74. Maren
Maren
Dimas reached for the dagger at his hip, but Aitne hadn’t even fallen before a second Naiad shot from the waves to snatch the blade from his belt, sliding it across his throat.
Drones.
They crawled from the sea like a nightmarish swarm, pale blue under the moonless sky, the cold flowing from their fingers as their eclipse frosted through the air.
Skin sizzled, puffs of smoke under their feet as they walked across a bed of ashy shield weed that hadn’t been there when we’d arrived.
As though they didn’t even feel the burn.
I hadn’t come with bloodlust. Not when I’d come for Thaan and Thaan alone.
But at the sight of Aitne and Dimas, crumpled and unmoving as the tide trickled over their faces, water slid off my fingers like an angry river, and a roll of thunder broke over the clouds.
The urge for minimal damage slid from my body like a torn veil, the remaining color of the world one of deep and dazzling bloodshed.
Everything happened in slow motion, like the shadow of a drifting cloud, too far for me to halt it.
Aren stretched a hand behind his neck, reaching for his sword.
His arm shielded Diara as she reached for an arrow, nocking it into place.
Nori sprung away from the drones, realizing ash had been sifted along the shore. One of them grabbed her hair, yanking her off her feet.
Sand sprayed as she fell, as they drove a knee into her neck.
Kazimir kicked the drone, a heel-stomp through the air. It landed in the drone’s face, the crunch of fragile bone sickening in my ears.
Diara’s bowstring stretched. Aren’s sword arced.
Electricity lit through my skin, fire through my bones, my heart pounding in my head as my feet pounded through sand.
Kye ran beside me, his strides longer, faster. My mother’s breath tumbled off my shoulder, just behind me. Someone pulled me off course, grabbing the silk at my neck, forcing me to slow.
Olinne.
“Stay here,” she said, her blue eyes wide with fear. “Command your storm outside their eclipse.”
The sky clattered again, the roar of it bright and vibrant, fizzling under my skin. Olinne’s hand left mine as she tore away, straight through the icy eclipse crystalizing along the shore, leaving footprints in the frost as she stripped her body of her own water-call.
If my stones blocked the drone’s eclipse like it had in the river, I was free to move wherever I wanted. But I held back instead. Here, facing the ocean, I had a full view of the beach, bodies crawling in all directions.
Sixty drones.
Sixty were coming. Climbing from the water like monsters from under a blanket. More and more of them emerged, sprinting toward us.
Kye.
It wasn’t the enclosed space of the cavern. The moon lay draped in shadow, but dim light was strewn across the beach, the stars betraying us from eons away.
Kye didn’t stop, but his glow thrummed under his skin like a song, glinting bright through his sunburst tattoos until his skin heated enough to match it. He ran like a star shooting through the night sky, twin blades in his hands.
I raised a palm, and the threads of fire cracked from my veins, igniting over my hand.
The world rattled. Sand shifted. Fire ignited.
A twitch of my fingers and I threw it into the tide, where it burst into a thousand jagged edges, the inside of my mind shattering under the noise. For a moment, the sea lit with white, silhouettes of rising bodies frozen within time.
Diara loosed her second arrow into the throat of a drone mere feet from her. The Naiad fell, but another one rose in her place, ripping the bow from her hands.
Aren shoved that drone away, leaning into his heels to swing his sword into another.
They moved without fear, ignoring when steel cleaved their bodies.
Aren’s sword swiped across the drone’s stomach, a fatal blow.
A human would have dropped to their knees, holding the wound in their hands.
But the drone absorbed Aren’s blade, ignoring the waterfall of red that streamed from their body, stepping closer to Diara.
Hadrian tore the drone from her, sending it across the beach in a spray of frosted grain just as the tide washed a flurry of bodies over the shore. The drone whirled back to her feet—and an arrow embedded between her eyes.
Golden light flung through the air, as bright as day, flooding from a burning torch with two blades. Kye stepped into the frost, fog blooming from his molten mouth. In the beat of a heart, every soul shaded their eyes from his brilliance.
Then the drones charged for him.
