“So sorry,” I tell him, scrambling to my feet and rushing toward Agrippina.
Agrippina who lays there, throat slit and body limp in the cradle of her mother’s arms.
My name is shouted from the rooftop.
I don’t bother answering since I’ve no doubt that Cathal, with his impeccable eyesight, will spot me in the crowd. I shoulder past onlookers. One of them tries to stop me, but a hiss, coupled with a glance at my eyes has him stepping aside. I push past Reid, who stands over the Rossi women, unmoving.
Ceres gasps when I crouch and touch her sleeve.
“Can I try to heal her?”
“Iron,” she croaks, pulling her arm away.
I fathomed the weapon was made of that. After all, Agrippina is pureblooded. Ceres wouldn’t be crying if it had been forged from any other metal.
I begin to lash at the warm, sweet essence flowing out of the yawning wound. Her blood gushes down my throat. I swallow and swallow until it feels like I’ve drunk all of what flows through her veins.Live! Come on…
When her skin begins to tauten, relief blooms within my ribs like an anemone, growing tentacles that snare every floating particle of hope. I wasn’t too late. I got to Agrippina in time.
Find Agrippina.
This was why! Because the Mahananda knew an evil man would come at her with an iron blade. I suck in a breath at the errant thought, recalling her tremulous warning.Malo uomo. Did she foresee him, or did she merelyseehim?
As I keep laving her cut, thoughts puff like the grains of sand that Enzo sends floating upward when he slithers across the bottom of the Amkhuti, as he so loves to do. My little bottom dweller. Well, my humongous bottom dweller, for he is far larger than I am in scales. In skin too.
I hate how I left things with him. I picture his green scales, recall the pliant press of them against my body a scant few mornings ago.Enzo?
He doesn’t answer me.
Please forgive me.
I pull away to check on Agrippina’s wound. I must move too fast, because my head thumps against the bloodied cobbles. I lay there, blinking back the darkness, trying to muscle my neck back up. Why does my skull feel like a galleon anchor?
Perhaps Faerie blood is noxious to Serpents? What if someone laced her blood with that toxin? What if it wasn’t the Mahananda that guided me toward her but Kanti? Could my cousin be so shrewd? She desires the throne so fiercely…
A cool splash startles my lids up. Cathal stands over me with an overturned bucket. His mouth moves over my name before moving over a barked command. “Reid, Erwin, more!”
More what? He tosses the bucket at the redhead and then drops into a crouch beside me, his charcoal stripes melting down his cheeks and into his facial hair like tears, his forehead slick with perspiration.
“Can you hear me, Príona?” He sweeps his fingers across my mouth, strokes a line down my neck.
I’m about to nod when another cool, delicious splash slicks over my torso. I can feel the salt trickle through my skin, vivifying my blood, rattling my muscles, crisping my mind and reminding me that I’m other. That to exist, I need salt, I need the ocean. That it wasn’t Agrippina’s blood or the substance of the weapon that drew me into the abyss, but my own physicalshortcomings. When I’d healed Enzo, I’d done so in scales. Perhaps I must always heal people in scales, be they Crow or Faerie or human.
With a sigh, I drag my knuckles over my mouth to wipe away any lingering blood, then scrub my palms down my face and up through my hair. “Did it work? Is she alive?”
Cathal scowls. Why? Because he wished me to speak other words? Since he’s yet to answer me, I glance at Agrippina’s neck, at the skin that’s hemmed shut, pink and puckered against the milky expanse surrounding it.
Ceres’s cheeks shine with tears as she tucks a lock of hair behind the scarred shell of Agrippina’s ear before curling herself around her daughter and rocking her.
I snap my gaze toward Cathal’s. “It didn’t work?”
“No.” It’s Reid who replies. He stands rooted to the same spot as before, his fingers balled into fists.
But…but I don’t understand. Agrippina no longer bleeds. I hunt what I can see of her neck for a throbbing vein, hunt her face for a twitch of lashes. Agrippina lays wilted in her mother’s arms, her skin so pale that her freckles resemble a crude paint splatter.
Find Agrippina, my mind nags.
I did!I want to scream.I found her!
