The smart part of my brain saysI told you soand I don’t even have time to be annoyed about it.
Because water is rushing over my head.
Cold is the first thing I feel. Not Kieran-cold, not shadow-magic cold, the deep cold of water that doesn’t see sunlight and doesn’t want to. It hits full-body and my lungs lock before I can pull a breath, and the thing that was wearing her face is in the water with me, all those teeth and those pit-black eyes and hands with too many fingers gripping my arms with a strength thatcomes from something that’s been hunting in dark water since before the courts existed.
I fight.
Of course I fight. I’m not dignified about it. I don’t have fire down here, water kills fire the way it kills everything else, systematically and without personal feeling, so I use my hands and my elbows and every dirty close-quarters thing the Wild Court Elders spent fifteen years teaching me, and the creature is stronger.
Of course it is.
I’m an idiot who walked off the path.
The cold takes the burning from my lungs. Takes the sensation from my hands. Takes the clever running commentary my brain provides in crisis situations, which I always found annoying and am now finding I would very much like back.
The dark at the edges isn’t the water anymore.
It’s a lie. I know it is a lie. The darkness whispers and I can’t drown it out.
Couldn’t keep one woman safe.
Couldn’t keep your people alive.
Can’t even keep yourself alive.
Three for three.
The last thing isn’t the counting.
The last thing is my wrist.
The almost-bond. Still there. Gone cold and wrong and strange, like something on the other end of it has felt the water close over me and is?—
Warm.
One pulse. The warmth coming back. Not distant. Not fading.
Desperate.
I’m here,it says, in the wordless language of something that was never quite a bond and is now fighting like one.I’m here. Don’t you dare.
The surface is very far away.
Getting farther.
The warmth pulses again.
And then?—
22
Ash
The creatures start runningtwenty minutes before the spiders arrive.
I notice it the way I notice most things, sideways, while I’m tracking something else. A flash of movement in the undergrowth to my left. Then another. Small things, fast, moving with the specific energy of animals that have made a collective decision about being somewhere else.
“Kestra.”
