two… One, two… Three. One…
I picked out Leander’s growl, and my whole body seized up, paralyzed by the thought that the sickening rip I’d just heard might have come from a part of him.Of any of them.
Then the surrounding water suddenly grew thick, and my stomach heaved as the carnage worked into my nostrils, into my mouth, glazing the inside of my throat.
My eyes strained, but there were only blurry fragments. Leander’s chin, Kai’s tail. Limbs thrashing, beating back shadows that slid through the water too fast to track.
Then a shriek came, and it was so savage, so resonant, it could have only come from the maw of a demon.
A final rip sounded, and I felt Leander jerk beside me, yanking the sharp end of his harpoon free from what I could only hope was a part of the enemy. “Claira,” he grunted, far too breathless. “Are you hurt?”
“Me?” Emotion cracked my voice. “You. Areyouhurt?”
Leander chuckled—the infuriating idiot actuallychuckled—and it was like my heart had started beating again.
He was okay.
Barren’s chest heaved under me, the bulk of him still tense, his muscles teeming with strength. “Barren? Kai?”
My vision started to clear on my next blink, and Kai’s toothy smile was waiting, though the glow in his eyes made mine burn even more.
“That was gross,” he said, shimmying his shoulders. He rolled his tongue like he was trying to work a chunk of something nasty out of the back of his throat.
I took a deep breath until the drag of saltwater relieved the tightness in my chest. We were okay, butwe could havedied. The cecaelia didn’t even have a weapon. Hell, he didn’tneeda weapon. But we were okay for now.
Another horrible thought knocked the oxygen back out of me—this was just one of them. Surely there would be more.
Pearls littered the sea floor around us, their glow faint like the very end of a spent wick. I’d never seen a mer try to light a pearl before, and maybe this was why. Their magic was already about to burn out.
I followed the long line of a limp tendril down below us and shuddered when it met with what was left of the cecaelia’s torso. Black eyes stared, angled up toward the surface, those creepy lips of his never to curl again. I should have felt relieved, but I felt sickened. Immobilized by fear.
This wasn’t me—wasn’tClaira. I wasn’t a weakling. I wasn’t scared—not normally. Not on land. But here in the ocean…
“I was so scared.” My arms trembled, fixed around Barren. “The bright light, the pearls—I couldn’t see anything! How did you guys fight him?”
My question was met with an uneasy silence.
“Did he touch you?” Barren asked suddenly, an urgency in his voice that I hadn’t heard before.
“He got a tentacle around Leander’s neck,” I said, my arms shaking even harder. I eyed Leander to see if he was truly okay.
“No,” Barren cut back, his voice drawing me over, his dark eyes taking me in. “I want to know if he touchedyou.”
“I—” I blinked back at him, stunned. Had the cecaelia touched me? Did it matter if he had? “I don’t think so,” I said carefully, and it might have been the purple glow or the damage to my vision, but the harsh square of Barren’s shoulders seemed to soften with relief.
“Oh, Kai, shut your eyes!” I gasped, remembering too late how close we were to the palace. Where there was one, there was bound to be more. There had to be.
But Kai was motionless down to the spiked tip of his tail, his eyes fixed on the corpse of the cecaelia underneath us.
“Kai?”