I reached for the stars again, ignoring the trickle of heat escaping from my nose. Throwing bolt after bolt into their running bodies.
Olinne slammed into a Naiad that stood over Nori, knocking herself to the ground along with the male. He shoved to his feet, but Kazimir wrenched him away, tossing him like a doll back to the sea just as my starfire blared through the tide.
“Get away from the water!” I screamed.
A hand wrapped around my head from behind, fingers dragging down my face.
An inferno screamed over my skin where the hand trailed, over my eyes and mouth. My starfire shuttered from my fingertips, deadened in an instant. I sprang away, scrambling to face whoever it was—
Selena stood behind me, the wind streaming through her hair and skirt, the red in her bloodshot eyes vivid against the blue. Not far from her feet, Pheolix had dropped to a knee, a knife low in his gut.
“What—” I rasped, the lining of my mouth and lips peeling as the ash ate away at my skin.
But I knew what.
I knew by the hateful emptiness in her eyes. The way she neither winced nor cried at her skin as it curled, blackened and disintegrating in her palm. Above her head, a murder of dark wings blotted out the stars.
Shield weed seared through my flesh, flames across my face and neck.
“Where are you?” I asked her, calmly, though my mouth had been set to fire. “The real you. Release Selena.”
She moved toward me, long skirt swishing over her hips, and angled her open hand before her mouth as though preparing to blow a kiss. Ash had collected along the lifelines of her palm, damp at the edges. I wonder how long she’d been forced to hold it. Hours?
Days?
“I thought you might come sooner, Maren,” she said, her voice like silk. Something wet splashed quietly over my nose; a wet kiss from the dark sky. “We’ve been waiting.”
“It was a real crow then.” My fists curled. “I stabbed a real bird.”
She stole another step in my direction. Without my water-call, I was forced to back away, sliding through leaves and ferns, branches scratching along my back. “One of my birds, fed a sleeping draught of koren valeriany. I needed you out in the open, separated from the others.”
“Well, here I am.” My friends dropped from view as the trees grew dense around me, the island jungle thick and lush and sparkling with danger. I reached for my hip and remembered I’d left my knife among the crow’s bones. “I should be no threat to you now. Let Selena go and face me.”
She smiled, beautifully serene. Cruel. “Were you happy to stab the heart of your once master? Did it heal the hate in your heart?”
The world ceased to let me evade her further. Smooth stone pressed into my back, the white rocks I’d once climbed and lounged on. My arms spread across them, calmly searching for escape. “I hold no hate in my heart.”
Selena laughed coldly. “Of course you do. Hate is an heirloom for you and I, passed through generations. It lives in your blood only because it runs in mine. Your anger is my anger, your wrath is my wrath. When your rage spikes and your fury reigns, it is a relic of me within you.”
Ice trickled down my spine, a bucket of cold water poured over my head. “What do you want, Thaan?” I asked. “If you’re going to kill me, the time is now.”
Selena shook her head. She stood taller than me, but her eyes and cheeks were sunken, her throat hollow, strength drained from her flesh by the days here. “Simple girl. I told you when we met, I wouldn’t throw your life away. I need you. And you need me.”
The hair along the back of my neck rose as I stared at her, knowing where this line of speech was headed. “You won’t frighten me into vowing anything to you again.” I let her step closer. Close enough to touch me.
“Once more, I find your lack of wisdom personally disappointing.” Selena leaned inches from my face. “Give them to me.”
The weight in my pocket seemed to double, that pulse I’d felt in the Parian tunnels threading against my thigh. “Give what to you?”
Leihani—where are you?
Selena’s mouth curled from her teeth, her nostrils flaring. Her skirt stretched tight over her waistband as she leered, the undeniable shape of a knife hidden within. “Give me my stones.”
In the trees—
She shoved forward, grappling, scratching at my skin and dress, feeling for the stones. I cried at the singe of her hand, angry tears biting through my lashes as I struck back, blindly punching, slapping. Her touch was a flame, an iron rod left in the fire, branding every inch of skin I owned.
