Actually…
I glanced down at Eryn as she stirred and leaned back with a frown. She wiped the tears from her cheeks as I tucked a stray curl behind her ear with a shaking hand, waiting for her to sort through her emotions. Too much was flying at me at once: confusion, hope, disbelief, and more confusion. She finally peered up at me with a wobbly smile.
I returned it.Whatever has you feeling like that has to be a good thing, right?
I don’t want to get his hopes up,she said, worrying her bottom lip,or mine.
Gods, we were a mess. The small circle we’d created this year was fractured and missing a huge piece. Something we wouldn't easily recover from, but any bit of hope was better than nothing.
“Just tell me,” Ez pleaded, looking at Eryn with a longing I recognized all too well. “You feel her too, don’t you?”
She nodded. “I don’t understand it, but…she’s on my map.”
It was possible that Eryn’s familiarity with Rani’s mind made it so she could track her. And I guessed it was also possible that by some miracle she had survived being thrown overboard. All of these were bigifs,though. I wasn’t sure how I would hold them together if their hopes turned out to be nothing but that.
“What are we going to do about the others?” I asked, gesturing back to the boat where Ezra’s magick kept the otherdjinn from escaping or attacking. “We still have this mess to clean up.”
I wanted to run after this lead as much as they did, but the humans would be scouring this beach soon, drawn in by the storm and wreckage. We had to clean this up or all our lives were forfeit. Exposure wouldn’t let us hunt for Rani any faster.
“I’m not sure,” Eryn said. “We need them for proof, I guess, right?”
That was the last thing I wanted to think about with my bond in my arms, and my hopeful cousin hanging on by a thread. Fuck Kol and everything he’d caused. If I could have killed him and gotten away with it, I would have. Just for the principle of it all. If it were only my life on the line, we wouldn’t even be questioning what to do right now.
Ez dug into his pocket, paused, and then pulled out a thin phone. He stared down at it, that mask of his cracking for just a moment before he handed it over.
“Everything we need is on there,” he said.
He’d had that the entire time. Rani’s phone…
I swallowed over the lump in my throat. “Hold onto it for me.”
He nodded and slipped it back into his pocket, then turned as Eryn marched over to the boat. What was she up to? I wasn’t worried for her safety, not with Ezra’s magick locking everything down, but her ability to process all this? Definitely. I gave one more glance to the dead djinn in the sand at my feet. She didn’t need anything else on her conscience.
thirty-one
Eryn
Nothing made sense anymore—not the storm that came and went from out of nowhere, the djinn that I’m pretty sure I just killed in a blind rage, and definitely not the fact that I could somehowfeelRani on my mental map. Feel her, like she wasalive.I held onto that hope and fought every muscle in my body that wanted to force me to run down this beach in search of her.
We had to clean up first. As much as finding my best friend should have been my first priority, I recognized the danger we were still smack in the middle of. Humans couldn’t learn about what happened tonight. A washed-up ship in a freak storm—that was the story we needed them to spin. Kind of hard to do that when there were four non-human bodies on board, completely encased in ice.
Climbing onto the ruined deck, I took in the damage for the first time. I hadn’t gotten a good look before. How had we survived this?
Skill, princess.Kai’s voice filled my mind with muted amusement.And a lot of luck.
I thought it leaned more on the side of luck. I strangled the sob that built at the thought of what could have happened if Kai’s shadows hadn’t shielded us. My chin quaked at the conjured imagery of him broken across the back bow, and a warm hand slipped into mine, soothing my runaway thoughts.
We’re okay,he said, and I held onto his words.
Wewereokay, but Rani wasn’t. She was somewhere out there, probably hurt and terrified. I shook myself and mentally ran through my options. We could kill them all, but that created a bigger problem to deal with later. It would be incredibly suspicious for the heir who had accused Kai of murder to suddenly end up…also murdered.
“He’s going to be a problem,” I said aloud, pointing to Kol.
His face was a mess of bruises. No pit bull in sight, thankfully, and his eyes were half-closed. I wasn’t even sure he was aware that we stood in front of him. The other djinn—only one still had my magick wrapped around his brain—-were at various levels of alertness. What was to keep them from spinning their own stories to the tribunal? The three of us stared at the four of them, none of us with a plan.
“We can’t kill them,” Kai said, stating the obvious. “Don’t look at me like that, Ez, you know we can’t.”
No…but…there was another way to put them out of commission. A plan unfolded before me, complicated and risky. There was a lot that could go wrong, and I wasn’t even sure I could do it. The muscles in my shoulders grew tense as the weight of my decision began to register. It wasn’t just our future on the line here if the tribunal ever found out…
