But more importantly, my tongue patched her injury, so why isn’t she waking? Why isn’t her chest pumping? I mustn’t have drawn out the iron…I must’ve sealed it inside her veins.
Though my sodden dress only sticks to my skin, it feels as though it swathes my lungs. I want to tear it off, to jump into the canal and shift.
I try to push away from Cathal but he clasps me like Ceres clasps her daughter. “Let go.”
He doesn’t.
I splay my fingers on his armor and shove. My muscles tremble so hard that my elbow buckles and my body ends up pressed to his.
Cathal’s arms tighten around me. “Please let me hold you,” he rasps into my hair.
With a sigh, I relent and press my Serpent away until it no longer niggles my spine. “You never came to see me,” I murmur.
“I came.”
“That was you in the gardens three days ago?”
“Ceres!” someone yells.
I twist away from Cathal to find Justus Rossi barreling through the throng of soldiers and halting beside Reid.
“Ceres?” he sputters again.
She picks her head off her daughter’s forehead and blinks wetly at him. Her cheek is stained black. He asks her a question in their tongue to which she responds with a shake of her head. And then he’s slinging his face my way, asking me something about the Mahananda. But I’m too distracted by the smudge on Ceres’s cheek to respond.
“Still closed,” Cathal replies in Shabbin, probably to keep the soldiers surrounding us in the dark about our lack of access to the source of all magic.
“Maybe we can place her on its surface!” Reid says with such vigor that his voice echoes over all the cobbles. “Maybe it would op?—”
A blue hue is enveloping Agrippina’s strands, snuffing out the amber. I press away from Cathal. This time, not only do his arms soften but he also helps me sit up. I push a lock of hair off my face, feeling it ghost over my mouth and coat it with the metallic tang of blood and salt.
Her lashes flutter. Draw up.
The air freezes inside my lungs as I stare…and stare.
“What have you done to my daughter?” Ceres gasps.
I saved her.
I transformed her.
Chapter 37
Zendaya
Justus’s silence rings louder than Ceres’s cries of outrage. Here I thought she might be pleased that Agrippina was alive, but, apparently, she’d have preferred her to be dead than a Serpent.
“Do not yell at her,” Cathal grits out. “All Zendaya did was carry her back from the underworld. The words you are looking for arethank you, Rajka.”
“She transformed my daughter into an animal,” Ceres snarls.
I flinch, which makes Cathal’s arm tighten around my middle. Is that what she really thinks of me? As an animal?
“A shifter,” Justus finally says, scrubbing a hand down his face. “Notan animal.” Ceres opens her mouth, probably to argue, but she’s interrupted by his next words: “Just like our granddaughter.”
Though her pulse still flicks against her elegant neck at a harsh pace, her lips press together and she grows quiet.
“You should get away from her.” Cathal’s tone is as placid as his pulse isn’t. It rages against my abdomen, its beats echoing the ones slamming against my own sternum. “If it’s anything like last time, she’s about to shift.”
