Voren
It’s a tidal wave of water in the wake of the breaker, sucking back in a riptide that even my godly strength is struggling with.
“Powers are back on,” Dastian shouts, flicking electricity around like we aren’t standing waist deep in water. The fucking moron.
“Where is she?” Dreven roars.
I taste her ending like iron on my tongue and shove straight into the water.
Plunging my hands into the freezing water, I close my eyes. “Find her,” I command, and the drowned come.
They rise out of the green like bad thoughts. Fishermen with ropes around their throats. Sailors with kelp in their hair. A girl in Sunday best with stones in her pockets. They dive into the rush, trailing chill.
“Nyssa,” I call into the dark. Not a shout. A name laid flat as a coin for fate to choose. My power pours out. The sea tries to eat it. I feed it more.
Cold answers, arrow-true. The drowned take my command and scatter, pale smudges slicing through green. I follow them with my will, feeling for the soul that is Nyssa Vale.
Caught in a churn just beyond the break, held down by the weight of that stupid, stubborn choice. I step into the cold.
She hangs in the water like a question mark, hair streaming, fingers loose around her blade. Her soul is half a breath off her skin, already peeling.
Not dead. Between.
“Mine,” I tell the water, the waiting dark.
It doesn’t argue, which is good because I’m feeling unreasonable.
I put my hands on her shoulders and still everything. I stop the part of her that knows how to leave. The drowned circle us, a ring of quiet faces, holding the riptide like pallbearers. I thread a ribbon of wraith-light through her spine. It bites. I bite back.
Her body bows suddenly, and her eyes fly open. Relief floods me, and I hold her tighter to lift her to the surface, but she doesn’t give me a chance. She rears out of my arms, out of the water, cutting the surface like a water goddess, upright and magnificent.
I swim to the surface to see her riding the crest of the Tidewraith, her hair flying back behind her, bone dry and every bit as radiant as she should be.
For a heartbeat, I forget to be a god.
She stands on the back of the wave like she was born in a storm, hair streaming, skin lit from the inside. The Tidewraith rears beneath her, a column of dark water shaped by a will that isn’t mine.
Her gaze cuts down to me. Not distant. Not gone. Brighter. The Wraith Crown shimmers into view on her head, a circlet of gold that drinks the light and still somehow gleams.
Dreven surges up on my left, shadows slick with salt. Dastian pops out of the foam on my right with the expression of a man who’s been told the fireworks are back on.
The Tidewraith hesitates, the counting paused mid-beat. It should be hungry. It should be cruel. It is neither under her feet. It becomes wild but obedient.
“Down,” she says, voice low. The sea hears her.
The wave sinks without collapsing, the Tidewraith folding like a bow. She steps off onto the sand that wasn’t there a moment ago, and the water withdraws, sulking.
I wade to her, reaching out for her and crushing her in my arms. “Stop being a fucking hero,” I growl in her ear.
She snorts. “Last time, I promise.”
“Liar,” I murmur against her neck, because we both know that’s bullshit. Nyssa Vale doesn’t stop; she just finds new and creative ways to give me a coronary.
I pull back, keeping my hands on her arms to make sure she doesn’t dissolve into sea foam or ascend straight to the Pantheon. Up close, the change is visceral. She’s a furnace. The light beneath her skin is a steady, golden burn.
“You’re bright,” I state, squinting slightly. “It’s obnoxious.”
“Sorry to ruin your goth aesthetic.” She grins. She looks wrecked and magnificent.
