Without a word, he lifted her hand to his mouth and pressed his lips to her knuckles. The gesture was old-fashioned, deliberate, more devastating than any kiss on the mouth could have been. His lips were cool from the water, but the heat that spread through her had nothing to do with temperature.
“Goodnight, Avine.”
“Goodnight, Theo.”
She watched him disappear down the path, her hand still tingling where his mouth had touched.
TWENTY-TWO
AVINE
The wards screamed her awake.
Not a sound—a sensation. Like tearing metal, like breaking glass, like every nerve ending in her body catching fire at once. Avine gasped, jackknifing upright in bed as the inn’s magic shrieked through her bones.
Blue fire raced up the walls. Across the ceiling. Burning cold instead of hot, ancient defensive magic activating for the first time in decades. The Siren’s Rest was fighting. And losing.
She threw herself out of bed and hit the floor hard as the whole building shuddered. The hardwood beneath her palms pulsed with wild, panicked energy—the inn’s own awareness, terrified and hurting.
“Hold on,” she gasped, pressing her hands flat against the floorboards. Her magic surged in response, trying to reinforce wards that were already fracturing. “Just hold on, I’ve got you?—”
Another pulse of invasive magic slammed into the building. Avine’s head snapped back, teeth clacking together. She tasted copper.
When she opened her eyes, dark sigils were burning themselves into the floor around her. Black flames licking at oldwood. And in the corners of the room, in the shadows between the blue fire’s glow?—
Shapes were forming.
Salt constructs.
The first one materialized in front of her bedroom door, blocking escape. Humanoid but wrong—too tall, too angular, proportions that made her brain dizzy. It was made entirely of sea salt crystallized into a parody of human form. Where eyes should have been, two hollow sockets glowed with sickly green light.
It moved toward her. Joints cracking like ice breaking.
Avine’s magic erupted.
She didn’t have time to think, to shape, to control. Raw power poured out of her—storm-surge and every drop of magical potential she’d spent years suppressing. It hit the construct like a battering ram.
The thing exploded. Salt rained down, coating her hair, her skin, the floor.
More were coming. She could hear them—dozens of them, forming throughout the inn, crashing through windows, tearing at doors. The wards screamed again, weakening further.
Avine scrambled to her feet. She was wearing an old t-shirt and underwear, barefoot, hair tangled from sleep. None of that mattered.
She threw open her bedroom door and stepped into war.
The hallway was chaos.
Blue fire competed with puke-green light. Salt constructs lurched toward her from both directions—three, four, half a dozen. The inn’s walls groaned and cracked around them, the inn’s own magic straining against the invasion.
Avine planted her feet and drew on power she didn’t know she had.
The first wave of constructs hit her defensive barrier and shattered. The second came faster. She threw bolt after bolt of raw magic, each one stronger than the last, her body shaking with the effort. A construct got through, reached for her with crystalline fingers?—
She grabbed its arm and PUSHED.
The thing disintegrated from the inside out. Green light flickered and died in its eye sockets. Salt cascaded around her feet in glittering piles.
I did that. How did I do that?
