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78
He couldn’t swim.
Syrinx couldn’t swim. He didn’t stand a chance of getting out, getting free of the nøkk—
From her angle below, Bryce could only glimpse the bottoms of Syrinx’s frantic, desperate legs as he struggled to stay at the surface. She dropped the book, the golden bubble rupturing, and tried to rise to her feet.
Micah emerged from the door to the tank stairwell. His power hit her a moment later.
It flipped her, pinning her facedown on the carpeted stairs. Exposing her back to him.
She writhed, the ebbing pain in her leg secondary to the tingling numbness creeping through her blood. Syrinx was drowning, he was—
Micah loomed over her. She stretched her arm out—toward the shelf. Her tingling fingers brushed over the titles. On the Divine Number; The Walking Dead; The Book of Breathings; The Queen with Many Faces …
Syrinx was thrashing and thrashing, still fighting so hard—
And then Micah sent a blast of white-hot flame straight into her back. Into the Horn.
She screamed, even as the fire didn’t burn, but rather absorbed into the ink, raw power filling her, flame turning to ice and cracking through her blood like shifting glaciers.
The air in the room seemed to suck in on itself, tighter and tighter and tighter—
It blasted outward in a violent ripple. Bryce screamed, hoarfrost in her veins sizzling into burning agony. Upstairs, glass shattered. Then nothing.
Nothing. She shuddered on the ground, tingling ice and searing flame spasming through her.
Micah looked around. Waited.
Bryce could barely breathe, trembling as she waited for a portal to open, for some hole to another world to appear. But nothing occurred.
Disappointment flickered in Micah’s eyes before he said, “Interesting.”
The word told her enough: he’d try again. And again. It wouldn’t matter if she was alive or a pile of self-destructed pulp. Her body would still bear the Horn’s ink—the Horn itself. He’d lug around her corpse if he had to until he found a way to open a portal to another world.
She’d figured it out in the hours after the kristallos’s attack at the docks, when she’d seen herself in the mirror. And began to suspect that the tattoo on her back was not in any alphabet she knew because it was not an alphabet. Not one from Midgard. She’d looked again at all the locations Danika had visited that last week, and saw that only the tattoo shop had gone unchecked. Then she’d realized the amulet was gone, and she had been attacked. Just as Hunt had been attacked by the kristallos in the park—after he’d touched Danika’s jacket in the gallery. Touched Danika’s scent, full of the Horn.
Bryce strained, hauling herself against the invisible grip of Micah’s power. Her fingers brushed a dark purple book spine.
Syrinx, Syrinx, Syrinx—
“Maybe carving the Horn from you will be more effective,” Micah murmured. A knife hummed free from its sheath at his thigh. “This will hurt, I’m afraid.”
Bryce’s finger hooked on the lip of the book’s spine. Please.
It did not move. Micah knelt over her.
Please, she begged the book. Please.
It slid toward her fingers.
Bryce whipped the book from its shelf and splayed open its pages.
Greenish light blasted from it. Right into Micah’s chest.
It sent him rocketing back across the library, a clear shot to the open entry to the bathroom.
To where Lehabah waited in the shadows of the bathroom door, a small book in her own hands, whose pages she opened to unleash another blast of power against the door, propelling it shut.
