32. Maren
Maren
Iripped through the murky water, following the Naiad’s trail.
Keep the humans safe, I directed Nori.
Aitne has them. Wait for us, she shot back. He’s trying to lure you. They’re trying to trap you.
And let them drown him? Humans needed air every few minutes. I thrust my senses ahead, calling through the current, desperate to lock onto where the Naiad had gone.
The water didn’t answer.
It ignored me, my call a distant echo in an empty room with fractals of ice for walls.
My mouth parted. I knew who had just stolen off with Kye.
Drones, I warned Nori.
She swore into my thoughts, her words near silent over the blood pounding in my ears. Terror leeched away everything else—what if they’d already found Kolibri and Cebrinne, too?
A dim shimmer of scales in the corner of my eye, a male body beside mine, catching up to me. I thought it was Aegir, but when I looked, Pheolix pushed ahead. He reached out a blind hand, and I wasn’t sure if he was searching for me or not, but I took it.
Abruptly, he stopped, forcing me to stop, too.
He glared through the sediment, gray eyes unseeing, waiting for something. The water whooshed from our combined wake, sending the silt swirling around us. I flexed and unflexed my fists, prisoner to the rise of adrenaline in my veins. When I tried to leave him, he held tight.
“Wait,” he said calmly, his voice watery, nearly inaudible. “Listen.”
I clenched my teeth, looking for whatever it was he waited for. And then found it.
Shadows, shapes, dark forms that blotted out the obscure sun. Descending toward us.
“How many?” Pheolix asked near my ear, so calmly I almost wanted to shake him.
I counted instead, my nails cutting into his hand. He didn’t flinch.
Ten, eleven, twelve…
“Thirteen.”
Pheolix didn’t respond, but his thumb twitched against mine as though the number meant something.
And when the nearest shape careened through the vortex, his head snapped toward them, already shifting to place himself between the figure and myself.
He was a different male than the one who had taken Kye. Larger, thicker, and perhaps a bit slower, but still fast enough to approach in a blur of silver-blue. Pheolix caught the Naiad’s fist in the center of his hand, yanking it to the side. Bone cracked, a delayed snap underwater.
The drone rolled away as if his snapped bone hadn’t even hurt, flinging his opposite arm toward Pheolix’s face. But Pheolix had already grabbed both sides of the Naiad’s head.
He twisted it, a sickening crunch through the waves. Then let the Naiad fall away, already catching the fist of a second drone.
A third joined, and a fourth. The sediment stirred, too thick to see anything but Pheolix’s pale-rust hair and an onslaught of elbows.
His movements were precise, rhythmic. An echo of time and bone woven together.
He knew when and how they attacked, catching their limbs before they could connect.
I barely noticed. A silhouette hovered next to the surface, a male Naiad and a floating human.
I shot from behind Pheolix just as Nori and the others broke through.
Aegir and Selena joined the fray surrounding Pheolix.
Nori and Olinne burst after me. If the unknown Naiad was surprised to see us, he didn’t show it.
I reached for the dagger strapped to my hip.
The blurred lines of his body sharpened into view the same moment a clap resounded against my chin, knocking my head back against the rocks.
Light flickered over shadow. Sound distended.
The world dropped to silence before I blinked, rousing myself. I’d sunk lower than I’d been the moment before.
My dagger was fixed tight in Olinne’s hand, and blood streamed from the enemy Naiad’s ribs in a wide gash.
Kye had drifted slightly downstream, wedged by the current in an alcove of rock.
Nori had wrapped herself around the drone’s waist, hooking onto one of his arms to pin him down while Olinne took another wild slash.
My head pounded as I forced myself upright, the light from above streaking through my eyes in a wave that sent nausea to my stomach. Even through the watery smog, Kye’s skin was too pallid, his lips tinted violet.
My heart leapt into my throat.
I lurched toward him, but my movement felt delayed. Heavy and lumbering. My mind moved fast, but time moved slow, demanding I wait for it to catch up. My fingers didn’t shift the way I commanded them to, but I reached him, slanting his chin toward mine, clumsily angling for his mouth.
A fist in my hair jerked me back. The world reeled sideways, my axis a queasy tilt. I struck blindly at whoever held me, my knuckles ramming into a cheekbone. But they absorbed my punch, holding tight, pulling me away from Kye.
I rolled, finding a female drone. She reached for my throat, nails slashing at my chest, scoring jagged lines.
Blood stained the water vivid red, the taste of iron in my mouth.
I punched at her again, listless, and she ignored me, wringing her arm oddly to the side.
It was only as the bite of metal cut into my neck that I realized she’d grabbed hold of the chain—the Breath of Safiro.
She twisted, warping the chain into a silver noose. Cinching it tight.
Again, I sent a desperate plea to the river around me, but the growing cold was the only answer, the water paralyzed by her eclipse.
I batted like a thrashing snake, tumbling and winding myself to break free. My arms flailed as I aimed to strike her again, but she leaned away, pulled away, shooting downriver.
