I choked and tumbled, spinning and somersaulting.
The whirlpool sucked me down.
And down.
Anddown.
Darkness chewed me alive as the water forced me into a claustrophobic chute.
The tunnel tightened like the throat of an ancient beast, feasting on me as my lungs screamed. Something whacked against my spine and suddenly...I couldn’t feel anything below my waist.
No—
Horror made me inhale.
Hot water flooded in.
I slammed shoulder-first into stone.
Something cracked.
The stone or bone...I couldn’t tell.
Pain radiated down my arm, white-hot and dizzying.
But the water didn’t care.
It just kept breaking me into pieces, pulverising me as it sucked me around a narrow bend, tearing, shredding—
I hit another wall.
And another.
Something sharp scraped along my chest, splitting my skin open and snagging against my collarbone. It hooked onto the only keepsake I had of my mother.
The chain that’d been around my neck ever since I could remember fought to stay with me. It clung to me so tightly—stretching, shivering, refusing to leave.
But then...it broke.
My raindrop pendant vanished in a surge of bubbles.
No!
My necklace!
My mother’s necklace!
I reached for it blindly, fingers scraping against rushing rock.
My body hit yet another obstruction with a savage smack.
I convulsed—
And somethinganswered.
Snow and sleet and ice, ice, ice ripped through me in a soul-rending flash.
Power flooded my veins—so cold it burned, so vast it erased pain, so wicked it ripped me from death’s embrace androared.
