Evidence of what she’d endured at the bottom of the Aegean Sea. The damage that should have been enough to end her, but wasn’t.
Groaning, Kore turned her back to the sun.
Hiding her face from Apollo’s blistering gaze—it was an unconscious action, but one that held significant weight nevertheless, for even in her delirium, she turned away from her lord.
Water dripped from the ceiling above. Splashing across her brow. Lapping at her cheek with gentle, insistent waves.
Kore flinched, jerked from a dream of glittering scales and sheets of impossible, undulating muscle, she sucked a breathbetween chapped, dehydrated lips. Spluttering as she worked to peel her lids apart.
He’d returned.
Lying just there.
Sleeping on his side, half in, half out of the water. The tide was high. Water lapping at the mouth of the cave, enabling him to block the only exit with a body she couldn’t make sense of.
A body straight from the annals of myth.
Blinking in the gloom, Kore stole the chance toreallylook. Scarcely daring to breathe, she inspected the impossibly broad expanse of his back, where dense muscle became elegant scale and man became leviathan.
Wicked spines were laid flat, almost flush against his scales. Harmless in their net of gossamer webbing, dozens of fins were tucked tight to his tail. It was a limb more than three times thicker than she was wide, the first mighty fluke rocked above the surface in time with the pulse of each gentle wave, while the second was submerged in dark waters. Peaking above the surface, it flicked with an unconscious grace that begged to be returned to the sea.
In slumber, his breath was rattling and heavy, but as steady as the ocean itself. In any other, that rattle would hold the ominous jangle of death.
But in a creature such as this?
She shivered.
A wave splashed against his scales.
He flinched.
Spines flicking high as his fins flared, it was an unconscious defense that sent Kore cringing back. Away. Clinging to the shadows at the back of her lonely, sodden cave. Terrified that he would wake and turn his attention upon her once more.
To what end, she did not know and couldn’t begin to guess.
She stayed like that for countless, frantic beats of her heart. Unblinking. Her breath shallow as she waited to drown beneath the next crushing wave of despair the gods might send to test her faith.
And there she remained. Cowering in the dark. Knees drawn up and pressed to her chest. Sitting in a shallow pool of tide water warmed not by the sun, but by the heat of her body. Unmoving until it occurred to her that she should not be alive enough to know fear. Not warm enough to heat water. That she should have died with the other priestesses, if not by drowning, then crushed to nothing beneath the weight of a broken ship grinding her into the sea floor.
Her pelvis had been crushed.
Her legs pulverized beneath the weight of a ruined slave ship.
But she was… whole.
Frowning, Kore looked past her knee. Inspecting the mottled colors blooming beneath her once-golden, sun-kissed skin. She flexed her toes, noting the sluggish response from the digits on her left foot. The swollen, disfigured contusion jutting out just beneath her right kneecap.
An injury that should have been crippling, but wasn’t.
Ugly though it was, she could scarcely feel the pain.
Clouds shaded the sun’s ferocity, sending shadows to dance across the foamy peaks lapping at the cave entrance and the creature blocking her exit.
And then she noticed it.
The glow.
A spiderweb of eerie blue lines pulsed beneath her skin. Delicate as spider’s silk, it was the exact shade of lightning when Zeus’ temper flared—and just as shocking for it should not exist beneath her skin!
