Sawyer could feel his concern, his stress, and he really wanted to tell him it was all okay. He just needed to sleep for a bit.
“Sawyer!” Ciaran barked, and the fear billowing out from him made Sawyer open his eyes.
“I’m here,” he mumbled.
“Get him inside,” Kellan said.
Ciaran looked distraught, and Sawyer hated that. He wanted to make Ciaran’s pain go away.
What had he asked? A question. Yes, he’d asked a question.
Right.
Who had called to him? In the water? The lure he felt in his blood?
Ohhh, yeah. Her name.
“Lusca.”
Chapter
Twenty-Two
CIARAN
Ciaran satbeside the bed where Sawyer slept soundly. Propped up on pillows to an almost-sitting position to prevent secondary drowning, he looked so peaceful. A far cry from what had happened just an hour ago.
They’d carried him inside, stripped him out of his wet clothes, wrapped him in blankets, and put him to bed.
Again.
Sawyer’s habit of needing to be pulled out of the bay and saved from drowning and hypothermia was concerning. Ciaran had thought it was fucking weird the first time, even the second. The third time had been deliberate, but now it’d happened a fourth time?
At least now Ciaran might understand why.
Lusca.
Sawyer had said that name. He’d said she’d called to him.
And Ciaran hadn’t ever told himhername.
He’d referred to her as the kraken, of sorts. And Dylan had only said “she.” No one had said her name out loud for a long time. And for good reason.
There was no way Sawyer could have known it. Unless she’d spoken to him.... Called to him.
The thought made Ciaran feel ill.
He kept running the scene over in his head. How it had happened.
Sawyer had been right there behind Ciaran one second, and then in the next, he was at the edge of the pier, looking into the water, just a few metres away. Ciaran had called out, asking him what he was looking at, and then everything happened so fast.
Sawyer went in headfirst, and before Ciaran or Fray or Kellan could react, Tobin flew out from behind Fray and dove in after him. Ciaran was in the water a second after him, and Tobin was already bringing him up toward the surface. Ciaran had helped haul Sawyer onto the pier, rubbing his back as he coughed and coughed.
Human lungs were so fucking stupid.
Tobin had sat on the pier beside them, fully human, hair wet and trying to catch his breath. He’d been angry, his eyes wild. “He smiled at me,” Tobin said. “He fucking smiled at me like he’d just run into me in the store and not at the bottom of the fucking Cove.”
And then Tobin had said something else that sent ice through Ciaran’s core.
