Chapter 2
CHAPTER
Wren and Rodhi plunged in after us. When all four of us were paddling in the water, Gileon waving us goodbye and Lander still somewhere beneath us in his shark form, I hauled in a sharp breath.
Then sunk beneath the surface.
Murky gloom filmed my vision, but I kept my eyes peeled open and propelled myself deeper, until I came face to face with a few angelfish.
“Don’t make eye contact,” one of them glubbed to the other.
“Wouldn’t dream of it,” the other glubbed back.
Fine, then. I didn’t want to talk to them either.
I came up for a quick gulp of air, then barreled deeper than before, my cupped hands brushing past seaweed that swayed peacefully and sang heavenly melodies that made me want to close my eyes.
And suddenly my eyelids were fluttering shut at the thought of just… floating here. Forever. By the orchid and the owl, floating felt nice after three months of constant weight pressing in on my bones.
But no. I had a job to do. Catch Coen Steeler. Make him give my sanity back. Hand him over to the Good Council and watch him burn.
I opened my eyes against the sting of water.
And found myself facing a giant, flaming orange eye.
The octopus was bobbing along the lake floor, but when it saw my attention move from one eye to the other, its tentacles began to sway in fluid, lazy motions, and its skin… its skin went from warty brown to bright blue quicker than I could try to propel myself backward.
“I remember you.”
I almost made the mistake of gasping in a lungful of water.
Not because the octopus was talking to me, but because its gently swaying body was utterly silent on this underwater floor—yet I still heard the words as if they were floating in the water.
My Wild Whispering magic was translating the sign language of the octopus’s tentacles into something I could understand.
“You took a midnight swim with that lover of yours,” the octopus continued, drifting closer, and my heart stuttered.
A midnight swim with a lover? I couldn’t remember doing such a thing—which meant the octopus could only be referring to one person.
“Oh, yes.” It nodded. “You were clinging to each other like coral and algae, your limbs so beautifully intertwined. I saw—”
“Pervert,” I hissed at the eight-limbed creature.
A mistake. With the last of my breath leaving me in a torrent of bubbles, I kicked upward for the surface.
But a tentacle wrapped around my torso, reeling me closer to those massive orange eyes as large as the palms of my hands.
My chest screamed with white-hot flames, and it took everything I had not to inhale a lungful of lake water as the octopus brought me even closer to its body, the whole of it flickering into a mellow orange color.
“Where is your lover now, hmmm?” its free tentacles said.
I didn’t have enough air left to answer, and there wasn’t a single sign of Emelle or Lander in his hybrid shark form to save me. I didn’t have Element Wielder abilities, couldn’t conjure a pocket of air or make the water disentangle the tentacle from around my body.
The frantic thought scrabbled at the edges of my brain as my vision went cloudy: my Wild Whispering magic wasn’t enough to save me if I didn’t have the breath left to use it. Why had I parted with my mother’s knife, even for just a silly little swim?
“I do hope you find him,” the octopus said dreamily. “True love is such a rare thing to observe from these depths.”
A rush of water around my ears, and I was suddenly slamming back down onto the slick edge of rock, gasping and retching as a sucker-lined tentacle wiggled goodbye and slipped itself back under the surface.
“You found him?” Gileon rushed over to me, thumping me on the back. “Oh, Wren is going to be so mad.”
Before I could respond, Wren herself broke the surface of the water, spluttering and treading over to the slab of rock where I still kneeled. She swept aside wet strands of feather-black hair as she climbed up next to us, a scowl scrunching her face.
“I passed him on my way up. I guess Penny Ickers was telling the truth for the first time in her life. Maybe Rodhi won’t—”
But Rodhi popped up next second, already cackling with victory.
“Did you see the eyes on that thing? I swear, each of them was bigger than my face. Someone owes me thirty coppers, ten jokes I can claim as my own, and an apology in the form of a foot massage.”
Wren crossed her arms. “I’ll give you thirty coppers, fine, and the God of the Cosmos knows you need help with your jokes. But I’ll convince a rhino to eat my hands off before I ever touch your feet.”
Rodhi pressed a hand against his chest, pretending to pull an offended expression over his face as he clambered up next to us.
