24. Ocean And Lightning #2
I threw lightning into the crest of the incoming water.
The sheer heat tore the wave apart, dissolving it into a blinding, white-hot mist, and I used the cover to roll sideways and get back on my feet.
My ribs ached where the first blow had landed.
My knees throbbed from the impact. Every breath tasted of salt and ozone.
Orion came through the steam like he’d been born in it. A wave swept across the deck and caught my ankles, yanking me forward. I hit the steel face-first. Before I could rise, the current pinned me, a flat, crushing pressure across my back that ground me into the planking.
“Stay down.” A shadow fell across my back. Orion, above me. “This doesn’t have to be prolonged.”
“Is that all the ocean’s got?” I gritted my teeth and pushed my palms flat against the deck. “Fourteen generations of sea gods, and the best you can manage is holding me down?”
I couldn’t electrify the hull. I couldn’t risk the current traveling below deck. So I pulled the lightning inward, letting the searing heat of it bleed into my own skin and the steel directly beneath my chest.
The sudden, blistering heat met the freezing water pinning my back. The crushing weight boiled instantly. Steam exploded upward in a violent, scalding hiss, breaking the ocean’s grip just enough.
I heaved upward, breaking free. Blood ran from a cut above my eyebrow. My shirt was shredded. I could feel the exhaustion pulling at the edges of my vision.
Orion waited five feet away. He wasn’t untouched.
The aura had rattled him, and the sudden heat of the steel had forced him back.
Even so, he’d recovered his balance. Behind him, the Strait churned with a dark energy I could feel in my teeth.
Charybdis. The ancient thing beneath the surface, awake and attentive and hungry.
“I told her I would be ready.” Orion looked at me, and there was genuine regret in his face. “I’m sorry it came to this.”
“You’re not. You’ve been waiting for this since Samos.”
He didn’t deny it. “Perhaps. But I take no joy in it.”
The water rose around me. From everywhere at once.
The Strait was climbing the hull, pouring over the rails, filling every inch of open space.
A rising tide that reached my ankles, my shins, my knees.
Cold and dark and impossibly heavy, carrying the weight of the entire Mediterranean basin behind it.
I gathered what was left of my lightning.
Almost nothing. The repeated discharges had drained me further than I’d ever pushed before, and my desperate restraint had cost me the rest. What I had was enough for one more strike.
A last, brilliant bolt that would either save me or be the final charge I handed to the Strait.
Then I heard her.
“Orion.”
Andromeda’s voice came from the stern. I turned, and the movement cost me. The water surged against my body, pressing me back, as though the Strait didn’t want me to see what was behind me.
She stood at the top of the companionway.
Barefoot, dressed in a white shirt that I recognized as Orion’s.
The Mediterranean sun was behind her, turning her hair into a dark halo.
She looked rested, steady, and beautiful.
The sight of her knocked the breath out of me more thoroughly than anything the ocean had managed.
“Andromeda.” Orion’s shoulders dropped a fraction. The water around my legs eased slightly—not releasing me, but hesitating. “Go back below. This will be over soon.”
She didn’t go below. She walked forward, across the flooded deck, the water parting for her bare feet the same way it had carried her the night she fell from the sky.
She moved past me without looking at me.
She was going to him. Whatever happened next, she’d made her decision, and I wasn’t part of it.
“Andromeda, go back.” The command came sharper this time, edged with something that hadn’t been there before. She was too close. She was supposed to be below, safe, away from the fight.
She put her hands on his chest.
For one fraction of a second, nothing happened. Her palms lay flat against Orion’s sternum. Her fingers spread wide. Her face tilted up toward his, and from behind, I couldn’t read her expression.
Then the light came.
Purple-gold, violent, instantaneous, it erupted from her palms and poured into Orion’s body. It was nothing like the careful manipulations I’d seen Helena perform. This was raw and untrained and devastating. Orion let out a gut-wrenching scream, as if he was being ripped to pieces.
“What—” He tried to step back. His legs buckled. “What are you—”
The Strait went mad.
Every current reversed simultaneously. Waves slammed into each other from opposite directions, sending plumes of white spray fifty feet into the air.
The yacht heeled violently to starboard.
I lost my footing and slid until my back hit the starboard rail hard enough to crack something.
The water that had been pinning me drained away in a chaotic rush.
It was purposeless, directionless, as if the intelligence behind it had been ripped out at the root.
Orion was on his knees. His fingers dug into his own sternum, raking at the place where the light had entered.
His eyes were open, but the green had drained from them.
Something pale and hollow remained. The veins in his neck stood out black against his skin.
The purple-gold light continued to pour from Andromeda’s palms into his body.
Around us, the Strait thrashed like a wounded animal.
Waves crested at twenty feet, crashing against each other with no pattern, no rhythm, no direction.
I tried to stand. The deck pitched beneath me, and I went down again, my shoulder white-hot, my ribs grinding against each other. Through the spray and the chaos, Andromeda’s face remained clear.
She wasn’t screaming. She wasn’t crying. Her jaw was set, her eyes blazing with purple-gold fire. The light pouring from her was getting brighter, not dimmer. Whatever she was doing to Orion, she hadn’t finished yet.
The yacht rolled forty-five degrees to port.
Seawater crashed over the rail and hit me full in the face.
I clawed the salt from my eyes, but the light had consumed everything—the deck, the sky, the Strait itself.
The last thing I saw before the white swallowed the world was Andromeda’s silhouette.
She was still standing, still burning, her hands still pressed against the chest of a man who had promised to keep her safe.
Then there was nothing but the light, and the roar of a god’s ocean tearing itself apart.