Green dust distorted as a sudden blow to her shoulder slammed her into the rocks. The jolt rippled through my spine, my bones grinding against my joints, snapping me like a whip. A ring of fire erupted around my neck, though the tension of her pull had shattered. She’d let go.
No—she hadn’t let go. The chain was still in her hand, the rest of her flattened under a mighty body of deep blue, a shining neck and a wild mane and beating hooves.
The light had snuffed from her eyes, but Kolibri turned, bucking her muscular tail at the drone.
Then blasted away like a rock hurled from a slingshot, leaving the Naiad to fall eerily to the river floor, a tangle of broken limbs.
Kye was where I’d left him, pinned by the rough water in the corner of the rock, his color a violet gray that sent a knife through my heart.
I ignored the drone’s crushed body, hooking my mouth over his and exhaling.
His lungs expanded, pink flushing through his cheeks before softening to his familiar olive skin.
His hand pressed dimly against my back, as if fighting through the surge of Naiad oxygen in his blood.
I’ll be back, I said, unsure if he could hear me.
Naiads swam from every direction when I turned back around.
Far more than the thirteen I’d originally counted.
A few bodies lay at the riverbed, none that I recognized.
Huddled in a corner, Aitne held onto Diara, Hadrian, and Aren.
Cebrinne floated over her, fighting a drone who looked hardly old enough to have left home.
Kolibri brayed into the water, smashing at three Naiads that had circled Aegir, sending them scattering like motes of dust. She pivoted, rocking her weight to the side with her head lowered, and charged at the closest drone, a female wrestling for control of Olinne’s arms.
The dim glare of my knife still in her hand caught my eye.
I spun, climbing Kye’s chest and unlatching his sword.
It dragged heavily through the water, claiming the use of my second hand.
But it cleaved through the back of the nearest enemy like a predator’s teeth.
And when I ripped it loose, a veil of red burst from their back like a curtain thrown wide.
Something twisted and shook inside my chest, a glaring, primal scream building in my lungs and caged within my throat. My Naiads. My colony. My friends.
The ice above had only grown thicker, the light even further away. We’d run out of air soon. I didn’t intend to remain here until we did.
I whirled, Kye’s blade chopping off the hand of a Naiad reaching for Hadrian. The Naiad slung their new stump of an arm away, red oozing through the water. I reeled back, striking them again above the elbow.
I’d watched Kye brandish a sword many times, graceful and elegant, the blade an extension of his breath and body.
My wild strokes were nothing like his controlled wielding.
I was sloppy. Careless and unpracticed. I knew the targets I should aim for—heart and throat.
My attacks weren’t smooth enough to land those targets.
Instead, I thrust toward anything that moved the sickeningly efficient way the drones did.
Chopping into tails and slicing across hips.
The drones listed, swimming away from me in wayward slants, joining each other across the river from us.
My Naiads did the same, flanking me on either side.
My bones ached, muscles simmering with exhaustion under the weight of pulling Kye’s blade through water.
I banished the desire to glance left and right, to take stock of everyone’s injuries.
All I knew was none of them were dead, and that was enough for now.
We stared at the drones across the river. The pommel of Kye’s sword seemed to flex in my hands, my heartbeat pulsing against my own grip. The current rushed, a sound both loud and silent. Across from me, the Naiad who had taken Kye raised his hand, a single finger pointed in my direction.
My lips peeled from my teeth. Waiting.
Wanting.
Blood lust bubbled through my body, a desire to thicken the water with the taste of iron.
My vision flickered with haunting red, or perhaps that was my mind, slowly slipping beyond my grasp.
Blood in the water, blood on my blade. Blood seeping from their wounds and mine.
Blood loomed everywhere, all I could smell and see and touch, and I was suddenly drunk with it.
It taunted me like decadent wine offered to a thirsty peasant, like a meal laid before a starving dog.
I raised the sword higher, knowing if I couldn’t use steel to make them bleed, I’d gladly use my teeth. An invitation to spill themselves if they so chose, because I refused to let them win.
They surged forward. Directly at me.
My body tensed, ready to arc a wide slash at the drones as they converged with me.
Kolibri reached them first. The water mare barreled through their center, crushing their leader against the drone next to him.
But that didn’t stop the wave of the rest as they descended upon me.
I slashed, carving the throat of a female, Kye’s blade stuck tight into the chest of the drone to her left.
He doubled over, yanking away, and the pommel slipped from my hands.
They locked onto me, so thick they blocked out the sun like a horde of bees.
Someone screamed through the water. A fist sank into my stomach, hands grappling for my jaw, a heavy tail coiling around my waist. I turned my head and bit into someone’s wrist, tendons snapping under my teeth.
The hand snaked away, and I twisted, elbowing a nose.
And then I was knocked aside—we all were. Torn from each other in a savage explosion by a steel blue muzzle and wide nostrils before I landed at Kye’s feet. I rolled, shaking away the blur, urging my vision to refocus. Something sparkled between the rocks. A blue crystal prism on a broken chain.
I reached for it as the world sharpened into focus, righting itself once again. Shoved it into my pocket next to its mate.
As both stones met my skin, something strange happened.
Water called to me.