Gileon, however, furrowed his eyebrows at the lake. “Do you think Melle and Lander are okay? They’ve been under for a while.”
“Lander’s literally a shark right now,” Wren replied with half an eye roll. I suspected her tone had taken an even sharper edge than usual in the face of her loss against Rodhi. “They’re probably just making out among the angelfish.”
No sooner had she said it than both Emelle and Lander popped up, spluttering out laughs as Lander melted back into his human self. My own wetsuit sprung back into normal clothing, and I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to calm the rattling race of my heart.
You took a midnight swim with that lover of yours.
Where is your lover now, hmmm?
True love is such a rare thing to observe from these depths.
No, no, no. I could not have been in love with a monster like Coen Steeler.
I’d seen the memories the top Mind Manipulator on the Good Council, Kitterfol Lexington, had transferred to my own brain.
Steeler had used me and abused me and then ripped himself from my head, leaving this throbbing pain behind.
Even now, I could hardly concentrate on what Emelle was saying to me as that pain reached a new pulsing crescendo.
“What?” I asked, trying to refocus my vision.
Emelle squinted at me, the smallest of a concerned expression tightening the smile on her face. “I asked if you’d seen the octopus, too. Lander and I must have missed him, but Rodhi and Wren—”
She didn’t get to finish her thought. The next second, a piercing scream ripped through the air in the distance.
“By the feather and the fang,” Lander breathed, using his own sector’s motto on instinct as we all swiveled toward that sound. It was coming from the direction of campus in echoing waves.
“That is not a scream of pleasure,” Rodhi said, squinting.
Emelle glanced at me, and in that moment, it didn’t matter that I had a wall of ice surrounding me. She saw right through it, saw the fear that must have been in my eyes, that dread reflected in hers.
The next moment, we were both running.
Back across the bridge, through the Element Wielder sector, toward the courtyard that connected all of campus, where that scream was still spearing the humid air.
The others followed, our combined footsteps slapping cobblestone until the five of us nearly slammed into a crowd forming around the fountain at the center of it all.
It was Wren who dragged Gileon through the condensed barrier of bodies to carve a way for the rest of us. And when I saw where that screaming was coming from, my heart flipped over backward.
A young woman was on her hands and knees on the cobblestone by that fountain, which was tinkling merrily as if nothing was happening.
As if the young woman wasn’t blaring her throat out, bile dripping from her open lips.
Her hair had grown back in rough patches, and her eyes were no longer bandaged, but open and unseeing.
Jenia Leake. A fellow Wild Whisperer.
Nobody knew what had happened to her at the end of our first year, but rumor had it that she’d gotten into an altercation with her boyfriend, Fergus, out in the jungle where no one could hear them.
While Jenia had come out of it with her head and face mutilated, Fergus himself hadn’t come out of it at all.
He’d simply disappeared, despite the Good Council’s attempts to find him.
I’d never liked Jenia—not after that first introduction with Quinn, when she had surveyed me like I was a rotten piece of meat—but I couldn’t remember talking to her much after that.
And Jenia had been living in the sick bay ever since Fergus had disappeared.
I’d rarely seen her out in public, even in the dining hall of our own house.
Until now.
Now, not only was she out in public on her hands and knees, but a whirlwind of butterflies spun in tight circles over her head, faster and more frenzied than any I’d ever seen. Two Good Council elites stood on either side of her like bodyguards, watching her scream without even twitching a muscle.
I didn’t recognize them, but I would have known they were from the Good Council even without their attire: long, flowing cloaks clipped together with silver buttons, the left shoulders sporting a circle of sheer fabric to let us all to see those little red dots in the center of their brands.
Beyond that, they had that aura of elitism dripping from their slightly tilted expressions, the ease and smugness I had begun to associate with anyone who came from Bascite Mountain.
“What is this?” Emelle whispered beside me.
I hated that I knew. Hated that the whispered words slid so easily from my lips.
“It’s an early exile.”
Because why else would the Good Council come for Jenia, who’d been accused of murdering her own boyfriend and disposing of his body deep in the jungle?
“Please don’t,” Jenia choked out now between screams, her fingernails scratching at the stone. “My sister… she’s on the Good Council now. She won’t let you.”