They ran.
TWENTY-THREE
CASSIA
The harbor was chaos.
Fishermen scrambled across the docks, trying to secure boats that bucked against their moorings. Ropes snapped. Metal groaned. The water in the harbor churned with unnatural currents, sloshing against the pilings with hungry slaps.
Shouts echoed off the water—men calling to each other, warning each other, fear sharpening their voices. Somewhere, a warning siren wailed—the old mechanical one that hadn’t been used since the last tsunami scare two decades ago. Its mournful cry cut through the night, ancient and ominous.
Cassia didn’t stop. Couldn’t stop. She sprinted for the seawall at the harbor’s edge, her boots pounding on ancient stone, her magic already reaching for the sky.
The wave was visible now. A dark mass on the horizon, blocking out the stars, growing larger with every second. Fifty feet high. Sixty. The kind of wave that could swallow boats whole, smash through docks, and drive debris inland for blocks.
The kind of wave that could kill.
She reached the seawall and planted her feet on the weathered stone. The ancient ward inscriptions hummedbeneath her boots—Haven Shores’s original coastal defenses, straining against forces they’d never been designed to contain.
“Cassia.” Aero materialized beside her, his presence a furnace blast of heat against the cold sea wind. “What do you need?”
“More power than I have.” She stretched her awareness toward the approaching wave, feeling for the atmospheric pressure above it, the wind patterns surrounding it. “I can try to redirect it, but something that size?—”
“Use mine.”
She turned to stare at him. “What?”
“My storm magic.” His eyes had gone electric—literal lightning flickering in their depths. “It’s compatible with yours. You’ve felt it. Every time we get close, our magic resonates. Use that.”
“I don’t know how?—”
“Yes, you do.” He grabbed her hand. The contact was like completing a circuit—power surging between them, his lightning tangling with her storm. “Don’t think. Just feel.”
The irony of him tellingherto feel would have been funny if they weren’t about to die.
Cassia closed her eyes. Reached for her magic—and found it amplified. Strengthened. His power flowed into hers like a river meeting the sea, vast and ancient and utterly compatible.
She opened her eyes and raised her free hand toward the wave.
Wind screamed from the sky—not her summoning, but her direction. Aero’s lightning crackled along her arm, through her fingers, toward the wall of water bearing down on them. She pushed atmospheric pressure against the wave’s crest, forcing air into the mass, destabilizing its structure.
It wasn’t enough.
The wave kept coming. Seventy feet now. A mountain of dark water that seemed to swallow the entire horizon.
“More,” she gasped. “I need more.”
Aero stepped closer, his chest pressing against her back, both hands gripping hers. His magic flooded through her—eight hundred years of accumulated power, lightning and wind and storm energy that dwarfed anything she could produce alone.
“Take it,” he growled against her ear. “Take all of it.”
She did.
The combined force of their magic slammed into the wave like a battering ram. Lightning fractured the water’s surface, arcing through the dark mass in brilliant white forks. Wind tore at its structure, ripping away chunks of spray and foam. Pressure differentials created by her atmospheric manipulation ripped through its mass, creating chaos where there had been directed force.
Cassia felt every bit of it—the push and pull, the surge and release. Aero’s magic wrapped around hers, amplifying and directing. She was the scalpel; he was the hammer. Precision and power working in tandem.
For one horrible moment, nothing happened. The wave surged forward, seemingly unstoppable. Cassia’s muscles screamed. Her vision blurred. She felt the ocean’s fury bearing down on them, felt the malevolent intent behind the water’s movement.