No, I thought I heard her weep, please. But I could barely see through the pain, my knees trembling to hold me straight.
I felt her hand find them, curling around them through the byssus silk. Delving into my pocket, drawing the small weight of them out.
The world had lost shape and depth, the taste of smoke and metal swimming over my palate.
Strands of light fell like jewels through Selena’s shadow before something dark fell across her, forcing her away.
A golden hand reached through the leaves, pulling me to my feet first, then lifting me off them.
My vision focused enough to find my mother and father struggling with Selena in the grass.
“She took the stones,” I said, breathless, blinking Kye’s radiant skin into view.
He swore under his breath, spinning on his heel.
A sound like splitting stone, dark air and heat bursting across my skin.
The ground was hard when I fell, my teeth clacking against my cheek. The night whirled around me, leaves and grass and stars trapped in motion like water circling a drain. I pushed to my hands as someone swooped in at my back, pulling me to my dizzy feet.
Hadrian.
“Come on!” he yelled, and I realized the world was blaring with noise. Wind swept his hair and jacket to the side.
“No,” I screamed as he pulled, guiding me away. “Kye—”
Rain whipped at us, sharp as knives, blurring the island into muted slurs of green and black and gray.
I searched for a glow, a sunlit flare among the thrashing torrent, but there was none.
Someone else lifted me, heaved me against their chest. Dark red hair plastered over their face, wild as I kicked and fought for control of my own feet.
“I’ll find him,” Diara said. Her voice was clear and close, but I never saw her. Hadrian lurched to grab her through the branches, swearing under his breath as he failed.
The world screamed. Trees groaned and cracked, forced from their roots. Branches swung through the air, bashing against rocks.
Kazimir set me down under a cool shadow. The mouth of the cavern. He turned and knelt, drawing Pheolix’s shirt from the drone’s stomach.
“Where is she?” Pheolix asked, pale and shaking.
I swallowed, my skin still vibrating with incendiary heat. I blinked, hot tears escaping from the cage of my sudden anger. “Out there.” With Kye and my parents. “Where’s everyone else?”
They glanced at each other. “They went to look for you in the opposite direction.”
“All of them?”
Hadrian hesitated.
A sharp hiss made him turn, Kazimir drawing the blade from Pheolix’s belly. The drone’s eyes fluttered closed.
“Keep him awake,” Kazimir urged, fingertips soaked in blood.
“Stay here, Hadrian,” I said, turning to leave. Nori, come back to the volcano.
She’d been strewn on the beach, a knee in her throat the last time I’d seen her. I didn’t wait to see if she answered me, though, slipping through the cavern mouth and into a storm.
Kye!
I’m here. The thought answered mine, tension around its edges.
A hand wrapped over my wrist, Hadrian storming into my side. “I can’t—I can’t lose him again,” I yelled against the wind, bracing to fight him off.
But he nodded, drawing me close to his chest, battling the gale. “I know,” he murmured before surging ahead, pulling me through rain and leaves and blinding wind, leading me not back to where he’d found me but carving a wide circle instead.
My heart leapt as luminous gold broke through the foliage. We peered through just as pale ginger curls flew past us, slamming into a tree.
“Diara,” Hadrian murmured, the caution in his body exploding into urgency. He shoved through the trees, but he was lifted off his feet just as quickly, beads of water anchored to his chest and arms, nailing him to the grass.
The rain had turned into glass, solid and heavy, collecting along the island floor like pearls fallen from the sky.
I straightened, banishing any thought. Stepped through the brush, chin high.
Into falling glass and stolen sun beams and the promise of ash that would surely tear my skin from my flesh.
My heart hammered.
A drone was waiting on the other side. He reached slowly for me through the storm. But an odd expression warped his eyes, and he gazed down at his own hand.
His outstretched fingers were crumbling to dust.
The drone watched, almost mesmerized by the sight of his arm collapsing through the air, eaten away by the rain.
Then he was hurled away from me, a tall man in his place. One with salt-and-pepper hair, eyes like ice.
“So kind of you to join us,” Thaan said.