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“What are you doing?”
“Close your eyes,” Barren said, a dark command in his deep voice. As soon as my eyes shut, white light beat against my eyelids.
“I can’t leave him,” he said, and then his lips were on mine. The contact was brief yet nothing like the reassuring pat he’d offered earlier. I felt all the strength of his muscular jaw in his lips, the urgency, thedesperation. Like he knew that if he didn’t kiss me with all he had in him now, one of us might not live long enough to get the chance for it again. Then his lips, his body, his strength, all of it was gone. Barren ripped himself away from me, leaving me stunned.
“Keep her safe.”
I still felt the vibrations of his voice in the water as his body changed.
Pop.
“Wait!” I reached for him, then for Kai, but Leander’s arms wrapped around me, pulling me away with a rush of his tail. “No!”
“We have to move,” Leander said, but he was wrong. We couldn’t leave them! How could we possibly leave them?
“They’ll die, Lee!” I cried out, beating against him, but he held me tight. “Please!”
“They won’t,” he assured me, the vibration of his tail through the water desperate, unstable. “You had to let go to close his wound, Claira. They’ll make it to the top. We all made it to the top the first time.” He kept saying words, but how could I believe him? We were so far out that it wasn’t possible. Not everyone had made it. Kai’s sister hadn’t. But Leander wouldn’t listen. He just kept swimming, taking us further away.
I kept my eyes on the spot where we’d left them long after the pearl’s glow had faded. When my heart couldn’t possibly take any more, I finally turned away, and my flesh crawled at the sight in front of us.
Cecaelia.
There were dozens of them. Creeping behind rocks and drifting along the portal monoliths ahead. But how could Leander have known where he was going? He’d been swimming blindly in the dark while I’d been too consumed with grief to do the one useful thing I could manage underwater.
“You’re sure they’ll make it back to the surface?” I said slowly, carefully. Some had already noticed us, their appendages twirling through the current. Distant, but not for long.
“You know Barren will do his best to get them both back.” He sounded strangely uncomfortable saying Barren’s name. Like he hadn’t expected the kiss any more than I had.
The dark clouds drew nearer, and I took a salty breath, long and deep. “Lee? I think I’m hurt.”
His tail stopped just as fast as I knew it would. “Hurt? Where? Fuck, are you okay?”
“My tail. Could you look at it?” I pulled a pearl from my bag and slowly passed it to his palm. I watched his eyes, full of concern for me and unfocused in the dark. His hand curled around it gladly. “Go on and light it. My eyes are closed.”
I shielded my eyes as the pearl flashed to life. Leander wasted no time leaning forward to inspect my tail, but his body went rigid, and I knew the instant he noticed the danger closing in around us.
Leander’s lips parted to curse, and I did the only thing I could do. The only thing I knew might possibly save him. I let go.
“I love you, Lee. I’m sorry.”
Pop.
The body of a golden betta circled in the water, a bright pearl of light drifting down beside it, still shining.
And I… I was already sinking.
Silently, I prayed with everything I had to Poseidon that the pearl’s flash had blinded the cecaelia enough for Leander, that little golden betta, to go unnoticed. That somehow, all three of them would make it back to the surface. That they’d all be safe.
Even though I wouldn’t see any of them again, I could die here and now as long as I knew they’d made it. Leander. Barren. Kai.
Three separate pieces of my heart.
Tentacled bodies drifted closer, and useless as I was, there was no possible way I could escape them.
33
Claira
