As I stare at my Serpent’s flailing arms and streaming blue hair, at her saucer-wide eyes and slack jaw, I yell down the bond,Alexei, tell Asha to ward your wing and to let no one in! Not even if they look like me. Not even if they look like Fallon.
Chapter 68
Zendaya
For a beat too long, we sink because I’m too stunned to swim and Cathal is too hurt to shift.
Violet eyes.
Mádhi.
That wasn’t our daughter! It must’ve been an enemy Shabbin wearing her face. Which means the Crows aren’t coming. Which means we’re on our own. Unless Aoife or Aodhan or Reid managed to call to them? Where didtheyall go?
Agrippina?I rasp through the bond as I swim around Cathal, seize the handle of the sword Lazarus—or some other Shabbin wench wearing his face—plunged into my mate’s chest, and yank.
His body jerks and a thin stream of bubbles erupts from his flaring nostrils. He might be invulnerable to obsidian and immortal, but what will a blade through the chest do to him?
Cathal?I say too loudly.
Daya,he says too quietly.I can’t shift.
I drop the sword.Because you’re wounded.
I don’t allow my dread that the blade was basted in Shabbin blood, or that someone managed to paint a sigil to immobilizehis magic, pass through the mind link.Is there such a sigil?I try to recall all the ones I learned and witnessed…all the ones I practiced, but my mind has become a blank canvas.
Get out of the Amkhuti.Cathal’s supplication hones my focus on him. Him and his bleeding heart.Get out, now.
Not without you.I level off in front of him and hook the torn fabric of his shirt.Never without you.And then I rip it open and smack my tongue against his wound. A tingle races across my teeth, along my jawbone, down my throat.
Keep your mouth shut, mo Sífair! Don’t drink the water.
I lick him again just as something knocks into me from behind, dragging my tongue off its mark. Cathal’s gasp has me twisting. A scream clambers up my throat when I spy one of the corpses. I kick my feet to propel us up and away, only to push Cathal into another drifting body.
Can you shift yet?I ask him.
No.
Clasping my lids to keep the horror at bay, I swim around his body and tend to his back.Daya, I saidno.
I’m fine!My chest stings with bursts of heat that skip from rib to rib like steel scraped over flint.
It’s fear.
Just fear.
If it were anything else, I’d be floating like those fish, lungs saturated with water, heart still. Do immortal hearts stop beating? No, they probably keep beating.
As Cathal’s skin firms, I see Behati’s hollow, white cane. Not through the water, but in my memories. I see the dead coral it rested on and the lifeless barracuda beside it.
It wasn’t a cane—or at least, notjusta cane. It must’ve been a cylindrical container packed with poisonous flakes. Behatiinfected my haven!
I see red, and then I see her smashing into the boat. How stunned she’d looked. Like she’d truly tripped when she must’ve purposely flailed to keep me from pilfering the vision from her mind and witnessing Kanti’s trickery.
How I wished the seer weren’t immortal and that the fall could’ve broken her neck.
How I wished Meriam had taught me the death sigil, so that I could’ve drained my cunning cousin.
Agrippina!I holler through the mind link, but my Serpent doesn’t answer me.Enzo!Nothing.Alexei! Katya!Though the sky sparks, my mind does not.
