His expression darkened. “Wren?—”
I waddled down the staircase as fast as I could, which … wasn’t fast. Ronan could easily stop me if he wanted, but I didn’t think he would. My hands ached as I grabbed the railing hard, knowing how upset my mates would be if I fell.
“Eastern shore,” Ronan said, already resigned to following me.
“I know, I have ears,” I snapped, then immediately felt bad. He was just trying to protect me; they all were. “Sorry.”
He kissed the top of my head, smiling.
We made our way to the eastern cliffs, slower than I’d like as we made it out of the jungle and up to the open plains, which ended in rocky outcroppings. Down the sheer cliff, out in the ocean on the rocks, the seawitches were already waist-deep in the surf, screaming in frustration.
The reason was soon apparent.
Rising from the waves were bodies: pale, slick, and wrong.
Vampyres.
“Just twelve,” Benedict called out from above, circling high with Kieran. He shot Ronan an annoyed glance at my presence, but said nothing else.
Just twelve. Why the fuck were they here?
Benedict tried to dismiss the numbers as a non-threat, but watching them slip through the tides like silver eels, eyes bright red with hungry grins made my stomach flip. We hadchildrenon the island!
“They don’t breathe!” Meruse shouted, fury and panic mixing in her voice. “They can’t be drowned!”
Oh, that’s a fucking problem.
Air witches hovered overhead, unsure of how to help.
“Ignore them then, they shouldn’t be able to breach the wards,” Benedict ordered the drakens waiting at attention, who were lining the cliff as the dozen vampyres staggeredforward, uncaring as the tide bashed them into the rocks over and over again.
“They’ll just crush themselves,” I noted, frowning.
Kieran was beside me in a flash, sword drawn, eyes black with focus. “Get back, Wren!”
“I’m fine,” I snapped. “The wards will stop them if they don’t get shredded first.”
We all watched with bated breath as they tried to climb up the rocky surf. This would be the first real challenge to our wards.
The first vampyre lunged forward toward a rock and then fell backward violently, as if he’d been sucker punched back into the water. The rock it hit glowed gold for a brief instant, and hope flared in my chest.
It worked. Everything is fine.
But just as quickly the gold faded and turned to angry red lines, then black.
The rock exploded.
The seawitches fell back, watching with mild interest as the vampyres threw themselves at the wards, reaching for the rocks and land only to be violently expelled back into the ocean.
The wards worked, mostly, but they were showing cracks and fissures. They wouldn’t survive any sustained attack.
“Let me down there! I will flay them all alive!”
I turned to see Nerissa held back by two drakens, spit flying from her mouth as she tried to dive into the sea.
“Look at them, they’re already defeated,” I tried to point out. It was a bit sad, really. And anticlimactic.
But the wards are failing.
