A flash of lightning split the blue sky.
Another crash.
It was so loud my ears rang and my eyes watered.
Then a floodgate opened inside me. A river of power exploded. A torrential rain swept through me, a flash flood filling me with power.
Before Jacob, my power had been a trickle. Then it was a swift river. Now, it was a raging, wild torrent.
I gritted my teeth and gripped the back of the wooden chair. I fought the black curtain swinging at the edge of my vision. I couldn’t pass out. I couldn’t let on that anything was happening.
I fought with the torrent inside myself, trying to wrestle it and contain it.
Sweat broke out on my forehead, and I clenched my muscles. I was being torn apart. The power felt like it might swallow me. My vision went black. My ears filled with a roar. I felt as though I’d been thrown into rapids and swept underwater. The raging current and the sharp underwater rocks were ripping me apart.
“—Mari?”
Someone gripped my arm. I blinked, shoving away the black curtain covering my vision.
It was Justice. He’d pulled me to the side and held me tucked against him, out of Jagger’s sight. I realized I was shaking. I couldn’t stop. It was as if a giant were holding me in its fist and shaking me violently up and down.
Justice had wrapped his arm around me and was keeping me upright. I concentrated on the feel of his arm, the warmth of his hand, the firm line of his side. I pressed into his strength and willed the new power toward my core, where it could sit in a deep, endless pool instead of crashing through me in a raging current.
Slowly, the shaking stopped, the roar in my ears fell silent, and I could stand on my own again.
It had taken maybe five seconds.
In that time, another thunderous crash split the room, and more lightning speared the clear blue sky. I pushed away from Justice, and he let me go, only lifting an eyebrow.
“All right?” he mouthed silently.
I nodded.
I was all right, but either my dad or my brother wasn’t. Someone in my family had just died.
Across the small room, Rou screamed and crashed to her knees.
“Rou!” Griff cried, dropping next to her.
She gripped her head in her hands and dragged in a drowning man’s gasp. Her hair writhed like pale seaweed in stormy water. Her sandstone-colored skin turned muddy-gray, the color of turbid, violent waters shoving sediment to the surface.
Griff hunched over her protectively, wrapping his arms around her. Outside, distant thunder rumbled, crashing in echo to the thunder that had roared over Hell Gate. Streaks of lightning shot across the sky.
When Rou lifted her head, I realized she was fighting to hold her form together. It was as if we were viewing her from underwater. She was translucent waves, rushing water, and refracted light. I blinked, trying to focus on the moving wave of her face. She was more spirit than solid. Her eyes glowed like lightning striking a river.
“Well, well,” Jagger said, peering down at Roumelade, “what could this be about?”
She stared at Jagger, her sometime lover, her eyes flashing between tempest-gray and storm-blue.
She stood, rising like mist from the water, pointing to the south.
“It’s coming.” Her voice was the inhuman crash of a thousand roaring waves. “A conjurer shook the ocean’s floor. It’s coming. A tsunami is coming to bury you all.”
12
When the earth shook, startling a flock of pigeons roosting on the iron railing in Battery Park, the wind knew the boy was calling it.
The man was dead. The earth was shaking. The boy needed the wind.
