The waves fought her. They rolled and crashed and tried to spin her off course, but she was stronger and faster than any human swimmer and she kept going. Debris slammed against her shoulders and thighs, but the sound was worse, a constant roar that drowned out everything except the pounding of her own heart.
She Sang anyway.
The echoes came back fractured, incomplete, but there—there—sixty meters ahead and ten below, something small and struggling, sinking fast. She swam faster, praying she would make it in time.
CHAPTER 2
It was too quiet.
As soon as Valrek entered the caves, he knew something was wrong. The wind howled outside and waves crashed below, the storm building its fury against the cliffs that had been his family’s refuge for the past four years. But from the deeper chambers inside their home, where Lilani should have been playing with her collection of shells and strange stones, there was nothing.
No giggling. No humming. No endless stream of questions about why seabirds flew and fish didn’t, or whether clouds tasted like water, or if her Papa had ever fought a sea monster.
Gods damn it.
His heart started to pound as he dropped his kill and raced through their rooms. The main chamber was empty. Lilani’s sleeping alcove was empty. The small nook where she kept her treasures—stones she claimed were dragon eggs, driftwood she’d shaped into a fleet of ships, a broken compass she’d found on the beach and insisted still pointed towards adventure—was empty too.
But at the rear of the caves the hidden path down to the beach, the one he’d forbidden her from using alone at least a thousand times, had fresh footprints in the damp sand.
Small footprints. Six-year-old footprints. Heading straight into the storm.
His beast roared in panicked fury but he forced it down. Finding his daughter required control, not tearing the entire cliff face apart with his claws. He took the path at a dead run, despite the wet rock. He knew every step, every handhold. He’d walked this path a thousand times since their exile began—carrying supplies up from the beach, carrying Lilani when she grew tired, carrying the weight of his own failure like a physical burden across his shoulders.
The beach came into view, and his heart stopped.
There she was.
Lilani danced along the edge of the surf, her wild curly hair streaming behind her, her small arms spread wide as if embracing the storm itself. A seabird—one of the black-winged creatures that nested in the cliff crevices—hopped ahead of her, leading her in some game only the two of them understood. Her golden eyes, so like his own, were bright with joy. Her laughter carried to him in fragments, torn apart by the wind.
She was alive. She was beautiful. She was fifty meters from safety and far, far too close to the water.
“Lilani!”
His voice cracked across the beach like thunder, and the seabird startled into flight. Lilani spun towards him, her face splitting into the hopeful smile she reserved for the moments when she’d done something she knew she shouldn’t and didn’t regret it even a little.
“Papa! Look! The bird was showing me how to?—”
“Come here. Now.”
The severity in his tone finally registered, and her grin faltered. She took a step towards him, then another, breaking into the eager run that meant she knew she was in trouble but also knew he would never stay angry for long because he never, ever could.
She was too close to the edge.
He saw it happen with the horrible clarity that only came in nightmares. The rock beneath her foot, wet and covered in algae, shifted. A terrified cry escaped her lips as her arms pinwheeled. Her small body tilted towards the churning water just as the storm reached down and grabbed the sea in its fist.
The wave was enormous, three times the height of those that had come before, driven by the winds that had been building since dawn. It didn’t crest so much as lunge, a wall of gray-green water that crashed over the rocks where Lilani had been dancing and swallowed her whole.
“No!”
He was moving before the sound finished leaving his throat, his body shifting without conscious choice—muscles thickening, bones restructuring, the beast clawing its way free in a burst of desperate transformation. Fur erupted across his arms and chest. Claws split through his fingertips. His senses exploded outward, catching the salt-copper scent of blood in the water, her blood. Gods, please no.
He dove into the water after her.
The sea tried to kill him immediately. The undertow dragged at his legs while the storm surge shoved at his chest and yet another current yanked at the core of him. His Vultor strength meant nothing here. The ocean didn’t care about strength.
He fought anyway, through water so filled with sand and debris that even his enhanced vision couldn’t penetrate it, through currents that spun him until up and down lost all meaning, and through the roar of the storm and the howl of his beast. He thought he heard another cry and tried desperately to angle towards it.
Where is she? Where is she? Where is?—
